Author Archives: David Crampton

Hot Fuzz

Posted on by

Leaps and bounds and jumps and more leaps ahead of Shaun of the Dead. The main character reminded me of Horatio from CSI: Miami, but without the over-the-top I’ll-catch-the-bad-guy lines. Oh, wait, no. Definitely with the over-the-top lines. Much, many, scads, lots of those lines.

Also, gore. Gratuitous, squishy, bloody gore. Yay for gore! The bit of the church coming down on the reporter was the best.

I really liked this one, even through a massive sinus headache and slight nausea (could have been temporary con crud, could have been sleep dep, who knows). I gave it four stars.

Heroes, Season 1

Posted on by

Oh. Wow.

Let me say that again. Oh, WOW.

You know, if comic book superheroes were this human, in all the good ways and the bad, I’d be way more of a comic book fan than I already am.

This is the kind of series that you can’t really talk about without giving away spoilers. This is why I’m debating streaming the second season (first five episodes are available from NBC’s site for free, and Netflix offers the whole season) as opposed to waiting for it to come out on DVD. Then I can talk to people about it. :)

Did you know there’s a novel? There is! It’s called Heroes: Saving Charlie. I just picked my copy up from Everybody Reads. Oh, and did you know there’s also a graphic novel comprised of the online comic book content, covering stories and bits of the world that didn’t show up in the seires? There is!

The story in this show is great. The writing is top notch. The jerks are masters at cliffhangers, for which I shake my fist. That being said, I gave it 5 stars, and I can’t wait for the second season.

Signal glut.

Posted on by

I was just saying, last night, that I could use some more signal.

SETI@Home is beginning to suffer from an infoglut. The telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico was just upgraded. And from the sounds of this article, it was UPGRADED. To follow suit, so has the SETI@home program.

I’ve been an enthusiast for a while, and this is more reason than ever to get off my butt and get my old computers (soon of the SETI@Home Graveyard) out of storage.

They need more people. More computers. More processing power. It doesn’t matter how old your computer is. If you’ve done this before, you know how simple it is – just a screen saver running when you’re not at your computer for Windows and MacOS users. If you own ancient hardware that’s collecting dust, a net install of Debian, with a quick install of SSH (for remote access) and the SETI program, and your old computer is actually doing something worthwhile.

A Pentium 1 system, 233 mhz with 192 megs of RAM can crunch a SETI packet in an average of just under 4 days. The system’s deadline to crunch a packet? 30 days.

Worth it, in my opinion. If you have old machines lying around, and you want to get a SETI Graveyard of your own going, just let me know. I’m happy to help out.

Weekly Word Count

Posted on by

Holy cats, writerly update, but no new word count. That will have to come later.

– I’m going to ConVocation this weekend. It’s very, very likely that the last of the Squirrel King badge ribbons will be given out. Get one while you can! :)

– The first issue – two chapters – of the fiction behind the Steven comic have been posted on the Short Fiction page. Yes, the comic book project is still going on. If I have to draw it in stick figures when I’m 60 years old, it’ll happen. :)

– High Voltage ConFusion pics have been posted on my Picasa page. I really need to turn off the automatic light correction on my phone’s camera, as it tends to give a yellow tinge inside of hotel rooms.

– I will be bringing some bookmarks for Goblin books to ConVocation. READ GOBLIN BOOKS NOW! I’ll be setting some out on the flyer table, and giving one to anyone who asks.

– I think I’ve corrected all of the errors on my writery web page. Of course, this means that someone will find something I missed. If you do, please point it out. :)