Science Fiction

Gimmicky Promotional Giveaway Contest Winners

Used car salesman holding 'Infoquake' bookI’ve had a lot of fun with this Infoquake Gimmicky Promotional Giveaway thing. (See this entry for a recap of the rules.) I received a lot more limericks than I had anticipated, and a lot fewer science fiction convention sexual experiences than I had anticipated.

So here now, I present the five winners of signed copies of Infoquake. Winners are being notified by e-mail.

1. The poet: Liz Burgess.

There were lots of good limerick entries, and I had a tough time deciding on a winner. But in the end I had to award one copy of the book to Liz (last name pending her e-mail response) Burgess, whose entry made me laugh out loud for its skillful use of Beyond Linux from Scratch:

There once was a young man named Natch
Who read “Beyond Linux from Scratch”
Pushed code to production
Had poor QA function
And jonesed for a nicotine patch.

Honorable Mention goes to Thom Stanley, who certainly wins on tying in the limerick to the plot of the book:

There once was a young man named Natch
Whose program was more than a patch.
It is called MultiReal,
Which allows you to seal
A fate even God cannot match.

Honorable Mention, but Disqualified for Reasons of Nepotism: Cindy Blank-Edelman, who managed to squeeze three glossary terms into her entry:

There once was a young man named Natch
Whose enemies sent him a batch
Of code very black —
Programs Natch couldn’t hack,
Not even with Doc Plugenpatch!

And the “I Like the Way This Guy Thinks/Somebody Please Lock This Guy Up” Honorable Mention Award goes to Izyk Stewart:

There once was a young man named Natch
Who had quite the problem with Flatch-
ulence in his car
He never got far
But he never ran out of gas

2. The detail-oriented reader: Andrew Albert J. Ty.

I received several correct entries (and a few wrong entries) for question #2, which was to name the city that is the seat of centralized government in Infoquake. The answer is Melbourne, which is evident to anyone who’s read through to chapter 5 of the excerpt on the website. I used the Random.org True Random Number Generator to determine a winner among the correct entries.

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The Day of Gimmicky Promotional Giveaways

It’s Thursday, my brain functionality’s starting to recede down the back of my neck, and I’m staring at a stack of Infoquakes wondering what I can do to promote the book. I’ve toyed with the idea of doing some kind of gimmicky promotional giveaway here on my blog before. But I’ve always decided to put this off, because I don’t like to do things half-assed and I have no idea how effective this will be. … Read more

WorldCon Wrapup

A few more tidbits, shoutouts, and callouts from the WorldCon festivities in Anaheim: I was really hoping Tobias Buckell would turn out to be an asshole, considering that he’s smart, talented, funny, and successful. But alas, my hopes were thwarted, and he happens to be a great guy. I proved conclusively that I am The World’s Worst Pool Player™ while chatting up Sean Williams, Garth Nix, Madeleine Robins, and two other people whose names were … Read more

WorldCon Mid-Convention Report

It’s generally a good thing to have a niche in any field. I would have loved to be the Dark, Cool Mysterious SF Writer like Neal Stephenson, or the Dapper, Quick-Witted Handsome SF Writer like Neil Gaiman. But it seems like if there’s any niche I’m destined for, it’s the SF Writer Who Does Dumb Things and Then Blogs Self-Deprecatingly About Them. I just got back from the Pyr panel at WorldCon in which I … Read more

Prepping for WorldCon

I am busily preparing to get on a plane tomorrow and fly to Anaheim, California for the WorldCon convention. I’m going to attempt to blog from the con once or twice, but it’s certainly possible I’ll be too busy drinking in the bar to get around to it. For those who want to know where to find me, here’s a schedule: Friday at 2:30 PM: Pyr Group Panel with Lou Anders, Alan Dean Foster, Kay … Read more

Robert Charles Wilson’s “Spin”

This is the absolute wrong time to be posting a review of Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin. If I wanted to be timely, I should have read the book in early 2005 when it first came out. Or I should have read it in the weeks leading up to the voting deadline for the Hugo Award (for which Spin is nominated). At the very least, I should have read the book and written my review before … Read more

Greasemonkeying with Reality

Stephen Colbert had an amusing rant the other week about how the world is turning into a wiki. Everybody has the power to edit reality, said Colbert. If you don’t like the way the world works, just log in to Wikipedia and change it.

Stephen Colbert of The Colbert ReportHe’s almost right. If you don’t like the way the world is, now you can edit your version of it with Greasemonkey.

Greasemonkey, in case you don’t know, is a plug-in for the Mozilla Firefox browser that lets you write little Javascripts to run on web pages after they’ve been downloaded to your browser. It’s become quite popular with the Slashdot crowd.

Sounds techno-wonky? Something that only the dude in the back room configuring the Linux servers would care about? No. Hold onto your hats, folks, because Greasemonkey is your future. It’s the harbinger of a serious change in how the world functions, and in forty years you’re going to wonder how you ever lived without it.

Let’s just start with what the Greasemonkey plug-in is doing today.

On my browser, I have a Greasemonkey script called Linkify Plus installed. This script silently searches through every web page I download for web and e-mail addresses that haven’t been hyperlinked, and it hyperlinks them. So for instance, every time I see dedelman@gmail.com on a web page, the Linkify Plus script automatically turns that into dedelman@gmail.com — whether the creator of the page wanted that text hyperlinked or not.

And why should the author of the page care? After all, when you access a page on the web, you’re downloading a copy of it. Your own copy, to do with whatever you please. If you want to open up that page on your own machine and change the code, resize the pictures, or rewrite the text, that’s your right. I have a friend who writes little rants in the margins of his books to the authors when he finds something he disagrees with. Nothin’ wrong with that. Greasemonkey just automates the process.

(I should point out that Greasemonkey didn’t invent this functionality; they’ve just popularized it. All modern browsers have the capability of changing a page’s display through custom style sheets. And before I get bombarded with snarky comments, let me point out that Opera can run Greasemonkey scripts too.)

So Greasemonkey makes it easy to tweak web pages on the fly. Why stop with just style and display changes? Why not change the content?

Take this Greasemonkey script that I’ve just written, which I’m going to call Brockify in honor of David Brock. (Brock spent many years as a sleazy right-wing mudslinger until he switched sides and became a sleazy left-wing mudslinger instead.) My Brockify script will silently swap the words “liberal” and “conservative” for you on any page on the web. Go ahead, install the Greasemonkey plug-in and the script, then test it out. (And for God’s sakes, don’t forget to turn it off when you’re done.) It’s seamless and it’s almost instantaneous. You’ll see Rush Limbaugh is now bemoaning those “conservative pinheads,” while Al Franken has taken to griping about “liberal religious fanatics.”

The Washington Times always refers to gay marriage as gay “marriage.” This annoys the crap out of me; it’s blatant editorializing, and distracting as hell in the context of a straight news story. (No pun intended.) But now I can write a Greasemonkey script and remove the belittling quotation marks once and for all.

These are fairly crude examples, but you see my point. With a simple script, you can customize, bowdlerize, sanitize, and homogenize the web.

Now here’s where things get fun.

The Greasemonkeying of information won’t just stop with the web. It’s not going to end with the editing of digital bits on your computer screen. It’s going to move onto your telephone and your television and eventually, inside that thick skull of yours.

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