Weekly Reading Queue Update September 26, 2005 – Posted in: Aberrant Normalcy, Sybil's Garage

A brief Sybil’s Garage reading queue update:

We have received about 64 stories so far.
We have accepted 5 stories so far.
We have rejected about 50 stories so far.
We are still looking at several poems & are considering a few stories.

We would like to see more non-fiction essays & more science-fiction.

In other news, over the weekend I tried out Skype for the first time. For those of you who may not know what Skype is, the software allows you to make phone calls across the net for free. Of course, both users must be running Skype, but as an add-on feature, you can call many countries in the world for 1.7 cents Euro, which is about 3 cents American per minute. Not bad.

We used Skype so that my cousin and I could play a game of Yahoo chess and talk freely at the same time. His daughters would come up to the computer and talk to me like I was some amusement park clown (well, I guess I played the part a little. I can’t resist making kids giggle). He also played Deep House music in the background, and to our surprise, we found the sound quality very clear and far superior to a telephone call. And while he did help me avoid a few stupid moves, the chess game was mostly my own, and I beat my cousin for the first time since I can remember — perhaps ever. Thanks Skype.

And more on the recent topic of warming oceans, the debate continues over the influence of global warming on the climate of the planet. To the rescue comes high performace hybrid cars, but their assumptive panacea may not be all its cracked up to be. But as I always like to end bad news with good, Japan has released five captive-bred storks into the wild in an effort to reintroduce their native population.