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Actually, there is no chapter nineteen, at least in this iteration. The book now starts with a third person narrative between the CEO and an underling about Captain Knolls' report, which the underling is delivering. Most of it is Knolls' report.

At any rate, what was originally chapter one is now chapter two. Chapter one is now a conversation between the company CEO and an underling, who brings Captain Knolls' report with him.

I'm following (and copying and pasting from) the manuscript, but every chapter has changed and expanded. What I'm posting today is a couple months old and has been added to.

Oh, did I mention? This is the new chapter one.

Meeting
                "Did you bring Knolls' report?"
                "Yes sir, here it is."
                "Did you read it?"
                "Yes, sir, I did. It's interesting. Knolls could be a writer if his grammar wasn't so atrocious, it was actually a good read. These reports are usually pretty dry."
                "Well, he's just a ship's captain. It's not like he's been to college or anything. How detailed is the report?"
                "Heh, too detailed in places. I didn't really need to hear about his bowel movements."
                "How much did he leave out?"
                "Nothing important. At least I think nothing important."
                "It says he saved her life?"
                "Yes, sir. He apparently kept a cool head, kept his wits about him and did everything right. It looks like he saved Kelly's ship and cargo as well."
                "Yes, I read the investigation report. Sabotage to Kelly's ship during the Mars overhaul so they could get his ship and ores. One of the workers was arrested, he'd been paid a huge sum of cash to do it. It wasn't hard to catch him, they just looked at spending patterns to find who was living beyond their means. He confessed, we need to figure out how to prevent that from happening again."
                "yes sir, we're on it already. If Mark Johnson can't solve it, it's insoluble.
                "It had better not be. What were damages to cargo?"
                "One specimen was severely injured but recovered before reaching the port on Mars.
                "Other damages?"
                "One of the ship's two fusion reactors was ruined, as well as three of its ion drives. The other was damaged but easily repaired. One battery incinerated. Minimal damage considering the dangerous cargo it was carrying and the problems Knolls encountered. May I ask, sir, why you allowed her on board with such a dangerous cargo?"
                "No, Bob, you may not, but I will say she's going to do whatever the hell she wants no matter what I think. I'm just glad it turned out the way it did."
                "Sorry, sir. Anyway, I hope you read that report. It answers a lot of questions the investigators didn't."
                "I will, thanks. Afternoon open? Want to shoot nine holes?"
                "Of course. But please, read the report first."
                "Don't worry, I've been looking forward to it, especially considering... get the hell out of here, Bob. Let me read this thing. I'll see you on the golf course."

Chapter 20 is finished and 21 nearly so. And yes, the incinerated battery and more is coming.

"Nobots" showed up at Amazon.com today. B&N is the cheapest I've seen at $23 and change. Their shipping is free for orders over $25, while Amazon only offers free shipping for orders over $35. Unless you've been chomping at the bit for years, I suggest waiting until "The Paxil Diaries" shows up at B&N before buying a copy.

I'm disappointed that Amazon has no cover art shown, too.

I'm referring to the fans who bought copies of Nobots. It's finally listed at Barnes & Noble here, and somehow it's cheaper there by three or four dollars. Again, my apologies. If you're thinking of getting a copy of The Paxil Diaries you may want to wait a couple of months until it's at Barnes as well.

Barnes is far superior to Amazon. Why? The bitches at Amazon still haven't listed it. However, Google's spiders haven't found it at B&N yet, either; I found it through B&N's search facility.

I was amused that B&N suggested that you nag me to make a nook version out of it, when you can read it or download it (actually, both books) free on my web site on your nook. I'm making e-pub versions, but haven't quite figured out all the nuances of the conversion software. It will be free as well.

The Paxil Diaries is finally available. I hesitated releasing it, because it's still not perfect. There is at least one grammar error ("whom" should be "who") and at least two formatting errors. But to tell the truth, I'm really tired of working on this thing and it seems no matter how many times I proofread, fixing one mistake seems to cause another.

You can read it, download it for free, or buy a hardcover copy here. I hope you enjoy it, some of you have been waiting ten years for it.

I've been working harder since I retired than I did working. Maybe it's because it's something I want. I've spent the last week proofreading. I found that typos and other errors are far easier for me to find in a printed book than on a screen.

I finished yesterday, updated and uploaded the file and ordered a new copy. Still having writer's block with Mars, Ho! (which is only 20% done) I checked Amazon and Barnes to see if they had Nobots available. Not yet.

Fifteen years ago when I had the Springfield Fragfest I had a terrible plagiarism problem. Folks weren't just infringing my copyright, they were posting my own work under their name. Not a week would go by that I didn't have to issue a DMCA takedown notice to someone, usually a university (a different one each time) where a student was plagiarizing my work. So I googled for pages using Nobots in an infringing way.

I publish under the noncommercial GPL license. All I demand is that it's non-commercial and I get credit.

I ran across this German site. I was taken aback at first... DMCA doesn't apply to Germans. Then I realized they were displaying mcgrewbooks.com in a frame!

I don't see how it could harm me and do see how it might actually sell a book or two so I'm not going to hassle them.

I wish I'd learned German rather than Spanish.

In this week's poll on Pipedot I ask you to rank popular websites using the Borda Count voting method. In other words, how much do you trust these sites to maintain your data and your online privacy.

Instructions:

Rank any number of options in your order of preference.

Notes:

• The highest preference is "1" and will reward the highest number of points
• The largest number you can enter is the count of the options (In this case "8") and will award 1 point
• Don't duplicate numbers
• You can leave some options blank; no points will be given to these choices

This marks the 3rd voting method supported. Approval Voting was added last month.

How to find the most useless page of SoylentNews:

From the dropdown selection button below the story (the one offering "Threaded", "Nested", etc. for comments) select "No Comments", then click "Change".

The option delivers what it promises: No comments. Also no story. Just the settings bar.

Note that this is not a critique (it's clearly just an artefact of how Slashcode works, and not harmful in any way). I just considered it amusing.

I've hardly logged on to the internet at all this past week, too busy correcting a mistake software houses frequently do: Trying to rush a project out the door. The fact is, I'm tired of The Paxil Diaries, but I don't want to ship a flawed piece of crap.

The first copy had a messed up cover; my printer's "cover generation wizard" has an interface almost as bad as GIMP. I fixed it and ordered a corrected copy, and a day later as I was converting the .odt to .html I discovered that some of the chapter numbers were wrong and there were no page numbers. I fixed it, resubmitted it and thought "This time it'll be right."

Number three showed up bright and early Thursday morning. I started going over it with a fine toothed comb. Almost halfway through and I started to think I'd be able to release it. The weather got really nice so I decided to read it in Felber's beer garden.

I discovered I was far better at proofreading when I've had a few beers than sober. When I'm sober what the words are saying distracts me from the words themselves, and I read too fast and miss errors.

It was full of errors, many of them whoppers. I marked them drinking, and finished correcting this morning while sober and sent for copy #4. It may be available in a couple of weeks depending on if I find more errors when it comes. I'll upload the book's HTML and PDF versions as soon as I decide I can release it.

Meanwhile, I can get back to Mars, Ho! this week.

A $1,499 supercomputer on a card? That's what I thought when reading El Reg's report of AMD's Radeon R9 295X2 graphics card which is rated at 11.5 TFlop/s(*). It is water-cooled, contains 5632 stream processors, has 8 GB of DDR5 RAM, and runs at 1018MHz.

AMD's announcement claims it's "the world's fastest, period". The $1,499 MSRP compares favorably to the $2,999 NVidia GTX Titan Z which is rated at 8 TFlop/s.

From a quick skim of the reviews (at: Hard OCP, Hot Hardware, and Tom's Hardware), it appears AMD has some work to do on its drivers to get the most out of this hardware. The twice-as-expensive NVidia Titan in many cases outperformed it (especially at lower resolutions). At higher resolutions (3840x2160 and 5760x1200) the R9 295x2 really started to shine.

For comparison, consider that this 500 watt, $1,499 card is rated better than the world's fastest supercomputer listed in the top 500 list of June 2001.

(*) Trillion FLoating-point OPerations per Second.

Chapter One
Previously

Pirates
        Nothing happened in the last week that I didn't log in the ship's log. At least not what you want to hear, I get it. You don't need to know every time I take a shit or what I had for breakfast, right? Anyway, the whores pretty much behaved themselves. Like the log says, robots were trying to fix the busted generator but I knew they couldn't. They do what they're programmed to do no matter how impossible.
        Anyway, after a week there were some more little rocks in our way, but these were mapped; we could just go around them. The computers would do the actual steering but I have to sit in the pilot seat in case the four of them disagree about something and I have to make a decision. I've never seen that happen, though.
        While we were driving around the rocks, Wild Bill called over the MASER link. "John, Bill here. I'm about a light minute ahead of you and I'm standing still again, but this time it's on purpose. There's pirates ahead, and I can't outrun them on batteries. If your systems are all in good shape, run like hell. If you're having problems you should stop."
        Shit. I could out run them on one generator but what if the other one went out? Hell, I could just detour around them. Too bad Bill didn't have that advantage, batteries just didn't hold enough energy.
        I answered him back. "Pirates? This far out? Are you sure they're pirates?"
        It would be a couple of minutes before I heard back. I put the course correction into the computers' input console while I waited, then addressed the folks on board. "Passengers and cargo, attention. Prepare for unexpected gravity changes. That is all."
        Bill answered. "It's a fleet and they're not listed in the computer. Hell if I know what they're doing out here."
        Damn. Bill was a damned good friend who had helped me out of jams more than once. And he was hauling tons of different metals, a valuable cargo inside a valuable ship. His short circuit could have been sabotage; pirates have been known to infiltrate the company before. The company wouldn't too much mind pirates killing Bill but they'd hate to lose the ship and cargo, so maybe I wouldn't get in too much trouble for what I planned. I picked up the phone and addressed the ship's P.A. System. You can probably get a lot more detail from the computers, but anyway I got on the P.A. "Attention, ladies, this is the captain," I said. "Strap down, we're going to have some crazy gravity in a few minutes. That is all."
        I strapped myself into the pilot's chair myself. I turned the boat around and decelerated, shut down half the engines, made one look like it was sputtering, and informed Bill to get ready. Then I went toward the pirates while the computers figured out the trajectory for what I'd planned. I'm glad I have those computers, I could never do the math myself.
        They saw me, and I pretended I'd just noticed them and changed course. I wasn't kidding when I told the women gravity was going to be weird.
        They took chase. I went just slow enough to keep them the right distance and get where I was headed when I was headed there. From the radar it looked like they were steering those things by hand. Good, that raised my chances. Actually there wasn't any danger to me since I could outrun 'em easy and they can't shoot at me or anything that might damage the boat and cargo, which is what their goal is. But it raised my chances of saving Bill's ship.
        You know how the pirate fleets work, with a lead ship carrying an EMP. They don't know we designed these ships with pirates in mind and their EMP wouldn't stop us. And I didn't want them to know so I sent them a nice little present, fired from the rail.
        I hear the pirates still use gunpowder.
        The bastard's ship exploded and we were almost there –
        When I reached the right spot we took off like a bat out of hell. Ten seconds later the poor pirates got caught in the rain, as we say. They probably all died. I sure hope so, murderous bastards after my friend!
        I set the course back to Mars and addressed the ladies. "You can unstrap now."
        Time for inspection, since I'd pushed her hard on one generator.
        Like it says in the log, it was fine but a little warm. The engines were in good shape, too, but I shut down the one I made stutter for twenty four hours, just like the book says.
        This called for a beer. Hell, this called for champagne but I didn't have any. I started back to my quarters for a beer.

To be continued.