Scamming Scum

I’ve been working on the redesign of the site whenever I have a spare moment – I think I’ll divide the main site up between the blog, my writing and my coding. I want to have a consistent interface which still visually breaks the site into these different sections. The design for SM will remain pretty much the same but I’m adding two new layouts for the other sections – at least, that’s the plan.

In between working on the layout, I’ve been reading up on more scams by fake agents and I must say, it just makes me wonder about humanity all the more. Anyway, before I get into that, I guess I should talk about my own brush with a fake agent. It all started with a standard query. Usually, I would e-mail an agent a query but the Robins Agency had an online form for people to submit queries. So I submitted via that. I must admit, I made one mistake before querying them – I neither checked them out via Google or checked one of the online lists such as Preditors & Editors which provides a list of scam artists who pose as agents. (But I’m wiser now :p). The very next day, I received this response:

Dear Fahim,

Yes, we’d like to take on your work; however, we limit the number of clients we accept to only those with marketable works and who are in a position to pay our annual retainer fee of $3,250 (US). Although many agents charge $4,500 to $6,500 per year for expenses on top of their commission rate of 15% – 20%, we’ve found that we can do a superb job for only $3,250 with a commission rate of 10%-15%.

As to what you can expect. The process is rather simple (as compared to rocket science 🙂 ); we bring your work in, take it through editorial to make sure it is in good shape; take it through marketing and research to find not only direct sales opportunities, but indirect as well (i.e. film, tv, foreign markets); put together a marketing package, then start the submission process. When a buyer is found, then the negotiations begin.

You are informed each step of the way as to what we are doing with your work; and are a key player in the sale negotiations as well. We normally answer e-mails within 24 hours and telephone calls the same day … that is, if you don’t reach us when you call.

What you won’t get is the typical attitude of most agents (you work for them, not the other way around); you won’t get someone cutting your work up because they can, not because it may be needed (yours doesn’t need it); you won’t get an agent selling you or your work short just for their commission check; and you won’t have to wonder what is being done with your work as you’ll know.

Many agents do not provide the scope of services that we do; and they expense back to you (monthly or quarterly) about $4,500 to $6,500 annually.

We think that we provide a solid service for the monies charged; more importantly though — our clients feel they are getting more than their money’s worth.

If this is the way you’d like your agent to work — for you, not the publisher — and if this is within your budget, then let us know and we’ll get the paperwork in order and start straight away. I look forward to seeing how far our agency can take your work.

With regards,

Syd Michaels
********************************
Robins Agency
*******************************

Now the above is, in a manner, fairly straightforward – they do tell you that they charge an annual fee of $3,250 and as an aspiring author, I half-thought, "hey, if they can deliver on what they promise, that might not be so bad" even though I knew that most reputable agents did not charge an up front fee. However, I did decide to do some checking up on them online at this point and what I found was various posts on different forums where people said that they’d paid the Robins agency and then had not heard back from them or that Cris Robins herself would call a writer who’d signed up with the agency and cry (yes, cry) on the phone asking for money.

Now, I have no idea as to the veracity of any of these claims. The Internet after all is the one place people seem to feel secure about making all sorts of bogus claims and indulging in mindless slander. However, there just seemed to be too many instances of the Robins Agency being mentioned as a scammer for it to be just slander. Besides, the Preditors & Editors list (which *is* reputable) mentioned them as well. So, while I still wanted to cling to the hope that they would actually sell my book for me, I decided that these really weren’t the people I should be going with. So I sent them off the following e-mail:

Dear Syd,

Thank you for getting back to me. However, a few things about your response did not ring true with me – such as the fact that you claim that my work would not need any cutting based on just a few pages of my manuscript. I am in search of an agent who believes in my work and wants to sell it. You asking for $3,250 yearly up front to represent me seems to indicate that you do not really believe in my work but are simply doing it by rote. So thank you but I think I will pass. Regards,

Fahim

Two days later, I got the following from Syd:

Fahim,

I did not say your work would not need any cutting based on anything; fact is, I said we’d take it through editorial to make sure it is in good shape.

There is no such thing as a free lunch, Fahim. You get what you pay for — this is a business, not a wish factory. We pick up works we BELIEVE we can sell; but belief doesn’t pay the light bills.

We know we offer the most fair, complete, and honest service on the market. We would have like to work with you to realize your dreams.

Best to you,

Syd

And that was the extent of my dealings with them. Now this might just be conjecture, but the last response to me felt as if they were trying to make me feel bad about rejecting them and perhaps go back to them begging for another chance. Well, not a chance :p

Of course, this encounter was pretty mild compared to some of the others I’ve been reading about online. The agents appear to come after the people who posted negative comments about them, threaten law-suits, stalk the people, mail bomb them, call their neighbours up to get their unlisted numbers – the whole works. Then there are those who actually defend these people – saying that those who complain about them don’t have the talent to make it and so they are simply trying to bring down good people providing a solid service.

I can’t speak for any of these people but what I can say is this – if an agent wants money from me up front to sell my book and also wants a chunk of the money that I’d get for my book, then there really is something wrong. I agree, there is no free lunch – but that works both ways. I don’t see why I should provide a free lunch for an agent to potentially do nothing after taking my money. Their incentive is the commission that they get, my incentive is the (potential) fame and fortune in selling my book. An equitable trade, wouldn’t you say? :p

Change is in the air …

It’s been a very long time since I’ve done anything with my sites (except to try to combat all the spam that is :p). I’ve been taking a break from the programming and have been working more on the writing end of things. And then work became a bit hectic and took over everything and so didn’t have time to do anything at all.

On the writing front, I finally found an agent who wanted to actually read my manuscript instead of simply saying "Not interested" after I queried them. However, the manuscript has been with them for about two months now and haven’t heard much from them 🙁 So, I’m a bit disheartened at the moment and wondering whether the whole thing is worth it.

On the other hand, I’ve also been reading about scammers on the Net who rip new writers off without any compunction. Not that the agent who has got my manuscript is one – I did check them out first :p Interestingly, I did get approached by a scammer at one point and had an interesting exchange of mails with them but don’t want to get into that in this post since that’s a whole new post by itself :p But what I did notice from my reading online was that these scammers can get pretty vindictive when they are called scammers – imagine that :p There were some pretty interesting (and horrifying) stories online but one of the most detailed (and engrossing) ones was this one. After reading that, I do have to wonder if it is even worth it going through all that hassle to get published …

You might have noticed that SM has now moved to be the main focus of my domain. This is in line with other changes that I’m contemplating. If the current agent that I’m corresponding with does not work out, I might try to simply publish my current novel (and the other six in the same cycle) online. My friend Nige has been prodding me to consider some sort of Net-based publishing mechanism like Cory Doctorow does and I might actually do that and be done with all this agent business …

So what does that mean for the software part of this site? Well, the software will still be there and I will continue to provide support as and when possible. I’m even working on a few apps which will help a writer keep track of submissions and story ideas and they will go up when I think the app is ready. However, coding will probably not be the main focus of this site any longer. The old Developer’s Corner content is still there and I will eventually add links from the main page to all that stuff but for the moment, it becomes just another historical layer to this site :p

Those darn critters!

Sometime after I made that entry about writing, getting published and so on, Laurie convinced me that I needed to join a crit group. A "crit group", what the heck is that? I hear you ask :p Basically it’s a group of people who get together to critique each others’s work so that everybody could become better writers … and the people who submit crits are known as, critters :p

Laurie already had a crit group in mind and we both joined up after looking around a bit and deciding that they looked OK. Most crit groups require you to do some crits before you can submit your own crits – so as not to have people join up, get their stuff critted and then immediately leave. This particular group required you to crit six pieces before you could submit your own stuff and both Laurie and I started critting stuff immediately. I think I did one crit the first day and three crits the second day. On the third day, I discover that one of my crits from the previous day had been short critted.

Now a short crit, in this particular group, is a crit which doesn’t count as a crit. For each crit you give, you receive crit credits and you can later use the crit credits to "pay" for getting crits for your own submissions. So when you are short critted by an admin, you basically have your crit moderated down and you don’t get the credits for your work. I had worked several hours on that particular crit and I had stated in the crit itself that there wasn’t much to crit since the writer had done a good job. Besides, somebody who had critted an earlier chapter in the same novel, and who had written about 80 words more than I had (yes I counted :p) didn’t get short critted.

So I asked the admins about it and their explanation was that we were newbies and so were moderated and could have our stuff moderated down but the long-term members could call it a crit and it wouldn’t be judged till later – when the admins distributed crit credits at the end of the month. She went on to say that different moderators judged differently as to if it was short crit or not. I went back and did some checking – the other crit had been moderated as well and it had been moderated by the same person. So the explanations didn’t really hold water and as far as I could see, what it boiled down to was that they were simply looking at crits and deciding whether they qualified based on their whims and fancies, the phase of the moon and however they felt at a given time. I didn’t like that one little bit and quit that group immediately.

Laurie started looking around for other crit groups but we didn’t like any that we came across and so we started talking about starting our own group and how we’d go about it. After a little discussion, we both agreed that we really wanted to do it and so, the next day we bough the domain name we wanted and set about setting up the technology to do things the way we wanted them to be.

We wanted things to be as automated as possible but we also wanted the author of the submission to have control over a critter being credited or not – not some moderator/administrator who might not even have read the crit. We also wanted to take the critting process online – away from mailing lists though we wanted people to have recourse to a mailing list if that’s the format they liked. I looked around for a forum software which integrated well with a mailing list and the only candidate around seemed to be Fud Forum. But Fud Forum would not integrate with my choice for running the rest of the site – Mambo.

Because of this incompatibility, we decided to drop the mailing list idea for the moment and go ahead with the rest of the stuff. I set up Mambo and found that Mambo could be made to integrate fairly well with SMF – which was my choice for forum software. We also wanted a fully fledged web-based database system which would keep track of submissions, allow users to give themselves credit for crits they’ve done and also allow authors to either grant extra credits to critters or to take away already granted credits from a critter if they had done a poor job of critting. It turned out that Mambo had some pretty nifty add-on components which made coding all of this fairly easy. So, about a week after we had come up with the original idea, Speculative-Fiction.com was launched 🙂

Laurie had already gotten expressions of interest for the project from quite a few people on another forum where she’s a member, and by the time we launched we already had around 10 members. It’s been about a week since the launch and I’m still adding stuff to the database, we’ve had around four submissions and people are still signing up. It’s not a major success in terms of traffic but I’m happy at the direction its taking as far as getting stuff critiqued, encouraging people to write and making my own writing better 🙂

The Long Road to Publication

I have been totally incommunicado while I finished work on my first novel – I didn’t do much writing here or on DC and I have not been doing much work on my software – except to write a few new tools for my writing but more on that later. I finished the first draft about two months ago and since then, spent a month polishing up the first draft. Laurie helped me immensely with it since I tend to have this bad habit of using adverbs liberally and Laurie is of the opinion that there is only one solution when it comes to adverbs – total genocide :p Between the two of us we hit a happy medium where I do use adverbs but not as profusely as I did at first. I do see her point about adverbs being the lazy way of saying things at times and how it weakens a sentence but sometimes I feel that an adverb can actually make a sentence more succinct rather than having to use many more words to say the same thing without adverb usage 🙂

Anyway, now that I’ve polished things up a bit, I’ve moved up to the next step. There is difference of opinion at this point – some believe that you should go straight to a publisher while others believe that you must find an agent first. The first class of people say that if you find a publisher, any agent will take you on while the latter say that an agent will give you more credibility with a publisher 🙂 I decided to try an agent first and wrote to one and waited a couple of weeks, they took a look at the first few chapters and said that wasn’t for them. (Of course, I had done something really stupid with the first agent – I sent them my unedited first draft because I was too impatient and in the words of Laurie, "Of course, they rejected it" :p) That’s a lesson for anybody who might want to learn from my mistakes – do not send out your unedited first draft no matter how impatient you might be :p

I then queried a second agent and waited two weeks with no response and then wrote to them again to find out that they’d never received the first query. They came back with a "I personally dislike humorous science fiction". Then I queried another well-known agent and was told "that this doesn’t sound like a project for us" without them even seeing my manuscript.

So here I am – struck out three times. This probably is the time when I should take a good look at things and decide where I am going … or maybe not :p I did manage to get a hold of Terry Pratchett’s agent Colin Smythe and I must say that Colin was a really nice bloke and a great human being in that he didn’t know me from Adam and yet, he helped me out as much as he could and pointed me in the right direction for submitting to more agents and publishers. I will be forever grateful to Colin for his kindness.

I have decided to continue to try agents till I find somebody who likes my style of writing because I’m beginning to get the feeling that humorous science fiction might be a dirty word amongst agent or something. However, I ran across this site by a fellow programmer who has actually managed to get his humorous science fiction novel published and that has given me hope. I will continue on my road to publication and will try to keep this page updated in case somebody is still interested in how it goes with me – or not 🙂

Muggles, muddles and missives

Now there’s all this brouhaha over a letter Terry Pratchett wrote to the The Times about an interview given by J.K. Rowlings. I first read the original BBC article (not the one I’ve linked – the original is gone) on a newsletter and it portrayed Terry as being more worked up about the whole thing and taking swipes at JKR and thought "Hmm … is Terry getting jealous, as unlikely as it might be?" I then went to the BBC site and what do you know, the article had completely changed it’s tone! So I was like, "Oh yes, another one of those!" But I went to mugglenet and read their reactions and I must say that it left me less than impressed with humanity’s capacity for reasoned thinking :p

First you have all the people going, "He’s jealous", "I’ve never heard of him", "How mean of him to do this on Jo’s birthday" and "Harry Potter rocks". Then you have a few people who actually came in and said, "Read the article people, it isn’t the way you think it is" and right below that you’d get, "He’s jealous!" again. Now what kind of stupid, gormless moron do you have to be if you will not even read all sides of an argument before jumping to a conclusion? Probably somebody like me – totally human :p

Now I had missed out one thing here too, I read all about Terry’s comments (or the BBC’s interpretation of them) but I hadn’t read the original JKR interview. So I went back and read that now and I must say, that between JKR and the interviewer (who seemed to be very full of him/herself) the interview came out making JKR look totally silly – she should get her money back … oh wait, this was an interview right? :p

First, JKR says she didn’t know it was fantasy that she was writing and had no idea it was till she’d published her book – this could be true I suppose though I find it a bit hard to believe. Maybe she was being flippant or maybe she did indeed start writing a book and didn’t consider what genre it was going to be. But then she goes on to talk about how she doesn’t like fantasy, that she’s trying to subvert the genre and so on and I began to wonder whether instead of Pratchett being jealous, if JKR wasn’t a bit too full of herself. She kind of dismisses the Narnia series and says that she didn’t read all of it but talks about a character (Susan) and what happens to her which you would not know unless you read the final book of the series. So is she basing her opinions of Narnia and fantasy on general on other people’s opinions? Or did she *gasp* read the series out of sequence and make invalid assumption? Oh the horror!

Then there’s the interviewer waxing poetic over her " lack of sentimentality, her earthy, salty realness" and we have Rawlings talking about "Harry getting some action and Hermione getting some action" and I cringed. This is supposed to be a children’s writer? Sure, I know I’ll have people jumping up and down on me saying, "Hey, she writes realistic stuff, what teenage kid doesn’t think about girls/boys" but this is the kind of series which was originally aimed at the pre-teens as well as the teens and call me a prude, but I don’t feel comfortable having a child reading stuff written by somebody who thinks in terms of "action". But then again, you can’t blame somebody for being themselves can you?

But what I do blame JKR for is the fact that she seems to have such a lack of respect for fantasy and continues to write in the genre. Writing to me is about passion – it’s not about money but about putting down what’s in your heart, characters who are so real to you that you just have to put them down on paper. If Rawlings felt that way, why would she dislike fantasy or think it needs subversion? There seems to be a bit of a dichotomy there.

Contrary to the opinion of the press, there have been many writers who’ve invented and re-invented fantasy for years. Heck, as much as it pains me to say it, (I’m a bit partial to science fiction :p) – fantasy probably has been around since the dawn of time and it has never been *just* about knights and swords and sorcerers and "people dancing to Greensleeves". Whether you take Alan Garner or Roald Dahl or Enid Blyton or a score of others, they wrote fantasy and they wrote it in contemporary settings – they did just what JKR is doing now but in my opinion, they also did it much much better in literary terms. Sure I enjoy Harry Potter as much as anyone else but there is a difference between a good writer and a successful one – the two are not always synonymous.

Lest that be taken to mean that I don’t think JKR is a good writer, let me hasten to add that I do believe she’s good. I enjoy her plots – they don’t signal stuff a mile away, they don’t give anything away, they make you work. But for pure turn of phrase and for making you think about people and their foibles, I’ll take Pratchett any day of the week – and considering he’s made me write all this over a letter to the Times, I’d say Pratchett has done it again :p

Soul Brothers and other stuff

Do you think people can have soul brothers or sisters? Or at least spiritual brothers/sisters? Actually, that is a throwaway question prompted by the fact that I was going to write about somebody who I consider to be a kindred spirit – or at least of his blog :p I’ve known Tyran for quite a long time now and whether he’s writing about wireless or wagons, Firefox or Frodo, blogs or Barsoom, I know what he’s talking about … Or I can empathize with what he said. I’ve always made it a point to drop by Tyran’s blog first thing in the morning because whatever he writes about, it’s bound to be interesting, if not thought provoking. Which is why it surprised me today when I discovered that I had not been by Tyran’s blog in almost a year! Guess, that’s what marriage, shifting to a new job, going back to your old job again and all the other stuff in between does to you :p

Anyway, I decided to take a day off from coding and scripting and debugging and all the other good stuff that keeps me busy during the day, and catch up on my reading over at the Whinery. Of course, as usual, it was interesting and luckily for me, Tyran seems not to have been too prolific in his own blog output since I was able to get through a full year’s worth of entries in one day. Of course, if you’re interested, you can go over there and read his blog yourself :p

Then there is Nigel with his Red Ferret Journal. I’ve known Nige for almost as long as I’ve known Tyran and Nige also probably has the distinction of the Blog user with the most entries in his database :p I’ve been using Blog longer than anybody (I wrote it after all :p) but I’ve only got around 750 entries when you combine four separate blogs (some of which are no longer active) whereas Nigel has a whopping 4000+ entries in his single blog! Nige (like Tyran) has been a very good friend through the years though I’ve never met either of them in person. And this, probably is the greatest gift that I’ve recieved in the years I’ve been developing freeware applications – the great people I get to know and to make friends with. There are many others that I count as friends but I’ve lost touch with them through the years due to some reason or other but this is in remembering all those people who’ve enriched my life over the years 🙂

And that meandering entry is my excuse for not doing too much in the way of coding today :p Speaking of coding, I seem to have caught my first comment spam with the new and improved WPBlacklist 1.22 plugin 🙂 Unlike the old version, I even got an e-mail notification of the fact that a comment was held for moderation. Now, if I could just add the option to check external spam lists and a mechanism to search existing comments for specific keywords and IP addresses, I should be ready to release WPBlacklist 2.0 🙂 I’m kind of eager to get started on it but I think I should get Blog done first. But if you’re looking for information on Blog, this is not the place to be … DC is :p

And the winner is?

Yes, there have been no entries since I said I was thinking of moving to a different publishing platform :p And the reason is that I’ve been busy checking on each of the contenders I mentioned. Incidentally, I should mention that the folks over at pMachine were kind enough to give me a free copy of ExpressionEngine as part of their switch program 🙂 I didn’t really expect to win when I applied but I did and so I gave ExpressionEngine a try as well and while it is all they claim to be, it has a few things missing which made me decide not to go with it. Plus of course, there is the whole "commercial" thing – it’s a commercial app and while I got this release for free, I don’t know if all future upgrades will be free or not and so I’m a bit leery about it. The biggest thing that I missed in ExpressionEngine was the fact that it had no support for an external blogging API. So if I’d switched to EE, then I wouldn’t have been able to blog from BlogMan or Blog any longer.

As for the other contenders, I think I dropped Nucleus at the outset after discovering that their comment spam filtering features weren’t as good as I wanted them to be :p So that left just b2evolution and WordPress. My initial choice was actually b2evolution since it supported multiple blogs and WordPress didn’t but later I learnt that b2evolution’s multiple blogs weren’t really multiple blogs but some form of separating entries using categories – of course, I might be wrong here since it was something I read rather than know for sure due to firsthand experience :p However, it looked as if there was a lot more work being done on WP than on b2evolution and so I settled on WP.

Once I’d settled on WP however, the real work started :p It turned out that WP imported MT entries but first having the user export the MT entries in MT itself and then reading that exported file. However, that didn’t work for me since I’m on a really slow connection at the moment and the export would always fail before it completed. So I decided to write a script which would import the MT entries into WP on the server itself by transferring the records from the tables on the MT database to the tables on the WP database 🙂 It actually ended up being fairly simple to implement but I had to install Apache, PHP, mySQL and phpmyAdmin on my machine before I could get to work :p Once all that was done though, it took me one evening’s work to actually get the script to the working stage and a few more hours of tweaking saw all my MT entries transferred over without any problems (at least that I could see …) to my WP database. Of course, then began the task of converting my WP template to be as close to the MT original as possible but I think I’ve got that covered now as well. All that remains is to put a comments spam moderation system into place and I’m ready to go.

Here’s the kicker – WP has a lot of comment moderation options but I still like Jay Allen’s MT-Blacklist best of all 🙂 I want something like that! Now the thing is, I find I work really well with PHP since it seems to be an extremely intuitive language to me. So, I’m going to work on the code for an existing WP hack which actually works a lot like Jay Allen’s plugin and try to see if I can actually make it a plugin for WP. If I can (or once I decide I just can’t do it or it’s too much work :p) then I’ll do the final bit of switching over to WP. Till then bear with my comments on switching :p

Movable Type and Moving My Typing :p

As you are probably aware, I use Movable Type to maintain this weblog. At least, it is MT which handles the actual publishing though I do use my own offline application (BlogMan) to do the composing of the entries and getting them to the server :p The folks over at Six Apart (they are the ones who develop MT) have been talking about a new release of MT – 3.0 – for a while now and I’ve been looking forward to the new release myself. The first pre-public release – they call it a Developer Edition – was announced over the weekend and a veritable storm broke over major parts of the blogging universe :p

The reason? Ben and Mena Trott – the folks behind Six Apart and MT – had decided to go over to a paid model for this iteration of MT. Unlike a lot of the people who use MT, I am neither personally acquainted with Ben or Mena nor do I use MT that much – it is simply the backend handler for SM since I actually do all of the posting from my own application. However, I do like MT and the features it provides. On the other hand, the limitations of the free release under the 3.0 licensing does make me wonder about continuing to use MT and I’m already looking for replacements. This however is a personal decision based on the fact that the free version of MT might be too limited for me to continue to use it and the fact that future license changes to MT might mean that the free version will be even further feature-atrophied.

As far as Ben and Mena’s own decision regarding MT 3.0, I’m kinda divided. A lot of people seem to feel that Ben and Mena lied to them and that they were being devious in their later decision to change some of the original terms after they were released. I personally don’t think this is the case. Granted that I don’t know the people involved, their concern over having to switch over to a paying model seems to be genuine. But switch they must if they are to survive – this too I understand. As a software developer, I can understand the problems they face. On the other hand, I do think that charging US$ 100 for a personal package which doesn’t give that much more than the free version is a bit excessive as well – especially given that the new release of MT 3.0 does not have that many features added. Yes, there are a lot of changes behind the scenes that will mean more goodies in the future – but nothing for your average user just yet.

Then again, on the other hand, this *is* called a Developer Edition and is aimed mainly at the developer and so the average user shouldn’t really get bent out of shape – not till they do the public release and continue to charge them large sums of money for not many features added :p It really seems to be one of those grey areas that cannot be really categorized as one or the other – there are too many variables … not to mention all the heated emotion that gets in the way of cool thinking. But I do wish Ben and Mena best of luck in trying to take MT along on a new direction.
As far as I’m concerned, I’ll switch to something new soon. I’m looking at a few alternatives at the moment but the one I choose must meet a few criteria that is important to *me*. What are they? Well, first of all, it should be able to import my existing MT entries and comments :p Then, it should support the Blogger API or the MetaBlog API so that I can connect to it via Blog or BlogMan to continue to post offline. Next, it should support comment spam filtering and blacklisting since I seem to get a lot of that stuff :p Finally, it would be nice if it supported a few of the template tags and the calendar feature from MT that I kinda like … but that last is not a must 🙂

Of course, before people suggest (does anybody even read these entries anymore anyway? :p) alternatives, I guess I must mention what I’m looking at, at the moment 🙂 The top three contenders on my list are: WordPress, Nucleus and b2evolution. Each one has strengths and weaknesses but I believe all of them are open source projects and so hopeufully will not suffer the same fate as MT. There is a fourth contender, ExpressionEngine, but that is a commercial application. However, they do seem to be taking advantage of the current furore over MT and are running a sort of competition where the first 1000 people to send them an e-mail get a copy of ExpressionEngine for free :p

Incidentally, I’m not looking at the core or base install of WordPress or Nucleus :p Instead, I’m looking at Wuh Wuh, a souped up version of WordPress, and Nucleus Extreme. I’ll keep you posted as to my findings 🙂

Back at last, back at last …

Yes, I’m finally back … actually, I’ve been back for a while but there have been problems but where to begin? 🙂 Guess I’ll begin at the beginning itself and then go on till the end as I think the White King said to Alice :p I initially was away from SM, my other blog and general coding due to the fact that I’d met somebody online and I was spending every moment I was online with her 🙂 Then she decided to move to Sri Lanka in August and we got married soon after she got here and then there was a whole heap of other things to do. My wife Laurie is not a Muslim nor is she a Sri Lankan and so, my parents were dead set against the marriage – but to be fair by them, I didn’t tell them of the marriage beforehand. I sprung it on them after the fact so that they wouldn’t be able to guilt trip me into reconsidering – cowardly? Probably :p Anyway, my parents wanted to have nothing to do with Laurie or I and so we had to find our own place.

I’d anticipated this and had already rented out a house and had also gotten time off for two weeks from work and so Laurie and I were able to spend the time setting up house and attending to the hundreds of little things that needed to be attended to. The daily nitty-gritties are probably going to be way too exhaustively detailed for me to go into right here but if you are interested, you could always take a look at Laurie’s Sri Lanka blog since she has detailed everything that happened every day since she got to Sri Lanka 🙂 Anyway, since we were at a new house and had no telephone (except for my cellular) let alone dial-up access, I was again offline for several weeks except for the brief periods I had to come into work to attend to various things.

Then I finally got back to work around two weeks ago but still was not able to attend to my blogs since I had so much piled up work that needed to be attended to – among other things. In addition to that, I discovered that SM had a problem – I could not rebuild old entries and I wasn’t sure what was wrong. The network at work in the meantime had become extremely slow (I am still trying to figure out what the cause is – whether it’s a file sharer or one of those all too frequent worms) and so I was unable to do much online stuff such as trying to debug my Movable Type installation for SM. I tried replacing all the Movable Type files in case I’d made some sort of a mistake when I switched hosts (which I’d done just before Laurie came down BTW), I tried moving the Movable Type scripts to a different location on my server, I tried playing with different configuration options, I referred to the MT forums for days on end on an extremely slow connection – all to no avail.

I had installed Norton Personal Firewall just after I’d gotten back from vacation/marriage but I had not thought to test out rebuilding SM without the firewall. Or at least, I’d remember when I wasn’t at my computer that I should test without the firewall but never do it. Finally, I hit upon an MT forum entry which specifically mentioned that rebuilding and other activities on MT get affected when Norton Personal Firewall is on and how to get around it – disable the popup ad prevention feature in Norton Firewall. I did that and finally I was able to use my MT installation fully again – and this was on Sunday 🙂 Incidentally, the reason that I needed to rebuild all my old entries was because somebody kept on leaving strange and apparently pointless comments on one of my entries. I still have no idea what that was about .. unless they wanted people to visit their URL and while the comments and the URL’s were usually the same, the IP the comments came from was always different. Anyway, I deleted all these comments but could not rebuild the old entries due to the problems I had but now all that is done.

And yes, I’m back and hopefully will be posting more and will also start working on all those coding projects too but since I will not have Net access except from work, things are still going to be a bit slow – I still need to find a way to update my main site since that’s updated via Blog – I guess I should move my Blog installation to my work machine … So many things to do .. so little time :p

Who writes the script?

Have you ever wondered if your life is an elaborately scripted play or show like "The Truman Show"? I know I’ve talked about this possibility in different ways at different times but sometimes I just feel as if certain things have a pattern in the way they happen and that there are certain roads in life that you can take and almost be sure of their outcome. Yes, I’m being cryptic again :p But I’m just rambling again since "The Fountainhead" has been making me think a lot about how I act and react to the world and the people around me and that in turn made me look closely at the things which are not controlled by my actions – or at least not directly so.

It’s no secret that I’ve been looking for other employment for a while now. I’ve had some disagreement with my boss in the past and felt that he didn’t really want me there (I mean in the company) and that he’d eventually get around to asking me to leave and so I wanted to leave before that happened. However, I seemed to have no success at all at landing a new job – I’d go for interviews, they’d sound very interested, call me back and say "We are extremely interested and will get back to you" and then hear nothing from them at all. As Goldfinger in Fleming’s book says "Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, thrice is enemy action" :p Of course, I don’t really think it’s enemy action but I’m left wondering what to think when it happens so frequently.

Of course the latest was different – somebody who’d interviewed me and said they were very interested, calls me out of the blue just when I was beginning to think that maybe I should settle in at my current place of work because things had kind of worked out between my boss and myself and so many others had already left that I was beginning to feel sort of guilty in leaving myself since it would be like rats leaving a sinking ship – and I didn’t want to be a rat :p Anyway, they call me after almost a year and say that they are interested and whether I am and that gets me started on leaving all over again (and I totally decided to be a rat – yes, I’m fickle so sue me :p), I went for another interview and they simply wanted me to do a Brainbench test and let me even choose the test. I chose the .NET Framework test since it was apparent that that was what they wanted most <g> and it really didn’t matter to me much as to what test I took – I don’t do too well on programming tests since my style is different to what people expect – I haven’t been taught any of these languages and so don’t know the "theory" behind them :p

I did the test and it turns out that it is almost totally theory and nothing about actual coding. I realized how little I knew of .NET framework theory but since I don’t really need most of that stuff to code a good .NET application (which I’d already done several times already), I wasn’t really worried about it but I knew I wouldn’t even hear back from them – and I haven’t so far and I don’t think I will either (that brings up a whole new rant about courtesy but I’ll let that go for now) 🙂 But then I apply for another job on Sunday and I get an e-mail confirmation on Monday and a call yesterday asking me to come for an interview today …

The catch? The company is a sister/child company of my company :p I hadn’t known it at the point when I applied since the company name on the advertisement was different but when I got the e-mail response, I saw the domain name and it was the old domain for the company and I was curious as to what was happening – whether somebody working for that company was using their company e-mail address while working for a different company or if they were changing names since that particular company had been having financial problems for a while now. So I asked around yesterday (before I received the call from them) and learnt that this was some sort of a venture under a different name by the sibling/child company of the company I currently work for. I didn’t get the exact details but it turns out that this is indeed an organization affiliated to the organization that I work for and that they are/were in financial difficulties … Then I get the phone call asking me to come for an interview … and what did I do? I accepted :p

It was mostly to see what was going to happen since I’m kind of going with the flow on this one. I’m also curious as to whether anybody at the other company noted where I worked and they are waiting to see the look of surprise on my face when I go for the interview since I know quite a few people in the new company – if the top management is the same as it was when under the old name (yes, I know, not mentioning names makes this whole thing totally confusing :p) If so, they are the one’s who are going to be surprised since I already know who they are :p Or maybe, I’m being totally paranoid and they are totally unaware of what’s happening and just called me in for an interview … Anyway, I guess I’ll find out what next when I go for the interview today – so more details tomorrow …