Reactivated from the cruise!

How did my cruise go?

I have three hours of digital video footage.  However, I am not going to bore you with that, like some eccentric relative with home movies.  Instead, I will show one high point of my cruise in a simple digital image:

Yep, that's a dolphin.  Her name is Frida, she outweighed me 2 to 1, and I swear, out of all of us in the group, she liked to glide by me especially...she reminded me of Cortana (my cat).  I'll tell you, this was better than what they offered at Sea World of California:

Don't get me wrong, Penny was a delight.  However, there's a difference between the programs (the trainers will be there to ensure the well-being of the dolphins and the safety of the visitors, mind...the dolphins are trained but...if they don't want to interact, they will not interact!).  In all my observation, the dolphins in both facilities were well-treated, healthy, and enriched...however at the Cabo center, these dolphins could expect random stimuli from random visitors (and the trainers watched the visitors like hawks, and the rules they gave...well, given my research and behavioral psych courses in college, I agreed with what they said)...

There are those that are strongly against captive dolphins.  Me, I think the ideal would be like those dolphins at the facilities in florida where they are let loose into the open ocean, free, they get R&R, and come back when they want.

I'm back to work on my third (and hopefully final) rewrite of my Sci-Fi novel.  As far as Kane's Mind goes, I'm getting back with Jared O'Brien, but I have to wait until he's done with finals.  The voice work is ongoing and successful so far.

And IF I manage to finish and finally publish my novel (after more than ten years and three rewrites), look for this title:

And yes, I rendered that.  That was back in high school, using Strata StudioPro.  (And dammit, I will finish this book, it's the first of four in my plans...)

Kane's Mind will be done to completion.  I started in, people like it, I should finish it.  I cannot guarantee timing but...hell, I put my foot in it, I might as well finish what I started.

Oh yes.  Also, I'm working on trying to go Windowless...I can't yet afford to go Mac/Windows transparent (I can't afford the uber-core minitower and if I'm going mac, I'm going Mac pro uber processor architecture), but I have set up a partition with Kubuntu...that is, Ubuntu with KDE.  I've worked with KDE from Xandros, and I like the familliar environment and the interface.  It's a little quirky, but at least it doesn't pretend to be perfect and ignore the user (like any Linux distro, you work with it and people try to improve it).

'Course I still have to boot back into Windows to use Vegas and Soundforge (I need all of the processor cycles and I don't know how to configure Wine to maximize performance, I am ten years out of date with these techniques).  But, at least I have a fallback.

Addendum: I learned, on November 22, Anne McCaffrey, author of the Dragonriders of Pern series, and for a brief time when I was in high school, my mentor over E-mail (I kid you not, I had some correspondence with her for a time, she even let me interview her for a school project...a really nice lady, and she gave me some simple advice, but hearing it from a pro really cemented it home) passed away.

I wish I could have finally finished and published my book so I could thank her in person.

Consumite Furore.