micro-town?

The offer to buy the “u-town.com” domain seems to be off the table, but an interesting piece of information came out of it. I mentioned the offer to a friend, and he said, “I wonder if he sees this as ‘micro-town,’ though I doubt it.”

This intrigued me, so I asked, “‘U-town’ conveys ‘micro-town’? In what way? (This would be another lucky accident, of course, like the way it suggests ‘Utopia.’)”

He responded, “There is a convention among computer software engineers – I’m not sure how widespread; I’ve seen it here and there – for using the lower-case letter ‘u’ to represent ‘micro.’ The idea is that it’s really the Greek letter (lower-case) mu, which looks sort of like a ‘u’ with a long tail on the left side, so ‘u’ is the closest Roman character.”

So, a little bit of luck, as comes along occasionally.

The end of the newest chapter is up, but something weird seems to be going on at the website, probably with the PHP, so that the links between the sections aren’t working. It’s not just the current chapter (where I might have messed up the coding), I checked a few of the earlier chapters and they don’t work either.

I’m sure whatever it is will be fixed (perhaps even by the time you read this), but until then, this link will work: http://text.u-town.com/word/different/different.php#newest. And remember, if that ever happens, you can go to the “The New Novel” link up there, and in the second paragraph after the bullets, there are links to all the chapters (each in a single file) which should work. I’m thinking that when i rewrite I will probably just present each chapter complete in one file, as with the earlier novels.

Quite a bit of the next chapter is done, I’ll be posting some of that very soon. According to the current plan, it will be called, “(At this Moment of) the World.” I had another idea for the chapter title, but I can’t tell you what that was, since I realized that, sitting there in the list of chapter titles, it would give away the end of the story.

Good thing I thought of that in time.

Later: Contacted the webhosting company (Verve Hosting) and, as usual, they suggested the right solution. The site had been moved to a server with register_globals turned off, so I had to add “php_flag register_globals on” to my .htaccess file.

In case you were wondering. Anyway, the new parts can be found here. The beginning of the chapter is located here.

Now if I could figure out why my dialup connection is always funky (and not “funky” in a good way). Good thing I kept my old one as a backup.