Author Archives: sbrandt

Me as an Early Human

Posted on October 4, 2010 by sbrandt

This is what I would look like as an early human–according to an exhibit at the Smithsonian.

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Happy Birthday Harry Potter

Posted on July 31, 2010 by sbrandt

Harry Potter was born on July 31, 1980. That makes him 30 today. Wow, he’s really getting old! You know, I always thought we’d get a series of books entitled “Harry Potter, the Aurer.” Maybe it will still happen.

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Neanderthal Romances

Posted on May 7, 2010 by sbrandt

My theory is that this could be the beginning of a whole new line of offbeat romance novels: http://www.genomeweb.com/node/940177?hq_e=el&hq_m=708634&hq_l=1&hq_v=4cb508f503. Imagine the book jacket, “Where can a modern girl of the 50th century BC find a real Caveman, Jill asked herself…”

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True-Type fonts on Fedora 11

Posted on January 7, 2010 by sbrandt

The key insight to getting true-type fonts working was finding this page: http://www.go2linux.org/msttcorefonts-true-type-fonts-on-linux. I had to make some minor tweaks to get this to work. Here’s how my session went: yum -y install rpm-build cabextract xfs ttmkfdir rpm -ivh http://dl.atrpms.net/all/chkfontpath-1.10.1-2.fc11.x86_64.rpm … Continue reading →

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Cult of the Red Tears is Finished!

Posted on December 30, 2009 by sbrandt

“Cult of the Red Tears” is finished! This is the sequel to my book “Battle for the Sphere.” I began writing it on Dec 11 2008. Today, Dec 30, 2009 it is ready for reviews.

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Cult of the Red Tears

Posted on September 15, 2009 by sbrandt

I began working on my rough draft of my novel “Cult of the Red Tears” in December. I have been struggling to get to the end, working every spare moment I could find. Yesterday afternoon I began to realize that … Continue reading →

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Virtual Possessions

Posted on August 17, 2009 by sbrandt

I was thinking about the future of display technology. I imagine that it will become cheap enough, at some point, that we will cover our walls, ceilings, and tables with displays (possibly 3D displays). One consequence of this would be … Continue reading →

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ODT to RTF converter

Posted on July 1, 2009 by sbrandt

Recently I discovered that OpenOffice can’t really generate RTF files, so I wrote my own converter. It’s rather basic, just handles italic, double space, paragaraphs, and centering. However, for what I need it for it works a lot better than … Continue reading →

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The Devil Loves Me

Posted on June 16, 2009 by sbrandt

On a business trip to California I had the good fortune to bump into two pretty famous actors in the Baton Rouge airport. On the left is Ray Wise (a.k.a. the Devil from the television show “Reaper”). On the right … Continue reading →

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Battle for the Sphere is done!

Posted on December 12, 2008 by sbrandt

I’ve been working on a science fiction novel for about 2 years now titled “Battle for the Sphere.” Yesterday’s snow day was the impetus I needed to dig in and finish the second pass at editing. I’m sure there are … Continue reading →

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