Work was aggravating today. I went out for lunch and found the Wicked Tinkers - Those Marching O'Neills to be a good angry bagpipe song / march.

I tried to analyze what made me as angry as I was, but couldn't really come up with anything; I didn't try all that hard either, especially after a phrase lodged itself in my head and demanded to become a vignette: "I'm not a goddamn superman."

So at lunch I wrote. I wrote a page in a new, smaller journal before ordering my food. I wrote a page after my sandwich arrived before I started eating. Each page in this new journal is about half the size of a page in my regular journal, so this may not be as impressive as it seems.

It was great though.

Now I just need a name for this guy. He's a foul-mouthed, angry, average person who happened to be in the right place and the right time to stop a super villain, though he sees it as being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The city honors him and he just wants to be left alone.

Any one want to lend their name to the character? I'm not tied to the character being male... ;)

In a similar vein, I've been thinking I want to go to a convention and have an Alternia Comics booth, but with no actual comics yet, I'm at a lack of things to sell to justify the booth. I was toying with the idea of charging a nominal fee for a 500 (or more) word piece written for the requester, about them or their character, in one of the worlds of Alternia. They could then be a part of the Alternia universe for ever and have their character in a comic or other media eventuall. Assuming they grant the rights to it, of course. If they don't grant me rights to their character, I guess they just get a story for their money, and maybe I charge more... What do you think, lazyweb?

Here's a summary of the week long road trip / "vacation"

( before the con )
( during the con )
( after the con )
( even more after the con )
I want to get back to Optinomicon and finish writing it (a continuity error / internal inconsistency jumped out at me on the road trip) and meant to do that over lunch. Instead, another idea took hold and I wrote a thing. The first part could be the back cover synopsis of a book, or it could just be the introduction. Either way, I think I like where it's headed.

Ever have a good idea for a story, and fleshing it out in your head gets you all excited about it, but then you sit down to write it and get bogged down in the minutia of exposition?

Maybe I'll skip explaining what happened to create After the Collapse, and the events that created the Bards of Subterra, and just jump straight in with the vignette that inspired me in the first place.

At lunch, I brought my notebook to write. I stared at the beginnings of a steampunk story (Templeton Sledmeir the first (Tempo's great grand father)) that I had written last week. Then I turned to a blank page and stared in to space. I want to continue the steampunk / gaslamp thing, but my imagination is being filled up with ExMachina Future (Firely meets cyberpunk), and a second Bard of Subterra arc, where a Bard in After the Collapse tells several stories, neatly tying otherwise unrelated narratives together. It's a handy device, and I think it works well ... now I just have to not over use it.

In the Duster Quest saga, I may have found a place that actually has them in stock: Renton Western Wear. They actually have a Dusters category! Even if it does only have two items, and one is just the "Big and Tall" version of the other. Now I just have to go there some weekend I'm in the area anyway ... Seattle area role playing should start up in a few weeks ...

( And now, thoughts on Doctor Who 4x01 Cut for spoilers (duh) and language while I'm at it. )

I wrote something, finally, after not posting anything creative.

If I get up the gumption, I'll record it tomorrow night and post it in the feed.

I may have found someone to produce the episodes (edit the audio, add the music, etc) which is something I've been ... not doing.

I'll produce this vignette though, since it'll require overlaying my voice on my voice for one part, and I don't want to make the new guy do that right off the bat... ;)

For now though, I think I'm gonna hit the sack "early."

Part of the reason I went to Seattle last weekend was to drop in on a Cabela's store that's just north of Olympia to check out this coat before buying it. Turns out, it's not available in the store, but I could order it online and have it shipped to the store for pickup if I wanted. So that was a fun waste of a couple of hours (mostly just the drive there and back from Seattle).

Anyone know of a place in or around Portland or Seattle or along the I-5 corridor (the outlet stores in Centralia maybe?) where I could get a similar coat? I don't really want to order a coat online and have it not fit, or not be the right style, or something... Hats are one thing, coats are another..

I meant to come home and edit Episode 22 to post, but found I apparently forgot to record a story that needs alarin612's voice, so that's a no go.

"Oh, I'll just move on and record the Bard of Subterra stories." Sounds simple enough, but the one that sets everything up, the first one, isn't written as a narrative, it's written more like a script, so I'm fleshing that out, and editing the other stories.

There's five in all, several long ones. I'm not sure if I'll do one extra long episode for the whole series, or just do them individually.

At least now I have something to do over lunch. I didn't write anything today because I finished Swing Shift and wasn't sure where to go next. That and work called before I even had my food, so I cut it short.

The reason work called was because users were getting confused during the install. We have installers for crippleware versions of our product in our partner's product. One installer for the server, one for the client. Because the installers look the same and run one after the other, if a user cancels the server, the client installer runs and they think it didn't actually cancel.

So I cut my lunch short to disable the cancel buttons because our partner wanted the new installers as soon as possible.

A few hours go by while I fine tune it and the decision is made to change how the installers are being called so that if the server is canceled the client install won't run; a change that is 100% on our partner's side of the install process.

So basically the last four hours of my day were a waste of time. Hooray!

I may either play some more City of Villains or keep editing the Bards of Subterra arc ... I'll have to stitch them together to read in one long episode, but they were written to flow in the first place, so it shouldn't be hard. Not like stitching Sundog and Selene's story and Roy-G-Biv's story in to Day of the Tyrant...

It's sometimes a good thing I don't generally plan my days.

Woke up feeling sluggish, managed to stumble out of the house and off to work. Stopped at Fred Meyer to buy something for breakfast and some dish soap for the office, a small philanthropic gesture. Also picked up some stuff for lunch without really realizing it.

My entire day was spent on two issues.

1. The strange DHCP/DNS issue from yesterday
2. A new SQL Express error on Vista

After some research and some poking, I found that I can indeed reproduce the issue, but only when the computer gets its DNS information from the router I brought in. The service fails to start in a timely fashion when A) the computer gets its DHCP information from the router, B) the host operating system is Windows XP, and C) when the DNS servers handed out by the DHCP server cannot be contacted or are the router's IP address.

It seems to be a bit of .NET Remoting code that just takes ~45 seconds to run in that specific network configuration, and since it has to run twice (for reasons I don't grok yet) windows service control decides the program is hung and kills it.

The second issue wasn't really so bad. It was just compounded by having to work on the client's machine over a high-latency remote connection. I'd move the mouse and click, then thirty seconds later watch the remote mouse follow my instructions. It was tedious, time consuming, and painful, but two hours after Tim said "Hey, I have an interesting issue..." GURU was installed and working. Then I went back to work banging my head against the DNS/DHCP/This-makes-no-fucking-sense issue.

On the way home I thought maybe I'd tinker with the MythTV-box-in-progress (has been "in progress" for a couple of years now) or maybe play around with Qemu and see how easy it would be to set up a virtual network of two to five machines on one physical computer. Mike says it's easy...

While making boxed potatoes au gratin for dinner, the sauce boiled over, so after I finish this I guess I'll spend the rest of the night cleaning the stove...

Thinking of a theme for my audioblog podcast, I think I'd like to go with Fanfare for the Common Man, especially if I can find a good version that's free to use (Creative Commons licensed and/or public domain, or explicit permission from the performer(s)..) Any of my musically inclined friends want to helm me out with this? Or should I just whistle the tune if I can't find a suitable one? ;)

I'm also not sure how I'll work with the new Audioblog and Karak Speaks True. It makes sense to move the stories of Alternia to Alternia Comics and use Karak Speaks True for the audio blog, but that's kind of a pain, plus making people that don't want to hear the blog posts have to unsubscribe from one feed and subscribe to another... would have been more seamless if I'd been using Feedburner for the feed, instead of the one podPress generates. ;)

I need an icon of the Adherents of the Repeated Meme, I think ...
( Dream Home Meme )

A story of After the Collapse. This universe's incarnation of Cathy Travis was a publishing mogul, though her media empire was destroyed in the war. She's rebuilding it, with local print publications and wandering bards. This is a story told by one of those bards ...

---

They say every man has a story to tell.

( This is one. )

---

Blame mayamaia for this one. ;)

Work was pretty meh ...

It's reasonably cold here recently.

I bit my lip recently, and so of course I continue to bite it while chewing. That's always fun ...

Listened to the last episode of 7th Son today ... Damn you Hutchins! Now where will I go for my modern day techno-thriller fix? Not that hack Sigler ... he's more modern horror than techno-thriller...

Moving on...

Looking for volunteers for Alternia Comics, specifically people to help wikify information from alternia and Karak Speaks True.

Also, it'd be great to have a transcriptionist to copy my hand written pages to digital media, plain text works, word doc or open office writer document works better. Someone in Portland would be cool, so we can get together once a week or whatever and I can clarify my chicken scratchings when needed. Someone outside of Portland is not ideal, but workable. I can scan pages in and email them.

I feel like I'm writing a job ad ... and maybe I am.

The transcriber could also be a first reader, offering feedback on how the story is going, continuity errors, etc, or the transcriber could also just transcribe it verbatim and leave it to someone else to offer criticism and feedback.

November is apparently National Do Stuff Month, including Novel Writing, Blog Posting and Podcast Posting.

I'm not sure if I'll do any of the above, but if I do it will probably be all three, simply reading what I write that day, giving it a quick edit and uploading it to Karak Speaks True which would then auto-post here for me.

Speaking of writing today, I started a chapter in The Tyrant Takeover story line called "Blur's Choice." The entire chapter will cover at most six seconds of the fight against The Tyrant and be written from The White Blur's perspective as he faces a tough decision. I'm happy with it so far. Waiting for word from alarin612 about how kosher it is to post this snippet of the fight before much of anything else about the fight is written. We know what's going to happen, but most of it hasn't been set down on "paper" yet, just tossed back and forth in IM.

In other news, I found an envelope under my welcome mat this morning. Apparently FedEx put it there last night, but it was too dark for me to see it when I got home. I didn't recognize the return address, so held off on opening it until after I got my smoothie (my morning ritual recently includes a trip slightly out of my way to work to Jamba Juice. They keep giving me coupons for free smoothies!) I open the envelope and there's a CD inside, in a paper jacket. It's the advance copy of Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips to Clean Up Your Writing audio book I won last month! Woo! I'm not crazy about how the tracks are split up, but that's more of a personal preference thing.

Apparently I wasn't the only one to release a podcast last night. Scott Sigler (scottsigler) launched NOCTURNAL and Mur Lafferty (mightymur) launched Playing For Keeps. So far, both are awesome and highly recommended. Though Sigler's has a caveat that if you don't like horror/gore it's probably not for you, just like everything else he's done. ;)

In case you missed it, I have accepted a challenge. For at least the next week, look forward to a new story of alternia every day. Not long fiction like Optinomicon, or big stories like The Tyrant Takeover. Short stories, flash fiction, vignettes, etc. Probably not more than a page or two in length.

To that end, during lunch today I started Hammer and Axe. Look for it tomorrow. I like the characters I've created for this and may end up making this longer form.

Tonight I'll transcribe things I've written in my notebook in to electronic format, then podcast Optinomicon Chapter 11.

Things seem to have slowed down for the moment at work, but that doesn't mean they won't pick up again soon.

Hopped on the bike for half an hour while watching episode one of Penn & Teller: Bullshit. Now is time for Eureka and transcription.

Let's play out side / let's make angels

Remember last night I said I might write something during work? Here it is. A touch of Alternia's mythology and a new hero. And one paragraph somewhere in the middle that sort of went all wibbledy so I rewrote it ... leaving the original in. ;)

It started snowing again around 4 or so. Big fluffy white flakes. By the time I left work at 6:30 there was 2.5 to 3 inches of snow on my car. Good packing snow too. Wet but not too heavy. Roads weren't bad but weren't good either, with speeds on the surface streets topping out around 25-30. Washington Hwy 14 wasn't much better. Once I got to I-205 conditions predictably improved dramatically. And the roads in Portland were what I'd call "good" or maybe "normal" no snow, no ice, just a bit wet, not enough to affect driving conditions much. Judging by the parked cars and other spots of accumulation, snow South of the Columbia was much, much lighter than on the North side.

Very strange.

Temperatures are supposed to drop below freezing tonight, which should make the morning commute extra fun.

Tonight I'll record something for the podcast, more as a test run than anything.

Just doesn't have quite the same ring to it, does it...

I suppose I should either post something, or declare that I'm not posting everyday in November.

I have a bunch written (though probably less than I think it is) for the novel, but it's all handwritten, either at lunch on today and yesterday, or while I was at Hawk's place on Sunday.

I don't think I've mentioned that on my trip to Seattle and back, I listened to the Sarah Vowell narrate The Partly Cloudy Patriot again. I think that's the fifth time I've listened to that book.

I've been talking with alarin612 a lot about alternia, since I'm writing my novel in that world ... I'm using primarily new characters, but I do have a chapter that is largely dialog between one of my characters, and one of his, and part of the novel will revolve around a spectacularly momentous moment in the time line of the world.

Something about super heroes has captured my imagination again, it seems. It may have something to do with the new NBC show Heroes. It probably doesn't help that Mile High Comics keeps sending me emails about great deals on comics ... I haven't bought any yet, though.

I'm having fun creating heroes that are a bit off from the expected. Examples from my story: Sundog and Pivot. Sundog's name is a refrence to the optical phenomenon called "Parhelion" and the character himself is basically a super actor. His powers revolve around precise muscle control to mimic voices, movements, etc. He's trained his mind to align with his body's acting abilities. Pivot's power is a supreme sense of balance and stability. This manifests as an affinity for acrobatics.

Today has mostly been spent avoiding the translation site, and playing with SharePoint Server and Project Server 2003 for the company intranet site.

Yesterday was a long day. I ended up staying at the office until 11 PM, mostly just copying files off a hard drive so I could reformat it into the dedicated Nagios computer. Currently, Nagios is running in a Virtual PC on my workstation. Hardly ideal.

While waiting for the copy to finish, I added edit buttons to the Alternia Characters Database page. And actually made them work! Decided not to mess with a php login page, for now, so when you click a character to edit Apache asks you to log in before taking you to the edit page. Good ol' .htaccess files.

Before I fell into bed last night, I was thinking about what I might do for game this week, since the party "finished" the dragon hunt. Came up with some good ideas, I think ... some requiring a bit of rules research. Would anyone (excluding players in my game) have any interest in hearing about these and future adventure ideas?

Some odd DNS issues this morning. Everyone except me was having problems getting to Google (did I really need to link that?). The really odd thing is, Nathan could ping google.com, and get a response, and when he put that IP in a browser window, it pulled up Google. But if he put "google.com" into the window, Server Not Found. I set his DNS server to the exchange server (the DNS server I was using) and it worked, so an entry on the external DNS server got corrupted? It'll sort itself out in time, and I sent an email with instructions on changing DNS server info to everyone. Also updated the DHCP server to hand out the local DNS server as the primary. If nothing else, it should reduce the number of DNS requests going through the poor little router.

Today looks to be mostly spent on getting Slackware and Nagios installed on the "new" computer.

And if you haven't seen it yet, Wired recently ran an article full of Six Word Short Stories from numerous sci-fi, fantasy and horror authors. Some pretty good ones in there, from people like Joss Whedon, Neil Gaiman, James Patrick Kelly, William Shatner, David Brin, Stan Lee and Greg Bear, among others.

When I left for work I had just over 1/4 of a tank of gas. When I got to work I had 1/8th less, confirming what I said yesterday: I have just enough gas to get to work and back on Monday, if I don't go anywhere Saturday ...

Today was pretty good, and before I forget again, everyone reading this who likes webcomics, Final Fantasy, and/or FLCL should read today's Questionable Content. A warning though, naughty language in the second panel.

Last night, alarin612 and I set up alternia - a community for ideas and stories about his comic book world. I also posted more of Tempo's story there and in karakwrites. The Alternia posting has the entirety of Chapter 1 so far, the post in the writing journal just has the new bit. I sorta stopped writing 'cause I didn't know where I wanted to go next, and told Alarin I'd post it last night ... now I know where I want to go with it though, so I'll probably write more when I get home.

It hit me the other day why this apartment feels like home, and the other didn't after Onca left: This place is entirely mine. For the first time, I'm living somewhere entirely my own. I decide where the furniture goes, which posters are hung where, etc. I found it entirely on my own, and I'm paying for it entirely on my own. The house I grew up in, in Colorado, was home because it was... when I was forming the idea of "home" in my young mind, that's where I lived, and where my family was, so it must be home. I didn't realy notice it at the time, but as my family left the house, and my friends moved in, it became a little less "home" ... "home" was more "my room" and the common areas were "jaehop."

Today was a good day at work. Despite not being able to drag myself out of bed until 9 this morning...
Spent most of the day working on a Feedback form for the new site, refining the layout of the form and implementing the backend that saves the data to the database.

During the implementation phase, I spent some time learning RegExps, which make validation and some string processing amazingly simple and compact, code wise. With the regexp "[^0-9]" I took the data typed into a phone number field, "(800)555-1234" or something, and cut out all but the numbers, leaving "8005551234" to go into the database. Even if the user types in "Blar!@#$52607893!%^89" I'll pull out "5260789389" without trouble. I was going to do something similar on the other fields to get rid of characters that would break the SQL INSERT statement, but it turns out SQL doesn't care what's between the single quotes in a string, for inserts anyway. All I had to do was escape apostrophes, by doubling them. After that I could put whatever I want in the text area and it goes into the database just fine.

SciFi's showing the "new" season of Doctor Who (David Tennant) starting tonight. Actually started an hour ago, but I'm at work. They're repeating it at 7:30 Pacific, so I've got time. Hopefully they won't have cut out too much ...

Tomorrow I'm definitely going to sleep in. I'm beginning to loathe the alarm. After I wake up, I'll probably Franken-box (swap hardware between computers) to get a working linux computer going at home, until D&D time. Maybe after I've got some savings built up I can get something like this set up. Likely Jan, sooner of the players want to pitch in ... ;)