Category Archive: Life

Random comments about my day to day life, including the process of running this blog.

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January 24, 2010

Anyone Still Out There?

I haven’t posted a lot recently – what writing I have been doing has been longer format stuff that doesn’t fit on this blog. However, I have had a few ideas for shorter essays and was wondering if anyone was still looking here for new posts. So... if you are still following this blog, post a comment, or otherwise let me know. Thanks.

Posted by Steven at 02:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

September 04, 2009

50 years on

Today is my 50th birthday. A time for introspection and refection – two things I do quite well.

To start off with, this is not the only odometer that is rolling around a bunch of digits this year:

* 50 years ago today, I was born
* 40 years ago this coming April I began my journey following Jesus
* 30 years ago this January, I started my career as a full-time software engineer
* 20 years ago this January, I moved to California
* 10 years ago… Well, there are some things that happened 10 years ago; but nothing that cries out as a landmark to celebrate. Perhaps 10 years from now I’ll think otherwise.

Oh, and 23 years ago this coming March, I got married (not exactly in sync with the rest – so it goes).

So I’ll consider these in turn.

50 Years of Life and life is good. While there are many things I would be tempted to change if I could, the reality is that I’m not at all convinced that I would be a better person if I changed any of them. Even my worst regrets have built positive things into my life, so should I regret them at all? The reality is that compared to 99% of the people in the world, my life is amazing; so on what basis can I complain about anything? The truth is that while there are still things I want to do with the years ahead, my life has been a good one.

40 years of faith and my love of God and appreciation of His love for me continues to grow. Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows that my faith is a dynamic thing, constantly growing. My relationship with God continues to get stronger as he works in me to help me see the world from His point of view. I don’t think I would be able to appreciate my life as well as I do if it wasn’t for God’s Spirit in my life acting as comforter, counselor and teacher.

30 years of engineering and frankly I’m getting tired of it. Don’t get me wrong – I have a great job working with great people. It would be hard to imagine a better engineering position elsewhere. It’s just that I’m starting to feel like I’ve done everything I want to do as a software engineer. Yes, I can keep doing the same things for many more years; but I could also retire today as an engineer and have no regrets about my career.

22 years of marriage, and I think we have finally figured it out. Seriously. We’ve had our ups and downs over the years; but at this point I think we both understand each other enough and understand how to cooperate in the cramped space of a marriage enough so that 1 plus 1 really is greater than 2. Learning how to be married really is a lot like learning how to be part of a pair of people trying to cook in a tiny kitchen (perhaps preparing three dishes – two that you are doing on your own and one that you are doing together). It’s all about finding the balance between giving each other enough room that you can get your own things done, helping each other out when extra hands are needed, and finding joy in the things you discover to do together.

20 years in California and the move to the city has kept it fresh (for now). We moved up to SF in part because we had grown bored of living in the South Bay. Too much suburbia. Of course moving up here brought into sharp relief the things we really did like about where we used to live; but it’s all under an hour away, and I’m down there at least once a week anyway. We both still miss the East Coast (particularly our friends back there); but at this point we’d also miss California if we ever moved away.

OK, so much for retrospectives. What’s next?

I’m really overcome with the sense that I for all I have learned in the first 50 years of my life, what I need to focus on in the years ahead is passing all that on to other people. I’m still not sure by what means to do that. Write some books? Become a teacher? Become a pastor? All of the above? I’m not sure; but I really think the focus of my life needs to switch into output mode. What that will involve in terms of lifestyle changes is unclear; but changes are needed to go with the new focus. I have seen God doing a lot of clearing the undergrowth from my life the last few years. I think that was in preparation for what’s next.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

August 06, 2009

The prodigal returns to the fold

Four years ago (almost to the day - check out the post) I - who has started developing for the Macintosh 2 months after it was release and who worked for Apple for 7 years developing the Mac OS - abandoned the Mac for the PC. You can read the post to see how and why that transition happened. In essence I did not see the value investing my time in learning a whole new OS (Mac OS X) and a new programming language (Objective C) and neither did a lot of the independent developers who wrote the cool programs that made the Mac fun for me.

The news is that I am typing this post up on my new iMac that rests in the place of pride on my desk and my old PC is sitting in the corner, disconnected.

The reasons for my return to the Mac is manifold; but the real game changer is the iPhone. Now that I have a programmable device that I carry just about everywhere with me, the ability to program it for myself (even just utilities for my own private use) is something I can’t resist. What’s more, a cursory examination of the iPhone App Store provides ample evidence that the indie developers have returned to Apple as iPhone developers.

On top of that, the new Macs (being Intel-chip based) can run Windows, and I am setting up this computer to dual-boot, so I can still use Windows on those occasions I need to.

What’s more, I have a sense that God wants me to invest my energies into more creative activities (writing, programming, etc.) and to spend less time playing games, and the Mac is just a better computer for that (with fewer distractions for games).

Now I still have my 12” Sony laptop that I use to read Email (I use that because I can take it on trips easily, and I don’t have to worry about syncing my email archives between different machines); but for the foreseeable future I expect to be using a Mac a my primary computer at home.

Anne (who never left the Mac) is quite pleased.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 23, 2009

Learning

I just wanted to acknowledge here a lack of substantive posts. I’m in a learning mode these days and while writing is integral to how I lock understanding in my brain (and therefore plays a critical role when I have finished learning something), it can be problematic when applies too soon, thus locking incomplete understandings of things into my mind. I do have some older topics (whose understanding is unlikely to change) that I could write about, and have a couple of times sat down at the keyboard to do that so there would be some “meat” on this blog; but I’m just too focused on other topics to do them justice.

I hope to have much to write about when this is done; but only God knows when that will be.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 21, 2009

I remember more

It is common in our culture to talk about certain events as being so overwhelming that you always remember where you were when you first heard about them. Thinking about the moon landing being commemorated this week got me thinking about the other marker events I have experienced.

I don’t recall where I was when I heard that President Kennedy was shot – I was a bit too young to appreciate that. I do however remember sitting in front of the TV watching the funeral procession on TV (and being surprised that there was more to the tune of the funeral march than the phrase that everyone hums – dum dum de-dum, da de-dum de-dum de-dum).

As noted last week, I do recall exactly where I was for the launch, landing, and moonwalk for Apollo 11.

I also recall exactly where I was when I heard about the accident on Apollo 13. I had gone to bed; but was having trouble sleeping so I went out to the kitchen to get some water and saw my mother watching the TV (turned down low). We stayed up together for a bit watching the coverage.

I recall where I was when I heard that that Nixon resigned. I was at a Christian camp that week, and one of my cabin-mates told me as I was walking back to the cabin while he was headed to the common building to see if he could get more details.

I recall where I was when I heard about the Challenger accident – I was at my office at GCC . There were lots of TVs around the office (leftovers from our videogame days), and most of us spent the rest of the afternoon watching coverage together.

I recall where I was when I heard about 9/11. I had just gotten up that morning (early Pacific Time – I went into the office early those days to have some overlap with our UK office) and tuned on Headline News as usual. I was tuned in when the second plane hit (Anne was also awake at that point, although we can’t remember if I woke her up or not). It was a tough decision to stop watching the unfolding drama and go into the office (and as it turns out my company gave us all permission to head home if we wanted).

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

July 16, 2009

I remember

I know exactly where I was, 40 years ago today at 9:32 AM EST – standing in a boat in the middle of the Indian River in Florida looking northeast with a big smile on my face. I was there watching the launch of Apollo 11 from Cape Kennedy (along with throngs of others who had boat and knew that the closest you could get to the launch site was on water).

I also know where I was at a quarter past four, 40 years ago next Monday – in our family living room in Cocoa Beach, watching the landing with my mother and brother. My father, who had worked on the Lunar Landing Module, was still at the office – on call in case there was an emergency. I was in the same location 7 hours later (I was given special dispensation to stay up late that night), watching the first moon-walk.

It was an interesting time of my life, living just south of “the cape” with my father involved in the space program when it was the center of national attention (of course, many of my school mates’ fathers were similarly involved). Behind our house was a 4 story office complex where CBS TV had space, and once we spotted Walter Cronkite on the walkway as we looked up from our backyard. The open stairwell of the complex was also a prime location for watching “lesser” spacecraft launches (satellites, etc.) – either that or down on the beach (depending on which launch pad they were lifting off from). Launches of some sort were fairly common, and the local newspaper always listed the next launch on the upper right corner of the front page, so we all knew when to pause and look.

I had my models of all of the manned spacecraft, and was actually pretty good at drawing the Lunar Module (for those who know what it looked like can appreciate that accomplishment). Dad would sometime share with me some of the designs of the LM, fostering my interest in engineering. There was a real sense in those days that smart people who applied themselves could accomplish great things – not necessarily make a lot of money; but to do something they could be proud of.

And that was really the bottom line of being there at that time and place – pride. Not necessarily pride in America (although there was plenty of that to go around); but pride in humanity – that we had broken free of our home shores and ventured out into the larger universe. It was the start of a new age, although one which hindsight has shown to be slow to progress.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

July 14, 2009

Farewell Charles N. Brown

I have commented before on the virtues of Science Fiction Fandom (with a capital F) as a community. As with all effective communities, Fandom is held together by a small number of individuals who served as a glue that helped bind us together - some serving the community by organizing WorldCon and related gatherings, others serving by keeping us all informed of what was happening with others in the community. Charles N. Brown was one of the latter. His is not a name that people outside of Fandom would likely recognize; but the degree to which we in the community are indebted to him is measured by the 29 Hugo Awards he has won over the years.

Back in 1968, Charles N. Brown started Locus magazine (about which I have also written before). It won its first Hugo in 1971, and has been winning them pretty consistently ever since. As I have said before, Locus is to written science fiction what Variety magazine is to the movie industry – the “paper of record” where you go to find out who is doing what in Sci Fi writing and publishing. What deals are made, what books and stories have been published, what rights have been sold, and (relevant to this post) obituaries.

Charles N. Brown died Sunday, peacefully in his sleep. This was not entirely unexpected for the 72 year old who has had his share of health problems over the years. I met him twice (briefly) at WorldCon; but didn’t get a chance to talk to him much. Still his impact on the community has been significant, and his loss will be felt.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 13, 2009

Moderation

As some of you may have noticed, this blog has been getting some attention from a volume source of junk comments. I have therefore switched it into moderation mode. You may still comment; but will need to wait for me to approve your comments before they appear.

This should be transitory; but we will see.

Posted by Steven at 02:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 22, 2009

iPhone

As people who follow me on Facebook already know, I purchased one of the new 32GB iPhone 3GS’s last Friday. While I had wanted to get an iPhone since they first came out, I realized that I needed 32Gb storage on it minimum to do the things I wanted, so I have patiently waited until now to buy one.

I am quite satisfied with the results.

For me, this is largely an exercise in gadget consolidation. In the past I have (in theory) carried around with me:

- my cell phone, to act as a phone and a camera for the occasional opportunistic photos I wanted to take
- my iPod to act as a music player and a photo wallet (although you couldn’t really see the photos unless you connected the iPod to a TV, at least I always had them with me)
- A book to read when I have dead time to fill (or, these days, my Kindle)
- my Nintendo DS to play games when I have dead time to fill and don’t feel like reading

In practice, this is just too much stuff to carry around. There was a period where I always had my phone and iPod (and usually a book) with me; but it became too much of a pain. Likewise I carried around my phone and my DS (and usually a book) for a while; but again the benefit wasn’t enough to overcome the sense of pocket-clutter (and the discipline to keep everything charged). So I always settled back on just having my phone and book (or phone and kindle now) and lived with the lack of tunes, games, photos, etc.

For me, the great thing about the iPhone is that I now have everything I want with me in a single, reasonably sized device.
- it is a great phone
- it is a pretty good occasional camera (with video too now)
- I can store all of my photos on it and actually show them to people in a reasonable way
- I can play games on it when I have a few minutes to kill
- Amazon even has a Kindle-book reader app for the iPhone, although between the size of the screen and the luminescent display, I wouldn’t want to use it that often.
- Plus, I get something I never had – web access in my pocket. Now when I am “out and about” and need to check some web site quickly (perhaps to make some decision on where to go next), I can do so. I can even manage this blog via the iPhone’s brower without problems.

This is a really big win for me.

As noted above, I don’t think the iPhone is a solid replacement for the Kindle, so I will also keep that with me most of the time; but that brings me down to two devices when I travel, which is pretty good. What’s more, I can cut that down to one (just the iPhone) when I have to. As expected, my usage model does mean that I need 32Gb of storage in the device; but now that that’s an option, I’m set.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

June 15, 2009

Absence

Well, I hadn’t planned on taking a 2 week break from blogging.

Here’s the thing – I’ve been inspired of late to write some longer pieces which are unsuitable (both because of length and tone) for posting on my blog; and having written them, I haven’t had the energy to write something appropriate for this venue, so no posts. I may actually be working up to writing a book or two – we’ll see. What’s more, I didn’t write anything for this blog over the weekend (when I usually get ahead of things) and given that this is a busy week, it isn’t clear if I will have the time to do more posts this week. I do have some ideas for posts – it is just a matter of setting aside some of my own mind-share to write them up.

Since I am posting, I thought I’d put out a bit of a life-update.

Last week Apple finally announced a 32Gb iPhone. As previously noted on this blog, that was my minimum spec so I have pre-ordered an iPhone which I will be picking up on Friday. What’s more, since I am a programmer and I will soon have a programmable device with me at nearly all times, I have signed up to be a registered iPhone developer so I can develop some apps for myself. My hope is that some of them will be useful or entertaining enough to make available to others on at the Apple App Store. Unfortunately, this means breaking down and learning a new programming language (Objective-C) and a new Application Programming Interface (Cocoa). For those who don’t know, Apple’s OS X is a completely different operating system than System 9 and before, so while I was somewhat of a virtuoso at the old Mac OS, that is of no value to me now. Until now, I really didn’t have any reason to learn the new system (I don’t use it at work); but perhaps now I do.

Related to that, I have been using a Mac more at home (a hand-me-down from Anne). My desktop PC is quite ill, and I haven’t gotten it fixed yet, so I have been using the Mac for web surfing and writing. Anne is hopeful that the whole process will lure me back into the Mac fold. We’ll see. Certainly if I like developing for iPhone, it is a small step to developing for Mac (iPhone uses a striped down version of the Mac OS X). Plus, for development reasons I will have set up the Mac as the computer I sync my iPhone with, so I will continue to use the Mac for certain things regardless.

On more note: This Thursday (barring all unforeseen), I will officially “join” the Eucharist community (one of the groups of Jesus followers we have been involved with in SF). Their concept of being a member as opposed to just a participant is interesting and I hope to blog on it someday – I think there is some real virtue in their approach.

Well, until I post again. . .

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 29, 2009

Keeping up the pace

When I switched to posting updates about my everyday life onto Facebook, I knew there was a risk that I would not be able to keep up the three post a week pace on my blog. So far I have succeeded; but there have been times it was a close-run thing (such as my creating this post to finish off this week). I have some ideas for next week which may yield another trio of posts; but at some point I will run out of steam. When that time comes, I will likely to switch from three days a week (Monday, Wednesday, Friday) to two days a week (Monday, Thursday) until I have accumulated a bit of a backlog of posts to buffer slow weeks.

So, consider this fair warning - some Wednesday you are likely to find no post. When that happens, look for a post on Thursday and none on Friday.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 10, 2009

Premature Post

Sorry - Wednesday's post got put up today because of user error. I took it back down and it should re-post correctly on Wednesday

Posted by Steven at 03:34 PM | Permalink

May 04, 2009

Settling on Church(es)

Anne and I seem to have settled on being a part of two church communities in San Francisco for the time being. This is actually a bit odd for me – usually God has directed me to a single community into which He wants me to pour all of my energies; but I do have a sense that God wants us involved in both of these groups for now. I’m still not sure how that is going to work out; but I’ll keep my spirit open to God showing us how to do this. We’ve had one schedule conflict we got stuck in this quarter; but should be able to work around that starting next month.

So one of the communities is The Journey, a plant from The Journey church in New York City. It is in many respects a fairly standard modern evangelical church. Big church service on Sunday led by the pastor, a variety of small groups through the week for those who are open to more. What I personally appreciate about The Journey is first its friendliness – Anne and I have quickly made connections with a number of people there; and second that while in many respects they are a “seeker friendly” church (one that structures themselves to be very welcoming to those who are outside of the faith), they in no way compromise the message of the gospel. In too many cases “seeker friendly” translates to “soft-sell God’s message”; but that isn’t the case at The Journey. The music is hip (sometime a bit too hip for me, but I cope), the Sunday service is short, with many breaks, etc. However the message is clear and uncompromising. I’m still not sure what our role is going to be with The Journey; but we are committed to being involved there until God tells us otherwise.

The other community is Eucharist, which is a bit more unique of a group. In many ways they are the embodiment of what I mean when I say “organic church” in that they seem to have set aside all assumptions about what it means to “do church” and are really focused on becoming a community that will attract and serve the people in our area (I say “our” because the community is centered in our neighborhood – Anne and I tend to walk to gatherings). The result is an interesting mix of meetings which continues to evolve as new needs and opportunities are identified. There is a set of meetings which conform to what would be called a simple/house church and Anne and are building some great relationships at that. There is a larger meeting on most Sundays which is focused on studying the book of Acts (so people understand how the first century church operated in their context). Then one Sunday a month there is a special forum (called “The Big Question”) where we talk about big societal questions, not necessarily from a Christian point of view (and invite people who have not been a part of the community to join us). The way I personally look at “The Big Question” is that we can’t always expect people to be willing to talk about the things that matter to us (God, Jesus, etc.) unless we are willing to talk about the things that matter to them (consumerism, ethics of torture, etc.). I think I have a clearer sense of why God wants us involved in Eucharist; but regardless of my understanding, we are also committed to being involved with them until God tells us otherwise.

By the way, both of these communities also have regular service projects as part of their schedule where we get together to help out the larger San Francisco community. I hadn’t realized until we moved up to San Francisco how much I miss that kind of service (at University, I was a brother in Alpha Phi Omega, a national service fraternity, and was used to going on service projects multiple times a month).

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 01, 2009

Mission accomplished

As long time readers of this blog (are there any other kind?) know, in the fall of 2007 I reached a crisis of shelf space. My “shelf of books purchased but unread” had overflowed the shelf, the bookcase, the bedside table and on to the floor around my bed. I had 167 books I owned that I had wanted to read; but had not gotten to yet (this despite reading over a hundred books every year).

So, over the next year I made a concerted effort (particularly in the form of limiting my purchases of new books) and managed to work the total down to 73 (with only 25 new books purchased) – good progress, but not finished. Actually, while it was easy to monitor my progress in the early stages in numerical terms (how did the pending list increase or decrease in a given week), my ultimate goal was geometric. I wanted all of my “pending” books to fit on a particular shelf in such a way that I could identify each of them at a glance (so no book could be obscured in a way that prevented my being able to tell what it was).

Well, as you might have guessed from the title of this post, I reached that goal last night. The count turns out to be 29, although that will obvious vary as the thickness of the books I purchase vary. The main import of this accomplishment is that my “rules of engagement” at Amazon are relaxed. I can now buy whatever books for Kindle I want, as long as I have budget; and I buy whatever paper books I want as long as I have budget AND there is room on the shelf for them (so I need to read a couple more before doing my next order). Feel good to have that back under control.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 29, 2009

I Got Nothin’

As those readers who are also friends know, I have had other thing on my mind this week. I actually do have an essay I prepared for today; but I was never happy with how it came out, and I decided last night to pull it until I can do a better job. I also wouldn’t be surprised if I have no post Friday, although I will certainly try to put something up. I do have ideas for several interesting essays I want to do; but just haven’t had the mind-share to flesh them out and get them ready.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 08, 2009

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

One of the banes of modern life is the phenomena "Out of Sight, Out of Mind". While we all have many people we would like to keep in touch with, we are also all way too busy to be particularly effective at that. The result is that, unless something happens to remind us of someone and we find the time to contact them before the mad rush of daily life drives them out of our minds, we don't actually stay in touch with many people.

I have an additional problem in that I have been bi-coastal – spending my teen's and twenties on the east coast, and the last two decades the west coast. The result is that I have been particularly bad at keeping in touch with people from the first half of my life – not because I am not sincerely interested in what has happened to them; but because there is too little to bring them to mind here on the west coast.

There is however at least a partial solution . . . Facebook

While I signed up for Facebook a couple years ago so I could check something specific out, I never did much with it until recently. Two things changed that. The first is that I got a mailbox full of friend invitations from old co-workers at GCC (people who I definitely wanted to stay in better touch with). The second was that Anne and I discovered that many churches in San Francisco make extensive use of Facebook to keep their communities informed.

Based on that, I decided to take the plunge and embrace Facebook, and am quite happy that I did. For those old (and current) friends who are on the service, it is a great way to stay informed. They are no longer "out of sight" since I see periodic updates on them, and Facebook makes it easy to send notes, so that while they are "in mind" I can quickly contact them if I have anything to share.

I've put a moderate amount of effort into my profile to reflect who I am – including setting up a couple of apps to track my book reading and television watching. I don't think I'll do much more in the immediate future. I am also trying to update my status at least once a day for those people who care about what is happening to me.

The only downside is it leaves me in the position of shilling for Facebook as I try to encourage other old friend who I still know how to contact to join the service. Ah, well, such is modern life. At least most of my old friends are tech-savvy, so getting them online isn't a problem.

One side effect of this is that you are likely to see fewer "life updates" on this blog – I will be posting most of that information on Facebook and keeping this for my more thoughtful contributions.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 25, 2009

Phrase of the week: "Used To"

So as I noted in last Friday's post, Anne and I spent a large part of last week visiting Boston where we both lived 19 years ago. Before that I lived in the Boston area for a bit more than 12 years, Anne for about 5.

So as we wandered around our old home towns, the phrase which most often passed our lips was "used to" as in "Didn’t that used to be a book store?" or "Isn't that were we used to eat pizza?" The number of places we used to frequent that still exist are in a distinct minority. In fact, I had wanted for us to eat our anniversary meal at some restaurant (any restaurant) we used to go to when we were dating, and had to settle on Bartley's Burger Cottage near Harvard Square. Definitely a place we have always enjoyed eating at (and did again); but not exactly the romantic anniversary meal I had hoped for. We enjoyed ourselves regardless.

One thing I did find interesting is that for all the changeovers in individual businesses, the overall feel of the city was largely unchanged. On Newbury Street (a high-end shopping area that we always enjoyed window shopping on), most of the businesses have changed; but they were replaced with the same kind of businesses, so Newbury Street still feels like Newbury Street. Same with Harvard Square – lots of stores and restaurants have come and gone; but the kinds of establishments remained unchanged and so it still feels like the Harvard Square we remember (the only real change to the feel of Harvard Square being that there are fewer book stores). Same was true almost everywhere, although Downtown Crossing felt different – more run down. It is not the central shopping district that it once was. I think that has moved to the two urban malls that have opened up in Boston and Cambridge.

This whole "things have changed but remained the same" is worth noting as it contrasts with our experience in Silicon Valley over the last two decades. In our time here, we have seen a major tech boom followed by a major tech bust, followed by a smaller building boom and building bust. The net result is that beyond grocery stores and movie theatres (which seem to be fairly stable, although there have been some changes to those), it is hard to think of someplace we frequented when we first came here that still exists – that either hasn't been replaced with something "bigger and better" or gone out of business in one of the downturns.

But what's more, many of these changes were part of larger changes to the "look and feel" of the valley. Orchards plowed under to build shopping plazas. Shopping Plazas torn down to build malls. Malls torn down to build apartment complexes. Anything and everything torn down to build office buildings. Many of the places we used to go to not only no longer exist; but are now completely different kinds of buildings than they used to be. Places we used to go for walks are either no longer walkable or are at least less interesting to visit. Even the neighborhood where we live now in San Francisco was mostly warehouses as recently as 10 years ago.

So for all its changes, it was nice for us to see that Boston has managed to maintain its identity over the years. That's not something that can easily be said of Silicon Valley. Perhaps one of the reasons we found ourselves drawn to San Francisco is that many of its neighborhoods have managed to stay true to themselves over the years.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 20, 2009

Boston

If all goes according to plan, I will be in Boston today, recovering from Anne and I celebrating our 21st wedding anniversary last night. We decided to go back to where we met, courted, and married for our anniversary this year (we might have done it last year for our 20th if we hadn't had the opportunity to go to Sydney instead).

Actually, if you are reading this blog post, it means that I was too busy (or had too poor connectivity) to write a post from Boston. I'm leaving this one set up for auto-post in case I don't get a chance to write one on the road.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 11, 2009

27 days without a car

So I drove down to my employer’s Mountain View office today for some meetings. Prior to today, the last time I had used our car was February 11, a month (well, 27 days) ago. I’ve been down to Mountain View several times in that period; but I have been taking CalTrain down and walking from the train station to the office (and back at the end of the day). The main reason I drove today is that Anne had some errands to run in the South Bay, so it made sense for us to come down together. I normally expect to have to drive 2-3 times a month; but it just worked out to be a long stretch this month.

I’m really enjoying life without a car – it was one of my main motivations for moving into the city. I like being able to walk and take public transportation to get around – it had been one of the things I have missed from my time living in Boston. I’m getting good exercise and exploring the city in the process. Sometimes Anne and I get on a bus and ride it to the end of the route just to see where it goes. We’ve found some interesting neighborhoods in the process.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

March 09, 2009

An Interesting Week

Last week proved both exhausting and informative with respect to churches in San Francisco.

On Sunday, at her knitting group, Anne heard that there was someone in our neighborhood who was looking to plant a new church in San Francisco. We didn’t get a lot of details; but expected to hear more in a couple of weeks. This was after we had gone to the church meeting we have been attending (at least until God is clearer about how he wants us to server Him in the city). The church we have been going to is called “The Journey”.

On Monday night we want to a book club meeting at our apartment complex. As I have previously noted on this blog, I believe relationships are the only thing of eternal value, so Anne and I have been looking for new ways to meet people; and a book club sounded like something worth trying. The book we had all read was Mortenson’s “Three Cups of Tea” (interesting book about a man who has been starting schools in rural Pakistan). The meeting was interesting, although the views expressed were rather polarized. There were however some people we thought we might want to get to know more.

Tuesday evening, thankfully, we had a chance to rest.

Wednesday night, we went to a gathering of people who were thinking about starting House/Organic/Simple Churches in San Francisco. There were about 14 people there (including us). Some were seriously committed to starting a house church, while others wanted to understand the concept better. Many were students at a local seminary. A few wanted to start ministries focused on some specific ethnic groups in the city. One of the people (who encouraged the meeting) was someone who provides support and advice for individuals who want to start House Churches in the Bay Area. He is someone our old pastor has been in contact with as well, so it was good to meet him. There was no one else who was in quite the same position as Anne and I; but the plan is for this group to get together monthly so it may serve as a support group for us in the long run. Just as important, we seemed to connect with a few people at a personal level, so some friendships may come out of this.

By Thursday we had heard a bit more about the people Anne heard about Sunday. Turns out the couple who are leading the effort to start the new church live in our building. We arranged to have them over Friday night to get to know each other. Given that (and given how busy we had been the rest of the week), we decided to punt on home group sponsored by The Journey that we have been attending Thursdays.

So Friday, we had the church planters over to share dessert with us. Turns out the wife was one of the people at the Book Club on Monday (and another from Monday was part of their team). They are certainly interesting people, and regardless of whether God leads us to join their church, we hope to be friends with them (that the husband is a Chicago Cubs fan pleased Anne). In the process of talking, they invited us to their monthly team meetings on Saturday.

So, Saturday morning, Anne and I went to the meeting of the team that hopes to plant a new church in San Francisco – over a dozen people. They are starting their small groups this week, and hope to start Sunday meetings in the Fall. Turns out, about half of the team are currently going to The Journey (the church we have been going to) so lots of familiar faces; and the leader of this group has even preached at The Journey when the pastor was away. We still have no clear guidance if we are supposed to join in on this (it is intended to be a more traditionally structured church, so not exactly what I had been hoping for; but I serve at the pleasure of My Lord).

So, lots more cards on the table, and much more for Anne and I to pray about. Plus a few nascent friendships formed. A good week.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

March 06, 2009

Thinking of starting a separate blog

So I am planning to do more serious writing – the kind of stuff that may eventually get put into books I will want to get published. I am also interested in “beta testing” some of it on the web – putting it out there and getting some feedback on it. Now here’s the catch – I made a very deliberate decision when I started THIS blog to publish it under a “non commercial, for attribution” creative commons license. Essentially people are free to republish anything I say here as long as they don’t make money off it, they give me credit, and they preserve those rights in their copy.

But I am thinking that may not be appropriate for prose I hope to eventually publish.

So I am debating starting a parallel blog which is kept under a more traditional copyright. I would post my more serious writing there, and would also put up notices on this blog when I post anything “over there”. An imperfect solution; but it is the best compromise I can think of.

If I do this, it wouldn’t happen very soon – I would want to make sure that the new blog is visually distinct, and right now I have no interest in playing with MovableType templates. But I wanted to put the idea out there in case anyone has an alternative suggestion.

Any thoughts?

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

March 02, 2009

The Kindle 2

For those who do not know, the Kindle (now the Kindle 2) is Amazon’s eBook reader – a device that allows you to download files that contain the text and images from a book and read them on a screen that mimics the behavior of paper (unlike computer or cell phone screens, it doesn’t “glow”; but rather reflects light in shades of gray like a printed page – making it much easier on the eyes).

Various eBook readers have been around for years (including some nice models made by Sony); but they have always lacked one important feature – books. Their advertisements might talk about having “over a million books” available; but the catch is that 99% of those books are public domain works. Now I like to read the occasional classic; but most of the books I am interested in have been published more recently and still have active copyrights. When you look at the books available for most of the eBook readers out there, recent books are significantly underrepresented. The fact is that while Sony might have relationships with companies that produce music and movies, they clearly lack relationships with the print industry (and other eBook developers fair even worse).

That all changed when Amazon decided to get into the market. Clearly Amazon had relationships with almost every book publisher and distributor out there, including fairly small printing houses; and they have managed at last count to get the rights to sell nearly a quarter of a million recent books (you can also download and read those million+ public domain books to a kindle; but Amazon doesn’t bother counting those). I was already using my “wish list” at Amazon to track the books I was interested in, and currently almost 40% of the books I plan to buy are available on the Kindle (compared to 2% at the Sony store that has been around much longer).

So, when Amazon announced the Kindle in November 2007, I was instantly interested. Unfortunately, as readers of the blog know, that was also about the time I had made the decision that my collection of paper books I had purchased but not yet read was out of control and that I needed to spend at least a year focused on clearing out that backlog. Clearly buying a Kindle would be counterproductive to my reading my existing collection of paper books. So I made a deal with myself – I set specific goals for the size of my to-be-read collection and I would allow myself to buy a Kindle as soon as those goals were reached. What’s more (in a move that helped me keep my new book buying in check) I also committed myself to not buy any new books over the year that were available on Kindle. When I did reach my book-backlog goals this past December, rumors of a new model of Kindle were already floating around the industry and I decided to wait to see how they panned out (and to keep working on my existing books until then).

Thus I ended up buying the new Kindle 2 the day it was announced and it arrived last Thursday. I have now finished reading my first book on it (more on that in my next post). The verdict on the Kindle 2– Thumbs very much up!

The bottom line on any eBook reader (beyond the availability of books) is the quality of the screen. I am quite satisfied with the Kindle 2’s. It is very much like reading something that was printed on a very light grey paper. The contrast is good and the fonts are clear. What’s more, you can adjust the font size as you read. Normally, I use the smallest size, which puts about as much text on the screen as a normal 4x6.75 paperback page; but a couple of times when the lighting was poor or my eyes were tired, I switched to a larger font. I hadn’t considered that advantage when I bought the device; but it really gives an advantage over printed books. The pictures in the books are also quite clear since the technology Amazon used does 16 shades of grey per pixel (color e-Ink is still a few years off).

A few other key features of the Kindle – it includes a wireless connection using 3G cell phone technology, so you can access the Amazon store from anyplace you could make a cell phone call. What’s more, you can Email eBooks and documents to the device (so if I wanted a public domain book, all I need to do is find it online and Email it to my Kindle). The Kindle also includes a primitive web browser – not something I would want to use for my everyday surfing; but useful when I want to look something up because of something I read in the book. The Kindle also allows you to set up bookmarks and write notes on passages in the books, and those annotations are backed up to Amazon’s servers, so if your Kindle ever breaks down or is lost, you can recover all of that data from them on a new device.

Is the Kindle2 perfect? No. The user interface would be much nicer with a touch screen (you use a small joystick to navigate menus and to select parts of the text). The biggest weakness is that while it comes with enough storage to hold “1500 books” in the device, the tools they provide to organize the content on your Kindle2 are almost non-existent. You can simply list (at 10 books per page) all of your books sorted by Title, Author, or how recently you access it – the latter being useful to find the few books you most recently looked at. No “folders” or other organization tools. So with 1500 books, you might have to run though 150 pages to find some book in your collection. This has to be fixed.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 18, 2009

Good question, Anne

I took last Friday off, which together with Monday being a holiday meant that I had a nice 4-day weekend. On Monday night Anne asked me a very good question for which I didn't have a great answer, and it has got me thinking (and blogging). Thanks Anne.

As background, several weeks ago Anne asked me another good question; but one which I have thought about a lot and therefore had a ready answer. She asked me "If you knew you only had 2 months to live, what would you do". My answer, without any hesitation, was "write". The reality is that while there certainly things I hope to do someday before I die; in most cases I would not have any regrets if I did not get to do them. I believe I have a life after this one, and that gives a very different sense of perspective and value on what I do here. Will I really care after 1000 years of being with God if I never visited Tokyo in this life? I suspect not.

The only real exception to that is that I have done a lot of thinking in my life about a lot of topics and have not communicated most of my thoughts to anyone else. While I may still be wrong in many of my opinions, to go on to what's next without communicating the fruits of my mental labors (whatever their value) to anyone here would seem like a waste to me. So, if I knew I was going to die soon, I would focus on getting down in black and white as many of my thoughts as I could – kind of my version of "The Last Lecture".

That wasn't however the good question Anne asked this week.

Monday night, Anne first repeated the same question above, and I gave the same reply: "write". Then she asked: if that was true, why did I not spend any of this long weekend writing?

D'oh

What I actually did this weekend was for the most part read and spend 12 hours playing a computer game (I am budgeting the time I spend playing games, and that was the limit I set for myself – I actually ran over by about an hour when I add up the sessions). I had actually intended to write some on Sunday; but I never actually got around to it.

Anne's question is an important one. If writing is what I would spend my last weeks doing, I really should be making more of an effort to spend time doing it now. Just as I am limiting the time I spend playing games, I should be setting aside time each week to write, and long weekends should have extra time allocated to a task that is so important to me.

Now part of the problem is that other than this blog, I'm not sure how to start attacking the other writing projects I have. There are, conceptually at least, several books I would like to write (some fiction, some non-fiction); but every time I have tried to start one I have been overwhelmed by the enormity of the task (a common problem with writers). The recommend solution is to just start writing and worry about the "big picture" later after you have some pieces done, understanding that the pieces may well need to be re-written.

Another part of the problem is that the unread books on my shelf continue to weigh on me psychologically, and I want to spend time reading to reduce their number (that was certainly what motivated me this weekend). Particularly with the Kindle2 showing up in a couple of weeks, I want to focus on clearing out the old "atom" books before I start in with the "bits" ones.

Regardless, Anne is right. If writing is important enough to me that I would spend my last days doing it, I really do need to make a greater effort to do it now. I haven't quite thought through how to organize myself for that; but it is a change I need to make.

Again, thanks Anne.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

February 13, 2009

In word mode

It may have been noticed that I have been blogging a bit more of late. This is a reflection of the fact that I have been in "word mode" as opposed to "code mode" lately. Every couple of years my employer holds a big internal engineering training event – bringing in engineers from all of our offices to get trained on our latest technologies. The latest one is in a couple of week and given my position in the company I am busy preparing presentations and writing documentation.

The side effect of this is that my brain is current revved up to generate words, which I have found is a quite different mode for me than my state of mind when I have been spending most of my time writing code. When I spend most of my day writing code, generating prose is possible but takes much more effort on my part. Thankfully since I have been generating prose most of the day recently, prose for this blog comes quickly and easily for me.

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February 10, 2009

The world is once again safe for ellipsis

Commenters on this blog (one in particular) have been tripping over the fact that the only way I had discovered to filter out a particularly annoying source of unsolicited and unrelated comments was to moderate any post that contained three periods in a row.

Well, it appears that that source of rogue comments has moved on to other things and I am able to remove that moderate rule, so feel free to use ellipsis with abandon... and without fear of moderation.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 09, 2009

Church Sabbatical Over

As long-time readers of this blog will know, the church which Anne and I had been attending (and serving as leaders in) for the past several years had been on sabbatical for the past year – we all took the year off and went together to another local church which offered to host us so that everyone who has served in the church could get a much needed rest.

Well, last weekend marked the end of the sabbatical. At that meeting the pastor announced that he does not feel God is leading him to restart the old church, and that we are all therefore free of our commitments to that church and that he was no longer our pastor. Instead, God seems to be leading our old pastor to start a new ministry – an organic/simple/house church of the kind that I have been talking about in this blog – as soon as he finds himself a non-ministry job. People who were involved in the old church will be welcome to join that new group when it starts; but are also free to go elsewhere as God leads them.

On face value, this is a half surprise. It was well known that our old pastor supported the ideas of the organic church movement, and in fact he was the one who recommended Neil Cole’s book “Organic Church” to the leadership team to read. He clearly viewed the kind of churches I have been talking about as a legitimate alternative to more institutional churches (although he did have some concerns about them as well). On the other hand, I always had the sense that he himself was fairly committed to the institutional model and to being a part of a church or ministry staff, so his decision to go that direction was a bit of a surprise. I actually did think this was the direction God had intended for that group; but I thought it might take longer for people to be ready for it. Perhaps the year away from doing institutional ministry was exactly what was needed.

So, where does all that leave Anne and me?

In San Francisco.

Seriously, while we are supportive of our old pastor’s plans, we continue to think that God wants us to get involved in church up here.

The first church we had been “comfortable” with is now out of consideration. After going there a few more times, we were still finding it hard to connect with people, and I started to get concerned that the Sunday messages were always a “lite” form of the gospel – focused on getting along with each other and not so much on “getting along with God.” Actually, having stepped away from them, I think those two factors are connected – I think the kinds of “soft” sermons that are being preached have encouraged a rather self-absorbed congregation who isn’t that interested in who is sitting next to them in church.

So we are now checking out a second church where we have already had some really great conversations with people before and after service and there are indications that we may be able to get together with some people outside of church. On top of that, all of the sermons we have heard have actually been quite strong. In January there was a series on spiritual disciplines (prayer, bible study, meditation, fasting, etc.) and this week he started a series talking about the “Seven Deadly Sins (and their complimentary virtues)” While, the presentation is fairly cool (he often uses film clips to illustrate points), the pastor does not hesitate to say the hard stuff. This week Anne and I are going to check out one of the home groups.

On top of that, our old pastor has been feeding us contacts from the organic/simple/house church movement. Turns out there’s another Vineyard pastor who left his institutional church to start a house church network and is trying to get the denomination to formally support this as an alternative model. Our pastor made introductions for us as well, and I have started following this guy’s blog. What’s more, this other pastor was able to put Anne and me in contact with another (non-Vineyard) simple church leader in our area, and he was able to introduce us to 4 other people in San Francisco who want to start an organic/simple/house church network here. We all plan to meet in a couple weeks to start to get to know one another. So it is quite possible that we may be starting something like that by the end of the year.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 04, 2009

Of Buskers and Beggers

On Monday, as I went into work there was a street musician (a known "busker" in the UK and elsewhere, affording me the alliterative title for this essay) performing in the MUNI station. He was bluegrass fiddler of significant skill, and with very little thought I dug into my pocket and dropped a bit of money in his violin case. While I don't know the man's story, I would hope based on his skill that he is not homeless; but rather just a musician plying his trade for the public.

As I walked from the station to my office, I passed two of the "regular" beggars who ply that route. One is a man who clearly is much the worse for wear from his life on the street; but his slurred speech and distinctive smell would seem to indicate that some of his wear is self-inflicted by the abuse of alcohol. I passed him by.

The second regular beggar is a man in his 20's who positions himself just far enough away from a popular sandwich place to not be annoying, while close enough to hit up the customers of that establishment. I've seen him walk around, and he appears to be physically healthy but I recognize that there are other kinds of issues which can interfere with a person's ability to find gainful employment. I felt led to give this guy money on one occasion; but not Monday.

On my lunch walk I passed by another MUNI station, and there was a homeless man selling the "Street Sheet". For those unfamiliar with it (or the several institutions like it, such as "The Big Issue" in the UK or "Spare Change News" in Boston), the Street Sheet is a small newspaper published by a homelessness advocacy group. Homeless individuals who are willing to abide by the organization's rules are given copies of the paper for free for them to sell for $1 and are allowed to keep all of the money they collect. While the 8-page tabloid is clearly not worth $1, I make it a point to buy one whenever I see someone selling a new issue.

Later on my walk I passed by an older man wrapped in blankets sitting on a vent. He was not asking for change – in fact he said nothing. He just stared ahead with hopeless eyes that seemed to see nothing (just as most people did not seem to see him). There was a part of me (the Holy Spirit?) who wanted to do something for the man; but I didn't know what to do. Perhaps I should have just talked with him, let him know that someone knew he was there; but instead I walked past him and afterwards felt like the Scribe or Pharisee in the story of the "Good Samaritan".

While all this was going on, I was reminded of a homeless man who frequented our old church in Fremont – I'll call him "John". John would show up to most services and load up plates of food (yes, more than one) from the spread that was there for people during the break in the service, often taking a substantial percentage of the available pastries. He would do likewise at other church events. Here's the thing, as we got to know him we discovered that he was a trained optometrist, and has a brother who is a professional living in L.A. He was quite open about the fact that he could get a job if he wanted to; but chose to live on the street and off of the generosity of others. While John remained welcome within our church community, people knew better than to give him money.

These six people provide a good overview of moral landscape I am trying to find my way around living in San Francisco. There is so much need I see around me, and I just don't know how to respond. I am clearly willing to help those who are making an effort to help themselves; but I recognize that the people who most need help are those who are unable to make such an effort – people who might not be able to do more than ask for change, or perhaps not even be able to do that. Yet some of those people would simply use the money to buy things that would only make their condition worse, and some are in fact able to support themselves and live on the street by choice. That may be only a minority of the people I see on the streets; but their existence is a poison in my mind that I must struggle against.

I try to listen for God's voice within me to know when to help and when to walk by; but it isn't easy, particularly when that voice seems to indicate that what I should give is not my money; but my time (clearly there is work to be done in me). Anne and I have talked about putting together some tiny care packages (non-perishable and no-cooking-needed food and drink) that we could carry around with us wherever we go in the city and give out to people we see. Our assumption is that people who really are hungry would appreciate it, while those who insist on wanting money are more likely to be those who would use that money for unhealthy purposes.

I don't have answers; but God made a point of making me aware of all those people Monday and I thought I would share it.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

January 21, 2009

Mortality

I discovered in a conversation I had with Anne last week that something I had meant to be text in some of my posts last year had somehow slipped into the subtext and away from view. This short essay is to make explicit what I had meant to say and somehow missed.

Simply this: I'm getting old, and I am becoming increasingly aware of my mortality.

That's what was really behind several of most posts last year about sorting through my life and trying to decide what I will actually get around to doing. I really thought I had said this in those posts; but I want back and looked at them after I talked with Anne, and she was right.

I will turn 50 this year, and while I expect I have a few decades left, the "deadline" for finishing anything I want to do in this life is starting to come into view, and I am seriously evaluating how I invest myself based on that recognition. What really is of value for me to do in my remaining years? What do I want to make sure I get done before this life is over?

To give a sense of how seriously I take this, I have even found myself questioning spending so much time reading. What value is there is stuffing more information and ideas into my head if that's where it stays? If I don't have some plan to make good use of what I have learned over the last 50 years, what's the point of learning more over the next 50? That's one reason I have been thinking about writing more – not just this blog; but ordering my life so I start writing some of the books I have always wanted to do.

Taking the sabbatical at church has also made clear to me how important it is for me to have some consistent outlet for my faith. While the growth of my personal relationship with God is of value beyond this life and therefore always a worthwhile investment, I am getting more and more aware of how important it is for me to pass on what I have learned (and am still learning). The question is – what means does God have planned for me to do that?

Of course, you don't have to be 50 to start thinking this way; but it sure has helped me focus my attention.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 13, 2009

Lazy, misc

Yes, I've been lax in posting to this blog regularly. I actually wrote a couple of week's worth of posts when I was on vacation; but when it came time to put them up I just wasn't comfortable with them. My thoughts on the subjects are still in transition, and while what I wrote may have accurately captured by thinking at the moment, my ideas continue to evolve. Since vacation my focus has been elsewhere (mostly on work).

Anne and I did check out another church in SF that we might get involved in. It was interesting enough that we plan to go back next week. Anne has previously made an observation about our church attendance – we have never started going to a church that was more than 5 years old. Whether by God's plan or our preference, we like being a part of building a community, not participating in an established one. This is relevant since the church we had checked out in November and December is well established (the current pastor is the son of the founding pastor), while the one we visited Sunday was planted only a couple years ago.

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January 07, 2009

Macworld

I haven't been to a Macworld Expo trade show in quite a while. I haven't been using a Mac professionally since I left Apple over a decade ago, and haven't been using it personally for a few years (although I do own one these days – a hand-me-down from Anne). So, the motivation to go up to the city for the show hasn't been there. I think I have been once in the last decade.

However, this year I don't have much of an excuse – the Moscone Convention Center (where the San Francisco Macworld is held) is less than a mile from either work or home. So I took a long lunch on Tuesday and cruised the trade-show floor. On the way over I realized that not only had I not been to a Macworld in a while; but I hadn't been to a trade show of any kind in a while (while my employer maintains a presence at several shows, there is little value in anyone going other than to work the booth, and so far I have avoided that).

Macworld Expo was mildly interesting for me. I did purchase one item (more on that in a moment); but more than anything I was struck with how little I actually used computers for these days – not just how little I use Macs, but even Windows. Seeing all of the software and hardware that was available, there just wasn't a lot of it I could imagine using. I surf the web a lot, so I need a good browser. I do Email. I compose blog posts (and some occasional creative writing), so I need a fairly basic text editor; but I really don't care about any of the fancy formatting features (it all gets lost when I paste it into my blog). I use a spreadsheet a bit (some budget tracking, a couple of simple databases), although again I only use a fairly minimal set of features. I download, organize, and occasionally clean up pictures from my camera; I don't really modify my pictures much – usually just a bit of color correction and perhaps some exposure compensation.

So other than the browser, I use the basic features of 4 programs. Not much to make me want something new (or even to upgrade to the latest version of the software I have).

The one program I did purchase at Macworld is "Delicious Library 2" (from Delicious Monster). It is a Book, CD, DVD, etc. cataloging program to help people keep track of their collections. Scan the UPC code for an item (either using the camera built into the Mac or an optional Bluetooth scanner), and it gets the information about it off the web (actually off the Amazon web site using their public interface) and adds it to the database. What's more, you can publish the collection to their server and even access it from an iPhone (useful once I buy an iPhone)

For me, I am forever forgetting what I already own, but hand entering the info on all of the books, CDs, and Movies I own has always put me off creating a database. I had previously looked at Collectorz (a similar PC program); but with them you have separate databases for books, CDs and DVDs, and have to pay for separate programs for each; and it was never worth it. With this, I just scan in the UPCs and the program does the rest. Well worth it.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 01, 2009

Another Year

Not a great one by most measures for the world as a whole (although the election of Obama might be considered a bright spot – we’ll know for sure in 4 years).

Ignoring the usual kinds of health issue for people our age, Anne and I are doing well. The two “stand out” stories for the year for us were: first that this was the year our church went on sabbatical as a whole. An interesting experience and it did give me more time to step back and rethink my own views about church. The second big story was our move to San Francisco which will certainly color the next few years of our lives.

For me personally, it was a pretty good year. At work I managed to deliver my main project ahead of schedule with more features than originally promised. Spiritually, I continue to feel God is working in my life and I continue to grow closer to Him. I also managed to make a serious dent in my reading backlog.

So what’s in the work for next year?

First Anne and I need to figure out what God wants to us to do for a church here in the city. There’s one we have found that we are comfortable going to; but both of us are getting a sense that it isn’t where God wants us. I have a short list of other churches for us to check out and remain open to finding out about others. And, of course, there’s the option of starting something new of our own.

My second big goal is to lose weight – in fact that’s one of the factors in our decision to move to the city. You tend to do a lot more walking when you live in the city, so exercise becomes a part of daily life as opposed to something you have to schedule time for. So I have been walking home from work most days that I am in the city (1.7 miles). I walk to the theatre when I go to movies (1 mile). On those days when I don’t need the car when I work out of the Mountain View office, I take CalTrain down and walk from the station to the office (1.2 miles) and back. I also tend to take walks for lunch (1.5-2 miles) to explore the city a bit – I keep a map on my office wall to track where I have been and to plan new routes each day. On the other side of the equation, Anne and I have also been much more careful about how much we are spending on food (both groceries and restaurants), so we are also managing our calorie intake.

The result is that I have already lost 20 pounds since we moved to the city and keep losing at a slow but steady pace (the rate of loss is such that I am confident that it is sustainable and that I will be able to keep it all off in the long run). I’d be quite happy if I lost another 55 pounds over 2009 (I need to lose a bit more than that; but I don’t want to push it).

So that’s my year. How’s yours?

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

December 08, 2008

Alas poor Forry . . .

Alas poor Forry . . .

. . . I knew him, as did most of Science Fiction Fandom.

Last week, at the age of 92, Forrest J. Ackerman (“Forry” (or 4E) to just about everyone) died, and Science Fiction as a genre and as a community is poorer for it.

For those who are not SciFi fans, Forry (among many other things) was the guy who coined the term “SciFi”. He also discovered and encouraged a teenager with a gift for writing that you may have heard of – Ray Bradbury. Actually his contributions to Science Fiction as a writer, publisher, agent, actor, and collector are numerous – the media would often refer to him as “Mr. Science Fiction”- but first and foremost Forry was a fan with a heart for Fandom as a community.

I met him a couple of times at World Science Fiction Conventions, and was always impressed with his openness to talk to anyone who shared his passion for Horror or Science Fiction. He was always willing to lend a hand (or even money) to fellow fans. There are many science fiction writers today who owe their careers to a “leg up” from Forry. His home (the “Ackermansion”) was probably the best science fiction museum in the world with over 300,000 items he had collected over the years; and every Saturday, Forry opened his home to anyone who wanted to tour it (no charge). That’s the kind of man he was.

From 1959 to 1999, Forry was responsible at WorldCon for giving out the “Big Heart Award” to a fan (whether professional or amateur) who has served the community with generosity and magnanimity. I was there at LACon-IV in 2006 when the community not only gave the award to Forry; but renamed it the “Forrest J. Ackerman Big Heart Award.” No one disserved the honor more.

Forry, you will be missed.

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November 28, 2008

500 posts

This is my 500th post on this blog (comments are currently up to 650), and it is a good time to consider the “state of the blog”.

I have to admit I am a bit ambivalent about it right now. Certainly the rate of two new posts a week (excluding the book posts which are a bit artificial) which I have been on for several months (with a few misses) is a comfortable one for me – I seem to have that much to say on an ongoing basis without it feeling like a burden. What’s more, I have a whole collection of posts that are coming together in my mind which should keep me busy for a while.

On the other hand, comments are down, and it does feel sometime like I am talking to no one out there. Some of that, I am sure, is a consequence of the number of posts that have been on fairly mundane topics, like our move to SF. I’ll see if things change if I start posting on weightier matters again. However, there hasn’t been a new commenter in long time, and perhaps we are reaching the point where those few who have been a part of this blog have said everything they have to say to each other.

Nonetheless, I remain committed to maintaining this blog at a slow pace of 2-3 posts a week (Monday, Wednesday, Friday or Tuesday, Friday) at least through the end of the year. I will re-evaluate it again in January.

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November 26, 2008

A Year of Book Posts

A Year of Book Posts

As noted Monday, this week marks the 52ns and final weekly book post on this blog. It was an interesting experiment (and certainly one I benefited by); but as there seems little interest in it from my meager readership, I will pass on it for the future.

A quick summary of the year:

I started with 167 books waiting for me on my “to be read” shelves. Actually the situation could better be described as their “overflowing from my too be read shelves”, hence my intent to discipline myself on purchasing new books this year and see how far I could drive that number down.

Over the last year I have:
- read 110 books
- punted 11 books
- purchased 25 books
- borrowed 2 books

Leaving me with a count of 73 remaining (and yes, in the last few weeks I did consider making a final push to get that down to 67 so I would have reduced my initial number by an even hundred; but there were too many other things I also wanted to do).

So, what now?

First, as stated, I will discontinue the weekly posts. I will still post reviews of particularly significant books; but no longer list all of the books I have read. However, since I have found the collection of posts quite useful for me at times (being able to go back and figure out what book it was that had something I was remembering), I will maintain on my computer my own little diary of books read, including the running count of my backlog.

I had considered replacing the weekly book posts with a shortened diary post, simply listing books read, TV watched, movies seen, games played, etc.; and may in fact implement that at some point; but my current plan is to not do so immediately.

As to my smaller but still not small backlog of books, my goal remains to get it down to a single row of books on a single shelf (roughly 20-25 books). On the other hand, there are clearly books available now that I am far more interested in reading than the ones I currently have pending. My solution then is that until that goal is reached I will limit myself to purchasing in any month a number of books equal to half the number I read in the previous month. Thus on aggregate, half of the books I will be reading will be newly purchased and half will be from my backlog. At that rate, I should reach my goal sometime late next year.

I had also intended at this point to purchase an Amazon Kindle E-book reader for myself. I still want to buy a kindle; but plan to wait until after the new year to do so.

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November 12, 2008

Thinking

There's a bunch of ideas for blog posts that have been rolling around in my mind, unfortunately none of them have come to fruition for me to post today. A bunch of them are likely to end up as a long series that will run several months (not unlike the church series I did last year), occasionally interrupted by interesting life events.

While it may change form by the time I start posting it, the basic theme of the series is: "the first ten lessons I would teach if I were starting a new church". Essentially what are the core concepts I would want everyone to be on the same page on if I was starting something new.

Now I have a fairly clear idea of several of the later lessons and could write them now; but the first few are proving to be more challenging that I had expected. Part of the issue is that I am less certain these days of how to explain exactly what Jesus did on The Cross than I once was.

For almost all my Christian walk, I have been part of churches that taught "substitutionary atonement" – essentially that Jesus paid the penalty for our sins when he died on the cross; and I can explain the whole of the Bible based on that theological perspective. In fact, I wasn't even aware that there were other non-heretical points of view.

However, this past year I have come to appreciate that people like C. S. Lewis and the whole of the Eastern/Orthodox church have a different way to explain Jesus' work on The Cross (referred to by some as "Christus Victor" theology). The effect is the same; but the emphasis is different, sometimes in subtle but perhaps important ways.

I am therefore loath to write up a description of the meaning of The Cross (which strikes me to be something I would want to establish early) until I either resolve this or have some way to explain things that provides a bridge between "substitutionary atonement" and "Christus Victor" (which is what I'd really like to do).

Anyway, since I had no post today, I thought I'd at least explain why I have no post today, and thus create a post.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink

October 10, 2008

Whither Church

One of the still-open issues with regard to our move to San Francisco is what will Anne and I be doing to be a part of a community to fellow believers in the city. This is slightly complicated by the fact that we have an outstanding commitment to support our old church at least until the end of the sabbatical in February (including continuing to serve on the leadership team). Our compromise on this is to go to our old church every 2-3 weeks (about a 45 minute drive on Sundays) and investigate other options in the city in between.

Before we signed the lease at the new place we did identify at least one church we thought we would be comfortable at in the city; but that is a long way from having peace that God wants us to get involved there (and in fact our "comfort" is not always what He is interested in). I've since been back to that church a couple of times and continue to like what I see; but have yet to sense anything in my spirit that would indicate we are supposed to go there.

Last week we tried out yet another church, and very quickly both of us got a strong sense that it was not the place for us. Not that there was anything obviously "wrong" with the place (although the message was a bit more political than we like – I'd be interested in visiting again after the election). In some respects it was actually quite nice; but both of us sensed that it wasn't what God had planned for us.

The other question is if God wants us to be involved in an institutional church at all. I have written a lot in this blog about how I believe in the Simple Church movement; but until now God has kept me involved in fairly traditional churches. This move might be when God has us switch to something more house-church-like. Then the question becomes, do we find an existing network of house churches to be a part of, or do we start one on our own.

So far, I am comfortable that we are doing what we are supposed to be doing in the transition; but I have no clear sense yet of what God has planned for us beyond that.

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October 08, 2008

Why SF

I’ve had a number of people ask me these past few weeks why we are moving to San Francisco. There were even interesting rumors at work that this was part of some re-org that was yet to be announced. The truth is that this was purely a lifestyle choice for Anne and me. We are and have always been “city people” and this was our chance to get back into city living.

This past week provided a number of examples of why we like cities.

Last Friday the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra gave a free lunch concert in at a plaza near my office. Anne came over and joined me for the performance. Sunday we went to a members-only reception at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and toured a couple of the exhibits there. Then, after a short break at home, we spent Sunday evening at a free Bluegrass music festival which was running all weekend in Golden Gate Park. Five stages scattered around the park with new acts every hour and a half at each stage. Big name people too – we saw Earl Scruggs (only surviving member of the Blue Grass Boys who gave the genre its name), Rickey Skaggs, and Emmylou Harris.

All of these events were free (OK, we had to pay for membership in SFMOMA; but we do that anyway). None required us to drive or park anywhere. They were all things we could do on the spur of the moment. Cities tend to provide those opportunities. While there are cultural activities down in the South Bay (as the region where we had been living is know), they tend to require more planning and more cash, not to mention driving and parking.

The only thing we didn't do this weekend that we hope to do more of is go to a play. We made it to a few TheatreWorks productions down in the South Bay; but it was never very convenient. Our hope is that having the San Francisco theatre district a MUNI ride away, we will be able to go to stage productions more often.

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October 03, 2008

Blogging again (I hope)

So things are settled down enough now that I hope to resume my M-W-F blogging schedule next week. First couple of weeks may be lighter fair; but I should have something to say.

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September 28, 2008

Mostly Moved, Partially Up

Anne and I are not quite where we expected to be at this point; but we are certainly much more in San Francisco than in Mountain View.

The move itself went well. The movers took the bulk of our stuff up on Tuesday with only a couple of minor casualties. My room and the kitchen are largely unpacked, the living room and Anne’s room less so. There’s a bit left in the old place for us to sort through and clean up; but we have a couple of weeks to do that.

The problem has been with AT&T – we ordered our phone, internet, and television service from AT&T (the only option in this building) on September 9 to be installed on September 20 (before the actual move). We have only today (September 27) have cable and internet access and we still don’t have a home phone number. What’s more, I just discovered that I am unable to send Emails via this internet connection.

By the way, for those of you who know us outside of this blog, we do plan to send out new contact information as soon as we have the phone issues resolved.

I have other things to blog on; but at this point getting caught up with my web surfing is the priority.

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September 03, 2008

Busy Packing

As may be obvious from my missed posting dates, I am busy (and expect to continue to be busy) for the rest of the month getting ready for the move - on top of the fact that I am still deeply engaged with my project at work. I will try and post at least once a week; but beyond that, no promises.

My weekly book posts will certainly be one of the casualties this month – given everything else I have to do, I will be happy if I finish reading two books this month: the one I am currently reading, and Neal Stephenson's new (900 page) book which comes out in the middle of this crunch. The move has however forced a decision on culling my to-be-read books – no reason to transport to San Francisco books I may not ever get around to reading.

Another inconvenience of the timing of this move is that Spore, Will Wright's new game also comes out in a week, and I won't have the desired time to play it. Ah well.

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August 27, 2008

San Francisco Bound

So, barring all unforeseen, Anne and I will be moving to San Francisco by the end of September. We found an apartment in the South Beach area (a recently gentrified part of town near AT&T Baseball Park). Within a block of the apartment is a CalTrain (commuter rail) station, a MUNI (SF subway) station, a Safeway grocery store, a Borders book store, a branch of the public library, and numerous eateries.

I know the neighborhood fairly well since I spent a year commuting from Mountain View to my employer’s San Francisco office and often took CalTrain to MUNI to work and so spent time in the area (sometimes stopping to shop or eat on the way home). The plan is to work 3-4 days a week out of the San Francisco office (it will take me about 15 minutes to get to the office from the new apartment), and 1-2 days at the Mountain View office (about a 45 minutes to drive, although if I can get back into bicycling shape, I might take CalTrain down and bike from the train station to work – a little over 2 miles).

With this post I have also inaugurated a new category of posts on this blog: “San Francisco” which I will use to post comments on things that Anne and I discover in the city – shops, restaurants, odd museums, parks and the like – as well as observations on city life. Not sure how often I’ll post on things like that; but I expect there will be some things worth saying. Certainly exploring the city is going to be one of the things consuming my attention and I have always intended this blog to reflect what I am thinking about.

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August 20, 2008

Discarding the Roads Not Taken

As Janbergs has noted in one of his comments on this blog, Anne and I have been on a "getting rid of STUFF" crusade for a couple of years. In that cause, I spent a part of this passed Saturday at the storage locker going through my boxes (I still have one more trip to finish that project).

What I noticed is that much of what I kept in the locker were things I was holding on to with the expectation of needing them whenever I "got back to doing" one thing or another. There were the notes I had on leadership training that I'd want if I ever got back into motivational speaking. There were blank maps and game pieces I'd want if I ever got back into board game design. There were books on various topics I kept in case I ever got back into doing whatever they were about.

This is significant because I put a lot of mental energy this year into thinking about what things I realistically might "get back to doing" and which I would not. This was mostly an exercise in prioritization. If I had time, I'd like to do all these things; but some were clearly more important to me than others. By taking the time to think through what I most wanted to accomplish, I was able to prune off some branches of my life to make it more likely that other branches would be successful.

That was the theory.

Sorting through the boxes in the locker was when it came down to practice – actually getting rid (one way or another) of the things I would no longer need given my earlier decisions on roads I not longer planned to travel with my life. It was tough in many cases - once you have hung on to something for many years, getting rid of it can be difficult. Nonetheless, I persevered and stuck with my earlier decisions; and as a result I got rid of over ten boxes of stuff from the locker. Not bad.

I still have a lot there – mostly books I want to re-read and games I have no room to play right now but which I'd love to play in the future. I still have a couple small boxes of mementos from my life – silly stuff that beings back deep memories for me. However, I am quite satisfied with my progress.

There's another 6 medium boxes to go through and one large box that contains (with lots of padding) various commemorative glasses I have accumulated over my life. Still not sure what to do with the glasses – all of them represent memories for me; but they take up a lot of space and I really don't have anyplace to display them. Is the memory-content sufficiently high to justify the cost of keeping them? I won't know until I actually look at them again.

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August 15, 2008

Moving on?

Anne and I have been at our current address for several years and we are both thinking that the time has come to move someplace else in the area. There are many aspects of our situation we believe we are in a position to improve – in fact the problem is that there are too many different ways we could improve upon our living situation and it isn't clear which ones we should focus on.

First, there is the fact that we are still renting. Between the high cost of housing here in Silicon Valley (at its peak, a small 2 bedroom house could easily cost more than a million) and our investing our monies in things other than accumulating a down payment (travel, etc), we have never gotten around to buying a place of our own. However with the housing credit crisis, prices in the area are in near free fall (houses are selling for half of what people originally paid for them and two-thirds of the real estate listings are foreclosures) and our ability to set aside some money the past few years, buying is now a very serious option if we go to one of the bedroom communities in the area. It may mean a bit more of a commute to for me; but getting into the housing market near a low has a lot of advantages. We could also move closer to our church which would open up more social opportunities.

On the other hand, as I have explained before, Anne and I are really more city people. We like being able to walk to places. We like the abundance of cultural activities. We like the energy of city life. For the year I worked out of our San Francisco office, I hated my commute; but I loved the access I had to the benefits of the city. So the other clear option is to move up to the city. Prices are, of course, still higher up there and while we can afford the rent for a nice apartment in the city, it is not at all clear we could afford to buy a place there (at least not in a neighborhood we'd want to live in). My company would love me to work out of the home office in San Francisco, so that isn't an issue.

Personally, I'm somewhat ambivalent between these options. There are advantages of both but they are very different advantages. While I am not interested in moving just for the sake of moving (or for minor advantages – moving is too much of a pain for that); as long as we gain some significant advantages in the move, I am up for either option (or anything else). Anne and I are spending significant time praying about this to see if God has any preference in the matter, and in the mean time we are seriously investigating both options. Our current lease runs out at the end of October (although we have the option of going month to month after that), so we are looking to take action this Fall or Winter.

I should note that what Anne and I really want is to end up in London or back in Boston/Cambridge and we keep investigating opportunities that come up in those directions. So far, nothing has panned out. My company even has an office in London; but so far all of the openings for me there have been undesirable.

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August 06, 2008

My own words

I’ve been struggling writing the next essay in my “The Mission of the Church” series. I intend it to be an explanation of the differences between The Kingdom of This World and the Kingdom of God. The problem isn’t actually producing an essay – I can generate pages of text on the subject with ease. The problem is that whenever I step back and look at what I have written I realize that I am just repeating things that I have heard or read from other people. I’m not explaining the ideas; I am repeating how other people have explained the ideas.

Now this might not seem like a problem – it would not be unusual for a blogger to simply repeat explanations heard elsewhere – but I have some deep-seated issue with doing that. Sure, I might quote a phrase that I think is particularly well turned; but it is psychologically important to me that my explanations of things be my own. I get very unsettled when I am put into a position of using someone else’s verbiage to explain something.

Having realized the source of my blockage, I started to look into myself to figure out where that little personality quirk came from, and quickly found the answer.

When I was 13, my mother took me to Bill Gothard’s “Institute for Basic Youth Conflicts” (now call the “Institute in Basic Life Principles”) – a week-long seminar on the practical application of Christian principles to real-world situations. That week had a far more profound influence on who I am than any other single week of my life. I’ve even returned to the seminar twice (one of the perquisites of having graduated from the seminar is that you are allowed to attend again for free as many times as you want.)

Not that I agreed with everything Gothard taught. Even at the age of 13, having only been a Christian for 3 years, there were points he made that I didn’t quite buy. Now, with many more years of growing in Christ, the list of issues I have with the specifics of Gothard’s teaching has grown substantially. However, underneath the specific applications which he presents in the seminar, there is a foundational layer of attitudes about things like authority, responsibility, respect, honor, and the like which remain true and very central to my identity.

Which leads me to some of what Gothard said on the last day of the seminar the first time I attended (I noticed this was not repeated when I returned to the seminar as an alumnus years later). There was no book we were given as part of the course – just a binder with pages to takes notes on. Gothard explained that what he was teaching was based on a “life notebook” he kept – his notes on all the things he had learned about life and Christianity; edited and re-edited as his understandings of things changed and grew. He told the crowd that he did not publish it in book form (which, by the way, he does now) because it was just his understanding of things, and that it was important that everyone develop their own understanding. He said that we would be tempted to immediately go tell other people about what we learned; but that we should resist doing that. He said we should all take the time to apply what we learned to our own lives, and only after we had seen these principles at work for ourselves, should we go and find our own way to express them to others – not repeating information second hand; but communicating our own first-hand experience.

Like I said – that week had more influence on who I am than any other week of my life. Even now, the idea that I should not teach something unless I have processed it through my own life first and found my own way to express it drives how I blog.

Of course, what this means is that someplace deep down I know that I really haven’t put my intellectual understanding of what it means to spread the Good News of the Kingdom of God into practice, and therefore have no way of my own to express what it means. That is perhaps the point God has been trying to get through to me. I need to go out and start doing what I know before I start to tell other people about it.

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July 16, 2008

Busy and Introspective

As of this week I’m switching back to making only three posts a week again – the book post on Monday and (I hope) new essays on Wednesday and Friday. The reason is twofold.

First, this past week I started leading the architecture development for the next phase of my project at work. This is consuming a great deal of my mindshare and what free time I will have is likely to be focused on getting mentally prepared for the next day. Not a great environment for thinking deep thoughts and writing them up for the blog.

Second, I sense a bout of introspection coming on. There are some things that God is challenging me on and I expect to be using yet more of my limited mindshare processing how God is leading me. In the long run, this may provide to be a subject for many blog posts; but in the short term I need to understand things better before I can articulate them. I will make a quick attempt in Friday's post; but what I say now may bear little resemblance to the understanding I have at the end of this process.

Between the two issues, blog posts may be a bit unreliable for the next couple of months. I will try to stick to my (reduces) schedule, but no guarantees.

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July 07, 2008

A nice little vacation

Last Thursday and Friday were company holidays, so by using only three vacation days I could get nine straight days off – an obvious choice. What’s more, I seem to have made good decisions about how to spend that time.

On Monday and Tuesday, Anne and I took a little mini-vacation up in San Francisco (about 45 minutes North of where we live). We went to a nighttime Cubs/Giants baseball game at AT&T Park and had a great time. I previously had been to a RedSox/Athletics game over at Cisco Park in Oakland (my only other Major League game) and was nonplused; but this was a much more enjoyable experience - a nicer park with better announcing and tastier food. On the way to the game we did some photography, and after it we spent a night in a hotel near fisherman’s wharf. The next day we saw an exhibit of Chihuly glass at the de Young Museum. The whole experience was a wonderful break that felt like a much longer vacation.

Thursday I spent a fair chunk of the day starting to sort through all of the stuff in my storage locker. While Anne had managed to whittle down her stored stuff over the last couple of years, I haven’t spent much time on it until now. My main goal was to reduce the size of my board game collection – identifying a significant subset to sell off; but those boxes were in the back and I spent almost all of my time going through the boxes in front. Managed to empty five boxes into the trash, identified a half box of books to give to the library, and three boxes of games to sell; although I only just started to work on the games when my energy gave out (I own a LOT of games).

The rest of the week was spent doing your basic resting – reading, playing games, watching DVDs, etc. The net effect of it all was that I feel like I had a vacation, I’m rested, and I also got something useful done. A nice little vacation, all in all.

Now today we start the architecture phase of my next big project at work – it’s a good thing I am ready for this.

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June 29, 2008

Wordle, Reprise

A "bonus post" this week - I found a way to get the text for my whole blog, including even people's comments and my replies, and ran it thourgh wordle.net .

Even when considering all of my posts, God and People still loom large, although Anne has dropped off the radar (she has her own blogs - I let her speak for herself).

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June 25, 2008

Wordle me

I've always loved word-clouds (tag-clouds, whatever) – the diagrams that some web sites use that display the common tags/words used on the site where the more common the word is, the larger it appears in the diagram. By providing a quick visual gestalt, they sometimes can provide real insight in what going on beyond what the author is trying to say.

I used wordle.net to produce a couple of these diagrams for the larger subsets of this blog. Wordle provide some nice options for how to format the diagram (although I am not thrilled with the choices of color palettes).

Here's what you get when you feed all of my "faith" posts into Wordle. Click though to get a full sized version (so you can read some of the smaller words).

I'm reasonably pleased with that – a big GOD in the middle with people being second, followed by words like church, Christian, relationship. The only odd thing is how small Jesus comes out. For a Christian I actually don't seem to talk about Jesus by name much. Hmmm.

Here's all of my "Life" posts. Again, click through to get the full-sized version.

Time, People, and Blog seem to be the big words. I also note that time related words like week, day, year also come in strong, which I guess makes sense since I am often talking about what happened last month, next year, etc. The word "interesting" also comes out strong. Interesting.

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June 09, 2008

Blogging, increased

Two real posts each week is turning out to be too few, so I am increasing my schedule. Starting next week, I will be doing three “real” posts each week – on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. My weekly book post will be done over the weekend whenever I finish the last book of the week. BTW – how interested are people in my book posts? Regardless of the feedback I get, I will continue to do them until the end of November (so I will have done it for a full year), but I’d like to know if there is value in my continuing them after that.

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May 09, 2008

Six Word Memior

I've been tagged by Barry to participate in the Six Word Memoir meme:

1. Write the title to your own memoir using 6 words.
2. Post it on your blog.
3. Link to the person that tagged you.
4. Tag five more blogs.

Here's mine:

A life exploring transitions between concepts

subtitled

How does this result in that?

I will however descline step 4, although I would welcome Melissa trying this (or Ro in a comment).

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May 07, 2008

Maker Faire

This passed Saturday Anne and I went to the annual "Maker Faire", sponsored by Make magazine (and its sibling publication Craft). This is a gathering of people who, well, like to make stuff. Everything from people who knit (Anne's focus) to people who build their own musical instruments from scratch, to people who do model rocketry, to people who build robots and even folks who build custom Victorian-style cases for computers. The common theme of the whole show is the value of hand crafted goods and the knowledge of how to do things for yourself.

We had a great time, although there were only two talks Anne and I went to together. One by a knitting humorist who I also enjoy, and another that was a demonstration of molecular gastronomy where the presenter created carrot juice "caviar" – small beads of carrot juice with a thin outer membrane and liquid inside. I also saw a talk by the creator of the character McGyver (a patron saint to this crowd) and one on the recent re-creations of Babbage's Difference Engine (including one made from children's construction kits). This on top of visiting hundreds of booths with a variety of demonstrations, tools, and goods.

I really respect the people in this movement, and realize how much of what I am today is a result of how my family encouraged me to make things for myself when I was young. I remember playing with "Major Mat Mason" astronaut action figures when I was in 2nd and 3rd grade and how my parents encouraged me to build my own moonscape diorama out of paper machete to play on. I also did model rocketry and fairly quickly transitioned to creating my own designs (some of which worked, all of which were educational). Inspired by my brother, I started taking plastic model car kits and creating my own vehicles using parts from different kits. My parents also made sure my brother and I knew how to cook – we were given responsibility for preparing Thanksgiving dinner for the family (with supervision).

On the other hand, there was a touch of sadness in going to the faire and I really don't do this kind of stuff anymore. Partially this is a reflection of my personal transition of going from atoms to bits – I still create stuff; but my creations are almost entirely made of bits. Partially this is a reflection of the desire of Anne and me to live light – to reduce the amount of stuff we own. One thing all of the people who participate in the faire have in common is that they have lots of stuff – tools, finished projects, projects in process, etc. I've contemplated restarting one of my "maker" hobbies from time to time; but the question always ends up "where would I put it all?" I still want to know how to do all of this kind of stuff for myself (hence my desire to go to the faire); but actually doing it represents a level of baggage on my life that I am unwilling to carry right now.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

May 02, 2008

Web surfing expands . . .

It seems to be one of those maxim's: Web Surfing Expands to Fill the Time Allotted.

A while back I switched to using Google Reader to follow any web sites that have RSS feeds. It significantly reduced the time I needed to go through the sites that I visited regularly. I can scan through the titles of all of the new posts on every site I am interested and quickly pick out those few I want to read in detail. A very efficient mechanism.

Of course, adding new sites for Google Reader to check for me is easy, and the incremental cost for each new site is small, so naturally I have been quite free with adding new sites to my list to surf. The result? I am now spending almost as much time surfing today as I was just before I started using Google Reader. sigh.

To be fair, I am now checking for new content on 48 different sites and reviewing (on average) 200 excerpts (titles, first paragraphs) a day. I probably only read 10-15 articles out of all that; but it still takes time. And this is on top of another couple dozen sites I check which do not have RSS feeds.

Why do labor saving devices never seem to actually save you any labor?

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

April 30, 2008

Books and wish-lists

Thinking more about my progress on my reading list (or last week, the lack of progress). As is often the case with these things, I'm really just changing the problem to a different one. In the 22 weeks I have pushed my purchased-but-not-read list down from 167 to 120, my Amazon wish-list has grown from (as I recall) 102 to 169. At least the books on my wish-list haven't cost me any money (yet). As the saying goes: "So many books, so little time."

Also, I don't always purchase everything on my wish list. In fact, keeping them on that list longer tends to give me time to reconsider purchases. Sometimes I see an interview with someone who wrote a book and I'm all excited to get it; but 6 months later is doesn’t sounds quite as interesting. Then there are the occasions when, by the time I end up purchasing the book, a cheaper trade-paperback is available.

I tend to keep a fairly low bar when it comes to adding something to my Amazon wish list (since the incremental cost is only about 10 seconds). When I actually place an order with Amazon, I tend to scan the list for others to purchase (at least enough so that the order qualifies for free shipping), and remove those that don't sound quite so interesting any more.

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April 25, 2008

Party Time

I don't talk about my job much on this blog for both legal and security reasons; but even if you know who I work for this is all public information so it is OK.

Last night we had a big party at the office to celebrate shipping our 100 millionth copy of our product. They even bussed up all of the engineers from our Mountain View office to the main office in San Francisco and invited back key employees who had left the company.

100 Million is pretty good for a software company. I'm not sure how many other companies have sold that many of their product (I'm excluding folks who give away their product). Obviously Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, McAfee, Norton, and the like; but how many others have passed that mark? Not sure; but it feels pretty good.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

April 23, 2008

Or it could be…

…depression. As previously noted on this blog, I deal with chronic recurring depression and always need to evaluate any disinterest or lack of motivation as a warning sign that I am becoming depressed again (wonky brain chemistry and all that). So when I realized that I wasn't writing as much (for this blog or otherwise) I evaluated whether this could be a red flag to signal that I should start managing another cycle of depression (thanks to a good counselor, I have gotten pretty good at handling my depressions without the need for medication).

My current evaluation was (and is) that this is not depression. I continue to be quite productive at work (when not interrupted every few minutes with questions from other parts of the company) and in other contexts. There are only two things I seem to be less interesting in right now: reading and writing (which I have previously established as related functions). My experience is that when I get depressed, I loose interest in things in a specific order, and my current state is not even close to that pattern.

So, I'm looking at this as, perhaps, just temporary burnout and not as an indicator of depression. Nonetheless, I will remain vigilant – my depressions tend to be much harder to manage if I do not catch them early.

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April 16, 2008

Downshifting again

I am definitely running low on ideas for blog posts, and so am going to formally downshift to 3 posts a week – on Monday Wednesday and Friday. Monday will remain my book post, so that means I only need to come up with two original posts a week. I want to stay on a schedule since that has proven to provide an added bit of motivation to write.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

April 14, 2008

This morning's post delayed

Sorry – this morning's book post will be delayed for technical reasons. While it is written, I couldn't get on to schedule the post last night, and forgot to do it this morning before I got into work. Unfortunately, the text of the post is on my computer at home, so I won't be able to do it until lunch today at the soonest. The tally is 2 books read, none purchased with a new count of 119.

Posted by Steven at 04:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 28, 2008

Three Years of Blogging

As of today, I have been blogging for three years. I have written 394 posts, and there have been 561 comments in reply to those posts. I’m fairly satisfied with that.

I’ve been keeping to my 5 posts a week schedule so far this year (4 real essays but one book review post); but it is getting harder and harder. The truth is that I have tended to only generate two or three new essays each week. I’ve been able to get by since I was quite prolific over last Christmas vacation and started the year with a couple dozen extra essays; but I have been working though that buffer at a fairly steady pace.

It is also the case that (in my opinion at least), the quality of the recent essays have been somewhat lacking. When I look back and read things I wrote in the first year, I believe I was more eloquent in my observations than I have been of late. This is not necessarily a bad thing (I’m not writing these essays to get published); but it is disappointing.

The net result is that at some point I may have to switch to a 3 post a week schedule (Monday, Wednesday, and Friday). Just a warning in case you see me start missing Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 21, 2008

Yes, I read comic books

As can be seen from the list of books I read over the Christmas holidays, I do read “graphic novels” a.k.a. “comic books”, despite being 48 years old. Actually I don’t read a lot of them. I pick up 2-3 issues in a month and perhaps one collection a quarter (the list I read over the vacation had been accumulated over time); but I do read them.

Now as I kid, I used to read comics a lot. I was a fan of the various Marvel titles (as opposed to D. C. – even then I was more interested in character vs. action). I even read some in college where copies were always laying around the Alpha Phi Omega office. But after college I lost interest in the rather repetitive stories of costumed superheroes that dominates the comics industry in the United States.

The seed of my return to comics was planted in 1995 when I read Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics”, an excellent analysis of the art and medium of “sequential art” (as he calls comics). This book (which I strongly recommend to everyone) helped me to appreciate that people can and were doing things with the format that went well beyond the comics of my youth. It made me open to the possibility of looking at graphic novels (as high-end comics are often called); but didn’t provide enough motivation to actually get me to try.

The motivation finally came in 2001 when I heard that J. Michael Straczynski was taking over writing Marvel comic's flagship “Amazing Spiderman” comic series. I knew and respected JMS’s work as a television writer and producer (Babylon 5, Jeremiah, etc.), and the thought that someone of his caliber would write comics was enough to get me to give it a try. The results were interesting – far more literary than the comics I recalled reading in my youth, and certainly enjoyable, although the limits of the Spiderman franchise eventually constrained how far JMS could go. I did however find out that prior to taking over Spiderman, he had written some graphic novels based on his own original ideas, including “Midnight Nation”. Without the limits of working within a predefined franchise, JMS was allowed to take full advantage of the medium.

Two things finally sold me on putting some effort in reading the “best” of the graphic novels out there. First, there was the “Amazing Spiderman” volume 2, issue 36. This is the “black issue” written by JMS to respond to 9/11. Rather than a typical “comic” story, it is a tone poem about those events with various characters from the marvel universe in the background. It remains, in my opinion, the most eloquent and complete response to that tragedy from any source, including pundits and politicians. Second, there is the final page of issue 4 of JMS’s “Midnight Nation” series that expresses with sad irony how fear hobbles us. Rod Serling quality stuff (as is all of Midnight Nation, in my opinion).

Having been hooked, I now track what is going on in the industry, and particularly what specific writers are doing. I’ll read pretty much anything by Neil Gaiman, Orson Scott Card, and JMS (although my willingness to read costumed superhero stories is limited). I am also making an effort to get caught up on classics – those books that people recognize as the best of the genre. Things like Moore’s “Watchmen” and Miller’s “The Dark Knight Returns”. “Watchmen” in particular is a must-read which I have blogged on before.

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March 19, 2008

Twentieth Wedding Anniversary

As of today, Anne and I have been married for 20 years.

We've had good times and bad. We've had times of plenty and times of lack. We've had times of illness and times of health. We've had times of joy and times of sorrow. We've had times of understanding and times of confusion.

But through it all our love for each other has grown, as has our ability to trust each other when things get rough.

A successful marriage requires a lot of work. It requires investments from both parties: patience, forgiveness, time, flexibility; but having made those investments, the benefits far outweighs the costs: having someone you can be yourself with, having someone you rely on, having someone with whom you share memories.

I can honestly say that our marriage today is better and stronger than it has ever been – pretty good for 20 years on.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

March 12, 2008

Sydney Observation

So what did I think of Sydney? First, this is more than a purely abstract question for Anne and me. There is no doubt that if I were to express interest to my employer in living in Sydney, they would be quite happy to relocate us there for whatever period of time we want. So a subtext of our short vacation was to determine if we did in fact have any interest in that regard.

Second, I want to recognize up front that the following are poorly informed opinions based on working for a week and having a week's vacation there. Still, in that time I did get to spend time in two office environments, visited a couple different suburbs, and spent the evening at a co-worker's house (we so got some sense of how "real people" live).

Overall, Sydney reminds me a lot of San Francisco: steep hills rising out of the water, good (but not great) public transportation, tall office buildings next to colorful Victorian structures, active LGBT community, moderate weather thanks to the surrounding water, large parks, endless suburbs. Particularly when walking around the city proper, it was easy to convince myself I was "back home" (or at least 40 miles north of home).

What I liked:

- Australians seems to be sincerely environmentally conscious. Their history has engrained in their culture how easy it is to adversely affect the environment and they are sensitive to those issues.

- Because of strict quarantines (another lesson learned), there is a limit to the amount of foodstuffs which are imported; but that has the side effect that most of ingredients that actually are available are relatively local and fresh. Even the food in the smaller restaurants tasted great because the ingredients were better, and when we ate at someone's home the food was excellent (although, to be fair, our host was a fairly serious foodie). Fish in particular was better than we get even in San Francisco or I remember from Florida.

- Sydney is a picturesque city, and I'd love to have much more time to do photography there. I know that there is even more to see and photograph elsewhere in Australia; but even limiting myself to Sydney I could spend a lot of time behind a camera.

- Public Transportation was good. At no point did I wish I had rented a car while we were in the city. Even getting out to the suburbs was not much of a problem.

- The Christian book store actually had a more diverse selection of books than the one we have near us.

What I didn't like:

- Books are expensive (and it is well established how important books are to me). They generally cost twice as much as they do in the 'States. I have been assured that if I am willing to order in bulk (many books at once) there are ways to get books at reasonable prices; but it is a factor. In general, anything not produced in Australia (which is most things) tends to be 1.5X to 2X the price in the USA.

- While they are environmentally conscious, they are less concerned about issues like fair trade. Almost everything not produced in Australia was produced in China. Anne and I have been trying to be more socially conscious in our own purchases, and that would seem to be difficult in Sydney.

- The overall culture seems to be significantly more "masculine" than in SF or Boston today. There's more of a focus on sports. Men tend to talk more coarsely. Women tend to dress to impress (seduce?) more. There were times that I felt like I was in a time warp back to America in the early 70's.

Right now, my impression is that Sydney is a city I would like to spend more time visiting; but I'm not prepared to move there for a long period of time. I am also quite interested in seeing more of the rest of Australia. Perhaps when my current project goes into deployment I can wrangle a month or two there.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

March 11, 2008

Sydney Travelogue

I’m doing at least two posts about my Sydney trip. This, the first, will be a fairly conventional travelogue while the second will be more subjective observations.

Monday through Thursday of the first week I was busy with work. Anne got to see the city, shop, and make some friends while I got to see the inside of our hotel, our company’s offices, our customer’s offices, and some nice restaurants.

Friday I had some short meetings in the morning and then Anne and I spent the afternoon wandering through the downtown shopping area of Sydney. There are several buildings there that have been converted into malls – the most interesting of which is the Queen Victoria Building, originally built in 1898, which is now a four story shopping mall that retains much of the historic Victorian architecture. It should also be noted that most of these malls are interconnected underground so you can go from building to building without really being aware of it. In terms of shopping, I was able to find a good board game store; but discovered (confirmed) that books are a generally twice as expensive as they are here in the ‘States.

Saturday and Sunday we went to Canberra by bus. This was mostly to see Melissa (having not seen her in over ten years and finding ourselves within a couple hundred miles of her, this was an opportunity we didn’t want to miss). Melissa did a wonderful job of showing us around town. We sent up the Telstra tower to get a wonderful panoramic view of the whole city. We toured Parliament House (Australia’s modern capitol building). We saw the War Memorial and walked down a small part of ANZAC Parade (a wide boulevard with various military monuments and memorials on either side). We want to church with Melissa. Canberra is an absolutely beautiful place. It is a modern, planned city – created in the early 1900’s explicitly to serve as Australia’s capitol - with lots of parkland, wide tree-lined avenues, and modern buildings.

Monday we toured the Botanical Gardens (an enormous open park with diverse plants) walked around the Opera House, and took a short ferry ride over to Manly – a beach/resort suburb of Sydney. Manly kind of reminded me of Santa Cruz California, although without the boardwalk carnival. The local equivalent of the Santa Cruz boardwalk is actually Luna Park just down the hill from the hotel we stayed in. This is also a good point to mention the diversity of modes of transportation in common use in Sydney. There are the standard taxis, busses, and subways/trains; but being built around a harbor, ferries are also an integral part of the public transportation system, and we used them almost every day. In addition there is a small monorail system that runs around the downtown and Darling Harbor sections of town. As we explored the city I found myself wanting to create a new SimCity scenario to see if I could integrate so many transportation systems so well.

Tuesday, we went to the Toronga Zoo (another short ferry ride) and got to see various marsupials (Kangaroos, Koalas, Wombats, etc.) up close. It was a nice zoo, although I think the Miami-Dade Matro-Zoo has really spoiled us.

Wednesday we took the two tourist “explorer” bus rides (numerous stops, with on-off privileges) to get to see some of the other parts of the city we hadn’t been too yet. One took us around Sydney proper (including over to Darling Harbor and “The Rocks” which we hadn’t seen yet) and the other did a larger loop that took us down along the southern beaches of Sydney, including Bondi Beach (the famous surfing beach). The one thing I want to note is how small the beaches are in Sydney. I am used to the beaches in Florida and California which go on for miles. The Australian cost is much more irregular and beaches tend to form in small coves. Manly and Bondi beaches are only about a mile across and many of the others are even smaller.

Thursday we saw the Powerhouse Museum, which is kind of like the Australian equivalent of America’s Smithsonian or London’s Victoria and Albert (although not as large). A rather eclectic collection of crafts and technology. We also went over to Darling Harbor to eat (at a steakhouse called “I’m Angus”) and looked around. Darling Harbor is one of the big nightspots with lots of restaurants, clubs, and the like.

By Friday we were getting pretty tired and just stopped back at a couple of locations we had missed taking of pictures of previously and then rested the afternoon.

So that’s what we did. In the process I took 551 photographs which will eventually end up on the web.
+
Next (or at least soon) I’ll write about what I thought about it all.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

March 08, 2008

Back Home

Jet lagged with a lot of catching up to do (TV, web, etc.); but home again. I have a blog post or two to write about our Australia trip; but I’m not sure when I’ll have a clear enough head to write it.

Posted by Steven at 06:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 07, 2008

Thanks Melissa

Just wanted to drop a quick note to thank Melissa for the “Desert Island Media” idea. It was just the inspiration I needed in this busy period to come up with some posts while I was otherwise distracted. I do very much plan to address some of your other suggestions as well – perhaps after this crunch.

I am also thinking of doing a fifth post in the series for Board Games I’d bring; but not now.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

March 04, 2008

Tetsuya’s

For last week’s business trip, I was part of the entourage of my company’s head of marketing, head of sales, and head of engineering; who were meeting with similarly high pay grade folks from 5 of our biggest customers. Definitely up there in the rarefied air, and it was my first experience with world-class “wining and dining”. I ate more excellent food and drank more wine last week than I had all last year.

The climax of this experience was that we ate at Tetsuya’s, which (according to the New York Times) is the fourth best restaurant in the world – an honor I can not dispute based on my experiences last week. We were served a 14 course meal (accompanied by 7 different wines chosen to compliment each dish). It was an amazing culinary experience.

For those who have seen the TV show “Iron Chef” (either the Japanese or American versions), the fourth act is always the judges getting to taste each of the ten or twelve creative, well presented dishes that the two competing chefs managed to cook. Eating at Tetsyua’s is kind like that.

Every dish is innovative both in terms of ingredients, preparation and presentation. Things like “cold corn soup with saffron and a dollop of vanilla ice cream” (trust me – it worked); or “grilled wagyu beef with lime and wasabi.” Most courses are only a two or three of bites; but the flavors are wonderful and varied. There were a couple of dishes (and wines) that didn’t work for me; but most I would love to have again (and again).

This was my first experience with food at this level. Not sure when (if ever) I’ll have the opportunity to do something like this again (at $300 per person, I doubt I’d end up paying for it myself). I do note that the number one restaurant on the ‘Times list is actually not far from where we live.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

March 01, 2008

Greetings from Canberra

I ommitted a few details on my post last Friday about my business trip this past week:

- The business meetings were in Sydney Australia
- Anne (my wife) traveled with me
- We are spending an additional week in Australia to play tourist and...
- We are visiting at least one long-time friend while we are here :)

Posted by Steven at 02:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

February 28, 2008

Games, God, and I

Playing games has always been an important part of my life. At one point I had a collection of over 350 board games and I have no idea how many computer games. For a while it even became a source of stress in my marriage – I was spending too much time playing computer games and not enough with my wife, but that was addressed a while back. Anne also doesn’t approve of some of the game I play; but that’s a different matter.

This past fall, The Lord started to deal with me on my choice of games to play (although, not exactly in ways that Anne would have wanted). I sensed that He was asking me questions as I played various games. What do I like about that game? How do I feel after having played it? Why did I pick that game to play tonight and not another? What did I get out of playing that game? God was working to help me be more conscious of my relationship to the games I played. A similar thing happened a couple years ago when God led me to re-think my TV watching.

The bottom line is that God helped me become aware of what games were beneficial for me to play and which were not. What’s interesting is that despite the amount of hot air generated by pundits on the subject, the issue was rarely a moral one. It was far more about how the games made me feel as I played them. Did they make me think? Did they allow me to be creative? Did they get me interacting with people (board game obviously have a big advantage here)? Or did I tend to get frustrated and stressed as I played them? Did they lead me to isolate myself?

Now a lot of these ideas are obvious; but the fact is I had rarely used principles like this to guide my game purchase decisions. I was more interested in what was “hot” and what had cool new technology than what benefit I derived from the experience (other than a few hours of distraction from life). Which leads me to the other thing I realized – how much I used computer games as a means of escape when I got stressed at work. Now there is value in that to a point; but only to a point; and there are dangers if I use games to avoid dealing with things that need to be dealt with.

So I am in the process of formulating some rules for myself for how I will decide what games to buy and play in the future. I don’t have a sense that I will necessarily be spending less time playing games; but the kinds of games and the venue in which I play them may change significantly.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 22, 2008

Away on a business trip

I will be out of town next week on a business trip, and I don’t know how much time I will have to write things or how good my internet connectivity will be. I have scheduled posts for while I am away, so there should be things for people to read; but I may be unable to reply to comments or to moderate the blog.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 12, 2008

Election 2008

The California primary was last week, so I suppose I should say something about the election. Problem is, as has often been the case, I am so disappointed with the state of affairs that I find it hard to drum up the motivation to say anything.

As reader of this blog will know, I have a strong Libertarian streak, so it should be no surprise that I voted for Ron Paul (while a member of the Republican Party, Paul was the Libertarian Party’s candidate for president in 1988). I had no illusion that he had any chance to win; but I had to vote my convictions.

So when the dust settles, it looks like McCain will get the Republican nomination. I’m OK with that – he would have been my second choice. I would not vote for him in the primary because of his support of the Iraq war; but I respect that fact that he is a true fiscal conservative (his previous campaigns have focused more on the economy); and perhaps more important he has shown the ability to work across the aisle with members of other parties. While I disagree with him on a few decisions, I am comfortable with most of his voting history in the Senate. If he is elected I expect the country will make real progress on real problems.

Now many Republicans don’t like him because first, he is not focused on the social conservative agenda promoted by many Values / Christian voters. While his own beliefs are quite conservative, McCain doesn’t see those issues as a priority and considers those who focus on those issues to be divisive (famously calling Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell “Agents of intolerance” in his 2000 presidential campaign). I have no issue with any part of that. Second, some Republicans dislike him because he has worked so well with Democrats to get important bills passed. To me that means we won’t have four or eight years of gridlock if he is elected, which is a good thing.

Still, he will likely need to pick someone from the social conservative end of the party as a running mate to shore up support from that part of the base. A McCain/Huckabee ticket may prove to be a winning combination.

On the Democratic side, thing are still up n the air. I like neither Clinton nor Obama. Electing either of them will result in no progress on the budget deficit, which I have previously established as one of my main concerns (in fact electing either one of them guarantees substantial increases in the deficit).

However if I had to choose one I would pick Obama. First, I don’t think Clinton is even remotely electable. While she touts her “35 years of experience”, much of that experience has set up ill will towards her from too many people. Having a record can be a bad thing if there are too many skeletons in it. Second, I believe her impact on the deficit is likely to be worse than Obama’s.

On the other hand, as a candidate Obama has an interesting combination of virtues. First, he is a compelling public speaker. He has that rare ability to inspire people with his words. Second, he has almost no record for people to campaign against. The combination of the two means that people can read into him positive ideals without getting distracted by actual policies. Because of that I think he has a better chance of winning that Clinton, and if he wins, he has the skills to make America feel good about itself again. If only his policies would actually improve our lot as opposed to just helping us feel better. For a running mate he needs to pick an experienced technocrat from the Northeast or Southwest (definitely not Hillary, and not Edwards). Bill Richardson might be a good choice, or even Dianne Feinstein.

So that’s how I see things now. More if/when the situation on the Democratic side becomes clearer.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

February 11, 2008

500 comments

Just a quick note – sometime Friday this blog got its 500’th comment posted to it. Yippee!

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

February 08, 2008

Comment Problems

Melissa reported having some problems posting comments on the blog. Now one of the problems was simply that one comment got caught in moderation (and I have been busy today and so I didn't get around to approving it until later).

However, I also had a comment of my own that simply wouldn't post today. It didn't go to moderation - I got an HTTP 406 error (with the cryptic text "Internet Explorer cannot read this webpage format"). I was able to post it by removing the word "s e x". What is frustrating is that this was not sent to moderation; but was refused outright by the server without any opportunity for me to approve it.

I'm going to try and figure out what is causing this (and if I have any control); but the bottom line is that if you have any problems posting comments, post a comment that simply says "placeholder" and Email me the text you want to put there.

Posted by Steven at 03:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

February 06, 2008

The State of the Blog

The next few weeks (until mid-March) are likely to be busy for me at work. There’s a new version of a document that I need to get out, and the current version is already 360+ pages. That’s a tripple problem for this blog. First, I won’t have as much time to write in general. Second, I will have been writing all day, so I won't be as motivated to do more writing. Third, since I tend to write about whatever I am thinking about, but I don’t write about work, therefore the fact that I will be thinking more about work in the next few weeks means that even when I have time and motivation to write I may not have anything to talk about.

As a possible means to ameliorate the third problem, I am open to suggestions from my readers for things to write about. If there is some topic you’d like to see me hold forth on (or otherwise want to know my opinion on), drop a comment and I’ll see what I can do. The only absolutely forbidden topics are my work and personal information about family members. I’ll consider suggestions on any other topic or question.

On another front, the battle between comment spammers and anti-spam technology continues. Every few weeks the spammers seem to discover some new trick to fool the blockers and I end up cleaning up bogus comments until new countermeasures are discovered. While I could probably stop them cold using a CAPTCHA, I am loath to do so. The measure I am contemplating is turning off comments entirely on any post that is more than a month old. Most of the bogus comments I get are on older posts, so that should help. Any thoughts from my readers?

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

February 05, 2008

Of RSS and Other Things

The number of blogs I follow seems to be constantly increasing. While I occasionally do “spring cleaning” – removing those blogs on which I haven’t actually read a post recently (or for which there for which there just haven't been any recent posts ) – the number of new blogs I find to read always seems to be greater than the number I punt. I am now up to nearly 30 blogs I follow.

As a result, I have finally decided to switch to reading blogs via their RSS feeds as opposed to going directly to their sites. I have avoided this until now because you lose context (you only see the post, not the whole page); but opening all of those sites has just gotten too tedious (particularly since some of the site are rather irregular in their posts).

I have therefore decided to try out Google Reader to manage my blog-reading. It provides a nice web-based interface not unlike the net-news readers of old. Yes, I have been on the web long enough to have a lot of experience with news groups (A.K.A “usenet news”); and was even around for the “Great Renaming” (a gold star if you know what the “fa.” prefix stood for). With the Google Reader I can find out at a glance from one web page which blogs have new posts. I just have to paste into Google Reader the URLs for the RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feeds for each blog and it does the rest. This is particularly useful for those blogs that rarely or irregularly have new posts. I can now monitor them for new content without having to visit the page frequently.

The only downside I have identified so far is that the frequency with which Google checks for new content depends on the number of people interested in a feed. For most of the sites I follow, that seems to be OK; but I doubt that Google will ever check my blogs as often as I want to monitor them for comments. Even IE7 will not check feeds any faster than once an hour, which is too slow for me. So for this blog I will keep checking it the old fashioned way.

Now that I am a client of RSS feeds, I also realized I needed to update “Sighs and Musings” to be more RSS-friendly. I improved the RSS template for the feed of all of my posts, and created a second feed that lists the comments on the site. By subscribing to both, people can track all activity on my blog. Links to my two feeds can be found near the top of the right column on every page. I wish more sites has comments feeds as there are a few blog where I am as interested in the comments as I am on the original posts.

I also took the opportunity to clean up some other minor issues with my blog templates. Nothing big – the title of the post is now a link to the individual page and the “recent comments” links in the right column now takes you to the comment section of the page such that the new comment should be visible (if not always at the top of the window).

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 29, 2008

The Current Slave Trade

Anne and I saw a presentation this last Sunday on human slavery – not the enslavement of Africans for American plantations in the 19th century; but the forms of slavery that exist today, some in our own city. The presentation was given by an activist who is passionate about the cause of ending slavery, so I am hesitant to quote their statistics without some additional investigation (my experience is that people who are that passionate about a cause are rarely analyze supporting evidence very carefully); but one fact stuck out that I want to share – according to their statistics there are more people enslaved in America today than there were over the whole period of the Atlantic slave trade in the 18th and 19th centuries.

To be clear, I am not talking about people working in sweatshops for sub-standard wages and under sub-standard conditions (a deplorable situation in its own right). I am talking about real slavery where the workers are kept under constant guard, paid nothing (given only subsistence food and shelter) and locked up at night to prevent them from escaping.

Unfortunately, I have a lot of reason to believe their numbers. I can recall two slavery busts in our local area within the last 5 years. One involving agricultural workers at a farm just south of here, and another involving eastern European sex workers that was actually in the town where we live (on a street that we drive down regularly). In the presentation they talked about two other cases I hadn’t heard about – one involving restaurant workers in Berkley and another involving Asian sex workers in San Francisco. It is assumed that this is a small fraction of what is actually happening in our community. And the US is likely better than in many countries where the government (or at least the police) is corrupt and prosecution of slavery is rare.

One of the points that were made in the talk is that many products we have available to us in the US (or the materials used to make them) are produced by slave labor. Their statistics (again: caveat emptor) are that roughly half of certain key minerals are mined by slave labor. Anne and I had already established a bias in our purchasing in favor of products that have been “fair trade” certified. This cause might raise the importance of that distinction in our future decisions.

The presentation also covered some other interesting aspects of the problem. For instance, some groups have advocated paying to redeem slaves and set them free. The problem is that, as well meaning as this idea is, it actually only has the effect of raising the price of slaves (to buy someone out of slavery you have to pay more) and thus making it more profitable for slave traders. Essentially, such groups just subsidize the industry and have no effect on the availability of slaves.

Again, I want to do some independent investigation of this – see if anyone out there refutes their numbers; but I think this is an issue I might end up investing some of my energy in. It is amazing that that 200 years after William Wilberforce helped end the African slave trade in England, slavery has actually grown around the world and in America.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

January 21, 2008

Church Taking the rest of the year off

My wife posted on her blog about this past Sunday's final meeting of our church before the sabbatical. I couldn't have said it better, so I'll just point folks at what she said.

Posted by Steven at 10:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 15, 2008

Church winding down to sabbatical

This past Sunday, our whole congregation went over to the church that is going to host us while our own gathering is on sabbatical so that we all could check it out. They have two services Sunday morning; but they are not symmetrical. Most churches that run two services essentially do that same thing in both services (the idea being that they only reason to do a second service is because not everyone fits into one meeting, so you want to duplicate the same experience); but that is not the case with our hosts for the next year. Their two services are complete different – even different sermons delivered by different pastors. One service is focused on folks 40 years old and up, and the other for folks 39 down (although Anne and I both preferred the "younger" service and plan to attend it).

We also had the last meeting of our church's leadership team (what other churches might call "elders") before the sabbatical starts. We tied up a few loose ends and met with the representative of our denomination to talk through a few final issues. The denomination's rep doesn’t quite know how to record and report our status for the year (this kind of thing hasn’t been done before); but otherwise things seem under control.

Next week we have the final meeting of our little group as it exists now, and are planning it as a kind of celebration of what has happened over the last 10 years. Former members have been invited back (although I don't have a sense for how many will come). Then the week after that (January 27) we all officially start attending the church that will host us for this year. Our hosts have been very supportive of our move and our plan to re-launch the church in 2009. They will be giving us a place to meet together as a group in between the two services and the founding pastor of the host church has suggested that we reserve a few rows and all sit together so as to maintain our distinct identity.

On the flip side, the Tuesday Bible Study that I have been leading resumed last week after an extended December break. In fact Anne and I seem to be the only two people really "working" over the sabbatical (violating it?) – me teaching the study ( at least until we finish John) and Anne handing the administrative issues that need to be taken care of. Everyone else is taking a break from ministry.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

January 10, 2008

Game Design and I

Game design has always been an important part of my life. I designed my first game when I was about 9 years old, and by the time I was 12 (often in collaboration with my friend Peter) I had developed a dozen or so games of different styles – including one “sport”. As a professional, I worked for several years as a video game developer and later consulted with a couple of other development companies on their projects (look for “additional programming by” credits), and I’ve been a regular beta tester for several companies through the years.

While it has been quite a while since I have done any game work professionally, I have always kept alive the idea that I might eventually get back into the business. As part of that I have maintained a file of various game ideas I have thought about over the years. Some of these are board games, others are computer games, and a few are online/email games. For some I have only managed to produce short concept statements while others I have extensive notes and mathematical models.

These past few months, sorting through the physical and intellectual baggage of my life, I have come to the conclusion that the probability that I will ever get back into game design is fairly small. There are just too many other things I want to do more to believe I will ever have the free time to invest in this. Given that, I can free up some space on my bookshelves by punting several books I have on game development (certainly the computer game books are now obsolete given new technologies) – but what to do about all of my ideas?

The decision I made over the holiday break is that I would start posting the ideas here and making them freely available to anyone who finds something useful. As per the license for this web site, all I ask is that I be given credit in any resulting products. I know the list of regular readers of this blog is small and they are equally unlikely to use the ideas; but someone may stumble here by Google or other search engine. So expect another category of post to be added soon – game ideas. There are a couple of ideas I plan to hold back for now (I’m not yet willing to completely let go of the dream of doing games again); but any of the rest that I still think are worthwhile will get posted here.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

January 04, 2008

Cooking Classes

A few years back there was a cooking store around here called “Home Chef” that sold high end cooking equipment and ingredients. The centerpiece of the store however was their cooking classes which were held several times a day. They had a series of ten classes for all the basics, and the numerous (and often seasonal) classes on various other cuisines and techniques. Most of the classes were demonstrations, although a few were hands-on lessons. All of the classes allowed you to eat what was cooked.

Anne and I took several of these classes together as “dates” and we had a lot of fun. They added a bit of variety to the standard “let’s go out together” activities like movies, concerts, and eating in restaurants. Plus we learned something that we could apply afterwards.

Unfortunately Home Chef eventually closed down and so we’ve been doing without for a while; but tonight we finally tried one of the classes at the local “Whole Foods” grocery store - a chain that focuses on organic, sustainable, and otherwise less-processed foods. They aren’t strictly “health foods” (they serve beer braised lamb shanks in their deli); but tend to sell stuff with fewer chemicals. They do however have nightly classes on a variety of topics, and we’ve been looking for one to try.

Last night we finally tried one – a class on Moroccan cuisine (one of our favorite kinds of food). Frankly it was a mixed bag; but I am hopeful enough to try more. The chef/instructor was good and the food was excellent. The problem was that the class was a late addition to the schedule and the chef was not the one to prepare the menu and recipes and unfortunately both were flawed. One dish would have taken 4-5 hours to prepare (the class was only 2 1/2 hours), and two others had clear errors in the recipe. In the end the chef ended up preparing only two of the four promised dishes – doing substitutes for the other two.

Still we enjoyed it enough that we plan to try another class there.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 01, 2008

Resolute

I don’t do New Year’s resolutions in the traditional sense (promising that I will/won’t do specific things in the coming year); but I do often take the opportunity at the start of a new year to think about those things I’d like, The Lord willing, to focus on in the coming days.

This year there are two things I’d like to focus on.

The first is one I have already started – getting my backlog of books cut down to size. That involves both making the time to read more and being more disciplined in how many books I purchase. Neither of these should be difficult most of the time, and I don’t plan to worry about the occasional exceptions. For instance, Anne and I may return to London in the fall of 2008, and I’ll certainly purchase a number of books while there - even though there are several books still on my “to be read” shelf that I purchased on our last London trip – three years ago. There are just too many places in London to find books that are not readily available in the USA to worry about the impact it will have on my count.

The other area of focus is to take a realistic look at the various “dreams” I have had and decide which I am really going to pursue and which I should discard. I no longer think it is feasible to do all the things “I have always wanted to do”, and making a conscious decision to discard some of these is another form of simplification of my life which will increase my chance at getting to the others.

The list of dreams to consider includes:

- Game Development. I have a large file of game ideas (both computer and board games) I have thought up over the years hoping that someday I’d have the chance to develop them. Will I ever get to them? What am I willing to give up to make the time? At a minimum, perhaps I should look through the list and pick out a few that I want to keep and abandon the rest. I have been thinking about posting the ones I discard to my blog in case someone else wants to pick them up.

- Computer Simulations. I have a smaller list of things I have always wanted to program. Some of these started as part of a game idea; but I became more interested in the question of “how would I simulate that” than the game itself. Others have interesting applications which might be profitable if successful. I justify a couple of shelves of programming books I keep in my office under the guise that I’ll need the books if I ever get around to any of these projects; but I haven’t actually written any code for any of them in over 5 years. Hmmm

- Fiction Writing. I deliberately set this aside over a year ago because I didn’t feel I had anything to write that I would actually recommend if it was written by someone else. My ideas were entertaining; but I didn’t feel that entertainment alone was worth the investment it would take to finish one of my ideas. I’m still mulling over this quandary.

- Non-Fiction Writing. In this blog at least, I seem to be able to produce a fair amount of non-fiction content; and as I have been blogging I have started to get some ideas of books I might want to write. Should I set aside the time to work though one of these projects?

There are a few others; but those are the big ones that I want to prioritize and hopefully make some decisions on this year.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

December 31, 2007

A Very Fine Year

Well, we live in interesting times, and between work and church, that has certainly been true for me this year. I have already posted on events at church, and as per my policy I will say nothing about my work other than what is in the pubic record - we have gone through 3 CEO's this year (I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to guess what that has been like); but on the upside we are now cash-flow positive.

Despite all that change, it has been a good year for Anne and me. Our marriage is stronger than it has ever been. Life in general is going well. I've made some real efforts to focus my life more on the things that are important to me; and that has freed up the time to invest enough in those things to start seeing tangible rewards. I even made some progress losing weight (at least until the Holidays arrived).

And obviously, I am back blogging.

I'm still ahead of the game on posts, and given the variability of my life I'd like to keep it that way. My plan for next year for this blog is to do 5 regular (scheduled) posts a week on Monday-Friday, with additional posts on any day when I have something more to say that can't wait. Furthermore, until my reading list is cut down to a manageable size, Monday's post will always be a "books I have read" post (I may actually keep that up even after I have tamed the list). So that leaves me with 4 new essays to write each week, which I think is a sustainable pace. The regular post should be up at 5:07AM Pacific time.

I also expect to return to a more diverse mix of posts again. My intent has always been that this blog reflect the mix of things I am thinking about, which lately has mostly been about church. I do however have other topics I expect to get to, including some of my game idea files. Several people have suggested that this blog would be more successful if I picked one topic and promoted the site as a go-to place for that subject; but my goal has never been to have a successful blog – I write this to get things out of my system and to engage other folks on topics that interest me. As long as there remain a few people who are willing to comment on what I say, I am content.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

December 29, 2007

Yeah, no post

Last night I looked at the essay I had planned to post this morning and decided that it really needed more work, so I pulled it. There also wasn’t another ready that I would want to put out today (lots for next week and beyond; but none for today), so I just let it go.

In other news, I am preaching again tomorrow – the pastor and I are each taking half the usual sermon slot to share something. As I prepared, I started to realize that this may be the last time I “preach”. With the church going on sabbatical, I am certainly not preaching again for another year; and I don’t know what is going to happen after that.
Given that my heart is towards styles of church where there is no preaching, I may never again be in a context where I do this. I’m fine with that; but it was worth noting.

Posted by Steven at 11:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

December 24, 2007

Wii are having fun

A while back Anne and I realized we just plain had too much stuff, and started to restructure our lives to both slow down our acquisition of new stuff and to divest ourselves of a lot of things we already had. As part of that we have decided to forego exchanging Christmas presents this year. Instead, back before Thanksgiving, we purchased a Wii game system as our one present to ourselves for the year.

I have often looked at the various other consoles on the market (XBox, Xbox 360, PlayStation, PlayStation 2, etc.) but always decided that getting one would be unwise. Most of the titles available for those systems would only have been of interest to me, and I already had enough forms of entertainment available to me – I didn't need another time and money sink. Now a system that would represent a new thing for Anne and I to do together, that would be a different matter. So when the Wii came out and I had a chance to try it in the stores, I realized that this was the system I had been waiting for, and Anne agreed.

Bottom line is, yes, the Wii really is as fun to play as everyone says it is. Whether playing some of the more aerobic games (I do tend to work up a sweat playing WiiSports Boxing), or one of the more simple games that you can play from your seat, the novel control system makes the experience both new and fun. Anne and I have a great time playing together. She beats me at tennis, I beat her at golf. We're about evenly matched on Mario Party (we both are abysmal at the more platform oriented mini-games; but enjoy most of the others).

Definitely a good purchase for us!

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

December 22, 2007

Taking it Easy over the Holidays

As of yesterday's post I finished dumping everything I have to say on that nature of Church that has been building up over the last year. I have to say I'm glad I got all of that stuff out of my system now. Once it started to come together in my mind I really felt the need to put it all down. I appreciate everyone’s patience with the rather weighty set of posts.

With the holidays upon us I've decided to stick with lighter stuff from now until the New Year. I'm off work until January 2nd, and Anne and I will be taking it easy around home – no big trips this year. I’m going to do likewise on this blog.

My personal goal for this break is to drive down my pending book count as much as possible, so I am focusing on any books that I think I can get through fast. The goal is quality, not quality, so expect a long list of fluff next Sunday.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

December 14, 2007

Scheduled Posts

Since I now am ahead of the game writing posts for this blog, I finally got around to setting it up so I can enter posts into the system and schedule them to be published at a later date automatically. So as long as I can stay ahead of the game you’ll be seeing my main post each day show up regularly at 5:07AM Pacific time (when I have the scheduler itself scheduled to run).

Lord willing and barring any last-minute inspiration, I now have posts set up out until Saturday the 22nd (not counting the Sunday “books I have read” posts that obvious need to be written last minute). I also have drafts of 6 other post written; but I am not sure when I’ll use them, as well as ideas for several more. Ah, it is good to be blogging again.

Posted by Steven at 05:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Pub Quiz

Anne and I went to my first Pub Quiz last Tuesday at a local English-style pub (Anne has previously been to one in the UK). Essentially the various tables competed against each other to answer the most of a long list of trivia questions correctly over the course of 4 rounds (we had a table of 8 people, all knitting friends of Anne). The questions posed were quite varied and included:

- In the movie “Back to the Future”, at what speed did the Delorean need to achieve to travel through time?

- What percentage of the universe is made of dark matter?

- What disaster occurred the same year that Fenway Park opened?

- In geography, what do the initials C.B.D. mean?

It was an interesting experience, and I had fun; but I’m not sure I had enough fun to justify spending a whole evening at it. I do however recognize that being there with a bunch of strangers may have detracted from the experience. Someday I’d like to go with a bunch of friends and see if that makes a difference.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

December 03, 2007

Reading Again

In addition to not blogging much over the past year, I have also slowed down the number of books I have been reading. That I took the time to re-read Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon/Baroque Cycle (4 books; but around 3500 pages) certainly didn't help. Unfortunately, I wasn't wise enough to slow down my book purchasing in proportion to my reading and so my backlog of books has grown from around forty in 2006 to a hundred and sixty-seven books waiting to be read now.

The good news is that in addition to blogging again, I also seem to have found time to read as well (and yes, I have considered the proposition that those facts are connected – that reading gets the word-oriented parts of my brain spinning and so I also write more). With the TV writers strike underway and my reconsideration of the number and kinds of computer games I am playing, I suspect this return to reading will continue for a while. Hopefully long enough to work my backlog down to something more reasonable – perhaps thirty of forty.

I also need to look back over what I have read over the last year and see if there's anything blog-worthy in the mix. Nothing jumps to mind; but looking at the titles may inspire me.

Posted by Steven at 07:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

December 02, 2007

Interesting Times at Church

So the news of today is that the church congregation of which I am a part is going on hiatus for a year. We are suspending most aspects of ministry (including Sunday services). The organization will continue to exist and we will stay connected to each other; but we are stopping operations for what we expect will be a period of a year. To ensure that everyone continues to be supported, we will all be visiting another local church (not associated with our denomination) for the year. The expectation is that over the year we will all come to a greater understanding of what God wants from our little band of believers and will re-start our church with a new and clearer mission at the end of the year. The plan is to meet again as a group every quarter to reevaluate where we are and what we discern of God’s plan.

As part of the church’s leadership team, I’ve known this was coming for a while; but it was formally announced this week with the public announcement this morning (hence this blog post now). I’ll note that the leadership team is unified behind this move. We all believe it is part of God’s plan. The reasons for this a manifold, and I suspect each member of the leadership team (including the pastors) has a different sense of what the “main” reason is. The fact that our pastors are somewhat burnt out is clearly a key factor; but that alone does not justify the rest of us taking a break.

Speaking for myself, I believe there are two specific things that God intends for us in this time. A couple years ago our gathering got the sense that God was calling us to “do church differently”. We have made several changes in how we “did church”; but several of us have sensed that we have not gone far enough. I believe part of God’s purpose in having us suspending operations is to take away the inertia of how we have always done things, so that when we re-start in a year we can really do church as “differently” as God intended. This is in part why I have been putting so much energy into re-thinking the nature of the Christian Church over the last year as is evidenced by my recent blog posts.

The other factor which I believe is part of God’s plan is that our group needs to learn how to be a community better (hence the other common theme to my posts). I believe community is God’s imperative for His church; but that there is a tendency for people to think that having been part of the audience on Sunday morning, that they have “done church” and there is no responsibility to the rest of the congregation for the remainder of the week. For our gathering of believers, without Sunday meetings to bind us together, the only way we will continue to exist as an entity at the end of this year is if we learn how to be a community outside of formal meetings.

This then is the challenge that God is putting before us – learn how to be a community over the coming year (and as a community discern how God wants us to restart things in a year), or over the year dissolve into other area churches and disband.

It will be an interesting year.

Posted by Steven at 01:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

November 28, 2007

Definitely Blogging Again

Yup – my blogging engine has definitely revved up to speed. I have 8 posts already composed and entered into the system, just waiting for me to hit “publish”; and I am really enjoying the comment discussions. Woo Hoo!

Posted by Steven at 08:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 22, 2007

Beware the ellipsis

A few people have had difficulty posting comments lately (they have been moderated, so they don’t show up until I approve them). I have trace the problem to the comments containing ellipsis – well actually 3 consecutive periods (“...”), which seems to annoy my filtering software for some reason. I hope to track this down and fix it; but until then, beware the ellipsis.

Posted by Steven at 07:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 12, 2007

A Quick 6 Month Summary

Been off the blog for six-ish months, so I should probably fill in a few blanks before moving on, although there really isn't much to report.

Anne and I had a nice vacation at the end of September. Saw my dad in Florida and spent time in Miami and at Disneyworld. The theme of the trip seems to have been safari animals as we visited both the Miami-Dade Metrozoo (which has a very nice collection of African animals that like the warm weather there), and then stayed at the Disney's Animal Kingdom Lodge – Disney's new hotel associated with their safari-style theme park. While Disney's Animal Kingdom itself was nice, Disneyworld as a whole seems to have swung back toward being kid-centric (for a while they seemed to be trying to find a better balance between keeping kids and adults entertained; but apparently that didn't work and they have abandoned it).

Just this week Anne and I went to see Billy Joel in concert. That was a real treat for me as Joel is one of my favorite songwriters and performers. The concert was great – he played for over two hours straight, giving a good survey of his work without becoming a "greatest hits" collection. Joel is a great showman and doesn't take himself too seriously, so it was a very fun evening.

As to TV, the only two keepers from the fall season are "Pushing Daisies", which is probably the most original TV show in a very long time; and "Journeyman" which while not original in concept is executing the vision quite well. "Chuck" is an also-ran that I kind of wish I could justify the time spent watching it, but it just doesn't have enough to say.

Oh, and Anne and I finally broke down and bought ourselves a Wii game console – and quickly had to clean up the living room to make room so we could play.

Other than that, life goes on. I've been thinking a lot over the summer – some of that will probably be reflected in later posts - and there are hints that things may become "interesting" for Anne and I soon; but I am going to pull a "Melissa" here (some of you know what I am talking about) and not say what I mean by that quite yet.

Posted by Steven at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

October 29, 2007

Anybody listening?

I'm still alive and doing well. More details may follow. I've been thinking recently about re-booting this blog and wanted to do a quick check if anyone was still looking here for new posts. Please leave a comment if you are still checking this site – thanks.

Posted by Steven at 01:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

May 07, 2007

Docking With the Mothership

For several years I worked as an engineer for companies that developed third-party hardware and software for Macintosh computers. In those days when someone would go to Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, CA; we would say that they were “docking with the mothership”. We all understood that we orbited and drew our strength from that central source and needed to return to there occasionally to get our vision refreshed.

Well, this week, I am spending some time docked at a different mothership.

For the last seven and a half years, I have been a part of churches that belonged to the Association of Vineyard Churches (a.k.a. “the Vineyard Movement” or “Vineyard Christian Fellowships”). That is a small percentage of the time I have been a Christian; but I have learned a lot from the Vineyard people, as I did from Foursquare, from Catholics, from Baptists, from Assemblies of God, and from the various independent churches I have been a part of. As you may have guessed, I consider myself a Christian and not a member of some denomination; but for now God seems to have me spending time working within the Vineyard Movement.

Which brings me this week,which I am spending down in Anaheim, CA (near Los Angeles) to attend the Vineyard National Leadership Conference along with a few thousand other pastors and lay leaders within the movement. It’s a chance for me to get some sense of what the denomination thinks God is doing and what their part is in it.

This is not just “the mothership” in terms of being a meeting of the denomination’s leadership; but also in terms of its location. In the 80’s and 90’s, the Anaheim Vineyard was the home church of John Wimber who was the key leader in the early years of the movement. This was the church you went to to get a sense of what Vineyard churches were all about. Now these days, the denomination’s headquarters has moved to Texas and the role of Anaheim Vineyard declined after Wimber’s death; but it is still interesting to visit this place for the historical role it played back when Vineyard was the fastest growing denomination in the world.

Posted by Steven at 08:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 22, 2007

Happy Again

It appears that for much of the past year, I have been depressed. That statement alone is not worth commenting on – I have previously established in this blog that I have dealt with periodic bouts of depression since I was a teen. What is worth noting is that I didn't realize I was depressed, and in fact when my wife asked if I was, I told her (with great confidence) that I was not. None of my usual warning indicators had been triggered, I was still motivated to do everything I usually do (well, I wasn't writing blog entries; but there were other explanations for that). The only symptom was that I was unusually tired – I'd come home from work and need to take a nap, even though the day had not been particularly strenuous. Given that I am overweight, I was willing to chalk that up to poor health.

What changed my mind that this was depression was that my exhaustion disappeared quickly once one factor in my life changed. I normally don't talk about work on this blog; but think I can say this without disclosing any material information. There was a project that I was very interested in that I was supposed to have started leading in January of 2006. However company priorities meant that the start of the project kept getting delayed again and again. There was a false start mid-year, which quickly fizzled as resources where needed elsewhere (while annoying to me, these may have been correct decisions for the company). In hindsight I realize that my needing naps started around the time that I gave up on the project actually starting anytime soon.

Well, the project finally started a few weeks ago, and I realized that the week before the project started (after the process passed the point of no return) that I wasn't needing naps anymore. In fact, in the week the project actually started, I was getting by with less than my usual amount of sleep – I was energized.

So I have to concede now that I was in fact mildly depressed for much of last year (my mood being driven down by not being able to start the project I so wanted to work on). The depression was so mild that none of my warning signs were evident; but it was depression nonetheless.

Ah well, lesson learned. I may have been living with the specter of depression for most of my life; but that doesn't mean I know everything about how it affects me.

BTW – this post is also a kind of test to see how much my mild depression affected my blogging. If I keep posting over the next few weeks, then I will have to also concede that I had a warning sign and didn't realize it.

Posted by Steven at 06:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

January 01, 2007

Another Year

Yes, I am alive. No, I have no idea if or when I will begin to post here regularly again.

As a quick update, no fundamental changes have occurred in my life. Still at the same job. Still at the same church. Anne and I are doing well (although, as befits our ages, we both have begun to have nuisance health issues from time to time). I'm just finishing a week and a half of vacation where the main focus was cleaning my home office (resulting in nine large bags of garbage being tossed and four boxes of books being donated to the library). Tomorrow work resumes.

As for the blog, I'm still not sure what I am going to do. Trying to post 3-ish times a week clearly does not generate enough inertia to keep me going (it becomes too easy to "wait another day" to post, and thus delay indefinitely). On the other hand, I am not sure I am ready to go back to trying to post every day, which seems to be what is needed to provide me with sufficient focus to post regularly here. Actually, I'd like to get back to posting every day; but there are too many other things demanding my time right now to do that without it becoming a burden.

So things continue as they are, with sporadic postings. So it goes.

Posted by Steven at 01:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

September 08, 2006

Getting my Mojo Back

I'm coming to the end of my nice, long vacation. I had become rather burned out at work over the summer and wasn't working at my full capability, so I've taken 3 weeks off to get well rested and relaxed before this Fall's new projects start up. What is unique about this vacation is that I actually have concrete measurements of how burned out I was and how I have recovered.

For my Birthday (actually, near the start of my vacation), Anne gave me a Nintendo DS Lite portable game system. Two of the cartridges she bought me were "Brain Age" and "Big Brain Academy", both of which are IQ-test like puzzle programs. "Big Brain Academy" (my favorite of the two) has 5 categories of puzzles: Think, Memorize, Analyze, Compute, and Identify. Each category has three kinds of puzzles; each puzzle can be played at three levels of difficulty. You choose the category, puzzle, and difficulty and then try to solve as many randomized puzzles of that type and difficulty as you can in a limited period of time. The result is a numerical score, and bronze, silver and gold medals are awarded if you score above certain thresholds. The puzzles themselves are both fun and challenging.

Anyway, I received the gift near the start of my vacation (when I was still fairly burned out), and I didn't do so well. I managed all right with the six kinds of Compute and Identify puzzle (getting silver medals even on hard; but no gold); but with the six Think and Analyze puzzles I was only able to get silver when I played on easy, and for Memorize I could only get bronze on easy. However, now that I am near the end of my vacation and am fairly rested, I have gold medals in all of the Compute and Identify puzzles at all difficulties, all golds in four of the six Think and Analyze puzzles (and all silver or better in the remaining two). My scores on the Memorize puzzles also improved; but remain weaker than the others (no gold on one, gold only on easy on another, and gold on easy and normal on the third). One lesson here is that short-term memory is probably just not one of my strengths as this age.

I even started to wonder mid-vacation if my improvement was really a matter of getting rested or if it was just a matter of practice, so I set the game aside for two days and they played again, and my scores still improved. Having this metric is very interesting – particularly the opportunity it provides to see how things change after I go back to work.

Posted by Steven at 04:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

August 28, 2006

64th Annual WorldCon, final remarks

So, I managed to make it to 35 events in the week on a variety of topics. That sounds pretty good until you consider that there were 1057 events total in the program, so there were vast portions of the convention I never saw. Some of that is by preference (I have no interest in costuming; and there are very few people I'd care to get autographs from, none of whom had scheduled autograph sessions); but a lot of it is just that I couldn't be two places at once. I say that to make the point that if the sessions I attended didn't seem interesting to you, that doesn't mean that there weren't others that would have been.

The other point I wanted to comment on was that "Graying of Fandom". Looking out at most of the sessions and you can see a sea of gray (or bald) heads. They had a display showing the programs and pictures from all 64 WorldCon, and a place for people to sign their names under the first WorldCon they attended. There was a definite bell curve in evidence in the number of names below each convention with the peak in the 70's. This correlates to my own informal observation that the median age for a WorldCon attendee is around 50 (I'd love to have some hard facts on that). Total attendance at WorldCon BTW is reasonably constant (roughly 6500, and preliminary data for this one indicates it will fall in that range as well).

The optimistic view is that this is a result of the addictive nature of attending WorldCon. Once people start to attend, they continue to do so until their health prevents it, so all of the 70 years olds attending now include those who started attending in the 90's as 60 year olds, in the 80's as 50 year olds, 70's as 40 year olds, 60's as 30 year olds, and the 50's as 20 year olds. There is at least some evidence to support this view. According to this theory we reached steady state in the 90's, adding enough new people each to replace those who can no longer attend.

The other opinion however is that WorldCon was created as a means to support a community of fans (sometimes referred to as Fandom with the capitol F) at a time when physically meeting was the most effective way to support each other and our strange common interest. Individuals have raised the issue that perhaps in the age of the internet there are new ways of creating community which are more flexible and effective than large conventions, and that WorldCon itself is in danger as more and more young people look to the net instead of the fan conventions to build the community. These people predict that WorldCon attendance should soon start to decline.

Since no decline is apparent, I provisionally include myself in the first category. I do think that the net has and will change the nature of Fandom; but there is no substitute for getting in the same building as 6000 other people with the same interest as yours. I know when I showed up at the hotel on Monday and started to see familiar faces in the halls, there was a feeling I just don't get visiting web pages.

While I expect to skip the next few conventions, this is clearly not the last WorldCon I will attend. I admit it. Hi, my name is Steve, and I'm a WorldCon-aholic.

Posted by Steven at 11:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

August 27, 2006

64th Annual WorldCon, Day 5

The final day for this year, and I was exhausted (as were many of the panelists).

What is it about Buffy?
Panel: Writers of the show (including Jane Espenson) and people who have written about the show.
The basic question of the panel is – why, two years after it want off the air, are DVDs selling so well, are people writing doctoral theses on the show, are viewers still watching the re-runs, and are people still holding panels about the show?

The first question the moderator asked each panelist was interesting in that all of them (serious professional writers, journalists, and academics) had very similar stories. All of the came to the show "late" (after it first started), having discounted the show originally. All of them walked in on some group friends intently discussing a work of fiction talking about things like "subtext", "thematic density", "metaphoric integrity" and "character development". All of them asked what great work of fiction was being talked about and in response to being told "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", responded "Buffy? You have got to be kidding."

In terms of answers to the main question, the responses tended to revolve on two ideas. The first is that Buffy' managed to tap into the power of metaphors in a way that no other show has managed. (I'll note that I believe Grey's Anatomy has followed the same path as well).

The other key factor which the panel discussed at length is the way that the show transgressed genre boundaries, not only by a being a comedy/horror/drama but making it such that you can never tell what genre the next 10 seconds will be based on the previous 30. This was central to Joss's concept of the show and was the reason he resisted both request from the network to change to change the name of the show (to "Slayer" before it aired and to simply "Buffy" after season 1). Joss's reason is that the name of the show itself has all three genres "Buffy (comedy) the Vampire (Horror) Slayer (Drama)".

The analysis of the panel is that there are three emotional reactions you can encourage from the viewer – they can laugh (comedy), they can scream (horror), or they can cry (drama). Life is also a mix of these three emotions, and in reality, you never know what is coming next. By writing the show to mix these element in unpredictable ways, they made the show more resemble real life, and therefore was able to connected with viewers in ways other shows was not. I'm not sure I agree; but it is an interesting thesis.

There was more; but I've run out of room.

Inside Battlestar Galactica
Panel: all seven of the show's writer.
A discussion from the writing staff about what they are trying to do with the show and how they do it.

While not "ripped from the headlines", the intent is that the show would be about current issues in society. SciFi is "just the prism through which they examine current issues".

In the miniseries (and first few episodes of the regular show), they enforced a documentary style of filming to make it all feel more real. Even for the CGI shots, there was a rule that you couldn't position a shot unless it was possible for someone to be at that location with a camera. Now that they have the foundation style down, they are a bit more flexible and allow exceptions.

Ron Moore (creator of the show) also wanted to create a very collaborative environment where everyone felt they were a stakeholder. All of the writers are encouraged to suggest improvement. What's even less common in other shows is that this extends to the actors too, and there have been several cases where actors have proposed lines which they felt better communicated their characters. When actually filming, the actors are required to do the scene as scripted at least once; but after that are allowed to improvise if they feel so motivated, and some of the best scenes have been ones the actors created on their own. (all of this is in sharp contract to how Joss Whedon and J Michael Straczynski work).

In other news, the season 2.5 DVDs will contain a 90 minute cut of the episode "Pegasus". Also 10 short "webisodes" will be made available on-line to lead into season 3, filling in some of the gap between the seasons. Finally, "Caprica" (a spin off series) is still in development. It is set 50 years prior to 'Galactica and is about how the Cylons were created. It is more of a drama about families and corporate politics, and tends to stay on the planet.

A Day in the Life of an Editor
Panel: Two (very) senior editors from Ace and Tor and the editor for Asimov magazine.
All about how editors actually spend their time. For the book people, it’s a lot of meetings and fire fighting. There's even a regular meeting to decide the exact font size to use for each book (actually the meeting is to talk about price and page count; but the knob they can actually turn at that point is font size). The editor of Asimov is pretty much a one woman show (she even does some of the type setting), so there aren't as many folks for her to meet with.

There was some discussion amount various levels of editors are publishing houses. There are usually several grades of junior editors (with titles like editorial assistants, assistant editor, etc.) who are all editors; but have someone supervising them. At the top end you have various senior editors (with titles like supervising editor, senior editor, executive editor, etc.) who in addition to handling books also provide supervision to the junior editors. In the middle are the people whose title is just "editor" who are not supervised but don't have to supervise anyone else either. Both of the book editors said that that was the sweet spot in the career of an editor – you can focus entirely on books. Note, the various titles do not represent a hierarchy within the organization – you don't have editorial assistants reporting to assistant editors and so on – the titles are more a matter of pay grade and seniority. New authors will almost always be assigned to junior editors, and the more senior editors tend to just support the authors they established as they worked their way up (mostly because they are too busy with other responsibilities).

An editor might be responsible for publishing 30-90 books a year, with three times that many somewhere in process. The point was made that an editor is never done with a book – years after it as been published they are still the person to go to if some issue comes up with the title – so for senior editors a lot of time is taken up fighting fires on old books.

At the two book publishers, there are a half dozen editors who are focused on doing Science Fiction; but that is just a matter of the editor's preferences – any of the 100's of editors at the company can buy a SciFi book (and do), and those that are focused on SciFi also buy other books when they find something they like. When looking for an editor to send a manuscript to, the second most important thing is to find an editor who has a track record of doing books like yours (the first is to follow submission guidelines).

Advances for authors are based on formulas. They type certain numbers into a program and it tells them the advance to offer. They have some flexibility as to what numbers they type in; but their career depends on those numbers being proven correct most of the time.

The number one requirement for anyone wanting to become an editor is "Move to New York City". The publishers are all based there and while senior folk might be able to arrange to telecommute, new employees don't have that option.

Punt
After that, there was one more seminar slot and the official closing ceremonies. I know from past WordCons that the closing ceremony is puntable, and I was tired enough that I really wanted to get headed home, so I passed on the last seminar (which would have been "The Query letter" – how to write a good "Dear editor, can I send you my manuscript?" letter).

I'll post some summary comments on the conference later this week.

Posted by Steven at 10:18 PM | Permalink

August 26, 2006

64th Annual WorldCon, Day 4

Mistakes Writers Make
Panel: 2 editors, 2 writers and a journalist
It quickly became clear that they were going to cover things I had already heard at this and previous WorldCons, so I moved along....

Moonbase Science
Panel: A former astronaut, a couple former NASA people and some space engineers
While it appeared that everyone on the panel owed their living to NASA at some point in their career, the overwhelming message of the session was that NASA can not and should not be trusted with the future of space exploration, and the private sector was the way forward. If it was only one or two member of the panel, I might have chalked it up to axe grinding; but everyone on the panel had horror stories of how bloated, self-centered, and incompetent NASA is - some quite shocking. While the actual science content of the session was rather low, as a "NASA brat" (my father was involved in the Apollo program), I found it quite interesting.

Behind Forbidden Planet
Panel: five movie writers, directors, and art directors
This was supposed to be a one man show by a guy who had done a lot of research on the history of this classic movie. He however backed out at the last minute, and a director who was a fan of the film stepped in and brought a bunch of folks from the industry who he knew were fans (including director Bill Malone, who owns most of the original props from the movie). Given the substitution, I almost headed to my next choice; but it quickly became apparent how passionate this group was about the film, so I stayed.

As they began to talk about all of the "firsts" in this film and what made it great, I came to realize that "Forbidden Planet" is to SciFi films what "Citizen Kane" is to cinema overall. A lot of people these days watch 'Kane and are unimpressed - there's "nothing new" in it for them; but they miss the point - so many of the cinematic techniques we all take for granted were invented for Citizen Kane. Yeah, they are all standard now; but they were "new" when Citizen Kane came out. So it is with "Forbidden Planet" - so much of what we take for granted in "good science fiction films" today, was done for the first time in Forbidden Planet.

A Key factor in the films greatness (in the opinion of the panel) was how it treated all of the earth/human technology as "matter of fact" - correctly showing that the characters were used to living in this environment. This pointed forward to Lucas's "lived in universe". The cook in "Forbidden Planet", while used for comic relief, was a precursor of the freighter crew in "Alien". This also means the movie is a great example of how to "show, not tell" in cinema.

There was also an interesting side discussion on whether the Internet could be interpreted as our version of the Krell planetary machine, and are there social "creatures of the id" which will be unleashed by giving everyone the ability to publish and access data world wide. Not sure I buy it; but the discussion was interesting.

There is a 40th anniversary DVD of Forbidden Planet due out soon, which may include an early working print that shows how much the film changed in editing.

Harlan Ellison Tell Us
Panel: Harlan Ellison
Harlan, for those who are unfamiliar, is one of SciFi's greatest writers. He has also spent 50 years cultivating a reputation as SciFi's bad boy - offending in person everyone and everything, every chance he gets. He started his talk by kicking people out of their seats to make room for his friends, and then insulting people in wheel chairs ("pretty careless to lose your legs like that, losing your keys I can understand; but your legs..."). He then warned everyone that if they were offended with what he had done so far, that they should probably leave now since it will only get worse. Going to a talk by Harlan Ellison is like watching a car wreck - you know you shouldn't watch but you can't turn away.

Most of the session was taken up with him asking the audience to state the most outrageous story they ever heard about him, which he would then confirm or deny. There was only one denial, and quite often he corrected the story to explain what he actually did was much worse. The bulk of the talk was his correction to "Did you send a dead rat to a Hollywood producer". The answer was no - he actually sent a dead gopher to a New York publisher, and that wasn't the only thing he sent to get the guy's attention. Others deliveries included 100's of bricks, all mailed individually with postage due; and a mob enforcer (with the side story of how he arranged that). To be fair, the publisher has violated the terms of the contract, and Harlan had tried normal means to address the issue first. It was however the gopher, which got (by chance) delivered Friday and spent the weekend in the mailroom, resulting in the building having to be closed on Monday that finally got the mater resolved. The lesson - don't mess with Harlan.

The other bit of news is that he announced that he plans for this to be his last convention appearance. While he continues to write (and has done an episode of "Masters of Science Fiction" to air in January/February), after 50 years he's grown tired of doing conventions.

Mistakes Future Historians Will Make About Our Time
Panel: several writers, some known for their historical research
This was quite an interesting discussion. While there were few specific predictions (other than the future will find our attitudes towards politics, sex, and particle physics to be strange, and probably amusing), the overall discussion was about the kinds of things people misunderstand about other ages, with many good examples.

There was a lot of talk about how people project their attitudes onto people of the past. As an example, many folks today project their post-civil-rights views of race on to the slavery debate in the 1800s - thinking that those who opposed slavery viewed people of African decent as equals, while many of them did not.

There is also the issue of language change. Even today you may get a chuckle in the room when you play the theme song to the cartoon series "The Flintstones" as Fred and Barney sing about having a "gay old time". One panelist reminded people that "motion" used to mean any change, and that "locomotion" (change in location) was the word used for what we mean by motion today. Likewise to "exterminate" was to put something outside the boundary - to evict or exile, not to kill. The point being that folks from the future looking at records of today will be at best confused and at worst will completely misunderstand them.

This then led to the question of what records will actually survive. We like to think that in our modern society that we can now preserve our history; but many examples were given of information which is lost every year. Even within entertainment media, what movies have not made it from film to tape, or tape to DVD? The problem with the last machine that can play the original recordings from Apollo 11 being decommissioned, and NASA not being able to find the tapes was mentioned. It was stated that "the only writings which made the transition from papyrus to parchment were those that were interesting to the people at the time the transition was made".

The final issue discussed was the telescoping effect - how people tend to collapse distant time periods together in their mind, jumbling events together. How many people know who reigned first - Elizabeth I of England or Louis XIV of France? In the future, will people think of long-haired hippies protesting the Gulf War?

Trailer Park
This was just a session where they showed movie trailers for upcoming films. In some cases they were test versions which had not been released yet.

Crafting the Whedon-verse
Panel: Two writers (Tim Minear and Jane Espenson) and a special effects supervisor (Loni Peristere) who worked with Joss Whedon
Joss Whedon is the genius-creator of Buffy, Angel, and Firefly; who, along with J Michael Straczynski (creator of Babylon 5), are the two TV writers I most admire. The three panelists are "Joss-lings" who (by working on his shows) went to "Whedonversity". The panel was them talking about the experience, what they learned, and a bit of what they are working on now.

I think the most telling story of the session was one Jane shared. One of the key principles Joss believes in is that even though you may be writing action/adventure/horror, the story must always be driven from the characters out to the plot. Many other writers of such stories develop stories based on gimmicks – let's send them through time, let's have an evil twin show up, let's have them repeat the same day over and over, etc. - then decide how the character will respond. Joss's approach is to ask what is happening internally to the character, and then what action/adventure/horror situation will best reflect that.

The story Jane Espenson told was soon after she started writing for Buffy', she discovered that Nicholas Brendon (who plays Xander in the show) has an identical twin brother. Immediately she saw all sorts of opportunities to use that and pitched a bunch of story ideas based on using Nicky's brother. Joss rejected them all as gimmicks. A couple years later, the character Xander was in the middle of making a transition from fun-seeking teen-age to responsible adult, and there were conflicts between the two sides of who he was. That's when Joss pulled out Nicky's twin and told a story where the character was split into two people – the teen-age Xander and the Adult Xander, making his internal conflict manifest. That's a great example of the difference between Joss and most TV writers.

The Hugo Awards Ceremony
The climax of each WorldCon (and probably the only event everyone attends together) is the ceremony where the Hugo Awards are presented. While this is the "academy awards" for SciFi, it is a much less formal affair. Connie Willis served as MC, with "help" from Robert Silverberg (they are close friends and have a long standing gag of always interfering with each other when one has a role in the Hugo Awards).

I won't list the winners (lots of places to grab that on the net); but will mention a couple other items:

The "Big Heart Award", given out "for outstanding service to the Science Fiction field" to someone who has contributed in some humanitarian way to SciFi fandom, was given to Forrest Ackerman (who actually co-created the award back in 1958), and the award itself was renamed "The Forrest Ackerman Big Heart Award". Forry (as he is known) is one of the recipients of the first Hugo awards, and was the person who coined the term "SciFi". More relevenat to the honor, he is known for rallying the SciFi community when one of its members is in need.

Betty Ballantine (who together with her husband Ian created both Bantam Books and Ballantine books) was presented with a special award for her contributions to SciFi. At 87, she is still actively involved in publishing and is a strong supporter of the genre.

Harlan Ellison also received a special award, and was obviously surprised and moved by the gesture as he almost made it through his acceptance speech without insulting anyone. He was actually speechless for a bit when he first went to the podium, and was clearly grateful for the sincere honor. While I find his public persona annoying, I can not disagree that his writing disserves all of the honors it has received, including this one.

Posted by Steven at 10:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

August 25, 2006

64th Annual WorldCon, Day 3

This is always the day that scares the locals. Because night 3 is when they hold the masquerade, a lot of people head out in the morning wearing their costumes. The reactions of hotel staff and other guests is often interesting.

Getting Started Writing SF, Part II
Panel: An agent, an editor, and two published authors
Yes, I skipped part I which had a panel of authors who has recently been published for the first time. Just too many conflicts.

The really short version of the session can be summed up as "As an author, you are the proprietor of a small business, act like it. You and only you are responsible for your career" and "Your rights are all you have, keep as much control of them as you can, and get as much money you can for any control you give away."

A lot of the session was warnings about a lot of the scams and otherwise underhanded dealings which are out there. The most basic principle is that money always flows to the author, not the other way around. If a publisher or agent is asking you to spend money (either paying them for services up front or paying someone else for something), its a scam and run away. A more subtle recent invention is companies which claim to be small press publishers who promise to pay a good commission on books they publish and half the amount for any subsidiary rights they sell. The catch is that the contract doesn't actually promise that they will publish any books (and in fact they never do). Their businesses is raking in the 50% commission you gave them when they re-sell your book to a real publisher.

Even real publisher have started to get more hardball as they have been acquired by large conglomerates. The agent on the panel told about a contract they received recently from a major publisher that had the author sign away all rights to the use of the name they were publishing under indefinitely, and the publisher's new legal office (inherited from the corporation that bought they out) said that the clause would not be removed under any circumstances.

All this led into the importance of having a good agent. The problem of course is that agents good enough to want won't deal with people who haven't sold a book. The solution (which I have heard on every similar panel at every WorldCon I have been to) is that you pretty much are on your own to sell your first book. However, as soon as you get an offer letter, you tell the publisher that you will have your agent contact them to negotiate the contract, and then and only then approach an agent, offer in hand. While the top agents might still decline, there are plenty of good agents who will take you on once you have the offer letter. The important thing is to find an agent who is experienced and knows the kind of writing you do. Another trope which I have heard repeated time and time again is that choosing your agent is as important a decision as choosing your spouse. Also, having an agent is much better than having a lawyer (this being the opinion of the editors and writers). An agent is paid 15% commission, and is well motivated to get you a good deal. A lawyer is paid by the hour and is well motivated to slow down the process as much as possible.

Books that should be filmed
Panel: a critic and several author/screenwriters (big names too)
The panel really turned into a discussion on why most SF makes bad movies. Why Dune failed (both times in the opinion of the panel) and why Enemy Mine worked. The consensus seemed to be that SciFi is (as has been said many time before) "The literature of ideas", and ideas don't translate onto the screen very easily, and it is even harder to convince a studio to try and translate ideas to the screen. The result is that books that film well are action stories with minimal intellectual content. You might want certain books to be turned into films; but you are unlikely to enjoy the results.

It Crawled out of the Slush Pile
Panel: five editors from various sized publishing houses.
The "slush pile" is the industry term for the stack on unsolicited manuscripts the editors have to wade through each week looking for those rare new authors who are worth investing in. This session wasn't about them; but rather the other end of the spectrum - stories of some of the worst submissions the panelists have ever received. Stories with incomprehensible prose, cover letters overflowing with the author's ego, concepts that make you check the return address to see if its a mental institution. The session was quite a laugh.

Perspectives on SF and Media, part 2: Femme Fatales
There is a small track at this WorldCon for presenting formal academic papers, and I wanted to check out at least one of these sessions to see what it was like. This was the only one I could fit in. Two papers were presented:

One was a correlation between gender roles of robots in 50's SciFi and the attitudes of society towards cosmetics. I know that sounds bizarre; but the presentation actually made sense (it wasn't some kind of joke).

The other was a very detailed analysis of a German novel and movie "Alarone" (?sp?) which translates to "The Mandrake". The story is about a girl who is conceived (literally) as part of a scientific experiment and becomes evil, ruining all those around her. The paper was an analysis of those texts in the context of the nature/nurture debate, and the degree to which the various characters' preconceived notions of what would happen and their unwillingness to consider alternatives became a kind of self-fulfilling prophesy.

Not sure I'd go to one of these again; but I was glad I went this once.

Hotel Room
Panel: bed, pillow
I was getting burned out at this point and decided to punt for a slot and get some rest

An Hour with Walter Koenig
Panel: Walter Keonig
Being focused on literary SciFi, WorldCons typically do not feature much in the way of actors. This time however, given the location, the overall TV and Movie content of the program is much higher, and there are a number of sessions which feature actors from a variety of TV shows, most of which I have chosen to skip (although I hear I missed some real entertainment from Marina Sirtis' talk). My one exception is Walter Keonig (Chekov, Bester,...). This is largely based on having read his autobiography which led me to believe that he's not a "star" or a "celebrity" but a hard working actor who really loved his craft and who has a great sense of humor. Hearing him speak only improved on that estimation.

He talked about a lot of stuff. His favorite TV role is Bester (from Babylon 5) - not a surprise. However there have been a number of stage productions he has done which he feels is even better work (such as playing an old Tom Sawyer who encounters Huckleberry Finn one day and they talk about how their lives turned out). When Walter was young, people would mistake him to be Davey Jones (from the Monkeys); but most recently he had someone who thought he was Woody Allen. I think the most telling part of the talk was when someone asked him what historical figure he'd love to be able to play. This was obviously a question he hadn't considered before, and while he contemplated a response, someone from the audio shouted as a joke "George Bush", to which Walter responded quite seriously (and obviously a bit of thought) why a chance to play the president would be a very interesting challenge as an actor - how to play him as a human being as opposed to the caricature that either side of the political spectrum would want to see (and implicitly not whatever he personally believes about the man). You could see the wheels start to turn in his mind as he considered how he might do it. The session was more like an episode of "Actor's Studio" than seeing a "Star Trek Actor".

The Business of Writing
Panel: an agent, three writers, and a writer's business mangers (and wife)
At the first session today they talked about how once you were a published author you were the proprietor of a business. This session was about some of the nuts and bolts of what that means.

There was a discussion of contracts and some of the things to watch out for (or rather get your agent to look out for - they echoed all of the same stuff about agents as in the first session). Be very clear about what rights you are granting, a lot of publishers will try and grab a lot of secondary rights (audio, foreign, etc) in the initial contract without much additional payment. Watch out for exclusion and non-compete clauses - make sure you can live with the limitations. Watch out for how the rights revert when the book goes out of print and how that is effected by "print on demand".

There was a discussion of how advances are paid out (generally not in an initial lump sum any more - you may have to wait for up to a year to get the last installment of your "advance"). Agent fees (usually 15%) and taxes must be taken out of that. There was a lot of talk of tax consequences of being a writer. The irregular income causes all sorts of issues (all of the writers had been audited at some point), and a good accountant is a must. On the plus side, many things become deductible - two of the writers have done TV scripts, and legitimately deduct their cable bills as professional research. Keep receipts on everything. While doing these deductions is clear once you have been paid as a writer, its a bit more fuzzy for aspiring writers.

Publishing houses are viewed as tough businessmen - trying to get as much as they can as cheaply as they can; but are generally honest. There's a bit of short-term magic accounting in how they deal with returns from chain stores; but while you may get less than you should in any given year, in the long run the numbers get corrected. All of the writers felt comfortable doing work for a (real) publishing house based on a handshake, trusting them to work out the contract in the long run. This is in sharp contrast to they experience doing work for TV or movies where they will not type a word without a signed contract in hand (and even then expected to get shafted). The one consistent complaint the writers had was having to remind their publishers to send later installments of their advance.

There was some discussion of publicity and how you should not expect the publisher to do much for you. It is recommended that authors make an effort to publicize their books in any way possible that doesn't cost money - but don't actually spend any of your own money. For instance, a couple of the authors stop by bookstores in any city they are in and offer to sign copies of their books that the store has on hand. The store then tends to position the signed books to sell better (since they can charge more), which increases overall sales. You should at least stop at every bookstore in your home town and suggest they stock the books as being written by a local author.

The most important thing however is not to focus too much on the sales of your last book; but always be working on the next one. Don't let publicity get in the way of productivity. Standard novel contracts expect you to deliver a second book in 6 months - longer than that, and the sales of one will no longer help the other. The synergy between a sequence of books is critical to their success.

The Masquerade
One of the standard features of WorldCon is the Masquerade. This is not a party where everyone dresses up; but a competition where people go on stage in their costumes and are judged, with prizes awarded at the end of the show. I managed to make it this year (normally night 3 is when I run out of steam and end up sleeping through the masquerade). Had a fun time.

Robot Stories
Also watched an independent movie "Robot Stories". I had heard about the film when it won prizes at the Asian-American Film festival (the filmmaker and most of the cast are Asian-Americans); but hadn't had a chance to see it until now. This is a film I plan on ordering a copy of as soon as I get home. The "tag line" they developed to market the film was "Science Fiction with a heart", and that's appropriate. The film is an anthology of four stories, each dealing with human relationships in some way. The "SciFi" elements are there to support the emotional stories, and do so nicely without distracting the audience from what's important. I haven't been moved by a work of SciFi like that since the last Orson Scott Card book I read.

Posted by Steven at 11:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

August 24, 2006

64th Annual WorldCon, Day 2

Today was a tough day for decisions. Except for the first session, there was always at least 2, and up to 4 seminars in each schedule slot that were on my "must see" list. Have no idea if I made the right choices; but here's what I did:

What's next from the SciFi Channel
Panel: a rep from SciFi.com
A quick peek at some of the upcoming shows from SciFi followed by some Q&A. The project which most intrigued me was the 6 hour miniseries coming this December "The Lost Room". Something happens in a hotel room in the 50's, and all of the mundane objects in the room at the time acquire unusual powers. If you comb your hair with the comb, time stops for 5 seconds. If you touch the bus ticket, you are immediately transported to a location on Route 66. If you tap the paperclip, a penny appears. A whole secret culture evolves among those who know about this, with people collecting and trading the artifacts. The most powerful item is the room key itself, which fits any door lock and transforms the door into a portal to any other door in the world, including the door to the original hotel room.

Aliens Among Us
Panel: a collection of writers including one trained anthropologist
The concept of the session was that anthropology can serve as good inspiration for someone designing an alien society - that the diversity of real human cultures can provide interesting ideas for the writer. Unfortunately, the debate quickly digressed into talking about how to do this respectfully to the source culture and I lost interest. So I moved on to my second choice....

Revise, Revise, Revise
Panel: a collections of published writers, some of whom also teach writing
This was a great session on various approaches to getting from the first draft to the final one (or at least the one you turn in to the publisher, understanding that they will desire their own revisions). I have three pages of notes from this one. Some of the key points were:

All authors are different, there is no "one size fits all" approach. Even for a given author, each story is different. Different stories come from different places in the subconscious, so what worked for one may not work for another.

There was a strong consensus that the first pass at revision should focus only on structural issues, and that the level of detail you look at with each subsequent pass should be progressively smaller. Everyone felt that the biggest mistake novice writers make is getting into detailed wordsmithing too early, with the result that they get too invested in good phrases and are unwilling to make bigger changes that may be needed. A couple of the authors felt you should only revise the document twice before sending to your editor - once for structure and a second time for style and wordsmithing.

Everyone felt that reading the text out loud was important, and if you can get a friend to read it to you, that's even better.

Some suggested that you should never edit a document in place when revising it, no matter what the computer lets you do. They felt that retyping the whole thing forces you to think about every word again and produces a better product.

There was a long discussion on outlining, and one author on the panel has the most useful opinion I have herd on the subject. They took the point of view that every author has strength and weaknesses, and that you should design an outline style that addresses your weaknesses. If you tend to lose your character arcs in all of the detailed action, then outline the character arcs in advance; but trust your ability to write the action without outlining. On the other hand if you tend to write your character arc well but get lost in the flow of the action, the outline the action. And so on.

Writing SF for TV and Movies
Panel: Some writers with a bit of experience
It was the hope for panels like this that I decided to go to this WorldCon. The panel was packed with TV writers whose work I know well, going back to D.C. Fontanta who wrote many episodes of the original Star Trek (and became associate producer for the show), and Melinda M. Snodgrass whose recent work I am a fan of.

The concept of the session was to talk about the differences between writing for the page vs the screen. To start off with, the panelists agreed that you have to turn the story inside out. In novels, you generally write from inside the character's head looking out, while for the screen, you are almost always looking from the outside in. The result is that you need to be even better than in novels at "show, don't tell". Dialog is everything in script writing, and prose descriptions should be minimal. Famously, the script for the movie "Sparticus", in describing the key fight in the gladiator arena, only says "they fight". People reviewing scripts written on spec often just read the dialog. The pace of a script is unnaturally fast for most novel writers, particularly for TV. With only 42 minutes to tell your story and the need to set up commercial breaks, you can't have any extraneous content. In fact, all of the writers on the panel who also wrote novels said that their novels got better because of the script writing experience - much tighter and clearer.

2081: The Remake everyone was waiting for
Panel: miscellaneous Schmos
This panel turned out to be a hoax, designed to see how far they could push the audience before they realized it was a joke. The idea was that Sony was going to "re imagine" 2001 a Space Odyssey for the 40th anniversary of the show, only as the panel described the project it would become clear that they were butchering it. I realized what was going on after about 5 minutes and moved on to my next choice (although I did check back at the end to make sure I was right)...

Distribution: how SF gets to you
Panel: missed the introductions
The session was on how book distribution works and how that effects the writer. Things like the differences between mass-market and "trade" paperbacks, etc. What I heard when I came in after leaving 2081 seem to me to be fairly incoherent with lots of isolated facts and figures and I decided to punt (having already wasted 5 minutes). I know it might have improved if I had stuck around; but I wasn't willing to risk it given that there were two other seminars I wanted to see in this time slot. So, I moved on...

The "Surface" of an "Invasion" is at the "Threshold"
Panel: missed intros, but there was at least one writer and one TV critic
The panel was about the three new TV shows last season that involved "alien" invasions that start in the water, and in particular why they all failed to gain a mass audience. A lot of the discussion duplicated a lot of what was said in yesterday's session on "why SF doesn't last on TV", only in applied form. All of these shows were viewed by the panel as "Children of Lost", down to the one-word ambiguous names. They were all guesses by the networks at what made Lost a succeed, and all (in the opinion of the panel) guessed wrong.

Surface never figured out what type of show it wanted to be. Threshold had a great pilot; but then the abandoned all of the character stuff that made the pilot interesting. Invasion was acknowledged as the best of the shows; but it lacked a clear hero that the audience could connect with, and relied on the audience watching each show to pick up all of the clues. It eventually became too complicated, with too many characters having different agendas for a mass audience to follow it. The consensus was that Invasion and Threshold could have probably been written to succeed; but that Surface was too much of a jumble to do anything with.

British SF Television Today
Panel: a bunch of British TV writers and one American critic
I'll start off by saying that while the information content wasn't as high as I hoped, the British writers were an outrageously funny crew and I needed some good laughs at that point in the day. They started with a long list of TV shows currently in production in the UK which we should look for (or avoid) on this side of the pond. "Life on Mars" has already started to play (I'll do a separate blog on it someday). The most highly recommend was "Robin Hood" which isn't actually SciFi; but has a lot of SciFi writers working on it so the dialog is intelligent and snappy. The most interesting news is that a new series of "Sapphire and Steel" is being produced with the original writer from the 60's at the helm.

A lot of the discussion however was about the impact the new "re imagined" Dr. Who has had on British TV. The panelists told some of the story of how it got made (the successful writer refused to do any more work for the BBC unless they let him do Dr. Who). How the BBC then pawned the project off on BBC Wales because they didn't want to waste their time on it; but how the production has been so successful that Cardiff is now becoming a major TV production location thanks to Dr. Who. Given this success, the BBC has now taken a much more positive view on SciFi, and is funding a bunch of new shows - not all of which are worthy. They also talked about how the BBC is starting to adopt some more "American" production methodologies, with both good and bad results (although the writers thought it was mostly for good).

Another interesting side fact that came up - the reason DVDs make in the UK are so "bare bones" - without a lot of extras - is that by law the censors have to approve everything you put on the disk, and that approval costs an outrageous amount per minute of content. Given the cost, they just don't bother over there.

Publishing Science Fiction
Panel: a mix of publishers and editors from small, medium and large press
I didn't stick around long as they weren't saying much I didn't already know from previous WorldCons. The best comment was the "Three laws of editorics":
1) you will buy books which are best for your publisher's bottom line
2) you will buy books which are best for your readers except where such purchases conflict with law 1
3) you will buy books which are best for the genre except where such purchases conflict with laws 1 and 2
stayed about 10 minutes then moved on to...

Good Endings:
Panel: TV and print Writers (including Fiona Avery) and some writer/instructors
The panel was about how to end a story. The key concept is that "writing is a promise, which must be fulfilled in the conclusion". That if you are having problems writing the end of the story, the problem is likely to be in the middle of the story where you didn't set things up right - "the middle justifies the end". Another choice quote was "non-fiction is about facts, fiction is about truth" - that the best ending for any story must be emotionally honest with the characters you have created.

The bulk of the discussion was about how to correctly "twist" the ending. The best endings are those which the reader doesn't see coming, but feels (after the fact) that they should have. The list of individual ideas on this is too long to enumerate here; but among the better suggestions (IMHO) is to fulfill the reader's external expectations but have the emotional impact on the characters to be unexpected, or visa versa - have the character's internal emotional conflict resolved by some unexpected external means. Another option is provide some information at the end which causes the reader to reevaluate the story as a whole (The Left Hand of Darkness was given as a good example of this - where you are given information which causes you to re-evaluate how one character felt about another, and therefore reinterpret certain events in the story).

There was also more discussion on the different types of writers - those than plan their stories, and those that grow them organically as the write them. The latter can actually be surprised themselves by how their stories end.

Posted by Steven at 10:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

August 23, 2006

64th Annual WorldCon, Day 1

And so it begins....

Opening Session
Opening sessions at WorldCons tend to be fairly minor affairs. Gifts are exchanged between the chairs of the previous convention with the chairs of the current one (last year's WorldCon was in Aberdeen Scotland, and they were presented with ribbons which read "So long, and thanks for all the haggis". The guests of honor are introduced (somewhat sad this year as two of them passed away between the invitation and the convention). And the opening gavel was struck.

The highlight this year (in honor of special guest Frankie Thomas who played the title role in the 1950's) was viewing the pilot episode of "Tom Corbett, Space Cadet", complete with the original commercial for Kellogg's Corn Flakes.

Buffy, The Master's Thesis
Panel: a TV studio person, an academic, and an editor of a couple of collections of papers
The session was not about Buffy' itself; but about the growing acceptance of "Television Studies" as a legitimate academic topic for study (in the same way people study Shakespeare's plays). The consensus of the panel was that there were several factors causing this. In part it is because the generation that grew up watching shows like "All in the Family", which did far more than entertain, are now coming to power in academia. In part it is because the ready availability of DVDs of TV shows make detailed study of individual shows practical. In part there are more and more TV shows being produced which are worthy of study (although there was some debate as to whether that was just a result of the Sturgeon Effect - with so many new shows being produced for 100's of channels, the bell curve was bound to produce more good ones).

Given that I love writing about TV shows on this blog, hearing other folks echo some of the thoughts I have had was quite gratifying.

Fantasy doesn't have to be about Kings and Wizards, does it?
Panel: 2 fantasy writers and a fantasy fan
As it turns out, the moderator of this session's flight has been delayed, so the other members of the panel had to scramble to fill in. I stayed long enough to hear all of their initial statements and decided I wasn't going to get as much out of this as I oped so I punted, and headed to my 2nd choice for the time slot....

Why doesn't Science Fiction last on mainstream TV?
Panel: mostly TV and SF writers (I missed the intros; but knew a number of them)
... and boy am I glad I did. The thesis of the panel was that horror and fantasy seem to do better on network TV than SciFi. The quality of the discussion and debate was quite good, and I ended up with nearly a page of notes on this. A lot of points were made which I wish I had time to repeat here; but the consensus view was that mainstream audience wants something that is familiar so that they can get into quickly. SciFi by its nature is about new things, new ideas, and as such it usually takes too long for people to come up to speed and understand it. Horror and Fantasy do somewhat better because they rely on existing tropes (folks know what a vampire is, so you can tell a story with one without having to explain a lot). The agreement from the panel is that the best chance for SciFi on network TV is to do some other genre and add SciFi elements (X-files could be understood as a cop show first, allowing a mainstream audience time to get hooked on the SciFi elements). The other common agreement was that people watch TV because they get involved in the lives of the characters. Too many SciFi shows have characters that are too thin to be interesting to a wide audience.

The best part of the session however was that Tim Minear (a TV writer whose show's I am a big fan of) was added to the panel at the last minute. He was a riot - making fun of all sorts of shows (including his own). His insights on why certain of his shows failed to gain as mass audience were very interesting.

The Brain's Process
Panel: one neuroscientist
A presentation by a rather eccentric and entertaining neuroscientist on some of the latest understandings on how things like consciousness work. A lot of the talk was fairly technical, and so is hard to reproduce here. While I didn't agree with everything he said (a lot of it is creative guesswork without a lot of hard facts), I did learn a lot from the session.

The Buffy Sing
One of the big things in London these days is showing the film "The Sound of Music" and inviting the audience to sing along. Well tonight they did a similar thing, only with the musical episode of Buffy'. I was not surprised that despite the event being held in one of the larger rooms, the place was packed - standing room only. What I was surprised at is how well folks sang - at least enough of them to drown out those who didn't. A good fun time.

Well, that's all for today (first day is short). More tomorrow.

Posted by Steven at 11:03 PM | Permalink

August 22, 2006

Disneyland

I confess that I am a frequent visitor to Disneyworld in Florida. The fact that my father retired only a 90 minute drive from the resort complex helps, although I was addicted to Epcot, Typhoon Lagoon and the rest of the parks there long before that happened. However, despite having lived now in California for nearly 16 years, I haven’t managed to make it down to Disneyland since we moved here. In fact, I haven’t been to Disneyland in California since I was about 5 years old. To put this in perspective, the last time I visited Disneyland, there actually were “E Ticket” rides.

However, WorldCon is being held this year at the Anaheim Convention Center which is essentially across the street from the Disney complex, so I spent the morning there today.

Now for those who are unfamiliar, the “Magic Kingdom” theme park at Disneyworld Florida is essentially a clone of the original Disneyland in California, so I went assuming I knew the place fairly well. What surprised me most was how small Disneyland was. While the arrangement of the rides is essentially the same between the two theme parks, at Disneyland, all of the rides feel like they are right on top of each other. I knew that one of the things Walt did when he created Disney World was to spread things out some; but I hadn’t really seen how much until now.

The other interesting thing was how they have expanded the complex here in Anaheim. For many years, Disneyland was hemmed in on all sides by businesses which were established to take advantage of the flow of tourists that Disney brought it, preventing the park from expanding (which is why Disney bought a large part of central Florida before building Disneyworld to make sure it didn’t happen again).

Fortunately, in recent years, the Disney corporation has managed to get control of some of the adjacent real estate and built “Disney’s California Adventure” and “Downtown Disney” to finally expand the complex here. While still miniscule compare to Disneyworld (which now had 4 major theme parks and several smaller attractions), with these additions they have managed to bring the best elements of Florida to California while keeping the original Disneyland intact.

A couple other quick comments. Two of the rides - “Pirates of the Caribbean” and “The Haunted Mansion” have been at least somewhat renovated and “re-themed” since I last saw them. Pirates’ was substantially modified both to bring in elements from the successful movies and to remove some “objectionable material” (the implication that the pirates were taking women by force). The changes were in my opinion rather heavy handed and I could have done without them. The ‘Mansion however was a more subtle thing, weaving into the ride a story about a bride who killed each of her many husbands, providing some background as to why the house was haunted and by whom. While I am not sure it was necessary, it certainly didn’t detract from the ride at all.

BTW (being at Worldcon and going to Disneyland) I should note that there is an interesting little subculture within SF fandom of folks who are fascinated with Disney theme parks - the most obvious example being author Cory Doctrow who wrote “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom”. These people are not so much interested in the theme parts as rides, or in the technology itself; but how the rides are designed to interact with the guests. Think of it as an exercise in user interface design - how do you get people to notice the things you want them to notice and ignore the things you want them to miss. It is an interesting subject, and having played through the recent game sequels to Half-Life 2 with the commentary tracks on, I can see some parallels with the problems Valve faces in designing games.

Well, that’s all for tonight.

Posted by Steven at 08:07 PM | Permalink

August 21, 2006

A Thoroughly Modern Road Trip

When I was in my 20's, I used to go on road trips quite often. Between lack of funds for flying and the pleasure of driving the open highway, it was my preferred form of vacation. However, since Anne and I got married, the places we have wanted to go for our vacations (like London) have tended to be places where driving was impractical (although we did drive cross country a few years back). It is certainly the case that I have not been able to do a road trip with a tricked-out car like our Prius until now. What a difference.

Mileage
I made it from Mountain View to Anaheim, a distance of 450 miles, using about 9 gallons of gas (I didn't need to fill up), and that includes being stuck in LA traffic for about an hour with the A/C on. The car's on-board computer said we did 53.0 MPG over the trip, although based on how much gas I put in (an unreliable measure), it came out slightly less than that. Nonetheless, given gas prices these days, I have no complaints.

iPod Audio
Anne and I actually used this on our cross country trip, so it wasn't a new experience; but having access to all of my albums (grouped in various ways) to listen to on the way down certainly made the trip more pleasant. Started it playing all of my Folk albums the first day (never made it to the end), and switched to Country on the second day. I decided to save my Rock and Roll albums for the trip back when I expect to be more tired. Not having to fiddle with the radio, and having only those songs I actually enjoy made a significant difference.

Cruise Control
OK, cruise control is very old technology; but back when I did a lot of road trips I couldn't afford such bells and whistles on my cars, so it is relatives new to me. Not only was my leg not tired at the end of the day; but my back felt better too.

GPS Navigation System
By far, the biggest advantage was having the GPS Nav System which came as part of our package on the Prius. I prepared for this trip the same way I have always prepared for a road-trip - by picking up maps and a Trip-Tick from AAA (the main national auto club in the 'States for those from elsewhere). Never used it once. I simply told the nav system where I wanted to go and followed the instructions it gave. I also programmed it to show icons on the screen for all gas stations, restaurants and hotels, so as I approached an exit, I could tell with a glance how "civilized” it was. When I got to LA, I turned off hotels and restaurants and quickly found a gas station nearby to top off the tank.

The best example of how the nav system changed things was when I hit a bad traffic jam on a highway in the middle of no where. As I neared an exit we were stop and go (mostly stop) and state troopers came by with sirens going so I assumed there was an accident someplace ahead. Now in the past, I would never consider getting off the highway in a winding rural area - while the roads would almost certainly connect to a later exit somehow, knowing what turns to make to get there would not have bee a safe bet. However, a quick glance at the nav system showed that it know about the local roads (they showed up on the screen), so I got off and headed in what appeared to be the right direction. Soon the nav system started to show a route other that heading back to the exit I got off at, so I followed the directions and in less than 10 minutes I was back on the highway passed the jam. My guess is that it saved me 30-40 minutes.

I can definitely get used to doing road trips the high-tech way.

Posted by Steven at 08:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

August 19, 2006

Off To Worldcon

I have some vague hope that (assuming I can get internet access) I will post daily reports from the show. More likely, I'll just sleep in any spare time I have. I will at least post a trip report when I return.

Posted by Steven at 03:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

August 08, 2006

Gearing up for WorldCon

WorldCon (the world Science Fiction Convention) is in two weeks and I am getting ready to attend. The official program is not yet available (so I don't know yet what tough decisions I will need to make between seminars which have been scheduled at the same time); but the preliminary list of seminars has been posted and here is that subset which caught my attention. BTW – the best seminar title IMHO is "Everything I Needed to Know About Quantum Physics I Learned From the Three Stooges" which is apparently a serious explanation of Quantum Mechanics illustrated with clips from Three Stooges movies. Go figure.

Writing:
Assistant Editors: Glorified Gophers or Finders of Hidden Gems?
The Author/Editor Relationship
Character Vs. Plot
Clichés of the Future
Creating Languages
Culture Building 101.
A Day in the Life of an Editor
Different Types of Writing? The Novel, Novella, Short Story, etc.
Distribution: How SF Gets to You
Editing: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
Escaping the Slushpile
Furgonomics (designing a world and the stuff in it with non-humans in mind)
Getting Started Writing SF -- Part I & Part II.
Good Endings?
How to Kill off a Character.
It Crawled out of the Slush Pile.
Mistakes New Writers Make
Promoting Your Book & Yourself
Publishing Science Fiction
Revise, Revise, Revise!
The Secret of My Success.
Small Press Publishing
Time in the Novel: the Stapledon/ Woolf Correspondence
Writing Military SF
Writing Non-human Characters
Writing While Holding down a Day Job
You Are Responsible for Your Own Career.

SciFi
Aliens Beyond Probability (aliens that were too alien)
Dune Again Kevin J. Anderson talks about continuing the Dune series
Fantasy Doesn't Have to Be about Kings and Wizards, Well, does it?
Favorite Fallacies of Science Fiction
Future Trends in Science Fiction
Great First Lines
Overlooked Books & Overrated Novels
Look at past Futures (What did the science fiction of the '30s - '60s say about today?)
Military Tactics in Science Fiction
No, Really, That Makes Sense (a "stump the panel" event where they need to come up with explanations for things raised by the audience from fiction)
Page 119 (Can you really tell if a book is good by randomly opening it and reading a page or two?)
Religion in SF Books & Movies
Science Fiction of the '30s & '40s, '50s & '60s, and '70s & '80s (3 seminars)
from Smallville to Secret Identity (how the superman myth has been constantly reinvented)
Style Vs. Substance (Is science fiction becoming too concerned about literary style at the expense of storytelling?)
The Sound of Thomas Jefferson Spinning in His Grave (Why do the descendants of rebels love reading about kings and wizards?)
The Worst Ideas in Fantasy or Science Fiction

TV
Battlestar Galactica ( with Executive Producer Ron D. Moore and others.)
Crafting Buffy
Lost & How to Get There
Running TV Shows
SF TV as Western
The Surface of an Invasion is at the Threshold
What Is it about Buffy ? (why are people still talking about this show?)
What's next from the Sci Fi Channel
Star Trek: from Concept to Editor in 14 Days

Real World
Buffy the Masters Thesis (about the growing acceptance of "TV Studies" as an academic discipline)
Craig Newmark on Craigslist.
The Future We Didn't Expect (what did SciFi get wrong?)
Is the Scientific Method the Death of God?
Mistakes Future Historians Will Make about Our Time (If we were to read a story written in the 23rd Century but set in our time, what might we find wrong with it?)
Robocop Vs. Real Cop: Future Law Enforcement (Criminologists and others discuss what changes they're already seeing in their work and what they expect for the future)
Real Aliens (what might we expect real aliens to be like)
Secrets of Area 51 (Based on declassified government documents, personal interviews and extensive fieldwork, aerospace historian Peter W. Merlin reveals the secrets of Area 51. )
Nanotechnology: the Future or a Dying Fad?
Okay, You've Got the Moon. What're You Gonna Do with It?
Unexpected Heroes of the Future (what people from today will be revered in 100 years)
Unintended Consequences (how much do you trust science?)
What If Superheroes Were Real?

People
Being Anne McCaffrey.
Harlan Ellison Tells Us.
An Hour with Frederik Pohl.
Jerry Pournelle: Inventing the Future.
J. Michael Straczynski On...

The catch of course is that there are only 28 schedule slots in the program, and I already have 70 seminars I want to attend, so even if these were optimally scheduled for me I'd end up missing two-thirds of them. Sometimes you are lucky and two seminars you are interested in are across the hall from each other and you can time share between them; or you discover your first choice seminar has a bad panel and you quickly run to your second choice. But my observation from my last two WorldCons is that I probably miss about half of what I would have liked to have seen.

In addition, the seminars run straight from 10AM to 7PM every day with no break - there are no scheduled slots to go find a lunch - and then the evening programs usually run from 8PM-11PM. The bottom line is that WorldCons are endurance events. You try to grab as much as you can without killing yourself in the process.

Posted by Steven at 06:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 31, 2006

Snap goes the shell

I have been trying to understand my recent lack of posts on this blog. To some extent I have been busy and otherwise distracted over this summer (those who read my wife's blog know the most recent in the series of issues). Since I want to keep this exercise as something fun as opposed to something I "have to do", it would be easy to simply say "I haven't had time" and leave it at that.

Yet my gut told me there was something more.

Was I depressed? Not that I could tell (and I think I have become quite adept at recognizing those symptoms). Was I really that busy? No – I certainly had time for a great many other things. Did I have nothing to say? Well…. that becomes an interesting question. I do seem to have been somewhat lacking in introspection the last few months; but is that a cause or a symptom? While it might explain the lack of interest in writing for this blog, it would also seem to be something requiring an explanation of its own.

This question seems to have been enough to rev up (at least temporarily) my introspection engine. What I have come to realize is that for the last few months I seem to have just been "grinding out the days" – living from one day to the next with only minimal concern for the larger picture. Given that I only realized this now because of the blog, I don't know if this is a mode I have periodically dropped into over the course of my life without noticing it, or if this is some new phenomena. Either way, it merits further consideration on my part; and that consideration merits comment on this blog.

I do have a sense of having been withdrawn of late – like a turtle pulled into its shell, although I can point to no obvious trigger for such behavior. There are more recent events which I could imagine having that effect; but they clearly postdate my behavior change. I seem to have subconsciously slipped into "survival mode" – focusing on doing what is necessary to get through each day and not "wasting energy" looking at things beyond that (as I at least think is my normal habit). It is quite peculiar to realize this behavior without knowing what motivated it.

And then of course there is the question – is this realization and the introspection which led to it a signal of another phase transition back to my "normal" behavior? Or am I merely poking my head out of my shell for a moment?

One thing is for sure; blogging is a great tool for self analysis. It shows you things you might never notice otherwise.

Posted by Steven at 05:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

June 06, 2006

Voting Machines

Today was a primary election in California (where members of various political parties choose their candidates), and in addition there were several direct measures on the ballot (mostly tax and bond issues for various causes).

What I found interesting was the new voting machines. California used to use the punch-card ballots which caused so much trouble in Florida in 2000. After that fiasco, the State of California (as well as its constituent counties) had been casting around for the best solution which meets such a diverse set of constraints that when the process started there was no voting system which met all of the legal requirements. Even in the last election, there were counties where the combination of the requirements of the counties and the requirements of the state invalidated all available systems.

The device I got to use today was clearly a compromise in the worst possible sense of that word. It was fundamentally a touch-screen voting machine. You sign in and get an authorization card from the poll workers. The card just ensures that you only vote once and vote only on the questions you are authorized to vote on (so members of a political party can only vote on their own candidates). You stick the card into the voting machine and it displays on a screen the candidates and questions in large print. You touch the screen to mark your vote, with the ability to go back and review and change your votes before committing to them.

After you commit is where things get interesting. The voting machine has bolted onto its side a paper tape printer (like a cash-register printer) encased in clear plastic set up so you can read the last 30cm of the tape. When you commit your vote on the touch screen, it then prints out what you voted for on the paper tape and you have to confirm that what was printed was what you meant to vote. Actually, the ballot was long enough that it comes out as multiple pages so you have to do this multiple times. You can at this point go back and change your vote, causing the cycle to begin again. Once you say "yes" to all pages, it prints out a final page which is a pixel encoded version of the same thing. Because the printer is relatively slow, it at least doubled (if not tripled) the time it took me to vote.

I understand the reason for this. Having a "paper trail" for all votes makes sense (bits are too vulnerable). Likewise, if you do have a paper trail, I can understand wanting to allow the voter to confirm that it matches what they intended. Still, when I actually had to use it, the whole thing seemed rather contrived. One of my co-workers regularly votes by absentee ballot so that they don't need to worry about making it to the polling place (they live far enough from work that this is an issue). I'm starting to wonder if they have the right idea.

Posted by Steven at 09:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Still here

Been distracted lately, and so have missed my three times per week goal for this blog. So it goes. I do have some things I want to blog on as soon as I have mind-share to spend on this.

Posted by Steven at 09:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 30, 2006

System Upgrade

I made some change a few months ago to combat spam on this (and related) sites and it seemed to have helped for a while. Unfortunately this past week someone renewed the abuse of this blog (as well as my album blogs) using an approach which was immune to my previous blocking strategy. My apologies to anyone who had to wade through the pile of false comments over the last few days

The good news is that I discovered that an upgrade to my blogging software had become available through my host. I have now upgraded this site to Movable Type version 3.2, whose major advantage over 3.15 is the inclusion of extensive anti-spam technology. Hopefully, this will block the latest wave of attackers.

Of course, anytime you move to block unwanted posters, particularly using a software solution, there is always a chance that it may also block legitimate posters. The approaches used by MovableType look reasonable and safe; but just in case, EMail me if any of you have problems with the site now that I have upgraded.

Thanks.

Posted by Steven at 07:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 16, 2006

WorldCon in August

I decided this past week that I will in fact be going to WorldCon (the World Science Fiction Convention) this August in Los Angeles. This has been a surprisingly complex decision for something a year ago I would have considered obvious. I have been to two WorldCons (2002 in San Jose and 2004 in Boston), and I found both to be immensely enjoyable and extremely useful to me as a writer. When it was announced 3 years ago that this year's convention would be in LA (not too difficult to get to from where I live), it seemed like a great opportunity. However, my rethinking of my life this last year significantly altered my perspective and complicated that decision.

To explain why, I need to step back and explain what WorldCon is. Those whose image of a "Science Fiction Convention" is a bunch of twenty-somethings in Klingon costumes drooling over the chance to see actors from their favorite TV show, that is not WorldCon. I have been to regional conventions which fit that description and would never return. When I found out in 2002 that the World Science Fiction was being held in San Jose, CA (a half hour from where I lived) I almost skipped the opportunity because of bad experiences at other 'Cons. I am so glad I didn't.

WorldCon started in 1939 as a convention for fans of written Science Fiction (and Fantasy). There was no TV then and very little in the way of SciFi movies. The focus of WorldCon then and now is on Science Fiction literature. These days there is always some content related to TV and movies (5-10% at the ones I have attended, I expect a bit more for this next once since it is hosted in LA); but the bulk of the convention is about the written word and it is largely attended by intelligent and literate people (with an average age in the 40's I would guess).

Furthermore, WorldCon is where the Hugo Awards are presented. The Hugos (Technically the "World Science Fiction Achievement Awards") are the highest honor bestowed on Science Fiction writing. There are other awards (the Nebulas, for instance); but the Hugo is the one everyone in the industry wants. The Hugos are in almost every respect the "Academy Awards" for SciFi.

One result of this is that the convention is well attended by professional from the SciFi publishing industry: publishers, editors, literary agents, illustrators, and of course lots and lots of writers. I struck up a conversation in a line once and discovered that the guy I was talking to was the submissions editor for a major publisher (the guy who makes the initial decision if his company is going to buy your new novel). Later, I found myself sitting in a seminar next to two agents who happened to handle two of my favorite authors.

And speaking of seminars, the backbone of WorldCon are usually over a hundred panel discussions. Some are "just for fun"; but many relate to the craft of writing and the art of getting published. Some of my favorites from past WorldCons include:

- "Things I Wish Some Pro Had Told Me When I Was Just Starting Out" hosted by two published authors, Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta.

- "1000 stories in one hour" hosted by one of my favorite authors, Orson Scott Card. For the record, he cheated; but it was still a great brainstorming exercise and taught me a lot about the different between a great concept and a great story.

- "The first two pages" with a panel of publishers, editors, agents and writers talking about what they look for in the first two pages of a novel.

- "Designing an alien language" hosted by a professional linguist talking about how human languages differ and how to extrapolate ways that non-humans might communicate

- "How to write a fight" by an author and martial arts expert.

- "Things we hope never to see again in another novel" a discussion of worn-out ideas (or ideas which should never have been used in the first place). In the process, the panel talked about a lot of books that "got it right" and I walked away with a long list of new novels and authors to try.

The summary of all this is that if you are an aspiring SciFi or Fantasy writer and have a chance to attend a WorldCon, you really should go – there are too many opportunities to learn and improve your craft there. Furthermore, if you are an aspiring SciFi or Fantasy writer and you have a completed manuscript, you would be foolish to not attend WorldCon. Why? Because having an editor recall your name and remember you as someone who seemed otherwise rational can make a big difference in your chances of getting published; and WorldCon is the perfect place to develop those relationships. This isn't even sleazy – the reason most editors attend WorldCon (and hold parties in their suites) is so that they can meet aspiring writers (I have been told so by multiple publishers). Just don't come with manuscript in hand (a serious faux pas). The goal is to let them get to know you; and if you are lucky, get them to ask you to send them your manuscript. Being able to say in your cover letter "Here's the manuscript you asked me to send you…" can get you past a lot of competition – as long as you are telling the truth.

Which finally brings this back to my own situation. As I have commented previously on this blog, I have decided to put my fiction writing on the back burner and focus on non-fiction for the next few years. So, when my reminder to register for WorldCon this year came up, I was in a quandary. Fiction and non-fiction writing and publishing are different beasts, and I'm unlikely to learn anything at WorldCon that would help with any of my current projects. Likewise, any relationships I develop now would likely to be forgotten by the time I actually have a fiction manuscript in hand to sell. As an aspiring writer, there was no real reason to attend WorldCon this year, and as such I had to rethink whether it was worth attending as "just a fan". What finally closed the deal was that, given that WorldCon is being held in LA this year, a lot of my favorite television writers will be attending and the chance to meet and spend time with them makes the trip worth it to me. However, I suspect this will be the last WorldCon I will attend until I get back to writing fiction and have a manuscript complete.

Posted by Steven at 05:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 04, 2006

Adjustments

So, as previously noted, the conclusion I came to at the end of my first year of blogging was that trying to do a blog of this style on a daily basis was going to take too much energy away from other things I wanted to accomplish. I'm not willing to change the style of blog, and I'm not willing to make it the focus of my life, so the only remaining knob to turn was frequency.

I now believe I can fairly consistently produce 3 blog posts a week without it becoming a problem for me. I still might miss an occasional one, but I think I can stay enough ahead of the curve at that rate that I can be fairly consistent.

Given that, here's my question: if I am only posting 3 entries a week, does it matter to my readership if I am consistent in when I make those posts? Does it matter if I post Monday, Tuesday and Friday one week, and then Wednesday, Friday and Saturday the next? Or would it be a significant advantage to people if I posted between 6PM and 9PM (Pacific Time) every Monday, Wednesday and Friday (with exceptions made only for dates of historical significance)?

I personally have a very long list of web sites I track, and have made an effort to actually organize them based on how often I check them. There are "multiple times a day" sites, "daily" sites, "weekday" sites, "MWF" sites, "weekly" sites, and "monthly" sites, so for me, being predictable would help. However I suspect I am unusual in that effort and organizations. So, any opinions out there?

Posted by Steven at 09:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

April 18, 2006

Quake Day

Today (as I suspect a great deal of US media will pick up on) is the 100th anniversary of the "Great" San Francisco Earthquake. Those who live in the SF Bay area have been inundated with coverage of this event for the last week – I suspect most are, like me, already getting a bit tired of it.

I moved to this area just 4 months after the 1989 Loma Prieta quake (the one the broke the Bay bridge, caused those fires in the marina district in SF, and resulted in the collapse of the highway in Oakland where so many lost their lives). As we arrived, the damage was still quite evident as one went driving around. Houses toppled, roads closed because of cracks, etc.

But the bay area has always been resilient – rebuilding and moving on. The media periodically reminds people to have their emergency kits ready, out-of-state contacts coordinated, etc. The next big one is, after all, inevitable (the next little on has already happened – we get a dozen or so small quakes a week – most too small to notice).

Some friend questioned the wisdom of our moving to California; but the way I see it, every area has its "faults". The Southeast gets hurricanes. The Northwest gets blizzards. The Midwest gets tornadoes. We get Earthquakes. So it goes.

Posted by Steven at 05:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

March 28, 2006

A year on the web

Despite the year going out with more of a whimper than a bang, this is the first anniversary of my starting this blog and thus an obvious occasion for introspection and evaluation. I started this blog for a multitude of reasons. Some were achieved, others not.

First some raw statistics.

In 365 days I made 218 posts, or an average of about 4 posts a week. Obviously the last two months reduced that average significantly. To those posts there were 197 comments from other 12 people and 111 replies to those comments from me for a total of 308 comments. The fact that the ratio of posts to comments is nearly 1-1 over the year is very satisfying for me. Just looking at the posts (my comments would significantly increase this), I wrote over 92,000 words which, when formatted as manuscript for submission to a publisher, would fill 271 pages. So essentially, I wrote a book this year.

Beyond the numbers, how well did this venture “succeed” at being what I had hoped it would be? The answer is somewhat mixed, as were the reasons I started this.

One reason I started this blog was to encourage myself to get out of my shell. I am by nature a reserved, almost reclusive person. I am most comfortable either alone with my (many) thoughts or in the company of one or two other people I know. My hope was that doing this blog would encourage me to be a bit more open – not just on the web, but also in every day life. On that goal I am please to say this was a success. Putting my thoughts out on the web (even if it is read by only a couple dozen people) has managed to make me more comfortable talking about myself in general.

Another reason I started this blog was I wanted some outlet for all of the random things I think about. Again, a success. Looking back at the entries I posted over the year, I do think they are a fair reflection of what I think about normally. Being able to put these thoughts down in ones and zeros has been a great release for me.

Another reason I had was to make some new connections to the world – to find some people with similar interest and develop some new friends. Here the blog was somewhat less successful. Of the twelve people who commented on this blog, only 5 were not known to me before I started blogging, and those 5 only accounted for 33 of the 197 comments. While it was never my plan to become a famous blogger, read by millions, I had hoped my audience would extend a bit farther outside my existing associations than it did.

My biggest disappointment?

While the lack of contact with new people rates fairly high, I have to say the difficulties I have had the last two months is probably my greatest disappointment.

My biggest surprise?

I was most surprised by how much I like writing non-fiction. I have always viewed myself as an aspiring fiction writer, even though I have never managed to finish any of my larger projects. What I discovered with this blog is how much I like writing essays, and that has led me to wonder if my pursuit of fiction has been misdirected. I am now contemplating putting an effort into writing a non-fiction book and laying fiction aside for a while.

What’s next?

Well, my intent is to continue blogging here; but I’m still not sure how often or on what topics. One challenge I have (other than work) is that I seem to be able to focus on one writing project at a time. Some of the gaps in the blog are from times when I was busy writing things for work or church. If I do in fact start to write a non-fiction book in earnest, that will almost certainly impact my ability to also write for this blog. On top of that I have the issue that a lot of what I have been thinking about lately is related to my faith and I still am unsure how much of this blog I want to see dedicated to that one (albeit important) part of my life.

Posted by Steven at 09:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

March 19, 2006

18 years

As of today, Anne and I have been married for 18 years. This is a short post as obviously I have more important people to attend to; but I thought it was an occasion worth marking.

Posted by Steven at 08:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 16, 2006

Yes, it has been a long time

The problem has been that I actually had three events which consumed my mind share, one after another.

First there was the original work-crunch. I'm glad to say I managed to care for my health (physical and mental) much better through this one than the last. I'm not as young as I was, and last big crunch at work I dove in like a 30-year-old and burned myself out after a few days. This time I ramped up more slowly, giving my body a chance to adjust to the faster pace, and was more careful to listen when it started to say "enough" at the end of each day. The result is I managed to put in a lot of extra hours over two weeks and still had energy at the end. The fact that I had been exercising regularly before this also helped I am sure.

But that's not all….

The timing of the original crunch was driven by a bunch of people coming to our SF office from around the world (no details, as per my "I don't blog on work" rule). As it turns out, it was decided that a subset of them would stay for the following week to work with me on an unrelated task. This was essentially a training exercise where I had to spend a fair part of the week teaching them about something. It was actually quite fun for me (as has been previously established, I love to teach); but "teaching" uses pretty much the same part of my brain as "blogging". So, while my hours were normal, I didn't really have any mind-share left to think any deep thoughts to blog about.

Finally, I had previously committed to preach at my church on a particular day when my pastor was out; and as it turns out, just as the people I was teaching at work left, it became time for me to prepare my sermon, which again took up whatever mind-share I had for blogging.

So, I spent 4 weeks with no real mindshare to spend on this blog, and then a few days where I really didn't want to think any deep thoughts.

But now, hopefully, I am back.

Not sure I have many big thoughts yet; but I'll find something to say.

Posted by Steven at 09:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 01, 2006

Stati

crunch over
steve tired
blog coming
not today

big thoughts
will come
need rest
write soon

think
sleep
clear
choice

z
z
z
z

Posted by Steven at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

February 13, 2006

Crunch Time Again

I didn't post over the weekend as I was too busy recovering from a personal crunch at work last week. A lot of things on my plate happen to all line up in the next few weeks, so I am living in interesting times. I'll probably be fairly busy one way or another until March 13th, so posts may be a bit less frequent for the next few weeks. Given that, I thought I'd just make a few random comments while I wait for the caffeine to take effect.

- One reason I am upbeat despite the workload is that some of it relates to my being able to do some teaching. There's a week of training being given by my department, and I am teaching the whole first two days of classes. On top of that I am preaching at church on Sunday, March 12th. Color me very happy (just ask Anne).

- I continue to not be drawn to the Olympics. Anne and I watched our recording of the Opening Ceremonies last night – nothing to write home about; although I did enjoy the ski-jumper and the dove that were animated with people's bodies. I'm pleased they are giving good coverage to curling this year. I'm not big "into" the sport; but find it interesting and the lack of coverage in previous years had always bothered me. I have the same feeling about Rhythmic Gymnastics in the summer games.

- A couple years back I realized I had never read anything by the great SciFi author Alfred Bester, so I picked up a couple of his books, and am now finally getting around to reading his first novel – the Demolished Man (which holds the distinction of being the winner of the first-ever Hugo award). I am quite impressed so far. Some of his techniques are "old hat" now; but one must remember that this is the book in which they were invented (kind of like watching Citizen Kane).

- Grey's Anatomy remains one of the best written shows on television. While this and last week's two-part episode were clearly written as Sweeps Month ratings fodder, they clearly show what you get when you ask an already great show to do something outstanding. Both episodes were a fugue on the subjects "what really matters" and "how people handle stress". What's interesting (that I learned after watching it) was that the first episode (last week's) was deliberately written to show the "masculine" point of view; while this weeks was meant to show the "feminine" point of view. In hindsight I can see it. The point I wanted to make though is that this is a show that actually tries to do things like that. Also, the bookend "shower scene" motifs (at the start of the first part and end of the second) were perfectly done - showing the difference between masculine and feminine POV; but also commenting on what we think matters vs. what does really matter.

That's all for now.

Posted by Steven at 02:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 08, 2006

Olympic Apathy

In years past I have gotten very excited by the arrival of a new Olympic Games, planning strategies to maximize my opportunity to watch them on TV. I might skip hockey in the winter games (never my sport) or most of track and field in the summer; but the Idea of the Olympics had always captivated me.

However, two years ago, I found my ardor for the Olympics had begun to wane. I recorded everything I could (Tivo Rules!); but found myself fast forwarding through much of it. I still watched gymnastics (both artistic and rhythmic) and swimming; but I skipped (or rather watched at 8X) most of the rest.

Now a new Winter Olympics is upon us, and I am finding it hard to muster much in the way of enthusiasm. I'll probably watch the skating competitions; but I'm usually excited about the various sled and ski sports and I find I am not this year. Is it my age creeping up on me? Is it the acceptance of professionalism that has somehow "corrupted" the games for me? Is it a sense that for all its grand ideals, the Olympics has never really made a difference in the world? I don't know. I just know I am more interested in doing the things I usually do (read books, watch DVDs, watch TV shows, etc.) then I am in watching the Olympics this year.

Posted by Steven at 07:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

February 05, 2006

Next…

I know I'm jumping the gun a bit; but I'm already starting to think about what I'm going to do with this blog as it enters its second year of operation at the end of March. This started out as a bit of an experiment (as most blogs do), and the one year mark of anything is a good time to look back and make any mid-course corrections that are needed.

So first, I'll ask again, if you read this blog regularly, please sign up on the guest book on frappr. All you need to provide is a name (it can even be a nickname) and what city you live in. I know from access logs that there are over 20 regular human readers (not counting the various 'bots that cruise through here daily), only 10 of which have signed up on frappr. I'd also love to know who is generating so much traffic on this site from Sweden, although I'm pretty sure that is automated.

Second, if you have any suggestions or requests, please pass them on via comments. This remains my blog, and I obviously reserve the right to ignore any and all suggestions; but I recognize that there may be useful improvements I haven't thought of.

Third, if you have any topics you'd like to hear me hold forth on, let me know. I blog on what I am thinking about; but more than once your comments have gotten me thinking about something new.

Finally, just to put this out there for comment, there are two things I am at least thinking about doing next blog year. The first is to focus more on quality vs. quantity – producing fewer; but hopefully better written essays. My plan this year was to try and capture as many of the things I think about as I could, not spending a lot of time writing up any one of them (most of my posts are dumped stream-of-consciousness and go through a single editorial pass). What I have learned in the process is that I really like writing non-fiction, and would like to use blogging as a means to improve my skills in that realm. I think that will require spending more time in each post, which in turn almost certainly means fewer posts.

The other option I am considering is splitting this blog in two. There are things I'd like to say to a wider range of Christians, which is possible if I promote the blog more in the "godblogsphere". However, given that a minority of my posts are on my faith, I think folks who are looking for a "Christian blog" would quickly loose interest with Sighs and Musings. If I created a second blog just for my Christian posts (and perhaps cross-post pointers here), I could promote that other blog more to a specific audience. I haven't decided anything; but (as always) thought I'd share what I was thinking.

So, any suggestions? Comments? Opinions?

Posted by Steven at 07:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

February 03, 2006

My Book process

A rather mundane post; but it is what I was thinking about.

I read a lot of books, and over the years I have evolved a strategy for managing books in my life. There is a relatively fixed sequence of "locations" a book can be:

Amazon Wish List
This is a relatively new technique. It used to be that when a book came to my attention, either through a friend's recommendation or by being mentioned in some article, I'd write it on a PostIt™ and stick it in my wallet. Then when I next went to a book store (which in my life was typically within one or two days), I'd buy it. Since PostIt's in the wallet were not a "volume" solution, I tended to buy books soon after they were recommended, which tended to have a different and very undesirable effect on my wallet. Now, whenever I identify a book I want, I find it on Amazon and add it to my wish list, where it can stay indefinitely. When my "To Be Read" shelf (see below) starts getting empty, I place an order at Amazon to fill it up again, culling those books off the list which in hindsight I'm not really interested in. The other advantage of Amazon is that I can add books that have not yet been published to the list, so it’s a good way to keep track of "what's next" from my favorite authors. Right now I have 50 books on my Amazon wish list. This also cuts down on trips to book stores, which tend to be hazardous to my bank account.

To Be Read Shelf
Whether I buy them at Amazon or on one of my trips to a book store, purchased books end up on my "To Be Read" shelf. I like to keep twenty or thirty books there waiting for me. Right now I have nearly a hundred (it's actually the To Be Read shelves – plural). Books move off the To Be Read shelf onto my "On Deck" pile on my nightstand in groups of four or five.

On Deck Pile
On my nightstand I keep a short pile (four or five books) that will be the next books I read. My "rule" (occasionally broken) is that I finish reading all of those books before pulling down a new set from the "To Be Read' shelf. I used to do this one book at a time – when I finished a book I'd grab the next book I was interested in from the "To Be Read" shelf. The problem I discovered that there were lots of books I really did want to read; but which psychologically were never the #1 book I would grab next, and so they would languish on the shelf for months or years. By grabbing four or five, I forced myself to think a bit more about what I wanted to "get read" as opposed to just what I wanted to "read". This has also helped me maintain a bit more balance in what I read - another rule (also occasionally broken) is that I don't grab more than one book on the same topic (religion, fiction, physics, biology, sociology, history, etc.) at a time.

Current Book
Obvious

To Be Sorted Shelf
When I finish reading a book, I put it on my "To Be Sorted" shelf, and then when that shelf gets full, I sort the books into one of the three destinations described below. I find that by delaying this decision (not choosing as soon as I finish the book), I tend to make better decisions – I'm not as caught up in having just read it and have some hindsight on how much the book has effected me.

The there places a book ends up when I sort it are:

1. The Recommended/Reference Bookcase
Books that I end up recommending to other people (and therefore I want to keep on hand to loan out) and books that I refer back to get put in a special bookcase in my room, ready and waiting to be called upon at a moment's notice. The really good books I read end up here.

2. Long Term Storage
Books that I think I may want to read again, but I'm unlikely to recommend, get put into a storage box (clear plastic, so I can see inside) in my room; and when the box gets full, I put it out in the storage locker. On my trips to the storage locker I also tend to take a look at the boxes already out there and see 1) if in hindsight the bloom has faded off of any of the books I have stored - they got moved to the next destination, or 2) if I want to grab any to re-read – in which case they get put on my "To Be Read" shelf.

3. Donation
Books that I have read which I don't expect to recommend or re-read get donated – usually to the local library; but occasionally other causes. Books in Long Term Storage that I am not longer interested in end up here too.

As I said, not a very interesting post.

Posted by Steven at 05:50 PM | Permalink

January 13, 2006

Busy week

The lack of posts this week has been a reflection of my mindshare and time being consumed by other things. There is a co-worker in town from our London office that we have been spending some time with after work. There have also been some interesting discussions on my church's mailing list which I have been involved in which have used up many of my writing cycles. Some of that thinking may eventually be reflected in posts here; but I'm not there yet. I just wanted folks to know that I am otherwise OK.

Posted by Steven at 05:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 02, 2006

Best Vacation Ever

OK, perhaps not ever; but this is certainly one of the best vacations I have had in a long time.

I got enough practical stuff (like cleaning my home office area) done to feel like I accomplished something; but I didn't try to do so much that I ended up needing a vacation from my vacation. I actually got into a relaxed state and managed to stay there for a whole week at least. I spent some good time with Anne, had meals with friends, read a half-dozen books, got caught up on Tivo and DVDs, and saw some good movies. All in all, a very nice break, and I do feel ready to go back to work tomorrow.

Work tomorrow... Aaaack!

Posted by Steven at 03:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

December 30, 2005

Ahhhh, books

I am an avid reader, usually going through 50-60 books in a year, sometimes more. I think my record is from the year I spent 3 hours commuting on a train every day when I managed to read almost 90 books (and very nearly emptied my "to be read" shelf in the process – I was down to only 3 books left!).

For a variety of reasons this has been a relatively light year – I haven't counted; but I doubt I will reach 30 books. That's OK, although I'll note that while I was vaguely conscious of not having spent as much time reading this year, I failed to change my purchasing habits, so at present my list of books to read is getting quick long.

So it was with great pleasure, as my vacation days dwindle down that I have been able to set a few days aside to just read. I have been running through book at a rate of about a book a day. The latest was Sean Astin's autobiography "There and Back Again", which I did not find very complimentary of the author.

Anyway, I hope to get through at least a couple more books before I have to head back to the office on Tuesday.

Posted by Steven at 09:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

December 20, 2005

Trying to relax

I'm on vacation for the last two weeks of December this year, and I am currently still in the phase of trying to downshift into a state of relaxation (the fact that I had something specific I needed to do for several hours Monday didn't help). This usually lasts for 3-4 days before I'm finally chilled, so vacations that only last a week or less are fairly useless for me – long weekends I don't even bother.

Relaxation has always been an issue for me – just ask Anne, who had a hard time getting me to just lie in the sun for half-hour on our honeymoon. As has come up in this blog before, there has always been so much I want to do, that I don't feel comfortable unless I am making the most of my time, so relaxation doesn’t come easily to me.

My natural inclination is to plan my days off by trying to fit as much into it as I can. They become a kind of jigsaw puzzle – I can fit these two DVDs in before lunch, then I should have just enough time after lunch to write something for my blog before I go out to a movie. Then when I get home, I can clear those three TV shows off the Tivo before dinner, and so on. So while I may spend a fair about of time watching TV, movies, DVDs, which are physically restful; my attitude is not one of relaxation. Just ask Anne (again) about my old natural response when she used to try to insert something in the middle of my carefully planned day.

Fortunately, a side effect of cleaning out my life is that the pressure is coming off. I am planning my days less carefully, which means I am more amenable to Anne's additions to my day. Still, after more than forty years, relaxation is something which just doesn’t come naturally to me – I am having to learn how to do it.

For most of my life, there have really only been two activities which naturally get me to relax. The first is prayer and meditation. While it does usually take me 10-15 minutes to calm down; once I do, I can get into a very relaxed state while spending time with God. I don't know where I'd be spiritually if I hadn't learned at least that. Still, once I finish my prayer time, it doesn’t take long for my life to rush back into its normal hectic state.

The other activity which often (although not always) is relaxing for me is doing photography. I think it's because to take good pictures I have to slow down and really observe the environment around me to spot the shots. Normally, I am too focused on getting someplace to do the next thing to bother observing much about my environment; but with photography, the whole exercise is about observation. You can't plan the best shots, you have to discover them; and I often find that the more intensely I look, the harder they are to find. I have to get into a relaxed state and let the shots happen. It's almost like a form of meditation, although instead of communing with God, I am communing with my environment.

Well, back to trying to chill enough that I gets some real relaxation time this holiday.

Posted by Steven at 07:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

December 18, 2005

Improved (?) blog templates

As you will also have noticed, I finally got around to hacking around with the templates for this blog. I got rid of the left column (making more room for the actual content), moving that information to my "about" page. I also added to all of the archive and individual entry pages links to all of the other archive pages, so it is easier to get around.

Let me know what you think, and if you discover any problems.

Posted by Steven at 09:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I'm back

Well, obviously, the muses have returned. Unfortunately, I still have no idea where they went.

I've never tried to write on a regular, ongoing basis before this Blog. Previously, when I felt inspired to write something, I would. When I didn't feel so inspired, I had far too much else to do to bother wondering why not. Now I discover that there are these dead periods in my writing. It isn't depression. It does not appear to be how I normally experience writer's block (I have plenty of experience with that too; but this is different).

To be clear, the fact that I can't write for a few weeks at a time doesn’t bother me (I still have too much else I want to do to be concerned about that); but not understanding why can't write does. I like to think I have a reasonable understanding of myself – my moods, my triggers, my patterns. Finding something like this which doesn't fit into my existing self-knowledge is a bit unsettling.

Hopefully, as I continue to write this blog (or otherwise try and write on a regular basis), I'll start to see the pattern.

Posted by Steven at 09:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

December 01, 2005

Format matters

Ormond Otvos noted in my guest book (if you are reading this and haven't signed in, please do) that I needed to "narrow the columns" on this page. I assume the issue is that the two side columns are wide enough that on small screens, the center column (where the important stuff is) gets squeezed too much. A fair suggestion.

I actually have other reasons to go back and hack the templates for this blog, so I'll see what I can do about that - I may just move the right column to my "about" page and remove it from here entirely.

However, before I start, I was wondering if anyone else had any requests/suggestions for improving the structure (as opposed to content) of this blog. Please comment if you have any ideas.

Posted by Steven at 06:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

November 27, 2005

The muses come, the muses go

For most of November, I have been ahead of the game on this blog – often having two or three entries prepared in advance and having the luxury of picking which one to publish on a given day. The words just kept coming and my only problem was finding the time to get it all out.

Alas, I am now back in the state I was through most of October. I have six incomplete blog entries on my computer desktop which I seem unable to find the words to finish. The issue is not a lack of ideas to write about or the lack of motivation or time to work on the blog. Nor am I depressed. I just can't find the right words to finish any of the entries I have started (except, I hope, this one; lest I be left with seven incomplete entries).

What further complicates things is of the six incomplete entries I have started, four are on matters of faith, and two are about TV shows. That is problematical for me because my intent has always been to write about a diversity of topics, and conversely to avoid publishing entries on any single topics for several days in a row. My, perhaps futile, hope is that from time to time new people will discover this blog, and I don't want them to look at the last two entries and think "oh, this is a blog about TV" or "oh, this is a blog about Christianity" when it is in fact neither (or rather both and more). So even if I finished all of those entries today, I'm not sure I would be willing to publish them all in a row without finding other topics to intersperse in the sequence.

Actually writing about my faith here has been an interesting experience. I knew from the start that I would have to write about my experience of Christianity if this blog was to be a reflection of who I am, but my assumption was that most of the people who would read this blog would find those posts uninteresting. I didn't expect anyone to object or be turned off by it, but I did kind of expect a reaction of "yeah, OK, now can you get back to the interesting stuff like TV, movies, books, etc." Instead, my posts about my faith have consistently drawn comments from other people. Not more than other topics, but certainly not less - enough to indicate that people do find them interesting. I had not expected that.

Well, that sums up where I am right now, and having said that, I think I can actually say I finished this entry. I hope that bodes well for next week.

Posted by Steven at 01:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

November 24, 2005

Good memories

Overall, I had a happy childhood. Not an idyllic 50's sitcom childhood - my parents and sibling were normal human beings with normal faults; and their faults did on occasion affect my life in ways which had adverse consequences. I do not however subscribe to the popular notion that anything less than a perfect family is "dysfunctional". I have seen true, dysfunctional families and know the difference. No, my childhood was overall a good one and I am, to use the word of the day, thankful for my parents and how they raised me. Given that, I choose when I think of them to dwell on those occasions when they "got it right" rather than when their humanity failed me.

One such occasion was thanksgiving when I was, I think, 8 years old and my brother was 15. That thanksgiving my parents had the two of us, with substantial adult supervision, cook the thanksgiving meal, from starters to dessert. I'm not sure where they got the idea to do this; but it remains one of my favorite memories from childhood. The reasons were manifold – being able to do something so "adult" when I was only 8, being able to spend that time working together with my parents on a project (something I experienced more of later in life; but at the time it was novel), being able to experience directly the fruits of a job well done (eating the meal I had just cooked). In addition, the process got me comfortable with the process of cooking, so that when I was in my teens and both of my parents had full-time jobs, I was able to cook the family dinner on occasion.

As I recall, my brother and I did the whole dinner at least one more time after that, and even when my mother re-assumed primary responsibility, we always had at least some role in preparing the Thanksgiving meal. Perhaps more important, we become more involved in cooking other meals as time went by; but nothing compared to the memory of the first time we did it.

Thanks.

Posted by Steven at 06:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 16, 2005

Another milestone

Anne wins the door prize (my appreciation) for posting the 200th comment on this blog (on 165 (now 166) posts). Many thanks to all of you who have commented on this blog. Those of you who are fellow bloggers know (and those who are not can certainly appreciate), comments are to blogs what applause is to performance arts – it's how we know what we are doing is appreciated. There's nothing worse that making a post and getting no comments – you feel like finding someway of tapping the microphone and asking "Is there anyone out there?" You start to wonder, did I offend people? Is everyone on vacation? Not that I have any basis to complain on this blog – I have attracted a steady stream of comments on a fairly diverse set of postings. The fact that my comment count has almost always remained higher than the number of posting being commented on is something to be satisfied with. I only wish the set of commenters was a bit more diverse; but I'll take what I can get.

Posted by Steven at 07:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

November 11, 2005

Yet another desperate plea...

... for people to sign my guest book (I know from access logs that there are more than six people who read this regularly). I will stop doing this soon - promise!

Posted by Steven at 05:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 09, 2005

I know you are out there

Lurking, secretly reading this blog, not wanting anyone to know. Come out of the darkness and declare yourself to be a reader of "Sighs and Musings" – sign my new guest book!

Posted by Steven at 12:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 08, 2005

New Guest Book

I've set up a guest book on frappr. If you read this blog (even if you'd rather not comment), PLEASE sign in here . No personally identifying information is needed, so this is risk-free. Just provide a name (even a nickname), your zip code (or city), and any statement you want to make ("hi" is sufficient).

Posted by Steven at 05:46 PM | Permalink

November 07, 2005

The Risks of blogging

Well for anyone who tuned into this blog last night (Pacific Standard Time), you will have discovered that my blog was attacked by a comment 'bot (the blog equivalent of Email "spam"). Over the last couple of month I have had a few stray advertisements posted as comments; and deleted them as soon as I saw them (while starting to research the state of the art in protection against such). Last night I had 20 comments added to the blog which were essentially links to other sites. I cleaned them up quickly; but the people who run such services tend not to just "go away", so I will have to implement some of the techniques I have researched. I hope to have the first wave of changes implemented sometime this week. These are changes which will not affect legitimate commenters at all. If that doesn't work, I have a second wave of changes I can implement; but unfortunately they will make it slightly harder for legitimate people to post. I hope it doesn’t come to that.

The one think I would ask my readers is if you see any such comments; please do not click-through any such link. It only encourages them

Posted by Steven at 09:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 04, 2005

Playing Games

For the last few months, the graphics processor on my computer's video card has been dying. It worked fine when I was doing "normal" stuff (web surfing, wing Word, etc.); but started to die (crashing the computer) when I played graphically-intense games. The Mean Time to Failure started at about an hour of play, and then slowly dropped down to about 5 minutes (which basically made games unplayable). Well, I finally got around to getting the board replaced as of Wednesday.

All this is by way of explanation of why there have been no blog entries for the last couple of days – I have been quite busy playing the games I have been unable to play in recent weeks. (For those who are interested, the big winner is "Civilization IV").

Posted by Steven at 08:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

October 25, 2005

Blog vs book

I was looking at the backup file for this blog today and did a small experiment. I striped off all the descriptive information used by the program as well as all of the comments, leaving only the text I had written for the blogs. I then poured that into Word with fairly standard book-submission settings. Based on that, in the last 8 month I have written the equivalent of a 155 page book. Unfortunately, I'm no Wil Wheaton. Wil has published two books ("Just a Geek" and "Dancing Barefoot") which are largely collections of entries from his blog (worth reading, too!)

Posted by Steven at 06:15 PM | Permalink

September 01, 2005

Kepler's RIP

Kepler's book store, the finest independent book store in Silicon Valley, unexpectedly closed its doors yesterday. Kepler's was where Jerry Garcia hung out before he had a band. It was where Joan Baez shopped for books in the 60's. Kepler's was to the 60's what City Lights was to the 50's and the beat generation.

But it was also much more than that.

Even when the hippies had all grown up and gotten high tech jobs, Kepler's remained everything that an independent book store was supposed to be. They kept pace with changes in the community, and stayed relevant, hosting book signings for everyone from Al Franken to Barbara Bush to Lauren Bacall to Salman Rushdie.

They were the place to go for books published by small publishers that would never get shelf space in a Borders or a Barnes and Noble. I don't think I ever managed to visit them without making a purchase of some book I never would have known about if I hadn't see it on their shelf.

Word is that the lease they signed at the peak of the dot-com boom killed them – that Clark Kepler (son of the founder, Roy) had been putting his own money into the operation to keep it afloat; but finally ran out.

Whatever the reason, they will be missed. I think it is a fitting tribute to the store that two days after Hurricane Katrina, news of Kepler's closing made the front page of the major newspaper here in silicon valley. It was that kind of store.

Posted by Steven at 10:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

August 27, 2005

The crunch is over

My crunch at work has finished (actually there are 2 more deadlines coming up over the next month; but barring surprises we appear to be ahead of the curve right now). So, I hope to resume normal blogging (whatever that may be).

Posted by Steven at 09:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Not as young as I was

These past 2 weeks have provided yet another (unwelcome) reminder that I am not as young as I used to be. There was a time when working 60 hour weeks was normal for me, and I even recall doing a 78 hour work week without breaking much of a sweat.

Two weeks ago as part of this push I did three 12-hour days in a row and was totally exhausted at the end. Some of it, I have to admit, is that I am not in as good physical shape as I once was; but since my job does not require much physical exertion, I'm not sure that can explain it all.

What I do observe is that it takes me longer to mentally relax after work than it used to. It used to be that given 45 minutes of distraction after work and I'd be mentally ready for anything. Now it is taking hours to get my brain to calm down. When I work right up until it is time to sleep, this means I tend to sleep less well (although I seem to get amazing dreams if/when I do reach REM state).

Ah well, there are too many other things I enjoy in life to spend that much time at work anyway.

Posted by Steven at 09:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

On the bright side

One of the less pleasant tasks in software engineering (a task which has occupied most of my last two weeks) is debugging someone else's code. Generally you end up spending a lot of time tediously single-stepping through code, or instrumenting the code with debug-prints to gather information about what was happening just before things went south. Since the point at which a problem gets reported is when it gets serious enough to impact people, it is often the case that the actual flaw in the code occurred much earlier and you must back track the problem (A went bad because B was already bad because C had the wrong value because someone calculated D wrong five minutes before A). This kind of back-tracking is always time consuming drudge work; but a necessary aspect of debugging.

But there are moments…

There are times when you look at a problem and without looking at the code you say "Hmmm. For this code to work, there must be a loop somewhere that does E, and in that loop there must be a test F and inside that test the code must do G, H, and I. And if someone did G and I inside the test; but did H outside the test, then the code would behave exactly like it does now". Then you go and look at the code and sure enough, H is outside of test F, and you have found the bug by pure deduction – no single stepping, no debug prints, no back-tracking.

I tend to think of these as "Sherlock Holmes Moments". For me, the joy of occasionally finding bugs by pure mental effort is great enough that they more than compensate for the drudgery of pursuing the rest of the bugs "the hard way". I've had 3 of these Sherlock Holmes Moments these last two weeks, and it has made all the difference.

Posted by Steven at 09:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

August 18, 2005

Crunch Time

Sorry for the lack of posts this week. I'm in a crunch time at work, and the few working brain cells I have at the end of the day do not appear to be enough to compose more than this meager comment. There is some light at the end of the tunnel, so hopefully I will be back to my normally inane/profound self soon.

Posted by Steven at 06:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

August 10, 2005

The end of an Era

I purchased my first Macintosh computer – one of the original 128K models - in March of 1984, only a couple of months after they came out. I had played with a Xerox Alto and had used an Apple Lisa at work, so I had some sense of how revolutionary the Mac was going to be. Shortly thereafter I was programming the Mac professionally, a career that continued for many years until I was hired by Apple itself. I worked at Apple for 7 years, eventually serving as one of the architects for the Mac operating system.

Around the time I left Apple, I purchased my first Windows PC. My reason was simple: I was an avid game player, and while there were a few companies developing interesting games for the Mac first, too many games I wanted to play were only available for Windows. I those days I would accurately (if a bit smugly) tell people that I did "all of my serious work on the Mac" and that my Windows PC was "only to play games".

After I left Apple I started to do different kinds of software engineering professionally – not Windows; but also not Mac – but at home I continued to do all of my personal programming projects (assorted simulations, parts of games, etc.) on the Mac.

Things however started changing around the time Mac OS X came out. For myself, I was faced with the prospect of learning how to program a whole new system if I wanted to continue to do my personal development on the Mac (for as different as OS X was from OS 9 for the end user, they were completely different beasts for the programmer). So the question became: If I was going to learn to program a new OS, which OS should I learn? The choice was clear – knowing Windows would open far more doors for me professionally than knowing OS X. So I took a few courses at a local university extension, bought a copy of Microsoft Visual Studio, and started doing my personal projects on Windows.

I was not the only person faces with this decision. While most of the "big" developers made the switch from OS 9 to OS X, a lot of the small companies – those who created the cool little programs that made using my Mac so comfortable for me personally – didn't. I knew a few of the developers personally and was able to confirm their decision was the same as mine – they switched to making cool stuff for Windows rather than learn OS X.

So at this point I was now doing "serious work" (programming) on my Windows PC, and starting to buy other productivity software for Windows as well. This trend continued for a few years as more and more of my "serious work" was getting done on Windows and less and less on the Mac until, about 3 years ago I reached a point that the only thing I was still doing on the Mac was reading Email. One reason I stayed in that state for so long as that people don't bother to write viruses for the Mac, so I felt safer using my Mac as a "firewall" to protect my windows machine.

The last straw appeared as I set up this blog. LivingDot (which hosts this site) is a very nice and very flexible web hosting service. I can do just about everything through a convenient web interface. Most of the interface is OS-neutral; but there was one small advantage for Windows – when you created a new Email address, it was able to automatically configure Outlook to use it. So, as I created the various Email addresses for this and other blogs, it was easier to set them up on Windows than Mac, and since I had a lot else to worry about, I took advantage of that.

The result was I was reading all of my "stevenanne.net" Email addresses on Windows, and only my old Email addresses on Mac. Since all of the important action was on these new addresses, I found myself getting lazier and lazier about reading the Email on the Mac – often going days at a time before I bothered to boot my Mac and check mail.

Well, I finally gave up.

Tonight I transferred over my 120 Megabytes of archived Email from Mac to Windows, and shut down my Mac, perhaps for the last time. After 21 enjoyable years, there will soon no longer be a Mac computer on my desk at home. It's been fun; but while I don't believe ALL good things come to an end, this one certainly has.

Farewell Macintosh, you've been a good friend.

Posted by Steven at 09:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

August 01, 2005

Finding brevity

I typically compose my blog entries in Microsoft Word (tm) before posting them, and my rule of thumb is that I try to keep them to under a page given my default Word settings. If the last paragraph crosses into a second page, that's OK; but I try to avoid postings longer than that (I realize for many people even that is too long).

The problem is, there are a number of topics I think about which I have not posted on because every time I start to write a posting I end up with two or three pages in word, and I don't want to start asking for that much of people's time. I've thought about starting a second blog for long essays, for which I would post short introductions here; but if I really believed that was of value I might as well just post them here.

No, what I need to do is find shorter ways of expressing what I want to say.

Looking at why many of these essays end up so long, I realized that while there are topics on which I am comfortable simply stating my opinion and letting stand or fall on its own; there are other subjects where I have felt compelled to provide a justification for my opinion. It is with these topics I have ended up with pages of supporting data to go along with the simple statement of what I am thinking.

As an example, when I have attempted to write about my faith, my tendency is to not just say what I have been thinking about; but also provide either long stories to explain how I came to that conclusion or references to the Bible verses which have led me there. The resulting essays rarely conform to my self-imposed one page limit. This also applies to some political and scientific topics I have pondered in the last 4 months.

I think I am just going to have to focus on stating my observations and trust my audience to ask if they want to know how I got there.

Posted by Steven at 01:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

July 30, 2005

One Hundredth

Well I made it to 100 posts in 125 days – an 80% rate. OK, I did squeeze in the "movies" post today just so I didn't drop below 80%; but I really had intended to make that post at some point.

The bottom line however is that I am still enjoying doing this. I think the next milestone I am looking for is 365 days (however many posts that turns out to be).

Posted by Steven at 08:09 PM | Permalink

July 23, 2005

Churchill's black dog is chasing me again

I'm depressed.

Not the ruby-black despair that drives people to seek any way out of their non-feeling. Fortunately, the flaw in my brain chemistry does not allow things to go that far.

My experience of depression is that I lose interest in doing things, and lose pleasure in the remaining things I do. In the most extreme case (which I have only experienced a couple days out of my whole life), I can't motivate myself to do anything other than curl up in bed - not to sleep (I'm not tired) but simply because there is no activity which has the slightest appear to me.

This, thankfully, is not one of those times.

This week's depression is actually quite mild on the scale I have developed. What I have realized is that I lose interest in activities in a predictable order. I stop reading non-fiction before I stop reading fiction. I stop reading before I stop playing games. I stop playing games before I stop watching television. I have learned over the years (depression has been a factor in my life since I was in my teens) that just about every activity fits neatly into this spectrum, and that I can gauge the degree of my depression by what I am and am not motivated to do. It provides a convenient self-diagnostic tool.

I'm not completely certain what the key criteria is that orders things on this scale; but it clearly relates to the level of personal involvement. The more of myself I need to put into an activity, the less depressed I have to be before it goes away. Television, being almost entirely passive, is one of the last things to go. Bloging appears to be early on the list.

Oh, with regard to my current depression – I'm not concerned. This kind tends to pass after a few days, so I usually just take it as my body's way of saying I need to take a break. I have had more serious depressions, and am unashamed to say I got professional help (I don't care what Tom Cruise thinks); but this one is no cause of concern (unless you are waiting for my next blog entry).

Posted by Steven at 04:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 09, 2005

Modern Life and New Toys.

Technology and specifically computers are changing just about everything. I really started to notice when I switched to using a digital camera. I never had to worry about how long it took my old film camera to boot; and I never had to worry about downloading software updates for it either. In some respects photography has become more complex; but at the same time, the computers within my camera have taken over some of the more mundane aspects of taking pictures and allowed me to focus more on the creative aspects. That's a good thing.

Today Anne and I purchase a new car – a Toyota Prius, which is about a leading-edge in technology as you can get these days. I am discovering how much technology is going to change the process of driving, and (to be specific) how many new things I am going to need to get used to. Really – driving hasn't changed much since power steering and power breaks were invented. Electronic locks were a small change; but beyond that, driving a car today is about the same as it was driving a car back in the 70's. The Prius (and other cars like it which are reaching the market) are going to change that.

First, the Prius is a true hybrid car. There are other gas-electric cars out there that call themselves "hybrids"; but in fact they are electric cars that use a gas engine to charge the battery. The Prius on the other hand powers the drive train with both the electric motor and the gas engine, and uses computer algorithms to continuously manage how much power is pulled from each, including turning off the gas engine when it isn't needed.

Adjustment #1: been driving for a bit, stop at a red light, hear the engine turn off.
Old thought: the car stalled when I stopped.
New thought: The car has a full battery and doesn't need to use gas while it is stopped.

Adjustment #1-B: The light is long (and your battery was close to being low), while you are sitting at the light not moving, the gas engine suddenly starts.
Old thought: ????
New thought: The car decided it should top-off the battery.

It also uses the momentum of the car to recharge the batteries as you coast or put on the breaks.

Adjustment #2: it gets better mileage in the city than on the highway

The Prius also uses an RFID key that stays in your pocket. This is already deployed on some luxury cars; but for us normal people it is new. Basically, as long as the key is within 1 meter of the car, it will unlock itself for you when you try opening a door, or the trunk, or trying and starting it. Starting the car is a matter of pressing the "start" button while they key is still in your pocket (and wait about a second for the car to "boot").

Adjustment #3: I still find myself reaching to take the key when I leave the car.
There is actually a dummy-slot where you can put the key in the dashboard. I guess that's for people who can't adjust.

Of course, this is still our first day with the car. There are multitudes of features I haven't had a chance to try. For instance, most of the dashboard functions (climate control, radio, CD player, etc.) have voice controls. Press a button on the steering wheel and say "radio on", and it will turn the radio on. Say "70 degrees" and it will set the climate control to keep the interior temperature within 2 degrees of 70. It also has a GPS navigation system with voice feedback ("turn left in one quarter mile…").

I think this is a car I am actually going to have to read the owner's manual for.

Posted by Steven at 10:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

July 05, 2005

UK 1994 Albums Posted

My SimCity and Book Reading therapy has done its good work, and I once again don't view working on my albums as a chore, but rather as a pleasure. On Monday I finished the remaining 110 captions, and the albums from my first trip to the UK are now posted for your viewing pleasure.

Since there are 250 pictures (selected from over 600) I have divided it into 2 albums, one for pictures taken in and around London, and a second album for picture takes in Southern England and Wales.

Now I need to deciede what album I want to work on next. All of the rest will be much shorter.

Posted by Steven at 03:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 29, 2005

The importance of recreation

You may have noticed that I haven't posted for a few days. The short answer was that I got burned out - not of blogging; but of life general. I knew when I added the x-GCC'er mailing list and teaching the Tuesday night study to the mix that some adjustments to my priorities would be needed. What I hadn't realized was that even my old priorities weren't giving me the balance I needed in my life.

What I wasn't spending enough time on was recreation.

I had been very careful to sort through all of the things on my plate and make sure I was only spending time on things I thought were "of value". The problem is, I didn't place enough value on just plain having fun. Yeah, I watched TV; but the only shows I watched were those that that were "meaningful", and that focus in "meaning" meant that I wasn't watching just to have fun – there was a purpose to it. In addition, I had almost completely stopped playing computer games (not an explicit choice, I just didn't have any time left to play when I got everything else done – or rather when I ran out of time doing those other things).

What I discovered was that without at least some time to do things "just for fun", regardless of what other value they might have, that my ability to actually enjoy the other activities drained away. Everything – even things I would normally enjoy – became a "chore" that "had to be done" because I had deemed those activities to be worthwhile. I think this effect is related to the same reason why the fastest way to get a child to hate some kind of food is to tell them it is good for them. I had selected a list of activities for my life that were "good for me", and suddenly they weren't "fun" anymore.

The answer of course is to plan on spending some limited amount of my time doing things that are completely value-less. Things I do only because they are fun. This is essentially desert – to be eaten along with a balanced meal. I think I have juggled my priorities again to allow me this freedom. We'll see how it goes.

Posted by Steven at 10:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

June 23, 2005

Comfort games

I play a lot of computer games (although not as many as I used to – I've decided that there are a number of other things which I'd rather spend time on). However, most games only last a couple of weeks on my computer. I'll play then intensively for a week or two (much to Anne's displeasure), and then I'll reach a point at which I suddenly realize I've gotten everything out of the game I'm going to get, and I'm finished with it. I'm usually quite lazy about actually uninstalling them; but it is rare that I return to a game once I have initially played them out.

However, there are a few games which I keep coming back to again and again. Games that I install immediately when I get a new computer. These are the games I come back to when I want to play something; but don't know what. They are to games what "comfort food" is to food. I was reminded of this when I became sick this week and found myself at home from work, playing SimCity4. I actually have a new game to play (Supreme Ruler 2010); but given that I wasn't feeling well, I didn't want to start a new game, so I found my zoning neighborhoods and building roads. Ahhhh.

There are actually a few games that fall into this category for me:
- SimCity 4
- Railroad Tycoon 2(but not RRT3)
- Neverwinter Nights
- Rome, Total War
- Rise of Nations
- And the most comfortable of all: Minesweeper

Posted by Steven at 08:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

June 20, 2005

Captain Caption

I'm still slogging through captions for the pictures I have of our first trip to the UK. I have selected about 250 pictures (out of 600), divided them into 2 albums, and am now putting captions for each picture. The problem is that this trip was 10 years ago, and I find myself double checking on web sites to make sure I am remembering things correctly, which is slowing down the process significantly. I am just over half-way through the pictures. This is however the last step to getting two more albums up on my gallery, so there is some significant light at the end of this tunnel. I think this is going to be the hardest of the albums I am doing (the rest I either remember better or just have less to say).

Posted by Steven at 09:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 15, 2005

Overload

Today was an all-day departmental offsite. We did a post-mortem on a (nearly) finished project and talked a lot about what should change to improve things in the future. As an introvert, I reached my input limit by mid day, and without any time alone to process things I was in overload soon thereafter. Fortunately, I understand myself better now, and have some strategies which allowed me to stay involved to then end; but I definitely need a few hours of quiet time now to recover.

Posted by Steven at 07:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 14, 2005

Still Alive

Unfortunately, all of my deep thinking of late has been focused on work (which I have made a rule not to talk about in my blog) and on a draft of a novel a friend is writing (which it would be inappropriate to share). On top of that, I spent a good chunk of Saturday morning looking through boxes in the storage locker, and inhaled enough dust to give me respiratory problems for a few days, so I haven't exactly been full of energy. Sigh.

I briefly contemplated pulling out a "ringer" topic – something I could dump out a few hundred words on without having to think about it much (I have many pet subjects which would serve nicely); but I realized that was a step on to a slippery slope. I do this blog for fun, for me. As soon as I start to post something because I feel I have to, I start down the path which will lead to my hating it.

I will say that reading my friend's novel made me go back and re-read some of my old fiction. My goal is to get the rest of my photo albums finished by the end of the summer, and then make another go at finishing a novel of my own starting in the fall. I still struggle with whether what I am writing is worthwhile; but I want to at least be able to say I finished it.

Posted by Steven at 08:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

June 05, 2005

No deep thoughts today

Just an update on life.

The photos I posted of GCC have attracted a lot of attention from other GCC alumni, and I spent some time this week setting up a mailing list and web site for former employees of that august company.

I've also been working on preparing an album of our first trip to the UK. 550+ photographs to sort through, select, organize, caption, etc. I think it is actually going to end up two albums – one of pictures in London proper, and a second of pictures taken in our excursions out of the city.

At my current job I'm busy working toward a mid-month deadline for a deliverable to a partner (one of my rare occasions to actually write code these days). I'm essentially code-complete at this point and just need to test it thoroughly in the next 2 weeks.

Anne and I are having a great time together. We've always been "marriage, self-entertaining model"; but have entered one of our silly phases of late. It makes for some interesting times.

At church I have been asked to preach again (on July 10th), as well as start a Tuesday night bible study. I am looking forward to both although it means having to do another re-shuffle of my time priorities.

And, finally, I am looking forward to the summer movie season as well as a few of the summer TV shows (not many though).

Posted by Steven at 07:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 02, 2005

Sun, sun, go away.

Summer has finally come to Silicon Valley. The sky is blue; the sun is warm and bright; the air is dry; and a slight breeze blows in the day.

I hate it.

I am a confirmed heliopath – I hate the sun. Please understand, I am not afraid (beyond normal precautions against sunburn) to go out in the sun as a means to accomplish some other desired end (walking around taking photographs for instance). But given a choice between two ways to do something, one of which involved spending a lot of time in the sun, and the other not; I'll choose to stay out of the sun every time.

Even when I was a child in Florida and spent long hours riding my bicycle or swimming at the beach; what I enjoyed was bicycling and swimming. I have no memory of wanting to be outside for its own sake (although I have to admit that I am at the point that any recollections of my motivations in youth are suspect).

The idea of lying out in the sun just to get a tan is certainly foreign to me. I realize many people enjoy that, but I am not among their number. Give me a crisp New England winter's night – air crystal clear save the whips of cloud as you exhale; streets quiet but for, perhaps, the crunch of snow beneath your feet. That's my idea of a "beautiful day".

Posted by Steven at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

May 28, 2005

What is worth writing?

I have always aspired to write fiction.

I can recall at the age of 7 starting to write a novel (I was a precocious child). I even remember the first line, typed on an old manual typewriter that I kept on a makeshift desk in my closet (as with most writers, I craved solitude to work): "It was a stormy day in Eastport when the Martians came…." Not a prize winner (unless you count the Bulwer-Lytton prize); but I remain proud of the attempt.

Since then I have produced a fair collection of half finished (or less) stories; and a few, mostly done for school, which I actually finished. Before the computer, the volume of this unfinished effort was never apparent as eventually the older scraps of paper would scamper off to some hiding place, never to be seen again; but since my first computer, it has continued to grow unabated in the digital confines of my hard disk, faithfully transferred from host to host as I upgraded my system.

This is all in contrast to the equally growing stack of completed (and that's the key word) non-fiction essays I have collected. So why is it that I have such ease at finishing essays on complex subjects like quantum physics, religion, ethics and the like, yet seem unable to finish even short fiction works.

Recently I have been putting a lot of energy into cleaning out the clutter in my life. Not so much the physical clutter of possessions; but the psychological clutter of all of the things I want to do with my time. As part of that I have established standards for what kinds of games I am willing to spend my time playing, what kinds of books I will read, what kinds of TV shows I will watch, what kinds of movies I will attend. I'm not talking about moral standards (which I like to think I have always applied); but rather a recognition that I don't have time to do everything I want and therefore have to make some choices as to which things provide the greatest value for me.

In the process, what I have realized is that the kind of fiction I have tended to start to write was not the kind of fiction I would now be willing to invest my time to read. My stories tended to be entertaining fiction (either sci-fi or fantasy); but when you scratched the surface there was nothing underneath. I had nothing I was trying to say with my fiction beyond pure entertainment. When I did have something to say, I would tend to write a non-fiction essay on the subject, so all that was left for my fiction was providing a few hours distraction to people.

I think at some deep level, this is why I have had such a hard time finishing my fiction. I was not driven by some deep desire to say anything in particular, merely a desire to tell a good story; and therefore when I stumbled there was nothing within me that demanded that I get up and continue. This is not to say that the kinds of stories I was writing were bad, or not worth reading (I still believe many of them would have been quite enjoyable); just that I did not have the same passion driving me to produce them that I had when I wrote essays.

So I'm trying to decide now: am I content with only producing non-fiction? Or is there something I want to say which demands to be told in fiction? I think there is at least one story – one of the most challenging I have conceived – which stays something worth writing. It exists only in outline so far. I have always been too afraid to even start it as I was unsure I was up to the challenge. I had always hoped that after I had a few other books under my belt I would tackle this story.

I'm going to have to think about this more.

Posted by Steven at 05:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

May 26, 2005

Separation of Work and Home

Someone asked me Wednesday why I don't have a collection of pictures from other employers like I do from GCC. A good question, and not one for which I had a ready answer. There are certainly a lot of minor reasons:

- Photography as a hobby went on to my back burner after I met Anne... but that doesn't explain why I don't have pictures of Interleaf from before I met her.

- GCC was more photogenic than most of my employers (you can take only so many different pictures of generic cube farms).... But that doesn't explain why I don't have pictures from Apple, which was an even more visually interesting place.

- I liked working at GCC more so I took more pictures... but again, that doesn't explain why I don't have more pictures of Apple, which I also enjoyed a lot.

The conclusion I eventually came to was that I don't take pictures around the office these days because I tend to maintain a distinct separation between "work" and "home", and that in my mind I view photography as part of my "home" life and not a part of "work". GCC was however a special case. I had no life separate from work when I was at GCC. Even when I was away from the office doing "fun" things, I tended to do them with other people from GCC, so it all blended together. Since there was no distinction between "work" and "home", it was natural that I would take pictures in and out of the office with equal frequency.

Posted by Steven at 05:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 24, 2005

Announcing "Gallery SZY"

I now have the start of my photo gallery up and running: "Gallery SZY". The first exhibition is my collection of photos related to GCC. If you are an former employee of GCC, please help me add names to faces here. Thanks.

Posted by Steven at 09:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

May 21, 2005

My Fiftieth post

This is my 50th post to this blog (not counting comments)! Time for a look back and a mini-celebration.

My goal was to average one post a day. I reached 50 posts in 55 days. I'm comfortable with that. What surprises me is that the word-count on those posts totals about 20,000 words. At that rate I'll be producing a reasonable sized book every year!

For those who may wonder, I really do think about all these things on a normal basis (as well as many more subjects that never come together well enough to write about). Most of the time my post is about something I thought about that day. Occasionally I'll have multiple topics to write about and too little time to write, and I'll hold over a topic for a later day. I also try and mix up my posts so if someone starts reading they have a variety of recent posts to look at. That also can result in a post being delayed if I've done too many similar posts recently. As a result I currently have a back-log of 3 ideas for posts I have not written. The days I miss making a post are almost always because of lack of time to write as opposed to lack of things to write about.

There are many reasons I started this blog. One of them was just to provide some kind of outlet for all the random thinking I do. It feels good to get it down on bits, regardless of who may read it. Of course, I also want people to read it. My hope is that at least occasionally I get someone else thinking too. From the comments I have received, I feel comfortable that I am being successful in that regard as well.

Thank you all for your support, particularly Anne, my patient wife.
(BTW – she too has a blog: "Midlife Memoirs: A Middle-Aged Midwesterner in Exile")

Posted by Steven at 08:23 AM | Permalink

May 12, 2005

2878 Negatives scannned and....

... finished! With the negatives at least. I have a small collection of prints for which there are no negatives that I need to scan; but I should be able to do that in a day or two. Then I will have my entire collection in digital, finally. Another week or two and I should be able to start putting up albums.

Posted by Steven at 10:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

April 28, 2005

Auld Lang Syne

Had a wee bit'o good news last night – managed to reconnect with an old college friend who I had lost track of. Despite being a fellow techie (or perhaps because... ?) he had managed to stay "under the radar" on the internet, so finding him proved to be difficult. As it turns out he is within an hour's travel, and we expect to get together soon to catch up and reminisce.

Posted by Steven at 09:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

1783 scans and counting

I'm still scanning all of my old negatives, although I have clearly passed the half-way point. At least I have now taken the time to organize them into stacks by subject matter. Of course when I finish with the scans, I then need to go back and organize them, do some cleanup (some of the negatives were not in as good shape as I would have liked), and finally publish them on the web. It may be another month before thing start to show up here.

Posted by Steven at 09:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

April 26, 2005

Steve's Law #1

'Twas a slow day, so I thought I'd just post one of the rules of life I have learned.

"Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by mere incompetence."

Most of the time "they" aren't out to get you – they are just horrible at doing their job.

Posted by Steven at 11:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

April 23, 2005

For one brief shining moment….

… there was a place called GCC

I am still scanning in all of my old film photographs. Many are pictures of Boston, where I lived when I discovered photography; and quite are few are pictures taken at GCC (General Computer Company) where I worked at the time. The latter have been fountains of memories and emotions for me, for GCC holds a very special place in my life. It remains the experience against which all others jobs are measured. Only my years at Apple has come close to that standard.

Some of GCC's special standing with me is certainly because ...

Some of GCC's special standing with me is certainly because of where I was in life at the time. GCC was my second job, I was young, single, and had no significant life outside of work. The same was true of most of the other employees (at 25, I was actually above the median age for the company). So for most of us, our lives revolved around work and around each other. We worked together. We played together. Some even lived together. It was a total experience and provided the kinds of camaraderie that only total experiences (like fighting in the same platoon in wartime) can provide.

Some of GCC's special standing with me is certainly because of what we did. For most of my time at GCC, we developed games. We did coin-operated arcade games, home console games; we even developed a new console system. It's just hard to complain about a job where you "have to" spend many hours a day playing videogames as legitimate research! Now before you start scratching your head trying to remember "GCC", we never marketed our work under our own name – we developed products for other companies to sell under their brand. We traded fame (name recognition) for fortune (more money).

Some of GCC's special standing with me is certainly because we were a pure engineering company. Because we sold our work to other companies, we didn't need to have a marketing department or a sales force; and because the founders were all engineers and didn't know any better, we also didn't have an HR department or any of those things. We had one guy who dealt with the company finances; one office manager to take care of facilities and supplies. For a while we had a full-time chef, and for a time we had a social director. But other than that, everyone else was either an engineer or an artist, all working together on games. The result is that much of the politics I have grow used to at other companies was absent from GCC.

Finally, some of GCC's special standing with me is certainly because we were just plain good; and I say that with sober reflection and twenty years of hindsight. Because of what we were doing (developing games), and where we were (around the corner from MIT), we attracted a lot of very bright people, and we could afford to be picky about who we hired. We might interview one in one hundred resumes we received, and actually hire one in twenty people we interviewed. Our interviews were notorious – I recall our getting hate mail from candidates for how hard we were on them. We weren't just looking for good engineers. We were looking for good all around people – renaissance men (and women). We got away with not having a marketing department because we hired people who thought about those issues as they engineered. When the company finally changed focus and started selling products ourselves, we didn't hire marketing and sales people. We took volunteers from the engineering staff and made them our marketing department.

I think the finest tribute to the kind of people we hired was what they have done since. They have become executives if not founders of companies; and not just small startups. For instance I know one of our engineers-turned-marketer became a VP of marketing at a fortune 500 company. That's the kind of people I spent 5 years working with back in the 80's.

So when I look back on my days at GCC, the song from the musical "Camelot" always comes to mind: "For one brief shining moment, there was a place called GCC."

Posted by Steven at 10:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 11, 2005

Scan the live-long day

I spent 10 Hours on today scanning in 524 negatives from my first trip to the UK in 1995 (back when I still used film). These will eventually show up online; but assembling all that the way I went it will take time. As a bonus I also scanned in the one roll of pictures I was able to take on a brief business trip I took to Jerusalem in 1999.

I’m quite happy with the new scanner (CanoScan 9950F). In the end I compromised some on scan time vs. quality – cutting the pixels-per-inch in half from what I started with to be able to get through my stack 4 times faster. The scanner allows you to do batch scans of up to 5 strips of film at a time (automatically scanning each picture individually) most of my negatives are in 4-per strip format, so I typically get 18-20 pictures per pass. It took me about 5 minutes to set up and 20 minutes to scan. The 20 minutes of automated scan was long enough that I was able to do other things in parallel, and the quality was perfect for computer use.

Posted by Steven at 11:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

April 09, 2005

Playing

No profound thoughts for the last couple of days. I have been busy playing with a new toy – a CanonScan 9950F Scanner. I converted to doing only digital photography a few years back; and now want to convert all of my old negatives to digital. The scanner will do them 5 strips at a time; but it is quite slow. I’m not talking about just 'coffee break' slow – this is 'eat a meal' or even 'watch a movie' slow.

Posted by Steven at 10:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 02, 2005

XHTML, CSS and the rest of the alphabet soup

I have been spending some time learning the various technologies being used to implement this blog (I knew HTML 1.0 and 2.0; but have largely been out of the loop on web development since then). The result is the revised look & feel now in place.

If any of you have problems with the site, please let me know and I’ll try to correct it. Please be clear on what version of what browser you are using.

Opinions and suggestions are also welcome.

Posted by Steven at 01:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 28, 2005

I blog therefore I am.

Of the seven deadly sins, pride has always been my biggest weakness (although others may attest that gluttony ranks a close second). It there therefore not surprising that I have given in to the temptation to inflict my opinions on the rest of the web. I hope at least a few of you find this entertaining and/or interesting.

Blogward ho!

Posted by Steven at 05:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

September 08, 2002

WorldCon 2002 - ConJose

This is a "retroactive blog entry". I attended the 60th Annual World Science Fiction Convention back in 2002 (long before I started this blog) and wrote the following "trip report" on my experience. If I had been blogging back then, this would have been a blog post, so I figured I'd add it after the fact.

----

So, I spent Thursday->Monday at the 60th annual World Science Fiction Convention (WorldCon), this year known as "ConJose". This was a marathon adventure, and I am in serious need of a vacation from my vacation.

I'd like to start by making the point that if your concept of a "science fiction convention" is something like Saturday Night Live's "get a life" skit, that WorldCon is something different. I've been to "those" kinds of conventions too, and WorldCon is not like that.

First, WorldCon is primarily about written science fiction - novels, short stories, etc. I'd estimate less than 5% of the 600+ events at the convention related to TV or movies. Thus the people who show up to WorldCon are for the most part avid readers. This alone, I suspect, filters out much of the lunatic fringe.

Second, I suspect because it is where Hugo's (the "World Science Fiction Achievement Awards" - SciFi's answer to the Oscars) are presented, WorldCon is a place where the business of Science Fiction publishing meets. It is very well attended by the professionals of the genre, not just the fans. While the person sitting next to you in a seminar (or behind you in line) might be "just another fan", they might also be:

- One of last year's Hugo award winning writers
- A professional illustrator who does SF artwork
- The submissions editor for Dell Books (the person who decides what new books are acquired)
- A literary agent who handles several writers you have read
- A book critic for Analog magazine - A book buyer for Waldenbooks or
- The manager of a small-press publishing company

I had a chance to meet (not just listen to) all of the above over the last 5 days.

Finally, because of the previous two points, the demographics of the conference are a bit different from the "get a life" crowd. I have been to conventions where the median age was probably about 22 years old. I'd guess that the median age for WorldCon is in the low 40's. There were a couple people there who were at the first WorldCon - in 1939! And that's not just the professionals who are skewing the age up. For those of you who know who Bjo and John Trimble are and know their "historic" contribution to SF fandom - remember that they are in their 60's now (that made me feel old).

Now all that is not to say you won't occasionally see people walking around dressed as Klingons (or things much more bizarre), just that convention has a balance between folks like that, "just plain fans" (like me), and SF professionals.

Anyway, that being said, here are a few notes from the conference itself. Obviously my observations are skewed by the people I know, so many of these names will be meaningless to many of you. I hope some of you recognize some of them.

- No one was surprised that "The Fellowship of the Ring" won the "best dramatic presentation" Hugo. The actor who played Samwise was on-hand to receive the award.

- It was obvious that Neil Gaiman was very surprised that we won the Hugo for Best Novel for "American Gods". The last line of his acceptance speech was "F**k, I won a Hugo!"

- It turns out I have been pronouncing Vernor Vinge's last name wrong (it has 2 syllables, not one).

- I learned a lot of interesting things about Swahili and some Australian aboriginal languages in the "creating alien languages" workshop.

- The SciFi channel has optioned to make an Amber mini-series, although it is very early in the process and may be dropped.

- Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta (husband/wife, both writers. He is doing the new series of Dune books) did a very good/useful talk on "Things I Wish Some Pro Had Told Me When I Was Just Starting Out".

- There was a seminar which talked about the variety of sexual behaviors of real creatures on earth as an inspiration on how alien sexuality might work. I learned we've got some really strange creatures living here!

- There was a panel on "Will Tolkien remain relevant in the 21st Century". The only person they could find to take the 'no' side on the panel hadn't read the books!

- Robert L Forward, scientist (inventor of gravity-wave astronomy, laser-powered light-sails, and several practical applications of anti-matter), and SF author (the Rocheworld and Dragons Egg books) is dying of cancer and is not expected to see next summer. He created some of the most physically-alien aliens I have ever read, and may rival Clarke on the number of technologies he invented in his books that eventually end up being created for real.

- One of the best seminars I went to was Orson Scott Card's "1000 ideas in One Hour". OK, he cheated - we actually came up with 2 ideas; but since there were 500 people in the audience and we would all write those stories differently, he counted it as 1000 stories. Nonetheless, it was an excellent discussion of what the difference is between a good concept and a good story based on that concept.

- While I am mentioning Card, I'll say he was in person absolutely nothing like what I expected. Based on his books, I had expected someone with the kind of intensity that they usually get Christopher Walken to pay in the movies. What I found was that Orson Scott card was a very relaxed, humorous, open, and accessible. If he is one of those writers who uses his writing to exorcise the demons of his psyche, then he has obviously been very successful.

- Tad Williams (a local guy - was born in the valley) was the MC at the awards ceremony and did an excellent job with lot so good humor. I also saw a panel with him, Terry Brooks, Orson Scott Card, and Alan Dean Foster that was a riot. The 4 authors playing off each other kept the audience laughing the whole time.

- Speaking of Alan Dean Foster - he must have a painting in his attic. He looks way younger than any 56 year old disserves to look.

- They showed A&E's new production of "Lathe of Heaven" that will be broadcast next week. While I don't think this production really captures the spirit of the book any better than the previous PBS production, it did manage to capture elements that the first production missed and is well worth seeing. The film "feels" right even if they skip too many story elements IMHO.

- Donald Kingsbury is finally (after 20 years) returning to the world of "Courtship Rite" and writing a sequel. Set 500 years after the 1st book, the Getans have a nascent space program and are launching a mission to visit god. If you have read the book, that will make perfect (and intriguing) sense. If you haven't - do so! It is IMHO one of the best depictions of an "alien" society (even though it is populated by humans), with an element of mystery where what you think is happening at the start of the story is actually something quite different.

Finally, a story to give a bit more of a "feel" for what the convention was like. There was a hallway in the convention center - on one side there were meeting room used for seminars, on the other side were doors which led to maintenance areas which we weren't supposed to use. On the second day of the conference, the unsuspecting staff of the convention center put up some signs on the maintenance side of the hall which read "This is not a door". The signs immediately began to accumulate graffiti. Things like:

"It is ajar"
"Of course not, this is a sign on a door"
"This is a pronoun"
and so on
as well as a number of comments in French (those who know art will understand why).

Eventually signs started to show up all over reading "This is not the floor", "This is not a wall", and "This is a sign".

That's the kind of event WorldCon is.

Posted by Steven at 10:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)