Breaking Radio Silence

As is well known, one of the great dangers of running this sort of web journal is setting the whole damn thing up and then running out of things to say. The Interwebs (aka the World Wide Tubes) are littered with endless sites that promise a new posting by [date years in the past] or report the latest update [which happened durning the dial-up era]. I have one or two of those myself.

Well, I’m here to tell you that there’s a flip side to the problem, one that is familiar to anyone who has ever kept any sort of diary: being too busy to write down all the things you have done.

After the pretty darn huge effort of putting together the files and setting the serial publication for InterstellarNet: Enigma, I spent the last 48 hours or so working with my father, Thomas B. Allen, to put together the ebook edition of his book, The Washington Monument, Sentinel on the Mall. (Available for Kindle at this link). It was a complicated job, but I believe the results are really quite good.

As with all good monuments, The Washington Monument gives a sense of having always been there, of being permanent, timeless, and inevitable. The true story is that getting it built was a saga, a decades-long struggle that involved some huge engineering challenges, some very unsavory politics, and some journeys down very blind alleys indeed. And then, in 2011, an earthquake struck, and brought into question just how permanent the Monument was going to be. It’s a great American story. Go read it.

All best

PS — Plenty more on the way. I’ve just got to make sure I find time to write about it as I do it!