My original PSA about what was to happen being lost in the rebuild let me surmise!  On Sunday August 1 the server that this site and The Old Dog Barks underwent a major upgrade as in a complete replacement!

The Workstation grade machine was removed and an Honest-To-God purpose built Server was put in it’s place!  For those of you who might care the new machine is a Dell 1600 with 1 Terabyte of initial storage on board.  It has two 2.0 G Processors and the power supplies and cooling of a real server!

Hopefully this will be the last major upheaval for a while!  BTW in the process we are on the very latest versions of both Fedora and WordPress making my life much easier!

Posted by - OldDog  August 1st, 2010 under Novel Ideas.
Comments: none

This is my first high resolution Terragen 2 rendering. It is an 800 x 600 pixel done in bitmap, a one meg file, converted to a smaller jpg. The Terragen 1 program I used for the video below is maxed out at 640 x 480. The original file here took 16 minutes to render but I spent about twelve hours figuring out how to do it. I still have not got to the part about adding vegetation except for a few samples.

This next image is the same basic terrain but from a different point of view.

This program is going to take a long time to learn.

Posted by - Wes  July 14th, 2010 under Off Target.
Comments: 2

This is an old Terragen computer generated video I created when the Old One and I were writing on Colony Alchibah. I did a little editing so with some new additions I am posting it now. Like what is going on here we had a fair amount of down time on Alchibah to work on background. I needed to use four different programs to complete this project but I see at the Terragen page there is Terragen 2 out that combines the rendering and animation in the same program. I will download it and see how it works. The older version is still available and I can warn anyone interested that it has a steep learning curve, but is well worth the effort.

It can take a long time to make one of these, each frame has to be generated and rendered individually. This is low resolution. The most extensive (highest resilution) video I generated back then was a couple of minutes long and took more than 24 hrs to create the images. It is 64 megabytes long, too long for me to upload and post. I will post a low res version one of these days.

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On this video I must say the voice-over actor is great — but he needs a better script writer.

Posted by - Wes  July 8th, 2010 under Novel Ideas.
Comments: none

While we have been quiet on the web site, Ditmars Mining and Minerals, along with the rest of the New Texas industry has been very busy. This is the ship Ditmars just put into service:

The latest thing for use in the belt, built for moving small asteroids from their existing orbits to central manufacturing centers it is operated by a crew of five and able stay away from base for six months at a time.

Posted by - Wes  June 28th, 2010 under Novel Ideas.
Comments: none

At the Old Dog Network’s main studios up on the shores of Lake Superior, through the magic of blue screen and the liberal use of digital imagery, we shoot and edit the features we present for your enjoyment.

This is a pre-production view a project we are working on now. After you have seen enough hit the pause button to end the show.

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The fish the Outlaw Don is showing off we call a “Hammer Handle,” for obvious reasons. We will work on this a little more before finishing it off. Take a look when it comes to a Theater or TV Screen near you!

Posted by - Wes  June 16th, 2010 under Off Target.
Comments: 1

For more of the Never So Few story to be told I have just posted today at the FutureVerse — Chapter 11 of  A Very Blue Moon.

Posted by - Wes  June 14th, 2010 under Novel Ideas.
Comments: none

No, just overworked and underpaid!  After weeks and weeks of trying to keep this company afloat suddenly we have work out the ass!

I am currently involved in trying to getting a new PBX on line for a customer!  This is just called time consuming not difficult.  I do nothing that could be called Rocket Science just Common Sense!

This site shall resume new content soon.

Posted by - OldDog  June 13th, 2010 under Novel Ideas.
Comments: none

In the Neolithic Age
— Rudyard Kipling

IN THE Neolithic Age savage warfare did I wage
For food and fame and woolly horses’ pelt.
Was singer to my clan in that dim, red Dawn of Man,
And I sang of all we fought and feared and felt.

Yea, I sang as now I sing, when the Prehistoric spring
Made the piled Biscayan ice-pack split and shove;
And the troll and gnome and dwerg, and the Gods of Cliff and Berg
Were about me and beneath me and above.

But a rival, of Solutre, told the tribe my style was outre-
‘Neath a tomahawk, of diorite, he fell
And I left my views on Art, barbed and tanged, below the heart
Of a mammothistic etcher at Grenelle.

Then I stripped them, scalp from skull, and my hunting-dogs fed full,
And their teeth I threaded neatly on a thong;
And I wiped my mouth and said, “It is well that they are dead,
For I know my work is right and theirs was wrong.”

But my Totem saw the shame; from his ridgepole-shrine he came,
And he told me in a vision of the night: -
“There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,
“And every single one of them is right!”

Then the silence closed upon me till They put new clothing on me
Of whiter, weaker flesh and bone more frail;
And I stepped beneath Time’s finger, once again a tribal singer,
And a minor poet certified by Traill!

Still they skirmish to and fro, men my messmates on the snow
When we headed off the aurochs turn for turn;
When the rich Allobrogenses never kept amanuenses,
And our only plots were piled in lakes at Berne.

Still a cultured Christian age sees us scuffle, squeak, and rage,
Still we pinch and slap and jabber, scratch and dirk;
Still we let our business slide-as we dropped the half-dressed hide-
To show a fellow-savage how to work.

Still the world is wondrous large,-seven seas from marge to marge-
And it holds a vast of various kinds of man;
And the wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Khatmandhu
And the crimes of Clapham chaste in Martaban.

Here’s my wisdom for your use, as I learned it when the moose
And the reindeer roamed where Paris roars to-night:-
“There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,
“And-every-single-one-of-them-is-right!”

Posted by - Wes  June 12th, 2010 under Off Target.
Comments: none

This is the primary space to space weapon of the Cardoman Fleet and in fact all of the space based navies in the FutureVerse.

If the Old Dog grabs the image first it could be a part of the New Texas military as well.

The version seen above is under the stubby wing of a Cardoman Shuttle Patrol Craft modified for system defense use. On a larger vessel they are fired from a standard launch tube. As configured it will take a hit in performance, but there is just no room on an SP for a launch tube and all the hardware that goes with it.

They may be setup for recon or jamming missions and are fully capable of entering a planetary atmosphere.

Posted by - Wes  June 6th, 2010 under Novel Ideas.
Comments: none

It has been a while without a post here but new things are going up at The Old Dog Barks site all the time. Tomorrow I am going to post a new chapter of A Very Blue Moon over at the FutureVerse and I do have a little something for NSF today.

The hook for this occurred to me last night before falling asleep so I figured I better get it down quick like before a dream, I forget it. It follows directly after the end of the post below and that is where I will place it in the short story section of the FutureVerse, but as an edit and not a new story.
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Doc Science Asks the Question

After the time machine guy left the bar I asked the Doc why that it being the case he knew so much about time machines and such, how come he didn’t go off and make himself rich? Like in the stock market or something, maybe betting on sporting events, picking lottery winners? There must be a thousand ways.

“Oh far more ways than that I assure you. But it just won’t work”
“For the Life of Riley then . . . Why not?”

“Because this is science we’re dealing with here and not magic! Not like those stories you write. You see to go back in time you pick up energy, a lot of energy, and have to give it all back when you return. To go forwards in time takes energy, more than we produce on the entire planet if we want to go further than a few seconds up-time. We would get it all back again when we returned to the past, but that doesn’t help if you don’t have enough to get moving in the first place.”

I had kind of skipped the second part of the explanation after the Doc mentioned the stories I write. Always good to find a reader and the Doc was the kind of reader I hoped that I appealed to.

“You’re not the only one that wonders why I write things the way I do. The guy that runs the servers on a couple of the web sites asked me the same thing, What I told him was this: that I am writing Space Opera, not trying to predict the future or even write the thing like I think it will turn out. Space Opera, pure, plain, and simple!”

“Look here Wes, I have some idea of the numbers of readers that follow your stories, and not to put too fine a point on it . . . no let’s just say you might could do better with a little more realism.”

“Easy for you to say!”

“Well yes it was,” and he took another swallow and called for another Blatz. “I can tell you from certainty that someday we are going to have computers smarter than we are, robots to take over all the things that we don’t want to do for our selves. After that why even illegal Mexicans are going to be redundant. Now there is something to write about.”

“No point in writing about robots Doc. Sure in the future we are going to have them and I figure not too much beyond that and we give them the vote and everything that goes with it. That’s the part that depresses me.”

“Okay,” the Doc said, looking like he regretted it or soon would. “Why does that depress you Wes?”

“Isn’t it obvious! They’re robots after all. Machines! With all the rights we have I know what will happen because who can stop them from making as many more robots and as fast as they want. And what happens next? Why they vote in the welfare state for the rest of the robots and then where does that leave us who are merely human?

“Really Wes, you worry too much. Any robot smart enough to vote will be smart enough not to fleece the geese that lay the golden eggs.”

“They’ll be smart alright, smart enough to know just how far to go. It’s gonna’ be just like Roman times, Bread and Circuits, and people getting the crumbs! Are you really going to want to welcome your Robot Overlords?”

Posted by - Wes  June 4th, 2010 under Novel Ideas.
Comments: 2