Tuesday, December 26, 2006

Hipster Cool Dude

I have long been wanting new gadgets. And I have also been fashionably late in buying those gadgets. I talk myself out of them saying that in 4 months I will be able to get something twice as good for half the price. I am usually right, but when you never buy it makes no sense. So after spending 3 and a half years drooling over MP3 players, I received this one for Christmas:



Boy am I in heaven. This thing lets me listen to the radio, view pictures, and listen to my music on the go. So now that I am ultra cool and all, I have the right to wear this thing around. I mean I have seen people with earbuds in for a long time and it is socially acceptable. So the first thing that I did after receiving the gift and putting the Weezer Blue album on it was of course go out in public. "Hey honey, can you go get a couple items from the grocery store," was my cue. I threaded the earbuds through the jacket, hit play, put the player in my pocket and was off. Of course I did not make it out the door without my wife hanging her head in shame. Am I off or is that not still cool? I told her it was, but I don't think she believes that I am on the cusp of a culteral revolution or anything.

Monday, December 11, 2006

20,000 Reasons Not To Write About The Sea

I have been enjoying reading books once again. The past year has seen me read more books for pleasure than the past 10 years combined. I started out strong with Asimov's Foundation series. I explored many different aspects of Michael Crichton's imagination. I even gave Carl Sagan's Contact a try. Currently I am reading a book about heroic American figures that are not widely publicized.

So my current dilemma is to find a new book to read. I started thinking about different ideas and I could not come up with just one. A lot of authors I enjoy write thousand page novels that take 300 pages to introduce the characters. I don't think I have time for that. I enjoyed the quick fun pace of the Foundation series, so a sci-fi book sounded appealing. I pondered what genre of this crazy dorky world to explore and finally came up with a topic I was interested in. The following is the premise that I wish to explore in a book:

In the near future (50-400) years humans discover that exploring the solar system is very costly and not producing enough benefits. It still is only an elite few who can go up and small outposts are on the Moon / Mars etc. But the expected space boom just did not happen like the Jetsons promised. Somewhere in this time frame someone thought, "What about the 70% of the world that we can't live on?" At this point a new exploration / settlement occurs in which humans migrate / expand to the oceans and find new ways of living. It is much cheaper and easier than shipping people 100,000 times the distance to a nearby rock. Therefore this story is set with the expansion to the ocean as its backdrop. Now this does not include any people mutating into gilled creatures or anything. Just finding expansion room on Earth rather than elsewhere.

So I have searched for such a book. It sounds not only interesting to me, but also plausible. However, finding such a book has been anything but easy. I searched at Barnes & Noble, Borders, Amazon.com, the local library, and even Google. The only possible solution that I have found is located in an annoyingly green background site titled If You Like This. Beware going to that site if your eyes are not steady.

So my wife casually laughed at my subject of search and said, "Why don't you just write the book if you can't find it?" So the more frustrated I get with my search, the more I consider the idea. I do like the scenario at least. Lend me your thoughts.