Jun 12 2007
I finally got to bed around 3AM this morning. Around 5AM the cat managed to find a plastic bag. He managed to get his head stuck inside the bag and ran wildly through the bedroom, bouncing off the walls like a pinball while the dogs tried to catch him. He finally crashed into the wall next to the bed, broke free and hid under the bed.
Sadly, this wasn’t the first time he’s managed to get himself stuck in a bag.
Feb 14 2007
Mice are nibblely little creatures. They chew anything that tastes good, like cheese or peanut butter, which is a very effective lure to use as bait for the trap. I would have never expected todays turn of events, though.
Dena’s car was having troubles running. Some days it would be fine, others it would die every time it came to a stop. We ran through fuel cleaner, water remover, etc. We exhausted our meager non-mechanical options and took the car to the dealership to be looked at. The problem turned out to be that a mouse had chewed through some wires and the moisture in the are was causing them to make some kind of electro-erotic connection. The computer was getting hot and bothered and shutting itself off.
There was also a recall on a fuel pump or gasket or something, so we got that replaced and got out of there for a measly $210, a far cry from what I was expecting to pay.
Time to make the cats earn their keep and toss them in to the garage for a couple of hours.
Jan 05 2007
One of my favorite applications for writing is WriteRoom. It’s a “full-screen, distraction-free writing environment”. It’s good for people like me who are easily distracted or compulsive multi-taskers. Unfortunately it’s only for OSX (Dark Room is the Windows equivalent). Since I won’t run Windows on my Thinkpad and Apple has blacklisted OSX against running on non-Apple hardware, I needed to find a Linux equivalent.
With the full screen plugin for gedit, you can make it look and feel almost like WriteRoom.
Hit F11 and gedit will switch to full screen mode. It’s not quite as specialized as WriteRoom but it gives you the same distraction-free environment to write.
Jan 01 2007
I finally took some time out today and wrote myself a little Wordpress plugin today (screenshot) that lets me manage the stories I write. The first step of this is to track the story, word count, and if it’s been submitted, accepted, and/or published. It gives me a nice little running synopsis of my progress for the year. You can see this now, on the right side of my blog.
The next step to this is a daily writing log, so I can track how much I’ve written each day. The statistics from that will be nice, such as average words/day, number of days since I’ve written, etc., but the motivational factor makes it worthwhile.
The last step will be an actual submission tracker. When I send a story off, I want to track where I sent it, how long it lived in the slush pile, etc. With enough data, it should provide some useful information about the lifecycle of a manuscript submission. I think this kind of tool would be useful enough to put up somewhere that anyone can use. I know about the black hole but I don’t think that’s an effective way to organize the data.
Dec 31 2006
It’s the end of the year and as we prepare to welcome in the new year I want to take a moment to reflect on the past year.
The majority of my time this year has been into building up my primary company, Traffic Engine, Inc.. Very similar to what I was doing after ditto.com after it shut down and reformed as VPP Technologies (even though they still operate under the ditto.com brand). We’re basically a technology provider for web publishers. Our ad-serving platform provides them a meta feed of ads, based on the quality of their traffic, along with real-time reporting. Of course, everyone just assumes I do spam. Little do they know the long hours spent honing my finely-crafted algorithms to detect and block click fraud.
The rest of my time has been spent split between writing short stories and working on Open Source. I didn’t attend any writing conventions this year, but I did go to Penguicon in April, LinuxWorld and the Ubuntu user conference at Google in August, and the GNOME Summit in Boston. My two passions (writing and technology, for those folks who haven’t caught on to that yet) have merged, as I’ve begun a literary love affair with cyberpunk.
Travel-wise, I made several trips to southern California for work (I’ve lost count of the exact number), San Francisco, Boston, Las Vegas, and a layover somewhere in Texas along the way. Dena made one trip to southern California with me and the Las Vegas weekend was our little vacation this year. I had a planned trip to Paris, France for work, but it was too close to the holiday crunch so I canceled it.
Health-wise, I’m feel better than I ever have. I’ve lost 100 pounds and lost 10+ inches around the waist. I’m happy and healthy.
As far as resolutions go, making a list is the thing to do.
Happy New Years!
Nov 25 2006
Our XBox 360 started suffering from the dreaded red ring of death last week. I made sure there was plenty of airflow (and their was). Checked and cleaned the disc. The red rings didn’t reappear but it locked up. Occasionally at first, then increasing over a few weeks until it wouldn’t stay running for more than five minutes at a time.
We bought the XBox on a whim earlier in the year. We were shopping at Sams Club in April and Dena spotted a lone 360 sitting under a display. She knew I’d want one, so she ran and grabbed it. The extended warranty on it was ridiculously cheap (something like $39 for 3 years) so we got it.
After lots of Googling and trying various fixes, I broke down and called Microsoft. I walked through all of my troubleshooting with the tech and she confirmed my fears: it was dead. I could either send it in to Microsoft to be repaired (and probably end up with a refurbished unit) or take it back to Sams, the obvious choice.
It took fifteen minutes, half of which was them finding and printing out our receipt (we knew the exact date but didn’t know where the original receipt was). No questions asked, no pressure, no bullshit. Dena stood in line and I grabbed a replacement system (their last). Having dealt with the hassle of other extended replacement plans. Sams went far above my expectations.
Nov 24 2006
Dena and I went to Las Vegas last weekend for a mini-vacation and to meet with some of the supportive folks from Calorie Count. We’ve been to Vegas once before, but that was a one-night layover on our drive from Chicago to Los Angeles (and we stayed at a cheap motel). We stayed on the strip this time, at the Luxor.
Talk about a mish-mash of people! Las Vegas is one of the biggest tourist spots in the world, and the strip is the heart of that activity. There’s a lot to do and see, but we chose to watch Penn and Teller at the Rio Hotel. The show was fabulous. Afterwards, the cast hung out in the lobby and signed autographs and shook hands. It was pretty cool.
It was a little creepy to see the men and women handing out coupons for strippers and escorts to everyone walking by.. and I mean everyone. I saw them try handing them to men, woman, (young and old) and children. Next year we’re going to have a contest to see who can collect the most coupons, for the most services.
There’s a ton of shopping to be done. Walkways connect the Luxor, New York, New York, and the MGM Grand. We also walked through Caesars and a few other random hotels. I think I wore a hole in my shoes from all of the walking we did. That’s probably a good thing, given the food we ate. We didn’t have a single bad meal while we were there. We originally tried to get reservations at Emeril’s New Orlean’s Fishhouse for dinner one night but it was booked up. We went to Wolfgang Puck’s Bar and Grill in the MGM Grand instead and it was the best food we’ve ever eaten. Their Truffled Blue Cheese Chips were unbelievable and the Bread Pudding was to die for. Highly recommended.
We finished up on Monday, tired and poorer. We headed to the airport nice and early. Our flight ended up being delayed a few times. We eventually got home at 3AM Tuesday morning. I’m still catching up on sleep. I could never live in Las Vegas (my mom and brother used to) but it can be a fun place to visit. Next time I’m going to play some poker.
Nov 08 2006
Business is going well these days. I find myself needing to delegate more and more work. I need to find a person or persons, part or full-time, to design web page templates. You can work from home, the coffee shop, or wherever you like, as long as you’re able to communicate via phone or instant message and meet reasonable deadlines.
Required skills:
Preferred:
If you’re interested, send me an e-mail. If you know someone who might be interested, send them a link and if I hire them, I’ll send you a t-shirt or something.
Nov 01 2006
November is going to be an exciting month. I’ll be spending the first four days of the month in southern California for work. Dena and I are taking a four day jaunt to Las Vegas before Thanksgiving for a well-deserved mini-vacation. We’re going to go hiking at Red Rock Canyon and other fun stuff to be determined. Finally, at the end of the month I will spend few days in Paris, France for the Search Engine Strategies show. I’m really looking forward to the trip to Paris. I won’t get much time to do the tourist thing but I plan to see the Louve and Eiffel Tower during a caffeine-induced trek of the city at night.
Aside from travel, this is also National Novel Writing Month. I’ve been trying to do it for four years now. Each year work and life gets in the way. This year may not be an exception, unfortunately. Because of the time crunch, I’m going to focus on rewrites and exploring the current work in progress. It’s the first short story I’ve written in nearly two years. It was critiqued by my writers group at the last meeting. I’ve got a stack of notes to sort through and some pretty interesting ideas to explore. I’m going to focus on that. There are a few stories-worth of material I want to explore so I’ll take the time to do so now, instead of writing something I would likely be embarrassed by. I think, at this point in my “career” (I don’t know if you can call being an unpublished writer a career path), I would rather write 5,000 good words than 50,000 bad ones. If I end the month with one polished short story that’s ready to be sent to live in an editors slush pile, so be it.
Oct 27 2006
Yes, webcams are passe. So 1998, right? I don’t care. I bought an iSight from Jorge a few years ago, and I finally have it setup somewhere that it can be permanently mounted.
Now the whole of the internet can deal with my silly self visually.
