Okay, I haven't been as great about blogging as I said I would be. The semester always hits fast and hard when it begins, and it's always a lot more than just classes and normal things. Professors get reviewed regularly, and I've had to be reviewed and review others. We also had a qualifying exam for our grad students, and I had to write, grade, and proctor for the gruelling two-day exam. Et cetera.
Even I got tired of the spam nostalgia and have blocked comments here on posts more than five days old. We're talking about upgrading our software to filter blog spam, so I might change that if/when we implement the new software.
My buddy Jay Lake just sold a novel to my editor at Tor, which is really cool. Now Jay and I are even more closely associated weird writing brothers or something, doing more than just freaky clown anthologies (I have to check and see where that is -- I sent the stuff along to Jay a couple of months ago, FYI).
Now I've got to get back to work, since one of those "other" items is Hubble Space Telescope proposals. The deadline is Friday, and I don't want to pull an all-nighter this year. I've done a couple of those in the last five years for Hubble, and it just gets harder. We'll be proposing for additional images in different colors for our post-starburst quasars. We've got some good justification as we're learning how difficult the spectral modeling can be, and the images can really help.