Well, that's one excuse for not posting much recently

One of those strange things that people often do on sabbatical is write books. I've never written a book before because, to be honest, I'm excruciatingly slow at both writing and editing. And, in fairness, I still haven't "written" a book, since most of this text originated with the other two authors, and we'd still be gently contemplating phrasing in Chapter 2 if I'd been in charge :-).

That said, it's still taken up a crapload of energy and time and distracted me from many other projects, including photography and Flickr.

But now it is nearly done, and we hope to finalize it in the next 1.5 weeks. (Anyone want to proofread a section?) Our plan is to make the PDF version of the book freely available on-line, and sell printed copies at cost via lulu.com.

This is a draft of the cover, and the final cover could indeed vary from this, although hopefully only in small ways. (We're getting a proof print shortly, at which point we learn whether lulu can actually pull off these electric colors.) Consider this a valuable collector's item :-). The super cool cover drawing and the original design are due to Tyler Hutchison, and then I fiddled and moved stuff around to yield this "masterpiece" of technical book cover design.

I'll let everyone know when the book is available, and you can all rush right out ... and ... uh ... celebrate ...

Or something.