It’s a gloomy day, and although the spitting rain has stopped, an icy wind is blowing.
Why, then, was I not surprised when I heard the ice cream truck outside?
Neither rain, nor snow…
2
glided
Help me out. Glide is a graceful word, but in the past tense glided is particularly ugly. Glid? Glode? I could substitute floated, and in my context I could even use slid (see glid), but glide is the right word. Or it would be if the past tense didn’t have two abrupt stops in it that undermine the meaning of the word. The word serves as the antithesis of its own definition.
Here we have one of the hallmarks of English, its strength and weakness all in one, that rules are made to be broken. Yet we have a case where an irregular conjugation would vastly improve the word. How could Shakespeare’s inventive tongue ever have allowed glided to happen?
Mo and Mo
Man, it’s a good thing I didn’t sign up for NaBloPoMo. (Link too much work (greater than zero) to dig up. we’re looking to gizo here.) I certainly did not need any other responsibilities this month. Buggy pointed me to another NaNoWriMo-derived activity over at Defective Yeti, NaNoReMo, where the author is spending the month reading Moby Dick and is blogging about the adventure. He is an entertaining guy, so you might enjoy popping by and checking on his progress. You might want to check his election guidance over at McSweeny’s as well.
My days have been spent writing and coding. While I am (generally) satisfied with the results of my NaNoWriMo effort, producing a complete and finished work of 50,000 words is a hell of a lot of work. Granted the language I use is loose and conversational, which helps reducing editing and tweaking, but some days finding 1800 words to put in the “done” bin is not easy. Fortunately there are several themes running at the same time (in the absence of a plot, pretty much), so I can work on whichever one strikes my fancy at the time. The time is not right, I think, to point you to the aforementioned done bin, but I’m not sure when the right time will be. It’s out there, an Internet land mine, waiting to blow the leg off one of the unsuspecting goatherds who wander cyberspace.
I will say that there have been some turns of phrase in the Big Pile o’ Words that I particularly like, and most of them are occurring in parts that are otherwise shameless filler. What does it say about the frozen burrito you’re eating when the textured vegetable protein is the best part? (Actually, I miss those frozen burritos that you could buy three for a buck, smother with cheese and salsa, and live for another day.)
Also please note the increased difficulty factor this year is a good thing. NaNoWriMo was starting to fee routine, and while I will always appreciate it as a chance to work on an idea that otherwise would never see the light of day, this year I really have to mean it.
I just thought of a great passage for an Eels episode. I’m going to have to jot that one down, even if it does qualify as planning ahead. The creative juices have been flowing pretty well, fortunately. What’s languishing (even more than usual) is the business end of writing. I’ve really got to get more stuff out making the rounds. In contrast, the business end of Jer’s Software Hut is making steady progress.
Repeat the mantra along with me, please: Writing: career, engineering: hobby. Writing: career, engineering: hobby. Writing: career…
Odds and Ends
The sun has flown south for the winter, and a very pleasant autumn had given way to long dark. There was a dusting of snow on the rooftops yesterday morning, and the temperature was looking upward longingly at freezing. When the landlord came by to collect the rent, he spent a little extra time trying to find out if there was anything I needed. It seems he’s not comfortable with someone who has no complaints. He went out of his way to ask if I was warm enough. It’s fortunate the itchies have mostly cleared up, because it is certainly time to bundle up, but overall I’m quite cozy. No need for the toasty tent yet.
I got my first haggle swag today. It’s a bound galley of a novel by one of the Jer’s Novel Writer faithful. I haven’t started reading it yet, it was waiting on my step as I headed out today. I’m looking forward to it, though. One happy side effect of creating the software is that I have come in contact with a whole bunch of thoughtful and articulate people who love the written word. They are by no means all professionals, but there is a camaraderie that I enjoy immensely. I felt the same thing back when NaNoWriMo was only 1100 people or so (don’t quote me on that number).
On the subject of JersNW, I had a really good day of coding yesterday. I explored a different architecture for part of the database, and the thing clicked into place with ease. I learned a lot while doing it, and the possibilities are really exciting. I just want to tip my hat to the kids at Apple who came up with NSPredicate. (Experienced cocoa programmers are rolling their eyes right now — yeah, big discovery there, Marco Polo — but I could never use the stuff before, because I was trying to maintain compatibility with older versions of MacOS.) Now, things I’ve been dreading coding I can’t wait to get to.
NaNoWriMo. This is by far the most challenging year for me. Not just 50,000 words, but 50,000 publishable words, and the story complete at the end. In other words, a finished product in a month. I have two word counts, one already way up there, the other behind the curve. Finished words take a lot longer. I believe I’ll devote another episode to go into more detail about my NaNoWriMo project, and to share the parts already published.
To my Arky cousin David: if you read this, the Little Café Near Home needs you. The chairs that inspired my thoughts about triangles in architecture are failing. Welds flexed too often are failing, the steel tubing itself is giving up. We need your welding skills stat (what does that actually mean?)! The things just aren’t safe anymore. Bring some triangles.
Right now the TV is on. They’re showing Mr. & Mrs. Smith, with Brad Pitt and that actress with the lips that would be sexy if they didn’t feel so unnatural. Mt. Pitt is a talented actor, but a skill more important than acting is choosing the right script. I was surprised at how much I liked that movie, and knowing the plot already, it’s easy to follow in Czech.There’s a concept that must have been easy to sell: Two super-assassins, and they’re married, completely unaware. Each accepts the other’s cover story. Maybe someday I’ll write something that easy to explain. I’ve come close a couple of times,
Episode 21: Cold Water
Note: To read the entire story from the beginning click here. Continuity issues are probably starting to pile up, but so it goes.
Alice was tied to a chair. Her face was puffy from being hit. Her nose had been bleeding but wasn’t any more. “Mr. Lowell!” She was glad to see me.
“We’re leaving,” I said. Punching Paolo Fanutti in the face right there and then was the most difficult thing I’ve ever not done. I had made a promise, that was enough.
“There’s something you must give me first,” Fanutti said.
I glared at him. “I don’t trust a man who hits girls.”
Paolo squinted at me with his little weasel eyes. He probably needed glasses but wouldn’t wear them because it would undermine his image. Like being blind was good for one’s standing. “You are not in a position to make demands,” he said.
I pulled out my penknife and cut the ropes binding Alice’s hands. Her fingers were purple and cold. She groaned as I helped her to her feet. “I’m not demanding anything. We’re leaving.” I caught Fanutti’s gesture and felt the presence of the meat moving in behind me. I turned, leading with my fist, and put everything I had behind it. As God is my choreographer lightning flashed in the window and there was a crash of thunder just as my fist hit the other man’s face. I caught him square in the mug and broke my hand but I broke his face worse.
The goon dropped like a bag of nickels in Atlantic City on new year’s eve. The room froze as he fell, blinded by the flash and ears ringing. Everyone except me, and by the time I completed my turn my gun was on Fanutti again, reasonably steady in my broken hand. “Paolo, you are a stupid man. I told you I keep my promises.”
He watched the gun carefully. “You will pay for this.” It was his turn for the dramatic thunder crash; the storm was in full fury, trying to wash the city into the river so Manhattan could start over again.
“But now, you see, I am in the position to make demands. And now I must demand that you stop being stupid and let me give you what you want.”
“You mean…”
“I think I should introduce you to your sister-in-law.”
He smiled cautiously. “Perhaps we can do business after all.”
Apparently I’d reached the limit of his vocabulary. “No, Paolo, we can not do business. Somewhere there’s another Fanutti behind you who’s smarter than you are, who doesn’t hit helpless dames, and knows that when two people shoot square then business gets done.” I wondered how this other Fanutti would react when I beat Paolo to a pulp. “We are not doing business, we have a mutual problem that is best solved if I tell you where Lola Fanutti is.”
Alice turned to look at me with an expression behind her blackening eyes that simultaneously said, “how could you possibly sell out your client?” and “it’s about time you got rid of that bitch.” Alice was going to be disappointed when she saw how things went down, but at that moment, she provided the necessary authenticity to shift the negotiation my way.
“Where is she?”
I lowered the gun but didn’t put it away. “Well, see, I knew this morning, but I’ve spent the day tracking down my secretary, and now I haven’t the slightest idea where she is. It’s going to take me a while to find her, or more specifically, for her to find me. If she sees any of your people near me, you can kiss her goodbye.”
“So…”
“So stay the hell out of my way and I’ll contact you.”
He didn’t want to trust me, but in the end he had no choice. And technically, I hadn’t lied at all. “All right.”
“We’re walking out of here now. Give me your card and wait.”
Fanutti frowned, nodded, and provided a card. We followed him to the front door. He opened it to find two miserable guards standing in the deluge. “Umbrella” Alice said. Fanutti produced one and we were on the street, but moving slowly.
It took a while to get a safe distance and at least try to see who was following us. Alice was having a tough time of it; I took her arm to help steady her. We turned a couple of corners and I stopped our little parade. I tugger her elbow to stop her and said, “Let me take a look.” The umbrella was barely adequate, and we were getting soaked as we stood there, but now that we were away from the apartment house I wanted to see just how much I owed Paolo Fanutti. Alice didn’t want to open her mouth. Sure enough, she’d lost a tooth.
“I spit it into my blouse,” she said. “Maybe a dentist can put it back.” She smiled up at me with her swollen face. “I bit him, Mr. Lowell. Hard.”
“Don’t call me Mr. Lowell anymore.”
“But….”
“You’re not my secretary anymore.”
“Y-your’e fining me?” her voice was tiny.
The wind shifted, lashing us with rain. She staggered and in her condition I worried that the storm would be too much for her. But God wasn’t done with his little production yet, and with His next flash and bang, two long black cars pulled up, carefully not splashing us. A door opened on each. “Mr. Lowell,” a man said from the lead limousine, “would you come with us, please?” He was shortish, with dark hair, but there was no Fanuutti family resemblance.
“Sorry, pal, I’m taking the lady home.”
“That’s very noble of you. Please allow Jorge the honor of providing her warm, dry transport, and… perhaps we could provide medical attention as well.”
“I just got her back. I’m not letting her go again.”
He looked me straight in the eye. “Mr. Lowell, when two people shoot square, then business gets done. Allow me to gain your trust by affording your employee care that you cannot possibly provide.”
Alice’s grip tightened on my arm. She’d had enough of strangers. “We’re partners,” I said. “Anything you can tell me, you can tell her.”
Alice gasped. Since she did the books she must have known that she’d just taken a pay cut. She pulled herself together in a moment. “You’re Spanish,” she said.
“That is mostly correct. Maps can be deceiving; within one nation, many peoples can exist.”
Standing in the rain, trying to keep the umbrella where it could best protect Alice, I had a feeling I already knew the answer to my question. “And you are….”
“We are the blood of the saint.”
Tune in next time for: Never on Sunday – Reprise!
Chill
I was sitting in my accustomed corner at the Little Café Near Home, and having secured permission to unplug the television so I could jack in the laptop I was rolling along. Of course, with any writing adventure, there are the blue times, when you are letting things spin in your head, and typing would be a waste of time. It’s like bottling a cloud. It makes a lot more sense after things have condensed.
I was in such a state, moving the big Lego bricks in my head, a long way from the technical bits, when I was politely interrupted. I had peripherally noticed folk at the bar carefully poring over the labels of a couple of thin bottles. It turns out they were pooling their English knowledge to translate the propaganda on the bottle. Like a team solving a puzzle, they had it figured save for one critical word. “This word, chilled, does it mean a little hotter or colder?”
I answered “zima”, he was thankful, and that was that. Except… chill. It’s a reflexive verb now. (I trust my sister to correct me if I’m wrong, I’m just a guy chillin in a pub.) It’s an adjective. “That guy’s chill.” No matter how you use it, chill is good.
For well you know that it’s the fool who plays it cool, when all you have to do is chill.
Of course, by now teenage kids are rolling their eyes when their parents make awkward attempts to use chill. I’ve been a fan of chill for some time now, which means the the days of chill are long past. So it goes. This is one flash in the pan I will miss. Because, come on, “Take a chill pill, man” is poetry. American Haiku.
A Good Day at the Potraviny
I go to the market often now. Rather than occasionally going in and stocking up with all I can carry, I try to make a habit of grabbing a few things every time I pass by. This has led to a steadier supply of food in the domicile, but less variety. The cycle goes: buy rice, stay home until the rice is gone, go out and buy rice. Today I had to go down to the bankomat to withdraw rent, so I found myself outside the market when I already had a supply of rice at home. What do you buy for someone who has rice? Bread. If you have bread, you have to have cheese. Cheese requires talking to the woman at the meat and cheese counter.
There are three women with whom I interact while buying sliced products. One of them is almost shy with me, one indifferent, and the third is strict. Now that my face is showing up across the counter from her more often, she expects me to order correctly. Last time I was in there, I asked for one hundred grams of bacon. “Deset deka” she said. Ten decagrams. This time I was was all over it, and she gave an approving nod as I said “Taky patnact deka” for my second variety of cheese. While she measured out my cheese I heard “Dobrý den“, and turned to face a very pretty czech girl smiling at me.
Of course, if a girl smiles at me, she is by definition a member of the food service industry. This fine example of the best the republic has to offer (blonde, curvy, cheekbones, taller than me) works at the bowling alley. On days when I need to get out of the house but I don’t know where to go, she is a definite factor in my decision.
It was a good moment. I had won the gruff approval of the sliced things lady and I had a pretty girl smiling at me, who had just heard my successful use of her language. I took my cheese and got in line. It was a little awkward when she ended up in line right behind me, having received her sliced goods much more quickly. On my way out I said goodbye to the people in the store, as one does here, and I enjoyed my walk home.
Internet Explorer 7 is officially out.
Better, but not that great. It renders this page mostly correctly; the deficiencies are minor and overlookable. So that’s good. For Instance, the bottom of the ampersand in the logo is cut off, but while it’s not as stylish, it looks a hell of a lot better than it did before. That is where my adventure began. In the end, my first day with the new version of the software left me befuddled.
Then I noticed that my “Now Playing” section wasn’t working on IE. The way that content is generated is a bit hokey, so I thought it might be a good time to clean up the script. I figured that would probably fix the problem with IE at the same time.
Allow me to interject that the worst language for programming computers ever invented is AppleScript. They try to make it read like “real English”, like you’re chatting with your computer. As mentioned here many times, real English is about nuances, about color and shade, not black and white. As such, it’s not well-suited as a programming language. What Apple ended up with was a syntax that has the same old rigid rules, along with a hell of a lot of verbal clutter and words that don’t always mean the same thing. But I digress.
I cleaned up the script that generates the script that the browsers load to show what music I’m listening to at the moment, and I learned a couple of things along the way. The code is better than it was before, and I will be able to improve it further rather easily. So, that’s cool. I was mildly disappointed that the result still did not work on Internet Explorer 7. I suspected I knew why, but I wanted to see the IE error messages to make sure. I couldn’t find them. I was looking for some sort of window with a list of errors and any other output from the script. I went through all the menus, but could find nothing. I dimly remembered having to set a preference in previous versions of explorer to turn on the Javascript Console, so I…
Wait a minute… where are the preferences?
As far as I have been able to discern, there is no preference window in Explorer. Now, in one sense that’s a good thing. It’s been a design philosophy I’ve been using in Jer’s Novel Writer: put the settings next to the task. But what about the settings that apply to the program itself? Maybe the preferences are there and I just missed them. There were lots of cases where controls were in unfamiliar places.
Which brings me to a lament that is more about other software developers. There was a time when every program’s controls were different. One of the most revolutionary things that the mac introduced was providing a standard way to interact with software. Love the mac way or hate it, it dramatically reduced the learning curve for new applications, and you didn’t have to remember where everything was for each application. The Windows world followed suit, and for a long time computing was just a bit easier. That is breaking down now. I first noticed it on media players for Windows. They look slick, but in many cases important controls aren’t even visible until you move the mouse to a specific area. Menu bar? Forget it. Now it seems even Microsoft is sacrificing simplicity for slickness.
Right, then. One option I did find was to look for extensions for Explorer. The light came on over my head. Somewhere there would be a tool that would let me look at console output from a script. I went to the site, and there was Developers Toolbar. Hooray! I downloaded it, installed it, and discovered several useful tools, none of which were a script console. It was a nice addition, and absolutely free from Microsoft, but not the addition I was looking for. (Having this as a separate download is another design philosophy I agree with. Provide the core and let people add on the parts they need.)
About then I noticed the little error message down at the bottom of the window. Silly me! It was there all the time. I clicked the error icon. Nothing. I right-clicked the icon. Nothing. Now that is just bad design. Microsoft themselves led the charge to make “if you see something you want to interact with, right-click to see your choices” a standard. I concluded that the icon was for informative purposes only, and that somewhere else I would find the explanation of the errors. Only later did I double-click the icon to cause an error window to pop up. More bad design. Double-click is to perform the default action on a selectable item. This is simply a button, and nothing more. You don’t double-click buttons. (You also don’t put right-click menus on buttons, but once the single-click didn’t work I assumed it wasn’t a button, and tried to treat it as an item with more than one action. When the one-action behavior failed, then the multiple-action behavior failed, I assumed there were no actions.)
The window opened up and said there was a problem on line 2 of the file. Line 2 is blank. The “next” button in the little window was dim, so I didn’t realize for a moment that pressing “previous” brought up an error message dealing with line 700. “Object Expected” the error said. There was a “hide details” button, but what passed for detail wasn’t. Could I please just see a list of errors (instead of a little window where I have to click through them) and any debug information I might want to send out? The root error is ultimately my fault, but is it asking too much to make it easier to find, especially since the scripts work on all the browsers whose error reporting doesn’t suck? (Yes, I searched for other downloadable extensions. If anyone out there knows of a solution, I would be grateful.)
I guessed that there must be something wrong with the way I wrote the script tag. Luckily, one of the cool features of the Developer’s Toolbar is a validator. You can do this easily enough anyway, but right there was a way to submit your site to w3c and get back a full report card of your compliance.
I ran the report and had a bucketload of non-compliant code. I wasn’t that surprised, as the original blog template was done a while back by someone else, the comment system is someone else’s code, the Amazon links weren’t compliant, and so on and so forth. There were plenty of errors of my own doing as well, including some stray markup in a paragraph complaining about Microsoft’s non-compliance to standards. When I saw that error my mind was made up. Time to clean house! I went through the template, modifying (almost) all the markup to match standards, paying particularly close attention to script tags. Almost all of them were using syntax that was at best out of date. Not any more, baby! I brought them all into the modern age, something I would not have done were it not for Internet Explorer 7.
The result: users of Internet Explorer will have to use Firefox to post comments telling me what I’ve done wrong, because now all the Haloscan script tags are broken in IE. “Object Expected.”
Too many ones, too many zeroes
A couple of days ago the business end of Jer’s Software Hut went down. I got the message “Your bandwidth limit has been exceeded. Please contact your system administrator as soon as possible.” It turns out that for Liverack, my hosting provider, “as soon as possible” translates to “never”, even when you’re trying to give them more money. As I have mentioned elsewhere, I don’t think their hearts are in the business anymore. In the past they had been very responsive, and I wondered how they could have a business that charged so little and maintain that level of service. I guess I got my answer.
Is there a silver lining to this cloud? is my bandwidth limit getting blown more and more quickly an indication of success? Not… so much. While the rest of the Web clamors for Google’s attention, the Goog is loving me to death, downloading several times the entire site’s worth of data each month. This does not include the application download, which is already on another server.
So jerssoftwarehut.com/ will be moving soon, to a server maintained by a Friend of the Hut. I tried to ask Google how I could help them spider the site more efficiently (it costs them also), but got no response. My question was such an outlier on the forum I thought it might get some notice by insiders.
Not being able spend my days combatting spammers on the Jer’s Novel Writer forums, I suddenly had a lot of extra time on my hands. Good timing for it, as I wanted to get a new release up, even if most people won’t hear about it until the hutsite comes back to life. I retired to the Secret Lab, located on an island of stone on a river of magma, drifting through the network of grand, eerily-lit caverns deep beneath this quiet Prague neighborhood, and prepared a release. When all was ready I called to my misshapen assistant, “Raise the software to the server!” “Yes, master!” he called as he shuffled to a giant switch mounted on a stalagmite and threw it in a shower of blue sparks.
We waited.
And waited.
You see, The Hut’s Internet provider also imposes a bandwidth limit. When you reach this limit, the connection continues to work, just very, very, slowly. Remember dialup? I do now.
Too many ones, too many zeroes. The file will be up before you are able to read this.
Come Wednesday all will be well again, and I won’t have the need to do the same large downloads I did this month to get my mini set up. Also I’ll use lower-bitrate Internet radio options. Soon everything will be hunky-dory, and the ones and zeroes shall flow again.
The calm before the storm
Six years ago my wife mentioned that one of her coworkers had told her about a thing where a bunch of people were going to write entire novels in the month of November. (In an odd twist of fate, later that same coworker was my roommate, and my ex-wife was the coworker.) I immediately latched onto the idea, as I had started novels before, but had never seen them through. Already I had been noodling on a story idea, and now here was an opportunity to do something about it.
I signed up and soon I was sitting at Callahan’s (the old location at the start of the month, the new location at the end), cursing the short lifespan of the battery in my Sony laptop, trying to wrestle long, rambling sentences into a long, coherent narrative. I barely made the word count by the deadline. I closed the file, closed the laptop for a day, and then started on another novel. I have written almost every day since that first NaNoWriMo. I have not read the product of the first year’s efforts; only one person can claim that distinction. Melinda reported that it had its moments, and yes, I was correct when I recalled that there was a lot of sex in it.
Of course, along the way I started saying to myself, “boy, it would be nice if my word processor did x,” and so Jer’s Novel Writer was born. Then I quit my job, took a road trip for several months, and moved to Prague.
All because of NaNoWriMo.
So, if you’re thinking of starting a novel on Wednesday, please be careful.
Time flies when you’re clueless
I am sitting at the Little Café Near Home, facing the television (there was hockey on earlier). I glanced up from my work and noticed the clock on the tuner atop the TV glowing greenly. The clock is in 24-hour mode.
I did a double-take. Is it 2007 already? Crap, I know I’m out of touch— oh, wait 20:07. That’s all right, then.
An exciting time at the hut!
The time before NaNoWriMo is pretty hectic, and all the more so for me. Lots and lots of people out there are searching for software to make their lives easier in the coming months, and people around the world are discovering Jer’s Novel Writer for the first time. What’s cool is that all these new users are discovering the rough edges in the software that regular users have grown accustomed to. It’s all the little things that make a product feel finished and fit, and in the last couple of weeks I’ve gotten a whole bunch of feedback. (Not all from NaNoWriMo folks, there are even professional writers using the program now, and their input even more valuable, as they try to make the software work in their existing processes. Overall, I have managed to attract a fairly passionate user base. Part of it, I think, is that I do all I can to make others feel that they are valued members of the design team, and people like seeing their ideas show up in the product — sometimes the next day.)
So I’ve been doing quite a bit of coding lately, and while none of the improvements have been earth-shattering, when taken in sum they add up to a better user experience. As I sit here in the Hut Treehouse, high in the crown of the teeming tropical rain forest for which this Prague neighborhood is well-known, surrounded by screeching birds and curious monkeys, I am filled with a sense of energy and I’m taking pride in fixing bugs hours after they are first reported.
Of course, that will end with the onset of November, or at least slow down, as we put up the monkey-screens and hunker down to write a novel. One unexpected side effect — from the user registrations I now have a list of a thousand names from all over the world that I can use in my writing. There are some pretty good ones in that list.
More about the itch
This episode is one big complaint, which is not my usual style (at least, not so overtly). For those of you tuning in for the first time, I had (I hope) an allergic reaction to some cheap Czech laundry detergent and every part of me that is touched by clothing is now a mess. I’ve never had anything like this happen to me before.
I haven’t left the homestead in a while — the day I watched the Chargers lose was the only other time in a week, but today I had no choice if I wanted to eat. I’m at the little café right now, and I’m itchy.
At night, I go to bed, and often manage to fall asleep, only to wake up a short time later with one nerve somewhere on my body screaming bloody murder. In my half-awake state I will scratch it. From then on I’m no longer just half awake. Whatever I scratched burns like someone is holding a match to it. I lie awake, trying not to think about the burning, trying not to think of… the other itch, and the other one, and the one after that. I lie in bed, rigid, resolutely not scratching, chanting my “no scratching” mantra.
Must. Not. Scratch. Must. Not. Scratch.
Then there is the moment of erosion of will. A new itch will arise, angry and demanding, from a new awkward and uncomfortable location. I thought I had run out of such spots several nights ago, but no. “Oh, crap, not there too,” has become my eternal lament.
Eventually the itch becomes too powerful, and I will watch as if from a distance as one of my hands scratches the most urgent of the itches. There is a tiny moment of blessed relief before the burning starts. I try to restore discipline, but there’s no turning back now. I claw at my skin, from neck to toe, trying to draw as little blood as possible, but there is only one priority. Scratch. My mantra changes as well — last night I caught myself muttering:
Scratchy. Scratchy. Good, Good.
Eventually my brain is so flooded with endorphins that I can fall back to sleep. For while it’s painful, it’s easier to sleep through the general discomfort of ones entire epidermis burning than it is to ignore the urgent, actionable discomfort that is the itch. Once the itch is banished and there’s nothing I can do to lessen my mysery, I am released from my scratchy frenzy and sleep can come again — until the next itch starts.
If you really want, you can see my skin here, but it doesn’t really capture the purpleness or the puffiness. My hip was just an easy region to photograph. I offer this image in defense of being called a whiner.
Sorry about that.
I was in the Little Café Near Home when I got the call. “Come on! Let’s go watch some football!” I would have said no, but I realized I did not have my AC adapter with me. My time there was limited anyway.
I went to the bar. When I got there, San Diego and Kansas City were knotted at zeroes. We worked our way into one end of a table, and I talked to the guy next to me, then I looked up to see Kansas City score their second touchdown. I hadn’t been there very long at all. I laughed and rocked back in my seat, and reminded myself that this is just statistics. It’s got to happen to someone. Which just proves that I am someone.
The First Millennium
Other than myself, 999 people (not counting the backlog) have requested keys to turn off the gentle nagging in Jer’s Novel Writer. That’s not a huge deal, as keys are free until release 1.0 (other developers have delivered far less for a 1.0 release — remember Windows 1.0? I didn’t think so — but I want it to be right). But still, out there are 1000 people and counting who have been excited enough about the software to request their very own key.
Key 1000 was, completely without my planning it that way, a haggle. Although you don’t have to pay for a key, you still can, and the key you get will last much longer. That’s cool, but the same price doesn’t work for everyone. I set a very reasonable price for the software, but out there are students and teachers and other folk generally working to make the world better and people like that deserve a break. Rather than make a whole set of proces for different circumstances, I recognized that my market was writers. You want a discount? Tell me why you deserve one. Style counts.
Actually, key 1000 wasn’t so much a haggle as a barter. In exchange for a software key that will last a long, long, time, I get a bound galley of his first novel. No two ways about it, I win. From his emails I know I will like the author’s work. You can just tell that sometimes. Some folks have a way with words. Those are the people who can score a discount on Jer’s Novel Writer.