Browse: Page 24
By J. Timothy King on August 11, 2010
Scene from Star Trek: The Next Generation, "A Fistful of Datas"
Now that I have some money coming in, one of my top items to get is an ebook reader. And in my typical style, I began thinking of all the ways I’d love to use such a device to help me in my work. Unfortunately, in my typical style, no reader out there does most of what I would want to do.
I realized that what I really wanted was one of those PADDs they have on Star Trek. It can work as an independent device that you can use to read or write content. But it also seamlessly integrates with the main computer system, to retrieve and store data and to share content with others. Continue reading “A Star-Trek-style Ebook Reader”
Posted in Technology | Tagged ebook |
By J. Timothy King on August 10, 2010
I’ve been absent, as you may know, because my computer’s mainboard died, and I’ve been busy with a new software contract, and our only working car stopped working, and then my computer’s hard drive died. (Yes, I’m getting tired of it all.) As a result, I hadn’t had have much time to write over part of June and the whole of July, and I truly missed writing. (But that’s another blog post.) I also didn’t have time to read, and I missed it, too. Now that life is returning to kinda-normal, I’ve finished reading Truffles by the Sea, which I loved, and A Time to Tell.
One of the beneficial side-effects of the software contract, of course, is that I have the money to do something I’ve wanted to for some time: an Internet-wide book give-away. I’m in the process of contacting numerous book bloggers, asking each if she’d like to give away a copy of one of my books. I can mail the books to the winners, but I need bloggers to host the giveaways and choose the winners. I don’t know that I’ll ever do a giveaway of this scale ever again. If you’d like to be included, please contact me and let me know.
For my next read, I long for a story that I’ll adore. That means something by Holly Lisle. Specifically, Talyn. I’ve left this book of hers sitting on my shelf for far too long, just because I haven’t gotten around to reading it. “Not your average fantasy book,” according to Robin Hobb. This book should’ve been an order of magnitude more popular than Twilight, were it not for Sturgeon’s Law. A book with as rough a birth as any book gets. An epic story born of an epic concept that was years in the making. According to Holly, “the best world I’d ever built, with the best cultures, the best people, and the best stories in my career.” I’ve just begun reading Talyn, but from the very first pages, this book effuses inspiration. Continue reading “Teaser Tuesdays: Talyn”
Posted in Books, Teaser Tuesdays | Tagged Holly Lisle, Talyn |
By J. Timothy King on July 23, 2010
Photo © 2010 Mike Cohen CC 2.0 BY NC ND
I apologize for the delay. It’s been over two weeks since my last post, and I haven’t replied to anyone’s comments or emails. Part of the reason is that I billed over 30 hours last week on this new software-development job, a heavy week for an off-site contractor. (I’ll have to explain to you the math of billed contractor hours versus employee hours sometime.) And I’ll probably bill about 30 hours this week, too. In between those hours—at least last week—I spent numerous hours taxiing the family around, my Beloved to and from work, my daughter C to and from school. I would get up in the morning, drive around, and get home just in time to start working with the guys at Client Z, out on the west coast.
That’s because we had one working car, and it wasn’t even ours. Continue reading “God Has an Ironic Sense of Balance”
Posted in About Tim King, Stories, True Stories | Tagged car, car repair
By J. Timothy King on July 7, 2010
Photo © 2008 David J Laporte CC 2.0 BY
“Why does all this stuff happen to us? It can’t be bad karma. We never did anything.” Or so says the Little One. And I think she’s right. Sometimes shit just happens.
And if it could have waiting just another month or two, I wouldn’t even be in a jam. Incredible. It’s like, just when you think things are looking up and you can breathe easy and ends will finally meet without stretching, the universe is like, “Uh. Hold on a sec—” Or as Dad puts it sometimes, “Cheer up! Things are going to get worse.”
(My Little One is not so little any more, BTW. But I still call her that. She insists. I don’t think she wants to grow up.)
Since last week, I’ve started working this new software-development contract. Last night, I had my first real “Aha!” moment. The engineer I’m working with seems a capable guy and easy to work with. Blessings for a confirmed cynic. Money’s still a little tight, until I get paid on my first invoice, which should happen in about a month. That’s how it is in independent contract work. But we can make it. And in the meantime, I’m keeping track day by day of how much I’ve earned. Yeah, money is a poor motivator, which is something that people say who already have plenty of money. But as it turns out, this contract looks like it will be bearable anyhow, and maybe even enjoyable. I was actually feeling pretty good about my situation.
And then… Continue reading “Another Car Bites the Dust?”
Posted in About Tim King, Stories, True Stories | Tagged car, car repair
By J. Timothy King on June 30, 2010
Photo © 2005 thomas23 CC 2.0 BY NC SA
I’m sitting here in Dunkin’ Donuts, Wednesday morning, with nothing that I feel like writing about, eating a delicious breakfast sandwich that will probably set my cholesterol and blood pressure back six months, mentally preparing for my MRI, which will take place in about a half an hour. “Mentally preparing,” that’s the medical term for “working up anxiety that they actually might find something wrong with me, or that something might go wrong, like I’ll accidentally bring a steel nail file into the MRI room and the superconducting magnet will stab me to death with it, which I’m sure you agree would be not very pleasant.”
Why am I getting an MRI? The same reason I got a new BP prescription. (By “BP,” I mean “blood pressure,” and even though it does have to do with oil, not that kind of oil.) I’m getting an MRI, because over the past several months, I’ve been suffering from headaches, debilitating at times— migraines, we think, probably.
My father also suffered from migraines when he was about my age, and my brother and I were about the same age as my kids are now. Interestingly, as soon as we grew up and moved out of the house, my father’s migraines disappeared. So my headaches may be partially hereditary. The answer, in any case, seems clear: all I have to is wait until the kids grow up and move out, and then I can have nice things again. Continue reading “If I Die, Please Post This Posthumously”
Posted in About Tim King, Health, Stories, True Stories | Tagged MRI |
By J. Timothy King on June 28, 2010
Photo © 2005 Jimmy Hilario CC 2.0 BY NC ND
Ain’t it fascinating how your life can be completely derailed by a few days of computer downtime (and an impending new job, and a birthday party, and Mario Kart)?
My MacBook Pro’s checkerboard-display crashing problem, which first hit back in January, suddenly reappeared about two and a half weeks ago. After several hours of persistence, I finally got the computer to boot again.
All that time, I was not writing.
It crashed then once or twice more during the week, and through persistence I goaded it back, limping along.
This time, the problem seemed worse than it had in January. I felt it was about time to take it in for service. And then it stopped booting at all. I couldn’t get the computer to come back. But I didn’t know how I was going to afford the repair bill.
On top of that, my daughter C’s MacBook, which I use as a backup, it was also out of service. I had been running a data-recovery program on it for months, trying to get every last bit of data I could off of its failing hard drive. Again, I didn’t know where I was going to find the money for a replacement hard drive. But I knew I needed to work something out, somehow. Continue reading “My Computer Is Back, and Maybe I Am Too?”
Posted in About Tim King, Technology | Tagged MacBook Pro, white screen of death
By J. Timothy King on June 8, 2010
I started Truffles by the Sea a couple months ago. Then life got in the way. Being an author and blogger is always a balancing act between reading and writing, and sometimes I fall off the high-wire. I’m about a quarter of the way through this Christian chick-lit— er, that is, beach-lit novel by Julie Carobini, and I’m liking it better than its predecessor, Chocolate Beach, which I did enjoy.
Today’s teaser, from page 37 (randomly selected by Random.org) of Truffles by the Sea:
“Doug’s running late.”
I’ve been sitting at Bri’s dinged-up kitchen island nibbling on slabs of French bread from the bakery while mulling over my earlier decision to ask her for a loan sometime after tonight’s dinner.
Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just follow the directions at the “Teaser Tuesdays” post.
-TimK
Posted in Books, Teaser Tuesdays | Tagged Julie Carobini, Truffles by the Sea |
By J. Timothy King on June 4, 2010
How I love Mission: Impossible! Let me count the ways…
There’s a quirk of personal history connected with this show. The first time I ever saw it was as a teenager, when I happened to catch a rerun of a 1970 episode, “The Killer.” In this episode, co-starring Leonard Nimoy, the IMF team cons a killer who makes all his plans at random, at the last minute, to prevent anyone else from knowing what the plans are and developing countermeasures. So they pull off the con by making all the decisions for him. A très kewl episode.
Then Mission: Impossible came back for two more seasons in 1988-90. And I completely missed it. I still haven’t seen those episodes, and they haven’t yet been released on DVD. But now that the entire 7-season Mission: Impossible original series has been released on DVD, I hope they’ll continue with the 1988-90 episodes.
(And then, of course, there were the Tom Cruise movies. But we don’t talk about those.)
Since I’m almost through watching the original series on DVD, I was considering some of the things that characterized this show: Continue reading “Mission Magical”
Posted in Entertainment, Television | Tagged Mission Impossible, TV |
By J. Timothy King on May 25, 2010
For a study series with some of the gang from my church, I’ve been reading Timothy Keller’s The Prodigal God. In this short but profound book, Keller reexamines the so-called Parable of the Prodigal Son. He points out that the story is really about two sons, the younger brother, who squanders his share of his father’s fortune, and the elder brother, who in the end cannot fathom why his father has readopted the younger. The title of the book alludes to the fact that the father in the story expends lavishly in order to bring the younger brother back into the family.
Before I get to my teaser, however, a heads-up from author Destiny Booze: this is the last week of the 15%-off sale on her romantic suspense novels Altered Beginnings and Predetermined Endings.
Today’s teaser, from page 36 (randomly selected by Random.org) of The Prodigal God:
The hearts of the two brothers were the same… They each wanted to get into a position in which they could tell the father what to do… but one did so by being very bad and the other by being extremely good.
Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just follow the directions at the “Teaser Tuesdays” post.
-TimK
Posted in Books, Teaser Tuesdays | Tagged The Prodigal God, Timothy Keller |
By J. Timothy King on May 21, 2010
As you may know, I do the soccer-dad thing really badly. I do okay as a stay-at-home Dad—except that I always seem to be behind on the housework. But I am so glad I don’t own a minivan! I don’t know how I would cope if I had to cart the neighborhood kids around everywhere. Just dealing with my two plus one or two more (the most that can fit into our old Saturn sedan), just that overwhelms me sometimes. I tell my Beloved to take the car to work, in part because the alternative would be for me to spend 3 hours total driving her back and forth to work. But the real reason is because if I don’t have a car, I can’t be expected to taxi anyone anywhere!
I carry the really-bad-soccer-dad image into the kitchen, where the first thing you’ll notice is that I’m always behind on doing the dishes. The second thing you’ll notice is better-than-average junk food. I love to cook sometimes-elaborate meals, but I rarely have the time or energy. I do, however, throw together simple snacks (usually using prepackaged ingredients) with minimal preparation. Continue reading “Better Junk Food through Science”
Posted in Food, Recipes | Tagged burritos, junk food, McDonald's, nachos, potatoes, ramen |
