Mark L. Van Name's Blog, page 159

On the road again: IDF, San Francisco, day 3

The conference wrapped up this afternoon.  After some time on work email, we headed down the 101 to a work dinner at a good Mediterranean place, Dishdash, in Sunnyvale.  We mostly missed rush hour on both ends, though the traffic on 101 is worse at almost any hour than traffic back home.  The food was good, as was the conversation.

I have to get up before six a.m., which is really not me, so I'm going to cut this short. 

Tomorrow, I fly home, which is a good thing. 

On the road again: IDF, San Francisco, day 2

After an eighteen-hour workday, I'm afraid I don't have the energy or desire to write much here.  The show is full of great devices, from phones to tablets to two-in-one laptops to servers, so it's a great place to be if you're a tech geek--which I am.  Almost all of what I did today, though, I can't, as usual, discuss.

Dinner was a meeting with friends who are also clients and colleagues, a tasty steak and Caesar salad at a San Francisco landmark steak house, Harris'.  The conversation and the food were good, though also about work and so nothing I can discuss here. 

Tomorrow, more conference, more meetings, and a trip down the 101 for, yes, a dinner meeting, one that promises to be both interesting and tasty.

On the road again: IDF, San Francisco, day 1

Though I can't talk about most of what I do in my job at PT, I can say that one of the joys of being in the tech industry is that it's always changing.  New technologies and new products lead to new ways to use them, and for the most part we consumers benefit from the improvements.  Seeing the hot new stuff is always big fun. 

Lunch was at IDF, the usual trade-show fare, decent but no more. 

Dinner, though, was a top-drawer meal at Coi, one of the more adventurous restaurants in the area.  The course with beets was fine, though nothing special.  The shiso sauce on the final dessert was perhaps the meal's only misstep.  The rest of the dinner was delicious and perfectly executed.  To my amazement, I even loved the chilled eggplant soup and would have liked more than they served.  I highly recommend Coi if you're out here or live here. 

On the road again: IDF, San Francisco, day 0

All of today went to work, which I can't discuss.  I can say that after spending much of the day in my hotel room working, though no hotel room is as good a workspace as my office, this one wasn't half bad. 

Dinner tonight was a fun meal with a colleague at Le Colonial.  We shared two appetizers, the pot stickers and the pork belly.  The pot stickers were good, but the twice-cooked pork belly, each chunk topped with a quail egg and all the pieces in a delightful oil-and-citrus-and-other-stuff sauce, was exceptional.  We also shared a main course of lobster over noodles, along with some fried rice and, believe it or not, a side of Brussels sprouts.  I normally hate the nasty Brussels sprouts, but these were good enough that I ate multiple pieces and enjoyed each one.  I'd definitely return to Le Colonial.

Tomorrow morning, the conference sessions start in earnest.

On the road again: IDF, San Francisco, day -1

Meetings associated with the conference don't get rolling until tomorrow, but I needed to get out here today so I would have the option of attending some of them.  Thus, I found myself on a Sunday morning getting out of bed in the single digits to begin the long travel day. 

The first bits went well:  easy check-in, work in the Admirals' Club, an upgrade, and a very productive flight to Chicago. 

The second leg was also productive but not at all fun, because I spent it sitting next to a Dubliner who would not stop poking me in the side with his elbow and putting his right foot on top of my left.  After a few minutes of this unwanted contact, I asked him directly and nicely not to keep making it.  He complained of how small his space was, and I agreed it was small--and pointed out that mine was equally small.  I also noted that we were lucky to have the extra leg room of exit-row seats.  He shook his head.  We sat silently for a while, and then he began the contact again.  I pushed back.  He stopped.  For a while.  We repeated this for the entire rest of the flight. 

I'm proud of myself for not hitting him even once. 

By the time I landed, I needed the walk to baggage claim and the taxi ride to the hotel just to calm down. 

After checking in and registering for the conference, I did some more work and then walked to a nearby movie theater.  There I treated myself to a truly terrible yet occasionally entertaining film:  The Bounty Killer.  I can't recommend it to any who wouldn't enjoy the late show at the beach, but the all-male audience hooted and hollered quite often during it.

That said, watch it at your own risk.

The next Jon & Lobo book

At WorldCon and in email, a lot of folks have asked recently about the status of the next Jon & Lobo book.  That's more than fair, because in my ideal world the book would have appeared earlier this summer.  It did not, however, for a very simple reason:  I'm not done with it yet.  I'm working on it, but I don't know when I'll finish.  I've told this to folks, but otherwise I've stayed mum on the book.  That practice is, unsurprisingly, more than a little frustrating to many people.  I've explained before why I try to avoid talking about works in progress, but I also don't mean to be annoying by doing so.

After much thought, I've decided to leak one little tidbit about the next book:  its title.  Though I don't know when I will complete the novel, I do know its name:

All the Worlds Against Us

No, I did not miss an apostrophe; I really mean all the worlds of my future. 

I will also say that the title is rather more true than Jon & Lobo would like.

Zombie fight and bomb shrapnel claim part of writer's tooth

Despite the timestamp on this post, I'm writing it about five in the morning Friday night/Saturday morning.  (I refuse to acknowledge the new day is here until I've gone to sleep and then awakened in that day, so to me this is still Friday.)  I discovered a couple of hours ago that a big chunk of the side of my top left rearmost molar (the only tooth behind it is my wisdom tooth) is missing.  This tooth is one of the few I have that contains a filling, so I suppose that's part of the problem, but I was at the dentist just last month and the check-up didn't reveal any cavities.  To be fair to them, we didn't do x-rays--my fault due to a terrible gag reflex--but, still.

I fly to San Francisco Sunday morning and don't return until Friday night, so my first shot at an appointment with my dentist is a week from Monday.  I fly out again two days after that, so my window of opportunity is small.

The remaining chunk of tooth doesn't hurt, but from what little research I've done, it's probably not great to leave the tooth untended for long.

This sucks.

As life problems go, of course, it's relatively minor, so I won't complain further, but it certainly is annoying. 

It's also annoying that I have no great story to go with it.  Had I been in a fight to protect a young anime-eyed child from a mob of brain-hungry zombies or racing at high speed in my Tesla to drive a fully armed bomb far enough away from a crowded urban center that no one would be hurt and then lost the tooth to a piece of shrapnel, that would be at least interesting.

Instead, sometime today I bit something hard and lost a bit of tooth, and I didn't notice it until the wee hours.

I think I'll just go with the bomb or the zombies and hope folks buy it.

A video series worth watching (and I'm in it)

A while ago, the Space Frontier Foundation enlisted the help of Dr. Kiki Sanford to create a short video series about the influence of Robert A. Heinlein on writers and technologists.  Jonathan Card, the Executive Director of the Space Frontier Foundation, helped pull together the folks involved and create the videos.  Baen Books, my publisher, was a sponsor.  The series appears on the 25th anniversary of Heinlein's death. 

The result is a series of three videos that you can find on YouTube.  You can also click below to watch the first one. 

In the series, Kiki interviewed three people:  Peter Diamandis, entrepreneur and author; Art Dula, trustee of the Heinlein Prize Trust and literary executor of Heinlein's literary estate; and me. 

My interview was the first to appear, so I'm embedding it here.  Fair warning:  I did it via a laptop's webcam while sitting in a temporary office at PT, so it's a bit stark, and I had to limit my movement quite a bit to stay on camera. 

Kiki was a great interviewer, smart and fun and very well prepared.  I enjoyed talking with her.  I hope you also find the conversation interesting. 

More PT sabbatical goodness

In
I hope you enjoy it.



I should also note again that PT is giving the charity in each of these videos the right to use that video to help promote the good work they're doing. 

I'm very proud of what these PT employees have done, and I'm proud to be part of a company that actively pursues doing good in the world.

Frederik Pohl, R.I.P.

Fred Pohl died yesterday.  I learned about it online while on a plane home from the WorldCon.  With his passing, our field has again lost one of its giants.  He was also one of the last of the first generation of great SF writers: his first publication appeared in the thirties, and his most recent in 2011. 

If you haven't read his fiction, you owe it to yourself to check out such wonderful works as The Space Merchants, a collaboration with C.M. Kornbluth from 1953, Man Plus, and Gateway, to name but a few. 

I did not know Fred Pohl.  I met him once, at my very first science fiction convention.  He was a guest, and a fan friend introduced us.  He wouldn't remember me, of course; I was just another nervous fan.  I mumbled a few words about wanting to be a writer, and he smiled and told me to get to it.  There really is no better writing advice. 

We are poorer for his passing.