Deanna Hoak

I think all of us have talents that others might not know about or even suspect but in which we nonetheless take a great deal of pride. I’m going to tell you about one of mine, and I’d love to hear about yours. I imagine this is something people would prefer to post in their [...]

“But science fiction eventually becomes true, doesn’t it?” Rhetorical question by Dr. Steven Wolf of Brooke Army Medical Center, in this story on attempting to regrow human limbs. Would love to hear this group’s thoughts. :-)

I hope you all had a lovely weekend! My nephew Zach, whom a few of you have met, is headed off to college next semester, and I’m thinking of getting him an EEE PC since I’ve seen so many of you rave about it. It seems it would be handy for note-taking and such in [...]

CNN ran a story today on a Boston University professor who composes science songs, and they showed a short clip of him singing one about a black hole. I of course had to search out the archive of all his songs. They’re fun and made me laugh a lot. :-) “Bad Data” particularly cracked me [...]

I’ll be at OASIS 21 in Orlando this Saturday, 5/24, along with the wonderful John Scalzi. Here are my panels: 2:00 PM Copyright or Copywrong – How will the proposed new copyright laws affect writers and artists in the future? Conrad(m), Hoak, Scalzi, Bill Sutton 3:00 PM So You Want to be a Writer – [...]

Evan’s school photo came this year with a note attached saying that the school was sure I’d want the photo retaken, because it hadn’t come out well. Here it is: So…yeah, the photographer didn’t do the best job cropping; and yeah, Evan is squinting in the sun. But all I can think of when I [...]

I believe my website is all clean now. Over a hundred invisible links had been hacked into my header and footer, and I didn’t realize it till I got a note from Technorati telling me they’d dropped my site because of the issue. :P Google had apparently dropped me too. If you’re a WordPress user, [...]

So I have WordPress updated, but in my nice space theme that I love so much, there are tons of hidden spam links still. (I see them in Firefox if I go to Page Info and Links.) I have had no luck whatsoever searching out a way to get rid of them. Anyone have any [...]

I was reminded of the movie I Am Legend today, which I’d seen a while back and mostly enjoyed despite what I considered a pretty big plot issue. (Does anyone know if they have the equivalent of copyeditors for movies? They really should.) It seemed to me that if rats can get the disease (and [...]

My husband made a nice breakfast this morning, and the kids both gave me presents they’d made. Part of Blaine’s present was this lovely poem (corrected only for spelling, though the restaurant mentioned is actually Courtyard on Grove–yummy place. :-)): MOM by Blaine Hoak (age 9) My mom and I, Together we laugh and we [...]