Today has been consumed by accounting.

Also the post office. Friendly advice: Don't go to the post office around April 15th if you don't have to.

Everything is still on track for the May 14th date. I'll try and get together a rough and tentative time table for the rest of the project in the next week or two.

*DRUMROLL*

*ahem*


We have a ship date--the day on which the printer will have the books ready--of May 14th--the day before my birthday, oddly. I will check with Apogee and see what sort of average turnaround time we're looking at from there to get the books into people's hands.

Irony tastes strangely like Velveeta

So I had to go out of town for part of last week and wound up without internet access come Friday. I believe this is at least a little ironic. But I'll steel myself against such ferrous and base assaults on my precious nobility and boron 'til the bitter end.

We've been shifted to a new contact point at Transcontinental--which, I must admit, was not a foreseen event, but we seem to have gotten through the transition hurdles and they have all of our files and corrected files, genotypes, phenotypes, hair and blood samples, and I'm expecting to hear back in the next day as to what the ship date will be on the first set of books. I will post that information here as well as emailing it to everybody in a test of the mailing list.

I was going to make an April Fool's post telling you we'd found the Nehemiah Scudder stories, but I realized I'd be mailbomb angry after having something like that pulled. So consider yourselves almost fooled.

I'm going to move substantive posts to Fridays 'til I miss another day. EIther way, I'm not expecting terribly event-heavy posts most weeks for a while.

Either my immune system has decided we're no longer friends or Houston has become a swirling cesspool of allergens. Both are possible and, potentially, self-reinforcing. Especially in the adipose-connected, PCB-rich, ozonated swamp that I love to call Houston.

So far as items directly related to the Virginia Edition:
There was a problem--now resolved--with the resolution and detail of the icons. It's no longer an issue, but that ended up pushing the final date back by about two weeks.
Blue lines have been reviewed and returned.

As I promised a week or so ago, here is the status report on the Heinlein Archives as prepared by Deb Rule:

We're pushing forward very hard toward completion with the online
Archives currently 90.4% complete and online.

There are 182,091 pages of documents and photos online. 19,228 pages
remain to be added, of which 5789 are photographs. The remaining page
total may vary as Geo just discovered a duplicated file of over 2000
pages. He's working to reconcile those two files now. You can see Recent
Additions at:
http://www.heinleinarchives.net/upload/index.php?act=viewDoc&docId=8

The online Heinlein Archives has 151 registered users from at least 10
different countries. While the majority are from the US, we have 8 users
from Canada, 3 from France, 2 from Japan, plus others from Italy,
Brazil, Ireland, the Netherlands, the UK, and Bosina & Herzegovinia.
These are registered users--the site stats show visitors from numerous
other countries around the world.

We also have several users at the US Naval Academy from Herb Gilliland's
class.

The most popular item to order is Heinlein's First Scrapbook and Photo
Album, with Opus 52: A Spaceship Navy second. Destination Moon files,
and Blassingame Correspondence are also popular. There are a number of
academics regularly and thoroughly using the Archives (as paying
customers).

Most frequent searches are done on Stranger in a Strange Land, Moon is a
Harsh Mistress, Starship Troopers, To Sail Beyond the Sunset.

Since the Archives launched there have been 103,000 visits with almost 2
million individual page hits. February had 8857 visits. January had
12923 visits.

In the last month we have updated/upgraded the DORA document processing
interface in several regards--it now supports multiple source document
directories to better balance disk space distribution in a large
collection, plus a watermarking failure of a single page will no longer
halt the entire process; it now 'fails gracefully', substituting the
single (very rare) troublesome image yet completing the order. We're
also exploring a shopping cart upgrade that would include features such
as gift certificates and coupons.

It isn't really within the scope of this blog, but, nonetheless, I'd like to wish safe passage to Arthur C. Clarke. The world is poorer for his absence.

Grade 19! The 19th highest grade there is!

Transcontinental is shipping me fabric swatches so I can decide what color the ribbon/bookmark should be. I feel strangely like I'm married. In addition, the printer proofs are, for lack of a better word and love of alliteration, being printed and shipped to us so we can review and sign off on them to avoid any end-game errors.

As near as I can tell, the website is fully functional and when people order, they should be receiving automatic notification of success. I've also got recurring payments set up so I can just go in and turn them on for everybody who needs them.

That's all I've got at the moment that's really related to the production of the books. In a couple of days, I plan on posting the report Deb Rule sent us about the Heinlein Archives.