My fellow Shine author, Gareth L Powell, very kindly invited me to play in his sandbox. Hop over to his blog to see me (briefly) discuss scientific plausibility in SF. Take a look–any and all comments welcome!
(and many thanks to Gareth for the space)
So, back to the semi-regular schedule… Today’s fun thing: the BF’s internet provider apparently upgraded their antivirus system with a faulty patch, which classified 90% of all incoming mail as spam, notified the sender that the mail was spam, and erased it from the servers.
(yes, go figure).
Several mails have been eaten past recovery. Hopefully nothing too important. The BF is (understandably) fuming; I’m left wondering how on earth they thought an antivirus that erases mails would be a good idea. They’re trying to throw up a smokescreen by saying that they don’t keep viruses for security reasons, but that still leaves the question of what happens when the antivirus is wrong. I suspect you’re screwed. What a great concept…
Mind you, my own internet provider puts spam in an “undesirable folder” which is only available through their clunky online email software, so it’s only marginally better.
Garked from Vylar Kaftan, a rundown of characters in my stories by gender, race, sexual orientation, age, class and ability. I wanted to add religion as well, but faith is quite a different kettle of fish when the gods are allowed to be main characters.
I tracked 172 main characters: the arbitrary part of the selection was choosing whether a character should be included or not. I went with “has significant part in plot”, but even that is debatable… If a character appeared several times (in different stories), I only counted them once.
