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

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

The incredible changing human …

I talked about careware and people caring less about money and more about people, yesterday. But I find myself wondering, would I behave the same way if I was making money? I know of people who once they start making money, can’t do anything but think of making more money. It seems to be a sort of a disease, or an obsession. Once you start making money, nothing seems to be enough. Is this human nature or just the way some people are? I don’t know enough not having ever made so much money that I never knew what to do with it – but I find myself wondering.

Till the present day, I’ve never wanted money badly. Sure, there are times I’d wish that I had more money so that I could buy a new gadget or a bunch of books or things like that. But I’ve never been driven to try to make money at all costs so that I could have more money. In fact, some of the people close to me disparage my total lack of interest in money. But I find myself wondering if this is who I am or if I am not interested in money because I don’t have any :p If I started making money, would I be like all those other people? Would I stop enjoying life, stop caring about other people and their problems and simply concentrate on making more money? Would I even want such a life? I don’t know …

But what I do know is what I think, feel and believe right now. And what I think is that life isn’t about material stuff. Sure the material possessions and money makes life easier and a lot more comfortable. But the trick is in knowing when you have enough. As human beings, we appear to never be satisfied with what we have. We always want something more, something new. But if we can learn to balance this yearning against appreciation for all that we currently have and to think about those unfortunates who don’t even have what we have, I think our lives will be much fuller and far less unhappy. But can we really do all this as human beings? That is a question that each and every one of us will have to answer for ourselves ….

The Games People Play ….

I was offered a job a few days ago by a good friend. I had used to work for the same company but in a different department and I’d quit due to certain differences that I had with one of the people in my department. She (my friend) asked me if I’d like a job in her department and I said "yes" since I liked the company and I was getting a bit stressed out at my current job. She, being the nice person she is, didn’t think it was going to be any issue with my former boss but I wasn’t so sure. Turns out that my fears were well grounded :p

My friend had asked the head of her department (who we’ll call C) to ask the head of my former department (who we’ll call L) whether L had any objection’s to C’s department hiring me. My friend didn’t think this would be a problem since I had not been fired and I’d quit. But the thing was, I knew I would have been fired if I’d stayed there much longer :p Not because I was incompetent mind you – in fact, I was certain I was about to be fired one week when I was saved by the Director of Operations of the company handing me a case where I resolved the issue and turned the customer around. They liked how I helped them so much that they went to WebHostingTalk forums and raved about me and how I’d helped them. I believe the Director of Operations pointed this particular forum thread to L and she was all praises and smiles for a while. Of course, I knew it was too good to last and so looked around for another job, found it and quit. Yeah, call me paranoid but just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you :p

So what has all of this to do with this current job offer? Well, the fact is that the reason that L didn’t like me was because her department was being run like a Nazi concentration camp :p You were supposed to do what you were told, no questions asked. I don’t believe any organization should be run that way. Sure, I’m always loyal to the company I work for but I should also have the opportunity to question something if I feel it is wrong. If they tell me, hey, these are the reasons that we do things this way, I’d be happy. After all, at least they gave me the option to voice my doubts. I had tried that with L and had been shot down and told curtly that the forum I used (internal department e-mail) wasn’t the place for such discussion. After a couple of questions like that, I knew my days were numbered and that’s why I left in the first place.

Now, when C asked L about hiring me, L had said that I had told a customer that I didn’t agree with company policy and so I wasn’t a good choice. Now, I complain a lot internally if I don’t think something is right, but I don’t go tell customers that. As far as I can recall, what L said is a blatant lie. What gets me is that she is able to make an accusation like that with impunity knowing that I can never refute her – what are they going to do? Hold a court inquiry to prove my innocence :p I don’t think I personally could do that – tell such an obvious lie about somebody without any compunction. I’d be like, "Hey, they’d know I was lying … what if they questioned me?" But in L’s case, thinking back about it, I guess it’s sheer brilliance – who is going to question her word over that of somebody who no longer worked in the company and who would have no way to defend themselves?

I was slightly irritated when I started this post but now I’m simply amused :p It was a nice stroke of corporate gamesmanship and while I can be magnanimous and try to believe that L honestly made a mistake and confused my internal complaints with something else, I am more than 80% certain that this wasn’t the case. Ah well, rest assured that this will make it’s way into a book someday :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 🙂

The right time to write …

I’ve been meaning to write here again since my last entry … but never seem to find the time :p But then again, that seems to be a common complaint of mine recently. I’ve been thinking of getting to work on the novel that I started a while back thanks to Laurie but even that has been progressing in fits and starts. I’d never really thought of writing a novel before I met Laurie – all I really wanted to do were short stories because I didn’t think I could sustain the effort needed to produce a novel … mostly because I’m really impatient and want everything done now but also because my writing style changes from day to day and depending on what my mood is. But somewhere along the way (probably because I heard her talk about writing novels day in day out :p) I got started on a novel and suddenly I realized that by Jove, I could actually do it 🙂

Another incentive of course was the program that I’d started on for Laurie. She’d mentioned the need for a good writer’s text editor and I scoured the net for something which had all the features that both she and I needed and couldn’t find anything that had every feature we wanted. In fact, in most cases, we didn’t even come close. So I decided that I might as well go ahead and write my own :p So was born Amanuensis – which is still very much a work in progress – and I needed something to test Amanuensis with and since I tend to hate using junky test data, I actually decided to use the novel that I wanted to do as the test data 🙂

Anyway, the first rush of work (and testing on Amanuensis) got me up to around 20,000 words and I am pretty happy with that since I don’t think I’ve ever written that long a story before. But then I got stuck – as usual, I got sidetracked, Amanuensis was put aside and I went on to other things. Since then, I’ve come back to Amanuensis several times and made some major changes to the program for Laurie but I haven’t actually gotten back to writing on a daily (or even extended time period) basis. I do think about the story and add to the characters, dialog, events and so on but haven’t actually sat down to do any extensive writing. I feel that it’s time to do so … but have been finding that time is always the issue. Of course, if one wants to write, and I mean really write, I don’t think anything would stop you. So, I’m still probably making excuses for myself since I’m a lazy git :p But I’m closer to actually putting down words on paper again … so let’s see where it goes 🙂

Done, done at last! Thank God almighty, done at last!

The last entry for this site, which was made somewhere in June, was never published at all due to the fact that Blog wouldn’t cooperate :p I finally got that entry to publish today after getting most of the major problems in Blog. Actually, I’m kind of happy to get Blog working again since now, I use one application, Blog, to post to both my WordPress site and my non-WordPress site :p That is kind of cool.

A lot has happened since I last posted here and I’d probably have to make a humongous entry to catch up with all the stuff that has happened :p I just don’t feel like making the aforementioned humongous entry due to the fact that I’m not feeling totally well today. So I guess I’ll do the Cliff’s Notes version of what has been happening so far instead :p

OK, I left my then employer and joined a new company somewhere in May. This new company had been a project of my then employer’s and I’d been involved in the project for about a year before they decided to go off and form a separate company and they wanted me involved. I did get involved but found that I’d taken on way too much than I’d bargained for. I found myself doing systems administration, HR duties, procurement and a heck of a lot more besides when I had actually been hired on to be their lead developer. Things got a bit too hairy for my tastes and so, I went back to my old employer (who now is my new employer … again :p).

I’ve been here at my new/old employer for a couple of months now and things have been fairly hectic since I’ve had to do a couple of proposals as well as a full promotional video for the Information and Communication Technology Agency (ICTA) of Sri Lanka. I really enjoyed the work on the ICTA video since it was something different from the usual run of the mill stuff I get to do. Unfortunately, till about a week ago, all this stuff meant that I was kept fairly busy since I also had taken up writing for another monthly magazine here in Sri Lanka (in addition to my existing column on a different monthly magazine :p) and what with trying to do all that and keep up with my comics, movies, TV shows and so on, not much time was left over for doing other things … such as coding.

Since I couldn’t post here till I got back to coding and got Blog working, that presented a bit of a problem as far as posting on SM was concerned. Of course, I really didn’t have much time to worry about SM and so, I’d think about getting back to the code, but really wouldn’t do it :p I’ve finally been able to get back to working on Blog – mostly because a friend needed Blog working more so than because I needed it working :p – and so, hopefully, I should get back to posting here too. We’ll see …

My Favourite Waste of Time …

Actually, what my favourite waste of time is, is a question since there are so many :p As I mentioned in the previous post, of late, the problem has been finding the time to do anything because I seem to have accumulated a lot of ways to waste time 🙂 And the funny thing is, that in the beginning I actually seemed to have the time for all of this but suddenly I find that I have so many things to do and not enough time to do it all in. I blame the Internet :p

You think that’s an exaggeration? Not at all. Just take a look at the list of my most recent wastes of time and you’ll see why I blame the Net. First there are the TV shows. I had a few shows that I loved when I was in the US but once I got back to Sri Lanka, I ever gave up hope of seeing those shows. Then came one fine day when I realized that all these shows are available on the Net for download and all I had to do was get them off the Net and I could keep up with the shows almost as soon as they were aired in the US! So now I’m busily watching 24, Gilmore Girls, Monk, Smallville and Star Gate whenever there is a new show and that keeps me busy through the week 🙂 Actually, in the case of Gilmore Girls, we actually get the fourth season (which is on air in the US as well) here in Sri Lankan television but they are a bit behind in Sri Lanka and so I prefer to get my show from online and then watch it again when it goes on TV :p

Then there were the comics. Again, something I’d had access to in abundance when I was in the US. Here, it’s hard to get your hands on comics. Then I discover that that too is available online for download :p Not only that, but I discovered that I could get hard to find collections like Marvel’s "Infinity War" or the "Infinity Gauntlet" or any of DC’s Elseworld’s titles, fairly easily online. The only problem? They seem to be either archives of JPG collections or files in the comic book reader format (CBZ or CBR), which are just renamed ZIP or RAR files. I simply hate having to go through JPG collections and reading it file by file – yeah, nothing to get so upset about but call me finicky :p So, what I do is extract all the JPG files from their archives and then use Adobe Professional to combine them all in one PDF file which I name a specific way and then add to my collection. Yes, I’m anal and I create most of my own work :p

The latest waste of time came about of course when I discovered that I could get old DOS games from the Net and better yet, get their Amiga versions which look better and even play better as long as you can configure the Amiga emulator correctly. So now, I sit at home on an evening playing Lemmings when I don’t have a comic to go through or a TV show to watch 🙂

And those are just the latest of my wastes of time 🙂 There are the existing ones like watching movies – I just bought 13 DVD’s last Saturday since the pirate DVD trade is booming in Sri Lanka and you can buy the latest Hollywood releases for something like US$ 3 :p And guess how many of those 13 movies I’ve seen so far? One! Yeah, there just is too little time in the world :p

Return of the Prodigal

Yes, I am not dead …yet :p And I had to think long and hard about where to post this one since my main blog at The Developer’s Corner has been inactive as well for the longest of times. I finally decided that the post should go here since this post has nothing at all to do with development but the original dilemma arose from the fact that I did have a lot to say about why I haven’t done any development work in a while :p Ah well, guess there are always going to be such cases where you can’t figure out which blog gets the post when you have multiple blogs. Maybe I should go back to a combined blog? This might actually make sense when I combine Blog and BlogMan (whoops, that sounds like a development related statement … see what I mean?)

Anyway, the situation has been like this – my routine has changed so much that I really haven’t had much time for blog entries .. there is always just too much to do. So I kinda stopped making SM entries and then The Developer’s Corner went into neglect as well since I didn’t have time to code any longer either. I’ve been working on two different fronts – one is my regular job and the other is a separate project that I got involved in as part of my job. This second project has gradually taken up more and more of my time until during the the last month I was even working weekends to get things ready for the Sri Lankan elections which were to be held at the beginning of April. The elections have come and gone and things have calmed down a bit now but I still don’t seem to find the time to update my blog or to do any coding since the two jobs continue to go on. I have decided to try and make more regular updates though since otherwise my two blogs that I seemed to be so religious about updating would just die a natural death. However, I think I really must think about combining The Developer’s Corner and SM. This actually would allow me to make more frequent updates and still try to somewhat keep things on topic since the topic can once again be anything at all :p

So what have I actually been doing? Well just last week, my friend Robin and I were discussing old DOS games – games that we both used to enjoy but hadn’t played in ages. The nostalgic trip down memory lane got me thinking about some of the games I really loved and suddenly, I had a hankering to play some of them. I’d already tried to play a few them, like Gods, on Windows XP but had found the game to be slow and I didn’t really feel like going through that again. However, I suddenly realized that there might be a virtual machine or an emulator around for DOS which might allow me to play the games as they were meant to! My search resulted in me finding DOSBox – an emulator for DOS on Windows (as well as a host of other platforms actually …) – just what I was looking for! My tests with DOSBox were less than satisfactory though since Gods still seemed to run much slower than I remembered. However, I did bag a whole bunch of old DOS games from the Web since there were a lot of abandonware sites which had all my old favourites for download 🙂

Somewhere along the way, I stumbled across an Amiga emulator – WinUAE. I have no clear recollection as to how that happened now. I realized after some reading that all I needed to run Amiga games was this emulator, an Amiga ROM image and some other little bits and pieces which I was able to get together fairly quickly. I found that there was a whole slew of Amiga games available for download and that all of my old DOS favourites were there in Amiga format too 🙂 Unfortunately, my first attempts at getting an Amiga game running on WinUAE weren’t very successful but this was mostly due to my total lack of knowledge of both Amigas and WinUAE. I finally stumbled upon the correct way to set things up in WinUAE so that I can run a game and my first game was Deliverance. I was so hooked by the game (yes, even though it was ancient :p) that I played it till about midnight on Friday!

Over the weekend, I perfected my configuration of WinUAE for playing Amiga games and was able to get a few of my old favourites like Gods, Lemmings, The Lost Vikings and Chaos Engine working just fine on it. The game play is as good as ever, there is no speed difference and the best thing of all, the games take only a few megs on my hard disk! What more can one ask for? :p