World Fantasy - Day 2-4
Day one was fine, but after getting no sleep… the rest of the time pretty much killed me. I like my 8 hours of sleep per night! 
The panels were mostly awesome. There were a couple that made me wonder about the panelists. I think a few authors felt that their way was the only right way. This, of course, is BS. Fantasy is the place where your allowed to break the rules. You can create the world as you wish. Oh well, overall the advice was well thought out and well presented. The parties were awesome as well. I was able to introduce myself to many other writers, aspiring writers, publishers, agents, editors, etc. It was definitely a great experience. While I don’t have a finished manuscript yet, it does give me faith that I can one day enter the ranks of a published author.
As for last night, I came home… tried to write but ended up going to bed early. I’ll have to write extra tonight to catch up for NaNoWriMo, so off I go!
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World Fantasy Day 1
World Fantasy was awesome today, and it wasn’t even the first full day. I met a lot of really interesting people: writers, aspiring authors, publishers, people who just showed us because it looked fun. The panels were really interesting as well. There was one about Edgar Allan Poe’s influence on modern writing, which was interesting. I met writer John Levitt who used to live in Salt Lake City, and moved to San Fran, and wrote urban fantasy. (Which matches me pretty well: grew up in SLC, living in SJ, and writing urban fantasy.) I also met Jeff and Ann VanderMeer at the opening ceremonies and was personally invited to their after party. I stayed for the Google Books Settlement panel, which was very interesting… and then hung out at the parties. Made a lot of new friends tonight, which I guess is the point of attending. Now I’m eating cold pizza and drinking mint tea—I don’t know how those go together either but I ran out of bottled water in the house. :/ It’s almost 3am, and I need to be up by 9am if I want to make it for the opening panels. If things keep going like they are now, this will be one of the best $200 ever spent on a convention! (Oh, and not to mention all the SWAG they gave out… I’ll post more on this when I actually have time to go through the bag! 
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Favorite Podcasts!
I decided to write a quick post showing my favorite podcasts. Check them out, they’re good. (ITunes links will open up in ITunes.)
Writing Excuses (ITunes Link) - If you’re writing, this is awesome. It’s done by Brandon Sanderson (Author of Mistborn, Elantris, Warbreaker, the forthcoming Wheel of Time book, etc), Dan Wells (Author of I am Not a Serial Killer), and Howard Tayler (Webcomic Author of Schlock Mercenary). They give tips on how to be a good writer, have good guest authors, and have writing prompts to help you keep up your writing. It’s good stuff.
Science@NASA (ITunes Link) - If you like astronomy, this is the podcast for you. They tell stories of the past, inform you of cool forthcoming events, and give you a good science kick.
Grammar Girl (ITunes Link) - I know my grammar’s not the best, but I do want to improve myself. The Grammar Girl podcast tackles a different grammar topic (usually answering questions submitted from listeners) and it is really useful.
JapanesePod101 (ITunes Link) - If you’re learning Japanese, check these out. They are well produced and include lots of extra information to help you learn.
Please feel free to comment any other podcasts you think I would enjoy.
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Birthday Wishlist
Since my birthday is a week from Saturday (Sept 5), my family has been asking me what I wanted. I keep telling them a gift certificate to Amazon or Thinkgeek, but they just tell me that a gift certificate is a cop-out. So, fine… I’ll actually make a list of stuff I want.
- Kindle DX - $489.00 - I specifically want the DX since it natively supports PDF documents. This way I can send ebooks I get to the device. Also, this way I can send writing group stuff to the device w/o having to convert it first. (Well, doc->pdf is fine now that M$ Word will do that on it’s own.) Expensive, yes, but oh so useful. I’m pretty sure I’ll get this one way or another by the end of the year, hence the reason I want Amazon gift cards… so I can buy books for it.
- Samsung SyncMaster T220 Widescreen LCD Monitor - $229.98 - I already have one of these monitors, and I would like to get another one (or one similar to match color tones/etc) for dual-screen display. They say another monitor increases productivity by 30%, so this will be a good investment.
- A new router! - $40-$120 - When I went out to get a new router, I instantly went for a WRT54G… just to find out that Cisco neutered it by making it only have 2MB flashable memory. So, I have to use DD-WRT micro. It’s crap! So, now I want a new router with at least 16MB memory that I can put DD-WRT/Tomato/whatever on it and use it as a VPN server among other things. (Hence, the newegg gift card.
- A trip to Japan - $lots - Yea, I really want this.
- Photoshop CS4 - $699 - I don’t use this much, but it’s awesome for web design! Stuck on a Trial Version atm.
- A new bike - ~$1k - I don’t have a bike… and I kinda want one.
- Anything else techy/cool. Because… I like to be techy and cool.
So, after looking at that list, you still think a Gift Card is too much? I’ll add more as I think of stuff.
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Where to look until I get this updated
For those wanting to keep track of me, here are the best pages to look at:
http://www.twitter.com/stridera
http://www.facebook.com/stridera
and (haven’t been used much recently) http://stridera.livejournal.com/
I do have a couple reworks of this page in progress… hopefully I’ll finish it soon.
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New Servers
Moved content to a new server… sadly… they zapped the old server before I could backup the database. Luckily, I didn’t have too much stuff on there… just the comments/descriptions from my iraq pictures… I’ll have to retype that… damn
Anyway, hopefully I’ll get the site back up and running soon.
And… finally… this server should be a little more stable than any of my past servers.
Feel free to check out my livejournal in the meantime.
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