So I recently had my first short story published. It was carried by Ireland’s only print science fiction magazine ‘Albedo One‘, and you can and should pick up the magazine at Dublin’s Forbidden Planet (or grab a subscription online). The magazine (despite being designed like the popeye of a dogs arsehole), actually carries some stunningly good SF; emphasising quality over trendy ‘new weird’, or ‘post singularity’ stories. The whole publishing thing is weird… I wrote this story several years back, had it accepted for publication about two years ago and …

Image: lake superior by pierrestephanie, available under Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic.

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Lake Superior
I was fifteen the year Tom died. But this story isn’t about him. I was fifteen and greyhound lean. I drove an Oldsmobile Rocket 88 Convertible. But this story is not about that beat red, soft-top wonder carriage. It isn’t about the girls Tom and I would ferry from bars in Aurora, down to Tettgouche Camp, to make on the beech by the edge of …

I attended the Phoenix Convention last weekend. The con is a literary Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy gathering, which this year included some fascinating panels on micropublishing and ebooks, both easily worth the price of admission alone. I will hopefully do a more detailed post on the con as a whole in the near future, but for now, here are a couple of business ideas that struck me during the panels.

A Federated Media For Podcasting
John Battelle’s Federated Media is a medium sized company which aggregates the eyeballs of several …

Over the past year, I’ve contributed a handful of readings to the wonderful Starship Sofa science fiction podcast. Ciaran O’Carroll and Tony C. Smith began the show in 2006, as an in depth discussion of the life and works of a variety of New Wave and Golden Age Science Fiction authors. Ciaran left the show last year, but far from this being the harbinger of podfade, it spurred Tony on to new heights of fevered podcasting activity. The Sofa began to acquire the audio rights to a host of science …

Synopsis:
I detail my experiences with a WordPress hack across multiple shared hosting sites, the steps taken to recover WordPress and secure against future attacks.
Introduction:
On the December 15th I discovered a number of my WordPress installations had been compromised. Rather than a concerted attack, this was likely the result of widely available scripting tools that allow ‘crackers’ to exploit known vulnerabilities in out of date WordPress installs. Due to the large number of WordPress installs on my server, and a reluctance to run bleeding edge software, I’d been a little …