http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=38839

To understand what the moon landing meant to me, you’d have to go back to a dark night in 1957 when I crouched in my attic room with my ear pressed hard against a huge old console radio. The volume was turned down as low as it would go, because I was supposed to be asleep. I was listening to news reports about Sputnik, which had just been launched by the Soviet Union. The Cold War was raging, and though I was not quite seven years old, I understood that the Soviets had just seized the ultimate military high ground.

Nobody followed the space program closer than I did. My father was an engineer for General Electric’s aerospace division, so I had a better idea of the realities than most. Thus when, less than twelve years later, using laughably primitive technology, two men landed on the Moon, I stayed up late to watch those grainy miraculous pictures on television, even though I had to get up at five in the morning to work in a factory to help pay for college. What moved me most was the plaque on the lander, reading, “WE CAME IN PEACE FOR ALL MANKIND.” It was signed by Richard Nixon and a cynic would say that it was empty political rhetoric. Yet, astonishingly, forty years later, it appears that every word of it was true.

Michael Swanwick is an American science fiction and fantasy author and essayist. He has received the Hugo, Nebula, Theodore Sturgeon, and World Fantasy Awards for his work.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DearAuthorRomanceBookReviewsAuthorInterviewsAndCommentary/~3/-r-HYpJS7Lg/

http://dearauthor.com/wordpress/?p=13382

Welcome to the My First Sale series. Each Monday, Dear Author posts the first sale letter of bestselling authors, debut authors, and authors in between.

Roslyn Hardy Holcomb is the author of three books. Her most recent book, Pussycat Death Squad, is available from Loose-Id.

***

My first sale story should probably be a primer called How Not to Get Published. My first book happened purely by accident. Back in 2002 I was on a message board with other romance readers complaining about interracial romances. I think I read my first one in 1999, and being in an interracial marriage, I really liked them. However, they were few and far between, and many of them were quite tentative when it came to the more erotic aspects. I had just finished one that had no sex at all, and I was beyond annoyed by it.

So, my friends challenged me to write a love scene of the type I’d like to see in a romance. I’ve always been a writer, primarily of technical and instructional copy, but I’d never written fiction in my life. I had a lot of experience reading romances, however, and knew exactly what I wanted to read. I wrote about a rock star because the lead singer of one of my favorite bands had recently died and with him in mind, I wrote a romance scene from what eventually became my book, Rock Star. My friends loved it and demanded the rest of the story. The rest of the story? Fortunately, they wouldn’t leave me alone about it. I must have more of a pleaser personality than I had initially thought because with them harassing me daily, sometimes hourly, I wrote and posted the book on the message board, chapter by chapter. (By the way, I don’t recommend writing a book this way. It was excruciating.) Once it was written, I made the book available as a free download. I kept getting emails asking when it would be published. Everyone who read it insisted that it was good enough for publication.

Of course, I knew nothing about that process, but I’d been reading romances since I was nine years old and had plenty of them lying around. I pulled some of those books off the shelves, saw who published them and began searching their websites for submission guidelines. Synopsis? Partial? It didn’t take long for me to realize that given my life circumstances at the time, the submission guidelines were far too arduous. So I shoved the manuscript under my bed and more or less forgot about it. It wasn’t until nearly a year later that I decided that I was ready to deal with actually submitting it. So I did what they requested; I put together partials, made dozens of copies and shipped them off to agents and publishers all over the country. The response? Nothing. I do literally mean nothing. Now I know that at ten plus pages my synopsis was probably too long. I also discovered that there were “rules” against romances about rock stars. (Too bad I found that out after the book was written.) Of course, I have no way of knowing whether any of that was germane. Bottom line is, nobody even asked to see a full manuscript. In some cases I got my cover letter back with No Thanks scrawled on the bottom. That was far more welcome than the chirping crickets I got in return from most publishers and agents, even with a SASE. The manuscript went back under the bed and I forgot about it again.

Then, as so often happens, life intervened. After struggling for years with infertility I was finally pregnant. It was a high-risk pregnancy and my doctor placed me on bed rest for the last three months. That was all well and good except that my favorite author, Susan Elizabeth Phillips, was coming to town. Or rather, she was coming to Birmingham, which was close enough at only an hour and a half away. Of course, my husband was horrified at the notion of me with my hugely pregnant belly schlepping down to Birmingham alone. He even threatened to rat me out to my doctor. Despite all of this I was determined that nothing short of actual childbirth would keep me away. With assistance from several girlfriends and machinations that would do Mission Impossible proud, I sneaked out of town to attend that book signing.

To this day, I’m convinced that the publishing fairies were looking out for me, because that encounter with Susan changed my life forever. For one thing, she was unbelievably gracious and kind. Though like all published authors, she has to deal with aspiring writers constantly harassing her, she took the time to talk to me and answer all my questions about getting published. She told me I had to be more aggressive and stop being so nice. At her recommendation, I started doing multiple submissions. She also said that if I hadn’t heard back from a publisher in a reasonable amount of time (at this point over a year), I should assume it was lost in the mail and submit again. I did exactly that, and lo and behold less than six weeks later I had offers from two publishers on the same day! Apparently someone wants to read romances about rock stars; that book is still one of my publisher’s best sellers.

http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=39278

The Prize: The winner will receive a copy of Origins: The Art of John Jude Palencar signed by the author. Don’t miss this one. Need more convincing? Check out his Tor.com gallery.

The Rules: To get this giveaway, all you need to do is comment (once—duplicates won’t count) on this post. The winner will be selected at random. You have until 12pm EST on Tuesday, July 21st, to comment here. No geographic restrictions apply. You may enter yourself to win as many of these giveaways as you’d like, but if you are randomly selected as the winner you are ineligible to receive any others, so make sure to pick the ones you want!

http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=39135

On July 20, 1969, I was 16 years old, and I had a lot of things on my mind. I was a chicken farmer for the Future Farmers of America at the time, and I remember I was having problems with possums going after my brood house. Then there was Douglas Southall Freeman’s biography of Robert E. Lee, which I was reading at the time. And I was also reading one of “Doc” Smith’s novels that day. I don’t remember exactly which one, but it was one of the Skylark books, not the Galactic Patrol.

And then there was this minor little expedition, something called . . . “Apollo 11,” I think. [G]

Actually, in a lot of ways, I was less excited on the 20th than I’d been when I watched the televised launch (in black and white, of course) on the 14th. It hadn’t really percolated through my brain that I was going to see real, live TV from the surface of the Moon, and boy, oh, boy, had that Saturn V launch been exciting! And then, there it was—late at night, sitting up, watching, and there was Neil Armstrong actually standing on the surface of the Moon.

I knew I was seeing something special, something that was never again going to happen for the very first time, but I was sixteen. I had no notion of how I would look back at that day from 40 years down the road. And I think that those of us who saw it then, that night, live, sometimes fail to realize how much more stupendous those grainy, poor quality black-and-white images were for us than for the (literally) two generations who have seen them since as archive footage. In some ways, it’s like the opening sequence from the original Star Wars movie. When we sat in the theater and watched that huge starship rumbling by overhead, moving out into the screen for what seemed like forever, and then realized it was the little ship, we were seeing something moviegoers had never seen before. Now it’s old hat, and people who first saw it on the little screen are never going to be as impressed by it as we were when we saw it on the big screen for the very first time.

I think it’s like that for people who don’t remember 1969 first-hand. It’s that sense of “old hat.” Of “been there, done that.” Space shuttles, space stations, communications satellites, GPS—they’re all part of our everyday, taken-for-granted world in 2009, not part of an incredible odyssey. We’ve lost that sense of wonder, of reaching out for something totally new, of being committed to and witnesses of one of the human race’s unique and enormous accomplishments, and in its place, I think, we’ve turned inward. These days, we’re thinking small, with a sort of what I can only think of as guiltiness as we look back at the “hubris” of that commitment to grand scale achievement.

I want that hubris back. I want us to be accomplishing unique and enormous things again, with the confidence that we can accomplish them. I want manned spaceflight, not just back to the Moon, but beyond that. And I want my daughters and my son to have their own July 20, 1969, to remember.

Apollo 11 didn’t give us wings; it only showed us how far the wings we had would take us.

David Weber is an American science fiction and fantasy author. He is perhaps best known for the Honor Harrington series, consisting of eleven books, with over three million copies in print. His most recent novel, By Heresies Distressed, is available now from Tor Books.

http://www.cartoonlabs.com/comics/index.php?date=2009-07-20&show=sinfest

Sinfest
Tatsuya Ishida

http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=38831

No good deed goes unpunished. I missed the moon landing by being nice to a stranger.

Gay and I were spending the summer (my first since returning from Vietnam) in Guadalajara, Mexico. We’d taken a long weekend to go enjoy the beach at San Patricio, a fishing village.

We planned to get back to Guadalajara long before the Apollo landing. But they moved the landing up by several hours—and there was no way for us to know! San Patricio is in the shadow of the mountains, and couldn’t receive any radio or television.

So we got back to Guadalajara with only minutes to spare, but I didn’t know that. I dropped Gay off at the house where we were staying, and then drove across town to take an American hitchhiker home.

So she saw the landing, but I had to watch the re-runs. Which were pretty interesting; American video with Mexican audio. I saw Walter Cronkite looking really serious while the sound track went “¡Tequila Sauza est tequila mas fina!”

Joe Haldeman is an American science fiction author, perhaps best known for his novel The Forever War. His work has received many awards, among them five Hugos, five Nebulas, and a Campbell award.

http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=39257

The Prize: An adorably cuddly elder god. 

The Rules: To get this giveaway, all you need to do is comment (once—duplicates won’t count) on this post. The winner will be selected at random. You have until 12pm EST on Tuesday, July 21st, to comment here. No geographic restrictions apply. You may enter yourself to win as many of these giveaways as you’d like, but if you are randomly selected as the winner you are ineligible to receive any others, so make sure to pick the ones you want!

http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=38829

I was just shy of 20 years old as the countdown proceeded. Home from college for the summer, I sat in my living room in Huron, Ohio, mesmerized by the moving phosphors as the Apollo/Saturn 5 rocket—to my eye the most beautiful creation in human history—steamed and fumed and all but stamped its feet with impatience. The phone rang. A friend had a proposal: if we jumped in the car right then and headed for Florida (a 30-hour drive), we might just make it to the Cape in time to watch the launch in person. This would require my commandeering a family car without my parents’ knowledge or permission, as neither was at home, and cell phones were still science fiction. That might not have been enough to stop me. What did stop me was this thought: if we were delayed or ran out of cash on the way (all too likely), we’d miss the launch altogether. That thought was too much to bear. I watched the launch on TV from home.

Glorious! Saturn 5 climbs a pillar of fire into the sky! My God. That was our destiny, humanity’s destiny, to ride fire to the stars! (To this day, I cannot watch the replay without chills in my spine. The same goes for: “Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”) Once those brave, lucky astronauts were safely en route, I settled in for the long watch. Finally came the landing, and the footsteps on lunar soil, which I would not have missed if the house were on fire. But I had an unanticipated difficulty: Do I watch Walter Cronkite on CBS, with Arthur C. Clarke as guest, or John Chancellor on NBC, with Robert Heinlein? Aaahhh! With no remote, I kept leaping to the set to wrench the knob from one station to the other. What a satisfying crown to the occasion: two of my science fiction heroes, called upon to comment! I already knew then that science fiction would impart a crucial direction to my life. But what a triumph, what vindication!

Forty years ago? Seems like yesterday.

Jeffrey A. Carver is an American science fiction author, perhaps best known for his Chaos Chronicles and Star Riggers series. He also created Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy, an online course aimed at young, aspiring writers.

http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=39256

The Prize: A combined DVD/Blu-Ray edition of the gorgeous stop-motion animated Coraline. This edition includes both the 2D and 3D versions of the film, and comes with four pairs of 3-D glasses.

The Rules: To get this giveaway, all you need to do is comment (once—duplicates won’t count) on this post. The winner will be selected at random. You have until 12pm EST on Tuesday, July 21st, to comment here. No geographic restrictions apply. You may enter yourself to win as many of these giveaways as you’d like, but if you are randomly selected as the winner you are ineligible to receive any others, so make sure to pick the ones you want!

http://www.fborfw.com/strip_fix/archives/003887.php

http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=38827

Much to my surprise, I remember the Apollo 11 landing, and the first moon walk. My wife—who is 22 months younger than me—doesn’t. She was three years old at the time; I was not far off five, and somewhere in that gap lies that developmental point where most infants start to remember significant events.

I live in the UK. The precise moment when “Eagle” touched down, 20:17 UTC, would have been around 9pm; rather late for a toddler to be up, but I think I remember my parents bringing me into the living room to watch something important on the new, 625-line black-and-white PAL TV set. That memory is vague—I've seen footage of the descent so many times since that I can't rely on my own experience.

What I definitely remember is my mother waking me up really early—it was still dark—and bringing me downstairs. It would have been around 2am the next morning. I was sleepy, and couldn’t make much sense of what I was seeing on the screen; the upside-down image (at first), the hazy, ghosting figure in the big suit clinging to a ladder, very slowly climbing down it, the crackling static on the sound. I knew something important was happening, because my parents had woken me up and told me to remember it. But after about fifteen minutes, not much seemed to be happening: and I was very sleepy. Back to bed.

The next day, and the day after that, the news sank in; and so did the meaning. Newspapers bore huge headlines, as large as for a royal coronation or wedding, or the assassination of a foreign president: and the pictures that accompanied the headlines made it clear that something epochal had happened, the significance of which—I was four. (Nearly five.) Significance was to come later, gradually sinking in. I was, of course, space-mad for six months, like all my peers. I knew that when I grew up I was going to be an astronaut! There were collectors cards, and colouring books, and all the ephemera of childhood overrun by the Apollo brand. I memorized all the facts and figures I could find, understanding very little. I watched the TV news in 1970 as Apollo 13 ran into trouble, with a five-year-old’s understanding; I watched the final take-off of the Apollo 17 LM ascent stage on that same black and which TV in 1972 as an eight-year-old, still unable to quite comprehend that the program was over. Then it began to sink in—that I probably wasn’t going to grow up to be an astronaut, after all.

They’d taken the moon away from me.

Charles Stross is a British science fiction, fantasy, and horror author. His work has earned over a dozen award nominations, and his most recent novel, Saturn’s Children, is up for this year’s Best Novel Hugo.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/uuworldlatest/~3/81QLL_GtNBg/141811.shtml

http://www.uuworld.org/spirit/articles/141811.shtml

SPIRIT: People probably thought my parents were hippies because we were out-of-the-closet Unitarian Universalists.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/uuworldlatest/~3/EEqhkMg6d34/144607.shtml

http://www.uuworld.org/news/articles/144607.shtml

NEWS: D.C. community youth groups adopt UUA's lifespan sexual education curricula.

http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=39255

The Prize: A $30 gift certificate to Bud Plant’s online comic and art store. Art aficionados rejoice! The image here is from the Spectrum 2009 calendar, one of many items that could be yours.

The Rules: To get this giveaway, all you need to do is comment (once—duplicates won’t count) on this post. The winner will be selected at random. You have until 12pm EST on Tuesday, July 21st, to comment here. No geographic restrictions apply. You may enter yourself to win as many of these giveaways as you’d like, but if you are randomly selected as the winner you are ineligible to receive any others, so make sure to pick the ones you want!

http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/moonhoax.asp

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/AncestryInsider/~3/sacomDu9y-A/familysearch-support.html

Six years ago when Lance McIntosh started working at FamilySearch, the organization received very few support calls. Little wonder since the support phone number was not publicized, the support hours were limited to standard business hours, English was the only available language, and calls from outside the United States were toll calls.

McIntosh, North America Area Manager for FamilySearch Support, was given the assignment to build a world-class support organization to handle the growing set of FamilySearch online products. With 20 years of experience in support, he was well suited for the job. What made this assignment unique was the mandate to use volunteer labor.

FamilySearch’s sponsor, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is well known for its young, white-shirted proselyting missionaries. In his presentation at the July UVPAFUG meeting, McIntosh informed us that the Church also assigns missionaries to various family history assignments.

When McIntosh started in 2003, FamilySearch support had 5 missionaries and 35 employees. The number of employees (the light green line in the graph) dropped to a low of 10 in 2006. Missionaries grew slowly at first, only reaching 20 in 2005 (the dark green line). With the release of New FamilySearch (NFS) that number has grown tremendously since and is expected to hit 1100 this year. Supporting that number of missionaries takes some amount of paid staff, so the number of employees has also grown, although much, much slower, projected to reach just 15 this year. This small growth is only possible by using missionaries in many leadership positions.

Support handles four types of questions:

• Product questions “How do I…”
  • FamilySearch.org
  • PAF
  • CD products (which are being phased out)
  • FamilySearch Indexing
  • Family History Center (FHC) operations (my uncle and aunt are missionaries in this area of support)
• Installation questions
• Policy questions
• Research questions

Support for FamilySearch products is available to both members of the Church and non-members, alike.

Levels of Support

There are three levels of support.

1.  Local Support

At the local level, support is provided by family history consultants and family history centers. “Did you consultants know you were part of FamilySearch support?” queried McIntosh. “There’s no way we could handle the load without you.” In fact, the 2006 update to the Family History Work section (nine) of the Church Handbook re-centered the Church’s family history support on consultants. Family history center directors have felt threatened because centers are no longer the focus. “We feel strongly that the consultant is the key.” About 50,000 individuals currently work in this level of support.

2.  Area Support

There are 1,100 volunteer missionaries serving in about 45 countries around the world. Some serve in the 14 Area Support offices scattered across the globe. Others serve in their very own homes. Most are older, retired individuals. FamilySearch uses a sophisticated phone system that routes calls to missionaries home phones when they are signed in to take calls. The system also utilizes the location of callers so that both parties to each call speak the same language.

• The system first tries to connect the caller to someone in the same country.
• If there are no support personnel available in the same country, the system next tries to route the call to a country that speaks the same language.
• If that is not possible, it next routes the call to a secondary language. For example, many Portuguese speakers are able to communicate in Spanish.
• Next the system asks the caller if English is OK, and routes the call to an English speaking person.
• Finally, the system will advise the caller that no one is available to take the call and asks if the caller would like to leave a message and receive a call back.

3.  Headquarters Support

If Area Support is not able to provide an answer, the issue can be escalated to Headquarters Support. Headquarters Support is composed of about 40 individuals, a mixture of employees and missionaries. These missionaries are usually very technical, sometimes 19 years old or in their 20s.

McIntosh then compared the support experience today with that of six years ago. The support e-mail address and telephone numbers are widely publicized (see “Getting Help,” below). Support is available around the clock, in every major language. Toll-free numbers are available for 90 countries.

Getting Help

1.  Self Help

When you need assistance, FamilySearch prefers that you first try to help yourself. Both the old FamilySearch.org Product Support page and the NFS Help Center allow users to type questions and get answers from a knowledge base. This is the same knowledge base used by Area Support when they help you. See an example of using the Product Support page on the old FamilySearch.org website.

McIntosh called for a show of hands from those who had NFS accounts, and then a show of hands from those who had used the help center. Amazingly, only about half of those with NFS accounts had used it. For any product that allows public access to their internal knowledge base, I always prefer self help. I’m technical enough that when I get stumped, it’s usually because of something well beyond first-level support staff’s capabilities. I don’t have enough patience to shepherd an issue through the levels of support necessary to get the right answer.

Self help: very much recommended.

2.  Family History Consultants

Most family history consultants are members of the Church and are given the assignment by leaders of their ward. Some family history consultants are not Church members, but are community volunteers who help staff FHCs.

Similarly, Church members can obtain assistance from consultants within their ward and anyone can obtain assistance from consultant by visiting a FHC. This past week FamilySearch added a new tab to the NFS Help Center. The new Local Assistance tab (see the graphic to the right) lists the names and contact information for consultants within your ward.

3.  E-mail/Web Form 

I’m not certain McIntosh expressed a preference between using e-mail and telephone support. Companies seem to prefer e-mail over phone calls because the per-incident cost is cheaper. When I do have to contact a support organization, I prefer e-mail over telephone calls. That way nothing is lost in translation as my incident is escalated up a support organization.

McIntosh did express a preference that NFS questions be submitted through the Help Center instead of the e-mail address (support@familysearch.org) because the Help Center captures and sends additional information about the context in which you were working. This additional information might be necessary to resolve your issue. Don Snow, the UVPAFUG officer conducting the meeting complained that using the Help Center doesn’t carbon a copy of the issue back to your e-mail address. Another audience member suggested relying on the My Cases tab of the Help Center (partially visible in the graphic, above) to track your support cases.

4.  Telephone

The toll-free number for FamilySearch Support within the United States and Canada is 1-866-406-1830. The number is derived from the date that the Church was organized (April 6, 1830). McIntosh had apparently been questioned before about why the order of the numerals didn’t follow the United States genealogical standard for dates. He deftly sidestepped the issue by declaring that we couldn’t blame him for the choice, as he hadn’t chosen the number.

All the world-wide toll-free numbers as well as the e-mail address can be found online at contact.familysearch.org .

Registered Consultants

McIntosh reminded family history consultants that they needed to register. He pointed out that registered consultants received all these perks:

• News
• Training
• Information and tips
• Resources
• E-mail memos
• Links to past memos
• Early access to NFS

McIntosh asked the people not register just to get NFS access. Remember, you will be listed a a consultant to others using NFS. On the other hand, he said, if you are a de facto consultant, go ahead and register. That is to say, if because of knowledge or prior callings you are acting in the capacity of a consultant, you should go ahead and register and go through the training so that the assistance you give to others is correct.

McIntosh showed us the http://consultant.familysearch.org web page and the registration form, which is accessed from the left side of the page. To change your information, register again. It won’t produce a duplicate. It will overwrite the old. If you change wards, it won’t automatically change you. You must register again to change it. They have asked the Church to add features to their membership software so that this isn’t necessary, but have no control over if and when this might happen.

The right-hand side of the http://consultant.familysearch.org web page leads to the New.FamilySearch.org Utah and Idaho Release website. McIntosh told us that barely half of the Church, by volume, had switched to NFS and both the system and the support organization had to handle the upcoming volume. Someone in the audience asked about the Provo temple and I heard say that all temples were then using the new NFS ordinance recording system. I may have misheard, as all temples are now capable of accepting NFS Family Ordinance Requests (FORs), but not all temples are using the new Ordinance Recording System (ORS). (See “NFS Rollout News: Ron Tanner Presentation.”)

While FamilySearch used to roll entire temple district live all at once, with Logan, it was spread out over a month. The rest of temples were expected to work that way. Since then, it was announced that all of the Boise temple district would roll live today, 20 July 2009.

McIntosh said that the exact schedule and order of remaining temples has not been established yet, but that the goal is to have them all done “soon.”

Closing Bonus

In closing McIntosh announced that there is a current opportunity for members of the Church to serve as FamilySearch Support missionaries. While some part-time missionary opportunities prescribe a minimum of 8 hours of service per week, FamilySearch Support requires at least 12 to 15 hours. The Church website states that a minimum commitment of 12 months is needed; McIntosh said six.

As mentioned, the service is provided from your own home, answering questions about family history products and software by responding to phone calls and e-mails. For more information, click here.

Images, in order of appearance:

• Lance McIntosh photograph, photographer unknown, FamilyHistoryExpos.com (http://www.familyhistoryexpos.com/events/presenter.php?sid=192&&eid=45 : accessed 18 July 2009).
• Photograph of missionaries on Temple Square, Christina Smith, photographer, Ensign, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, April 2006, 26-7 (http://lds.org/gospellibrary/pdfmagazine/0,7779,592-6-1-2006,00.html#).
• Graph of support staff prepared by the Ancestry Insider.
• Diagram showing three levels of support, slide 158, “How Consultants Support the New FamilySearch,” online training module, FamilySearch.org  (http://familysearch.org : accessed 18 July 2009); available to family history consultants in the New FamilySearch Help Center > Training & Resources > E-Learning Courses.
• Detail from New FamilySearch Help Center, FamilySearch.org (http://familysearch.org : accessed 18 July 2009); copyright Intellectual Reserve, Inc.
• “Family History Consultants are Key!” slide 166, “How Consultants Support the New FamilySearch,” online training module, FamilySearch.org (http:/familysearch.org : accessed 18 July 2009); available to family history consultants in the New FamilySearch Help Center > Training & Resources > E-Learning Courses.

Notice: The Ancestry Insider is independent of Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org. "The Ancestry Insider" does not mean "Ancestry.com Insider." The opinions expressed herein are his own.

http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=38824

I remember that day very well.

My about-to-be-wife Marilyn and I were on our way to a Moonship-watching party at John and Bjo Trimble’s house. We were at a traffic light when they decided to send the LEM down. I remember a moment of panic: Am I sure about this? Nothing will ever be the same.

At the Trimbles, we watched. The LEM landed. Then nothing happened for hours, as the astronauts slept. And finally they emerged. And the world was supposed to be changed forever.

We went to the Moon, and returned, and stopped. There was no moment of disappointment. It just grew over the decades. We were promised the Moon.

Larry Niven is an American author of dozens of science fiction and fantasy novels. He is perhaps best known for Ringworld, which won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards. He also penned the classic essay on Superman, “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex.”

http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=39254

The Prize: This little man 4-port USB hub. From Thinkgeek: “It's USB Man—the cutest little four port hub around. He’s got a USB port in each extremity and is ready to connect to your goodies. Wait...that sounds kinda wrong, but you know what we mean.” His heart lights up so you know he is working.

The Rules: To get this giveaway, all you need to do is comment (once—duplicates won’t count) on this post. The winner will be selected at random. You have until 12pm EST on Tuesday, July 21st, to comment here. No geographic restrictions apply. You may enter yourself to win as many of these giveaways as you’d like, but if you are randomly selected as the winner you are ineligible to receive any others, so make sure to pick the ones you want!

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2009/07/20/yet-more-travel/

http://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=7989

Heading back to Ohio today. Thanks, California, you were fun. Let’s do it again.

I’ll update when I’m back at home. Keep it together until then, okay? Excellent.