Lately, I feel like I've been sucking karma out from the environment around me. Several people I know are having *really* bad luck - and everything is unbelievable peachy with me. Of course, these things are more random than one seems to think, but still...

The big news is that my second book went to press yesterday - it is really beginning to seem tangible now. The column is going well so far. My old TV fritzed out, so I bought a Vchip-free, 27in TV at Goodwill for a paltry $40, and no less than five good samaritans helped me move it from the store to my car, and to my car to my front door. That would have never happened before the karma sucking period began. In fact, the two people who helped me bring it up the stairs were the same people I had to call the police on for a domestic dispute they had outside my patio while I was trying to work on the XML chapter in DTP - they threatened to beat me up at the time, but instead, they carried a ridiculously heavy object to my threshold. I can continue to worship at the altar of NetFlix.

Since I was such a longshot at getting the column (and totally put my heart into the application), I've started doing other longshot stuff. Today I set up an audition for the Southwest Shakespeare Company. There is no possible way I can get that either - but what the hell, my luck is ludicrously good right now, and there is no harm in trying.

I did this one on parallax. I don't think this one is as good as the others simply because there is so much information that can be given to explain it. Working with just 400 words is really difficult! I still went over.

I just posted my second physics article, after much writer's block, on gamma ray bursters. I love this phenomena, they are more apocalyptic than most people seem capable of imagining. I just had a hard time relating it to physics, as opposed to astronomy. In the end, I can justify it by categorizing appropriately as astrophysics.

I was googling my name (cheesy, yes) to see if my column had made it into the search engine yet (justified), and I found an interesting entry that I had completely forgotten about. Years ago, back when I was into the Mars colonization scene (uber-geek stuff here), I signed up to have my name engraved on a microchip sent aboard the Stardust mission to comet Wild 2, which launched in 2004, and was completed this January with a return sample mission - but there is a lander on the comet, with my name on it, along with the names of about a million other people.

Apparently now there is a new mission in prep, called Dawn, which will go to the asteroid belt (how cool is that), that is also taking names.

In other news, we are now at 141 days sans precipitation in Phoenix.

I'm officially a "columnist". I've just posted my first physics column, and despite the searing, itching pain of a recently extracted wisdom tooth, I feel great! I'm beginning to think this whole writing thing might just work out.

Check out the article at physics.suite101.com, this first one is about the totally misunderstood coriolis effect.