20 March, 2010
08 March, 2010
Paranoia
So, I'm a child. House of Leaves has completely creeped me out. I do understand this is the point. I have also been mired reading it long enough to know much of what it's about, checking into its creepy little dark corners (yes, I do make intentional puns here) and I'm pretty satisfied with it, content-wise. Meaning-wise. Yep. But one thing pisses me off. Several times (there is some rapid-page-turning during parts, as well as some gripping pieces which spit a sentence on a page, on purpose), I could swear publishers electrostatically charged the pages so they are harder to pry apart. Technologically it's do-able. I mean, there's no reason they can't do it, it's well-understood. But would they be so evil as to fuck with the hardware of a book??
Seriously, someone tell me this is not happening. For once, I want it told to me that I am paranoid.
Seriously, someone tell me this is not happening. For once, I want it told to me that I am paranoid.
06 March, 2010
writing
Holy shit, writing is working very well. I haven't exercised these muscles in a long time, and I really like the feel of it. It's a nice way to not feel so alone at home. I'm still working on Meat, and I am pretty sure I know where it's going. It's not nice-n-pretty, but I may never get to the point where I write anything that doesn't have a taint of some kind to it. That and I am reading through House of Leaves, which is more than a little creepy.
Someone I know suggested outpatient work for various violence I was involved in when I was younger. "You have a lot of anger in you." Well, yeah, have you read anything I've written? "That means you're volatile, and with the amount of guns you own and your perpetual drive to get through things [including people], you probably need to get some kind of treatment." I suppose when you put it that way, I'm going to start ruminating, cogitating. Writing. I wonder if there are straightjackets with support for laptops. Please? It's a really little laptop.
And so life becomes more novel. Hah, novel.
Someone I know suggested outpatient work for various violence I was involved in when I was younger. "You have a lot of anger in you." Well, yeah, have you read anything I've written? "That means you're volatile, and with the amount of guns you own and your perpetual drive to get through things [including people], you probably need to get some kind of treatment." I suppose when you put it that way, I'm going to start ruminating, cogitating. Writing. I wonder if there are straightjackets with support for laptops. Please? It's a really little laptop.
And so life becomes more novel. Hah, novel.
27 February, 2010
Just when things were looking good
I did get to the gym after the last post, and I had been thinking a lot about the project I shelved a while, Meat. I think it will have a new name, and I'm not divulging any details of it yet, but I had gotten started with the process I use when writing a book. I think it's probably not going to be more than 60,000 words, but it might get longer if I develop a couple pieces of it a little more than I'm thinking.
Unfortunately, I hit a real brick wall with it. I had been writing and thinking, and then I went to the gym. At the gym, I managed to bruise one of my kidneys (my left, for whatever that's worth) and it hurts like fire. It was the worst pain I'd had since I initially broke those vertebrae. I did not call an ambulance because I figured if I got to the ER and was wearing a fentanyl patch, they would say that I was already very heavily medicated, and that they were uncomfortable giving me more (e.g., a couple grains of dilaudid, which usually does the trick) because of my respiration. This is what happened when I dislocated my right knee. They were willing to sedate (read: feed opioid analgesics) me to a certain level, but even with my tolerance, my sustained breathing and healthy vital signs, the doctors said they worried about my respiration.
So I didn't go to the hospital. All the NSAIDs I have were worthless and so I've been applying ice to it as much as I can (I only have two really big wrap-around ice packs, and it takes them longer to freeze than to melt), but it's been agony. Agony not conducive to writing.
How did I bruise a kidney in the gym? Doesn't it normally take trauma to do that? Well, yeah. Since the accident, my back muscles have wasted a lot, and I'm still working on them. My hamstrings, too, have gotten weaker although my quads are fine. When I was working on my hams, I was face-down on a bench with my arms holding on to the handles of the machine. When in this prone position, I have been able to use my diaphragm, lungs, and abdominal muscles (including muscles I didn't have before the accident, like the transverse abdominus) to stretch my spine. Effectively, I can provide "traction" by increasing the length of the spine by curving it upward using muscles in my abdomen. I had been getting very good results, but there was one last vertebrae I wanted to "pop" (like knuckles), and I worked pretty hard on it. I realize now that those muscles, in a prone position, would have impinged on my kidney if I worked too hard.
The pain feels like a couple of broken ribs, like somebody socked me real good there. It's my own stupid fault, and nobody should (be able to) injure their kidneys (or, really, stretch their back with traction) in such a manner. So, I did it, and now I'm paying for it. Instead of following that creative spark that was the re-beginnings of Meat, I'm now barely able to sleep or flex much of my left side (the back muscles hurt, the stomach muscles and diaphragm hurt too, leaving me pretty immobile).
Moral of the story is, if you want traction to stretch, use an inversion bar/table (or other proper instrument) or see a chiropractor (or, preferentially, your physical therapist). Doing this sort of thing can and will hurt you, and it hurts like the devil. If I were working in a chair right now instead of telecommuting, I'd be out of the office. Probably for a week. More than most of us can justify.
So be safe out there. Even if you think you've made real progress since an accident.
Unfortunately, I hit a real brick wall with it. I had been writing and thinking, and then I went to the gym. At the gym, I managed to bruise one of my kidneys (my left, for whatever that's worth) and it hurts like fire. It was the worst pain I'd had since I initially broke those vertebrae. I did not call an ambulance because I figured if I got to the ER and was wearing a fentanyl patch, they would say that I was already very heavily medicated, and that they were uncomfortable giving me more (e.g., a couple grains of dilaudid, which usually does the trick) because of my respiration. This is what happened when I dislocated my right knee. They were willing to sedate (read: feed opioid analgesics) me to a certain level, but even with my tolerance, my sustained breathing and healthy vital signs, the doctors said they worried about my respiration.
So I didn't go to the hospital. All the NSAIDs I have were worthless and so I've been applying ice to it as much as I can (I only have two really big wrap-around ice packs, and it takes them longer to freeze than to melt), but it's been agony. Agony not conducive to writing.
How did I bruise a kidney in the gym? Doesn't it normally take trauma to do that? Well, yeah. Since the accident, my back muscles have wasted a lot, and I'm still working on them. My hamstrings, too, have gotten weaker although my quads are fine. When I was working on my hams, I was face-down on a bench with my arms holding on to the handles of the machine. When in this prone position, I have been able to use my diaphragm, lungs, and abdominal muscles (including muscles I didn't have before the accident, like the transverse abdominus) to stretch my spine. Effectively, I can provide "traction" by increasing the length of the spine by curving it upward using muscles in my abdomen. I had been getting very good results, but there was one last vertebrae I wanted to "pop" (like knuckles), and I worked pretty hard on it. I realize now that those muscles, in a prone position, would have impinged on my kidney if I worked too hard.
The pain feels like a couple of broken ribs, like somebody socked me real good there. It's my own stupid fault, and nobody should (be able to) injure their kidneys (or, really, stretch their back with traction) in such a manner. So, I did it, and now I'm paying for it. Instead of following that creative spark that was the re-beginnings of Meat, I'm now barely able to sleep or flex much of my left side (the back muscles hurt, the stomach muscles and diaphragm hurt too, leaving me pretty immobile).
Moral of the story is, if you want traction to stretch, use an inversion bar/table (or other proper instrument) or see a chiropractor (or, preferentially, your physical therapist). Doing this sort of thing can and will hurt you, and it hurts like the devil. If I were working in a chair right now instead of telecommuting, I'd be out of the office. Probably for a week. More than most of us can justify.
So be safe out there. Even if you think you've made real progress since an accident.
25 February, 2010
A complaint with the TheraBand™ system
This is kind of unfortunate. They're so great for therapeutic devices; the newly injured and the patients just-out-of-surgery are going to have real limitations (I sure did myself), and some of these one-pound-or-less tensions are appropriate. The bands from the brand-name guys, TheraBand™, go up to just over forty pounds, and that's choking up (to borrow parlance from batting) on their "gold" bands. I'm not going to say that I'm some huge gorilla and that I need to have more than forty pounds of resistance for some of these small muscle movements (I do, actually, but not for all of them!). I just find these bands to be so unproductive for most of my home workout. I can get a lot of work done on the ball with or without weights, but I think, even having invested in the bands (they were a package deal with the ball), I'm going to be spending most of my time in the gym.
And I noticed my iPod today is touch-insensitive. So it may be time to pester the wife for a new iPod Touch, which I have wanted for a tres long time. Too bad about the one that croaked. I liked it a lot and it supported my Nike+Run pebble. Sigh.
Off to the gym. Maybe I'll get around to, heh, fleshing out that outline I wrote for a project I tentatively called Meat.
Strange motivations take me by surprise...
…when I find myself dusting off my subversion repository. I committed a couple thousand files this morning that had been lingering on my laptop but not pushed over to thunder (so named because wifey wanted to name it "cloud" and I refused), which has redundant (rotational) storage, which may or may not be safer than the solid state storage I have on my laptop. The statistic that got my attention, though, was this:
I have two-thirds of a poorly written book that could probably be spruced up and chopped at 60,000 words into a pretty good book if I still had the enthusiasm for the characters and the message, and I have various fractions of other books which are far better, with much more clever hooks and characters but which take enormous effort to push forward. One of these books is rather like my tormentor of late, House of Leaves, in that it has English, Mandarin, and not a small bit of C for prose. One of the blurbs on the back of Leaves is "...the first experimental novel of the millennium, and it's a monster. Dazzling." From, of all places, the Washington Post. Leaves is proving somewhat trying for me to read let alone compete with, so perhaps I'll write that polyglot book when speaking code is more in vogue, C is either more common or more mythical, or I'm a much more capable author.
But by god, I want to write again. My wife and I have been toying of the idea of writing a screenplay. Truth is, I've already got one, and I know it's garbage. Ironically, it would make an okay book or novella, but as a screenplay, it's the sort of thing that Michael Bay would have a giant chubby about and probably wouldn't interest the interesting folks like Richard Kelly (really, Richard, I did like Southland Tales, but I'm still trying to figure parts out) or Darren Aronofsky (I'd hand-polish your codpiece if asked, sir).
It creeps (these days, I think it rather creaks) into my hands like so much mania and spills forth here as promises to be fulfilled which usually aren't. Here, though, is to hoping I do rescue one piece of something and get something else published. Maybe even with wifey.
icarus:Writing alex$ find . -type f | grep -v '.svn' -cSo in my subversion repository I have over a thousand files–certainly not all of them complete pieces waiting to be pushed out–and this is a huge volume of work that I've been nattering away at for, what, six years now? More? I know Microsoft was the big push for me to start writing, but I remember wanting to write way back when I was working for SPAWAR and that was at least '03. So some of this stuff has been sitting around for close to ten years. I've had two pieces of fiction published and one piece of non-fiction.
1032
I have two-thirds of a poorly written book that could probably be spruced up and chopped at 60,000 words into a pretty good book if I still had the enthusiasm for the characters and the message, and I have various fractions of other books which are far better, with much more clever hooks and characters but which take enormous effort to push forward. One of these books is rather like my tormentor of late, House of Leaves, in that it has English, Mandarin, and not a small bit of C for prose. One of the blurbs on the back of Leaves is "...the first experimental novel of the millennium, and it's a monster. Dazzling." From, of all places, the Washington Post. Leaves is proving somewhat trying for me to read let alone compete with, so perhaps I'll write that polyglot book when speaking code is more in vogue, C is either more common or more mythical, or I'm a much more capable author.
But by god, I want to write again. My wife and I have been toying of the idea of writing a screenplay. Truth is, I've already got one, and I know it's garbage. Ironically, it would make an okay book or novella, but as a screenplay, it's the sort of thing that Michael Bay would have a giant chubby about and probably wouldn't interest the interesting folks like Richard Kelly (really, Richard, I did like Southland Tales, but I'm still trying to figure parts out) or Darren Aronofsky (I'd hand-polish your codpiece if asked, sir).
It creeps (these days, I think it rather creaks) into my hands like so much mania and spills forth here as promises to be fulfilled which usually aren't. Here, though, is to hoping I do rescue one piece of something and get something else published. Maybe even with wifey.
Going Green
I already have an enormous heap of vegetation in my living room from a hydroponics farm that's attempting to take over the apartment. Still, I think I will be trying this summer to build a working bioreactor with some of the usual COTS products. My goal will not be oil for fuel, I don't think, but rather obtaining metrics and testing various strains of algae. It just so happens that a very lovely friend of mine is something of an algae nerd. Yeah, I wouldn't have thought that "lovely" and "algae nerd" were compatible either, but trust me on this one.
So it would seem that I will be growing more plants this spring and summer (although not likely winter as aquaculture prefers to be, you know, not freezing), and I might even induce my peppers to produce an enormous crop with special nutrients and (if I can afford it) CO2 enrichment. Woot!
Hopefully the returns on effort will be metrics (I know Sergei really doesn't like me too much, and Sungo probably thinks I'm an asshole, but if it weren't for the two of them, I wouldn't have such a passion for sets and aligned data and nosql [e.g., non-relational] databases) on how bioreactors can and do perform (or if they perform), and maybe even if they are scalable. For instance, if my population is limited to fifty gallons, can I produce enough oxygen to do anything useful in a given time period?
Time will tell. Hopefully there will be meaningful data to actually tell the story, rather than just time telling us that time has passed. Or something.
So it would seem that I will be growing more plants this spring and summer (although not likely winter as aquaculture prefers to be, you know, not freezing), and I might even induce my peppers to produce an enormous crop with special nutrients and (if I can afford it) CO2 enrichment. Woot!
Hopefully the returns on effort will be metrics (I know Sergei really doesn't like me too much, and Sungo probably thinks I'm an asshole, but if it weren't for the two of them, I wouldn't have such a passion for sets and aligned data and nosql [e.g., non-relational] databases) on how bioreactors can and do perform (or if they perform), and maybe even if they are scalable. For instance, if my population is limited to fifty gallons, can I produce enough oxygen to do anything useful in a given time period?
Time will tell. Hopefully there will be meaningful data to actually tell the story, rather than just time telling us that time has passed. Or something.
24 February, 2010
House of leaves
Holy shit. I mean, really, holy shit. It's been compared to reading Foucault's Pendulum (by Umberto Eco, a professor of semiotics) and I have to say it is really grueling reading. I don't mean that in a bad way at all. Think of it more like a really good work out. You're covered in sweat and your clothes are stuck to you in unflattering (or more so) ways but you're done and feeling better. That kind of thing.
Remember I said I was out of money and I had finished reading all my books? Well, my CFO gave me a twenty and told me to go on a shopping spree. All the UK books I want of course are twelve quid or so, and add the shipping–it's just a losing proposal. Wandering the shelves at Borders I found books I'd already read, books I had no interest in reading, bargain books that were in the 90% off bin for a damn reason, and then I remembered a book from (of all places) 4chan. On literathursday (it's been a long, long time since I attended a 4chan forum), people were screaming for copies of House of Leaves. The problem is the formatting of the book makes it very difficult to make into an ebook. I will leave the reason for this as an exercise to the reader. And so I sought my holy grail of impenetrable reading which would occupy the space between now and when I was next given a twenty for a book, which could be quite a ways down the road. (Note: the Histories of Herodotus is not high on my list of books to read for weeks on end, but I did my due diligence and pawed through it reverently; all it really did was give me more respect for Judaism. Go figure.)
And lo on the shelf was a single copy of Leaves. I made my budget by a measly five cents, which mattered not because the taxman taxes fucking literacy (great idea, that). And so I have been reading–devouring–the book and its house and loving every word of it. I'd recommend it to anyone with an above average grasp of literature.
Remember I said I was out of money and I had finished reading all my books? Well, my CFO gave me a twenty and told me to go on a shopping spree. All the UK books I want of course are twelve quid or so, and add the shipping–it's just a losing proposal. Wandering the shelves at Borders I found books I'd already read, books I had no interest in reading, bargain books that were in the 90% off bin for a damn reason, and then I remembered a book from (of all places) 4chan. On literathursday (it's been a long, long time since I attended a 4chan forum), people were screaming for copies of House of Leaves. The problem is the formatting of the book makes it very difficult to make into an ebook. I will leave the reason for this as an exercise to the reader. And so I sought my holy grail of impenetrable reading which would occupy the space between now and when I was next given a twenty for a book, which could be quite a ways down the road. (Note: the Histories of Herodotus is not high on my list of books to read for weeks on end, but I did my due diligence and pawed through it reverently; all it really did was give me more respect for Judaism. Go figure.)
And lo on the shelf was a single copy of Leaves. I made my budget by a measly five cents, which mattered not because the taxman taxes fucking literacy (great idea, that). And so I have been reading–devouring–the book and its house and loving every word of it. I'd recommend it to anyone with an above average grasp of literature.