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Mayor Waldo was eating his salad as he waited for the main course when he was summoned to Dome Hall for an emergency. His secretary insisted that he couldn't talk about it in public or on the phone.
        He paid for the meal, told the serverbot to keep his food warm when it was finished cooking, and returned to Dome Hall, muttering under his breath. He asked Willie Clark, his secretary, what was going on that was so important it would interrupt his lunch hour.
        “A body was found outside the dome, sir. We suspect murder.”
        Murder? There had been a lot of death in Mars’ hundred years of colonization, but until now there hadn’t been a single murder, at least that anyone had known about. There were no homicides on the planet’s surface, at least; in space the pirates would kill you the first chance they got. In space, only the Green-Osbourne Transportation Company’s security fleet kept things relatively calm.
        “Why do you suspect murder? There’s never been a murder on Mars.”
        “Until now. The body was found outside the dome and wasn’t wearing a suit.”
        “Maybe he was drunk and stumbled through the wrong door. I should talk to council members about assigning guards to the airlocks.”
        “No, sir. Impossible. The body was found a half kilometer from the nearest lock. If he’d simply walked through the airlock...”
        “Hmm, yes. He’d have died before he went two steps and probably would have died inside the lock. Who do you have investigating?”
        “Nobody yet, sir. The police chief called us right before we called you, looking for guidance. The coroner is examining the body and we expect her report in a week or two. The corpse had been out there a couple of days at least. Of course there was no decay, but the body was completely desiccated, freeze-dried, as would be expected.”
        “Do we know the cause of death? Was a dead body taken outside, or a live one out there to die?”
        “The coroner is still doing the examination, sir. We’ll let you know as soon as we know.”
        “Thanks, Willie. Have the police start an investigation, and have them get in touch with an Earthian police detective who has experience in solving homicides, and have our people get advice from him or her.”
        “Should we keep this secret? At least until we know more? The Chief thinks so.”
        “No, you’re not working for Wilcox any more, and I’m not anything like Wilcox was. That’s why we won in a landslide, people hated his secrecy. Set up a press conference for tomorrow morning.”
        “Yes, sir.”
        He went back and finished his lunch.

        Albert Morton was the electrician who had discovered the body. It had been the most horrible thing he had ever seen in his life, and it ate at him that there had been nothing about it on the news. Who had done this, and why? He decided to contact a newspaper the next morning. Tonight he was going to get drunk; he’d never seen anything so gruesome, and couldn’t get the awful scene out of his head.

        “Say, Ed, how’s being Mayor treating you? Lager?”
        “Hi, John. Yeah, and a shot, I don’t care what. Scotch, I guess. My job’s sure not very fun today, we’re almost certain that we have a murder on our hands.”
        “Murder? On Mars? Really?”
        “We can’t see how it could be anything else. He was found half a kilometer from the airlock without an environment suit.”
        “What killed him?”
        “We won’t know until the coroner’s report comes in. But it has to be murder, nothing else makes sense. How’s business?”
        “I just got mail from Dewey this morning. We captured five pirate vessels last week and got a nice big finder’s fee from the boats’ rightful owners. He and Charles are looking at some new propulsion systems that might be a lot more efficient than the ion engines we’re using now. That will both lower the shipper’s cost and increase our profits, maybe even more than when we went from fission generators to fusions. And there’s a lot more shipping since they found all those rare earths on Ceres.”
        “Your bar doesn’t seem to be doing all that good.”
        John snorted. “You know this is just a hobby, but still, it is turning a small profit. It doesn’t usually get too busy until later at night. My brewery is doing almost too good. It’s hard to grow enough ingredients to brew enough of it to supply the demand. I may have to buy another building to grow more hops and barley and other ingredients.”
        A man walked in. “Hi, Al,” the bartender said. “The usual?”
        “Not today, John. Really bad day, I’ll have nightmares tonight. A lager and a shot of that white lightning you make. God damn, I ran across a dead body at work today outside the dome, and it was someone I’d met a few times. The poor guy didn’t have a suit on. Not just no suit, he wasn’t wearing a stitch of clothing.”
        “Yeah, Ed here was telling me about it.”
        The mayor said “I hadn’t heard that. They only said he had no suit.”
        The electrician asked “Ed, why isn’t this in the news?”
        “Beats me, but I’m holding a press conference about it tomorrow. Wilcox would have tried to keep it secret, but that’s why he lost the election. Was it gruesome?”
        Al downed his shot, took a sip of beer, and said “You wouldn’t have wanted to be there. John, another shot, please. Make it a double.

        Sam Woodside was a reporter for the Martian Times, one of several dozen such newspapers in Mars’ many domes. Al Morton called him the next morning, a day after the discovery, with news of the dead body that he had found. The reporter asked the electrician “Who was he and how did he die?”
        “I don’t know, His first name was Bob, but I don’t know what his last name was. He was an electrician, too, but he usually worked the other side of the dome from me and I didn’t know him very well, I only met him a few times. His shop was short staffed so they assigned me on that side temporarily. You’ll have to ask the cops his full name and how he died. I talked to the mayor last night at Hooker’s, and they don’t know much yet.”
        “Hookers?”
        “Hooker’s Tavern, named after a musician who lived in the nineteen hundreds. John Knolls is a good friend of mine and owns the place.”
        They spoke for another fifteen minutes without Sam learning much.
        As he was beginning to dial the mayor’s office to get more information, another call came in. It was from his boss, who assigned him to a press conference the mayor had scheduled for the morning.
        Typical. He really wanted to write about the murder and here he had to attend a meaningless press conference. He wondered what it was about. “Probably something nobody would want to read about,” he thought.
        The news conference lasted a long time, even though little was yet known about the murder. The only clue had been the corpse itself, and it hadn’t yet yielded any answers. They would have to wait for the coroner, who had possession of the case’s only clue that had turned up so far.
        The mayor issued an executive order that all airlocks be guarded, and that no one would be allowed outside the dome alone. Martians had to be extra cautious about everything, since the environment outside the domes was so deadly. Safety was drilled into native-born Martians from birth.
        The mayor had of course been in contact with Dome Council members, all of whom were going to present a bill making the guards and the “nobody goes out alone” rule law. All had urged him to make the executive order, which would last until the council next met.
        Sam wrote the story, which was on the front page with an extra large headline: “GRUESOME MURDER OUTSIDE THE DOME” and in smaller type, “Police Have Few Clues, No Suspects”. Sam took what little information he had about the murder and skillfully stretched it to two full columns, most of which was the accounts of the electrician’s grieving friends and family, and some of it slightly redundant.
        The dome’s police contacted a homicide investigator on Earth, who chided the Martian for doing so little investigating. “Come on, man, get a warrant and search the victim’s home and workplace. It may have been for robbery, but there are a lot of things that cause murder. Find out who he associated with, if he was having any love affairs, who saw him last. Don’t wait for the coroner! What did the crime scene look like?”
        “Like there was a dust storm between when he was killed and when the body was found. If there were any footprints or wheel tracks or any other such evidence they were gone.”
        It seemed the newspaper had done more investigating than the police. The Martian took the Earthian policeman’s advice, but still came up with little, at least at first.

        “Hi, George, I was wondering if you were sick or something and didn’t go to work today, you always drop by for a beer on your way home.” John poured an ale for him.
        “I ran really late tonight, somebody stole my tools. At first I thought somebody might have grabbed my tool box by mistake, but I’m pretty sure they were stolen. Anyway, I had to fill out a ton of paperwork for the insurance.”
        “Sorry to hear that, the tools must be expensive.”
        “Yeah, they are. Brand new tools, state of the art stuff. I was working on two panels around a corner from each other, and I had my tool chest by one panel when I was working on the other one. I closed that panel up and went to finish the side where my tools were, and they were gone.
        “Like I was saying, at first I thought someone must have picked the tools up by mistake, but I noticed boot prints going away from the dome from where my tools had been. So when I got back in the dome and out of my suit I called the cops. I didn’t think anyone picked them up by mistake after seeing footprints leading away from the dome. The cops said it was possible that were taken by mistake, but I don’t think so. Talking to the cops took another hour.”
        A man in a policeman’s uniform came in, sat down, and ordered a shot of Bourbon and a wheat beer. “Rough week,” he told the bartender. “Murder a few days ago, probable theft today.”
        “Yeah, I heard.”
        The policeman looked at George. “Say, you’re the fellow whose tools are missing, aren’t you?”
        George answered in the affirmative and ordered another beer. Obviously a little distraught, he had drank the first one far faster than usual.
        The officer said “those boot prints you saw led to wheel tracks. We followed them for ten kilometers, and it looked like a space craft had landed and taken off. We think pirates have your tools.”
        George shook his head sadly. “Damned pirates, the tools are insured but it’ll take three weeks to get them replaced, and I won’t be able to work.”
        “That sucks, George. Need to run a tab until your new tools come?” the bartender asked.
        “Thanks, John, but I have enough cash and credit to make it until I can get new tools delivered.”
        The police officer finished his beer and shot and walked home, just as Mayor Waldo came in. “Hi, John. We had a theft today, give me the usual.”
        “Hi, Ed. Yeah, I heard,” he said, pouring the mayor a beer and the thirsty electrician a third beer.
        Ed sighed. “News travels fast.”
        John laughed. “Where would you go if your tools were stolen and you couldn’t work for weeks? You know George, don’t you?”
        “Yeah, hi George. Those were your tools?”
        “Yeah, it really sucks.”
        “Anything I can do? Or the dome can do?”
        George laughed. “Yeah, get a better football team, the Australians and Europeans always kick our asses!”
        Talk drifted off to sports for a while, and a thought came to John. “Ed,” he said, “Could the pirates have committed that murder?”
        “No, they would have taken him to their ship so they wouldn’t harm the suit. Everyone knows how valuable a suit is. They would have just dumped the body in space.”
        “You ought to dump those footballers in space,” George said dourly.
        The mayor and bartender laughed, and talk went back to sports as more people started trickling in.

        The next day the Chief of Police called the mayor with news of clues: the dead man’s tools and environment suit were missing. Did someone murder him for his suit and tools? It looked like that was the motive, although police were still investigating the victim’s associates. If they found that suit and those tools, they would likely find the murderer.
        Things seemed to be looking up. He usually only stopped by John’s bar when he’d had a bad day or a seemingly insoluble problem, but he decided to make an exception this time since his old friend Charlie Onehorse would be there. Charlie was the mayor of Dome Australia Two, about twenty kilometers from his dome. Old Charlie had been visiting on a trade mission.
        When he got off work, John’s bar was already filling up. “Ed!” came a voice from the gloom, as his eyes hadn’t yet adjusted, but he knew that voice.
        “Hey, Charlie! How did your deal go?”
        “Ace, even though those blokes aren’t drongos, but the deals always go well. Almost all of them, anyway. I heard your dome had a homicide?”
        “Yeah, it sure looks like the poor guy was murdered. Had some thefts, too, but one of them looks like pirates.”
        “Maybe it was pirates that killed that bloke,” Charlie said.
        “That’s what John said, but like I told him, they would have just carried him and his suit away and dumped the body in space.”
        “Yeah, you’re right, they would have. Damned pirates, I hope they leave my dome alone. Hey, John, get a grog for Ed, would you?” Just then a robot rolled up with Mayor Waldo’s beer.
        At the other end of the bar, John was talking to Al. Al had been telling him of the nightmarishly horrible discovery and how it was affecting him for the last few days, which he had mostly spent in the bar getting very drunk. “Al, I want you to meet a friend of mine,” John said as an attractive woman walked up. “Al, meet Tammy Winters.”
        “Hello, Ms. Winters.”
        “It’s doctor, but call me Tammy. John tells me you’re having some problems.”
        Al glared at John angrily. Tammy said “Look, Al, your reaction to what you’ve gone through is normal. Look, I have a friend who needs some new patients, could you help him out?” and handed him her colleague’s business card.
        “Well, I don’t know,” Al said, looking at the card. “What will it cost?”
        “Nothing, the government pays for it.”
        “Thanks, I will!”
        Tammy replied “John, are you going to pour me a beer or what?”

        Several days later the coroner's report came back, right before the mayor was due to go home, and Mayor Waldo was puzzled. The report said the victim had a stroke; a blood vessel in his brain had burst and he’d died instantly. But why was he out there naked?
        He decided to talk to John. John always had an answer when things got crazy.

        “Holy crap,” Sam said when he got the news. “Damn, the most sensational news in my career and it wasn’t. How can I spin this? The boss wants more papers sold!”
        He decided to focus on the mystery of the naked corpse.

        “And your cops can’t figure it out, either?” John asked.
        “No,” said Ed. “It’s still a mystery.”
        “Christ, Ed, it’s as plain as the nose on your face! Look, only a few days later George’s tools were stolen, and the police say it was pirates. It’s simple, Ed. They were waiting for a chance to steal the poor guy’s expensive tools and he collapsed. So they not only stole his tools, but his environment suit and clothing as well. Why didn’t you guys see that?”
        Ed scratched his head. “I don’t know, but it makes sense. I’ll talk to the police chief about it tomorrow.” Just then George entered.
        “John!” he yelled. “Drinks for everybody! WOO HOO!”
        “What happened?” Ed asked.
        “John’s army!”
        “John’s army?”
        “It isn’t my army,” John said. “More Dewey’s than anyone’s, I only hold maybe fifteen percent of Green-Osbourne.”
        George said “I can’t thank you enough, John.”
        “George, I didn’t do anything, there wasn’t anything I could do,” John replied. “We capture pirates all the time. It earns us a lot of cash and makes shipping easier for everybody, including our competition. You just got lucky.”
        “I don’t care, I’m still grateful. They said I’d have my tools back the day after tomorrow.
        “Oh, and Ed—they found Bob’s suit and tools when they found my tools.”
        John grinned. “See?”

        After the Mayor’s press conference the next morning, Sam cursed. How could he spin this one without looking like a damned fool?

It was some time last year that someone on Facebook posted a graphic that said "Beer: because no good story ever started with someone eating a salad." There are a lot of them to be found in Google Images.

So I decided to write a good story that starts with someone eating a salad, although parts of the story do take place in a bar. How good is it?

Magazines like F&SF get a thousand submissions a month, and each bi-monthly issue only has half a dozen stories. Only the very best get printed, and almost all rejection slips are form letters that all say pretty much the same thing, no matter what magazine.

Out of over a hundred rejections, I've only gotten two that were not form letters. The first was actually the first story I ever submitted, "Voyage to Earth". A junior editor (or perhaps slush reader) wrote back saying that it was a good story and well written, but the beginning didn't grab her.

The story I'm posting tomorrow, "The Naked Truth" garnered a personalized rejection from Charles Finlay, F&SF's Editor in Chief! He wrote a very encouraging letter saying that the idea of a murder mystery on Mars intrigued him and it was well written, but he didn't like the ending.

It was very nearly in F&SF. That means it isn't just a good story that starts with someone eating a salad, but a VERY good story.

I'm putting magazine submissions on hiatus until I finish "Voyage to Earth and Other Stories". I want to publish it next year, some magazines hang on to stories for a really long time ("Dewey's War" was in Analog's slush pile for six months, Tor has had "The Exhibit" since December) and if they publish one, I won't be able to publish it for a couple of years.

I have five finished stories you haven't read, three of which nobody has. I'll probably post one every couple of weeks until I run out of them. I've been working on one story, "The Pirate" (which I may rename) for a couple of months. Writing's been hard since I smoked my last cigarette last New Year's Eve.

I didn't know how much storage my "new" tablet has (hadn't looked, it's eight gigs) but reading the manual that I had to google to find (It's second-hand) I saw that it would take a 30 gig SD card, what they're calling single inline memory modules (SIMMs) these days. I decided to get one at Walgreens when I got beer.

It was a 32 GB SIMM (MicroSD, whatever) so I made sure to keep the receipt in case it wouldn't work in the tablet, but installing it was easy.

I can't say the same about getting it out of the retail packaging! It took half an hour and I was afraid of breaking the chip getting it out.

When I booted the tablet, it reported that it had installed it and reported 32 GB. That's two gigs more than the size of the part of my music collection I actually listen to. So I connected to my network drive with the same file manager II use on the phone, copied the folder holding the music, and pasted into the SD card. It took several hours.

When it was done, it informed me that third party apps didn't have permission to write to the SD card! WHAT THE HELL IS THIS BULLSHIT?? So I googled, and it said that Android 4 was the reason -- except my phone is running 4 and it had no problem writing to the simm.

The tablet has a built-in file manager that will access the SD, but can't access the network drive. I started copying a few at a time... and had a thought. I wondered if that 32 gig SD would work in the phone?

It does. So right now my phone's copying music from the network so I gan get it in the tablet. Good thing the physical chip is so easy to install and remove. I have a 12 gig chip in the phone, I think I'll get another 32 gig for the phone. Maybe bigger, I'll have to google to see what it can hold. I'll give the phone chip away.

But why would they have had a restriction like that?? Anyone have a clue for me?

It was a bigger mess than I thought. Yesterday's Tomorrows looked fine on an e-reader on the computer, but when I bought that tablet I discovered it was really messed up in MobiSystems' Universal Book Reader (UB Reader). Not only was the table of contents hosed, but there were no indents on paragraph beginnings, and it was an ugly sans serif font rather than the Gentium Book Basic in the printed volumes and HTML (at least on a computer with that font installed, if not it falls back to Times New Roman).

It was, of course, from my own ignorance, both of e-books in general and Calibre in particular. I never had any interest in e-books, because you paid for something you didn't own. If I buy a book I can give it away or sell it, it's a physical thing. Not so with e-books, and the e-books usually cost as much as the paperback.

But since I was giving books away I needed to learn about them. I wish I'd bought a tablet a long time ago. At any rate, I finally got all of them straightened out. At least, I think I have, except I can'tseem to get the cover to show in the Kindle version of Mars, Ho!, and I'm still checking out the epubs in the Nook app.

There's still a few minor annoyances in Yesterday's Tomorrows. Images that are supposed to fill the page don't on a tablet. I experimented with changing the page size to 12x20 in Open Office and scaling the images, but it came out the same. Maybe I need to raise the resolution?

Reading the HTML on a phone gives no serifs. It appears that Android devices are almost devoid of fonts, from what I've googled about it. Time Magazine seems to somehow have a Times font. I'll get it eventually.

Meanwhile, I documented the steps needed with Calibre. I'll need it, since I likely won't be using that program until next year when I finish Voyage to Earth and Other Stories.

clone system(s) with various built-in games, this time featuring titles from the existing Sega Mega Drive library, as well as some original titles

http://japanese.engadget.com/2016/07/27/2-25/

So, audioguy (one of our sysadminy types) was checking the firewall logs and apparently one of the speedbumps we put in for bots got tripped by an L-3 Communications Holdings address. Not to be confused with Level 3 Communications, L-3 is the sneaky spy corp born of the Lockheed Martin merger. So, yes, we're officially being actively (as opposed to the passive scraping the NSA does to everyone's traffic) electronically surveiled.

Mind you, since they're tripping our firewall, they're not going to be seeing much unless they throttle back how many connections they use at once. They really should make use of the API for bot stuff. It's still firewalled but there are bits in it that can get you much more info at once and save us both the overhead of inefficient scraping.

It should come as no surprise that Runaway might have multiple identities. Among other things, I have a "whistleblower" identity. That personna has been around for awhile, contained within a Virtual Machine. He is rarely turned on, he has very few contacts, doesn't browse randomly around the web. only connects via VPN, uses a very secure browser. Very secure.

Tonight, he did a search online - and was greeted with a popup, suggesting that he check his settings.

Oh-oh. I've obviuosly done something WRONG!!

My secretive self isn't going to share any real details about his mistake(s). Suffice to say that I overlooked something that Edward Snowden addressed in one of his interviews.

If you need to be, or even if you only want to be, secure online, you need to revisit ALL of your security settings now and then. Keep in mind that companies might be bought and sold, that TOS may change, and privacy policies might change. Changing privacy policies contributed to my own little screw up.

I'm not really worried about anyone tying together certain online identities, but I know that I did slip up. Each and every slip up makes it easier for the opposition.

At any rate, it's time to retire that personna. It's probably not a good idea to maintain the same secret personna for more than a few months anyway. Or, even a few weeks, if you're playing high stakes games like Snowden.

Some people object to many of the submissions, which might be labeled "current events". Some of those objections are pretty verbose. Some people don't want to read "the news" when the click on Soylentnews, they want to read "Technology News". Which is fine - that's why I come here. I learn all kinds of things about technology. In fact, some of the tech is over my head, and I fail to learn from it because I lack the proper education.

But, "the news".

First objection to THEIR objections is, "Why do you click on the story if you don't want to read it?" Again and again, we've heard that our computers have an "off" button. If the intartubes get to be to much, you just shut the damned computer off. There are dozens of sites online that spew unfiltered hatred, such as stormfront. You don't click on their links? Well, then, why click on a story here that you don't really want to read? It's pointless to click the link, just to post a "Is this news?" post. I may start moderating those posts as flamebait, or troll. Come on children - grow up.

Second objection. Current events. Real shit, in the real world, that may directly affect any one of us. Stuff is happening, for real. I mean, really, for really real. Lives end, bodies are mangled, buildings fall, city blocks are burnt up, children are scarred for life, mothers bury their babies. Real life happens, and it impinges upon each and every one of us.

Some of our members are travelers. We have members who live in various states and cities that are directly affected by many of these current events. That is, we have members who might be directly impacted by current events. So, you or I feel "safe" from these events - we should feel no concern, anxiety, compassion, or empathy for those members who are living through those events?

Third objection. Elitism. I really don't like elitests. I don't like them in politics, don't like them in the community, and I don't much like them on the interwebs either. What is it that makes one person better than anyone else? At what intellectual level, or financial level, do you become "better" than everyone else? These current events obviously generate a good deal of discussion. Obviously, a lot of members feel the need to sound off, and/or get some intelligent input from other members. (You're not going to find much intelligent discussion on Facebook, FFS)

Elitests, go back to objection 1. If you're to good, or to highly stationed in life to be concerned with current events, just don't click the link. I don't care how elite you are, you really don't have the right to limit when, where, or how the rest of us discuss these current events.

Objection four? That would be the "intelligent discussion". THAT is the PRIMARY reason I come here. People post stuff in response to current events that make me think. Hell, I've got my opinions. I really don't need help forming opinions. But, people actually post things here that make me re-examine my opinions. A lot of people actually post links that support the facts and opinions they post. Soylent is a learning experience, because it consists of mostly intelligent people.

Let the discussions take place. I learn, and maybe I teach. Exchanging information is never a "bad thing".

Stop trying to be censors, alright?

If/when people stop responding to a certain kind of post, then the posters, such as myself, will begin to self-censor. If our submissions generate a lot of discussion, then there is obviously a need for those submissions. Some of us just need to blow off steam. Some of us actually have something to offer. Let it happen, alright?

And, one more time - if you don't think it's "news", just don't click the link. Blow it off. I do that with some stories.

I discovered the SFWA website last year, and it was a treasure trove of useful information. I'd probably have given up trying to sell stories by now were it not for that site.

There's an article by Terry Bison, one of my current favorite SF writers, titled "60 rules for short SF." Another is by a slush reader (someone employed by publishers to read and pass stories they like up to a junior editor) has an article about what you need to get her to pass it to an editor. And a whole lot more, I still haven't read them all.

I discovered that almost all of the advice and rules they pontificated on were things I was already doing. I also discovered how damned hard it was, how nearly impossible to get a good story published, because of the sheer mass of competition. There are only a dozen or two SF magazines, and they get a thousand submissions a month each, and print six each.

That's some damned bad odds.

I also learned from SFWA that if your rejection slip comes from an editor rather than a computer, you came really close to being published. I've had three! I'm not going to stop writing because I love doing it so much, but if I hadn't ran across SFWA I'd have stopped submitting them a long time ago. I am going to cut down on submissions, because I want to finish and publish "Voyage to Earth and Other Stories" by some time next year, and most of the magazines are REALLY slow at getting through their slush piles. I may keep submitting to Asimov's and F&SF since they're quick, but then again if they buy it I'll have to replace it with another story for the book.

Then late last week I was reading an article on SFWA and discovered that Stephen King had written a book about writing, called "On Writing".

King is one of the very best writers of our time, IMO. I don't like his genre so haven't read much of his stuff, but what I did read was brilliant and beautifully written, sucking you into the story and not letting go (and I don't want to be sucked into horror, I hate horror movies and books are even more intense than movies). So I opened a new tab on the browser and checked to see if Lincoln Library had a copy.

It did, even in e-book form so I wouldn't even have to go up there. Then I made another discovery -- my library card expired last month. That was Friday night, so Saturday morning I went to the library. I renewed my card, checked out the hardcover copy of the book, and started reading. I finished it last night; I'd been alternating between reading King's book, SFWA articles, Google News, the Illinois Times, and working on "The Pirate".

Another discovery: this book would be a great read even if I wasn't looking to improve my writing. It gives insights to a reader who isn't a writer on the connection between reader and writer. Kind of why you like to read what you like to read.

The first third of the book is an autobiography of sorts, and it starts with a child's pain (it IS Stephen King, after all). But from the time he reached high school until he gets to the writing part (even though the part before the writing part was about writing, too) it was hilarious. I don't nean it made me grin and maybe chuckle, I mean I was laughing so hard I had to put the book down to wipe the tears off my face. Well, I did have some pretty good pot. Anyway, If you're a reader, do yourself a favor and read it. If you live in Springfield and have a library card and a smartphone you can read it for free without even going to the library. In other cities as well, I checked last night and Belleville residents can access e-books from that library.

So this morning I decided that I wanted a copy of my own sitting on my bookshelf, because this isn't a "read once and throw it away" book. So after two frustrating hours trying to get a hardcover copy I'm flustered and frustrated and annoyed. Damn publishers and bookstores!

First, publishers. The paperback and e-book was released 3 years ago, but the hardcover is out of print. What, did Rority kidnap me last night and take me back to 1970 when books were written on typewriters and printed on presses designed a century earlier? Because now that we have computers and the internet, there should be no such thing as "out of print". Now there's "print on demand", so why should any book ever be out of print?

It's stupid.

Amazon said simply "out of stock" so I tried B&N. Their offline stores are excellent; large, with friendly, helpful staff.

Their website is a total clusterfuck to buy from. They should fire the incompetent webmaster who is enamored of flashy bells and whistles and hire someone who can design a usable interface.

First those stupid mouseover menus that open and cover whet you're trying to read. If you're doing that on your website, STOP IT!! Pissing off a prospective customer is brain-dead stupid. Where do companies find all these educated idiots?

So after navigating their awful interface to actually get to the book, there are three buttons: paperback, $11.95; e-book, $11.95; hardcover, $19.06. So once again there's stupidity, or rather, stupid greed. There is absolutely no reason whatever why an ebook should cost as much as a paperback. No paper to buy, no ink to buy, no pages to bind, nothing to ship, nothing to warehouse. An e-book costs almost NOTHING to produce and deliver once it's written.

The button for the hardcover didn't work. No feedback, it just didn't work, which is how the morons who designed the site set it up to work when an item was out of print.

By now I was annoyed and frustrated. I finally found a used copy there, and went to order it. They wanted to use an old credit card I no longer have, and it was more frustrating trying to get the damned thing to change cards.

I finally managed that, entered all the info, and it told me there was a problem with the card. IT'S A VALID CARD, DAMMIT! So I say "screw it" and call the local store. It's out of print, so they give me the 800 number.

After almost five minutes on hold a rude woman who keeps trying to interrupt me answers. I finally hung up on her, saying "fuck it, maybe one of the used stores in town has a copy."

I'll take it back to the library today. They sell books, maybe they'll have a copy for sale.

But I learned a lot from this book, a whole lot. But what he says you should do I already do, so maybe my stuff... nah.

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To Our Beloved Users,

The Russian Government has passed a new law that mandates that every provider must log all Russian internet traffic for up to a year. We believe that due to the enforcement regime surrounding this new law, some of our Russian Servers (RU) were recently seized by Russian Authorities, without notice or any type of due process. We think it’s because we are the most outspoken and only verified no-log VPN provider.

Luckily, since we do not log any traffic or session data, period, no data has been compromised. Our users are, and will always be, private and secure.

Upon learning of the above, we immediately discontinued our Russian gateways and will no longer be doing business in the region.

To make it clear, the privacy and security of our users is our number one priority. For preventative reasons, we are rotating all of our certificates. Furthermore, we’re updating our client applications with improved security measures to mitigate circumstances like this in the future, on top of what is already in place. In addition, our manual configurations now support the strongest new encryption algorithms including AES-256, SHA-256, and RSA-4096.

All Private Internet Access users must update their desktop clients at https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/pages/client-support/ and our Android App at Google Play. Manual openvpn configurations users must also download the new config files from the client download page.

We have decided not to do business within the Russian territory. We’re going to be further evaluating other countries and their policies.

In any event, we are aware that there may be times that notice and due process are forgone. However, we do not log and are default secure against seizure.

If you have any questions, please contact us at helpdesk@privateinternetaccess.com.

Thank you for your continued support and helping us fight the good fight.

Sincerely,
Private Internet Access Team