Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in scrottie's LiveJournal:

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Monday, June 29th, 2009
6:59 am	Duzer ryanvanduzer.com... Alright, so I get up one morning and notice some TBAG post about meeting this guy who is biking across the country on a three speed bike and they're going to ride out to greet him that morning. Sounds good. Then we basically spent the rest of the day drinking beer. The party grew and grew... there were six of us I think to start. At the end, 20 or 30... there was an intermission after brunch and before the evening, but you get the idea. Seriously though... his ride is sponsored by Fat Tire, and he's doing the ride to raise money for his local bike co-op. This was his first major leg so hopefully we helped him kick it off right =) -scott (Comment on this)
1:01 am	YAPC http://www.flickr.com/photos/85201403@N00/3664390382/in/set-72157620475426891/ Myself, Awwaiid, and Beppu. Beppu is in the green shirt just to my right. Awwaiid is on the far left of the photo in the white shirt. None of us knew we were being photographed. YAPC... my talk went very well. In fact, when my time slot ended, no one left. My 20 minute talk turned into a 30 minute talk plus 10 minutes of questions. The room wasn't occupied and apparently none of the other talks starting in other rooms were that interesting. Boy that felt good. I barely slept before I left, then I barely slept once I was there except for one solid 8 hour night. One night, we were at a local dive pub having "one or two" drinks before bed and Matt Trout and a gaggle of men in kilts walk in. In the photo, he has the long hair and he's right behind me. So, he chats up the waitress. Last call comes and goes and she's pouring us free drinks. The sun comes up... and she's pouring us free drinks. Then she makes us clean the bar and lets us out the side door and gives us all hugs. And all we had to do is listen in graphic detail about her taste in women. That was easy. Seriously, she was super cool, the pub had personality, and nothing else about Pitts left much of an impression at all. Especially not the football stadium where the YAPC dinner and auction was. Boo-ring. Matt Trout can drink. Damn brits. Spent the last three days restarting all of the processes on the computers that always seem to be off when I leave on a trip. I'm not sure if "water my plants" implies "and power down everything I left on" or what. That and replacing the failed flash card I've been using as a harddrive for over a year now. That was an experiment and it wound up working far better than I thought. Boy am I stressed out at how little work I've gotten done this month... and last month was a stop-and-go month too. And I have another trip coming up. I was stoked to do some fun, cool stuff after YAPC but now I'm just anxious. I'm still out of my league on this Flash stuff. I spent today figuring out that the load files/connect over the network security model doesn't work anything like it's documented to. The player blowing up and dumping core is useless for debugging this, not to mention that it's a bit ironic that if you don't do its security model in whatever mis-documetned way you're supposed to, it starts throwing pointers around, the first sign of remote code exploit vulnerabilities. That's like a door man who shoots himself if you get the password wrong. -scott (Comment on this)
Friday, June 19th, 2009
9:09 am	State of the Onion Every year, Larry Wall gives the State of the Onion address, talking about where Perl is at and where it's going, and cracks jokes and waxes poetic in the process. YAPC is now upon us. I've been trying to get organized here, including consolidating todo lists. Code: Work continues to dominate over my own ambitions but this was sadly intentional lately due to other goals, of being able to afford trips and trying to dig myself out of debt. Still, I've knocked out dozens of little projects. It's the large ones that are suffering. For example, technology is ripe for a Perl-in-Perl implementation. Every self respecting language gets implemented in itself eventually and this opens up a whole host of technical possibilities. Learning my way around the Perl 5 core well, as opposed to just dabbling, has been on my list for ages. My best works, including my typesafety implementation for Perl, sprung from this. Learning Flash might help me with a long time goal of doing graphics for the old MUD and trying to breathe new life into it thus. Debt: The dot com boom was not kind to me. I worked for small startups and was paid poorly rather than taking the ludicrous offers of the well founded madhouses. When it imploded, I didn't have a job or savings, having instead been paying on my student loans, buying a motorcycle, and living it up a bit, on the weekends. Not long after the market recovered, it went into recession again. Seldom having had kept a job for more than a few months, I'm extremely cagey about work. And I financed this Programmer Lifestyle with Mastercard. Mastercard and shitjobs. Killing off the Mastercard has been a long term goal. That and back taxes. I've been wanting to get my cost of living down. Travel: YAPC. Seattle to Portland. DEFCON. My mother wants to tour bus around Italy. YAPC is important to my career and hobby. DEFCON is the only way I'm in touch with a pile of old friends. I'd like to spend more time in Minnesota. As I get older, I'm learning to value the old friends more and more. They're not easily replaced. A medium term goal has been to get my rent down so I don't feel like I'm pissing away a bunch of money every night I'm not sleeping in my own bed. Computers: I still have these stupid ambitions of building armies of antique machines, but I keep lusting after hardware such as autostereo 3D LCD displays, which give depth perception without glasses. I got a bunch of old video game consoles and various hardware for them and have been having fun programming them, including and especially the Atari 2600 with the Starpath Supercharger. I don't have the right attitude towards my work thought. Any other consultant-ish person buys high end hardware regularly. I keep reluctantly buying last year's goods and then becoming enraged when it's slow. I guess I don't want to spend a bunch of money on something only to discover that it also doesn't work. So buying a $1000 or so system has been on the list for a long time but I mostly ignore it. In general, technology is a thorn in my side. I spend entirely too much time fighting with software, systems, and stupid crap, like cell phones. Business: I still want to start a cluster colo, where you send in a machine to jion a single image cluster. And there are various business ideas. Tracking down a graphic artist has topped my todo list for years now and I've spent quite a bit out of my own pocket trying to get some of these things to go. I don't want to be rich; I just want to code on my own ideas rather than other people's dumb ideas. I learned to program to code my ideas, not to be a foot soldier for a string of companies. But I need to foot soldier for now. So I need to get out to some of these newmedia douchebag events and whore myself out as a Flash programmer and try to make some bucks. A friend once pointed out that I seem to be adverse to making money. I think they're right... I think I have psychological hangups there. Maybe I'm afraid, deep down in my heart, that I'd enjoy being a management tool, and raking in the dough while riding the labor of others as my soul bleeds away. Entertainment: Stuff like Nearly Naked Theater is always on my todo list, but I have a hell of a time recruiting people to do anything I want to do with me. For the inexpensive stuff at least, I need to just go on my own. If I go regularly, I'll make friends there. Truckspace and PHiX fit that description. I should tag along to more shows with Jeremy even though that one time, he showed up way late after confusing the hell out of me on some elaborate ticket deal he then failed to set up and I had to buy a ticket from a scalper then he wouldn't hang out with me even though everyone abandoned their seat for the mosh pit eventually even including him even though he said he wasn't going to when I suggested both of us just heading there. I do not understand hu-mans. Maybe it's a study in breaking things down into subtasks, but every month, I cross a whole bunch of stuff off my lists but continue to feel like I've gotten nothing done. Or perhaps I'm just never happy. Perl doesn't seem to be getting anywhere either, and no one likes Perl any more except for its old, old friends, so I guess I'm in good company ;) -scott (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 9th, 2009
1:20 pm	Family On the old MUD, which is still up and I still hang on, my brother told me my mother wanted to talk to me. This is how she usually gets in touch with me -- calls him, tells him to have me call her, and he passes the message along on the MUD. He commented that he could her my mother's friend in the background saying, "what, Scott won't give you his number?". So I talk to her, and she wants to do a $3,000 trip to Italy that includes hotels, meals, and tour bus to and from everywhere. I've never been overseas and I'd really like to, but I'm not sure that this is exactly how I want to do it. I talked to her and told her as much but said I'd think about it. She doesn't even want to go if there's no tour bus for her. My mother's friend has my number because I stayed in her house (my mother is in a retirement home now, and her friend is MCS also, so that helps my case a lot). But her friend has a Blackberry and texts. I'm thinking my mother got my number from her friend because when I woke up this morning, my terminal window's entire backscroll was filled with "RING" over and over. Right now, due to compound technical difficulties, my number currently points to a datacard that emulates Hayes modems. Besides, my ringer is usually off. I sleep a strange schedule and concentrate when I work. In my email inbox is a rather incoherent email from her. I don't email her often. I usually call her back, eventually, because her otherwise good reading comprehension goes out the window when there's a computer in front of her. My father is still sticking it out old school style though: He sent me this: Ahh, my niece, Ellie, from the youngest brother, looking like a little pudge monkey. I need to go visit them... -scott (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 26th, 2009
4:08 am	I love condiments I found this fascinating... http://www.good.is/post/picture-show-you-are-what-you-eat/?GT1=48001 ... collection of pictures of the insides of peoples fridges with short bios about their owners. Here's mine: Not a very good photo. On the bottom is reconstituted store mole, gallon of salsa, cabbage tomato soup, pinto bean mush, half a gallon of grapefruit juice (really, too good to drink by myself). Not-yet-baked spinach and black bean enchiladas, and a whole bunch of green chilies from Food City. Yeah, need to incorporate the farmer's market into my schedule (or lack thereof). In other news... made orange lemon marmalade tonight. As in, it's the morning now and I'm still awake, for the moment. And figs are starting to come off the tree! These are oranges off of someone else's tree, along Lafayette. Yeah, kinda like I was threatening. That's the bruise that was left after this road rash faded: I almost never bruise... last time was the sprained ankle. There's some more road rash on my tail bone, where I landed hard, but I'm using the shot without butt crack. Yup, still photo documenting my injuries. -scott (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 19th, 2009
12:48 pm	Weekend Update I've told everyone in Phoenix stories about my "really cool friend" superflashgo. How cool is she? She's jumped into bigger piles of hops than you've even *seen*. I forgot about her flickr photostream until she reminded me and boy howdy... Okay, back to non-stolen photos. Marmalade. Spare wheelset. More peppers. Cantaloupe. Okra (out of the pic). Henhouse. With punching bag. This guy and a buddy of his (hers?) showed up one day, clinging to a wooden slat on a glass panel on a door. The landpeople let them in, feed and watered them, put them in a cage (eventually, at great effort), put them outside, and then the neighbors jumped the fence and stole one of them. Poor Lovebirds have had an interesting life so far. Bizarrely enough, the mate was tracked down. It was traded with the local breeder for a different Lovebird. So as soon as she's done hatched her eggs, she's supposed to come back. There's no shortage of drama in urban Phoenix. My mother made me a fabulous quilt! If anyone wants one of these original creations, she charges not very much at all. More non-fiction. Fountain pens. Just got ink for the Pilot, which doesn't use the disposable ink cartridges. Trying to get a picture of the ant crawling around on the new bottle of ink. -scott (Comment on this)
Saturday, May 9th, 2009
7:41 pm	Nerdy stuff I want to buy I'm a bit of a consumer whore when it comes to a couple of things, electronics being one of them. Electronics amaze me. They're an ownable monument to human ingenuity. They're toys with nearly infinite possibilities. Here's my current drool list. This is an example of stuff I won't be buying this month if I do Seattle-to-Portland. $170 (seen as low as $150) Linux, RISC based palmtop computer with 128 megs of RAM and a gig or two of flash disc. WiFi, host USB. Pocket computer. Handheld Sega Master System/Sega Game Gear with pre-installed games. I'd like something like a Sony PSP to futz with when I want to zone out and I'm stuck somewhere but I'm just as amused by the old games as the new ones so buying a PSP would be silly. Unless I wanted even more devices capable of serving as an MP3 player. On the other hand, I developed a fascination with this Korean ARM chip that's packaged with a streamlined 3D accelerator. Most 3D graphics accelerator hardware you talk to through many layers of indirection. In the old days, you could have a lot more fun getting to know the hardware intimately and finding clever ways to push it. Indirection means inefficiency. It also means you get punished for doing anything clever as it might work in one vendor's implementation but not in another's. So, this thing and one hardware board I was looking at for work have this chip. MIPS/Atheros based system-on-a-chip with WiFi. A whole computer, in the embedded sense, with a smaller footprint than a credit card. This would support some of the hackery I want to do. Problem with this thing is entirely too little built in flash and no option of adding more through USB for lack of USB host. I wanted to do some hackery with the EyeFi but the thing doesn't have enough room for even a tiny Linux install and it's unlikely I'd be able to modify its embedded eCos operating system. They already did some serious cramming to get the thing to fly. Floppy disc shaped and decorated CD-ROM. EyeFi. SD card that happens to include WiFi and enough smarts to automatically upload your photos to EyeFi's servers where they get re-uploaded to which ever photosharing sites you specify along with skyhook style geolocating so the system probably knows where the photo was taken. Ask me how this works if you see me. I love to talk about this stuff. A PC compatible (well, almost... BIOS doesn't do boot like a real PC) computer about the size of a flash thumb drive, with host USB. 32 megs RAM. $50. So, this is probably what I'll wind up using if I get around my little stunt. ThrustPlus for the Atari 2600. People still make 2600 games. Some of them are quite good. Many of them are extremely impressive given the limitations of the machine. This is what I mean when I talk about celebrating the human spirit of ingenuity The CuttleCart III, a programmable cartridge for the Intellivision system. The Intellivision came after the Atari 2600 but before the Sega Master system and had simple two color tile graphics. The NES is another tile graphics based system but one that's far more powerful. This cartridge lets you program games for the Intellivision and upload and run them on a real Intellivision. I happen to have an Intellivision ;) Cell Phone Jammer. -scott (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 6th, 2009
6:49 pm	Yesterday, at the bottom of a pint... But first... The second loaf of beer bread, made with homebrew coffee stout. I've been using public transit a lot, but with fares more than doubling, that's probably going to come close to a stop. Back to the library. Currently reading. Yeah, not exactly a bunch of Hugo award winners... I can't do this when I'm coding. Programming takes all of my concentration and then some that I don't have. But I've been fighting with Flash and moving pixels around lately. Late at night, drinking a Mickeys, fighting with Flash... I've also been eating a lot of these... rice, mole... ... and chili verde. I like the pipian mole too. So, if you're ever in Salt Lake City, UT (of all places), hit the Red Iguana. Best mole ever. Cornish Pasty Company, first stop on the Cinco de Mustache. One Skull Splitter please. And one for him, too. Jeremy (monk) and Sylvester (sly) here. Yup, even the women-folk have mustaches. uber and Jen. Tim and rebeccmeister. Moi. Bikes out of Pasty... ... and into Boulder's on Broad! Monk. What the heck is going on at that table...? Oh. And yeah, this is about the point it started to get ugly. Okay, not that ugly ;) Dude goes by the name "tweak". Forgot the name of this place, but total dive. Awesome joint. Cash only. Keil joins the party. Monk pulls out a bottle of sangria. And then off to Casey Moore's. Every night is an ugly night at Casey Moore's. This pic didn't look any more out of focus than anything else when I took it. Tweak would later produce two 40s of Mickeys from his bag... -scott (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, May 4th, 2009
1:16 am	Recurring dreams... My parakeets I had as kid aren't in fact dead, just badly neglected. Or some are dead, but some are still alive. They don't have any food or water and have been alive like that for years. Now days, I have a different permutation of this dream almost every night. Getting on a large elevator in a luxury building, I find that the elevator itself has stairs going up and down and is quite large, with bathrooms and sometimes a bar on it. There are a whole bunch of people just lingering there wearing ballroom attire. Before the thing gets to my floor, if I can even figure out which floor it is, the party has broken up and all gotten off, and I'm alone and confused. Riding in the backseat of a car with my mother or some aunt driving, or sometimes with me driving, we drive up a really steep hill that just keeps getting steeper. Some times its driving into a park area where there's a mountain. Some times its mechanical, such as going up a draw bridge that's not quite up or down. The car struggles and we keep going until eventually the whole car pitches over backwards. I'm either in the back seat of a car and some family memory was driving and fell asleep or else just vanished, or else there never was anyone driving, and we're speeding down the highway. I'm groggy and confused and I can't get to the front seat and if I do, the controls are strange. Or else I'm driving, but the breaks just aren't working well and I constantly have to make radical maneuvers to avoid hitting things, and I can't get the car to stop at all. I'm sleeping somewhere in public, quite often a bush in front of a bank that used to be on a busy corner near the old family house. Or I'm just sleeping in the gutter of the road, and I can't wake up even though the sun is up and there's activity all around me and I know people can see me. And of course there's just the dream where everyone hates me. And of course, there's the never-completed-some-grade-of-school dream and I have to go back. -scott (Comment on this)
Sunday, May 3rd, 2009
1:23 pm	Expenses (Mostly talking to myself here... don't mind me.) I've got two pages in a stack of half used paper next to the computer. One is stuff I think I should buy for whatever reason, and the other is money I've spent. I was keeping a spreadsheet for a while but I like this better, even if I have to add numbers myself. I keep thinking I'm going to get ahead on money then use funds to do a business idea or two. Among other things, I want to start a hosting provider that offers shared hosting a computing cluster as well as (maybe not the same cluster) cluster you can join by mailing a PC to and paying a monthly fee ($50/mo colo plus some expenses for me to admin the thing). Major expenses last month included a replacement external backup HD, new ignition lock for the motorcycle (which has been sitting for two or three months ago), tow for the motorcycle to the dealer, and a big bag full of bicycle miscellanea, mostly for the new Bianchi. Previous check was a small one too as the company spent half a month in decision paralysis. Upcoming expenses: YAPC, the Yet Another Perl Conference. Paid for admission already but need either airfare or bus fare. Seattle-to-Portland, bus/air fare and admission, hopefully. Have a stunt I want to pull that involves hiding a tiny server at a coffee shop and I'm looking at a $50 board that isn't complete. Want to point some kind of security cam that records at the motorcycle since the ignition has been jacked twice now, as lame as that is. I could really use a Mac for work, just for those things that Linux isn't set up well for, such as reading Adobe vector graphics file formats. I waste too much work time fighting with crappy Linux software trying to get it to do things that Mac/Win users can do easily. Need a new motorcycle helmet. I owe the IRS some money and I've been talking to them about this fact. I initiated the dialogue, by the way. I really want to pick up a $600 autostereo 3D LCD display. If you haven't seen one of these in action, it'll blow your mind. Full 3D with depth perception without special glasses. I love programming for 3D stuff like this, and the whole past VR fad. Recurring: Rent. Food. Self employment tax is about 50%. Yeah, we love small business in this country. Yeah, right. Had a long discussion about this with Jeff from Brewer's Connection, who I hadn't visited in years. Minor expenses: Have project computers that needs things. Grabbing a few beers here and there really adds up. Sitting in a coffee shop and dropping $5 on coffee and $5 on pastries really adds up but damn is it nice to get out of the house sometimes. Gas adds up quick even with 50 mpg. Raw energy wise, my legs are vastly more efficient than the motorcycle, but dollar for dollar, I think I consume as much as it does for the same distance. I feed it premium unleaded. I feed myself Sprouts. Well, and food from the dented can store (which has a lot of expired organics!), and cheap Hispanic food from Food City, and cheap Asian food from Ranch 99. Cell phone is about $30/mo, prepaid with NET10. Motorcycle insurance is cheap. Then there are expenses I don't have: no Internet bill, utilities included, no cable TV. Got rid of wireless data service a while back (and miss it). No health insurance. Which means minimally doctors visits are an expense. -scott (Comment on this)
Saturday, May 2nd, 2009
9:07 pm	Today, at the top of South Mountain... Last night, I did First Friday. I hit an art exhibit of an acquaintance I'd like to wake up naked next to then meet up with Jeremey/monk and the Phoenix Phreaks crazy bike (pimped adult sized ghetto cruiser trikes with hydrolics and boomboxes, super long chopper bikes) who pub crawled and art crawled downtown Phoenix a bit, then went to a tall parking ramp and rode up and down it. Then I came home, put together a batch of beer bread with some old homebrew coffee stout in the fridge, slept for three hours while it rose, got up, punched it down, threw it in the oven without letting it rise again, got dressed, grabbed some grapefruit marmalade from the cupboard, meet uber, Jen, and Adam, and rode to the top of South Mountain. No one was in the picnicking mood. Except me, of course. Adam won't touch my food, opting for gas station burritos and the like instead. He won't even eat home made cookies. There is something wrong with this boy. Ryan didn't have any cheese. Despite liberal use of sun lotion, I burned. Again. I really can't ease myself into the sun. My stupid skin has to burn about five times each year before it starts to tan even a little. And at no point can I stop lotioning the heck out of it. I really need to buy the zinc oxide stuff. If I'm actively reflecting the sun back off of my surface, it can't burn me. So I came home and nearly finished eating that whole loaf of bread. I need to get back on the artsiness of the photos again, which has been lacking. Recent work looks like highschool newspaper style reporting with me as the only subject. I need to start bringing the thing out of the house again. So I need to get another keychain camera of some description. My favorite pics, I took with that stupid $10 keychain camera. Top of my fridge. I've had a couple of the same things up for ages, the cardboard packaging from some Shimano Biopace chain rings and a page from a magazine with a photo of this green carbon bike that has titanium lugs and carbon rims. I guess I always thought that bike was an awesome mix of the traditional and modern, with round tubes, lugs (those sleeves on joints between the tubes that are always interesting shapes), square geometry, etc. I'm intrigued by the carbon bike that doesn't look like a marshmallow. There are also about 30 pages of maps to interesting places, just so I remember them, held on with rare earth magnets extracts from harddrives. I love those things. Still crackin' on Super Mario Bros 3, looking for secrets, and having no small degree of success finding them. The secrets are the best part! But man does this game get brutal later on... some of this stuff is just appalling. I can't believe what they want me to do. Sunburn. And seriously fucking gross muscles. Update: my snack from after the Sunday TNCLE ride around Mummy Mountain (is that right? near Camelback?). Butterscotch peanut butter banana =) I've been trying to make an effort at Facebook and MySpace lately to help do the work of keeping up with people. An old friend, Mark Weaver, appeared on Twitter and commented he was on Facebook, and I keep hearing noises about Facebook from people. LiveJournal friends delete their blogs randomly. When I asked about it, one of them commented that the stuff on LJ was old, it was just them whining about life, and they still haven't changed those things. So I guess their LJ blog turned into a sort of albatross. Looking at Facebook, there's a heck of a lot less of that whining LJ is famous for. Ditto for Twitter. But as usual, I've got it backwards. I bitch on Twitter and post happy stuff on LJ. So I went looking for RSS feeds on Facebook so I can try to tie all of this together. I found twenty different pages with twenty different places and elaborate rituals to try for finding a feed, and none of them worked. Finally I found this: http://www.facebook.com/help/question.php?id=183426 Since it's now only 20 minutes old, it'll probably be deleted by the time you see it, but basically Facebook removed all of the RSS feeds that they drug their feet on for so long, made such a big deal about when they finally offered, and moved so many times. I'm not sure whether to redouble my efforts here or to abandon the effort again, for another five years... What would life be like if people with Sprint couldn't call people with AT&T unless you also had an AT&T phone and then you had to remember which phone to use and remember to check all of your various phones? RSS bridges that gap. The only cool thing about Twitter, aside from forcing people to be brief, is that the company actively encourages people to pull out all of the data and mash it up and remix it in interesting ways, which people have done. So you get things like http://twittermap.com and http://twittervision.com. One wonderful thing about LJ is that, with the paid account, you can pull in RSS feeds from other places (such as Twitter) and have them mixed in with your friends timeline. Then even if your friends are using some other RSS enabled site, it looks like they're on LiveJournal. But then again, in the late 90's, I was leading a crusade to try to get MUDs to unite on a similar system so that their fragmentation wouldn't make them easy prey for the new breed of MMOs, and look how well that went... -scott (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, April 23rd, 2009
10:42 pm	Bike to Work Day So, I decided to ride my bike to work today for Bike to Work Day... and video tape it! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDkYlsB7a_s That video would have worked a lot better with these shorts: http://www.valscustomized.com/catalog/item/1749800/6208377.htm I apologize for the utter stupidness of this. And for cross-posting. -scott (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009
6:51 pm	Textual random misc Looking at the pic-posts, you'd get the impression that I don't do anything but party. I think the people in the pic-posts get that impression too. But here it is, Wed, 8:30 at night, and aside from some monkeying around with social networking, I've been at the computer working all day. Sadly, this happens more often than not. I earn my weekly bender at the Orange Table. Hearing people talk about Facebook and Myspace reminds me how seldom I get around to posting on LiveJournal, how never I get around to reading what other people in CRAP have to say on other sites, and how seldom I get around to reading things like New Times, PsychoSteve, venue's pages like Trunk Space, etc. Well, at least as of late. It was better before, mostly. Then it was bad before that. Then it wasn't so bad. Right now, for work, I've been ordered to learn Flash. I had been doing all "back end" stuff -- the behind the scenes server-side programming, in the land of databases, Unix, network protocols, and so on. Our company works with other individuals and one other company for the client-side (pretty graphics, etc) game development. For various reasons, including smartening things up so we can get future games out quicker and cheaper, I had been pushing for moving some of the front end stuff in house, and doing it in Perl. I spent two weeks doing a Perl/SDL version of one of the games, using technologies that I know. I thought that would make them say "holy crap, let's start doing games in Perl, if it's that quick and easy!". Ruby or Python or various other things would work as well, but Perl is the daemon that I know best, so that's what I used. The top guy in the company had been pushing for me do games but in Macromedia/Adobe Flash for some time. Which is what the other company we'd been working with had been using. For various reasons, I kind of lost the debate. It's me on front end game dev, which is good, since the backend stuff is in pretty good shape at the moment (I think... knocking on wood). There are unit tests, test clients, mock everythings, requirements met. But it's on Flash, not Perl. Like most things that are "easy", it's easy to do easy things in Flash, but hard to do hard things. I feel a bit like I'm trying to build a skyscraper out of Legos. There's a lot of complexity in here to deal with the simplicity. Larry Wall, the creator of Perl, has talked in the past on simplicity and complexity, in response to Perl being called "complex". He's pointed out how other languages have swept complexity under other people's rugs rather than dealing with it. But Flash also healthy doses of useful complexity. It just happens to be complexity that's completely alien to me. Part of the reason I lost the debate is that top guy in the org thinks that Flash is so easy that even he can grok it, so it should be extra easy for me. Short version is, I've been in a world of hurt. I'm where no tech person wants to be: unproductively bashing my head against a strange technology without much to show for my efforts. And I'm missing Perl, too. And I'm expected to master this easily, so I'm only going to disappoint. But I also do want to learn Flash, as it's neat *and* marketable. But bloody hell if every little test program I try to type in and run doesn't ever work. Grrr!!! The proprietary nature of Flash is a real curse. They think they can not document pitfalls, change the API all over the place, willy nilly create and discard APIs, etc, etc. All large commercial tech products are design by committee. There's a lot going for Flash, but all of the under-the-hood stuff and the group-think that went into itis throwing me for a loop. But on the other hand, Perl SDL is a buggy piece of shit. And then like every not great manager in the world likes to do, I get my chain yanked when I'm not being productive which has the effect not of making me work harder, only of making my fragile concentration even more fragile. I really need to feel like I have time to sit down and work through examples in one of these books. The long, slow way is by far the fastest way by virtue of being reliable. There really aren't short cuts to mastering a topic. I'm not referring to my immediate management here, by the way. And the chain yanking is relatively mild. I don't have anything bad to say about the company or anyone in it, but the situation itself is bad. Then there's something else I need to deal with -- whatever I'm not doing, I feel like I should be doing. If I'm getting ahead on work, I wish I were out partying. If I'm working, I wish I had more time to read. If I make time to go to that store that isn't very near me, I feel like I should be working. I feel like I should be doing a better job keeping up with old friends and interesting new acquaintances. Slowly learning more about the complex lives of long time CRAPpers and meeting interesting new CRAPpers lately is making me feel like I work too much. I need more normal social interaction rather than quick, compressed, hurried, over the top power binge drinking episodes. I swear I'm going to figure this out, just as soon as I learn Flash here. I have some other phone calls I need to make here, one as soon as I'm done writing this. I'm working for a startup. In a startup, there's never a reassurance that there's enough time. Even if I do a good job and get lots done, it might not ever be *enough*. Anyone who has worked in a tech startup can tell you that people there will accomplish great things against impossible odds and the whole outfit still gets buried in the rubbish heap. For a while, I was doing a good job getting to shows in downtown Phoenix once or twice a week and doing fun stuff like that, but it's been a while... need more balance here... just as soon as I get a handle on this... -scott (1 Comment |Comment on this)
5:21 pm	I hate this bloody time of year and always have Sure, the weather is nice. And it's raining mulberries. Which I'm making into wine, jam, and, oh, maybe some more tortes and some ice cream. For lack of proper brew equipment, I did primary fermentation in an enamel pot. Last time, the wine was most unsatisfactory. Mulberries are exceedingly mild. So this time, I avoided adding water or adjuncts. I threw the berries into boiling water in the pot after taking it off the heat and let it stand for a few minutes to sanitize the little buggers, then I drained the water, smooshed the barries, strained out some of the berry husk smooshing it further as I did so, pitched it with a beer yeast that's supposed to have fruity, estery flavors, put the lid back on, and put it on top of the fridge for a few days. Then I filtered the rest of the husks, squeezing them as I went, and have it in a plastic Rubbermaid bowl on top of the fridge. The new bike. Late '90s Bianchi Trofeo with Campagnolo Avanti. I'm in love. Oh, and could it be? Yet another gathering of the Extreme Picnicking Society? The Shroud would arrive the next day along with a Coleman stove on the back of rebeccmeister's old mountain bike, the Jolly Roger, whereupon four courses would be cooked for the gathered socieitites. Biking directly to the WIPE from a farmer's market with fresh veggies and a camp stove and then cooking hot food has got to be worth major, major points. Max and Diana. Yes, Diana, you do need to protect poor, vulnerable, sweet Max from me. Muahahaha!! Diane shows up to the ride on a mountain bike sporting pirate regalia. On the way back, she hauls ass down the hill getting to downtown Tempe in 1.5 hours flat, pulling with the pack. Diane, you'll fit in just fiiine. Adam supplying us with fresh brewed espresso. Adam proud of his belated effort to correct his farmer's tan. uber and Rebecca "frog legs" Hale chillin' after a hike up Flat Iron. And I do mean up. There were naps all the way around. "You see that mountain? Yeah? We climbed that, bitches. What do ya think of that?" Patrick. uber and Jen. rebeccmeister modeling, and creating, the latest in woman's cycling fashion. The picnic just went on and on and on... Adam sees something funny. That's the photo-worthy stuff. I'll post again soon about matters more textual. -scott (Comment on this)
Monday, April 6th, 2009
2:41 pm	Super Mario Bros, Bike Trailers, ... Bike trailer pics, for rebeccmeister. I got to pull nails, saw, and hammer! Wee!! I asked ubercurmudgeon what color I should paint it and he said offhandedly, the blood of your fallen enemies. Took me a minute to process that. I previously joked that my (mixed too strong) Gatoraide was that flavor. I've been slowly paying through Super Mario Bros 3 on the NES. There's no save, so I have to leave the thing on. When you run out of little dudes, you go back to the start of the "world". I think there are eight worlds, and I'm currently in five, but they get harder to insane proportions. Each world has several levels. This is from world four, the giant world (most of the objects are 4x as large, which is why it's chunkier than usual). I found a level with a secret area where you get not one but two 1ups. So I spent some time playing the level, collecting the two 1ups, jumping off a cliff, and doing it again until I had 50 guys. Later I found a secret with four 1ups hidden behind it, but it was hard to get to, and it would take me about six or seven deaths to make it there, a net loss. It's been a season of change. My virtually antique laptop (800mhz) is drawing near its end. The keyboard went out and I couldn't get it going again with the old trick of trimming and cleaning the ribbon cable. But I had a spare. Then the left touchpad button got really funky, not wanting to release, but I had a spare top half of the case that I put on (while it was still running, heh heh heh). But it didn't fix it! Eventually figured out that the little micro switch is soldered onto the main board and the button just pushes down on it. I do not have a spare main board and if I did, there's no way I could replace it without having to shutdown and reboot. Beyond that, I'm running the newest libc that I can run against the newest kernel I can run on the thing and it's all hopelessly out of date still. I love my little laptop but it's time is drawing near... Don't know if it's legible but on my todo list to the right there is, among other things, "thank rebeccmeister for the bitchin' spoke card". It is, among other things, a handy reference to bike laws, both for the rider and for those occasional confused police officers out unsupervised on the streets. It's nerdy. She joked that she just made spoke cards uncool. Muahaha!! Yeah? I broke my morning latte mug too. I think I can epoxy it back together, though. It had a few hairline cracks from heat and that allowed a section to break off while I was washing it, apparently not gently enough. And I lost my bike toolkit. Some of those tools I've had for a really long time. I was just about to get an under-the-seat style bag so I wouldn't lose the thing. But these are just things. Things amuse, distract, reflect our cultural and artistic values, or accomplish tasks. Nothing else. There is a joy that comes from things that work well and last o -- a joy in the form of misery averted. I'm only half serious about professing my love for my various pieces of hardware. Another friend just wrote about her break up. That makes me sad too =( It's starting to rain mulberries and peppers are flying off the pepper plants. A small crop of figs will be ripe soon. I spent part of the afternoon in the yard on the ladder. There are still grapefruit from last year's crop on the grapefruit tree and I juiced my brains out last night. Alright, more crap later. -scott (1 Comment |Comment on this)
2:06 am	Bike crap My first road bike was a red Schwinn Sprint: That's not my actual bike. It's just the make and model, taken from this guy's flickr page. Every now and then, I'd work up the courage to take it up the canyon outside of Spearfish in the Black Hills. It was a gorgeous, long steady climb that seemed to go on forever. I'd forgotten about it until now. I'd like to go back and ride on it again some time. I threw it in the car when I headed to the east coast. As I was loitering at a university pretending to be a student, it got plenty of use there too for puttering around campus. I've worn this story out (and maybe here I can lay it to rest), but I've been hesitant to get another road bike after the Schwinn's demise when I had to swerve to avoid a car that cut me off, climbed the median, ploughed into a sign, and crumpled the frame. Like this guy I took the image from said, the thing was heavy. It was a beast. It's odd how memories get triggered. I've been futzing with this other road bike. The brakes are on the drops, meaning you have to tuck down into race position to grab them. I kept trying to do something else -- putting my hands on the top of the bars, grab downwards, and squeeze. It took me a while to realize what was wrong with me. If you look closely at the Schwinn, it's brake levers go in front of the drops but also under the top part of the handle bars. I never braked while I was on the drops. I always sat up, where I had a more clear view of my surroundings. After many years, I still have this habit, but only in the context of road bikes. On the GT, I reach out in front and squeeze. This new thing, I'm distinctly trying to reach under the handlebars and brake. So I had to find an image to confirm my memory. That triggered the Black Hills memory. I forgot I did that. Google maps sat view of the canyon with photos, including the Bridal Vial Falls. The road through the canyon, by this other guy. Boy was I a fat little kid. I should have done that a lot more often. I spent the sunny part of today at Bike Saviours, the bike co-op, tooling on this other thing. I'm amazed by the single mindedness and dedication of the army of amateur bike mechanics. A few people dropped by to actually just fix something on an otherwise working bike but the army itself was building bikes from spare parts and making nice not but essential retrofits to other things. The locals in this crazy Phoenix place really have elevated bike building, especially the no freewheel single speed ultra Spartan variety, to an art form, and exposure to art is necessary. (I can't stand poetry, so this works.) Helping with trailer building when (almost) no one else was there helped a lot. I didn't realize it, but not knowing where things were was stressing me the heck out and that gave me a chance to peacefully look around and make a mental map. One of my seriously unfavorite things is sales clerks (especially the ones in Hardware stores) who won't let you look around but insist on leading you to the part you want and then staring at you, waiting for you to walk to the counter. For me, this is a bit like being jumped, blindfolded, and thrown into a van. I guess I'm kind of neurotic. This other thing needs some TLC. I kind of love it, but I'm kind of annoyed it's condition wasn't described. I feel like I should have paid less than I did. The rear rim isn't true. The rear freewheel was stuck and now it's gummy and slow after I pried it loose. It didn't shift but that situation is slightly better. I can't hate it. It's too pretty. I put Biopace on it and changed the seat for something more aero, and gave it some peddles with cages, and ordered leather straps with metal toe clips, and I ripped the bike computer off. I should probably put the water bottle cages back on but I'm taken with ultra Spartan thing the kids are doing and need to sort those feelings out. It's kind of fitting that art should be reduced to a question of water vs form. -scott (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 17th, 2009
1:10 pm	Misc photos - stealin' wifi, CRAP WIPE I love it when digital photography reminds me of film. Getting ready for a CRAP WIPE. Jen looking vaguely stoic. Adam with his hands where they don't belong. Rebbecca thinking silly thoughts. Under the stars. I once had a GURPS character who got points back on his character sheet for having the mental disadvantage of refusing to sleep indoors. We showed up at the hike-in-only spot to find that some old, angry fuck was car-camping there. We tried to rouse him to ask him if we could camp on the edge of the spot, which was large and isolated from the others. He wouldn't get up. So we sat down to picnic. Then he got up and told us in no uncertain terms that we were to get the fuck out and he didn't care how far we had come. One day I'll look back on that and laugh. But right now, it just kind of chills my spine. I have to believe that there _is_ a human experience, and that it is _good_. Cycling in pants is hard on pants. This started as a tear in the crotch. After a run to Tempe and back, it spread all the way around the right leg with the seam the only thing holding the pant leg on. I have a bit of a problem with collecting things. Maybe that's why reason to limit myself to one bike. One thing I collect is old computer hardware. Here's the insides of a Sun 3/60, a graphical Unix workstation from the mid 1980's. It was one of the earliest "pizza box" form factor machines, with a large, square-ish, flat shape reenforced to hold a very large, very heavy CRT monitor on top. Some times I order cases of Jyoti canned Indian food from Amazon. Shipping is free. Amazon foolishly ships a big box of canned goods for free, ships it priority, and throws it inside of another box with a bunch of bubble padding even though the other box has a big "ready to ship" sticker on it. But the problem is, I eat them all. I think I had four cans one day then four the next. Trying to do math and failing. The land people have in the past banned MAC addresses from machines of mine from the WiFi. I won't get into it, but Qwest sucks, the lines are crap, and it takes them a week to dry out and start working after a rain, but no matter how little bandwidth I use, I get blamed for the suckage. Oops, got into it. So I'm stealing WiFi from the neighbors until further notice. Even though technically I'm paying for Internet here. And of course, I'm doing it in style. Cantenna style wave guide antenna with the Toughbook CF-28 serving as the router, sitting on a lamp-table thing in the corner. -scott (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, March 16th, 2009
11:36 am	Musings Going to North Carolina years ago was the best and worst things I've done. It was formative. I was up to my neck in smart people and high-end Unix hardware doing VR, supercomputing, client/server apps including gopher and HTTP, and general hacking, back while the rest of the world was on Windows 3.1. I had Internet access in 24 hour labs on $10,000 machines with huge monitors before anyone knew what it was. I also had my eyes opened to a side of human nature I wish I didn't know existed. I take full responsibility for not being able to relate to people, pushing them away, and having various complexes, but a lot of that started there. Sorry, I'm trying to set the stage without getting into this. I took off in the never maintained retired family car, a '71 Toyota Corola. Gas tank was full of rust, fuel filter kept clogging, compression was bad, carbs were shot. Got stranded repeatedly, paid a few very expensive repair bills. I got there okay but then it started breaking down. I kept sinking money into it that I didn't have. In my mind, I needed it. After doing without it there, it being towed, paying to get it out when I had to leave, after all hell broke lose, it broke down on the way home. One of the things I figured out is that if I have the air filter off so I can get to the carbs, which were causing problems, the engine didn't have vacuum, and the timing chain tensioner was vacuum powered. Without vacuum, it didn't work, and the timing chain jumped gears, meaning the exhuast/intake valves were opening at the wrong time, which did a really good job of making the engine not work at all. So, broken down in Virginia, in the cold and rain, fingers numb, I have to tear the front off the engine and fix that. But that was for naught. Further down the road, the carbs went critical and there was nothing I could do. I didn't have the stuff to rebuild them. I think they were sucking air, screwing up the mixture. I had to abandon the car. A Christian fellow took pity on me and helped me pay for a Greyhound ticket home. I'd never ridden, considered, or thought about Greyhound before then, and it sucked, but I've used it countless times since. Counter-intuitively, Greyhound is freedom in important ways that a car isn't, especially when you don't have money in the bank. I owe my Greyhound habit to that experience. But I also owe my cycling habit to it, in a large part. The same do-it-yourself, live-or-die-by-my-own-hands attitude that had me pulling wheels on the crankshaft to re-set the timing chain also has me quite often pushing myself down the road under my own power. I might buy a car. I like the Geo Metros, which seem to live on as a model of Suzuki. Supposedly it's the Corolla in Japan, or at least it was. They made a 3 cyl version of the Metro. But I never have bought a car. I inherited that one. Then I bought a motorcycle. I liked the idea of the engine being entirely, easily accessible. No contortions to get to those various parts that are prone to breaking. It was a Honda CX-500 and I ran it for years. I had to rewrite most of it. Being in Minnesota outdoors mostly, the wiring insulation just rotted. I used to have a Schwinn Sprint. I forget about that sometimes. It was a bright red ten speed road bike that was heavier than fuck. The rims bent in no time flat from minor accidents. Then I got cut off narrowly by a car and was forced into a road sign in an island where the frame just bent, leaving the whole thing mangled, crumpled, and worthless. So, in my head, to this day, I have road bike = fragile. That was a heavy one too! When I got back and recovered my whits again and decided I needed another bike, the mountain bike trend was taking off, and I got a GT Avalanche, used. I've had that fucking bike probably 15 years now. Maybe 18. I don't remember. I'd have to do math. Maybe half my bloody life. I've hit cars with it. Cars have hit me. I've taken it into bike shops with stuff on it mangled and told the frame was probably trashed, then told, behold, it was fine. I love something that just keeps on working. I've been cycling a lot lately. I'm getting a bit envious of the pretty bikes people have. I'm rationalizing buying a bike as not wanting to hold up a group, being on a slow mountain bike. And some of these bikes are just sexy! But my biases are having a royal battle. Do I buy a cheap $250 generic aluminum fixed gear bike under the logic that it's pretty, cheap, and if I crumple it, I won't feel bad? Or do I buy something nice and feel like shit when I run it into a tree? Can I get insurance to protect me from myself? If so, can I afford it? It seems like "no" to one of those would pretty much be a universal constant. Do I turn into a crazy bike person who has more bikes than most people have pairs of non-torn underwear, complete with special occasion bikes? Another consideration is my competitive spirit can be Captain Ahab-esque. I have to choose not to engage it and to just have fun. I often avoid instruction as well as nice gear just so I can enjoy bumbling along the scenic route with plenty of excuses for taking my time and sucking. Will I turn into the pissy asshole that I really am if I have a nice bike? The beater really does help keep my personality in check. Another thing forcing this is people, or someone, keeps trying to steal the motorcycle, and there's not really anywhere safe I can put it other than in storage. I'm thinking of just selling it. Nighthawks retain their value. I love the motorcycle for the simple reason that it's a clean, simple, elegant design, which is a lot of why Nighthawks retain their value. Ditto for because it's a fantastic runner. It's only ever needed batteries and tune-ups. Carbs are a bitch. But I'll still take them over an ECU. Another thing I hate is making decisions. The present is too complex and the future too unpredictable for humans to be making decisions. The only win is ever to do your work and let things play out on their own. My kid brother used to say "I dunno" all the time, to the point of irritating everyone. I now realize he had something there. I've been saying "fuck if I know" and the lot a lot lately. Humans are especially consistent about being wrong when it comes to predict what will make them happy. -scott (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, March 15th, 2009
11:21 am	Operation Jock Strap: Support for 212 Sweaty Miles A.K.A: DOUBLE DOUBLE CENTURY CENTURY 3-14 3-14 http://www.azfixed.com/vanilla/comments.php?DiscussionID=2297 I offered to drive support and when Dustin, who drove support for me once on a Tuscon ride, couldn't make it, I got the chance. Todo, next time: bear costume with tight fitting pajama bottoms. It's stuff like that that you don't realize you need until you've done this once. Nate's butt would be the focus of the trip until Rebecca stole the show with her timber-rattling belch outside the donut shop. The patrons who were trying to ignore the spandex warriors lost all comity of their own, dropped their donuts, turned, and gaped. Nate's butt later re-stole the show when an SUV of Hispanic cowboys attempted to pull into the spot where he was greasing his bottom, rammed on the breaks, and did an emergency reverse. So, the point of that story is that Ryan demonstrated remarkable premonition by photographing Nate's bum right off the start. Last time, Nate brought piles of stuff which looked like the contents of a living room, but with no sort of container. They were just thrown into his car and transferred wholesale into the Roadtrip Spaceship. Nate got such a ribbing that this time, he brought nothing. He kept saying things like man, I didn't bring my ID. I should have brought a jacket. I hope you don't mind, but I'm just going to free-ball it this ride. Stuff like that. Ryan probably saying something starting with, "yeah, I think we should" then some generally optimistic, agreeably phrased thing that sounded good at the time but turns out to amount to hauling your carcass all the way across the desert, and then back again. Nate and Rebbecca strategically eating and avoiding eye contact. I should have photographed all of the picnics. I don't even remember this one. It looks like it happened on a sidewalk. The company hit the McDonalds in Queen Creek with nary a pass break, then hit picnicked on the dirt at the airport in Casa Grande, then went all the way to the Dairy Queen in Picacho. Tuscon didn't involve a picnic, just a quick donut stop. I guess that's the Casa Grande DQ then. We had a dinner guest who was very polite and cheerful and made a career out of not being anywhere in particular. Rolling into the park just across from the airport in Casa Grande as the sun sets. I was averaging about 40 mph in the Starship. These guys started off averaging 20 then slowly dropped down to 16 on the way back in a headwind then picked up again after dark. So even with few stops, I seldom had to wait long. F00d g00d. Minus the Luna bars, I ate as much as they did. Binge eating is apparently contagious. Boulders. Happily reunited with loved ones. Um, loved ones, be warned. The riders may or may not have contracted the zombie plague virus during the ride. Please report any lurching from a safe location. -scott (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, February 28th, 2009
3:27 pm	Vegas and Sci Fi Never start a long book on a short bus ride. That is, don't if you're obsessive-compulsive like me. 581 pages later, I'm done. This is the second book in a row I've read non-stop the said thank fucking god I'm done with that. This was a certain sci-fi work about incest. It got me thinking how little sci-fi has changed over the years. After having been subjected to Torchwood, NCSI, etc, this primitive pulp didn't taste much different. This is a rant. Normally I post these on use.perl.org. Especially nerdy rants. But use.perl.org has been fucking up. And I have to get this out of my system. And I'm a bit pent up. It barfed on my last two rants. 1. Sci-fi is always about social things with just enough techno-goop smeared on that people don't get offended. Approximately, it's "your sports team sucks... in a distant hypothetical future". 2. Writing about love, murder, betrayal, deviant sexuality, etc, is hard. Writing about love on a spaceship, murder on a distant planet, deviant sexuality among fantastic luxury, and deviant sexuality in a backdrop of life extension and strange drugs is fun and easy. 3. All predictions about technology are wrong. Sci-fi writers know this. They take it as a free pass. Too free. They're still making exactly the same crappy predictions that have been shot to hell. Handicapper's forums on sports bookies use more imagination. More specifically... sci fi authors... please fix a few things. We are now and have been creatures of instinct. We won't admit this to ourselves, and pretending it doesn't exist makes it easier to write sci-fi. Authors just ask themselves, "which if humans stopped doing things that I can't account for rationally?". That ignores millsions of years of evolution and adaption to environments other than space ships which makes the portrait of human life on a space ship painfully one dimensional. Stop laughing at society and culture. Stop treating them like arbitrary, interchangeable parts. If anything, humans are the interchangeable parts. Cultures are mechanisms for approximate data processing -- specifically, for evaluating distributed trust metrics, performing resource allocation, and are one of the most significant forces behind evolution. Yes, you heard me right. Of the selection pressures (who mates and who doesn't, and which offspring survive and themselves are well adapted), "female preference" is one of the most significant. For the majority of people, society exists to keep you from getting laid, or at least to make it difficult. Stop writing fluff about explicitly charismatic heroes who have women throwing themselves at him left and right. Oh yeah, you're writing for teenagers. Never mind. Don't do that. You'll go bankrupt. Ditto for mores. It should be telling that "morals" has roots in a word meaning "Customs; habits; esp., moral customs conformity to which is more or less obligatory; customary law". When you paint a picture of a distant future society where everyone fucks everyone else, especially their kinfolk, you are ignoring instinct developed through long natural selection as well as the utility of social mores in augmenting an individual's judgment. I realize nerdy teenage boys are eager to reject society and eat up this sort of affirmation that society is dumb. Okay, scratch; keep doing that. Again, you'll go broke. Know thy audience. Technology. This we can do something about. No more "we're all wildly rich in the future and have automated helpers". Think of something more interesting. No more computers that can scan anything, or go through arbitrarily complex deduction processes. No more tracing people by their cell phones as a plot device. Do it as a basic premise if you like. But stop pulling it out of a hat like it's a god damn rabbit. We know the rabbit is there. No more "easy to use interfaces". The more an interface has to do, the more specialized knowledge it requires. The real reason that "device convergence" takes a long time is that it takes a generation to get used to the interface for a camera+GPS+cell phone+game system+whatever. And even though voice dialing should be the only option while in motion, it quickly passed right back out of fad. Our UIs now are a mixture of touchscreen, motion sensing, light sensing, proximity sensing, and tactile feedback. Go Apple! Knock it off with the giant ships. Red Dwarf made a gag of this -- the arbitrary and expanding size of the ship was comical. The pilot had malls, bowling alleys, etc. People don't willfully pool their resources to any scale. The first "ark" ship leaving Earth will not be huge. People only pool their money to any degree when forced to by taxes or large corporations, both of which have better things to do than to build giant space craft. Yes, it's romantic to think of a giant ship. But a thousand stories with this with no good explanation, it starts to feel really trite. So if you do it, you better have a damn fine explanation. Gibson got this right, at least once. One of his short stories was about a cosmonaut who refused to leave a tiny satelitte. Answering the "whys" and "hows" separates sci-fi from fantasy. Hyperspace. Or wormhole-drive in general. Okay, you bend time-space. But like giant spaceships, you've both half assing this and going too far. Here are some alternate ideas: it takes a shitload of energy, and mega corporations and governments open them only in emergency or for very well defined reasons. I guess the alternative, of everyone having space-cars has been done. And so have space ports. What non-obvious angles can you get on this, rather than using it as a pointless backdrop? Long life. Write about the unintended consequences. Yes, we know you'll outlive your spouse. What else? For one, the rest of the human race will rapidly out-adapt you in everything else -- all of the skills needed for the changing environment. You'll be an old man not just in mind but in genetics. And go beyond stereotypes of old people too -- write something interesting about the (evolutionarily adapted for, normally advantageous) changes that accompany age. Time Travel. HHGttG does the best I've seen here only by thoroughly stomping all over the silliness of every other version. The fact that Milliway's seats an infinite number of time travels is flaunted. You can get technical about parallel branches of time if you like, but in this branch of time, there just aren't reports of people meeting themselves. We're painfully short on artifacts from the future. And I'm sick of unilateral decisions by individuals to time travel. I realize things like 12 Monkeys were spurred by this suckiness and sought to improve upon it but that hasn't stopped sci-fri from regressing over and over. Like any other sci-fi plot device, it's easy to write about time travel. That's the problem. So easy that you're likely to write something the reader could have written himself. Instead, take a lead from Stephen King, Tales from the Crypt, The Twilight Zone, or so on, and write using the Law of Unintended Consequences. Don't take someone else's dream, time travel, and spit out right back out. Dream up What Comes Next That No One Anticipated. Unless everyone can go visit their past and many do, explain why they can't and don't. Otherwise, the past is going to be awfully fucking crowded. In that case, illustrate that. And explain why it's different from the non-sci-fi real world. Computers. They talk. Just like unicorns and wolves and trees in fantasy novels. And they scp memories back and forth between their "data banks" and human brains. Red Dwarf made light of this too. Whoever wrote Red Dwarf was clearly sick of fuck of sci-fi even though they loved the genre in principle. Fine, computers talk. But aside from using terms "processing", "data banks", "does not compute", not wearing out, not making mistakes, all having access to each other's data, being able to scan things, having records of everything ever, etc, have you done anything interesting with them, or are they just a human dressed in a silver spray painted box in the grand drama of a gradeschool play? You can't tell us about the nature of computing because you yourself don't understand it. Here's a hint though. Computers are not and never will be easy to use for anything other than those 10 or 20 things that people the most with them -- Solitare, downloading pr0n, making phone calls, playing mp3s, etc. As soon as something is easy, we want something else, or something more complicated permutation of what we already have. So it naturally happens that we're buying more and more complex machines that are just fancier and fancier specialized gadgets. I think Gibson got a lot of this right too. For the most part, computers didn't "hack into" each other, take arbitrary commands as "programs", get "plugged into" each other, etc. If something is one verbal command away on a standard computer, then the protagonist did not think of it -- some kid did, and now everyone is doing it. Stop pretending like clever commands, plugging, and "hacking" are novel. Computers are a worse plot crutch than force fields, time travel, and hyperspace. Okay, maybe not. But close. A good mystery novel makes the reader feel like they have a chance of figuring out who dun it even though character's behaviors and motives weave and unravel. Any story has a plot, with twists that surprise the reader, and unexpected interactions. But it's hard to enjoy the story when the only twists are computers scanning things, telling themthings, overriding things, and jumping space and time. Nothing is unexpected. I kept reading this book because it had interesting things to say about politics, of all thing, and some quotable bits. It had one character that was moderately interesting just because of his quotable bits. Dammit, fucking use.perl.org fucking up all the fucking time... fucking piece of shit. -scott (2 Comments |Comment on this)