C James

Hi Jamie! Welcome to the forum, and thanks!! Chapter 37 was a bit on the tense side, true. And Eric, well, he could have been acting out of self-interest, or not. I left that a bit vauge... I plan a short sequel, so we'll see what became of Eric. Mushroom soup mix is one of my favorites in hambugers, though I add some tobasco sauce as well. Bondwriter!! Clifhhangers? Me? But I never use Clifhangers, you know that!

We'll see a great deal more in the next chapter. I can't say much without giving spoilers, though I will say that we'll be finding out what is going on soon. But what? Me, cruel? The phone call is a very big clue. That much i can confirm. I just can't say what it is a clue to. You're right, I am thinking of renaming the next chapter to "The Show Must Go On" General Bradson does have a knack for unconventional thinking. Much will be answered in the next chapter. Godzilla on Steroids does suit Helen at times, I think.

Thanks! As for the tease... Wait until the next chapter. Felecia... She's a fiery one, isn't she? Question of the day: what's her motive for acting as she is? Good catch BTW! We;ll find out much more about Jansen and Keith (and who Craig is) in the next few chapters. Cliff? What cliff? All we know is that the girl with the flyer on the counter is George Tankardsly's doughter. As for what will happen with George, I can't say as that would be a spoiler, but I can say that we find out in the next chapter. Good catch on that phone call. It's a clue, that much I can confirm. As for what is really going on, all I can say is I've been dropping clues in the chapters, and no one in the forum has even come close to guessing what's really going on. The clues are in the chapters, but so far, no one has caught on. CJ

Thanks Mike! And that's one sneaky general, I think.

I'm surprised you didn't claim it was EMP that fried the server! But come now... Surely you know that it can only be LiS 26, the Mother of All Cliffhangers! It was just too much for the poor server to take! Serveres are supposed to be in nice, clean, safe, air-conditioned rooms. Not teetering on the edge of a crumbling precipice, on the very edge of a gaping, dizzying abyss!

Speaking of distinguishing features... I felt very much at home in Ketchekan, Alaska. Then, I saw why... and snapped a few pictures. It seems I wasn't the only shades-wearing critter in town.

Shadowyness!! That server crash was hardware, not software, and it was well after my site goof. I do, however, know thew real reason that the server hardware failed... That server, after all, hosts LiS 26, and the poor server, teetering on the edge of the malevolent precipice, finally lost its grip and toppled into the looming abyss.

Thank you for not mentioning that, Your Cliffhangeryness. What happened was, I changed filenames, and in so doing bungled up all the links to chapters (from GA and elsewhere on the 'net) on my site. Big mess! Oops! This time, I'll be adding redirects to the chapter names that will be changing (FTL's chapters). FTL was posted to my site all at once, so I was lazy and created those pages as html. They are changing to .php so I can do the dynamic menus. (we'll have nav sidebars, like on my main page, on all the pages of my site). By using PHP, if I want to add something to a menu, I only need to update one file, not every page on my site (which has several hundred pages now). I'll post a test page soon, so y'all can see what I'm up to and offer feedback.

Thank you, oh Amphibious One!! And, hrmmm, I like that "The Show must go on".

Ahhem! Shadowyness.. that would be, stated more correctly, "Breaks the php yet again." Please do try and get that right. What his Shadowyness is referring to is php includes. I use dynamic php includes on my site, to drive things like the chapters menu. That way, the chapters menu is one file, and I don't have to update all prior chapter pages merely to add a chapter. I've also got a site redesign under way, which should be rolling out soon.

I try to have the chapter posted by 1pm Tuesdays, and I can say that this chapter will be posted at least 15 minutes early. (yes that means within the next ten minutes.. just doing a final check of the HTML now...) CJ

Would I do such a thing as that?

Hrmmm, Shadowyness is still claiming Benji and I are one and the same... How Evil of him! Slander, i say, Slander!!! Poor Benji!

I'm afraid I'm useless when it comes to Unix or Linux. I'll look into cygwin though! Hey, MikeL, looks to me like the Echidna wins the geekyness contest. This begs the question; how do you keep mud out of your keyboard? Hey, thanks Colin! I'll look around and see what I can find. Hi Steve, and Welcome!!!! I love Google Earth. One thing I use it for is finding hotels in places I'm heading for; it's great, and the best I've found for finding places to stay that aren't in cities. (most travel search engines search by city; not good if you want somewhere in a remote location). I alsl love the "fly route" feature, and a bunch of other things it does. CJ I should have specified in the text that that was in Colorado the first time I mentioned it. I've been there and love it, so it was easy to write about (LAst Dollar Road, featured in the story, is quite real, and one heck of a fun dirt-road backcountry drive through the mountains) CJ

Umm, oops! Wrong title! I decided to go with "Surfer Strip Show" instead.

Ack! I've been called a geek, by a frog! Bad froggy, bad!~ First you won't amphibiously certify my chapters cliffhanger-free, and now this! Fear not, one of these years, i will join the 21 st century! Although... I will probably always use DOS to one degree or another. For example, I do digital photography, and often I need to rename files by the hundreds. With the command line, it is supremely easy to, say, add a letter to their filename, or move all files of a particular extension to another directory. I also use a batch file to change my desktop image every time I boot. Batch files are also great for automatic maintenance, such as cleaning out the pesky temp files directories on my HDs. Here's a question for the more up-to-date; if you have, say, a thousand files in a directory, and want to add the letter "m" to the filename, or shorten the filename, etc, how do you do it without the DOS prompt? Or, say you want to make a text-based list of every file in a directory? (with dos, just do a dir and redirect the output to a text file). Hrmm, actually, one thing I do decry is the dumbing-down of software. As an example, the old Norton Utilities for DOS had vastly more capabilities than any recent version. Just one example: if you want to change the creation date on a file, just try that with any new utility on the market! LoL! (Yes, I still have the old Norton utilities, and use them on occasion, from DOS.) CJ

A disaster? In one of my stories? Nah, Google Earth would be too slow; many of it's internal maps are several years old. Meeko! Why do you suspect me so? Good news; thanks to Bondwriter's post, we now have another option: google maps! Bondwriter, you've solved the problem! Google Maps does indeed bring up the area I need, and all I'd have to do would be post the coordinates, in a format for pasting into the google maps search bar, and viola! All the reader has to do is make sure satalite imagery is on, and they are taken right there. I'ts almost as good as Google Earth for this. So, I'll post the google earth KMZ file, and also google maps coordinates and instructions. I'll definitely describe the site in the story, and I think that might be enough, but I do think it's interesting to be able to look at it. It also gets me past the "far-fetched" problem I might have; this place is a little hard to believe, so the fact that it's quite real might help. (BTW, it's not on any islands, so those who think it's la Palma, sorry. ) As for the crown thing... I think it's time to return it to its rightful owner, Shadowgod. It's been.. interesting, but this crown and throne make me dizzy, due to teetering on the edge of the soaring malevolent precipices. That's Shadowgod's realm and lair, not mine. He's in his element there, while I'm out of my depth. Hrmmm.. Well, your Frogishness, I could install XP, and it's tempting (due to having the disk) but, I have a highly customized (hacked) OS with Win2k, and I shudder at having to do all those again. Also, I've heard that XP does not work with 4dos (a DOS extender, which I use, and is many years old). A great many of my batch files are BTM's (Batch to Memory) and I'd have to do a great deal of re-writing to fix them. (yes, I still use batch files, quite often). Also, I can't seem to figure out how to get an equivalent to autoexec.bat to run on XP: I need to run (and then close) quite a few batch files on startup. Currently, I do this by placing the batch files in the startup folder, something my laptop version of XP does not like. Also, I'm on a homebuilt system; when I upgraded to 2k, I had to do a clean install and that entailed weeks of work re-installing stuff. (2k crashed and burned when I tried to do an upgrade install). Of course, it was sort of overdue; although the hardware had changed many times, the original OS had started as DOS 5 with Windows 3.1, then upgraded to Dos 5.5, 6, then Windows 95, then 98. I do find 2k very stable, and it's overhead usage is low, so I like it. So, this goat is a devout chicken when it comes to changing OS's... .

If you get it, beware.. it's highly addictive. Greetings, Your Amphibiousness! If only us goats were... I just wasted a great deal of time, getting a HP combo scanner/printer at the Black Friday sales, and now, I wasted even more time trying to install the thing. Well, turns out that contrary to what it says on the box AND on their website, they are liars; it does not work with Windows 2000. Tech support confirms; their claim that it works with 2000 is that the printer will, but the scanner won't. I don't call that compatible. So, back it goes. ARGH. I do have XP on disk, but I don't like it and won't touch Vista if they paid me. My system could run XP: 3.7 ghz CPU and 4 gigs ram, 8 phyisical hard drives, etc. I just don't want to (I have XP on my laptop; 2000 is more stable with lower system overhead). No fair using eyes in the sky to find this poor, shy, innocent goat! Hrmmm, I think your map might be better than the one I attempted to make, LoL! BTW... For google-earthing, it might also be fun to have a peek at the resort Eric is at. I based it on a real one... in the right location, too. I'll post the location soon, but not just yet... the location holds a situation (nothing to do with the volcano) the kmz file in the next chapter thread. There's enough info in the chapters already posted to find it, but the location holds a nasty surprise (nothing to do with the volcano) that would be a bit of a spoiler, so that's why I'm not posting it now. (the clues to the problem are in the chapter where he picks the resort for the party). CJ

Yes, another poll, but this one quite serious. For something coming up in Changing Lanes, I'd have fery much liked to provide a satalite photograph of the specific place. Unfortunatly, I cannot find one, other than in google earth. I also can't just do a screencap; it's copyrighted. (I did check with a lawyer). So, in order to see the place in question, I was thinking of providing the coordinates (they will be in the story) and also an embedded .kmz file at the end of the chapter, which will take you directly to the site. So, I need to know how many of you can access google earth. The site will be described in the story, so the google earth image isn't absolutely nesesarry, but it would be of great help IMHO. My other option is to draw a map. I stink at this, but I'm trying. Any thoughts? Thanks!! CJ Edit to add: Lower down the thread, Bondwriter came up with a solution! Google Maps is almost as good for what I need and does not require software installation, so I'll be posting links for both that and a kmz file for google earth.

But, Talonrider... I wasn't the one who created the collapse problem in La Palma... Mother nature did that. However, it may not be as bad as it seems. The report I linked to at the end of the chapter is controversial. There are several extrapolations in the data that have no basis in fact. For one thing, they refer to the water tunnels as a source for geologic evidence. OOPS! Big problem; the water tunnels are not in Cumbre Vieja, but on the extinct volcanoes to the north. They also postulate a faultline of 25 miles; there's only hard evidence for nine miles. My personal take on this... it is more likely that a collapse is likly, but on a smaller scale than they postulate, and more in tune with the many prior edifice colapses (massive landslides) that have occured there in the past. The likely east-coast tsunami would therefor be no worse than the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Of course, looking at the size of some of the prior collapses in the Canary islands, the article I linked to might not be that far off. BTW, Hawaii has edifice collapses too. The island of Molokai gets it's shape and extreeme geography from edifice colapses. As a result of these colapses, there are coral fragments at over a thousand feet of altitude in several locations in Hawaii. That could only be the result of a thousand-foot tsunami. The most likly Hawaiian location for a new collapse is the southern end of the big island; there's a big fissure system there, and the south side has slipped. Given a major earthquake, it could go. And don't blame me for the nuke in Australia.. Dimitri and The Scar did that. The Scar tends to be over-confident at times, doesn't he? In this case, he has no means to access the data, so asking the General is his logical alternative. It might also serve as a good means to gauge the General's intentions. You hit on a very good point. I can't say quite why, but The Scar is indeed interested in how the General got to the island. Part of it is that he's worried, at least a little, that the General might not be on the level. This served as independent confirmation that the General arrived as he said he did. There might also be other aspects.. I can't answer regarding how The Scar knows the status of the General's son, sorry, except to say it's covered in a coming chapter, and is rather important. Ahh, yes, Eric on the motorcycle... Lest we forget, HOW did Eric come to be astride a motorcycle in the first place? That was Shadowgod's doing! (he influenced Eric, by rading hell-for-leather in front of him.. The Shady-1 license plate, remeber?) And now, we have Eric, who is getting reckless on the bike. That garbage truck.. hmm, yes, it IS suspicious, is it not? Where did it come from? Why, "from shadow unto sunlight it came". Yes, from shadow. And breathing a devil's breath, too! The thirty-five, then forty five, miles per hour were a hat tip to the immortal Mother of All Cliffhangers, Living in Surreality 26! And please bear in mind... If I'd have been inclined to use cliffhangers, Eric's ride would have occrued at the end of a chapter, cutting right at the point where he's about to hit. But, I didn't do it... I never use cliffhangers, and this is proof that I take pains to avoid them! Well, um, I live at 7000 feet. I do like to climb. But cliffs? No, cannot be! A goat would never have anything to do with a cliff! As for Weapons of Mass Destruction... You missed the most dangerous one: Eric, on tequila. BTW, the title of chapter i6 is "Spreading the News".

Happy Birthday, Tim! Have a FANTASTIC day!!

Helen does love zapping Eric. It's her hobby. Cliffhanger? But, Your Frogishness, one measly little cranky mountain does not a cliffhanger make! By that logic, every story set on the big island of Hawaii would be a cliffhanger, as Kiluea has been erupting continuously for over 20 years. Yep, the title is based on the old saying: "A picture is worth a thousand words". In this case, it told The Scar where Eric is, too. Howdy, goat-buddy! Umm, goats are comfortable on cliffs? but, umm, I keep telling everyine that a goat would never have anything to do with a cliff... So shhhh, we mustn't spread goat secrets! As for the volcano... it may be perfectly benign. After all, the one in Hawaii is, except for some slow moving lave flows. I don;t think Kiluea has has an explosive eruption in almost 200 years. Good point on the warning! You're quite right, that makes it not a cliffhanger, no matter what happens. CJ

I'd never do that! That would be evil!! I'm far to nice. However, I will mention this... Had I been inclined to use cliffhangers, I could have moved that scene with Eric to a chapter end, and cut it, just before he regains control. But, of course, I don't use cliffhangers, so i didn't.

How did that happen? Yes... Thank you Krista! But, it's to be expected... the Devil is known for corrupting people, no? Thank you, goat-buddy!

Just a quick update. I plan to post Ch 15, "Worth a Thousand Words", at approximately noon, Arizona time, on Tuesday. CJ