Archive for May, 2004

Monday, May 31, 2004

May 31 2004 Published by under Miscellaneous

I’ve been reading a lot of good books lately. One of the latest is Dan Simmon’s Hyperion.

While I was discussing it with Brennen called the universe of Hyperion one of the best space opera universes he’s ever come across (or words to that effect). I actually disagree at this point, as what I’ve read of Hyperion isn’t much of a space opera according to the standards that I know of. Hyperion is big and epic, but it’s the grand scale of a Shakespeare play rather than that of a Republic serial.

Essentially, this book is sort of a futuristic Canterbury Tales; a mysterious, quasi-spiritual creature is on a killing spree on the planet of Hyperion, and six travelers are journeying there together. Some want revenge, others want answers; they all are tied to Hyperion and the creature in some personal way. This novel tells their stories, while (I understand) the sequel, Fall of Hyperion, tells of their fates.

Each story is fascinating in its own way, and impressively distinct. One is a religious/moral tale, another is the autobiography of a poet (told with appropriately vivid words), another is a hardboiled detective story, another is a bit of military SF, and yet another is a heartrendingly simple rendition of a couple losing their only daughter, and the final story is in the tradition of SF’s golden age, a tale of the end of a world’s way of life, and the consequences of man’s common blindness to the vastness of life.

The stories’ variety kept me interested and intrigued despite the length of the book. It’s really six novellas and short stories strung together with a common theme and the meta-plot of the six pilgrims making their way to Hyperion. This deepened my appreciation of the characters, though it’s a shame that the payoff won’t come until the sequel. Still, the device worked. There are still moments of the book that haunt my memory.

Which is an impressive statement for any book, really.

In other news, as part of a very busy weekend, my Mom and I braved the oddball weather (beautiful one moment, spitting rain the next) and saw Shrek 2.

I don’t want to write much about it, because any discussion of it will necessarily spoil a good amount of the humor, and I want any readers who haven’t seen the film to walk into that theater without preconceptions or expectations.

I will tell you that I found the film brilliantly funny, so much so that I didn’t hear a few of the lines because I was laughing so hard. The film maintains and enlarges on the spirit of devil-may-care fun in the first film. Moments like the fried bird’s eggs in Shrek—which were actually quite rare when compared to the time spent on the plot—are everywhere in Shrek 2, which is stuffed with cultural references and little gags.

But that’s icing on a solidly plotted cake (if I may mix my metaphors). There’s a good, solid story here, which is pretty predictable but nicely done.

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Wednesday, May 26, 2004

May 26 2004 Published by under Miscellaneous

I’m experimenting with a new work schedule. I’m getting in to work around noon and leaving between 6:00 and 8:00 p.m., then doing a few hours’ worth of work at home. I’m trying this because, for the past couple of months, my body has been refusing to awaken at 8:00 or 9:00 a.m. And I’m a big believer in reality, so I decided to fact reality and arrange my work schedule around my body’s actual sleep patterns.

I tell you, I felt odd typing away at my Syllable computer last night, glancing at the clock as it passed midnight, 1:00 a.m., and 2:00 a.m., knowing that this was okay. I’d have plenty of time to sleep in the morning.

And I did. I woke up refreshed and energized, like I used to. I’m not at 100% yet — based on past experience, that’ll take a week or two — but I sure feel a lot better.

And now, more of the VR story:

Thomas began considering options for escape. He glanced around the dingy room; the only thing near him was the nightstand, on which sat the flimsy VR goggles he’d used the night before. They hadn’t brought any extra clothes or luggage. He wondered where Doodlehopper had put her tazers. But they didn’t help either; Thomas was propped up on one arm and the sheets were twisted around him. He’d be hopelessly tangled before he got three feet, and that pistol was aimed straight at him.

He realized that the first thug was cringing. Heh. Thomas wished he could hear the reaming the guy must’ve been getting from “Boss.”

“Well, I wanted to know, Boss,” the thug said in a quiet voice, “should we shoot ‘em now, right here?” He paused. “Yeah, it’s a motel room.” He looked around. “Yeah, pretty crummy.”

His attention returned to Thomas, who didn’t like the hardness that came to the thug’s eyes. “Okay,” the thug announced. “Yes. Roger. Thank you, Boss. Over and out.”

His eyes fully focused back on Thomas. “We need to get out of here,” the thug said. “Come along quietly.”

Thomas gambled. What if they couldn’t kill him there? “And what if I don’t?”

The thug’s mouth twitched down slightly in annoyance. “We don’t have ta do it someplace else.”

Thomas lsot. He sighed, and made slow movements to get up.

The first thug motioned his pistol towards Doodlehopper’s sheet-covered form and said to his companion, “Karl, get him up.” Karl sidled over to the bed and gripped the bottom of the sheet.

There was a sudden swirling of sheets, a couple of yelled oaths from the thugs, a blur of black and skin, a low hum, and the sudden acrid smell of ozone. Thomas managed to kick off his sheets and curl his body forward on the bed ready to leap off as the two thugs slumped to the floor like tipped sacks of coffee.

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Monday, May 24, 2004

May 24 2004 Published by under Miscellaneous

Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

No, seriously. Had a good weekend, all things considered — Saturday was spent mostly powering through a daunting list of chores in time to entertain my parents and grandmother at my place. We had a straightforward dinner but it ended with a fabulous dessert: Chocolate Cranachan, a parfait of whipped cream and whisky combined with layers of a mixture of chocolate, oats, and hazelnuts. Worked really well; everyone loved it. Heck, they stayed for over four hours.

But then I couldn’t go to sleep that night. No particular reason that I could see; I just wasn’t sleepy. After staring at the ceiling for two hours, my mind wandered to the movie Tron and I realized I hadn’t seen it for awhile. So I popped it in and re-watched it, then reviewed almost all of the supplemental materials.

I’d almost forgotten how brilliant Tron really was. It was so incredibly visionary, and it was so complicated to make, and it actually worked. Did you know that the glowing circuit effect had to be hand-painted on every single frame of the film where it was used?

Anyway, I finally got to sleep a little after 5:00 a.m., then slept until 1:30 p.m., then headed over to my parents to help them set up their computer. Then went to work to finish up a few things, and back home. At least I made it to sleep with enough time to wake up in the morning and make it in by 10:00 a.m. — not as early as I’d like, but better than 1:30 in the afternoon.

In other news, I finished reading H.P. Lovecraft‘s short novel At the Mountains of Madness. It’s the first Lovecraft I’ve ever read, and I’m very impressed. He’s obviously one of the great horror writers, and like all great horror writers, he only drops hints. He explicitly avoids any descriptions of blood or gore. But it’s the hinting that bring the hairs on the back of your neck to attention. Great, great stuff. And a bargain, too.

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Thursday, May 20, 2004

May 20 2004 Published by under Miscellaneous

Sorry for the lack of an update yesterday; I had the worst day EVAR. Briefly:

Tuesday evening, I was supposed to take care of my parents’ dog, but forgot about it. So I drove there late at night to discover the dog had left a large present on the foyer carpet. Joy. I got to clean that up.

I got home and decided to take a sleeping pill, hoping to get a reasonable night’s sleep. Oh boy did I get sleep. That pill knocked me dead for twelve hours.

That means I woke up at 11:30 a.m. And I had to go take care of the dog again, who by this point was nervous and annoying, running in front of me and just generally being a nuisance.

I didn’t get to work until 1:00 p.m. I arrived to find an e-mail from my boss that informed me that he’s not my boss anymore; he’s going to be the boss of another group and now someone who (AFAIK) doesn’t even work in this state is now my boss.

Plus, the sleep was the sort of sleep that left me feeling drugged all day. And, because I woke up late, my eating patterns were all out of whack, so I was hungry and not hungry at weird times.

So, yeah. That was my Wednesday.

Thomas awoke with a bang.

Literally. The thin door to their room slammed open with such force that dust drifted from the ceiling. Thomas started up in bed, the tangled sheets coiling themselves further around his body. He blinked to clear the haze from his eyes.

Two very large Asian men, wearing business suits, strode into the room. Each had a pistol, one leveled at Thomas and the other at Doodlehopper’s bed. She was still curled into a ball under the sheets. Thomas continued to blink, his brain still a few subway stops behind.

“You’re Thomas Aznable,” one of them stated. The events of the past twenty-four hours poured back into Thomas’ mind, and he let out an amazed breath.

“You two again?” he said.

Both intruders shifted uncomfortably. “Yeah, well,” the first one said, jerking his head towards Doodlehopper’s bed, “we didn’t expect him last time. You covering him, Karl?”

Karl nodded, his gun aimed straight at the curved outline of Doodlehopper’s body beneath the sheets, and his face showing intense concentration. Thomas’ brain — which was still a bit dreamy from sleep — vaguely wondered if the thug was trying out some sort of mental powers, or was just that stupid. He figured it was the latter.

His mind had recovered sufficiently to realize that they thought Doodlehopper was male. He filed that way as potentially useful.

“Boss?” asked the first thug, still looking straight at Thomas.

Thomas blinked back at him. “Me?” he asked.

The thug gave him a disgusted frown. “No, not you, you idiot. I’m trying—no Boss!” His eyes grew wide with panic, and he straightened his spine but he continued addressing Thomas. “I was talking to someone else Boss! I’m sorry Boss!”

Thomas realized the thug must be wearing a mobile phone with a wire thin enough to be taped to his neck and made essentially invisible. Thomas felt himself frown slightly. He hated it when people did that.

“It’s the guy, Boss!” the thug said, his voice as excited as a kid in a toy store on delivery day. “We found him! And he’s with…the…other guy!”

Thomas was not typically a man of action. He preferred to use his brain, which was his excuse for not exercising. But it was true; he simply didn’t have a ”bias for action,” as he’d read of in a self-help book once.

But he was learning.

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May 18, 2004

May 18 2004 Published by under Miscellaneous

A retrospective on BookFinder.com’s first five years in business.

I seem to be recovering from my long “blah” period. And I now actually have some time to write a decent journal entry! Yay!

Much of my frustration and mild depression lately has come from a basic question about my quality of life. Do I love my life?

Obviously, just living where I am, I’m tremendously blessed from a global perspective. I can eat whenever I want, I sleep in a comfortable bed, I live in a large apartment, and I’m pretty healthy.

From a social perspective, I’m doing well. I make about $60k, I live in a good middle-class neighborhood, and my job is interesting and ever-changing. I also have good friends and family.

But do I love my life? Not really. I appreciate my life. I enjoy it; it has its fun moments. But I really don’t love it. I don’t open my eyes in the morning and think, “God, I can’t wait to get started with the day.”

Much of it comes down to my job, I think. I really want to spend my time at home, writing and making animations. But my job keeps me from having the time to really do enough writing and animation to spin up and make enough money to support me.

On the other hand, perhaps I need patience. Perhaps it’s natural for this process to take a long time. Maybe I should just do as much writing and animation as I can outside of work.

But no. That doesn’t seem right to me. I feel like I’m sacrificing myself and my dreams for a desk and a job. This doesn’t feel right.

But I can’t bring myself to quit my job, or go part-time. Perhaps that’s just weakness on my part?

I don’t know.

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Monday, May 17, 2004

May 17 2004 Published by under Miscellaneous

Oh! Um. Yes. Must update.

Briefly: Spent most of the good, if somewhat tiring weekend shopping. Ended up with some more anime (Angelic Layer and Kaze no Yojimbo), a new CD rack, some kitchen utensils, and some cookbooks.

I could write a few paragraphs about each of the above, but frustratingly, I have to leave work in a few minutes to pick up my parents at the airport.

I was able to finish reading all of the Edward Tufte books I got at his course last Wednesday. Very informative. I’ve begun using his advice at work, charting our documentation progress using small multiples.

Small multiples are essentially several diagrams all arranged next to each other, usually forming a sequence. Here’s an example:

[Small Multiples]

It’s a surprisingly powerful visual technique. Clustered diagrams invite comparison and contrast, which are essential to good information design.

>Writing Thoughts

After a long slump, I finally managed to write a little something over the weekend. Just a few hundred more words of Seeing Things Invisible.

I also assembled all my STI writing and VR Story snippets into a complete website, which I intend to use to replace my current writing website once everything’s moved over to the new server.

See, I’ve been demotivated for awhile, and I’ve had no problems with story, or characters, or forcing myself to write. The journey’s not a problem. It’s the destination.

I’ve had nowhere to put any of these stories. STI might’ve been a book, or a webdrama, or a series of short stories. But after awhile I couldn’t keep writing it while it stayed in limbo.

So finally I decided, screw it, I’m going to post all of this. My ”publication” will be posting it all to the web. Who knows? Maybe I’ll get some readers. And maybe I’ll be able to sell paper copies that way.

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Friday, May 14, 2004

May 14 2004 Published by under Miscellaneous

ExtremeTech has posted a slideshow of Windows Longhorn. I’m not impressed.

A few issues, off the top of my head:

  • I’m disturbed that buttons and menus now have no visual cues to tell you that they’re buttons or menus. This is a good example; what’s clickable, and what’s just a static text label?
  • The new ALT-TAB feature is an improvement on the current little popup window in Windows, but it’s nowhere near as useful as MacOS’ Expose, for example. With the new ALT-TAB, you can’t see all of every window; you just see a slice of the left-hand side of each window. With Expose, you see all of every window. Think it doesn’t matter? Okay, imagine that you have three terminal windows open. You hit ALT-TAB, and you see the left 80 pixels of each window. It’s a lot easier to remember the visual layout of all the text on each window rather than having to squint and read the text on a small visible slice of the window (if it’s even readable at that size). Check out the DOS windows in the screenshot.
  • There’s an awful lot of different colors used in the interface. I count four different background colors on this screenshot alone; white, pale yellow, light grey, and dark grey. Granted, this is a very early alpha. But then, if it’s an alpha, why are they putting in lots of different colors? I’d expect there to be very few colors in an alpha.

Sure, it might get a lot better as time goes on. But this is a public release that Microsoft made available to ExtremeTech. If this isn’t representative of their interface, why are they letting ExtremeTech show it off?

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May 13, 2004

May 13 2004 Published by under Miscellaneous

And now, more VR story, as promised:

Mother blew out a breath, then looked around at the others. Everyone else was quiet, but obviously intrigued. “Right, right,” she said. “Who wants to get together to help these two?”

Most of the people there raised their hands; after a moment, even Panic raised an armored fist.

Mother regarded Thomas and Doodlehopper silently for a moment, as if weighing them in her mind, then shook her head. “Okay,” she said. “But with this crew, you might live to regret it.” She knocked her head to one side and grinned. “On the other hand, with this crew, you will live to regret it.”

Thomas spent the rest of the night exchanging encryption keys, plans, ideas, addresses, anonymizers, and all the mundane details that were part of this sort of endeavor. The group from Fortis was an eclectic bunch, and while Thomas felt that worked in their favor, it also menat that each member had his or her own perspective on the whole situation and wanted to approach it from a unique angle. That meant having to satisfy a dozen different idiosyncratic cracker geniuses at once.

Doodlehopper spent most of the evening on the bed, listening to music via small wired nodes that stuck temporarily to the skin behind her ears, sitting upright in a position vaguely similar to the lotus, her eyes closed, and her head swaying slightly. What little time Thomas had to think about her was spent impressed that she was so calm.

Late in the night, as Thomas was collecting the last sets of data from the new eager participants from Fortis, Doodlehopper unfurled herself from the bed, slipped the nodes into a jacket pocket, strode over to the other side of the room, and began a series of stretches. Thomas kept glancing at her form as she pulled her limbs into what seemed like highly pinaful contortions, all without noise or a change in her neutral facial expression. She then began to move her body through some form of martial arts forms, though Thomas didn’t recognize them. Whatever it was, she had complete control over the forms she practiced that night, never wavering a muscle or seeming off-balance.

The each slept, clothed, in a separate bed. As Thomas lay in the dark, pushing himself to sleep and failing miserably, he couldn’t deny the sexual tension between them. And it wasn’t a chemical attraction; it was the uncomfortable tension of two people who recognize their sexuality but don’t want to act on it. Thomas had to admit to himself that he wanted her, but he knew that getting involved was a bad idea, especially right now when a bunch of very serious, very deadly men were trying to kill him. And the girl definitely didn’t want any physical attention from him. Thomas reflected that she probably wanted someoone much younger htan he, closer to her own age. She was probably fifteen years younger than him. She could almost be his daughter.

He knew where this line of thought was going, and pushed it away before it turned to his pathetic love life. He threw himself onto his side, pulled the thin, uncomforting sheets around him, and forced himself to think of nothing until he finally drifted off into an uneasy sleep.

Thomas awoke with a bang.

(More VR story later today.)

Well, that was interesting.

I’m writing this a few hours after returning home from a course by Edward Tufte, who has written a lot about information design.

What is information design? It’s the study of information presentation, really. How can information—data, numbers, trends—be presented in a way that accurately reflects the information itself? In other words, if I’ve found out about an outbreak of cholera, and I’ve found that it’s related to a particular water source, how do I show that relationship to people in an umambiguous way?

(I do it like this:)

[John Snow's Cholera Outbreak Map]

The course came with all three of Tufte’s books, as well as his pamphlet denouncing PowerPoint (except as a computerized replacement for a static slideshow). I’ve skimmed or read all of them, and they’re all excellent—informative, dense, witty.

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May 11, 2004

May 11 2004 Published by under Miscellaneous

Incidentally: I’ll be at an Edward Tufte course all day tomorrow, so no VR story snippet until Thursday.

3:49 p.m.

A friend suggests I might feel better if I ranted here.

Ironically, everything I need to rant about has been improving a bit over the past couple of days. But, I don’t need to let that stop me.

Sleep. Sleep’s been a big weight on my mind lately. I’ve been unable to fall asleep until after midnight, then I’ve woken up groggy and exhausted. Repeat. And it’s kind of amazing how much of an impact that’s had on my mood. I’ve tried everything I can think of, including sleeping pills, and nothing’s helped.

Then, I was completely unable to sleep Saturday night (but at least I finished the first of Dan Simmon’s Hyperion books, which was brilliantly written). This was the cap to an amazingly busy Saturday. Sunday, I went to church then spent the afternoon with my Mom, and after she left I fell asleep and didn’t wake up until late Monday morning.

So, that’s left me dazed and feeling out-of-sorts.

Then, the alien parasite illness of last week prevented me from doing pretty much anything productive, and I’m still recovering from that.

So, I’m mildly frustrated and annoyed.

Ummm. There we go.

I just wish I had done something in the past week or two. I feel like a drain on society right now; passively consuming but creating nothing.

Yes. Yes. I know. No updates in practically forever, other than anaemic posts Thursday and Friday.

To be honest, I’m just not feeling like it. Work is stressful, and my sleep patterns have become all wacky again, to the point where I have very little time at home when I’m not either asleep or trying to go to sleep.

So. My apologies, and I suggest that you expect a Week of Suckage here.

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Friday, May 7, 2004

May 07 2004 Published by under Miscellaneous

Whatever this illness is, it feels like some sort of alien parasite from a bad Star Trek episode. Normally, I get these things and I suffer through them and then I’m okay in a couple of days. This is day number six and counting. I’m not nearly as bad as I was on Sunday or Monday, but I’m still coughing and wrestling with an upset stomach. Blaaarrggh.

Anyvay. I’ve spent much of my time just lying in bed, doing very little.

I did watch a fair amount of anime this week, though: Last Exile volume 2, Texhnolyze volume 1, Tokyo Godfathers, and Angelic Layer volume 2. I also saw the first twelve episodes of the Clone Wars animations, which left an odd taste in my mouth.

I can’t summon the energy to write up my opinions on these, except that they were all good in their own ways. Except for Clone Wars, which was frankly just a really poor choice of animation and direction style.

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