In about 30 hours, I’ll be leaving for a whirlwind trip to Seattle to visit a couple friends. To friends also in that area I haven’t gotten in touch with yet, which is a fairly large number, I do apologize: I’m not kidding about the whirlwind part. I’ll be driving to the airport directly from the office tomorrow, and driving directly from the airport to the office on Monday morning, and Saturday and Sunday plans are pretty much being put together by others. If I can, I’ll come back to the Seattle area sometime for a week, or at least a long weekend.

The reason for this whirlwind-ness is the cloud to the silver lining of gainful employment: fewer vacation days, unless I’m allowed to just take some off without pay. As I’m planning a trip to Eurofurence (insert glance in cheetah_spotty’s direction), that’s going to be five or six days chewed off right there; given other smaller trips I’m planning, I’m likely to bump into my 10-day holiday allotment as it is.

This does bring up another issue: this is likely to be the first Anthrocon since 1998’s that I’ve missed. Boo hiss! I don’t think it can be helped, though. I’m hanging onto my AC hotel reservation for the nonce and keeping a search on plane tickets running in case a Really Good Deal (ha!) happens, but between travel costs and travel time I suspect I’m going to have to table plans this year. As they say: more info as it develops.

John Gruber of Daring Fireball wondered if there were any “testbed virtual hosting utilities” for OS X like Headdress and VirtualHostX. I only knew of the first, but I stopped using it when I realized how easy doing this actually was. ( Warning: geekery ahead. )

From TechCrunch:

Six Apart is launching an advertising network for blogs and will begin offering professional services (design, implementation, development, optimization) after acquiring New York-based creative agency Apperceptive.

The company is now competing with Federated Media Publishing, Glam, the upcoming Technorati ad network and a number of others to get bloggers to join their network. Six Apart has long sold advertising for itself on its network of free blogs on LiveJournal (before it was sold) and Vox. CEO Chris Alden says they have significant experience in grouping like-blogs and selling to large advertisers.

The observant will, of course, have noted that despite the message bankruptcy I am indeed still using AIM and logging onto MUCKs. I’m trying to do less of each, though, particularly when trying to do something else simultaneously: office work, writing, what have you. Is this “working,” whatever that may mean? Yes, even if I have some distance to go. The next step is getting more serious about workspace organization (i.e., my room) and time management. The latter’s always been a killer for me, but I think if I can take the approach of today I would like to get X done for small but concrete values of X I’ll manage. To pick a real-life example, “write something I can show for Claw & Quill” is so large it’s paralysis-inducing, but “Get something started for Claw & Quill” isn’t concrete enough to attack.

What I have accomplished is writing a short horror story, with the intent of sending it off for submission to the Eurofurence program book. (EF’s theme this year is horror.) I’m going to get a bit of feedback from the writing group before shoving it out the door, and, oh yes, come up with a title for the damn thing. I’m fairly happy with it in its current state, though. It may eventually show up elsewhere, but—assuming it makes it into the program book—you’ll just have to go to the con to read it.

As for why I am sending that off to EF, my answer for now is: because they’re just swell people. (Which is, from what I’ve seen, absolutely true.) Any other answers are waiting on other people to say something. (“You go first.” “No, after you.”)

To reiterate past mentions, I do still use Twitter, as chipotlecoyote, and update it both more frequently and more inanely than I do this journal. If you’re desperate to get in touch but e-mail is too slow and old fashioned for you, a Twitter reply or direct message will reach me faster. Theoretically.

I read an interesting column on TidBITS; while this is a Mac news site, “Instant Messaging for Introverts” isn’t platform-specific. Instead, it’s about the author’s problem using IM and similar apps, and trying to explain first what an introvert is (i.e., not “shy, withdrawn, afraid of crowds, or lacking in social skills”) and why this can lead to the problems he’s describing:

Introverts typically need to concentrate on just one thing at a time, and are often particularly sensitive to interruptions and distractions. Now, I happen to think “multi-tasking” is a concept that should never, ever be applied to human beings (regardless of personality type), but be that as it may, I can certainly say that I’m easily distracted, and having more than one thing to think about actively at any given time is sure to make me both ineffective and grumpy. Chatting online while also working on another task, therefore, is unthinkable.

As Rands observed in his article about “Nerd Attention Deficiency Disorder,” or N.A.D.D., the state of having a half-dozen different activity windows scattered about your computer screen isn’t multi-tasking. It’s context switching, or less generously, an inability to focus. I am less sanguine about the upsides than Rands is. People with N.A.D.D. have problems in 2008 that they didn’t in 1998 and really didn’t in 1988. The internet, and particular its flirtations with ubiquitous presence, offer opportunity for immediate distraction that has never existed before in all of history. No, I don’t think that’s an exaggeration.

In 2006, Internet law guru Lawrence Lessig wrote to his e-mail correspondents, “Bankruptcy is now my only option” and deleted all their messages, asking them to resend anything particularly pressing. I’ve gotten reasonably good at managing e-mail without just deleting it all, but I’m considering declaring IM bankruptcy.

Sound nuts? Here’s the thing. Suppose I have an IM window open and a MUCK window open, as I’m wont to do, and a couple of hours elapse. Now three or four (or five or six) tabs are open in Adium, each a different conversation; two or three MUCK characters are online, at least one of whom is sitting in a room with a handful of other characters, some trying to interact with him or her. In addition, several people will almost certainly be “paging” to one or more of those characters intermittently, in effect creating separate private communication channels.

That’s a half dozen or more one-on-one conversations and one or more group conversations at the same time. You wouldn’t attempt something that absurd in “real life,” but the mental context switching that you have to do online is the same. And if I’m sitting in front of the computer, the chances are there are other windows I’m trying to pay attention to, like a web browser or a text editor.

This is, pardon the language, objectively batshit.

Since many—not all, but many—of my correspondents across the internets read this, I’m going to put this here as a general beg for understanding. My “real job” work often requires real job attention, and I’ve learned from experience that I cannot write fiction and have any other communication window open. Given that at the moment I’m trying to write a novel as well as, at the immediate moment, an unrelated short story I need to get done ASAP… well, here’s my thoughts.

• When I am on MUCKs, I may turn off pages more than I historically have. It’s difficult enough to keep up when I have a character in a busy room having “cocktail party” conversations — throw in a couple page conversations and it gets psychotic. (VR social dynamics apparently dictate the only cause for missing someone’s cues is because you hate them.)

• I’m going to try to be more aggressive about setting my IM “away” when I don’t want to be disturbed. I’m going to try to do this instead of just not being on IM at all, but respect the away-ness.

• When I really can’t be disturbed I’m just going to shut the IM client off, and log off the MUCKs. Sorry. Email, Twitter and even SMS will all get in touch with me in ways that don’t break my concentration (but won’t get an immediate reply).

Oh. And sometimes, when I am online, it may be appropriate to ask me if I’ve actually gotten the shit done today that I need to get done. I have about a decade of NADD to try and dig my way out of.

So I’ve generally been steering clear of the various LiveJournal-related controversies, but I’ve been chewing over a few things the last day.

Yes, I’m still here!

Work is going reasonably well; not much to write about it. Things are likely to get busier as the project I’ve been working on starts getting actively beat on by other people. I’ve decided that the web framework I’m using really isn’t particularly testable in its stable version, and when I try to transfer it to its beta version, it segfaults Apache. Yes. But only when—wait for it—the debug mode is turned on. While I presume this is something peculiar about my code, I can’t imagine just what it is in my code that does this, and it happens on two different installations. Part of me wants to lock myself in a closet for a week, with nothing but the computer and an unlimited supply of nachos and margaritas, and rewrite the entire thing in Django or Rails. But I shall not.

Writing is also going reasonably well; I have about 9700 words written on the new “Gift of Fire.” This is remarkable, given that the old one was about 24,000 words, and I am not 40% through it, but more like 30%. (I think.) I’m writing in fits and starts rather than consistently; I tell myself I should write in the mornings, but my oft-griped-about problem with getting up early has been particularly bad the last month and the time change surely isn’t going to help. I should note that I usually wake up of my own volition by 9 a.m. so we’re not actually talking late, but since I should be leaving for work around 8:30 a.m. or so, to actually get a reasonable amount of work done I’d need to be sitting at the computer, coffee in hand and brain in gear, by 7 a.m. and this should not be as hard as it keeps being.

I have been feeling a little bit of pain in the wrists occasionally again recently, and so I have looked around for a truly ergonomic keyboard. No, no, not one of those dopey curved things. I mean one of these:

Yes, that’s the modern descendant of the old “Model M” IBM keyboards, the ones with the buckling spring switches and are really remarkably loud. This one is made by Unicomp, and it looks, well, pretty much like it always did—except that now it has the Windows keys and is USB. I also discovered, as a minor but pleasant surprise, that OS X Leopard has improved slightly on the modifier key remapping introduced in the previous version: now not only can I flip the Windows and Alt key mapping (Alt sends the keycode for Option and Windows for Command, but they’re in the reverse positions that they would be on a Mac), but I can do that on a per-device basis, so when I’m using the laptop’s internal keyboard or a Mac external keyboard, the remapping doesn’t happen.

Anyway, at the moment I’m just back from a trip to Forbidden Island and then Buffalo Bill’s Brewpub with dracosphynx to meet gatcat and a bunch of other people with him whose names I’ve already mostly forgotten because I suck. While I don’t feel tipsy, I feel tired, so maybe going to bed at a rational early time is in order.

It’s about ten before nine as I start writing this, and I’m not in traffic this morning; instead I’m sitting in the Millbrae Panera, about 10 miles from the house, with a bagel and cream cheese and a cup of coffee. Yes, it’s a holiday, and one that I’d almost forgotten about having off—it was only as I was leaving the office and called “see you Monday” to a coworker that I got back, “Oh, Monday’s a day off. See you Tuesday.”

The power at the apartment went out this morning, just after seven, and as far as I can tell it’s still out. This means that my web sites and the Excursion Society MUCK are down, as well as haikujaguar’s Stardancer. I did learn, at least, that the UPS monitoring daemon in OS X actually works now, as after about five minutes Parmesan (my PowerMac G5) shut down gracefully. Unfortunately, Agii (the web server) didn’t have that enabled, so hopefully it’ll all come back up without undue stress. (In theory, I back up my home directory to Parmesan via rsync every night, and I back up Parmesan to an external drive… somewhat less frequently than I honestly should. Parmesan is actually due for an internal hard drive replacement given its age, but I’m still debating replacing Parmesan itself. That’s another post, though.)

(Note: around 9:20 or so, Agii came back online. I haven’t reconnected to it to check on my own various web services, but I shall before I leave Panera.)

So what do I plan to do with my day off, you ask? In theory, write. I haven’t done anything on “Gift of Fire” since last weekend. I’ve been having trouble dragging myself out of bed early enough to get in writing in the morning, and both of the weekend days were largely committed—Saturday to a somewhat roundabout trip to Santa Cruz, and Sunday to a large block of role-playing on the Excursion Society, kicking off a long-delayed trip and some of the first interaction that hasn’t been characters sitting around hoping something would happen in months.

In practice, I don’t think I want to sit here at Panera the whole day trying to write, though. The atmosphere’s still pleasant enough in its own way but perhaps it’s become a little too sterile, or perhaps I’m anticipating the inevitable lunch rush with dread. (They’ve also taken to shutting off your wifi if you’re on it for more than 30 minutes between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m., precisely because of said lunch rush—an understandable business decision but not one that fills me with joy, even though if I’m writing I shouldn’t be on the damn network anyway.) I’m contemplating heading up into San Francisco to check out Ritual Coffee Roasters, which I’ve been to once before, many months ago, and see if I can write there. Will it be magically more inspiring? Maybe. Maybe it’ll just be a waste of time, of course.

I’ve also brought my camera with me. I have a Nikon D70; last week I became a bit technolusty after one of the newer Nikons, the D300. (For those not up on the model line, the D70 was replaced by the D70s and then the D80; Nikon’s newest cameras are the Serious Pro Level D3 and its less buff cousin, the D300, which is nonetheless a serious leap up from the D80.) But, I didn’t use it very much at all last year; if I want to re-engage my shutterbug a little, I need to get re-engaged with the tools I have before buying new ones. And, of course, if I bought a new gadget sometime for the D70—a new lens, a tripod, an external flash—it would transfer to any newer camera body. But the point is to retrain myself to get out there and start taking photos again.

Thinking about computers and camera gear also, not unsurprisingly, makes me think about finances. That too could be another post, but the short form is that on Friday, I got my first direct deposit paycheck. Regular pay means I can put into effect a regular transfer into savings, something I haven’t done since… well, I’m not sure I’ve done it this decade. Last year on contract, I did put money into savings irregularly, but most “savings” actually went to debt payment. At the end of 2006 I paid off my car, leaving just a credit card debt that was, if I recall right, about $10K. I paid that off by the end of 2007. Given the bleak economic outlook for 2008, this is probably an excellent time to not have debt. I now might have the stability to start (gasp) buying stocks and bonds—which at first glance seems odd to think about given that just-mentioned economic outlook, but over the long-term, it’s nearly always a good bet. I’m still doing my research on that.

At any rate, even if I don’t know what I’m going to do yet, it’s definitely time to do something. Upward and onward.

While I’ve been lax in updating again, I’m going to blame (with some justification, I’d argue) the flu of doom that I’ve been suffering. Truth to tell it’s not a very high level of doom, but in some ways that’s made it more irritating: instead of a few days of abject misery followed by recovery, it’s just been an ongoing lingering cough and low energy.

This has put the kibosh on a lot of “what I’d like to be doing” plans over the last couple of weeks; it kind of sucks to be inspired to finally get going on projects and then find yourself completely unable to work on any of them. Even so, one long-standing idea has been pulled out of mothballs, and has actually had a little progress made already.

About (glark) eighteen years ago I wrote a fantasy novella entitled “A Gift of Fire, A Gift of Blood,” which was—at least in certain circles—wildly popular and still has fans to this day. Since it technicaly remained in print up until just a few years ago, I’ve resisted the idea of putting it into a collection, but I’ve decided that YARF! is pretty much dead to the world. At the convention, I talked with a publisher about the idea of producing a new edition.

This of course leads to the question of whether to revise the story. While there’s something to be said for not mucking with success, the truth is that a lot of people either haven’t read the original version of the story—or haven’t read it in a long time—and together with its sequel story, “The Lighthouse,” there’s basically a novel-length narrative that could probably be strengthened by, well, treating it like a novel. (Looking back, there are things that were added to the story’s “mythology” in later bits that should really have been mentioned. Most obvious so far: one of the main characters belongs to a race which has a name—Derysi—in a later story, yet is never given in the fifty thousand words of the two novellas.)

So. I’ve actually already started. I have about three thousand words written on the new incarnation of “Gift of Fire,” which comprise the first two scenes—the first one a rewrite of the original first scene, an the second one a scene that was referenced but not shown before. (Funny how show, don’t tell actually works in practice.)

Deciding what to do with “Lighthouse” will be harder; while “Gift of Fire” is written in canonical third-person, past-tense from Mika’s point of view, “Lighthouse” is written in first-person present tense, virtually stream of consciousness, from Revar’s point of view. That seemed like a great idea at the time but I’m not sure whether to retool it—still from Revar’s point of view, but back to third-person, past-tense—this time through. The argument against doing that is that, well, it works in the current incarnation, mostly; the argument for doing it is that to make this all work as a novel, I’m going to have to give Mika more to do in the second half beyond just showing up at the end, and it may be easier to do that if I can switch between the two characters’ points of views. (If you’ve read the two, you know what I’m talking about; if you haven’t, I don’t think I’ve given much away.)

Even so, it’s already been fun to revisit the characters, and the world. This time I’m trying to assume that readers have no familiarity with the world the story’s set in—an assumption that wasn’t necessarily true back in 1990. (Yes, in the early days of the fandom, my stories were actually that well known. Scary, huh?) This actually adds to the fun; I get to re-examine the assumptions I made in the world in the first place, quietly disposing of things I no longer like, and seeing if I can bring out things that, if I’m honest, existed more in world-building notes than in the actual stories themselves. Something that should inform the whole world, for instance, is the idea that magicians are basically Ranea’s equivalent of engineers, fashioning devices that are used in everyday life by normal people—but we don’t see that in practice nearly enough.

I’ve been playing around with my working habits, too, for this project, and as I get energy back I’ll hopefully be able to put more of that into practice. But that’s for another post.

I’m still sick — and let’s call this “flu,” not “con crud” — so my brain is still largely offline. I’m getting better, but I’ve put off going to get a passport picture taken because I’d rather not look this much like a zombie.

But that’s not what I’m here to post about! Instead, I’d just like to say: Happy Birthday, susandeer!

I can give you… uh… the flu! But I’ll try not to.

Those of you attending Further Confusion may be interested to learn that I have a story in the program book, called “The Narrow Road in Morning Light.”

It is a samurai story, it involves wolves, and it has a frontispiece by haikujaguar.

That is all.

1:15pm: I’m sitting on a BART train at the Millbrae station. Where am I going? No idea. Ever since I’ve been aware of BART, I’ve had a vague desire to just… ride it. Go off on a public transit tour of the universe, as it were. I suspect what I’m going to do is transfer a few stations from here, off the line I’m on now that runs to Pleasanton and onto the Pittsburg/Bay Point line. I may get off at various points on the way, I may not; I think I’ll just ride it to the end and then possibly stop at Rockridge on the return trip. I’ll see. Right now, I can write rather than attempt to sight-see, though; most of BART is a subway between here and Oakland. (For those who aren’t in the SF Bay Area, BART’s trains go through a tunnel called the Transbay Tube to get across the bay, rather than following a bridge.) While the BART trains themselves are quiet, their trip through subway tunnels is decidedly not; this time I thought to get some disposable earplugs, and it does make a world of difference.

alinsa once referred to me having a perverse fascination with public transit. I don’t know if that’s true, strictly speaking, but I do like both BART and Caltrain, perhaps in part because there’s simply nothing like them where I grew up. I’ve heard people who’ve grown up with New York or Boston subway cap on the Bay Area’s public transit, but BART isn’t municipal rail. It isn’t long haul commuter rail, either, really; it’s sort of “intermetro” rail.

1:30-ish: I’ve made the threatened transfer, so I’m off on… well, an adventure of some kind, depending on what one considers adventurous. I doubt this will be a quest for food, given that I stopped at Millbrae’s El Super Burrito for lunch and had, well, three-quarters of the mysterious concoction known as a “California Burrito”: carne asada, avocado, sour cream, cheese, and French fries. Yes, in the burrito, instead of rice. It works, but it’s certainly not a light meal. I could attempt to get coffee at Ritual Roasters and might try for that on the way back, although when I’m in Oakland I might try to get Blue Bottle if I can remember where they are.

Yes, remember, not look up: I am without my iPhone today. This is sounding lower and lower tech all the time, if you discount the fact that I’m sitting here typing on a laptop. But I’ve given up on the various carrying cases I’ve tried for the iPhone—both clips broke, and I’ve been carrying the thing around in my pocket with a plastic shell that doesn’t cover the screen. So, naturally, the screen now has a small scratch on it, although you’d have to look carefully to see it. I figured I’d try one of the more serious “plastic film” protectors, Bodyguardz; applying it is a non-trivial operation, and it requires a day to dry.

3pm: I’m just leaving the Bay Point station for the return trip. Some of this trip has been fairly pretty; most of it’s above-ground, through the hills northeast of Oakland. While some of the path literally follows the highway, as I’m usually driving the highway I don’t get quite the viewing opportunity that I’m getting this time. I’m going to risk getting off at Rockridge or possibly Orinda; I say “risk” because I don’t have any idea what I’m likely to be charged for this trip. Technically, my start and end stations are Millbrae and Rockridge (or Orinda), but I’ve taken much longer to make that trip than I should have, and I don’t know if that will make the fare computer soggy and hard to light. Rockridge is a funky neighborhood in Oakland with an upscale shopping/dining district; Orinda is a smaller town I honestly don’t know a whole lot about, even though I’m positive I’ve driven through—or past—it a couple times. It’s a new place to explore, although I could easily find that I don’t have much to do there other than turn around and go back to Rockridge.

5pm: I am in Spasso, a little cafe somewhere in the Rockridge neighborhood. It’s the first place with free wifi I’ve found on this excursion.

I did actually debark in Orinda and wandered around a bit, and while I found some interesting dinner restaurants (possibly), there wasn’t a comfortable place to just camp out for a while. So I hopped back on and rode to the next stop: here. I walked down to the Bittersweet Cafe first to get hot chocolate, then back up, noting a few interesting restaurants along the way. Bittersweet also sells their own blend of coffee from Blue Bottle, so I’m returning with that.

Spasso, to be honest, really isn’t that comfortable, at least in the chair I’ve chosen. It’s clearly a college hangout. I feel decidedly old sitting here, although I’m hidden behind a laptop like 90% of the rest of the clientele. The coffee is acceptable, but just that. This is a good neighborhood joint, but not a place to go out of your way for, I think.

So. Am I going to actually stop at one of the places here for dinner? Truth to tell, I don’t know. I’m dressed in a T-shirt and jeans and the jeans have a hole in the knee, which makes me feel somewhat underdressed for anything that isn’t, shall we say, extremely casual. And, for that matter, I’m still full of burrito, and I don’t plan to hang around Spasso another hour until a proper dinner time. While I’m tempted, the better part of valor might be just going on home and getting something light. Nonetheless, I think I do want to come back for À Côté, which looks like it has a nice French/Mediterranean vibe with remarkably good prices.

In any case, I’m going to start wrapping things up here, now that I’ve finished the acceptable-but-not-great cappuccino, and head back to the BART station.