One more thing I forgot to mention about the writing, and which is absent from my sidebar: there’s a contest on at Highlights for Children which offers prizes of $1000 for (very) short stories (ie. of 800 words or so) set in the future. I thought of Stephanie when I read that, but I don’t know if I mentioned it to her. Me, I find any contest with no entry fee tempting, and when it’s stories for kids set in the future, man, I can’t resist. So, predictably, I’ve popped out a couple of things and been tinkering with them …
Month: December 2007
Ten Spikes, A Grasshopper, and Nemonymous Thing
I don’t know if it’s just because I’ve been multitasking so much this semester, but I’m currently reading a bunch of different books — about the first ten on the Now Reading animation that runs in my sidebar, with the rest being books I plan on reading next. Anyway, this multitasking has also bled over into my writing. I’ve been working, off and on, with three different pieces over the last week or so. Very off, not much on, but when I am on, I only do about a thousand words, maximum, on any one of these stories. Then I …
Happy Thing-Thing
Not everyone in the world — or even among my readers — is celebrating Christmas, but it does seem that this time of year is rife with alternate holidays. A friend of mine used to say he was celebrating the Midwinter Atheists’ Pissup, and it’s as good a handle as any to hang this day on. Of course, it’s also Lime’s birthday, so I made her a cheesecake. (Photo forthcoming.) I was shocked — it actually turned out okay. Better than okay. Chocolate cheesecake. Not as pretty as the ones my friend Jack used to make, but delicious all the …
Passports and Immigration and “Low Quality Foreigners”
Well, headaches averted, really. So far. I’ve been a bit of an ostrich, not paying attention to the whole Korean news/expat blog scene, and it came up and bit me in the back end last night. I came across these posts — like this one — that bespoke a big change afoot in Korean visa renewal procedures. The last I’d heard, those living here didn’t need to worry about that, but this sounded more complicated. Things like having to fly to Canada every time I get a different job, for example, or needing a criminal record check for March 1st. …
용산 멍청이, aka “You Can’t Run Linux on Laptops�?, Part 2 (and more)
I recently posted about being sold a computer on which Linux would not install. I left off with the computer still at the shop, and the guy trying to install it himself. Well, Lime’s looked around online and found that, since I’d taken longer than a week (it took me 8 days to give up on installing anything on the system) to go back and complain, I legally was less able to get a refund — apparently the law really does work that way here, or so she suggested to me. So anyway, when we went there this time, the …