Book Review: Meet Me at Half Court, by Julie Spencer

Julie Spencer is an author of sweet romance ranging from teenage to adult. I think she writes other things as well, but that seems to be her focus right now. She likes to post some of her works in progress in her blogs as she writes, so that fans and other interested parties can get hooked read them.

I've been reading along and commenting on some of those, and she asked if I'd put up a review of Meet Me at Half Court.

The premise is simple. A tomboy high school girl with a genius for basketball and an eye for a college scholarship finds herself choosing between her old, good looking next-door-neighbor boyfriend from elementary school days with a bit of history, whose interests lie in something other than basketball, and an equally good looking new transfer student basketball player with an attitude and something of an excuse for it, and something in his garage that he probably doesn't want all the kids at school knowing he has. 

Let's see what else I can say without having to give a spoiler alert.

I find myself wishing Julie had been willing to draw the plot out a bit and give the story less of a binary ending. (I have friends who have been in the position of the less-favored boy, you see.)

I suspect it will be more interesting to middle grade girls than other audiences, generally speaking. There are a lot of fun scenes. The sports angle works, although it could have been worked harder if she had been willing to add chapters. There are some gooey romance scenes, but they stay appropriate for an audience not looking for steam.

Rating? Four of five, assuming the middle-grade audience.

I think I can also recommend it to Japanese high school students looking for something relatively safe and relatively simply and modern to build their English reading skills with. And for parents looking for something for their middle grade children to read.

God turneth neither to the Left nor to the Right

Talking with the missionaries about economics. One of them reminded me about the economic power of differences.

It's something we all know. The scriptures even talk about this, if you know where to look.

It is our commonalities that enable economic exchange. Thus the Left. Socialism. Communism, even.

It is our differences that make us profitable to each other. Thus the right. Capitalism. Corporatism. Maybe even Nationalism.

If we don't have enough in common, we have no way for economic exchange to occur.

If we don't have enough differences, we have nothing to exchange.

If we get stuck either direction, the economy falls over and dies.

[JMR202007132051:

It occurs to me that I need to provide the scripture reference for the title of this post. It's a bit of a misquote, but here it is:

Doctrine and Covenants 3: 2

Also, see Joshua 1: 7.

]

wix?

Somebody signed me up for wix.

So I looked them up on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wix.com

Nothing but question marks. But it looks like it has been around a while.

They seem to have unresolved issues with improper use of GPL code (WordPress, who have their own SNS, BTW, which I also use a little).

Looking around their site, it sort of looked interesting. But there is no reasonable way to tell them to go away, and there is no way to contact a live person without giving them more information. They have an email address for me, why do they want more? If they are really legit, there should be some way to say goodbye without having to give them all sorts of private information.

Big no-no.

I will not be using or recommending wix.

In fact, at this point, I am recommending against using them. Negative recommendation.

If you don't know who they are, well enough. Don't bother. That's why I am not linking them here.

If you do, you should point them to this complaint and ask them to contact me. If anyone is at work over there, they should be able to figure out how. If they contact me, I might remove my negative recommendation here. But they will have to do some serious redesign of their services before I would consider using them myself, and, of course, I won't be recommending anything I don't use.

Mind you, this lights-on-no-one-home approach to business is all too common on the Internet, so they have lots of company. Not what I would call good company, but they aren't alone.

Green Teas vs. Black in Japan

I've been translating quite a bit of material for the tea market, in the mix of translation material that has been my means of trying to make a living lately.

In the process, I'm learning some things that reinforce my impressions about the differences between black and green teas.

I found a blog post (https://gjtea.org/the-history-of-japanese-black-tea-wakoucha/) written from the point of view of one who seems to think Japanese tea farmers should make more black teas, which blogpost contains a rather concise history of teas in Japan -- with a focus I really hadn't really seen before. It may explain why teas in Japan tend to be greener than black.

In the short version, teas in the first millennium ("Common Era") and the beginning of the second tended to be green, even in China. That was when tea was brought from China to Japan. Then Japan closed their borders for two centuries while Great Britain tried to take over the world. And Great Britain was fighting China with opium and other dirty tricks.

(Dirty tricks are dirty, even if the goal of opening China up could be viewed as somewhat noble, in case you need to be reminded about the dual consequences of European expansionism.)

So the Japanese tea market focused on, and developed an aesthetic around, green tea.

And Britain kind of helped move forward the trend in the rest of the world of focusing on the more intoxicating, more habit-forming black teas.

Japanese green tea, by the way, is generally prepared and consumed in processes that do not involve temperatures as high as with black tea, which is no small part of the reason that the beneficial chemicals in green tea tend to survive more and the toxic chemicals tend not to be produced as much.

So, I do not really recommend either black or green tea.

But I have been of the opinion that black teas tend to be worse for your health than green.

And now I have a bit more evidence of this concept.

FWIW.

Identify yourself!

Person with mail address pour_np3_liver@provider:
pour_np3_liver@provider というメールアドレスをお持ちの方、

I do not remember your mail address. I need more clues, or I must assume you are someone I don't need to talk with - a spammer or some such.
あなたのメールアドレスを特に覚えていません。ネタがないとあなたが会話の相手にする必要がないと推測するしかないのです。つまり要求なしの（たぶん不正な）行きなり連絡をバラ散らかすような人と思うべきだろうとのこと。

Which means I won't respond if you don't identify yourself.
したがって、どなただと教えていただけないとお返事はいたしません。

BIF-6809 Revived (near fig-Forth interpreter I put together in college)

I ported and modified a fig-Forth interpreter for a couple of my college courses about 30 years ago. It was for the classic 8-bit 6809 CPU, and I was not thinking clearly, so I mothballed it.

Twice.

Anyway, I took time out of my schedule, two and four hours at a time over the last couple of years to resuscitate it. It now seems to be more-or-less as it was before I mothballed it the second time. It functions, you can write and edit code and save it to disk and load it back again. And you can write in assembly language.

Booting and testing BIF-6809 on the XRoar Emulator running Disk Extended Color BASIC

It's a bit primitive. Raw disk, no file system. 

And the call protocol is a bit baroque, using the direct-page mode in a way that will conflict with more general uses. 

I hope I can find the time to rewrite it with a more conventional call protocol.

If you missed the link above, you can find it here: https://ja.osdn.net/projects/bif-6809/. (And here is a page for how to get started, and a page to help figure out what to do next.)

I would be happy to hear from anyone who successfully gets it to run on whatever they are running. (Contact me through the project page, please.)

Real Cocos or emulators, it should be just a matter of getting the disk image file bifsource.dsk in the second drive and tools.dsk in the first, and

LOADM "BIF6809.BIN:1"
EXEC &H1300

and, at the static white cursor, such things as

6 LOAD

followed by

0 QLIST

1 QLIST

etc., more in README.TXT and BIFDOC.TXT.

Note that a "Q" screen is a 256 byte sector, where a regular Forth screen is a 1024 block of 4 sectors sitting on a 1024 byte boundary:

Forth SCREEN	Quick SCReen (decimal)	Quick SCReen (hex)	byte offset (hex)	byte offset (decimal)
0000	0	$0000	$0000	== 0
	1	$0001	$0100	== 256
	2	$0002	$0200	== 512
	3	$0003	$0300	== 768
0001	4	$0004	$0400	== 1024
	5	$0005	$0500	== 1280
	6	$0006	$0600	== 1536
	7	$0007	$0700	== 1792
0002	8	$0008	$0800	== 2048
	9	$0009	$0900	== 2304
	10	$000A	$0A00	== 2560
	11	$000B	$0B00	== 2816
0003	12	$000C	$0C00	== 3072
	13	$000D	$0D00	== 3328
	14	$000E	$0E00	== 3584
	15	$000F	$0F00	== 3840

Redirect: Book Review: Fighting the Promise by F. Allan Roth

Pardon my dust.
The link you are trying to get to is here: https://reiisi.blogspot.com/2018/12/book-review-fighting-promise-by-f-allan-roth.html.