“I think you are a very bad man,” said Dorothy. “Oh, no, my dear; I’m really a very good man; but I’m a very bad Wizard, I must admit.” With that quote lifted from L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz begins James Maxey’s new novel Bad Wizard, available tomorrow, October 1, from Antimatter […]

While I was in Atlanta last week, my library hold on Robert Galbraith’s The Silkworm came in. I picked it up on Friday, and, being a good library citizen, I shoved the book I was reading (D.B. Jackson’s Theiftaker – really good, btw) temporarily aside, and started reading this one immediately so I can put […]

This sign wasn’t in this particular parking lot the last time I was on this side of town…. I am a positive force for social change, or at least influential in sowing paranoia.

Along with being International Talk Like A Pirate Day, it’s Friday, which means, if I get around to it, a list of tunes pulled at random from my hard drive. Twas a long week at work. New software releases, lots of repetitive questions, briefings to a nationwide audience, dropping everything to respond to Senatorial queries…you […]

Avast, Ye! It’s International Talk Like A Pirate Day! To celebrate, here’s Tom Smith (and the Pirate Guys) performing the official Sea Shanty of this annual tradition:

I am a bureaucrat. It’s not necessarily something I’m proud of; when asked what I do for a living, I usually offer up some variation of “IT guy”, which is what sticks. But basically, I’m a cog in a giant bureaucracy with a fearsome reputation for being unpleasant to deal with, even, as is the […]

As is the case with most modern white-collar offices, my workspace has taken advantage of the latest advances in display technology, and has placed relatively unobtrusive LCD monitors in high traffic areas; ideally, as a means of providing useful information to the workforce when they aren’t shackled to their cubicles and email accounts. When these […]

So, the Wizard Entertainment juggernaut came to town this weekend, as the popular comics and pop culture convention expanded into several new cities in 2014, including mine. I wasn’t really planning on going to this show, for a couple of reasons: first, the pricing for even one-day tickets was much higher than I’d like, and […]

After many, many weeks of (mostly exciting and cool) weirdness, I’m sort of zeroing in on a regular schedule again. This may change at any moment, as work is futzing with last-minute scheduling with business travel, and there’s always other mysterious possibilities on the horizon. Anyway, though – it’s Friday morning, the kids are at […]

So, as indicated previously, I spent the weekend at Dragon*Con in Atlanta, playing bass for my friends The Blibbering Humdingers throughout the weekend as part of the filk track. This is the space where I chronicle my experiences on this adventure. The executive summary/tl;dr version? It was great fun, though more than a little intimidating, […]