August 1998 Update

Saturday, 1 August 1998

See what I mean about how I never seem to update this thing when I'm having a life? I've still been doing contract work for Crossover this past month, though that may run out in the next few weeks. I've volunteered as an editor of the Arts/Books/Science_Fiction section of NewHoo. I've written a few entries and a home node for the Everything project.

I've been spending a lot of time on Usenet, especially on rec.arts.sf.fandom. I think I'm spending most of my time there being either indignant or flippant, but folks don't seem to mind.

Software recommendation for Windows users: At Crossover, I've been using the sort of machine that really oughtn't to be running Win95 -- an old 486 with only 8 megs of RAM. Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer both crash the thing regularly (read: several times a day in Netscape's case, several times an hour in MSIE's). So I downloaded Opera to give it a try, and it works wonderfully. It's small, fast, and feature-rich. It seems to have fallen through from some parallel universe where the people who write browser software actually care about the users. My favorite feature: The ability to open two windows and define a relationship between them such that links clicked in one window open in the other. It's worth the US$35 shareware fee. I can't wait for the Mac version.

I read Psychoshop the other week. It's not often these days that one gets to read a new book by Alfred Bester or Roger Zelazny, what with both of them being dead, much less a book by both of them. (Bester died with it only partly written, so the publisher gave it to Zelazny to finish.) This is a good one. Not up there with The Stars My Destination or Lord of Light, but much, much better than The Deceivers or the later Amber books. I think Zelazny wrote most of it, though. Certainly his writing style dominates for the latter two thirds of the book, but I don't know how much of it he made up whole cloth and how much Bester had left notes and snippets for.

It seems likely that I won't be writing another entry until after BucConeer.