The joys and miseries of technology

Another day of meetings, this time in a lecture theater with chairs that I don't think were designed to be sat in for a whole day at a time. The high spot of the day came at the end, when someone casually threw the Keyhole software up on the screen to demonstrate the route to the evening's attraction, zooming in from outer space to the US to California to the Bay Area to Palo Alto to the Stanford campus to the building we were in, and out again to the destination a few miles away. The low spot, for one of my colleagues, came when we got back to the motel and his key card wouldn't work, and the guy in the office could neither make it work nor break in to the room. They gave him a key to an unoccupied room to be going on with, but of course all his stuff is in the original one, and we're leaving in the morning. I trust they managed to sort it out while we were away at dinner.

I have obtained emergency backup reading material, to whit Spin State by Chris Moriarty, which Amazon has been recommending for me lately, I think because of my interest in Karen Traviss, Kristine Smith, and Elizabeth Bear. At least I need no longer fear being left bookless on tomorrow's trip.

Yay!

I hadn't been expecting it until late next month, but suddenly C.J. Cherryh's Destroyer, the new Foreigner book, is showing at Amazon as 'Usually ships in 2-3 days', and Barnes and Noble have cover art, though Amazon still doesn't.