Editorial

William Alan Ritch

Welcome to another incredibly late issue of Prometheus. Once again its lateness is entirely my fault. No one else is to blame. Just me. Victoria Varga has called me on the phone a million times to get this damn thing out and each passing day, another problem emerged.

Now I know that you do not want to hear any lame excuses so I will keep this short. The main thing that I did wrong was to buy a house. This was my first house, and I did not correctly estimate the enormous amount of time that it takes to select, process, close, and move into the house. Actually I did correctly estimate the time that it takes to move all my stuff (since I have thousands of books), but the rest of the time just disappeared like crazy. I never would have realized…

Then there is my job. In the current economic situation, even computer geeks, such as myself, have seen jobs dry up. I have personally ridden two companies into bankruptcy, and I fear that the third is soon to come. I have been working exceptionally hard to get products out so that the company I work for can sell them, be profitable, and pay me. Unfortunately, once the products are out, no one seems to be buying. The recession has everyone holding on to their money real tight.

Complaining about the economy to a bunch of libertarians is definitely preaching to the choir, so I will move on to the next disaster: after I moved I discovered that I had killed another hard disk drive. I have this power over hard disk drives that is most magickal. I have killed nearly 10 hard disk drives on PCs and Macintoshes over the past 12 years. Quite a record! I followed all the rules about moving my PC: I parked the disk drive, moved the computer myself, and set the computer back up on a nice level surface. Nonetheless, it died. So I had to buy a new disk drive.

Well, I cannot say enough about having back-ups of your hard disk drive. I thought I did, but with the move, some of my floppy disks went walk-about and made the recovery difficult. Now I am prepared. I have a large cartridge tape drive for my computer, and I can backup all the files on one or two tapes. I hope that I do not have to go through this again, but I bet that I do.

Congratulations to Prometheus Award winner Michael Flynn and Hall of Fame winner F. Paul Wilson. You can read of the giving of the awards at ChiCon V in Robert Shea's article, "Hasta la Vista, ChiCon", later in this issue.

Finally, my sincerest personal apologies to J. Neil Schulman. I had a copy of an anti-gun-control article that he sent me via Genie, but unfortunately, it disappeared with my hard disk crash. Since the issue is very long anyway, I decided that I could reschedule it for a later issue. Thanks, and I'm sorry Neil.