Mokka mit Schlag

This year for the first time I’m making a real effort to read all the Hugo nominees. First up: the novels.
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Third Flatiron has published my short story, The Right Books in their summer anthology Master Minds. You can read it on Kindle, DRM-free Pub, or just plain paper.

After 20-some-odd nonfiction books, and probably hundreds of articles, this is my first published work of fiction so I’m pretty psyched about it. More to come!

Monday’s final How I Met Your Mother episode is going to go down in the history books as the best wrapup to a series ever. It shows just what can be accomplished when the show runners really know where they’re going and plan it out in advance. It’s particularly impressive coming off of the worst season of the show ever.
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I’m looking for a simple HTML web host that is suitable for non-technical users. Here are my absolute requirements:

1. Must support custom domains (no www.host.com/~username)
2. Must have a built-in editor that is sufficiently WYSIWYG for someone with zero HTML skills to use. (Google Sites would meet this requirement, for example.)
3. Must allow me to import an existing site of static HTML pages with all links intact. (Google sites fails this requirement.)
4. Must not add any sort of header, footer, JavaScript, sidebar, or other junk to the pages. (Google sites also fails this requirement.)
5. No lockin. All pages must be served in and easily exportable as plain vanilla HTML.

I don’t need databases, JavaScript, or a lot of other advanced features. #1 is commonly met, but everything I’ve looked at so far fails either #2, #3, or #4.

Is there such a product on the market?
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An idiosyncratic list of the most intriguing, most mind altering, and just plain fun books/movies/games/etc. I read/watched/played in (not necessarily published in) 2013:
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Yesterday morning I had to hard reboot my Mac Pro when it wouldn’t unlock from the screensaver. When it came back up there were a few question marks in the task bar, some surprising warnings about full disk space from an extension I thought I’d turned off years ago, and unexpected software update messages. I eventually realized that my 480GB OWC Excelsior SSD had died, or at least was not being recognized. This is my primary boot drive, but instead my Mac had booted off another system disk with an older group of apps and Mac OS X 10.6.

Not a disaster; my data is backed up and my home directory never lived on this drive in the first place. I sent a message to OWC support (27+ hours and still no response, by the way) and then fired up Disk Utility. Disk Utility could not see the missing drive.

Next I launched TechTool Pro. Completely worthless. It found a few corrupt files on other drives but had no idea that the SSD drive even existed. And then it occurred to me that this is a common pattern. Although I have about one personal hard drive failure a year, I have never been able to use TechTool, DiskWarrior, Norton (back in the day) or any other such repair utility to fix anything ever.
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