Author Archives: Jerry

New Blog Design Progressing Sideways

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Ambitions are skyrocketing here at the Hut as the new blog starts to take shape. Too bad you can’t see most of it. But I’d like to ask two things:

1) When you wander over there, can you tell me what you see? I’ve got some of the same CSS that kills Internet Explorer over here at work over there as well, but I think I have things constrained so that the poor software can handle it.

2) Do you see a really dumb animated header? If not, what do you see?

Behind the scenes, that dumb header is grabbing haiku from a database using XML. The perfect storm of tech and art. Best of all, some of those haiku were written in a spreadsheet.

Which, now that I think of it, leads me to another way someone can help. All the old poems in the rotation are image files. Now I need them as text. Anyone want to transcribe them? It would be a big help! Just need a nice table (or spreadsheet!) with poem, author, comment, and link, if applicable. Surely someone out there is looking for a way to contribute to the arts.

So there we have it. My head is in such a technical realm right now that I can’t even watch cartoons. I amused myself tonight with wine and the ActionScript 3.0 documentation, with brief forays into php and WordPress APIs, thinking all the while about how to tackle a page count memory leak in Jer’s Novel Writer. Yeah, I know how to party on a Saturday night.

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Getting the Hut Back Up and Rolling

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Um… actually two releases. The first didn’t last long.

It’s been a while since I’ve really knuckled down and worked on Jer’s Novel Writer, but after wrestling with the script to extract data from iBlog to export to WordPress, my brain has been sliding into technomode, and it was nice to work in a programming environment that was less frustrating than AppleScript. I had a version of Jer’s Novel Writer that I’d done some work on a while back, but it took a while to get myself back up to speed on just what was going on in the code.

I missed something on my first try. Happily a loyal user caught it almost right away, and one day later version 1.1.8 is out there, helping people write. Whew! Slowly things are returning to the balance I’d managed to keep for the last few years. The last few months have been… less balanced. (Obviously I’m operating in the geek hemisphere right now. No metaphors for you today!)

Meanwhile, a few days ago I got this!

Jer's%20Novel%20Writer_award.png

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I Guess this is Good

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I’ve been thinking quite a bit about one of my stories recently, one I’ve worked on quite a lot because the story is very short but the ending is really tricky. I submitted it a while back to Fantasy and Science Fiction, and I hadn’t heard back. I assumed that their email rejection had not reached me due to my ongoing difficulties with my ISP (it was fine until the Germans took over). I started to get my head around the necessary modifications to the ending, but before I did anything rash, I thought I’d best contact the editor to make sure I was rejected.

It turns out I hadn’t been rejected, at least not until I asked about it. He’d been sitting on the story, on the bubble about whether to take it or not. When I asked directly, he had to say ‘no’, since he had no place to put it. Apparently the moon is common these days. Ultimately, I was almost there, but not quite, which bodes well for this story finding a home in a pro publication eventually.

Isaac Asimov, I’m told, advised writers to not revise stories between submissions. Let’s face it, the thing is never going to make a whole bunch of money and meanwhile you can be working on something new. It’s about that whole diminishing returns thing. Still, I can’t help but fiddle with this one. I’ve had endings that were lyrical, and others that were emotional, and others that were tight, but I haven’t hit all three. Maybe it’s impossible, but I have to keep trying. So I’ll tweak it, but not too much, and send it on to the next magazine.

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I’m Boned

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I’ve been under the weather the last few days, but last night I resolved to get back out into the world. I had a plan: visit the bread and cheese store, visit the bankomat, then on to the friut and nut store, then sit down for a nice pizza.

Mmm… pizza.

Step 1 went flawlessly, but they were short on stuff for my classic recipe “Rice and Stuff”. No worries. On to the bankomat (rhymes with ATM). After some deliberation I punched in a large number (rent is due) and the machine replied, “Unauthorized use. Card retained.”

So much for pizza.

I wasn’t terribly worried; I figured I’d be able to drop by the bank in the morning, communicate my predicament in broken czech, prove I was the same guy that was on the card, and recover my cash lifeline. Those who have been around a long time may recall that a bankomat ate my card once before. That was long ago, and I had a backup, so I just started using that one. Time has made me complacent, and now I have no backup.

There will be no pizzas until I get my card back.

This morning bright and early I popped down to the bank and spoke to a rather gruff person there. She spoke no English, but I’d mentally gone over the vocabulary I’d need. It took a couple of tries to get across that my card had stayed in the machine and that it was not a card for their bank. She went off for a brief conference with her colleagues and came back to tell me, “you have to call your bank and get a new card.”

No pizzas for a long time. Rent is a bit of a problem as well.

I left the bank in a bit of a daze, turned in the direction away from home, not sure what to do. Western Union? I’ll call the bank and we’ll figure something out. As I was walking I was stopped by an old man who asked me to help him across the street. So I’ve got a little karma working anyway.

Now I at Little Café near home, squandering pocket change on tea, thinking of the upcoming release of Jer’s Novel Writer (long, long overdue) and about scheduling problems with Moonlight Sonata, and generally moving my worry into channels I can do something about until business hours in San Diego.

But, yeah, I’m boned.

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AppleScript Sucks

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Here’s the thing: the idea behind AppleScript is actually very cool. That I can write a (theoretically) simple program that harnesses the power of several applications on my computer is the Next Frontier in Computing (Apple is not the only company doing this stuff). Now Apple even has a program called Automator to handle some of these tasks without you ever having to write any code. That’s a good thing, because AppleScript the language really, really blows. So much for the next frontier. It’s like the covered wagon is being pulled by an armadillo.

The temptation of AppleScript is that I need to take information from iBlog and convert it to a format that WordPress can use. AppleScript makes it really simple to ask iBlog for its data, already set up and accessible. Cool. Then we get to the part where we have to make AppleScript do useful things to the data. Uh oh. Welcome to the worst programming language ever created.

Sometimes with familiarity one learns that although a different language might do things a different way, it has its own strengths. Perl, for instance, is a text monster, but makes sacrifices to be one (so I’m told). AppleScript occupies a unique position in the programming world as I know it by doing everything badly. I challenged myself tonight to come up with one good thing to say about it. For perspective, when I try I can even think of good things to say about Microsoft and the Yankees. Not AppleScript. It’s like Apple is intentionally hiding powerful capabilities I know are there, built into the operating system. Not only that, it hides simple abilities that I can use in any other comparable scripting environment. AppleScript doesn’t want me to get my work done.

On top of that my task this time is made harder by iBlog’s grinding horrible slowness. Is nothing at all happening because I made a mistake, or is iBlog just off smelling the roses right now? What I want to do is exactly what AppleScript and iBlog’s script support were designed for, and I’ve already written some text functions that every other comparable environment has built-in, yet in the end I’ve been wasting my time. Now it’s time to bring in the big guns. Doing this the hard way turns out to be simpler than doing it the easy way. Go figure.

I will be doing a series of propellerhead articles documenting the migration from iBlog to WordPress. The articles might be interesting to someone if I wasn’t the only one on the planet still using iBlog.

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Moving the Blog!

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Yesterday I was hacking at some code, fixing a problem with the way the site looks on the Opera browser. I use iBlog right now, a platform with some cool features and some pretty obvious warts. It was designed to work on servers where the blogger had no control over the server at all (say, Apple’s .mac servers), and therefore the way it did some things was… unusual. Without going into too much detail, iBlog does some things that have unpredictable results on some browsers, including the latest Opera. In addition, the company that made it stopped working on it some time ago and even the discussion forums are gone now.

I fixed the most obvious problem, but there were others, and once again I was faced with the choice of spending my time cobbling together the old system or shifting to a more robust platform. Sooner or later I’m going to have to move, so I decided not to spend any more time tweaking this one.

I’ve been looking into various blogging and content management packages, without finding one that matched the features of iBlog. A couple came close, however, and that’s going to have to do. I will be moving to WordPress sometime this spring. I should be able to make it do what I want, as long as I don’t mind getting my hands dirty. Looks like I’ll be learning a bit of php.

Here’s where you come in: I’ve got a test blog up and running, and out of the box it looks… boring. Slick and professional and all that, but not really me. I Browsed through the bazillion other options people have already created and, well, they’re not very good either – either stodgy or designed by illiterates for illiterates. “Oh, you want to read the text? Dang, I never considered that…”

I takes only a glance around here for you to to see that my design skills are no better; but now I’m going to be doing a ground-up redesign of the site, even if I want to keep it looking the same. I have some thoughts about some fairly ambitious things I’d like to try, but before I get carried away I’d like to know what you guys think of the way things look right now. What do you like? What don’t you like? Layout? Colors? Content? Too much in the sidebar? Not enough whatnot?

One idea I just had: a page with links to all my stories, with a way for people to rate them. The favorites would rise to the top. Yeah, I suspect that feature’s not coming soon. But maybe your crazy idea will work! Leave a comment! Go nuts!

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I met a guy once

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I met a guy once

I met a guy once, a big guy his skin black his teeth white his eyes red his laugh came from deep in his belly, and “who the hell are you?” he asked me.

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Relativity is Relative

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So I’m writing a story that takes place in the Tincaniverse, a neighborhood of the Science Fiction world that suspends a couple of physical laws because they are inconvenient, while still maintaing a general feeling that science is real. Anyone who writes a story with faster-than-light travel or spaceships with gravity holding people to the decks is playing in this same universe. Everyone knows time travel is sci-fi hooey, but time travel and faster-than-light travel are pretty much the same thing as far as physics is concerned. This is the inconvenient bit that writers and readers would prefer to ignore.

Time travel stories are really tough to do, because the writer is obliged to create an elaborate set of rules to prevent paradoxes. Many writers go for the branching-universe model for time travel, that posits that when you change an event in the past you spawn a branch universe that reflects the change, while there’s still another copy of the universe crashing along as if nothing ever happened. Which means the catastrophe the protagonist went back in time to prevent still happens, just not on his new time line. He’s just blown off his friends to horrible suffering while he goes and has fun with copies of them. Selfish bastard.

Still, time travel makes a good story once in a while. (See “William Ashbless” and “Red Dorakeen”)

Anyway, here I am in the Tincaniverse, thinking about the most poetic way to wrap up a story, and suddenly selective relativity is attractive. Distance and time being synonymous really works in this case. The question is, am I brazen enough to go for it?

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Kindle 2 Rocks?

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kindle.png

Hmm… super-high resolution screen, and FREE unfettered internet access anywhere? Add to that books that cost a fraction of what they would on paper. Interesting. Very interesting. Is this one of those geat “writers don’t need stinking publishers anymore, they just need a bit of marketing and good word of mouth”, or is it “good writing will get buried in the noise because the traditional filters between the public and the host of really bad writers has been torn down” or is it “the era of the influential critic”?

Or is it all three?

By the way, the comic is xkcd, which will appeal to geeks of all stripes.

Important things you should know: I get a kickback if you use the link to buy a Kindle. I’ve never even seen a Kindle in real life. Make sure when you buy it that you’re getting a Kindle 2.

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Visitor in the Night

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I almost didn’t answer the door. There was no one I was interested in seeing on a night like that. When the bell rang I was sitting in front of a fire, contemplating the book I had just completed, while the storm raged outside. Occasionally the warm glow in the room would be interrupted by an electric flash, followed almost instantly by a bone-jarring crash of thunder. But the doorbell rang, and after a brief hesitation I answered.

I opened the door and there she was, a lock of her raven hair stuck to her pale face, glued there by the rain. She was wearing a long jacket but no hat; she was soaked.

“May I come in?” she asked. I stood aside and she brushed past me. “Do you have anything to drink?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said. She followed me into the den, loosening the belt on her coat while she walked. In the doorway she watched as I poured her a drink, then she let her coat slide to the floor. Beneath was lace and not very much of that.

We collided in the middle of the room, a four-legged beast fueled by lust, a tangle of flesh and sweat and breath. Finally we lay on the couch, intertwined, spent.

She got up at last and crossed to where her coat lay on the floor. She pulled out a compact pistol and pointed it at me. “I’m sorry Mr. Jones, but now you must die,” she said.

“My name is Thompkins,” I said. “Jones lives next door.”

“Huh,” she said. She glanced around the room before meeting my eye. “This is awkward.”

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Rejected At Last!

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I sent a story off to Wierd Tales, a venerable monthly magazine that publishes stories that fit under the broad category ‘horror’. It is the magazine that H.P. Lovecraft published most of his stories in, back in the 1930’s. When I sent off the story I thought publication in that magazine would count as a pro sale for the Science Fiction Writers of America, a group I would like to qualify for someday. Turns out it wouldn’t have counted.

On top of that, after I submitted I had a lot of thoughts about how to make the story better. The thing was, as long as there was a possibility that they would publish the story in its current state, it was a bit of a waste to go editing it.

Time passed. A lot of time. I began to assume that I had been rejected but had somehow missed the notification. Then I heard that the two magazines that publisher puts out (the other one named for Lovecraft) were consolidating into one. One less market for genre writers. Now that their reorganization and shrinkification is complete, I got the rejection I’d been waiting for. Hours later, I have a better story.

On the subject of shrinking markets, one and a half true pro publications have also bit the dust. One is gone completely, the other is going from twelve to six issues annually. That’s the publication that has been kind to me in the past. Tough times. I have a better story, and now I need to find the right place to send it.

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A Change in Schedule

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So there we were, careening toward our three days of shooting, which were scheduled to be next week. I had run some mildly distressing numbers, and despite some help from a corporate sponsor it looked like we were going to go over budget.

Yesterday I got one of those good news/bad news calls from fuego. The good news: he was going to have enough cash to pitch in enough to pay for the rental of a really good camera. That was encouraging. We’d spent the previous evening trying to figure a way to get one. fuego, it seems, felt even more strongly after reading my blog episode that it would be a real shame to miss the opportunity to look as good as possible on film festival screens. If we get everything else right, it would be a real shame to have a lower-quality product just to save a few bucks. We began planning how to raise a little more cash.

Note: If you or the company you work for would like to sponsor an independent short movie, it’s not too late! Product placement might be tricky, but a mention in the credits would not be a problem. You too can be a patron of the arts! And now back to our regularly scheduled ramble:

So, the call from fuego. The good news, if you will recall, was that he had found a source of money. The bad news was that he was going to have to work for it. He’d been offered a job that would take him from Belgrade to Milan to Monte Carlo over the next couple of weeks, planning and executing a show for Zepter, a company that markets high-end household crap. In typical Zepter fashion, they called him yesterday and asked him to be in Belgrade today. Also in typical Zepter fashion, they offered to fly MaK and Z-Dawg to Monte Carlo so the family could celebrate Z’s first birthday together.

Having the director on set during filming is fairly important, so we immediately began juggling the schedule. fuego gets back about the time Lenka leaves on a trip, and then when she gets back fuego is gone again, and that all adds up to push the schedule a month. Wow. fuego may cancel his second trip, but he’s already paid for it, so it comes down to finding someone to go in his place. Not something we can really plan around.

So, dang. That pushes editing into April. I think we don’t have to worry about the April 17th deadline for Karlovy Vary (which would be a sweet, sweet, place to premiere the film), since the handful of shorts they show seem to go through a different application process. No matter the date, getting it through post-production will be important, if only to let me see it before I head for the states.

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Kofola… Isn’t Very Good

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Back around 1959 or soon thereafter, the powers that be in the Czech Republic were looking for something to do with some sort of caffeinated byproduct of the coffee roasting process. They turned the problem over to a chemistry lab which developed KOFO syrup. Shortly thereafter Kofola was born, and Eastern Europe rejoiced that their children could also rot their teeth on carbonated sugar water.

Kofola boasts some 14 “natural” ingredients, and while the various references agree on the number, I could find no list stating what all of them were. The Wikipedia article (and the dozen other places that quote Wikipedia without citing it) focuses on things like apple extract, while others mention cardamom and licorice. They are proud to have less sugar than Coca-cola (almost certainly beet sugar in Kofola’s case), and essentially the same amount of caffeine as Coke, which is pretty tame by today’s standards.

According to the boys at Kofola, they are every bit as popular as the American invaders, but in my personal experience I don’t see how that could be true. Maybe it’s a city-country thing. More likely it’s a generational divide, and the people who drink Kofola were the ones who learned to like soda when the western options were limited. Among the people I know, however, Kofola drinkers are rare enough that in my years here I had never tasted Kofola. I decided this was one of the things I had to do before my return to the US.

I went to the corner store to buy a small bottle of the stuff. While I stood scanning the soft drink choices I noticed that the 2-liter bottle was the same price as the 1/2-liter bottle. Hm… I paid my money and hauled the big boy home. After all, if I liked the stuff, I wouldn’t want to regret not getting more for the same price.

I held my anticipation in check, deciding that my first taste of the stuff should be chilled. I wedged the bottle in the freezer next to the carp and waited. Before long I felt tired so I moved the drink from freezer to fridge and went to sleep.

The next morning I was up at the crack of midmorning and ready to try Kofola. I poured a glass, sniffed, swigged. As you might recall from the title of this episode, Kofola isn’t very good. I can also say that it defies description. Anyone who buys into Dr. Pepper’s claim as the most original soft drink in the world has not had Kofola. Perhaps if the communists had asked a kitchen to develop the syrup rather than a chemistry lab things might be different. Perhaps. Perhaps the recipe is “the fourteen things they had a surplus of in 1960.”

Now I have in my refrigerator most of two liters of Kofola (I had a second glass of the stuff to see if it might be one of those flavors that grows on you), and two carp. In the spirit of Communist Czechoslovakia, perhaps I should find a recipe that combines the ingredients I have a surplus of. CArp au Kofola, anyone?

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My Walk Home Tonight

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I left St. Nicholas (the bar, not the jolly elf) feeling a little bad because while I left more than enough money to cover myself, Brad was there at my invitation and I couldn’t cover for him (despite the money I sponged off fuego earlier). So I left feeling a little shabby (although I did teach one of the Drunken English Girls at the next table about shooting without a flash). I also left with an assurance from the owner that if I ever wanted to shoot a film there it was OK by him.

So, emotions mixed, I exited the friendly space into a chilly Prague evening, complete with light snowfall. Prague is a lady who wears snow well; it softens the stone and gives her the blush of a virgin bride on her wedding night.

It also makes the sidewalks really damn slick. Soon after I left St. Nick’s I reminded myself that when I leave this town, my shoes are not coming with me. Weighing disease and frostbite against injury from falling, I probably would have been safer taking my shoes off and walking barefoot over the icy cobbled sidewalks. Yet shod I stayed, mostly because I was worried about being taken in by the cops as an obvious nutjob. Also, my foot was really starting to hurt.

I crossed the bridge and surprised myself with my ability to navigate to a stop where tram 51 went by. For a while I wasn’t sure I was going to make it. I passed near Tesco, which for me is the disorientation point of the city. I swear that damn place is rotated ninety degrees out of synch with the rest of the space-time continuum.

Anyway, I got to the tram stop and checked the schedule. Tram 51 runs every half-hour, and passes there at :03 and :33. I hadn’t the slightest idea what time it might be, so I pulled out my phone to check. My phone was dead. “Bummer,” I thought. “I don’t know how long I’ll have to wait.” Then I realized an even bigger bummer: My phone was the only way I had to pay for my ride.

I decided to walk up to the next stop, which was a metro station, more to reduce the chance I’d get caught on the tram than to find a way to pay. I was about halfway there when tram 51 rumbled past. It’s a sound that on a quiet night you can hear from a long way off, the kind of sound that ordinarily gives you enough warning that you need to pick up your pace to reach the next stop in time — except that some stops are farther apart than others, and when you get caught in between and your shoes are skis and your foot hurts and it would be just plain stupid to run, that’s when the night tram is sure to go by.

I am home now, safe and sound (although, did I menion my foot hurts?), and once more I can look out at this city in her light veil of snow, and I forget the pain in the ass of getting home. After all, it’s not Prague’s fault my phone died, or that my shoes have super non-grip soles, or even that my foot hurts. I should be thankful they have a tram, even if it didn’t work out for me tonight.

Though, you know, I can’t think of any other city to blame for my foot.

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The Red

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In Japan, heroes often come in bunches. Take Power Rangers, for instance. Five heroes (almost always five, it seems, though I don’t watch those shows much) dressed in colorful costumes, working together to fight evil across the world (or at least the part of the world that matters). In these groups, one of them is the leader. You can tell at a glance which one it is, even if you’ve never seen the show before, because the leader wears red. When kids play, they argue over which one is “The Red.”

In the film world, when you say “Red” you conjure a different image, but the same feeling of awe. The Red is a camera. I’d heard people talking about it in the past, but as we head toward shooting I’ve heard that name from all sorts of people. The Red is one of those products that Changes Things. Specifically it means that people with budgets only somewhat larger than ours can shoot digital video at cinema quality.

The reasons this camera is so great are mired in technical details at which I generally nod and rub my chin in feigned understanding. “His is one of the older 4K ones,” one person told me while pimping a buddy’s Red. There’s stuff about dynamic range (one of the things that really differentiates film and video, apparently), and a host of other specs. In the end, it comes down to “there’s never been anything that can match this quality for anywhere near the price.” The fact that the Red still seems to be without peer indicates just what sort of breakthrough it represents.

“I know a guy with a Red,” I’ve heard more than once. “Maybe he can give you a deal on the price.” Unfortunately, although the Red represents a breakthrough in price/performance, renting one through normal channels for three days (along with all the gear and tech that goes with it – this thing produces an enormous amount of data) would equal our entire budget. Even getting a price break, it would still take up a lot of cash I’d rather spend on actors and musicians. We’ll use less expensive technology, and it will still exceed the abilities of HD television monitors.

Still, there’s a little part of me that pauses. Might I be saying, a year from now, “That came out so well. The lighting was awesome, the acting was great, the sound full and rich; it’s a pity we didn’t shoot it on a cinema-quality camera.” I answer myself, “when they pay us to do the next one, we’ll use the Red.”

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