10 posts tagged “kill me now”

I Am Officially Weirded Out

May 26, 2009
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Apparently, the ghost of Jon Postel is leading a pack of superheroes determined to defend the Internet from Fear Uncertainty and Doubt. Promote The Internet Way with Team ARIN!

Welcome to the world of Team ARIN! We hope you find these publications educational and entertaining. Team ARIN is a fictionalized view of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), its processes, and the whole concept of Internet governance. Though our heroes are fictional, the issues they face are very real.

Team ARIN is a group of superheroes that represent four of the principles by which the Internet is operated and governed...

I Hate The C Language Family

Jul 8, 2008
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This is the fifth time today my build has failed because I forgot that stupid semicolon these languages require for statement terminators.

Epic!

Mar 26, 2007
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101 Reasons To Stop Writing. I feel... inspired!

The Five Questions Meme

Mar 21, 2007
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I wouldn't do this for just anybody. My friend Van Mojo tagged me with it, and I'm not about to let him down over something this trivial.

(Here are the rules of this meme: I answer the questions my friend put to me, then— for no reason I can see— you're supposed to leave a comment here claiming that you're an egomaniac. I respond to those by asking you five questions, and then you're tagged. Um. Yeah, so here goes.)

1. What is the deal with you and this obsessive OCaml project?

It's a compulsion, not an obsession. As long as I've known how to program computers, I have always had at least one hobby project up in the air. I have never finished a hobby project, mind you. I just get bored with them and move on to another one. The OCaml Network Application Environment is the one I've kept at the longest, though I've been on hiatus from it for a while. (Other, non-code projects have precedence— see below.)

Basically, the motivation for it is to research the application of functional programming with monads to the problem of writing concurrent single-threaded network service daemons and applications, e.g. message-oriented middleware, peer-to-peer application protocols, etcetera.

I guess the reason I've kept at it so long is that I haven't encountered a blocking failure of the paradigm yet. It works. There's just a lot more work to do before I'll have a real application to show off. This would bug the hell out of a normal person, but as I said: I'm suffering from a compulsion to work on code as a hobby. It's not the eventual completion of the project that motivates me. It's the fact of having a body of code that is mine, all mine, and I don't have to take stupid orders from any pointy-haired managers or make painful compromises to achieve deadlines. I can just be a very simple code monkey and enjoy the labor for its own sake.

Other people garden. I code.

2. Why did you decide you had to write your cheesy fantasy fiction?

Egad. You would ask me that.

It's important to note that the reasons I had for starting are not the reasons I now have for continuing. I started writing Arts Of The Wize for three main reasons: 1) I've always felt a little guilty about having abandoned all my previous [juvenile] long fiction projects well before they were really all that hard to maintain; 2) I wanted to know what finishing a novel really feels like, maybe even what being the author of a published novel really feels like (though, let's be honest, the odds against that are practically nil); and 3) The kind of high fantasy genre fiction I like is harder to find on bookshop shelves than I would like, and I stupidly managed to convince myself that "if you don't like what the publishers are selling, then you should go out and write some of your own." Dumb idea, I know, but it's the truth.

At this point, where I am grinding through the major rewrite/overhaul of the first draft, I'm pretty sure what keeps me going is the sweet peaceful moment of sublime chillification I will enter when I can honestly say to myself that I'm done hacking on it, and I will never have to worry over another word of this story again. There's a part of me that looks forward to receiving a steady stream of form rejections from every literary agent in the world who handles the fantasy genre. If one of them actually decides to represent it, and it sells to a publishing house, then I'll probably be stuck cranking on it for another two to three years before I will be able to call it quits. I'm given to understand that becoming a published author can give a person quite a sense of personal accomplishment, but at this point, I'd settle for being able to move on to the next writing project without having to admit that I abandoned this one.

3. What beer is currently in the hopper and what beer have you never made that you are planning on? Why?

The lambic is probably not working. I'm expecting to pour it out. The Tumultuous Uproar Imperial Stout is in the secondary fermenter now, and it will be going into the bottles either this weekend or the next, I think. I have to look at my calendar.

I'm unlikely to try to make any new kinds of beer. I pretty much make the kinds I most like to drink. It's possible I may scratch the Jack Of The Green this year and try my hand at some kind of red ale. My summer California style ale is probably the least interesting of my beers. I might like a deep red instead, i.e. something like the Six Dæmon Ale only without the spices and maybe a little less malt. I would do this mainly to see if I can establish an "album" of beers throughout the year.

4. Have you ever considered abandoning computer engineering for computer or math research/academia? why or why not?

Considered? Not seriously. Daydreamed about it? All the damned time.

I'm too old to start a new career in academia. Getting on the academic track as a scientist or a mathematician is a young guy's game. I'd have to do four or more long years of full-time undergraduate slavery before I could even start graduate school. That kind of program is not for people going to night school. By the time I got to the point where I was in publish or perish mode, I'd be eligible for mandatory retirement.

I have my hobby OCaml project, and that allows me to scratch that itch well enough.

5. Why have you put up with me for these past 30-some years?

Why did Merry put up with Pippin, Sam and Frodo all those years? Why did Elwood put up with Jake all those years? Why did Thelma put up with Louise all those years? Wait, scratch that last one. You get the idea.

On The List Of Things That Don't Make Sense To Me

Mar 11, 2007
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At least, when we're talking about the publishing business… I don't get how all the material I can find, both online and off, about how to go about the process of querying literary agents says that I'm going to send letters to somewhere between twenty and fifty agents. Most of them will send me form rejections, because my manuscript is just not right for them and they can easily tell that by reading my query.

Meanwhile, I'm reading the agent profiles on AgentQuery and Publisher's Marketplace, and I can find anywhere between twenty and fifty or so literary agents that are accepting queries right now, and who say they handle the genre I'm writing. I read their profiles and I can tell immediately that most of them are going to send me a form rejection. I'm counting up the agents who seem to have the sensibility I would expect to react well to my work, who are building their client lists, and who have a track record of selling books like the one I'm writing, and the number is like about six or seven. Less, when I'm feeling particularly pessimistic.

This doesn't make sense to me. I don't like the idea of sending queries to agents I can tell are just not going to be interested, because they've never shown any interest in other books like mine, and in some cases have represented books I think are complete trash. The expert advice says ignore all that. Query anyway. It's not my business to decide whether my manuscript is right for them. It's theirs.

This business is weird.

I Don't Believe It

Mar 6, 2007
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a Knight Captain

You scored 9 Honor, 8 Justice, 2 Adventure, and 4 Individuality!

Some knights follow the orders given them. Some know when to improvise. The second sort are the ones that grow to power, to become leaders and Knight Captains. Your sense of duty, honor and justice speaks that your name should be amongst their ranks.

Get your squire, your banner, your armor and your sword. You're gonna do just fine

My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:

You scored higher than 99% on Ninjinuity
You scored higher than 99% on Knightlyness
You scored higher than 99% on Cowboiosity
You scored higher than 99% on Piratical Bent

Link: The Cowboy-Ninja-Pirate-Knight Test written by fluffy71 on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

More Writing Progress

Feb 27, 2007
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Up to Chapter Fifteen now (writing only scenes in principle protagonist's point-of-view at this point). Total pages rewritten so far: 108. Estimated number of pages intended to replace: 170±5. I have been ripping out huge tracts of first draft and replacing it with entirely new action and scenery. (The middle part of the book in the first draft was in desperate need of shitcanning and replacing with something that isn't embarrassingly craplicious.)

I am so not enjoying this part of the process. Next time: I swear on my mother's grave to have a fully functional outline before I even begin typing page one of a manuscript. I feel like I'm almost writing a second novel, one only vaguely reminiscent of the first. This is ridiculous.

What I Am Doing Instead Of Writing

Jan 22, 2007
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Today, I have been learning all about how to port the GNU Compiler Collection to an operating system that doesn't exist yet.

Why would I bother doing something that stupid, you ask? Well, because the operating system that doesn't exist yet is one that should exist, in my not very humble opinion— and, I'm going to need a C compiler to get the kernel bootstrapped. So, rather than start with a horrible, ancient fork from GCC that was done for an operating system only vaguely similar to the one I want and bashing on that until it looks like what I need, I decided that it would make more sense to start with the latest and greatest GCC and fork that off to build the operating system from scratch.

What vaporous operating system project am I fooling around with now, you ask? Oh, nothing... I'm just playing around with the L4 microkernel and various other BSD-isms I can find here and there. I did this once before, but the computer where I was doing it got its mind scrambled by Saddam Hussein's BabylonianFlyingSaucers, so I gotta start all over again. Also, in the meantime, I discovered Parallels and decided that it's the coolest thing evar for OS bootstrapping. Ergo, please look after this bear for awhile.

slush definitely considered harmful

Sep 14, 2006
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Oh, good grief. Another thirty manuscripts rolled into my email spool yesterday. I've been reading the queue for, what? three weeks? four weeks? (I've lost track of the endless march of time...) I'm now convinced. Reading slush is bad for you. It kills brain cells and harms other living things.

This does not make me feel warm and fuzzy about my chances of fishing in a literary agent or an acquiring editor. These people read slush for a living. That can't be healthy.

I've been reading this stuff for only a few weeks, and already I can't even parse the simple children's books I read to Leopold at night. By this time next month, I predict I won't even be able to recognize the latin alphabet. It'll just look like noodles stuck to the bottom of my soup bowl. You'll speak to me, and all I'll be able to say is, "Aaaiiieeieieiooeoueouoeiioieieiiieieieieeiiiiieeeeeeoeooioioiooiaeoaeiioiuuiooeaueeaeaoiaaaaaaahhhhhh!"

Ika ika ika ika ika ika ika ika ika krill ika ika ika ika ika!

slush considered harmful

Sep 13, 2006
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I have come to understand the mental hazards of the unpublished, unagented novelist in ways that were purely academic for me until only recently. I can think of at least six different ways for a writer to go insane while trying to write a novel without first having established some kind of professional credits with shorter fiction. That's assuming the writer wasn't insane before starting the project. I'm doing fairly well at managing the sources of mental instability, but I think I may have made a mistake and found a seventh way to go insane.

I joined an online critique group. I have not submitted any of my own fiction. I've just been offering critiques to others so far (the queue for new manuscripts is, like, somewhere around five weeks deep, and I'm 1) lazy, 2) impatient, and 3) possibly hubristic as well, i.e. all the virtues of the Perl programmer). As a result, I've been seeing a lot of stuff that isn't even ready to go into the slush pile yet.

I'm really not sure that's the right thing for me to be reading when I'm going into the first pass of revisions on a 140,000 word novel that nobody else has seen yet.