Anotherblog

Fork
One of the tricky things about trying to write a Greg Egan style hard science fiction novel is making it actually interesting to the reader. Mr. Egan manages it by being terribly clever, I’m sure, because the beauty of his books (and even more so, his short stories) is that they contain scene after scene that just boggles the imagination and makes you wander around for ages afterwards saying “Oooh.” For this reason, I’ve been putting off reading his latest book, “Schild’s Ladder” for ages, as I usually do when I get one of his books.

With Fork, I’ve kind-of managed to get a bunch of clever moments in there and the overall idea is pretty neat I think, but the plot outline at the moment contains great gobs of explanation that I’ll have to have actually come out of someones mouth at some point, which means that their character development time is currently rather limited. Not to mention, I dispensed with the Doctor Who companions after pretty much the first chapter - they’re still theoretically in the novel, but I haven’t really found anything for them to do. Which is just as well, really, as if it gets accepted as a Dr Who novel (hah!) I’ll probably have to put in completely different characters anyway, and integrate a Doctor that I really don’t know much about, apart from having read Jon & Kate’s novels and having watched the TV series.

Anyhoo, it’s just about in enough of a shape to show to peoples. There’s maybe not enough action or scenery and too much talking for the most part, but I finally worked out an ending that might actually have a chance at being thrilling, so there you go. And one carefully thought-through development didn’t make it into the outline until after the climax, which would make it a last-second plot-twist. Cool!

Pool
I got the dining top off the pool table yesterday and started getting back into the old practice again. I also made a nice discovery - when lining up long, fairly straight shots, it is important to lift the rest-hand off the cushion a few times once you have the shot lined up, to get it in the correct position. This has led to vast improvements in this kind of shot, and I’ve been regularly shooting 19. Tonight I shot an 18 and a 17, both very pleasing. The first one was actually kinda disappointing cause I potted three balls on the break, and had only dropped one shot with three balls remaining on the table, which (had I not fumbled the last remaining shots) would have given me a new record of 14 shots to pot 15 balls. Encouraging.

Dreams
I have been dreaming virtually non-stop about skiing, every other night for the last month. Generally along the lines of “Oh no, I can’t find my ski boots and the snow is melting”. Still, the weather in Sydney has been strikingly cold which is encouraging, as are the snow reports for Perisher. Yay!

emWallet
Looks like the end of the emWallet project for me. I spent probably about six days working on it in total, which was a nice bit of pocket money. But when I get back from skiing - then, I have no excuse and it is time to go out and hunt for a real job, dammit.

Guitar
I’ve been practicing guitar a great deal more than usual lately, and was inspired enough to go out and buy a book of performance pieces, which are far too difficult for me but are also something to shoot for. In particular, I had been listening to a rather nice Julian Bream performance of “Minuetto, from Sonata Opus 22″ by Fernando Sor, and figured “I can play that! Maybe!”. So I called around and couldn’t find the sheet music for it and went to a second-hand sheet music store in Glebe and couldn’t find it, then listened to the piece again and thought “Well, maybe it really is too difficult for me after all” and gave up.
But! I dropped Anna off at the store this morning and noticed that Allan’s Music had moved to right opposite the hotel, so I wandered in despite having called them the other day and being told that they didn’t have it. And there it was, only it was called “Minuet & Trio” but it was Opus 22 alright, and it was clearly the same piece. So I’ve been practicing it all day in-between working on Fork and playing pool and going out and buying chocolate and coke.
It’s pretty tricky.

Filmwise
I visit filmwise for my daily movie trivia fix, but last week’s Invisibles was the first time I’ve ever gotten all eight - and I’m embarassed to say, it was a competition with the theme of “guns”. Actually, I have to admit that it was a pretty easy one. I’m in the top-scoring list at #10 - I presume that they order them by completion time. The subsequent one is a return to form, though. I’ve only gotten two of them.

Declare
I’ve finished Tim Powers’ novel Declare. It lived up to its promise, though there were some shaky moments. Picture John LaCarre crossed with a tripping-out Greg Egan. The tension, the obsessively logical magic, the grandly cinematic set-pieces - ah, that’s the Tim Powers we’ve come to love. The big flaw with his last book Earthquake Weather was that it has such obsessive and opaque plotting that after a while, I just gave up. I figured there was an explanation coming at some point, but I just couldn’t get through the rather dull characters to do so. With Declare, he has hit a stronger chord - there are moments of revalation that left me breathless, and then there are other moments that are slipped in so casually that I almost missed them. Actually, I’m still a little undecided about it. There are exceptional moments, and there are some rather strange bits of pacing, as if he’s forgotten how… but still, I came out of it exhilerated. He’s on his way back up.

Fork
I’ve picked up the pace on trying to get Fork together, so that I can present Dave and Ev with the plot outline by Friday. Finishing Declare has inspired me somewhat - I’d always thought of Fork as a kind of Greg Egan meets Doctor Who, but there are elements of Tim Powers as well.

Warcraft 3
I’m momentarily stuck in Warcraft 3. Partly because my computer is too slow to handle the great big battle that I have to handle - I’m in the undead segment, having to defend a necromancer while he casts a spell, and I keep dying in the last 30 seconds of the 30 minute game-time. This is when all the allied forces attack at the last minute, overpower everyone, and trash the necromancer. Fortunately, I’ve finally figured out how to pick up the goblin mines, which will allow me to kill lots more of the good guys.
Which brings me to my second complaint about Warcraft 3 - I wanna play the good guys! The single-player mission starts with you playing humans (after a short introduction using orcs), but then you enter an enormous campaign playing evil undead. And I feel vaguely icky by winning. Most of the computer games that require you to do unpleasant things are adventure games, and those are usually along the lines of practical jokes (although the Monkey Island series really requires you to do some fairly despicable-but-funny things to various characters). Being forced to play through the undead bit feels like a chore. The undead aren’t having any fun, and neither am I.

I’ve just thought of a counter-example - Grand Theft Auto 3. Going around running people down, stealing their cars, etc. is fun. But the big difference there is, it’s free will - I’m not *required* to do it to advance the game and get to the fun bits (in Warcraft 3’s case, I wanna play the orcs). I could always play the multiplayer Warcraft, but in order to be even vaguely competitive, I suspect I should finish the single-player anyway. In D&D terms, I’m being forced to play Lawful-Evil when I wanna play Chaotic-Neutral. Dems de breaks, I s’pose, but I’m rather amazed that various parents groups aren’t up in arms about the single-player Warcraft 3…

Exasperating
I’d dump internet explorer in a second if any other browser would work with blogger. Any of them. I’ve tried Mozilla and omniweb and Opera (on the PC, and it didn’t work either). Is blogger *designed* to only work with explorer? Some kind of twisted pact?

Warcraft 3
So I got the freeware game “Freecraft” and it was kinda fun but also crashed a lot, but not before giving me a taste for the style of game, so what the hell, now I have Warcraft 3 for the mac. This is the first game of this type I’ve played since Dune 2, and despite the many innovations since - well, it’s good, and I’ll probably play it bunches, but Warcraft 3 ain’t better than Dune 2. I haven’t played any of the other many variations on the theme in-between - Warcraft 1 and 2, Starcraft, Dune 2000, and so on - so maybe they were all a step down and this one is the first to get back up there. Or maybe I’m just remembering Dune 2 fondly because it was the first of it’s type that I’d seen.

Pratchett-Gaiman
I’d point y’all at the link to the Gaiman article about Pratchett, but I can’t find the link because Gaiman’s blog is down (I wonder if he uses blogger too?) It will have to remain enigmatic for the moment.

Mozilla
I finally bit the bullet and downloaded Mozilla 1.0 for the mac, and I’m kinda glad I did (at the moment, anyway). It’s not as slow as I was expecting, and the interface is very familiar. It runs the Morse code applets OK and seems to work with Blogger so far, which would be a first.

*sigh*. Seconds later, as I see the “Post and publish” button disappearing off the top of the window, never to be seen again, I realise that it’s back to Explorer for my bloggage…

Fellowship
Chris Fellows came over last night and we played board games all night, and ate Indian food. I wish we could do that more often - it was fun. As we were coming back from the Indian food place, we heard a remarkable buzzing howling sound coming from somewhere in the area. The sound was kind of a cross between microphone feedback, a spaceship taking off, an experimental piece by John Cage, a theramin, a car alarm, and a Jackdaw. It shifted pitches suddenly, then stayed on the same note for a long time. Then, a two-tone howl for a second, and a kind of electronic gurgling followed by silence for a minute.

Did I mention that it was loud? It was very loud. At first we figured it to be some kind of car alarm, but as we were eating dinner and it just kept going on and on, we realised that it couldn’t possibly be. And it kept going on! After about 20 minutes we got up from dinner and wandered outside to see what was happening. Air-raid siren? Experimental musical anarchists at work? There were bunches of people on the street, and as we got closer, we realised that it was coming from the P.A. system at the nearby school. So, microphone feedback. We went back inside, then after another ten minutes or so I decided to record some of the sounds for prosterity, and, of course, it stopped for good. Chris and I wandered back over there just in case - there was still the loud buzzing low-pitched crackling humming sounds that you associate with the volume being turned up way too high, but nothing being played just yet.

An unmarked police car was sitting outside the school (possibly to stop irate locals knocking the place down) and they asked us what we were doing with that video camera, and I explained that I was trying to record that weird sound that had been coming from the school, and put it on my webpage. Which they also expressed interest in. They were very *interested* police men. At which point, Chris and I more or less simultaneously realised that Chris was still holding a beer bottle from dinner time, so we made polite exits before they were forced to notice too.

Lousy morse code
So when I was first thinking of writing the morse code simulator, I did a brief Google search and satisfied myself that there wasn’t much out there that could do the kind of things that I’m writing. Well, I did another google search yesterday, and who’d have thunk, there were billions of the buggers. Every undergraduate student in the history of computing seems to have had a crack at a morse code simulator, and the number and sophistication of the shareware and payware morse code sims are astounding. A little depressing, until I realised that mine is the first Java Applet morse code game that I can find, and one of the few that allows the user to tap in morse code of their own (most of them are geared towards the user parsing auto-generated morse code).

Lousy computing project
So it turns out that the WindowsCE (the smallest of the Windows CE ME NT trilogy) application must be coded using a compiler that doesn’t support all of C++. The bits that are not supported are quite substantial and would typically be used by any free utilities that you might happen to find on the internet, or for that matter, code up yourself without prior knowledge of their verboten status. Which sucked a lot, because I had to throw away most of my previous work and start again. I abandoned ASN.1, and wrote my own little data format today, which worked fine. Which is just as well, there’s supposed to be a customer demostration next Tuesday.

Pratchett
I was reading about Terry Pratchett in an article by Neil Gaiman recently (article teasingly not referenced here, because you’ve all read it too) and my attention was particularly draw to the tactful statement that Pterry does “not suffer fools gladly”. And it hit me: of course he doesn’t. What satirist would? If you’re the kind of person who accomodates imbiciles and thinks, well maybe that’s fair enough, I can see how you’d think that - well, you’re not in the right mind-set for gently laying down broad frameworks of mockery, are you?

Morse
I’ve added two new modes to the morse code game - it’s almost a game now, and just about ready for beta-testing. I’ve also had some more exciting ideas about what to do for it, so I may be working on this for the next two weeks. I tell you what, it’s actually a relief to be doing real coding after all this laziness - I’d like to devote creativity time to writing too, but I’d rather ride these obsessions while I have them - so long as it’s all creative, that’s good, right? Right?

Moovies
Speaking of creativity, I’ve committed to filming up to six short films before the end of the year - the tropfest item “Rock” has been announced so we’re going all for it. I have to tidy up “Crimson Nightmares” and film that with Jon, and “The Dentist” for Tony L. I’m working with Edwin, Ryan and Ben on “Training for the pain”, and I have my own projects “Leaf Heist”, “The Ghost Dancers” and “Sour grapes”, the last of which is the least likely to be made as it is my first attempt at a splatter film. Eww!

So, how many will get made? The good news is that I’m only the driving force in three of these projects, and two of those are good enough that I’ll really try and push them through. I reckon we’ll definitely manage three, probably four, possibly five.

Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
I’ve been watching a whole bunch of movies lately, but I really can’t be bothered writing up reviews for them, so what the hell - y’all know my tastes, I’ll just give recommendations. No, scratch that, I’ll write a great big commentary.

Jay and Silent Bob is one of those odd ones. I have mentally filed it next to “Meet The Feebles”, for reasons I will shortly explain. The film is an endless series of in-jokes, rude jokes, mugging, and self-reference. It takes the opportunity to point out its many flaws, even as it’s committing them. The self-awareness in the movie is so acute that it almost disappears up its own arsehole, and I’m frankly amazed that they didn’t say *that*. The final scenes in which they arrive at the film studio for the making of the Jay and Silent Bob film are the point at which the film really should turn into some kind of Klein bottle, but… well, here’s where the comparison with “Meet the Feebles” comes in. “Meet The Feebles” was an adaptation of “The Muppets” by Peter Jackson way back in his early days. It exposed the seamier side of the show - the drug-taking, prostitution, and so on. No taboo was left unexplored. The whole concept was really very lame, the kind of thing that a high-schooler would think up while watching the muppets and saying “hey, wouldn’t it be cool if they showed Kermit and Miss Piggy having it off?”.

It was the execution that made all the difference. Peter Jackson took all of the obvious bits and did them, and then he went a bit further into the realm of the gross, and did that, and finally went into the practically unspeakable and severely twisted even by high-school boys standard, and did that. With *enthusiasm*. And in doing so, somehow transcended “Meet The Feebles” into a kind of masterpiece, and proving once and for all that any premise, no matter how lame, can be turned into something… well, entertaining, I suppose.

That’s what Jay and Silent Bob Strikes Back is. It does the obvious self-reference, the self-indulgent mucking around, the endless self-deprecation, and carries it so far and drives it home so much that it actually becomes entertaining. It made me realise at last why so many comedies are weak: they are tentative. They don’t have the courage to really try and run with their premise - “Hey, our premise is, let’s face it, kinda lame, so lets dilute it and try and stop people thinking about it too much and…” Nonono. Embrace the premise. Run with its lameness. At least then you have a chance of transcending it.

Admittedly this is on the basis of two films that turned out rather better than I thought. I’m sure there are plenty that didn’t.

God-dammit, at least I tried…

Back better
My back is feeling a great deal better now, thanks to massage and not-playing-sports and not-lifting-heavy-things. It looks like my skiing crisis has been narrowly averted. I even managed to get that mustard patch off my back without too much pain (refusing Anna’s offer to rip it off in one smooth motion, as this kind of thing had been the main feature of the worst pain I have ever experienced, including breaking my leg). I checked the patch, but there weren’t any mustard plants growing.

Work
I have actually been doing a fair bit of work - the emWallet stuff has been keeping me busy *and* giving me nice bits of cash to spend on goodies (it doesn’t really feel like a salary). The first thing I bought with my paycheck was a nice new mobile phone, an Ericcson T39. Lovely, great battery life, still exploring its capabilities. It even has bluetooth (which I won’t ever use).

Morse
This morse game has been helping me learn morse quite well. I’ve written (but not put on the website) the basis for two more game modes, from which all the levels will be constructed. The idea will be that when you beat the game, you will be a morse code master. And even when you’re a morse code master, it can help analyse your “fist” (that’s morse-code talk for your tapping style) to see how to make it more generic and robot-like. Yay!

Declare
I’m almost spooked out by Tim Powers’ new book, “Declare”. So far, it has been a stunning return to form, after the nigh-unreadable “Earthquake weather” and rather indifferent “Expiration Date”. What is spooky about it is how he’s casually tossing off various bits of science and trivia that I’ve specialised in, with regards to my jobs so far. It’s a spy thriller with slight bits of the supernatural, and there’s a fair bit of morse code in it, and it describes long-distance sending using the Heaviside layer. Now, the heaviside layer is a bit of the ionosphere about 100km up, that is used, among other things, for bouncing over-the-horizon-radar signals. I used to work on analysing return radar signals that had been the result of multi-moding - that is, reflection off *two* separate ionospheric layers - which is a feature of “Declare”! He has really done his homework - as near as I can tell, his description of how it works is completely accurate (bar the magical bits, but I’m not sure he believes them himself :-))
Also in “Declare” is his description of one-time pad encoding, and how it is possible to break the coding if the one-time pads are misused (ie. used more than once). In the course of a single chapter, he referenced my first job, my second job, and my current interests. Given the context, I guess, it isn’t all that surprising, but what really got me was the bit about multimoding. I was probably one of three or four people in Australia who was working on that kind of thing, and probably the only person working on it specifically. I even have a published paper on the topic (as second author). Phew!

Back
I bought a whole lot of stuff from the hardware store on Saturday, ready to fix the laundry taps and the driveway-that-scrapes-the-car-bottom and the fence-that-leans. So I started by fixing the fence-that-leans, wrapping a big chunk of wire around the fence support and the big tree behind it, and as I was standing up felt this “twang”…
And that was it for my back yesterday. Upper back pains all day, unable to sleep on Saturday night, hobbling around in an amusingly crippled fashion wondering if this spelled the end of my skiing plans. Anna’s massaging helped a lot, although the great big mustard patch that she slapped on my back made things worse - every time the muscles cramped up, I’d have to stretch, and that in turn pulled all the hairs underneath the patch. Ow! I was pretty grumpy.

LAN Party
So I had a pretty bad sleep and woke up with back twinges, but by lunch time, things were already feeling much better. I had been invited to a house-warming and a LAN party, but since the LAN party was only a block away and the house-warming was in Epping, it was an easy choice. The LAN party was at Edwin, Ryan and Ben’s place - they’d networked the whole place, had a bunch of PCs and a farm of X-Boxes playing Halo, which isn’t nearly as fun as I thought it would be. So I wandered around, playing this and that, looked at Neverwinter Nights, and demoed my new Java Applet. Feel free to give it a try - if it doesn’t work, that’s because your version of Java isn’t the latest - try getting the most recent JVM from Sun, or using Netscape or Opera (which work fine for me). Enjoy!

3 hour train trip
Great big adventure
So I just got back from a three hour train trip from West Ryde to Marrickville, engendered by the power line falling on the train a couple of stations over from West Ryde. The subsequent wait for the buses to arrive (and for them to make sure we weren’t going to get electricuted) was made more enjoyable by the nice view of some pretty scrubland right next to the harbour, pristine and untouched despite the factories nearby, and also the big Greenpeace containers with the words “Dioxyn” on them.

Oh well.

I got chatting with another redundent computer programmer, going to an interview at 3:00pm, or more accurately, sitting in the train at 3:00pm watching the world not going by. After an hour or so, they decided it was safe enough for us to get off the train, and after another half hour, time for the buses to arrive and slowly take us to Strathfield through the school pick-up traffic. So it goes.

Morse code
I revived an old morse code project the other day, converting it to use the Swing Java libraries and got enthused about it again. My software writing enthusiasms don’t usually last very long, but this one is fun enough for Anna to get addicted to it already, he he.

Golf
The reason I was at West Ryde today was in order to continue the new-sport-every-week project with John D. It went pretty well - we went to a driving range first, which was grand, John’s a quick learner, and then to a put-put course. Not that a put-put course has anything to do with golf, but it was fun anyway. But I was kind of expecting to get back just after lunch, not just before 5:00pm…

radwm
The newsgroup stuff seems to be stalled at the moment, as it’s all up to the other admin guy and he needs to be prodded sometimes.

The mate’s rates job
I got the ASN.1 library up and working OK, wrote my wrapper, got my first cheque in a while. Used it to buy a mobile phone, my old one having karked it. The new one is rather nice - Ericcson T39, very small and light but with a decent battery life and all the mod cons. Despite my general distaste for mobile phones, it is still a toy, and as such, to be admired and gloated over. I likes it, precious.