Looking out of my office building, with the wind gusting, right now I can see the rain coming in from the right at a 45 degree angle, and from the left at a 45-degree angle, and straight over the top, as if all of it’s being drawn to a bare spot between clumps of trees on the soft slope of the hill.

… and now it starts to swirl.

I came across something online that claimed that diesel buses emit 200x the pollution of a normal passenger car. I looked into this, read some studies, and it’s not true.

The average vehicle on the road emits ~1# of CO2/mile (it’s higher for light trucks, lower for cars, but it works out quite well). I looked up some testing data, and a late-90s diesel bus on low-sulfur fuel (no trap, none of the new cool technology) puts out ~6.4# CO2/mile.

So an older diesel bus = about six cars, CO2-wise.

Caveats:
– There’s a lot of variance in how much pollution an individual bus generates
– This doesn’t account for the relative harm of the pollution generated by the different vehicles, and there’s a case to be made that the buses should account for non-CO2 products

But as a range… there’s just no way it’s 1-to-200.

I now possess a copy of the 1990 “Year’s Best Science Fiction” which contains the first sci-fi short to ever totally blow my hair back (“Beggars in Spain”) written by Nancy Kress, who is teaching the first week of Clarion West, where I’ll be in two weeks.

Woo-hoo!

If you’re curious, the two stories I applied to Clarion with were:
“Conversations With and About My Electric Toothbrush” and “Ember“. Both were a couple drafts off the early versions posted here, but not all that much.

You most likely want to be over on the Cheaters Guide blog

This is the new, rapidly-improving home of HLWT. I’ll be back in a minute.

This look is “Benevolence” and is, with a couple twakes, a theme that I desperately wanted to use for USSM. It was up on USSM for a little while on a weekend while I was tinkering and people flipped out with happiness.  It is a little hard-to-read, though. Anyway.

I look forward to being able to play around with WordPress plugins I can’t date tinker with on a much higher-profile site like USSM.

Hey, Hate Life, Will Travel is on the move, and should be up (and on a new, quite lovely WordPress setup) soon.

I finally got to play one of these, and I have a couple things to say:
– the control is a lot finer than I’d been led to expect from coverage
– Wii Sports is great fun to play
– I haven’t been that giddy playing a game in ages
– Playing games I felt more responsible for the results than ever
– Going back to my PS2 felt boring, like I wasn’t really doing anything

I loved it, and for the first time I really felt like I understood the schism people’ve been talking about: playing on the Wii is casual, easy to pick up, it’s fun and funny, in a way that I’ve never seen before. I don’t know if the novelty will wear off, or if developers will exploit it, but I’m unemployed and ever since I picked up the controller and swung a bat in Wii baseball, I’ve been even more obsessed with finding one. It’s so much fun.

I’ve been collecting rejections as I’ve tried to sell some fiction in this fiercely competitive market. It requires you to be able to not take it personally, which I couldn’t manage often ten years ago. It’s hard for the publishers, I understand, because they get more submissions than they can shake a stick at: I have this vision of the mail carrier coming in with a huge duffel bag of mail and dumping it down on the editor’s desk, which snaps. So they use form letters, and the form letters rub people the wrong way too often. And on the other side, the writers invest so much in their stories that it’s hard not to take rejection personally.

I thought about this today when I saw a job listing on Craigslist. Once, there was a startup I really, really wanted to go work for and thought I would be a rock star for. We flirted for a while, I went in to interview, I didn’t get it (reason given: I didn’t have enough GUI experience and they were all-GUI then). But I got the feeling that it was really close, and they said “hey, keep in touch”. So I did, and when I left Expedia, they called to see if I was interested in contracting for them, which I thought might be a way for the pro-Derek faction to get me in and prove I rocked… they seemed really happy that I might be available. But the timing was bad, because I had to finish the book and go to Europe, so they said “look, call us when you’re ready to go back to work.

I did. Even when I was at Expedia, I thought “if there was somewhere I would quit to go work at, this would be it.” And they’ve been cool through this whole on/off thing, so I dropped them a line and said “hey, the book’s done, I’m considering getting back to having a day job, what’s up?”

They said “Sorry, no program manager jobs, but stay in touch.”

I was cool with that – the timing’s always been weird. Since then, I’ve had an RSS feed from Craigslist for ‘program manager’ to see if there’s anything cool out there, since I figure if there are other startups out there not recruiting through word of mouth, that’s where they’d post.

Today, as you no doubt expect at this point, was a listing for the job I wanted.

And I thought “faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahk.”

I don’t know if I would have gone for it if they’d called me instead of posting: I’m juggling book projects, all kinds of good stuff’s afoot, and if I’m going anywhere, my first choice is going to be rejoining my friends at Expedia, because they’re a great bunch. I don’t know what the scoop is, if there’s recruiter A and recruiter B, or teams, or whatever.

It’s the first time I think I’ve wished for a rejection, because I held out hope for so long, and now I wonder why. I feel somewhat silly, like I’ve found out my girlfriend dumped me by reading her blog and seeing the “Status: Single” on her profile.

Soooo yesterday, I’m at the last of this series of scifi-writing workshops, and we were talking about whether we’d be returning for the next one. And there’s a 17-yr old girl there who is just an awesome writer, and she might not go because they’re evening classes and she can’t get there if she doesn’t get a ride.

And I’m local, have a car, I’m a fan, and I didn’t say anything.

Because, obviously, I’m a 30+ guy. Even married, I can’t make that offer. I can’t even say “I’d love to offer, but you see how bad this looks.” Or “I’d love to apologize, but…” which is in its way even worse.

I didn’t even really have the chance to be selfish, or consider if it was possible, or even think it through at all. All I could do is let the statement hang out there, and do nothing.

I felt bad then, and I feel worse today. It was a chance for me – or really, any of us – to do her a good turn, and I didn’t.

It’s always sad when we have our instincts for charity drummed out of us, often by people preying on them. But people did favors like this for me once, and now I can’t pass that on, and so today instead of feeling good about at least offering, I’m frustrated and a little depressed.