Well, I've been off work on vacation since the 7th, and tomorrow I return. What did I accomplish this last week? Well. I managed to set up my desktop computer with Linux and Windows 2000 more or less the way I want it -- Linux on the larger hard drive, Windoze on the smaller. I'd be all Linux, all the time, but there are just a couple of things it won't do just yet -- recognize my ancient digital camera, and run most of my audio recording and mixing software. When the Linux community catches up in those regards (or when I buy a better camera...) I'll be the first to jump on board. I want to be rid of Windows. I wrote the next column for Writers Unbound -- it's an ongoing series following my progress as I write a novel called "Brave Men Run." The idea is that writers who are even wetter behind the ears than I can learn from my successes and mistakes... I put most of my collections of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction up on E-Bay, something I'd wanted to do for a while. Bittersweet, deciding…

We never needed to have left our home. On Halloween night, it rained. It was perfect.

It's pretty creepy up here now. The animals -- we have four cats, a dog, and a turtle -- are getting weirded out. Okay, I don't know about the turtle, but you get the idea. The dog keeps wanting to go outside, where he just walks around and eats grass. The cats are whining. I've got a little air purifier running in the back of the house, cuz that's where I'm hanging out, but the air quality in the front of the house is noticeably worse... every window and door, including the flue of the fireplace, is closed, but the air outside is more smoke than air. There's still no fire in Hesperia. Heh. I said, "Still." There's no indication that there will be, but man, it's a little eerie out there. I've been pretty much stuck in the house (see exceptions in previous entries) and with the stars gone from the sky and the air fouled, I'm feeling a little boxed in. The darn animals are probably getting buggy cuz I'm getting buggy! There's a voluntary evacuation in a neighborhood about five miles southeast of here, and a mandatory evac a bit south of there near the Cajon Pass.…

So I went to get something to eat and the folks ahead of me waiting for a table were evacuees, straight from Big Bear. They were eating because they hadn't had time to get breakfast before they had to leave their house. I was eating because I was tired of being in my house. So I mostly filled up on a plate of perspective... Today's satellite image.

It's the third day in a row that I haven't been able to go to work because of freeway closures related to the fire. I want to make it very very clear: this is not like a vacation! I'm going buggy. I think I'm going to brave the air quality and leave this fortress for ... I dunno, a restaurant, a coffeehouse, something! I gotta get outta here for a while. I wish my laptop wasn't down. I've got website and writing work to do, but I don't think I can sit in my office all day today. I'm gonna stop whining now. My house isn't burning down.

For years, I've been fretting over the ultimate fate of the many cassette tapes I have of music I've recorded either solo or with bands that are now defunct. In many cases, these fragile cassettes are the only recorded history of some interesting times in my life. I fear that if they should be destroyed or deteriorate beyond repair, my own memory will edit the truth and something will be lost. So tonight, I finally started transfering them to digital. Eventually, my entire recorded musical history up to earlier this year will be on one fully-packed MP3 album that I will eventually make available for the price of postage to anyone who wants it. I want to shut the door on all the music I've made up to this year before I start writing new, and performing again. Why? Because all the music I've written to date is either so old it feels like a cover song when I perform it, or the associations I have with the songs are ones I'd rather, well, disassociate myself with! So tonight I started archiving, pretty much at random. I heard the two song demo from 1986 I did with Roger and a…

I move closer and closer to eliminating Windows -- and the influence of Microsoft -- from my working environment! I no longer code websites in Dreamweaver -- I use Screem or a plain old text editor. I no longer work with graphics in Photoshop -- I use Gimp! I am totally off MS Office and don't miss it a bit when there's OpenOffice and Evolution. And now... Thanks are due to Evan for building LogJam, the LiveJournal client for Linux I'm using to write this entry. It's going to be nice to throw entries up on the web without opening up a browser. A few wrinkles remain, like getting my digital camera to work with Linux, but man, this is great. Let's hear it for a DIY operating system stuffed with DIY software. Hurrah!

For the third night in a row, I've had to drive past hillsides where plumes of fire burn fifty, a hundred feet into a night sky made white with smoke.

This week, so far, I've had two distinct visits from people I haven't seen in years.