iPhone

My wife bought me an iPhone! :-)


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NaNoWriMo I did it

I did it. I successfully wrote 50,000+ words in less than one month.

My novel is not finished but I completed the NaNoWriMo goal.

I am looking at options for self publishing now.

nanowrimo

Kristen and I are going to do the National Novel Writing Month. We are each going to try to write a 50,000 word book during the month of November. This means I will be putting my other writing and misc projects on hold for November.

Come join us if you dare: http://www.nanowrimo.org/

Nebo Station Part 6

“With less than half the self-destruct charges working, we can’t count on anywhere near a full self destruct. The best we can hope for is that the Durement Nebo will break up into pieces, and with all those life pods out there we’re likely to kill more of our own people with debris from the ship caused by that kind of uncontrolled explosion.”

The bridge engineering officer’s report was succinct and to the point.

“Ok people, it looks like the self destruct charges aren’t an option at this point, but I don’t want to just leave the ship here for the enemy to salvage either, give me another option to consider!”

When the captain demands something you give it to him, even if what he is demanding seems impossible, so we threw out options from the top of our very tired heads and nothing seemed workable until I hit on an idea.

“What if we set the auto-pilot to jump the ship out of here?” I asked and could tell from the looks I got that the bridge crew thought I had finally snapped under the stress. “I know the ship can’t actually jump out of here.” I replied to the looks I was getting. “The hyperspace engines are probably shot even if the real space engines could reach jump speed. But if I set the realspace engines to over-max on the current course, override what’s left of the safeties and set the hyperspace engines to engage in fifteen minutes there’s only two possibilities that I can think of. One the hyperspace engines fail and without the safety lockouts they feedback and explode in a small nova, taking the ship with them. Two, the hyperspace engines work if only for a microsecond and the ship makes a semi random if very very short hyperspace jump. Still, that should be enough to make it hard for the enemy to find at the very least.”

The bridge engineering officer agreed with my assessment and the captain liked the plan well enough so that was what we did. With the captains key and some quick jury rigging we turned off the few safety systems that were still working, setup the blind jump in the autopilot, the captain recorded the last log entry and we pulled the backup log recording, pushed the engines back up past redline, and took the bridge life pod.

We spent the next twenty minutes watching the ship recede and waiting for it to blow up. When the explosion never came we concluded that against all logic the jump had been a success, and then spent the next several days waiting to be rescued.

After the Nebo ‘disappeared’ as it were, the battle pretty much ended. Our five remaining capital ships jumped out soon after that and jumped back in a few hours later after the enemy ships had collected their life pods and left. Then what was left of our squadron jumped for regional headquarters where ships and crew would be re-assigned into new squadrons.

Multiple DataKeyNames in GridView

I like to post links to programming tips I find helpful so here is one for a problem I was having today.

http://graciesdad.wordpress.com/2007/05/07/multiple-datakeynames-in-gridview/

and in VB Dim SID As Integer = StudentTextbooksGrid2.DataKeys(StudentTextbooksGrid2.SelectedIndex).Values("SID")

Death

My grandmother died last night. I am going to miss grammie.

Nebo Station - Part 5

Right after I realized we were going to loose the ship, the captain gave me an order.

"Pilot, do whatever you have to do to break away from this battle to give us some space to launch the escape pods safely. You have forty minutes before we launch the first pod. I am going to be organizing the evacuation of the ship. I'll order engineering to keep the engines running as long as they can at the expense of every other ship system, even life support if they have to. Just get us to a safe distance from this battle to launch the pods!"

Then the captain was gone to oversee the evacuation and I was spinning the ship, as much as it is possible to spin something that big, to avoid another attack, and looking for a vector with a somewhat clear path to some open space. A few minutes later I heard the order go out for a phased abandon ship. Non-essential crew would head for the life pods first, then any fighter pilots who made it back in time, then the weapons crews would fire every missile they could back at the enemy and set the ships guns on auto, with orders to shoot at anything that did not read as a life pod. Then the damage control crews, engineering, crews, and lastly when everyone else was off the captain would set the ship to self destruct and the bridge crew would be the last to leave the ship.

That was the plan. Nothing in war ever seems to go according to plan. We took a three more solid hits right about then and we lost engines for a couple of minutes and were holed to atmosphere on several decks. However, I found that piece of open space the captain wanted, and the remaining capital ships in the armada covered our retreat as I pushed what was left of our engines past their max to get us some distance. After the damage control crews along with everyone else who could help, rescued all the people they could from the holed decks, most of the rest of the evacuation went according to plan. Right up to the point where the captain set the ship to self destruct and the computer reported that at some point in the battle the control lines to the over half of the ships self destruct charges had been severed. It probably happened during that last attack when the ship was holed, but right then we had a problem.