Anotherblog

Writing and Procrastination

Writing and Procrastination
Yesterday I did my 400 words before I went to work. I had a pleasant and rewarding day at work (despite not playing any lunch-time games) and came home and…

Well, that’s where I decided that perhaps this procrastination thing isn’t so bad.

Back when I was living by myself, there were times when I would get home and I’d have absolutely nothing to do. Oh, there was plenty I *could* do - writing, guitar playing, and so on - but nothing that inspired me enough to get up and do it. Last night was the same. Sometimes, procrastination is the only thing that gets me doing other interesting things.

Procrastination adds zest to life. That’s probably why I keep doing it. Today, I have not yet done my writing, for comparison’s sake. (Oh, alright. Because I was lazy in the car.) I will compare my enthusiasm levels.

Kanji

Kanji
Because I didn’t have enough to do, I started Kanji lessons this morning. Actually, it’s just a reading group - we’re reading from “Remembering the Kanji”, and it’s every Wednesday morning. Today’s lesson was fifteen very basic kanji - the numbers from 1 to 10, plus mouth, sun/day, moon/month, rice field/brain, and eye. So far, so not-too-hard. But I suspect we’re being eased into it, and I still have the enthusiasm of starting something new.

Speaking of which…

Writing
Struggling, struggling. I’m getting the writing done, but it’s pretty painful at the moment, and not a joy to behold. It does, however, move me closer to finishing, and it’s the only thing I can think of that does, in a satisfactory fashion, at least.

Car
My parents’ car arrived last Thursday, and I picked it up yesterday before I went to work. It’s nice to drive. The seats are very comfortable, it has Zip, and I’ve happily settled into driving a manual again. Anna, who hasn’t driven a manual in a while, will take more time, but she’s happy too. The boot space is very impressive, with the back seats down. Finally.

Games
We’ve been playing Puerto Rico at lunchtimes recently, which is a very well constructed game. I’d heard reports that each and every choice you make is sheer agony, and they’re not wrong. So much to do! So little time! So many possible strategies! I think this one’s a keeper - the trouble is, we don’t own the set and it has to go back to its owner tomorrow. Also, it’s a little time-consuming for lunchtimes.

One game that works better for time limits, however, is Tamsk. I brought it along today because we had too many people for Puerto Rico, and a couple of people had goes at it. It’s a two-player game of pure strategy, in which the board pieces are minute glasses that die when they run out, so you sometimes have to move a piece (flipping it over) even when it’s in a good position. Loki managed to discover a new strategy that I’d not seen before. Pretty cool.

Guitar
I’m continuing to learn the seven three-note-a-string shapes on the fretboard, and how to move between them - these shapes are harder to play than the five shapes I showed earlier, because you have to spread your left-hand fingers a lot more when playing the shapes, but they give a greater ability to get around on the fretboard too. So far I’ve learned three of the new shapes. I’ll try and get some diagrams up at some point.

I’ve also been practicing playing scales and triads with the metronome (actually, the Zoom box’s drumkit), but I’m stuck on the scales at about 140bpm, and on the triads at 165bpm, or 175pbm for hammer-ons and pull-offs (which used to be harder to play than regular notes, but are now easier). No progress for a while. I think I need to practice more, with all that spare time.

Franz Ferdinand

Franz Ferdinand
It turned out that the good Archduke was playing at 11:30pm on Friday - and as Anna and I were not feeling our best, this was a bit disheartening (though not unexpected). So we went to see a movie, and came out with half an hour to go until the performance. Ran into Dri, as we had vaguely planned - Anna and I walked in, looked to our right, and there she was. But it was noisy and crowded, so we said Hello (Hello!) and went in search of a place to stand from which we would have a chance to see. Unfortunately, Anna is Not Tall, so the position we found was Not The Best - there was a very tall person one step below us, and Anna had to move her head a lot to see.
Fortunately, it’s all about the music: they were very good. But young! They are all very young people, people in bands nowadays. They were very enthusiastic and had a kind of semi-polished ironic rock-god posiness that reminded me a little of Ev. Now that I’m playing electric guitar standing up, it’s also easy to imagine myself there, easy until I remind myself how much playing I’d have to do to get to a semi-competent standard.
So, good. They played (I think) their entire album plus a couple of songs I hadn’t heard before (and are, no doubt, some of the five bonus tracks on the Australian release that I didn’t get), and they played them well and energetically, and despite our lethargy, Anna and I danced a little, or at least jumped around with the crowd. No regrets.

Some kinda weekend
That was the kind of weekend in which the entire day serves merely to delay when I have to do my writing. I wanted to write early each morning to get it out of the way quickly, and both days, I didn’t. I slept a lot. I played the guitar. Anna and I went to see movies: I, Robot, and Mean Girls, both movies that are prime candidates for my “Forensics” section: not terrible, but disappointing and somewhat frustrating.

I think part of the lethargy can be put down to the Franz Ferdinand concert, part of it was because I’m back off sugar again, and part of it is because of this massive plot change, which makes every word I write feel like a waste of time. I’m considering just writing as though the plot changes were already in effect, but I’d rather have a coherent first draft - well, as coherent as I can make it - than an allegedly more useful one.

As a consequence of these factors, I think my writing has never been as crap as it is now. The attitude of “that’s 400 words, can I go now?” is like being a teenager again.

Franz Ferdinand

Franz Ferdinand
We’re off to see the aforementioned band at the metro tonight. According to the reviews, they’re very good live, so I’m mostly looking forward to it. Reasons not to look forward to it? Smoke, crowds, and dancing. Still, I can probably avoid the dancing, or trick myself into enjoying it - Anna’s enthusiasm can go a long way.

Writing
Urgh. Thump. Yay! Splot. Gaaah!

120k words into the novel, I came up with a way of entirely eliminating the Doctor from the story while keeping most of the elements that were responsible for the introduction of the Doctor in the first place. And I think it’ll be a better novel for it, even though it will have essentially the same beginning as Contact or His Master’s Voice or even Species. There are quite a few plot things to rework, and I’ll obviously have to completely redo most of the existing novel, but I really think the end result will be improved.

Meanwhile, I will finish the first draft as currently specified, so at least I have *something* to show for the last year’s work. I suspect there’s 20-30k left to write. I should accelerate the writing, but I’ve tried that before without success. On the other hand, I’m much closer to the end this time. When I was writing Lotus (ah! Blissfully simple book!) I managed the last 7.5k words in one day.

But then!
Nothing happened.

Music
Goes well. I’m getting better at that Satie piece (I’ve ‘played’ it all the way through now), and the guitar is behaving much better, though it still does strange, freaky things in my dreams. How the hell did the strings get tangled up? And how is it I never saw the hinge in the neck before?

Will it never end?

Will it never end?
I cracked 120k words last night with a feeling of despair. I’m not sure whether this book can be wrapped up in another 20k words. I’m thinking 150k to 160k at the moment, which means another three or four months working on it like this. Maddening. The writing should be getting easier now: I know what has to come, and it’s a matter of trying to get to it quickly and stop fart-arsing around. But the plot keeps bucking. I just have to accept that it won’t be a well-written or necessarily sensical ending, and just write it.

Gymnopedie I
I’m almost a third of the way through learning this now, and it’s very relaxing. I can’t play it at any kind of speed or rhythm, but I’m hitting the correct notes, and Anna likes listening to me practice. So I’m confident that I’ll get it in time.

Off to England
My folks are off to England tomorrow morning, and are in the final stages of sorting things out now. Soon, as Jen points out, I’ll be the last of us still in Australia.

Their car will be arriving on Friday, and then it’s just a matter of sorting out the transfer and insurance and repair and selling the old car, and we’ll have a four-door car with a decent boot. At last. Not that the puported reason for this increased boot-size - making films - has been high on my list of things-to-do lately. But I’m sure it’ll mount a big return once this novel is done.

iPod
Yes. Don’t think I haven’t noticed the new iPod is out. I’ve been debating as to whether to get the new iPod or the new Powerbook with the money I’ve been gradually saving, and I think it has come down on the side of the iPod. 40GB of goodness, 12 hours of battery life.

Piano

Piano
The piano arrived on Saturday morning, and Anna and I (who had been up until 4:00am on Friday night/Saturday morning, watching Apocalypse Now and playing Magic/writing Fork respectively) had to blearily get up and direct the piano movers into the appropriate room, pay them, and then stagger back to bed until 11:00am. At which point, Anna enthusiastically attacked the piano, and I started the guitar repairs.

I really like Eric Satie’s short piano pieces. For ages, I wanted to learn them for guitar, but as it turned out, they really aren’t suited for it. So I found a copy of his Gymnopedies on the web, printed them out, and started learning the first one. I’ve never played piano before, but I will for this piece.

Firefly
Anna and I watched the last two episodes of Firefly on Sunday night with Jon & Kate. They were both good, though the first (Heart of Gold) was much more Western than SF. The last episode of all, Objects in Space, was excellent. And then we all chatted for a while, and decided to play music together. Jon will play bass or guitar, I’ll play guitar or bass, Anna will play piano, and Kate will drum. Fun!

Friday’s “Magic:The Gathering” Tournament

Friday’s “Magic: The Gathering” Tournament
We ran our second Magic tournament on Friday night at my place, with the same group of six who were in the first tournament. In summary, it was a lot of fun, and we ran very, very late.

This time around we decided that, since we weren’t using proper booster-packs anyway, we’d try something a little different. We were drafting Urza’s Saga from Andrew C.’s set of cards, and decided that for a bit more variety, instead of the usual 11-3-1 split of common-uncommon-rare, we’d go 12-4-2 for an 18 card booster, which meant that players got three cards each from a given booster.

We started at 7:00pm. The drafting went on to about 7:45, as we agreed to give ourselves 90 seconds for each of the first six picks, 60 seconds for the second six, and 30 seconds thereafter. The order around the table was Loki, me, Gary, Andrew C., David, Andrew K., so I was first receiving decks that had gone through Andrew K. and Loki - both good drafters who knew the set well. Fortunately, my very first booster pack contained Pestilence, widely considered to be one of the best picks, so the rest of my cards were very much informed by that choice - I drafted black and white, started picking up some of the underdrafted red, and as the draft went on and black and white were obviously being drafted by other people, I moved into blue. In the end, I thought I’d done pretty well - I was a little light on creatures, but I got two expunges and two corrupts, two unworth deads and a sanguine guard in black (the last three being regenerating creatures - perfect with pestilence), a bunch of flyers in blue - two pendrall drakes, two spire owls, two veil of birds, and a veiled apparition - some white stuff to support the pestilence: two Rune of Protection: White and a Disciple of Grace - and a couple of nice bombs, being the Phyrexian Processor (which some regard as the best Limited card in the set - it allows you to create big token creatures), Stroke of Genius, and two life-savers: Worship and Energy Field.

So, in the end, a three-colour deck: lots of blue and black, with a smattering of white for Worship. The nice thing about all the other white cards that I included was that they were all cycling - I could spend 2 and discard them to draw a card, which meant that they weren’t a wasted draw when I didn’t have any plains.

We spent an hour putting our decks together, so by the time we got playing, we were already running quite late. My first match was against Andrew C., who was playing green/black/white, I think - he had some nice green combat tricks and both befouls, but I managed to stall the ground creatures with my regenerators while flying over the top to win both games, without either the pestilence or the processor showing up. He was a little unlucky, I thought, to get fairly poor draws in both games. He eventually went 3-2 overall.

Second match was against David. He was running a very strong green/white deck - it came out strongly in both matches, and I was on the back foot throughout, fighting to stay alive long enough - he had big green trampling creatures I was having real trouble stopping, but I was lucky enough to get the regenerators out again, and got enough flyers over for a win. In the first match, I got both the Energy Field and the Worship out, which saved me long enough to rally a more effective defence, while in the second match I think I finally got pestilence out, along with a protection from black creature and a regenerator - enough to scrape through. 2-0 games to me. David went on to go 2-3 in matches.

Third match was against Gary, running green/black/white. Green was a really strong colour in Urza’s saga, but I didn’t see much, as everybody else was drafting it! I got into real trouble in the first game - he had a trampler, a swamp-walking 4/4 creature, and an island-walking 3/3. I, of course, was running islands and swamps, and so was taking a great deal of damage until I got out my Rune of Protection. Gary was unusually running quite a few annoyance enchantments, and I stupidly let them tie up my mana that should have been used on the rune of protection, so he powered through for the first game. Silly me! In the second game, I scraped a win by getting going faster - early fliers, and my good removal saved the day. The third game was looking quite good - early fliers again - until he brought out a green enchantment that gave all flyers -2/-0. The one real weakness of my deck was that it had no enchantment removal at all, so with that one card, half of my creatures were rendered unable to do damage. Then he got out the island-walker again, and things were looking grim until I got Worship out, and eventually cleared his side of the board with a pestilence and powered through for a win, two turns before I’d have decked myself. Phew! 3-0 to me. Gary was (I think) unlucky to have a 0-5 record in matches.

Fourth match was against Andrew K., who I’d seen running a formidable looking white/blue control deck. He’d picked up almost all the counterspells in the set, and had a white creature with power and toughness equal to his life-total, so it was fairly important to me to get his life total low before he could play it! In the first game, I got through too many threats before he could counterspell them, and the swarm of small flyers won the day. The second game went poorly after a great start - I got the processor out, paid seven life, and had it immediately disenchanted. I didn’t recover from that - Andrew was able to get flyers of his own and enchant them with a variety of nastiness to make them untargetable. Several of his creatures had protection from black - I had absolutely no way of dealing with them at all. The third game was extremely tense. I had a feeling his deck would, on average, beat mine - he had several threats I couldn’t stop, and his counterspell ability could kill any or all of my bombs. I got a bit of early damage in, but then he got out a Smokestack, a card that destroyed lots of permanents. He was on the verge of dominating when I managed to force the processor through, by drawing the counterspell with a pestilence first. It was enough - he conceded after casting a spell to draw lots of cards, and realised he was about to deck himself. 4-0 to me! This was the only match he lost in the night.

Last match was against Loki. I used a nasty trick I learned from David Low in Adelaide: the Chinese Cut. Which is to say, when you cut the opponent’s deck at the beginning of the game, you instead wave your hand over it with a cutting motion, and make a “whoosh” sound. It caused Loki to mulligan down to two cards in the first match, which I won fairly easily. I then retired the Chinese cut. It was a little too scary. The second game was more even - Loki was playing green/red/blue in the first game, but switched to green/blue in the second and was doing very well indeed - his big green creatures were putting a lot of pressure on me - he had a “tim” effect on one creature, so he was killing all my 1/1 flyers. I had to sacrifice the pestilence to a disenchant effect, so that I could get Worship into play, and then I was able to bring out a processor, get lots of big creatures, and swarm over to win the game, the match, and the tournament. 5-0 matches.

By this point, it was 3:30am. Loki’s first game with Andrew K. had taken 2.5 hours, and most of the other games were fairly slow too - it was pretty easy to fall into a creature stalemate. Still, rather than sticking to a 1 hour limit per match, we had decided to play them out, as it was more fun.

Overall - very thrilling games, and I’m looking forward to the next tournament, though we’ll try to start a lot earlier next time.

Guitar repairs

Guitar repairs
Good work today; I’m happy. I fixed the guitar. It sounds good. There are no crackles or hum any more.

I’d done some looking around at such places as Allen’s music and Tandy electronics for spare parts for the volume knob, but as it turned out, I should have gone to Guitar World on Parramatta Road, which I did this morning on the way back from dropping Anna off at work. They were pleasant and not at all condescending to a person who obviously didn’t know what they were talking about, and managed to get me not only the volume potentiometer, but also a replacement input jack holder.

So, I took the guitar back downstairs, heated up the soldering iron, and had at it. Here’s the guitar after I’d taken off the strings and unscrewed the front plate:

Here’s the replacement for the input jack holder. It’s the one on the left; I’ve already attached the input jack plate to it.

And here’s the guitar with the front plate flipped upside-down.

A close-up of the problematic volume potentiometer:

And an indication that I probably got the wrong replacement potentiometer, as it’s a bit too big:

I decided that I’d put the new one in anyway - it was a 500k pot rather than a 8k pot, but I figured it would probably work anyway - I could always keep it set between 8k and 0k anyway, if necessary. More problematic was that it wouldn’t fit in the front plate - the hole was too small. Fortunately, I have ways of dealing with such problems, that I have no hesitation with using on cheap guitars:

With the hole suitably expanded, it was a pretty simple matter to unsolder the old pot and put the new one on. The (relatively) new soldering iron is so much better than my old one - the old one was very feeble, and would have had real problems heating up the back of the pot, where all the ground elements were conveniently soldered.

Anyhoo, after about an hour’s work, I had it tested, the front plate back on, screwed back up, and restrung:

Note that the volume knob is a little bit more raised than the tone knob - that’s thanks to the extra-large pot.

And the results? It works perfectly. The new pot hasn’t presented any problems at all, and seems to offer (if anything) better fine-tuning of the volume. Very happy.

Thanks to Peter N. - although I didn’t get around to reading his comments until after I’d done the repairs, the info he pointed me at was still very interesting!

Stuff falling apart

Broke
Our hot water system has been getting progressively worse over the last couple of weeks - it’s leaking water, and the top seems to be coming loose, and there’s steam. It really doesn’t look very healthy at all, though it’s still producing hot water. We’ve called in a couple of people for quotes, including the possibility for going to solar power, and this morning one of them pointed out that there are some rotting timbers on our roof. I went out onto the road and had a look. Crap. Just where the car port roof joins the main roof, the tiles at the middle bit of the main roof, just above the living room, have collapsed, and one of the wooden decoration beams is askew. It’s only a couple of tiles, but still nasty: this house has a history of termites, and I haven’t had a pest inspection done in over a year.

Crapcrapcrap. Crap! I don’t think it is termites (yet), but we can’t exclude the possibility. Time to hit the panic button.

Yesterday, I went into town and shopped around for some replacement bits for the guitar, what is making those crackly noises. I wasn’t sure which potentiometer to get (though it did occur to me afterwards that although I couldn’t read the value, I could still measure it using my multimeter. Idiot!) but I did end up getting some parts for Andrea & Amanda’s Game-controller Project, so it wasn’t a complete waste of time. When I got home, I pulled apart the guitar and decided to resolder some of the joints in case that would help matters. When I took the guitar strings off, two of them broke. Crap! And then I did the soldering, but it didn’t help matters - still crackly, and there’s a lot of ground hum too, when the lever is set to some of the pickups (and Peter - I was wrong, the pickup-select lever does indeed allow combinations of two pickups). The ground-hum pattern is quite strange:

Pickup 1: no hum
Pickup 1&2: hum
Pickup 2: hum
Pickup 2&3: no hum
Pickup 3: hum

Ground-hum is one of those things that has always puzzled me. Mains power in Australia is 240V @ 50Hz, and ground-hum is the result of the 50Hz of the mains power getting into the signal coming from the guitar, somehow. (50Hz is roughly half-way between a G1 and G#1, so it isn’t even musical)

What’s puzzling is exactly how the 50Hz gets into the signal, though I think I’m beginning to understand it a bit. When I discard the guitar altogether and just touch the tip of the input jack, it produces the same hum.

So. Looking at this with faint memories of my Electrical Engineering degree, the outside of the input jack is probably connected to ground, and the tip is expected to carry the signal, which is then amplified and distorted by the Zoom box. When I touch my finger to the tip, I’m acting as a resistor, connecting the tip to the Ground. Forgetting exactly why this would cause the hum, I can at least figure that whatever is causing the hum in the guitar is a similar thing: there must be a connection within the guitar that is acting as a resistor to ground, in this case via the outside of the jack, which is connected to the chassis of the guitar. What I should be looking for, then, is an unwanted connection to Ground.

Maybe. This is why I turned to computer programming in the first place.

Anyway, the guitar is in bits at the moment. There’s no point putting it back together until I get this sorted, and buy the new guitar strings. It may be as simple as cleaning the connections on the volume knob and pickup-selection switch. Or there may be more thrilling soldering-iron action. I’d consider forking out for a new guitar, except that I really like this one - it has a nice feel, the fretboard isn’t warped or out of tune, and it looks good. Also, there’s pride. Just a little.

Not broke
Otherwise, things is going good. Writing gettin’ done, Magic Draft tournament tonight at my place for thrills & spills, much happiness with Anna. Beginning to get back into Japanese - there’s a new Kanji study group starting up, which I’m thinking of joining - they’re using Heisig’s “Remembering the Kanji” book. Using a bit more conversational Greek around the house. Playing badminton at lunch today.

No D&D

No D&D
Huh. D&D got cancelled tonight too, so I’ve got another week to come up with more Journal entries for Lorenzo. If this keeps up, I really will get them all done.

As a consequence, I can play guitar all night! Except for one thing: it’s acting up again. You may recall I was having problems with crackling sounds and cutouts, and that I pulled it apart and fiddled with it until it started working again. Well, it’s crackling and cutting out again. I think I’ll try getting a replacement volume knob (or hard-wiring the volume to maximum - I can control the volume using the Zoom box anyway) tonight. Then I can play standing up again and feel the awesome power of rock.

And there’s writing to be done, but there’s always writing to be done. If I keep this 400 words/day thing up, that’s 146097 words a year! And if I do 2000 words/day in each November, it’s 194097. That’s two novels, “easy”.