Leave the cocoon. Trendy yoga store Lululemon has a little aspiration to get you motivated: “Do one thing a day that scares you”. Some people resist, but for me it’s easy: everything scares me. I’m afraid of car accidents, disease, speaking to strangers, air-born chemicals, dentistry, swimming pools, sharks, spiders. I’m afraid of looking stupid, losing my money in the stock market, dying alone, falling off a cliff. Being chased by bears.

So for me to do something “scary” is pretty normal, I’d be a recluse otherwise. But I make a distinction about the normal-scary condition of life, and getting out of my comfort zone. Like a lot of people, I can habitually do the safe things every day both for the comfort of the familiar AND just because it requires less thought. That’s the whole problem: we save ourselves from disruption by not thinking in new ways. If you’re unwilling to try something that makes you uncomfortable, you end up taking the same picture over and over; buying the same clothing over and over; reading the same books, seeing Star Wars for the 157th time. And the next thing you know, you’re having the same thoughts every day and you are BORED TO DEATH.

The antidote is simple: do something outside your comfort zone. Start a conversation with the person behind you in the grocery line. Take a picture in some new place, like in front of a crowd. If you only read technical books, pick up a murder mystery. If you wear sloppy jeans and a t shirt every day, strut into Nordstrom and put on something trendy and prance around to see how it feels to be stylish.

The possibilities are endless. It does take an effort, but the reward is (a) less fear overall; (b) gaining a feeling that life is an infinity of possibilities; and (c) you are thoroughly competent to handle new situations, which let’s face it, is mostly all the time.

Since your comfort zone will be disrupted by life itself, over and over, you might as well get really good at it by practicing. Most likely little aliens from the center of the earth will NOT enter your bedroom glowing in the dark. But a neighbor might knock on the door screaming about parking, and you can shrug it off as just another small discomfort that doesn’t ruin your day.

Here in NC we get a lot of big, powerful, fast-moving storms. The clouds seem as dense as forests and can be very scary. Last night this storm appeared over my house, quickly forming into some weird and beautiful shapes; I was on the porch eating dinner and snapped a few pictures. The next thing I knew, my neighborhood’s alert system went crazy with people posting “Tornado spotted!!”. It is a cumulus that kind of rolled into that shape, not a wind vortex. It’s not going to suck any cows up any time soon.

The second image was the storm rolling in, and the last is a more fanciful version. The first two are not retouched, these are as-shot on an iPhone 6.

I recently had an hour or two to kill, and since I had my trusty Air with me, I stopped into a coffee shop/internet cafe to crank out a few pages of my latest short story. The shop is Bean Traders in on Route 54 in Durham North Carolina, and should you find yourself in its vicinity, I encourage you to stop in. They roast their own coffee beans and make a brew that is exceptional. Since caffeine is my drug of choice (my only drug in fact), I am particular about it. The Americano made my eyes roll back in my head. They also have fresh-baked bagels, very good as well.

But what really endeared the place to me was the sign: “Hippies use back door. No exceptions.” [smirk] I grew up and came of age in the 60’s and early 70’s, and well remember the attitude towards hippies. They were considered to be disreputable and dirty, walking around with no shoes on and all that long hair which could harbor disease. Not to mention the erosion of good old American values, which were under threat from all that free love, flower power, and marijuana.

The thing is, I haven’t seen one hippie yet in Durham. All the hippies are contained in Chapel Hill. A few years ago, the U.S. Congress was debating a grant for a zoo in North Carolina, and legendary Rep. Jesse Helms was quoted as saying, “If we need a zoo, just put a fence around Chapel Hill.” I take it as a compliment, as do most Hillians, even those of us who do not sport bellbottoms and headbands.

I just finished “Gene Mapper” by Taiyo Fujii, translated by Jim Hubbert. First off, I’ll say that the book was written in Japanese and translated by Hubbert, and it is one of the best, most natural translations I’ve read of any work of fiction. The story itself moves along fast and is constantly interesting. I found it to be original, and had a lot of social commentary that managed to not be preachy in the least. I hate preachy books that bash you over the head making a point that is totally obvious.

So I won’t bother summarizing the plot, you can find the book on Amazon or your local Barnes and Noble. I’d rather just talk about the style and influences. First of all, it is like a very modern, technical update of William Gibson’s seminal work “Neoromancer”, which I have read at least five times and never get tired of. Fuji’s work lacks some of the intense, lyrical style of Gibson’s early work, but makes up for it in the originality of his ideas, which I found to be believable (in a science fiction context). You know how it is: a perfectly good story gets fundamental science wrong and it is so distracting that you can’t concentrate on the action any more. Well, Gene Mapper isn’t like that. Since you’re not being brow-beaten, you can engage with the action and the characters.

I also appreciated that Fujii quotes from Eric Drexel’s “Engines of Creation”, which came out in the 80’s, and a book I also devoured. The concepts of nano machines are used in Gene Mapper without detracting from the plot, but it’s obvious that Fujii has spent his time in the woodshed thinking through the technology and possible uses. I appreciate a thoughtful author to someone just trying to make their characters have exciting adventures. In fact, the heroes of this book are all geeks. Just … ordinary geeks, in a world-changing situation with opportunities to change things for the better.

Thanks Fujii-san, for this terrific read!

When the Apple Watch was first announced, last September, I felt hot and cold all over, prickly with anticipation. My heart and soul were moved as few technologies ever had moved me. I’m not even sure why, except the pure sexiness of the whole concept. As launch day got closer, my anxiety and anticipation reached a fever point. I wondered if there would be a line around the block at the Apple Store, as there was when a new iPhone came out.
That was just wishful thinking on my part. Because as we all know, the Watch was not available on Launch Day, unless you ordered it in the first 120 seconds it was available on line. When I found this out, I went into a panic and ordered right away and was told, 3 – 5 weeks for delivery. I had already waited 8 months, I could wait another 5 weeks. Hopefully only 3.

As it turned out, the watch arrived into my hands 11 DAYS later. The waiting for the UPS truck that day was AWFUL but I survived. Within 10 minutes of getting the box in my sweaty hands, the Watch was fully set up, on my wrist, and being taken out for a test drive.
So the title of the post is, Why I Love My Apple Watch, so I will enumerate the reasons here:

1. My primary use case is the Activity Monitor. I had been using a Garmin VivoFit and found it to be limited and ugly. The Watch’s Activity Monitor is aesthetic, and flexible, and motivational without being a task master. Plus, it’s harder to cheat. You must be moving and have an accelerated heart rate for walking to count as exercise, and you are encouraged to get 30 minutes a day. You can set a “move goal”, which is the number of calories you burn throughout the day, but again, you can’t really cheat on this. More activity, more calories. And the display for the three types of activities (Stand, Exercise, Move) is three concentric circles, so you can tell at a glance how you are doing.

2. Secondary use case: notifications on my wrist. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve missed phone calls and texts because my phone is in my bag and I can’t hear it. I might even have it in my hand and if I’m in a noisy busy place, could still miss it. Since getting the watch, I haven’t missed a single call or text, because it’s on my wrist all day, and I always have my wrist with me wherever I go. I can answer calls and reply to texts without getting the phone out too. I can walk down the street talking into my watch and have it send as a text.

3. Tertiary use case: a watch. Yes, it tells time. And it shows me when my next appointment is, on the screen. I also added widgets (“complications”, a watch-geek term) for battery level, activity monitor, and a timer, which I use about 3 times a day.

4. I wanted to be an early adopter of this exciting device, and wearable technology which is going to skyrocket due to Apple’s entering this area.

I’ve read a lot of negative things, some of it bordering on outright stupidity, so my advice is, if you think it’s a waste of money or doesn’t do enough for you, DON’T GET ONE. It’s that simple.
Me, you’ll have to pry it out of my cold dead hands. I don’t have any desire to do without it.

Ah, those heady days of science fiction, the Golden Age of sci fi. Writers like Heinlein, Silverberg, A.E. Van Vogt. And a new hobby arose: fandom. Sure, a lot of people read those authors, and loved them, and thought about them. But some took it farther and there developed an actual HOBBY: being a fan of sci fi. Fandom was born. And you weren’t just a fan by yourself, in your bedroom with the banners on the walls and the models you built, or maybe in your parents’ basement where you were still living, surrounded by unsteady stacks of paperbacks.

No, if you were a true card-carrying member of Fandom, you wrote corresponded with other members of Fandom. You all wrote each other letters, and then people started writing one response on a mimeo stencil, and mailing it out to everyone they knew, who would write back in similar fashion. Then there were fanzines, which were also mimeographed, but had articles, commentary, and often just opinionated soundings-off from the editor. It all sounds pretty exciting to me, and not just because I always loved the smell of mimeographs.

It was the idea of that communication, with other people who loved the same things you were enthusiastic about, people you could talk to and they actually KNEW what you were talking about.

Of course, now there is a proliferation of that. Now, any sci fi fan can (and many do) write BLOGS instead of publishing ‘zines. But one big difference is: a blog is essentially published in one place. Maybe people read it, maybe they don’t, and you don’t direct it to certain people (as you do when you actually have to lick a stamp and put it on an envelope — remember those?).

Of course, you can send links around, to places like Facebook, Twitter etc., or you could even email people to tell them to follow a link to your blog. But do they actually READ it.. The thing about fanzines was that people did read them, but more than that, they CARED about what they read, and they wrote back. I’ve been doing a blog for a long time, and the worst thing is not when you get spam in your comments. It’s when you don’t get ANYTHING in your comments. I get a lot of hits, but people don’t answer back after they take the nuggets I proffer. Obviously those nuggets mean something to me, or I wouldn’t go out on a limb of putting them in public.

If you’re curious about this wonderfully fun book, which is the presenting reason for writing this post, you can find it here: http://smile.amazon.com/Zombies-Gene-Pool-Sharyn-McCrumb/dp/0345379144/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1435281804&sr=8-1&keywords=zombies+of+the+gene+pool