Category: High Tech

Back from Sakuracon

I took Dan to Sakuracon over the weekend. Sakuracon is the big anime (Japanese animation) convention in Seattle.

Anime fandom sure has changed since I first encountered it in the mid-Eighties. The Eighties boom was fueled by the introduction of the home VCR, which made possible the widespread piracy of laserdiscs and videotapes from Japan. Fans bombarded everyone they knew with low-quality tapes of their favorite shows. These were in Japanese, without subtitles, but many of the shows were so visual that understanding the dialog was unnecessary.

The surge of interest this generated allowed real, licensed versions to appear with English subtitles or dubbing. The industry has grown and grown, and anime is a major cultural force among our young people. A lot of its appeal is that most of it is aimed at older kids than American cartoons are, so there’s far more plot, romance, violence, mystery, horror, cuteness, crazy comedy, and sex appeal — often all in the same show. The basic approach is to take every knob and turn it up to “eleven.”

Karen and I are particularly fond of the works of Hayao Miyazaki, the “Japanese Walt Disney.”

At the conventions, practically everyone is in costume. This trend is more pronounced every year. I was definitely an oddball because I didn’t even make a token effort. Dan at least had a cape and an attitude:

The costumes can be almost anything, including non-anime characters. I saw an Edward Scissorhands, a guy dressed up as a whoopee cushion, and an Abe Lincoln in addition to the usual anime characters, including legions of girls dressed as “Japanese schoolgirls with magical powers” characters, of which anime has an infinite number.

So that was fun, and I’ll be doing it again next year. Need a costume, though. The peer pressure is getting to me.

My SF Novel Will Be Available in a Few Days

I approved the proof of my SF novel, “One Survivor,” today, which means that it’s technically in print already. However, it takes a couple of days for the news to spread. Amazon and Ingram (the world’s biggest book wholesaler) ought to figure it out at more or less the same time.

It’s a 258-page trade paperback and retails for $16.95.

I’ve posted a new One Survivor page on the Norton Creek Press Web site, which has background information about the book.

I’ve also published a lengthy excerpt, which consists of the first third of the book. If that doesn’t hook you, nothing will.

When was the last time you read a science fiction book where an alien spacecraft gets repaired by a group of teenagers?

Ruggedized PCs for Farmers’ Markets and Outdoor Use

We discovered years ago that our best chance of keeping our record-keeping and advance orders straight was to have a laptop with us at the farmer’s market. But most laptops can’t be used in bright daylight, let lone rain. What to do?

One solution we hit upon was to take the record-keeping PC with us to the market. For this, we turned to the Panasonic ToughBook. These are ruggedized PCs that can be tossed around, rained on, and generally treated like farm equipment. Spill-resistant, dust-proof, with shock-mounted disk drives and daylight-readable screens, they’re the bee’s knees for outdoor use.

We’ve been using a ToughBook CF-27 for years, but are upgrading to a faster and more modern (but used) ToughBook 29. Used ToughBooks are plentiful, since just about every cop car in the country has one, and the military uses tons of them, too.

Our CF-27 was slow but not too bad with QuickBooks 2005, and can run Web browsers and Microsoft Word and so on adequately. It only has an 800×600 screen, which is a nuisance, but livable. I forget what I paid for the CF-27, but they’re practically giving them away on eBay — most going for less than $100.

Putting Microsoft Live Mesh on the CF-27 (in a possibly-vain attempt to make all our computers sync their data effortlessly) was the final straw. It’s now so slow that we avoid using it, which is bad. Hence the ToughBook 29. These are going for $600 or so. (New ToughBooks cost a couple of grand, which is not something I can afford to bankroll out of farmer’s market sales.)

If you want to play around with the concept, you might consider blowing $100 on a nice CF-27 and seeing if it’s perfect except for being slow and having a low-resolution screen. You might discover that you never use it, or that its seven-pound weight is a turn-off, or that ruggedized PCs just aren’t your cup of tea, at which point you’ll be glad you didn’t spend more money. When you don’t need the CF-27 anymore, sell it on eBay, which will cut your total cost of ownership to almost nothing.

You have to be careful when selecting a model, because Panasonic has allowed their product line to become bloated, with many semi-rugged models that aren’t outdoor-rated. You want a model that says it has a daylight-readable screen and is moisture-resistant.

If you buy a used ToughBook, get one that has all its part, port covers, etc. Lots of these units have various pieces missing, including both the hard drive and the shock-mounted hard-drive carrier. Get one with the correct operating system already installed (almost always Windows XP Professional). You can ignore this advice if you want — parts and driver disks and such are readily available on eBay — but you’ll be happier if this doesn’t balloon into a big project.

[Update, 3/22/2009: My CF-29 has arrived, and it’s even nicer than I expected in every way — screen brightness and clarity, speed,weather-tightness, and overall condition. Though its 1.2 GHz processor isn’t up to modern standards, I maxed it out on memory (1.5 GB), and it seems very snappy. Highly recommended]

My SF Novel, “One Survivor,” Almost Ready

The aftermath of my cold has slowed me down, but I’ve made my final pass through my science fiction novel, One Survivor. Karen will go over it one more time, and then I can upload it to Lightning Source. It should be available in a week or so.

And it’s about time, too, considering I started this project in 1987!

After that, we’ll finish up the third book in the Tom Slade series. And there are plenty more books where these came from — chicken books, farm books, novels, you name it — all stacked up waiting for us to find some time.

Radio Clocks and Daylight Savings Time

Ah, daylight savings time. What was the point of it again? Oh yeah … it doesn’t work, but Congress look concerned and attentive. This isn’t easy for them, so they’ll clutch at any straw.

Anyway, I have a lot of “atomic clocks,” which are really radio-synchronized clocks that get their signal from the super-low-frequency transmitter at WWVB in Fort Collins, Colorado. I like these because you can forget about your timepieces except when you need to replace the batteries five years later. They set themselves to the radio signal.

The bad news is that the radio signal doesn’t actually get through all the time. Mostly it doesn’t matter, since once a week is plenty, but it’s a pain around the daylight savings time transition. Half my clocks have updated themselves and the others haven’t. Worse, these “zero-config” clocks are very inconvenient to set manually, maybe impossible. And because resetting these clocks is something you do twice a year at most, it’s hard to remember the steps.

Once again, a promising technology gets messed up by sloppy implementation. Where’s the button to push that says, “don’t try to synch up just once per night, keep trying continuously, damn it!” Where’s the “synch over WiFi” feature? Failing that, where are the set of, “never mind, I’ll set it myself” buttons?

People talk as if timekeeping was a mature market, but clocks and watches are designed by idiots. There’s probably good money out there waiting for a designer with half a brain, provided he isn’t saddled instantly with a pointy-haired boss who prevents all progress.