The days of twilight dwindle

A dark cloud shadows the steps of one in six adults throughout their lifetime, and that cloud is named depression. The cause of depression is varied. It could be the result of a chemical imbalance or trauma. Sometimes there’s no apparent reason. Whatever the cause, living with depression is an exercise in frustration. You can’t will it to go away. You think that it’ll go away on its own, but there are no guarentees. After nine solid months of living through this, I was finally diagnosed last friday.

Talking about depression this frankly may seem odd to some people but I am not the type of person to shy away from difficult questions or situations. For too many years I let things bottle up inside and the end result was me in a hospital bed being treated for ulcers at the ripe age of eighteen. Never again.

What exactly does it mean to be depressed? Well, it’s different for everyone, but the tell-tale sign for me was that I couldn’t focus or concentrate. I could sit at work and stare at my screen for hours and not get anything accomplished. There were days where I barely managed to write a single word. I tossed and turned at night, woke up at dawn, and was always tired. I was perpetually grumpy, liable to get angry over the slightest thing. I was emotionally unstable, apt to cry over complete nonsense. The worst part was that, try as I might, I couldn’t control it, or stop it. In fact, for quite a while, I didn’t even notice it. The weight of despair was on me, crushing me completely. Only at its worst did I finally see the extent of the damage.

The bottom line is that I was diagnosed with depression and put on medication to treat it. I also had bloodwork drawn to test for the possibility of a disorderly thyroid, which seemed to be enlarged to some degree. It doesn’t mean I’m fixed. It can take anywhere from one to eight weeks for the medicine to really take hold. Even after that, it could be years before I’m “cured”. It does mean that i took the first step towards getting better, seeking help, and it felt damn good.

The light at the end of the tunnel

I have seen the light. It flickers dimly in the distance but grows stronger the more I stare. It whispers promise of asylum and repose.

We finally hired another developer. We have needed another pair of hands for quite some time. For too long we’ve stretched the work between two people. I have worked too many hours, too many weekends, too many double and triple shifts. Long hours are fine for short stints of time. When they extend for months and years, it wears on one both physically and psychologically. This is the first step towards recovery.

Things won’t change overnight. Kurt, our new developer and my fellow moderator on the Ars Technica forums, needs to be trained. We’ve build some high performance, cutting edge systems and neglected to document most of it. Training Kurt really highlights the need to beginning documenting our existing systems and, going forward, documenting any new systems we build.

My workload won’t drop immediately. In fact, it will increase slightly in the short-term, as I spend time helping Kurt get up to speed. Even when Kurt is fully trained, he will be working in a different area technically. Ultimately his work will help us streamline some of the existing systems and build new systems that we need to generate revenue. Extra revenue will eventually mean that I will be able to hire someone to work with me. Short steps lead to progress. The end is nigh, but not here yet.

Too busy for boredom

We decided to head north for the holiday. Most of my family lives in the Great Northwoods, also known as Tomahawk, Wisconsin, and I hadn’t seen most of them for a year or so. We decided to split the trip into two days. It isn’t so long of a trip, only 300 miles due north, but we wanted to enjoy ourselves. We grabbed a hotel room wednesday night in Stevens Point, and then took county roads the rest of the way. We managed to avoid most of the traffic that way, but we did run into some interesting things. We saw more wildlife on this trip than we usually see on weekend trips up north. Our final count was four deer, a jackrabbit, two wild turkey, and a black bear. Unfortunately we saw the bear a short distance from a trail formed during the ice age. Alas, we decided to skip the hike lest the bear decide to turn around and pay us a visit.

This was the weekend of their annual Pow-Wow Days, consisting of a parade, ski show, and fireworks, among other things. We went to the parade with my brother and cousin, and fireworks with my dad. It was a good time. The weekend did have its sad note. Barney, my dad’s dog, is nearing sixteen years old and it nearly broke my heart to see him. He is going deaf, cataracts are beginning to develop on his eyes, and he moves around very slowly. I’m afraid that this was the last time I’m going to see him.

We left early saturday morning, heading south-east towards Lake Michigan. We made our way to Appleton, where we stopped and explored the Harry Houdini museum. I was facinated by magic when I was young and it was neat to see the life of Houdini from a unique perspective. From there, we headed east and stopped in the Two Rivers, on the shores of Lake Michigan. We went down to the beach and dangled our toes in the water briefly before getting back on the road. We meandered down to Milwaukee, then cut back west towards home. We managed to get stuck in traffic near a Dave Mathews concert, then south through Lake Geneva and a straight drive to home.

It’s great to be home. I did have a piece of news waiting for me. Analog rejected my story, so I’m preparing to send it off to the next publisher on the list. That rejection was only a minor blip compared to the rest of the evening. Around 3am I woke to lightning and thunder. Shortly after that the power flickered and went out. We fared well, minus the interuption of sleep, but our neighbors were not so lucky. To the left, our immediate neighbor is rebuliding his fence for the third time this summer. To the right, two neighbors had some kind of flooding in their kitchen, and one of them lost some of their guttering. There’s nothing like standing on the street with your neighbors in the middle of the night, appraising damage, and being the only ones without any. The only worry I had was the sump pump. Without power, I was afraid that the basement was going to flood. Luckily, we caught a break. Power came back on for two minutes, long enough to pump out some of the water, before it went out again. By the time we woke in the morning, power had been restored. I need to get a battery backup for the sump pump soon. We’re expecting a week of storms and I have nightmares of flooded basements and water-logged go
ods. I’ve seen the aftermath of one such flooding and I have no desire to experience that again.

I’ve been trying to keep up with all of the work lately, but I’ve been failing miserably. This has been the most I’ve written in a week. We should be hiring someone very soon, and I’m optimistic that this will give me the breathing room I desperately need. I have the Van Helsing anthology coming up, one rewrite to finish, one story to finish, and planning for this November’s NaNoWrimo, which I plan on attempting again this year. This time, I want to go into it with a complete idea and outline prepared. Last year I wrote myself into a corner. Sometimes that happens, but the more prepared the better, the former boy scout in me says.

Multitudes of fun

We have friends from Oklahoma (one of my fellow moderators over at Ars Technica) visiting for a few days. We’ve managed to keep them busy. Kurt came to work with me on Friday and then interviewed with us that afternoon. Then we took off for the day and took them to look at apartments. Saturday was a trip up to the mall (and the Apple store) and a visit with another moderator, Eric, from Ars. From there we all went to the Big Bowl, an asian noodle restaurant, and then into the city to hang out at Eric’s house. Sunday we took another trip to the city, this time by train. We decided to go to the Shedd Aquarium and caught a museum bus up to the lakefront. The aquarium was pretty impressive. I never realized from looking at it how much stuff it held. There’s an entire underground level filled with sea otters, penguins, dolphins and beluga whale. I took as many pictures as I could until the batteries ran out of juice. We finally ran out of steam and headed back home for a night of pizza and a movie. What a weekend.

I’m looking forward to the rest of the week now. In between running here and there I managed to pull off a skillful feit for work. We had a troublesome launch with Match.com last week and I spent most of Friday night working to figure out what went wrong. Somewhere around one in the morning I discovered a slight bug in a certain vendor’s code. After a three line addition, my code is now working the way it was intended when I wrote it two years ago and we should turn Match.com back on today. I expect it to go smooth and painless. The benefit of getting this new partner up and running is it helps us hire Kurt. Another pair of hands will help reduce the number of late nights I end up working and reduce the volume of projects I have just waiting for me to do.

Because of the recent excitement, I haven’t been able to get started on my next story yet. Once things settle down here tomorrow I’ll finally be able to crack open my rough draft and start expanding and rewriting. My next group is in three weeks instead of two (I’m not sure why, but I’m not going to question it since I missed the last meeting), but I don’t think I’ll have this piece ready by then. I’m beginning to realize it takes me longer than a month to finish any story of length right now. Maybe that will change the more I write, but finding more free time will be the true key.

The State of Me vs. Verizon Wireless

We’ve been using Verizon Wireless for the past four or five years for our cellular service. Overall the service was decent, but not spectacular. Their coverage area left something to be desired, and the available options, especially lately, were lacking. Our phones were more than two years old, so we decided to look at what new technology was available, and researched all of the major cellular providers – Verizon Wireless, U.S. Cellular, Sprint, T-Mobile, and AT&T.

It was pretty clear from the start that Sprint had a lot of the features we were looking for, plus some cool gadgets to go with it. Unlimited Web, minature cameras built-in to the phone so we could send each other funny pictures, digital service, and a wide coverage area. So, I decide to call Verizon Wireless and find out when our contract expired. We were pretty sure it had already expired, but we wanted to double check.

Liars

Verizon Wireless told me that our plan didn’t expire until February of 2004. They told me this on three seperate phone calls to them. Something didn’t compute. That would have put us buying our last phone while we were in the middle of the move to our new house. I smelled something fishy. On my third call to them, I asked them to tell me the start date of the contract. They came back with February 26, 2002. Impossible, because we knew we bought our phones in December, because we had received a special in the mail that expired at the end of the year. I tell them to look back further, and after much grumbling the guy finally admitted that our contract had, in fact, expired in December of 2002, leaving us free and clear to cancel with no cancellation fees. And that’s just what I did.

We went with Sprint and bought two Sanyo 8100 units. Compact flip phones with all the amenities, including the camera, full-color LCD, and extended battery life. We’ve only had the phones for a few days now, but already I can tell that the quality of the service is far and above what we received during our stint as Verizon Wireless customers.

Working weekend

Yet again I spend a weekend working. It does get tiring after awhile, but I’m hoping that the upcoming Memorial Day weekend will get me a little rest and relaxation.

We’re preparing to add more traffic, so we needed new servers to handle the additional load. Most of the parts came in mid-week. Most. One of the cases arrived Thursday, but the second still hasn’t shown up yet. They were ordered at the same time, from the same company, so I’m still not sure why they were shipped seperately. I spent all day yesterday building that one new server. This is a new case (cheaper) than the previous one’s I’ve ordered, so I had to spend a little time learning the new case, but otherwise it went smooth. That was, of course, until it failed to boot, and I disassembled it to find that one of the CPU’s (in a dual processor system) hadn’t seated in the socket properly. The day ended with one working server and one nasty scar on my finger. Typical day of computer building. If you don’t bleed, you’re not doing something right.

Today I’m working again, but luckily I can do so remotely from home. I have to finish configuring software and replicating data to this new server, and finish debugging my code that is set to go into production tomorrow. I really can’t wait to get someone hired to help out with the system building/maintenence portion of things.

Hopefully things go smoothly today. I need to give Shaken, not Stirred and prepare my cover letter to Analog.

Title this!

We’ve had some violent storms this past week. Heavy rain (which we needed), violent lightening and rolling thunder accompanied by strong winds and one confirmed tornado in the area. We were in a drought situation. The winter was the mildest in recent memory and this spring, before last week, had been dry as well. Now we have several local rivers near or at their limit.

The storms did some minor damage in our area. I found a piece of a shingle that might have come from our roof, but I haven’t found any bare patches yet. Our neighbors weren’t so lucky. About a month ago they built a fence around their backyard. They don’t have a fence anymore. Half of the fence was ripped out of the ground and layed flat. It looks to me that they might not have dug the fence posts deep enough, judging from the cement at the bottom of the posts I saw. They were pulling down the rest of the fence yesterday, so I don’t know if they’re going to rebuild it or hire someone to do it.

On the writing front, I’m more than a third of the way through revisions on Shaken, Not Stirred. I’m hoping to finish the edits today sometime and have a copy ready for Dena when she gets home from Minnesota tonight. I want to finish polishing it up and have it in the mail by Friday. Now I need to work on my cover letter to Analog. Once this story is submitted, I’ll keep working on Mirror, Mirror, now that I’ve finally worked out where I wanted tdo go with it.

My free time has been scarce the last couple of weeks. Work has picked up, with one new system being deployed this week and another new system to be designed and written next. The switch from maintenence mode to development and back again continues. The current active development cycle will go for another five or six weeks, and then things will relax again as I shift into maintenence and upkeep for awhile. I’m really looking forward to hiring someone that I can delegate some of the work to, so these development cycles aren’t such a panic.

Frozen in time

I feel like I’ve been idling these past few weeks, treading water but making no real progress. Work has picked up and is once again reaching a critical mass – the development plan looks big enough to occupy a dozen highly trained programmers, not just me. It’s all interesting, well-designed stuff (because I designed it), but I find myself wishing that I had at least one or two qualified programmers to delegate work to. It’s hard to keep up.

I spent last weekend at Penguicon. In a nutshell, if the universe were empty save for two masses of primordial goo, one being science fiction and the other Linux geeks, Penguicon was the big bang that brought them together. I’ve been to both types of conventions seperated, but never one that combined the two ideas. It was an interesting excercise, and I think it’ll be suceessful because of the level of overlapping interests between the two genres. At some time down the road I’ll be writting an essay that deals with some of the finer aspects of the Linux crowd.

I’m still working on edits for Shaken, not Stirred. It’s down to 600 words now, and I want to trim at least another hundred. I’m also doing a fair bit of revising, but keeping the core of the story intact. I’m going to finish the edits and have it sent out to Analog by the end of the weekend, or else.

I fell behind on new writing, unfortunately. I had originally said I wanted to have something submitted to group this week (tonight), but that isn’t going to happen. Once Shaken, not Stirred is sent out I’ll be finishing Mirror, Mirror and submitting to group. That will be ready for the next meeting in two weeks.

Another brick in the wall…

…and another day at the grindstone and not an inch closer to where I want to be.

I haven’t written any new words on Mirror, Mirror. I’m not entirely confident that I’ll have a first draft ready for group next week. Several things have contributed to the lack of output, including a flu and a six-block power outage that knowed out the lights (and servers) at work yesterday that kept me here several hours longer than I’d planned. Having battery backups to keep servers running in case of a short outage is one thing. Keepign servers up during a two+ hour outage is another. I suspect we’ll be investing in a generator of some kind soon.

I have slowly been cutting on Shaken, not Stired, finally getting it closer to a marketable word length. I’m starting on a its rewrite now. I should make some decent progress coming soon.

This weekend I’ll be attending Penguicon in Warren, Michigan. It’s a combonation Science Fiction convention and Linux expo. I’ll even be sitting on a panel about blogging, along with Rob Malda of Slashdot fame and Jorge Castro, a buddy from Ars Technica’s irc server. Terry Pratchett is going to be one of the Guests of Honor. I hope I have the chance to meet him.

Congrats to Trey, who sold his story "On Maple Hill" to Fortean Bureau. Trey also informed me of Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, which is another possible market for my short-short that I’m revising.

I’ll be leaving for Michigan on Friday afternoon, and I’ll have wireless internet access from my room, if all goes well at the con. I’m going to do a bit of writing while I’m out, since I morph into a insomniac when I’m travelling. Hopefully I’ll even get some pictures from the con posted while I’m there.

Ramblings

I’ve made some good progress this week. I’m on deadline with some side work I’ve been doing, and I’ve been steadly pounding out words for my current work in progress. I was up at five this morning and managed 200 words before it was time to get ready for work. Lunch today was a wash, but I will have some time before group tonight to write. If I can manage to get up early every day, with lunch and whatever extra time I can steal at night, I should be able to manage a few hundred words a day. Sure, it’s no thousand words a day, but it’s positive momentum.

Tonight my short story Shaken, not Stirred is up for review. It’s the first science fiction story I’ve written in a while. It’s not a very serious story, but it was fun to write. I’m not even sure what a good market for it would be, but I’m sure I can get some suggestions from the group on that. I also need to start researching markets for cyberpunk short stories. I know that I’ve seen some stories in Asimov’s that I would consider cyberpunk (to some degree). That seems to be my kick recently, and I want to get some stories sent out soon.