The Mirrored Road into the Interior

I think this is going to be a miscellaneous post.
First, because I suspect the payoff on this one is going to be rather a bit in the future, I want to thank for the huge amount of work he did answering a question I posted. I had mostly been hoping for links to the information I needed to do the analysis, and he sent me his own analysis of the subject as well as the informational links. Here's his primary website, by the way. http://www.highprogrammer.com/alan/ If I don't get my own work ready to post by say Friday, I'll make sure to post the relevant parts of his e-mail. The work he did deserves to be shared/aired in public, and my own scatterdness shouldn't be allowed to significantly delay that.

Second, I just realized something. If I'm ever in a position where I am overseeing the distribution of review copies of something, I am going to make sure that I contact both the people who don't get one of the limited numbers of copies and the people who do. I requested one of a stack of review copies of a book that I am looking very much forward to reading however I can get my hands on it. The folks managing the giveaway promised to email everyone who didn't ask for one in time. Now I sent my email out within minutes of the offer going live, so I suspect that I'm in line for one, but it is also possible that my spam box ate their message saying that I didn't get one. It would have been awesome if they had notified both groups. I know limited time and griping about the practices of a group that is (potentially) giving me something for free. This borders on invoking Eric Burns' Entitlement and the Modern Fandom essay. But this isn't about criticizing Tor, this is about me trying to sort out best practices for something like this. (And PNH and TNH are some of the best folks in publishing right now. I realize that they are working with a very limited resource pool on matters of time, what with between them there being a mere 48 potential hours in a given day, and having jobs that could easily take 192 of those hours if they let it.)

Oh goo. I think that I've forgotten several things I wanted to talk about.

Ooh, my library houses Scott Lynch's textually Prettier than Leiber urban fantasy caper novels in general fiction. I really don't understand them at all.

Haven't actually seen anything about this (I've spent my google time reading http://www.highprogrammer.com/cgi-bin/quoter/default/all and writing the above post, but I've heard via word of mouth that Obama is talking about an incredibly awesome plan to help boost the US back into the front position in the world educationally speaking.

Anyone looking to hire a synthetic generalist/researcher? I work cheap and I build unusual memetic structures.

Let's see. What else.

Oh yeah.

As a nascent writer, I've decided that the two nicest things someone could say to you are, in this order:
"You've caused me to rethink my position on X." (Not necessarily change that position. This one is, by the way why I don't think that internet discussions/arguments are pointless or stupid. At least in the parts of the net that I frequent people are generally capable of being convinced by solid data and well wrought logic. It may not happen often, but it happens.)

and
"Can I quote you?"

I'm not sure of the identity or order of the next entries.

oh well. If I think of the next points I wanted to make I'll post again.