Aimless Again

Now that I’ve got the site sort of working the way I want, I am aimless again :p There are plenty of things I really need to do – I need to finish work on WriteTrack and put that up for download, I *really* need to put out a new release of Blog, I should get working on my next novel and so on. But I just don’t feel as if I have the energy to do any of it. I’m taking a couple of days off due to the second of our (meaning Muslim :p) festivals tomorrow. I’m hoping that the time away from computers and work and all the other stuff that go into normal routine will help me recharge my batteries and get back into the thick of things.

WriteTrack is actually almost done. All the major work is over and I have one more section to add – the one for tracking income and expenses. Laurie has been trying to get some beta testers for it on a couple of writing lists that she’s on but we haven’t got that much of a response. There were a few people who downloaded it and one who actually provided some feedback. But then again, I guess one person with feedback is better than none :p

As for Blog, it’s actually ready for another beta release and has been for a while. I’ve been using it to post to WordPress for like the past year or more – I’ve just been kind of reluctant to release it since I know that there are a lot of areas that I personally don’t use which are going to prove to be troublesome. I don’t want somebody to jump in to the beta and then find that they have reduced functionality. So I should actually get off my butt and fix this stuff, right? That’s where the lethargy comes in :p But there are a few niggling things that I really want to fix and hopefully, I’ll get around to fixing those and doing another release after this little break …

And the winner is …

I was looking around for a mailing list/notification list script yesterday for a bit before I decided to customize one for my own use after all :p It seemed to be the easiest course of action since I couldn’t find even one that had all the features that I wanted. So I went to work, combined the code from two scripts that I liked and finally ended up with something which works (sort of) and is both secure enough and extensible enough for my tastes.

Of course, now that I had the mailing list software, I had to go ahead and use it :p That meant a further site update. The reason I’d needed a mailing list in the first place was because I wanted to provide the option to anybody who might be interested in my book(s) to be notified of any changes or events of note – such as the actual publication of the book :p (Not that I really know for certain that anybody is interested mind you … but there is always the off-chance that somebody is :p) So, I hastened to add a new page to the Books section of the site, add links, set up the mailing list subscription and so on and finally it all seems to be working. If you’re interested, you can go here and check it out yourself :p Don’t expect too many mails to come from that list but I’ll try to send out a mailing every time something of note happens … so whadda ya waiting for? Go on, sign up, you know you want to :p

Choices …

As you grow older, do you just get pickier or do you simply become more selective because of the lessons that experience has taught you? Or is it just two sides of the same coin? :p I realize that most of the time these days that I at least tend to want more out of software than most software offers. I want it to be simple, easy to use, safe and secure. Unfortunately, most of the stuff out there seems to be lacking in one department or another. One good example was my search for tagboard software recently. I couldn’t find one board which had all the features I wanted and had to end up trying to combine the code from two different boards which came fairly close. Of course, I got sidetracked by something else and that project kind of went into limbo :p

Now, I want a mailing list script. I looked around and while there are plenty of heavy-hitter scripts which will do the job fairly well, I didn’t want a heavy-hitter. I wanted something simple and easy. But do I find one? No :p Either the script has no admin interface at all or it has an admin interface but no protection – you have to go with directory password protection. Is it too much to ask that you have a well-secured script? I didn’t think so but then again, maybe I’m wrong.

So I again took two scripts and started to merge their features together. But then I realized that I’d probably end up spending another week on tweaking, modifying and getting things to work exactly right. Do I have that kind of time to waste? I wasn’t sure that I did. So I’m back to searching for a mailing list script :p Maybe I’ll go with a heavy-hitter after all but the problem there is that the scripts can get so cumbersome that if there is a script exploit, that I won’t know about it till it’s too late. Decisions, decisions … :p

Perceptions

Isn’t it interesting that we don’t always see ourselves the same way as others see us? Or is that just another facet of human nature? I’m aware of the fact that our perception of ourselves (or how we think others see us) isn’t always the same as how other people actually view us. But I had not considered the fact that this could be true also of cultural or racial groups. The fact was brought home to me recently by a comment somebody made.

I had just written an article for a Sri Lankan travel magazine about the Muslims of Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka, to lay some background to this whole entry, is kind of strange in that the people here don’t consider themselves Sri Lankans. Instead, they usually consider themselves as parts of a different ethnic groups – the Sinhalese, the Tamils and the Muslims. To me, that’s the strangest way to go about being a nation because you are never a single whole but a sum of fractured parts, if that makes any sense :p But then again, I guess this same sense of fragmentation occurs in many nations, human beings being who they are, just not to this extent.

Anyway, as I said before, I wrote this article about the Muslims of Sri Lanka. I was asked to write the article since I am a Muslim myself. So I wrote it and I kept it totally factual – I researched the story thoroughly, though I knew most of the bare outlines, and laid out the story of the Muslims from the early days in Sri Lankan history to the present (well, not actually the present – most of the major historical stuff ended around the British colonial period but who’s counting, right? :p) The editor’s comment on reading the article was that it was good but "not what he’d expected". I was a bit surprised since I thought the story was fairly accurate, so I asked him what he’d expected thinking that I’d slipped up somewhere. He said that he’d expected a story replete with buriyani and watalappam.

Now for the confused, let me hasten to enlighten you. Buriyani is a rice-dish that Sri Lanka Muslims are famous for, in Sri Lanka. It’s actually an Indian dish but they call it biryani there, what do they know? They might have invented the dish (I don’t know if they actually did …) but they can’t go around naming stuff differently than us Sri Lankans now can they? :p It’s basically rice, meat (and sometimes potatoes – the recipe varies a bit) cooked together with spices and it tastes really good. Muslims usually have buriyani at weddings, festivals and other festive occasions and so buriyani has come to be identified with Muslims.

Watalappam is a dessert. It’s basically a jaggery pudding. But then I guess I have to go into what jaggery is :p It’s the solidified treacle from either the kitul or coconut palm and is really sweet. It’s like a big, brown, chunky block of sweetness 🙂 And watalappam is basically jaggery and eggs. Again, it’s considered a Muslim delicacy in Sri Lanka and most people agree that Muslims make the best watalappam.

So what has all this got to do with the article? From my perspective, nothing :p I didn’t really think of the Muslims as being identified by either buriyani or watalappam since that has nothing to do with who the Sri Lankan Muslims are, how they came to be in Sri Lanka and their involvement in Sri Lankan history or politics. On the other hand, the editor, being a non-Muslim, expected me to write about buriyani and watalappam because I was after all, a Muslim :p I just find the fact that we have such diverse perceptions of the Sri Lankan Muslims as a whole and find myself wondering, if another Sri Lankan Muslim had written the article, would s/he have written about buriyani?

Images of the imagination

As I’ve mentioned so many times over here in the past couple of weeks, I am obsessed with art at the moment :p It’s not that I believe I can do a better job than a professional artist when it comes to a cover. In fact, I prefer the professional artist who does my covers to work on their own and come up with their own vision because I like to see what images (or imagery :p) people get from reading my writing.

However, I have a vision in my head for what I’d do with the cover if I had the artistic talent and I would like to make that vision a reality just to see how well the reality stands up against the vision 🙂 Besides, I’m a tech-junkie and I just like to tinker with stuff :p So, I’ve been working towards making the cover in my mind a reality. Of course, the first thing was finding the right tools for the job. I had intended to use PhotoShop at first because I’m most familiar with it and use it on and off for various graphic related jobs. However, as I considered what I wanted to do, it became evident that I wasn’t good enough of an artist to do the job in PhotoShop :p So, I turned to Bryce since it allows you to build a scene using 3D building blocks much more easily.

The snag was that I’d never used Bryce before :p But this is where I say that the Net is a wonderful tool once again. I found a set of excellent set of Bryce tutorials online. They are totally free but the quality of the tutorials are worth more than the $20 the author says that they charge for the actual 6 week course! I’ve been working my way through the tutorials bit by bit everyday whenever I have a moment. I do some stuff in the morning and then a bit more in the evening after work. So far, I’m only up to lesson two and have managed to make a toy wagon :p The little image shows how the final output looked though the actual output was honking big 3MB file :p

I’m happy with the progress I’m making though and am hoping that I’d know enough soon to start setting up the basic scene for the cover I have in my mind. Boy, it sure looks much easier when they do it in the movies :p

Memories are made of wisps

I have always (well, almost always :p) believed in the infallibility of my memory. I remember when I was 10 to 15 years old, how my parents would marvel at how much I could remember from my childhood. I still can remember things from when I was 2-5 years old even today. However, as I grew older, I discovered that there are certain blind-spots in your memory. There would be incidents that I’d completely forget and then remember one day for no apparent reason. I could then for the life of me figure out how I could have forgotten the incident in the first place. It’s kind of disillusioning to find that you can’t rely on your memory after all :p

Then I married Laurie. Now I had another person to verify the events of day to day life and my memory against. Now I didn’t have to rely on just what I believed had happened. But here is where it got even more confusing – sometimes Lauries account of events did not gel with mine and how do we figure out who had the right version? Or did either of us have the right version at all? :p

If you think of your memory as a hard disk (or even a floppy) and you basically operated on the assumption that what was on the disk was the true and correct picture of the world around you, what would happen if somebody could alter the contents of the disk without you being aware? Scary, huh? (Or maybe not, maybe I’m just conjuring up paranoid dreams :p) Because how would you ever be certain that you could trust anything you knew about yourself or the world around you?

I began thinking of this yesterday after Laurie and I had watched the season ender for the second season of "Stargate-SG1". (No, we are not totally behind the times or in a time warp :p We got the full DVD set for seasons 1-7 and have been slowly making our way through it.) There is this character who apparently miraculously (to me) is revived from the dead and I commented on it and Laurie was like, "Oh, she didn’t die. She just got up and walked away. It was in that scene we just watched." I was like, "I didn’t see her just getting up and walking away and I watched the scene with you!". So we argue back and forth as to what had really happened. I watched it today again and she does get up and walk away but there is so much smoke that you don’t actually notice it unless you are watching for it … and Laurie has probably seen that episode (and almost all other episodes of SG-1 as well) probably about 7-8 times :p So she would notice that. Whew, at least this wasn’t one of the times where memory was playing tricks on me … or Laurie :p

Accepting Rejection

I’d been waiting for weeks and finally it arrived yesterday – the agent’s decision on my novel. I’d queried around 50-60 agents and out of that lot only 3 bothered to go even as far as further discussion. This agent was the only one who went the whole distance – they wanted to see the full manuscript. They’d been hanging on to the manuscript for about two months now and I was getting a bit impatient about the whole thing because I wanted to move on. So finally, I got what I wanted yesterday :p

It wasn’t all bad, but then again, it wasn’t good either – depending on where you stand 🙂 For me, it was mostly a relief (and no,this isn’t my version of sour grapes :p) I had wanted to proceed with the Print on Demand option since there seemed to be quite a few things going for it and I was getting tired of waiting on agents and wondering and wondering. I wanted to get this book done with and move on to the next one but me being me, I couldn’t do that till I saw this book laid to rest – completely :p Yes, I know the verdict … they loved my writing style and wanted to see any other book I wrote but didn’t feel they could represent this one because they felt that it was too complicated.

I agree with her (and Laurie :p) about the complexity. The story is in four threads and it has a veritable busload of characters. Problem is, I don’t know how to make it less complex. To me, the story would be bland and uninteresting if I took just one or two threads and told the story from that limited perspective. Am I making excuses for my book? Perhaps I am. But at the same time, I can’t help but wonder if everybody would think it was complicated or if people might actually enjoy the chance to read something complicated rather than a linear story which simply goes from point A to point B. This brings me back to Print on Demand 🙂

This might be the best opportunity to simply publish the book and find out where it goes. At the same time, it will free me up to pursue work on the next book – which is a bit more linear but is also more convoluted in that it launches three different threads via three different books. Yeah, I don’t like keeping it simple :p

Mindscapes

Every once in a while, I get drawn into a new dream – or a new vision 🙂 Recently, I’ve been searching for cover artists and that in turn made me think "hey, what if I try to put my vision for a cover down on paper (or rather, the computer screen) as best as I can?" This is not to say that I will actually use what I do as a cover but it was more of an experiment to see how far I could go with it and what I could achieve with currently available technology. Of course, the problem with me is that I tend to get a bit carried off at times :p

I began simply enough. I got paper and pencil and drew a rough layout of what I would like the cover to look like. Then, I wanted to scan in what I’d drawn so that I can get the drawing into PhotoShop and then work on it from there.This is where things started to spiral out of control 🙂 I had wanted the text on the cover to have a 3D look and so I began looking for PhotoShop plugins which could do some realistic looking 3D text. I came across Vertigo who offer HotText – a plugin for PhotoShop which is supposed to do really good 3D text. At the same time, I renewed my acquaintance with AlienSkin since they too had at least one product that could do 3D extrusion of text. In the old days (I mean 6-8 years back :p) when I used to dabble in PhotoShop, 3D Studio Max, LightWave etc for work, I used to use AlienSkin a lot and I was pleasantly surprised to discover that there were a whole range of AlienSkin plugins available now for PhotoShop.

Now that my quest for 3D plugins were over, I thought of the background for the cover. I wanted a rugged landscape which was totally bare of anything except for grass. So do I try to draw it? Heck no, I went looking for more software! This time my discovery was the Terrain Generator from Nem’s Tools. That looked really nifty, appeared to allow you to manipulate the terrain to your liking and also was free! So I downloaded it.

Mind you, I still had not done any actual work on the cover except the hand-drawn image. I had not even scanned it in. However, I got side-tracked again. I remembered Bryce. I’d never actually used Bryce but had known of it since like version 1.0 or 2.0. So I had to mosey on over to the Bryce site and take a look and drool at all the new features :p While there, I read about DAZ|Studio, a product from the same company which allowed you to take pre-made content and put it all together to create scenes or characters. And would you believe it? It was available for free download! So I go ahead and download it. Of course, I then realize that the software is free but the models/content has to be bought separately :p So here I sit with all this new software and my cover still not done and now I’m thinking of learning how to use DAZ|Studio :p If you think I’m mad, I wouldn’t do anything to dissuade you ….

Not so fantastic

We watched the "Fantastic Four" yesterday. Or rather, we watched most of the "Fantastic Four" but didn’t get to really see the ending due to a really bad DVD disk which skipped during certain scenes and then got totally stuck towards the very end. However, it was enough for me to go on a rant – so mission accomplished :p

I normally do not watch live versions of comic book movies because they inevitably ruin the magic of the comic-book and the characters for me. I still have not watched most of the Superman movies, have seen only one Batman movie (and that too because that was the only thing on in the flight I was on) and have not seen X-men or Spider-man. However, I did watch the Hulk movie because Ang Lee directed it and I was rather disappointed with the final result. I’ve also seen all the Blade movies but since I never read the comic, I can’t really comment on it one way or another except to say that I liked the movies.

The Fantastic Four? That’s a different kettle of fish altogether. The Fantastic Four aren’t my favourite Marvel characters, not by a long shot. However, I’ve been reading the Fantastic Four for ages and I feel as if I know them really well and there have been certain periods in the writing of the book that I felt really close to them. The best periods that I remember are the ones from just after the whole pocket universe thing when the FF returned to Earth and there were some brilliant stories which emphasized the family aspect of the Fantastic Four.

The movie actually had some of these elements and I really liked the interaction between the different members of the Fantastic Four – the ribbing, the humour the insults. All of that seemed to be spot on. What I hated was the whole Dr. Doom bit. They ruined Victor Von Doom’s transition into Dr. Doom and in the process they also made some major characterization blunders – at least that’s how I see it. In the comics, Dr. Doom wears the mask and the metal armour because of a laboratory accident – unless of course, the story has been retconned and now it is supposed to be something else :p It makes sense for him to wear the mask because he doesn’t like the horrible appearance of his face. In the movie, Von Doom relishes the powers he gets and he doesn’t have metal armour he becomes a man of metal. Why would somebody who relishes his new "godlike" powers want to hide his metal face behind a metal mask? That just does not make sense to me.

Other than for the whole Dr. Doom bit, I enjoyed the movie and it appeared to stay true to form. Except, for one major alteration – another peeve I have with Marvel and their movies. The change? Alicia Masters is now black. I don’t really care whether a character is black or white or purple or grey. Their colour makes no difference to me. What matters is who they are. However, it annoys me when a company goes and changes a story just to be "politically correct". I don’t remember any other black characters in the story at all – maybe some of the firemen that the FF rescue are black, probably some of the waving people are black. But are any of the major characters black? No. Are any of the supporting characters (like Victor’s assistant) black? No. So why go make Alicia Masters black except as a token gesture and perhaps to say that "black people *get* being different"? Do you mean white people or brown people or yellow people or Martians don’t actually "get" what it is to be different? To me that is more racist than telling a story as it was originally told. That means that you feel guilty about what you did before … But then again, YMMV :p

Father Time takes a step?

The New Year festivities started early here yesterday. Several neighbours were blaring loud music in anticipation of partying on till midnight and fire-crackers and sky-rockets were going off every few minutes all over the place. What did we do? We went to bed early and Laurie put on ear-plugs so that she won’t be kept awake by all the noise :p

Call me a Scrooge (that’s a wonderful thought BTW – what would Scrooge have done for New Year if the ghosts of Christmas hadn’t gone and messed stuff up? :p) but to me there is nothing special about the New Year – it’s just another day. How exactly do we know that it’s a New Year? What makes it a New Year? Is all the hoopla all about the fact that you get to discard the old calendar and put a new one up on the wall? What exactly are we celebrating? Does anyone who celebrates the New Year with such gusto actually know what they are celebrating? Why they are celebrating? Or do they simply do it because everybody else does it – or because they like to have a good time and any excuse is as good as another?

Personally, I’ve never been one to go along with the Joneses :p I like to know why I do something and I really see no reason to celebrate New Year so joyously. It’s just an arbitrary day in the revolution of the Earth around the sun. Heck the Earth might not be in the exact same position each year when we do celebrate the New Year – and I don’t mean "somewhat close" when I say "exact same posistion" :p I don’t mind the good cheer and wishing everybody a happy New Year. We should be cheerful and wish everybody happiness everyday of the year 🙂 But I don’t see the point to all the revelry, the noise, the disturbance you cause to the other people who might really want to stay up till midnight and all the rest goes with it. If that makes me a Scrooge – put me down at the top of the list of Scrooges :p