A Nitrous Crouton

Today I had a buffalo burger for lunch. I have also consumed the equivalent of six cans of soda. I do not think the two cancel each other out.

This weekend I attempted to lay out all the personal and professional projects that are kicking around inside my head. One of the shiny new applications bundled with my Intel iMac was OmniOutliner, which seemed appropriate to give a whirl for this task. The good news is that OmniOutliner is quite slick and exactly what I needed for dumping everything out of my brain. The bad news is that I have more that I would like to do than I can possibly hope to tackle. This would be the case even if my current main project, which eats most of my time but also pays all of my bills, didn’t exist. With aforementioned project taken into account, however, all I (barely) have time for is one or two items on the list. Those items are prioritized by financial return rather than interest. In the end it was rather a depressing enterprise. Time to grit my teeth and hunker down for another few months.

At least my desire to burn time playing WoW is almost nil.

One of my online haunts is an obscure little IRC channel, a regular hive of scum and villainy, or at least some geeky approximation thereof. Like many such channels, it has a resident channel bot. The bot serves a variety of purposes, all of them frivolous. Puns are disdained on the channel. Therefore, one recent feature addition to the bot is a pun jar. As might be supposed, the pun jar is analogous to the famous swear jar. When a channel denizen makes a pun, one of their fellow members can tell the bot to punish (no pu…oh never mind) the offender. Punishing the offender adds a virtual $0.25 to the pun jar and the bot keeps a running total of the worst transgressors.

I don’t think this has exactly reduced the punnery in the channel. The term perverse incentive comes to mind. It did make me reevaluate the Turing test, however. I would be much more impressed by a bot that could recognize puns by itself versus one that could hold a conversation. It’s time to move the goalposts on artificial sentience.

We shall see what this weekend holds for me. Last weekend was a getting-my-ass-kicked-by-sci-fi weekend. Without getting into spoilers, all I can say about the season finale of Battlestar Galactica is that not only does Ronald D. Moore have gigantic grapefruit in his pants, he felt the need to kick me in the family jewels as well. They did something which pretty much eliminates neutrality as a reaction or opinion. I’ll get firmly into the ‘love it’ camp. I am rather bemused reading various criticisms, a lot of people will whine about shows being complacent, getting in a rut or playing it safe, but heaven forbid you actually make a big roll of the dice.

That was one cheek getting booted. The other was devouring Judas Unchained. Although technically a sequel to Pandora's Star, since they are really one unbroken work, I’m just going to lump them together and review them together. The rating? 4.5/5.0 Croutons.

Excellent stuff. While I enjoyed Hamilton’s Night’s Dawn books, they did have what felt to me like some jarring flaws. In Pandora/Judas, he has applied the same abundance of creativity and thought in creating a fascinating future galactic spread of humanity and technology that was the best part of Night’s Dawn. At the same time, Pandora/Judas avoids some of the silly or poor characterizations (which were most prominent in the early Night’s Dawn books), clunky plot elements and the literal deus ex machina ending that dragged down Night’s Dawn. Since I read fiction like a buzzsaw, even a hefty hardback like Judas gets eaten at around one hundred pages an hour, I liked the sheer amount of detail and action involved in the books. I will get irritated at repetition or filler, but neither were the case with Pandora/Judas. It would be easy to get overwhelmed, however. In retrospect I should have reread Pandora before reading Judas, it had been almost a year and I was belatedly recalling bits and pieces all the way through Judas. I had forgotten just how much stuff was crammed into the first book. Definitely read them together. Highly recommended.

This is turning into a week of inexplicably bizarre happenstance.

In software development, it’s frequent that you run into crashing bugs that happen on a “Release” build of the software but not a “Debug” build. This is almost always really annoying. However, it is rather odd to get a crash bug which only manifests on the “Debug” build and not on the “Release” build. Climbing further down the rabbit hole, we can then wrangle a bit of version control regression magic yet still be unable to ascertain when exactly the bug was introduced. Reevaluating the situation, we then make the discovery that the code above the crash point doesn’t work correctly. In fact, it has never worked correctly, however due to voodoo magic bits, the database engine previously didn’t crash but now does. Naturally this means that the previous version of the software actually shipped with this bug, and in fact had a functionality bug assigned to it that somehow got closed out as ‘Known Shippable’. Not that anybody really noticed until now when the voodoo magic bits changed and things started crashing.

The offending routine has been fixed, but since it was never working correctly and it’s actual behavior has never been tested, we shall see if we have fixed two legacy bugs at the expense of introducing a couple dozen new ones. Fortunately, QA is pretty sharp so if it makes obscure things explode, I will soon know to hide under my desk.

At least I was a bit better rested today in order to tackle this head-scratcher. Yesterday I was a bit of a zombie after the bizarreness of Monday night which involved some missing car keys. This would have been a minor irritation had the car in question (not my car), been parked in a spot that was inviting a tow. The situation was rectified by an expensive locksmith visit, but the affair didn’t resolve itself until nearly 2 in the morning.

The bizarre came into play the following day. As could be anticipated, the keys did turn up the next day. The bizarre was in true “Purloined Letter” fashion, three adults managed to somehow miss car keys sitting in plain sight on a kitchen counter at its end where it met up with the kitchen wall. My working theory is a visiting fifteen-month old is secretly one of the Baby Geniuses and put the keys back on the counter in the wee hours of the morning.

Inane construction supply company banner ‘truism’ of the week: “When in doubt mumble, when in trouble delegate, when in charge ponder”

I feel less guilty about the McGriddles. When filling up my car at 7-11 I happened to spot a little ad placard above the gas pump. Sadly, the product being advertised is not linked anywhere on the 7-11 site. I wish I could show the picture of the Short Stack breakfast sandwich in all its nauseating glory. That’s right friends, instead of bread we have two pancakes holding a gut-wrenching load of sausage and cheese slices.

I saw this before I read about the donut burger. I’m really not sure which is worse.

I’m waiting for the first scathing op-ed for the upcoming HBO show Big Love titled “Polyamorous, not so polyglamourus.” And if I get dozens of Technorati hits from searches for ‘polyamorous’, I may just have to set this blog on fire and start over.

Thank goodness this week is over, nothing bad, but I think I’m developing allergies in my old age, it’s that time of year in this part of the country and I’ve just been tired as snot the past two days. That said, I’ll take allergies over the cold that’s been dropping people around me left and right. Now where did I put that jug of vitamins?

I succumbed to a McGriddle run for brunch yesterday. Shame. What was interesting, however, was what I didn't notice after pulling away from the drive-thru. The small 'coffee' didn't immediately attempt to radiate my hand with thermal energy. Upon first inspection it appears that they changed their cup design and added a bright glossy wrap to it, full of cheery pictures and inane slogans. Then I looked at the underside of the cup and realized why the wrap was there...

...to hide the fact McDonalds switched from paper cups to some form of styrofoam. But it's not obvious, so you can go on pretending that it's still paper, and pretending that the paper cups were actually better for the environment. Mmm. Image over substance, that's the American way! Much nicer to hold though.

If Starbucks tried it there would be firebombings within minutes of the first RSS updates.

I didn’t mean to write my weekend round-up on Wednesday, but so it goes. I did indeed vanquish the ice age that was my freezer on Saturday, despite waking up with a soul-crushing sinus headache. After about five hours unplugged with the freezer door opened, the hoary coat covering the roof and walls of the freezer melted away. This left only the giant ice cube that comprised the lower half of the freezer. That is not an exaggeration; the sliding basket below the shelf couldn’t be removed because it was embedded in a giant block of ice that was frozen to the floor of the freezer. Making headway required leaving a hairdryer propped up on full blast for nearly an hour. Finally, the combination of the hot air and the heating of the metal framing allowed the basket to be lifted free. Mind you, this hadn’t melted all the ice, the basket still looked like it was ready to sit on a lab table next to a prehistoric cave man, but at least it was out of the freezer.

I’m happy to report that the exercise achieved its primary goal: making the fridge cool properly once again. Eventually I’ll retrieve the thawed basket from the patio and reintegrate it into the freezer. Eventually. Someday. Soon.

In other aspects of productivity, I did indeed finally crack open the Word file containing my aborted hardboiled sci-fi detective novel, which I pretty much agreed to write on a dare back in 2000. On Sunday I doubled the length, it is now roughly 3,000 words. I know the basic plot, I have no idea how I’m going to get there, reach 90,000 words or have it be any good at all, but at least I’m writing the silly thing.

Of course, I then had to spend the latter part of my Sunday evening finishing my reading of The Sparrow, which made me feel even more dirty and ashamed to be writing crappy pulp sci-fi. For all the books I read, it is still uncommon for one to resonate with me strongly on an emotional level. When it does happen, I can’t always identify just why a text hits so hard or makes such an impact. It’s a beautiful book, with deep human characters and rich with both joy and profound sadness. As a melancholic, I find the two so generally intertwined on anything other than say, surface pleasures that it was a rare book I had to read in chunks, because it just became too much. Mixed up with all of it was surprisingly thoughtful and intimate explorations of faith. If decades of crap like Left Behind and the Purpose Driven Toenail Clippers weren’t enough reason to torch the nearest Zondervan, the irony that the most haunting and genuine fusion of elements of Christian spirituality and science fiction come from an agnostic writing a book involving Jesuits published as mainstream secular fiction. I think the reason why the book affected me as much as it did, however, boiled down to the dynamics between the major characters, the authentically messy interactions and intimacy and blending and family that isn’t family and the pain and effect of loss. At a time in my life where I’m having to face a lot of issues involving my own family and choices I make in how to relate to people in the future, the themes of the book definitely hit me on a multitude of levels. That said, I give it a high recommendation regardless, either as science fiction or literature in general.

Now freshly arrived and in the queue: Judas Unchained, The Ghost Brigades, and A Feast for Crows.

These days, I rarely see movies in the theatres. In fact, I rarely bother watching movies on DVD. There are enough solid TV shows to occupy my limited viewing time and I just haven’t seen releases that make me want to break down and make the trek to Blockbuster or Hollywood. However, my friend Thomas, currently staying with me while doing an internship, had passes and wanted to see Ultraviolet. I had low expectations, and they were…met. It was both better and worse than I had anticipated. I hadn’t realized it was the same director from Equilibrium, which explained a lot. The problem is, if you’ve already seen Equilibrium, you’ve seen almost everything which is remotely cool about Ultraviolet, and if you thought the gun-kata was silly, it’s even more over the top now. That said, despite the horrendous script, frequently distractingly cheesy virtual city CGI, Clone Wars qualify dialog, it wasn’t painful-pain bad, I found it painful-entertaining bad. But then I wasn’t paying to see it. Verdict: 1.5/5. Worth seeing if it happens to be on cable and you have it on in the background while doing something productive. Otherwise, don’t bother. I’ve never cared for Mila’s looks (and she certainly can’t act), if you do then it’s probably a 2/5 rating. Needless to say, I’m crossing my fingers on V for Vendetta and A Scanner Darkly, but not getting my hopes up. The trailer I saw for Silent Hill, which ran before Ultraviolet, did probably sell me on seeing the movie, which isn’t something I had planned on.

I’m happily watching the evolution of the increasingly inaccurately named iTunes Music Store. They are now rolling out Multi-Pass and Season-Pass purchase options for tv shows. This is how I want my tv. I went right ahead and bought a multi-pass for The Daily Show and Colbert Report because A) that’s how I want to get my TV, B) I don’t have cable and C) They are damn funny shows. It’s just too bad this is developing a couple years too late for, oh, lets just say Firefly.

Reading impressions of Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter is severely testing my resolve not to blow lots of money on an Xbox 360 that I’ll never play. What makes it even worse is if I bought a 360, I’d have to buy some sort of HDTV. Mind you, the largest actual TV I own is all of 13”, you’d think I was downright un-American or something. Must. Exhibit. Self. Control.

In a conference call yesterday I identified our incoming party as "3-6 Mafia". I'm bad.

I was probably doomed from the start. While I am very very thankful to have been born into the personal computer age, the evil little boxes have dominated my life more that just a little bit.

My first exposure came at age five in the form of an Apple ][+. That was 1981. This will be the year I hit thirty. Twenty-five years in front of the keyboard, virtually the entirety of my life, at least the parts where I was self-aware enough to remember. I only have vague recollections of that era. My family lived in New Jersey in a house built on the edge of what could either be called a very steep hill or a very short cliff. The computer was in the basement. My involvement was limited to the odd bit of game playing and watching my father tinker with the machine. My vivid recollections are limited to two games: Alien Typhoon, an superbly implemented Apple II ripoff of Galaxian and The Atomic Foo Blaster. The latter game was never sold on any shelf, but rather a creation of my father using one of the first examples of create-your-own-game software, a program called The Arcade Machine. In 1983, my father traded in the Apple ][+ for the newly released Apple //e. At this point in time, the only effect that had on my life is there was one particular Pac-Man clone that wasn’t compatible with the //e.

I didn’t start my own earnest computer tinkering until I was older. In 1984 my family moved to Naperville Illinois, in the Chicago suburbs. I was soon raiding the Nichols Library for BASIC programming books aimed at kids and typing in bits and pieces from Nibble magazine. In retrospect at that point in time my own personal programming efforts were very rudimentary to say the last. I don’t think I ever learned the use of arrays, and I wasn’t even using GOSUB/RETURN but just GOTO all over the damn place. Needless to say, my own personally authored text adventure, which I originally titled “Sword’s Quest” was the very definition of spaghetti code. And I had no clue about the concept of a text parser. Strangely this didn’t stop me from calling myself “Nateware” with a business address in the “Basement Floor” of my family home. In one of my nostalgia boxes I suspect I still have the giant advertiser info package Nibble sent me when I enquired. Whoops. I was getting a bit ahead of myself.

I seem to recall making some stumbling attempts at assembly language around 1985/86 or so. I really wasn’t ready for that and didn’t get very far. My vivid memories from that era also involve games. I spent quite a few hours watching my dad play the original Wizardry I, charting out dungeon maps on graph paper. The old Wizardry games still have some of the most classic boxes in all of computer gaming. Associations can be strange things, whenever I hear the songs “Boys of Summer” by Don Henley or “Run to You” by Bryan Adams I can recall watching my father make his way to Werdna sitting in front of the //e with the radio playing. The other memorable game from this time period was Stellar 7, which both my father and myself spent many hours conquering. Stellar 7 was a game quite ahead of its time, both for the 3D wireframe graphics and a great deal of strategy and depth in its action-oriented gameplay. It’s a rare case of such a game that still holds up well today, something that can be said of very few early 80s computer games.

In mid-1986 I learned there was going to be a new Apple II model coming. I was excited. Very excited. I remember the teaser picture of a computer under wraps in the ‘Coming Next Month’ panel of the August 1986 issue of A+ magazine. The next month passed very slowly. When I ripped the September issue out of the mailbox with the glorious cover shot of the new Apple IIGS I got nothing else done for the rest of the day. There were certain advantages to being homeschooled. The wait to get a IIGS was even harder, but finally, in May of 1987 the family //e was traded in for a bright shiny IIGS.

The acquisition of the IIGS ushered in my own personal Golden Era of computing, when I was having lots of fun, really learned to program, got online, and started ‘going pro’ all before obtaining a drivers license. But that will be the next chapter.

Milestone Day. I’m sitting waiting on one more check-in and then I can pull the trigger on the build. It has been a relatively hectic last couple days due to the sheer number of testable items and deliverable bits to get in, check, double-check. I say relative in comparison to the norm of the past several months. In comparison to this time last year, it’s positively tranquil. Mind you, I am most certainly not complaining about the lack of waiting until 2AM to get the build finished and uploaded. Most certainly not.

In addition to less stressful milestones I’m also thankful at the beginning acclimation of my body to renewed physical exertion. Last weekend I finally made the pilgrimage back to my local gym and began running again. For the past decade or so, running, on a treadmill, has been my only real form of physical fitness. Furthermore, I had slacked off and hadn’t actually run at all, much less in any kind of regular routine in, oh, let’s just say the past eighteen months. After embarrassingly brief sessions on Saturday and Sunday I could sum up my Monday and Tuesday as follows:

Oof.

I let myself recuperate for three days and did another session yesterday morning. Only minor ill effects have resulted for today. Hopefully from this point on, I can maintain an intended schedule of Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday. Running at a shameful speed and duration will continue for the near-term future.

This means I am finally using the iPod nano I bought back in (November?) as an incentive to start running again. Pain, healthy cardio-vascular system, toy.

Even if I’m not going to engage in wonton nostalgia by doing something silly like writing a C compiler from scratch for the 65816, I have decided to chronicle some of my remembrances, thoughts and feelings on a lot of the things that have shaped me or occupied large portions of my time, specifically the computers I have owned and used over the years and the software projects I’ve worked on. I think I can guarantee polarizing results, you will either find my tales really interesting or utterly boring. I aim to please.

In other techno-news, I’m still resisting getting a new cell phone. I’ve had my current phone since 2001, which is cell-phone years means it’s like Methuselah with a rotary dial. Hell, I don’t even think it supports SMS. However, it’s simple, it’s durable and it works. The phone in question is a Qualcomm QCP-2760. The problem of course, is that the battery no longer holds a charge very well. Trying to google for cell phone batteries is a classic case of too much information. Furthermore, trying to search on a popular yet long obsolete phone leads to many dead-ends. I can’t tell you how many sites listed batteries, yet the batteries they were talking about were the optional external clip-on that supplemented the internal battery. The places that had the external didn’t have the internal, and even the ones that listed the external didn’t have it in stock. Finally, I found what I was looking for. However, I wasn’t exactly inspired with confidence by their rather draconian terms of sale. So I figured it was a crap shoot, the cost of the battery was low enough that if it was a dud I wouldn’t be out much.

I’ve attempted following the various conflicting instructions for initial charge/recharge (which strike me as odd for a Li-ion battery), but to no avail. My new battery seems to want to hold a charge even less than the old battery. I’m going to tinker with it some more this weekend but I’m not optimistic. Sigh.

This weekend I’m going to attempt to defrost my freezer, which will be very very exciting due to the fact that it is about half ice by volume. This is the fault of aging freezer door seals letting moisture in. It’s an old fridge. The ice buildup is affecting the temperature in the main fridge which pushes it to crisis action status. The trick is going to be avoiding a flood of biblical proportions on my kitchen floor. I’m thinking creative use of garbage bags and duct tape. Sadly, I don’t have a digital camera to chronicle the insanity, but I’ll be sure to blog how to turns out.

Inane construction supply company banner ‘truism’ of the week: "A good anvil does not fear the hammer."

My DSL connection has decided to become persnickety. This causes no end of irrational discomfort, sad to say I usually feel very grumpy and upset when the sync light just won't stay lit. However, probably will help me focus and do a little writing.

I'm finally coming out of a long phase of personal catatonia. Aside from the requisite minutiae of errands, bills, and living I've done very little of consequence these last few months outside of work, at least if one doesn't count World of Warcraft or the odd book or tv show thrown in for good measure. I definitely wouldn't count WoW.

At the moment I'm feeling tired and grumpy that I don't have the energy to do more writing. I actually desire to scribe at length. While I don't few the past months as wasting time, I needed the downtime, I am now mentally chafing at the bit. Going forward, WoW will seem like a waste.

There is the matter of having the mojo to be productive in these evening hours. Some of the problem is my fault, I still need to cut back on the demon sugar molecule. I think I'm doing better, at least I'm guessing the cravings are a sign that my consumption has been reduced, but I need to keep going. As much as I love the sweet sweet Coke Classic and Mountain Dew, I know it's heavily to blame for running out of gas later in the day. The lack of regular exercise doesn't help either. And, God help me, I've actually done the coffee with Mountain Dew chaser not once but several times this month. I blame McDonalds for that, my odd meal schedule results in sometimes being ravenous right before I hit the office. It's not that I love McDonalds, but for some bizarre reason the admittedly grotesque McGriddle is something I actually enjoy putting in my mouth. I know, I'm ashamed. Another major factor in this equation is that the McDonalds near my office is actually fast food. Not any of this, order and maybe eight minutes later you'll get your order handed to you without even a sorry, no, we're talking time to order at the counter to walking away with foodlike substance in around forty-five seconds. Sixty tops.

It might kill me, but at least I get to eat it sooner rather than later.

For some strange reason I'm getting blog deja-vu, have I written this before? Will I write it again? The curse of writing infrequently yet often enough to make it unwieldy to search means that if anybody besides myself read this, I might be mildly embarrassed.

One of the issues that weighs heavily on me as I mull future personal endeavors is that of strategy. There are a great many things I could do. There are even a great many things I could do which would pay the bills. However, moving towards some very large, very ambitious long term goals requires focus on what will scale and what will make money. Quite a bit of money. This isn't so I can retire early, drive a flashy car or feed some sort of material or chemical addiction, it's to have the resources to tackle some seriously large projects. I'm not going to get there by puttering around writing say, an Xbox Live Arcade game.

It's going to be tough, I've had a long last decade of learning and constant responsibility. Part of me wishes I could kick back and take a year to dabble and browse and work on little projects of amusement and intellectual stimulation. But, I do hit 30 this year, and in many regards as blessed as I've been the last few years, I have felt in many ways like I've been spinning my wheels.

On top of that, the writing bug is biting me again. I blame John Scalzi. I have a plethora of story ideas. Yes, all of them sci-fi. I still owe an old friend and colleague a hardboiled noir sci-fi detective novel. I wrote around 1,800 words in August of 2000 and it has sat ever since. Of course, I'm reflecting upon the fact that what I really want to do is make aspects sci-fi novels reality, not just write about them, but I still have stuff in my head wanting to get out. I'm under no allusions how much work writing is, but I might just not be able to help myself.

I think I have finally come to grips with laying to rest doing anything with technological items of nostalgia other than to…wax nostalgic about them. As much as I want to write Apple IIGS System Software 7.0 or the bestest most spiffy Sega Saturn emulator ever, life is short, even if you do go cold turkey on the World of Warcraft.

And now I want another Mountain Dew. Dammit.

I think I'll start turning on comments. Just because someday people might read this silly blog. Moderated, not because I hate you, but because all I expect are spambots!