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Eep! I've been neglecting my Vox account! Let's fix that some.

This week I helped a friend investigate various programs for generating thumbnail galleries for the pictures portion of her website. There's a lot of free options out there, but most come out lacking in one regard or another...except one, that delighted us both.

If you need gallery pages, check out JAlbum. It's a well-behaved Java application, so it runs on lots of operating systems, and it creates amazingly slick pages with equally well-behaved style sheets. Slide show options, automatic flagging of new pictures, nested sub-galleries, really flexible captioning, all kinds of things are here. The program itself can be a little intimidating at first glance, but the publisher's tutorials, manual, and FAQ pages are outstanding.

I give it, er, thumbs up. :)

I like it when I get to mark a passage from a less desirable state to a better one with something fairly concrete. Tonight I got it for this heat wave: tonight was the night when the fans all got turned off.

Now, they didn't all stay off. In particular, my little clamp-to-the-desk fan is running again to keep the air fresh around my work space (and amuse Montano). The ceiling fan in the kitchen will go on low before I go to bed. Maybe one or two more, too. But these things have all been running continuously since early Thursday morning, and I really enjoyed the sensations of handling each, feeling the machinery quiet and still.

This round of heat wave is really taking a toll on me. Particularly since I have a summer cold or something. I'm checking e-mail and otherwise mostly taking it really, really easy. But I'm not in real trouble of the sort I can be in during crises; I'm just sick and slow. Lots of repetitive chores in WoW. :) I'll mend over the next few days.

Time for a tally.

• Borrowed Time: working out the plan for supplements. The next thing is a master road map and I owe that to my collaborators this weekend.
• Secret Project S: doing some revisions to see just what my pace is right now. The next thing is getting back to the grindstone of real writing, and that's happening on or before September 1st.
• Secret Project A: brand-new to this list, just dropped in my lap last night. Waiting for the developer's detailed plans. In the meantime, I need to run some more sessions with the base rules to make sure I'm in the correct groove.

More news as it happens.

10 tracks I've listened to today:

• "Unbreakable", James Newton Howard, Unbreakable soundtrack
• "Show Me the Way", Styx, Greatest Hits
  
• "It's a Sin", Pet Shop Boys, Discography
• "Crystal Clear", Mike Oldfield, The Songs of Distant Earth
• + "Sleeping Sun", Nightwish, Highest Hopes: The Best of Nightwish
• "Ammonia Avenue", Alan Parsons Project, Love Songs (this is the oddest collection of "love songs" I know of)
• "Transfer Affection", A Flock of Seagulls, Best of A Flock of Seagulls
• "Herr, Lehre Doch Mich", Johannes Brahms, Ein Deutsches Requiem (Claudio Abaddo conducting the Berlin Philharmonic, my favorite performance of it)
• + "Requiem", Midnight Syndicate, Born of the Night
• + "We Are So Fragile", Jesus Jones, Random: A Gary Numan Tribute

Wow. These pictures are absolutely gorgeous.

Hollow Earth Expedition was my first completed writing of this year; I'm in it for a chapter and change. Working on it was one of the most altogether satisfactory experiences of my writing career, and getting paid this week only put the extra swirl of frosting on top. It's scheduled to debut at GenCon and I hope it turns out as swell as I think it will.

Lately I've been doing a lot of histamine flushing and such - the cooler weather and the reduction in my level of incoming new stress add up to let my body catch up on its backlog of removing things that I don't want to be carrying around. Very welcome, and not all that bad to go through. But sometimes it leads to weird experiences.

A few weeks ago I moved my computer desk into the bedroom for the summer. It gives me a north-facing vista, and makes a huge difference in temperature - ten degrees F or more cooler than the south-facing living room and dining room. It also lets me take advantage of the screened window here; the ones facing south are (with one exception) not screened, so I can't have them open more than a crack or Montano would get out. Here I can slide it open wide, and we both like more fresh air. When I work at the desk, he divides his time between the window sill, where he can look down on me, and the bed, where he can stretch out and be near but on his terms.

This morning I was fooling around with World of Warcraft a bit, and leaned back to stretch. I felt a really strange sensation in my right arm. I couldn't make sense of the feeling at all. Worried, I leaned forward and it stopped. I stretched again, and the sensation returned. Forward, stop. A third time, and this time I turned my chair partway around, to find myself staring right at Montano. Instead of lying down as usual, he was sitting upright  in that pert all-four-paws-together stance, and leaning forward to give my arm a lick and a nip.

Customized therapy, I guess.

I woke up about 4 am this morning to what sounded like torrential rainfall. Since I'd been sleeping with the window open, I got up promptly to close it, looked out, and saw that it was not in fact raining. Then I started worrying that the toilet or some other bit of plumbing might have broken loose, and prowled the apartment only to find that they were all in order. Gradually I realized that the sound was loudest on one side of the apartment, and looked out the window. There was the answer. Someone had smacked into the fire hydrant on the corner. By the time I took notice, the fire department was on the scene shutting it off. I couldn't get any good pictures of it, but the jets of water going all the way across the street, with dark pavement beneath and fire truck lights shining through the spray, was really very pretty.

This is a fresh start for me, and there's something about the concept of what could have been a disaster turning out to be an interesting interlude and then gone that strikes me as the right tone for where I'd like to be right now. Expect me to focus here on the interesting and the positive, and to look for good frameworks for dealing with the important negative things when they come along. Much thanks to Adam Tinworth for making it possible.