Info

I’m happy to announce that I have an anthology of my stories out and available for the Amazon Kindle.

“God, Time, Perception & Sexy Androids” features 27 of my short stories, written over the last 30 years or so – all completely revised and updated for this book.

Trying to come up with a title for this thing, we batted several ideas around, considered using the name of one of the short stories, but then finally I kind of summed up a thread I found among the majority of the tales. 

There’s a lot of what-if stories dealing with religion and/or the occult, several time travel fantasies, and a good dose of sexy androids.  And the one major thing I seem to explore among just about every story is the mystery of perception – what’s the difference between what we perceive, and actual reality?  Is there a difference?  Does our perception of something actually affect reality?  Can we change reality?  Are there other realities?

Or, basically, “What is reality?” 

That’s been my favorite question to explore since I was a teenager.  That and all the facets of reality – free will, destiny, synchronicity, and ultimately existence itself.

And, also, what is perception?  Do we alone perceive things?  If we program a machine to observe and recognize, is it truly perceiving?

This pretty much marks the end of my short story writing career.  I know you should never say never, but unless this anthology actually takes off, I’m going to concentrate on both longer, and conversely much shorter, works of fiction: novels and flash.

[Updated with Sago Palm and Xylitol]

An email showed up this morning warning me not to feed grapes or raisins to dogs, and I thought … oh that’s BS.  I’m checking Snopes.com.

But sure enough, it’s true.  It can cause their kidneys to fail.  So I read on and found a number of things we eat that are poisonous to our canine family members:

• Grapes
• Raisins
• Chocolate
• Coco
• Macadamia Nuts
• Onions
• Potato peelings and green looking potatoes
• Sago Palm (Cycad) House Plants
• Anything containing the sugar substitute Xylitol.

I don’t currently have a dog, but plan to adopt one again someday, and I’m going to keep this list handy (and updated here on the web) because I’m sure this is just the tip of the iceberg.

There are only a few books I can point to and say, “That changed my life.” David Allen’s Getting Things Done is the latest. It’s a very Zen and common sense approach to increasing your productivity and lowering your stress levels, and it has helped me tremendously.

The secret is to organize in a simple way, and empty your mind of all the things you need to do by putting them down on paper or PDA. The point is to have an uncluttered mind so that when you turn your attention to something, you can turn your entire attention to it. The system you set up enables you to not worry about forgetting this or that important thing, which really does lower your stress levels.

It’s made me realize, once again, that the simplest answers to problems are the best and often the most profound.

The book has spawned an entire subculture and influenced numerous websites, my favorite of which is Lifehacker, which I read daily. Lifehacker feeds you a continuous stream of tips to help “hack” your life and make it better, embracing the concept of Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD is how Lifehacker refers to it). They, in turn, pull from a whole group of other sites that are dedicated to the same thing.

If you’re stumbling through life juggling 40 things in your head, and keep forgetting half of them, and never seem to have the time to do any of it — and stressing out because of that — then I highly recommend taking a close look at GTD. It worked for me

I am happy to announce another spin-off site has gone live this evening: GroovyGizmo.com

It’s just getting off the ground, but already we’ve got:

• Coke bottles set to “stun”
• Introduction of the “Wammer”
• Cold beer flying at your head
• And a guy who zooms through the sky like a genuine super-hero

If you’re into gizmos and gadgets, please feel free to go take a look. And, if you’ve got one for us to look at, please contact us.

Thanks!

Ever wonder if some of those things that pop up in your email are real? Are people really raising kittens inside glass bottles? Did a turkey really bite President Bush in the privates? Is Starbucks really a money laundering operation for the mafia?

Fortunately for everyone, you don’t have to guess. Simply go to Snopes.com and look it up. If they don’t have it listed, give them a few days, it’ll show up.

Most of that stuff is complete BS … but more surprisingly, some of it is actually real. Urban legends have to start somewhere. But do yourself and everyone else a favor. Make sure to let that friend who keeps forwarding all that stuff know they should be checking Snopes before clicking the send button.

If you’re looking for a place to start a blog, and don’t want to invest in your own provider or bother installing software, here’s a list of the major free providers out there.  I created this mainly because I searched for such a list and didn’t find one.

• Blogger – the original, now powered by Google goodness
• Xanga – my personal favorite, but mainly because of my friends there
• MySpace – everyone loves to hate it yet everyone is there
• LiveJournal – lots of serious journalers here!
• Vox – new kid on the block, it’s feature rich and well designed
• WordPress – they make my favorite software and now do hosting too
• Yahoo 360 – well established user base, nice templates
• Windows Live Spaces – Mac and Linux users welcome too

Am I missing someone?  That is, one that’s free and doesn’t suck?  If so please let me know, I’ll add it to the list!