In two hours or so I start my third National Writing Month competition. My 2003 entry is available both in print and as a download thru Lulu.com and Amazon. My 2004 entry failed miserably and is hidden in the same place where Al Gore hides his “lockbox.” Hopefully I can get my ass in gear [...]

Mark Frauenfelder just discovered that (1) Guavas grow in California, and (2) they are freakin delicious. And goddammit, they are. I had two delicious guava trees in my back yard in Puerto Rico, and a third one on the other side of the fence. My neighbor did not eat them (those were sour as hell), [...]

A “good friend of ours” IM’ed me to ask me why I went thru all this trouble with my book re-formatting and did not give LaTeX a chance. This caught me by surprise because I had already experimented a little bit with TeX a few months ago, and I had put it in the back [...]

By now most news outlets have reported that the U.S. has agreed to cut in half the USMC presence in Okinawa over the next 6 years. This sounds like a big deal if you are a Japanese citizen and resident of the island (they have run into too many violent crimes committed by U.S. Servicemen) [...]

Kristian did a little digging around and found better background information on the issue of separating documents into sections so the headers and other formatting can be controlled both easier and more specifically. OOo Writer Guide on working with master documents (as a PDF) Same Writer Guide (in its open document format) The source document [...]

All Word:mac V.X sucks Word:mac 2004 sucks OOo Write 2.0 sucks AbiWord sucks Apple Pages sucks even worse. They all suck! Last night I wasted TWO hours trying to do something really simple: 1. Leave the first page of my document blank. No headers, no footers, totally blank. 2. Second page is the title page. [...]

I have published Shining Star, my first novel, thru Lulu.com. I am more interested in getting the word out and having people read my works, so conventional publishing at this stage does not offer me that much value added. The novel is available either as a 6″ x 9″ trade paperback or as an electronic [...]

George Takei is gay Originally uploaded by pvera. Mister Sulu is out of the closet, not that there’s anything wrong with that. CNN has a small article here.

When Roberts was nominated to be the Chief Justice of the SCOTUS, most of the press (and the cottage industry of “experts” that feed off them) wasted a lot of time agonizing over the nomination. Why? Because Roberts is a boring choice and did not bring to the table much fodder for drama and polemic, [...]

It is 7:46 PM … Originally uploaded by pvera. Sorry but I can’t help myself, I still think the whole argument about the root DNS is stupid. And worse, an hour ago I realized that these people don’t have the funds to be able to keep it up and running, so guess who is going [...]