(No excerpt) →
March 2002
24
Mar
2002
There's this thing commonly called the "slush pile". It's where your manuscript will end up if you mail it to a publisher. Manuscripts in the slush pile get read by a young recruit at the publishing house, straight out of college, whose job it is to look at the tens of thousands of unsolicited manuscripts, and recommend any good ones to someone higher up in the food chain. Common practice is for them to read the first four pages, or maybe the first chapter. →
23
Mar
2002
It's tiny. The picture doesn't do it justice, because it's out of proportion with my head, and just makes my hand look really big. Remember my Nokia 8820 phone? It's the same height and depth, and only about a third wider. I'm pretty sure the instructions at Apple would have been "Make it the size of a pack of cigarettes". →
12
Mar
2002
You can put your feet on automatic pilot, and your brain goes into this strange mode where some part is devoted to navigation and making sure you don't walk into anything (cars, people, lamp-posts, trees), and the rest is free to think about anything you want. But the part that's doing the navigating seems to be the same part that gets in the way when you're just sitting down. →
4
Mar
2002
When Dejanews came out, there was trend in certain parts of the tech sector to do a Dejanews search on a potential employee. Some of these searches were benign - to quote from memory one online friend, "Their posts in comp.software.xyz would give me a good idea of how much they know." On the other hand, the potential prejudice if someone found your posts to alt.lifestyles.furry, or the fact you used to troll alt.usage.english could be rather career-limiting. →
3
Mar
2002
I can only remember meeting "Uncle Wally" once. We were visiting England for my cousin's wedding, and I must have been eleven. He had a big fancy house and a swimming pool. He was nice. I played the first few bars of Pachabel's Canon in D on his grand piano, but couldn't play any more because I hadn't learned it yet. He died on December 26, 2000. →
