Dan Among Den

September 11, 2007

Rumors of my blogging death have been exaggerated

Yeah, it's been very quiet here, but I'm still around. It's just been so busy elsewhere in my life that I've had little time to blog. Also, I've moved my personal stuff over to LiveJournal and my art over to Two Sides Imaging, so that left with me trying to figure out just what content I want to put here. There will be some politics, technology and other stuff, but I haven't been much in the mood lately to write on those. That may change soon.

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March 11, 2007

Water conservation

I just found this little statistical gem in Becker's recent article on conserving water effectively:

Many discussions of water conservation create the impression that households are large and inefficient users of clean water for drinking, eating, bathing, and toilet flushing. That is a myth. About 40 per cent of all the freshwater use in the United States is for irrigating land for agriculture, another 40 percent is used to produce power, and only 8 percent is used for domestic use; these percentages are similar in other countries. Moreover, about a third of all the water used by households in rich countries goes to water lawns and for other out door purposes, so probably no more than about 5 per cent of the total demand for water is for personal use.

Think about that the next time you have to flush twice.

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January 27, 2007

Stonehenge construction techniques?

Here's a 6-minute video showing some techniques for moving large, heavy stones using nothing more than leverage and a little muscle. In it, a single man moves and erects stones weighing several tons using such primitive tools as stones, wood, and rope. Could this be the way Stonehenge was created?

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September 14, 2006

Opening up the Love

From KXAN:

A U.S. House panel Wednesday stripped antitrust protections from a bill that would lift restrictions on long-haul flights from Dallas Love Field. The legislation then moved forward.

Finally! This stupid piece of legislation is the reason it can be so expensive to fly in and out of Dallas sometimes. Anything other than the five-state area gets a huge jack-up in price since Southwest hasn't been allowed to compete on those routes. There have even been cases on some airlines where it's been cheaper to fly through Dallas (as a hub) than to fly to Dallas.

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August 08, 2006

Light activity

Activity here is going to be a little light for a while. Significant turbulence in my personal life has left me with little energy for blog work.

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June 15, 2006

The Butterfly Effect DJ

I just ran across this neat little video where a DJ can move time forwards and backwards via his turntable deck and uses it to navigate through a chaotic Butterfly Effect series of events.

Very cool.

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June 14, 2006

When Fetishes Collide

I just ran across an odd collection of photos from flickrbabes. I can only presume this resulted from the collision of an asian fetishist, a mud-wrestling fan, and someone trying to convince Americans that soccer is exciting.

Thus, I present: Asian girls playing soccer, in the mud, in their underwear.

Apart from the sheer strangeness of it, they're actually pretty good photos.

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June 10, 2006

An old look at New Coke

I just ran across a long, but fascinating article on the market research that led the Coca-Cola company to ditch the 99-year-old foruma of Coke and bring us New Coke, a decision often called "the Edsel of the 80's".

(Red Tanya should like this -- it has plenty of footnotes.)

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May 13, 2006

FlickrBabes

Just pointing to a nice site FlickrBabes. This guy (I presume) is scanning through lots and lots of picture feeds on Flickr, looking for hot babes. Mostly these are the kind of eye-candy girls you see in various men's magazines, but overt nudity is actually pretty rare here. And it's all available in a handy RSS feed. Here's one of my recent favorites.

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May 11, 2006

Message on a $10 Bottle

I recently ran across the strangest thing. I was in California, and I got a $10 bill in change. Scrawled across the bottom of the bill was the following warning:

If you can't quite make it out, it reads:
DANGER - GRAPEVINE TX POLICE MOLEST TEEN FEMALE DRIVERS - WARN OTHERS

It's strange to see such a warning on a piece of money. Usually it's something silly like "Help! I'm trapped in the Treasury building!" I know I've been guilty of a number of those. But more strange is that I should get it in California with a warning to carry back to my home state of Texas.

Anyway, MAW thought it was just strange enough to be blog-worthy.

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February 25, 2006

David Hasselhoff, American Icon or Embarrassment

I ran across this, well, this disturbing music video of David Hasselhoff (hat-tip to Jon), and what was most frightening to me was not the image of Hasselhoff snowboarding in a full-body fur parka while holding a salmon in his teeth, but the fact that he's a huge international star throughout the world, except for here in America. He's one of our biggest cultural exports, while our own reactions to him vary from disgust to embarrassment.

That got me to thinking about how we perceive other cultures through the media that we manage to import from them. We see Mexico via the scantily-clad game show bimbos on Telemundo. Brazil is one big topless beach filled with super-models. Britain is a hilarious nation of wacky misfits practicing their silly walks. And Japan is a nation of fetishists who spend their time fantasizing about tentacle rape and young schoolgirls.

Surely there are elements of truth to it, since we are seeing selections of their locally produced and consumed media, so these themes must have some resonance in the nations of origin. But they also reflect on us in that our culture selected those portions to import. Do they look upon these tidbits with great derision only slightly diluted by mild acknowledgement?

The rest of the world has latched onto our vacuous Hasselhoff and are forming their image our culture with him in mind. Thus, I must ask: Is David Hasselhoff America's tentacle porn?

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February 13, 2006

Geek Love

One of the online comics I read is Ctl-Alt-Del, and today's was one of the geekiest and most romantic things I've ever seen. Start here if you want to see it in context.

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December 20, 2005

Mock the stupid

I recently came across an LJ-community called Mock the Stupid. It's a collection of anecdotes that, well, mock the stupid. Check out my first post: Vegetarian Chicken.

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November 21, 2005

The Pre-Raphaelites (thank you Wikipedia!!)

I've long been a fan of a collection of painters, of a style really, that is referred to as "the Pre-Raphaelites". The thing that always bothered me was I kept wondering just who this Raphael was. What was it about his art that was so stunning and ground-breaking to mark all the artists who preceded him as not artists in their own right, but merely as his precursors? I found this especially troubling because I'd never heard of this Raphael. I mean, I could understand the Pre-Picasso's or the Pre-Michaelangelo's, but what made this guy so special? What made this even more frustrating was that whenever I posed the question to another Pre-Raphaelite fan, they never knew the answer.

Well, on a lark this morning, I looked them up on Wikipedia, and I finally got my answer. It turns out that it was quite the opposite of what the name implies. The Pre-Raphaelites came after Raphael. They were a reform movement attempting to restore to the art the things they felt that Raphael and his contemporaries had driven out. From Wiki:

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (also known as the Pre-Raphaelites) was a group of English painters, poets and critics, founded in 1848 by John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt.

The group's intention was to reform art by rejecting what they considered to be the mechanistic approach adopted by the Mannerist artists who followed Raphael and Michelangelo. They believed that the Classical poses and elegant compositions of Raphael in particular had been a corrupting influence on academic teaching of art. Hence the name "Pre-Raphaelite". In particular they objected to the influence of Sir Joshua Reynolds, the founder of the English Royal Academy of Arts. They called him 'Sir Sloshua', believing that his sloppy technique was a formulaic and clichéd form of academic Mannerism. In contrast they wanted to return to the abundant detail, intense colours, and complex compositions of Quattrocento Italian and Flemish art.

The Pre-Raphaelites have been considered the first avant-garde movement in art, though they have also been denied that status, because they continued to accept both the concepts of history painting and of 'mimesis', or imitation of nature, as central to the purpose of art. However, the Pre-Raphaelites undoubtedly defined themselves as a reform movement, created a distinct name for their form of art, and published a periodical, The Germ, to promote their ideas. Their debates were recorded in the "Pre-Raphaelite Journal".

So, ++good for Wiki.

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November 11, 2005

Huggy Veterans Day

Today is Veteran's Day here in the US, oringally Armistice Day to celebrate the end of World War I. It's a day that vaccilates between somber ceremonies and joyous parades. But this time, I suggest we all celebrate by hugging a veteran today.

There are almost 25 million veterans in the U.S. Go hug one today.

(Alas, I am likely to be chained to my desk all day and will fail to do this, but we'll see. I might escape yet.)

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November 08, 2005

Print on Demand

I ran across a reference to a print-on-demand site this morning, LuLu Publishing. Now, I haven't really researched this area lately, so I don't know if these guys are the best by any means. Still, I'm amazed at how far it's come. About five years ago, I was just becoming aware of this little niche industry, which is becoming far less niche, and at the time, it looked a little iffy on both the price and the quality.

Now, however, it seems that I can have them print me a book, perfect-bound, with my own full-color wrap-around cover design, for not much more than the cost of printing it out at home on my laser printer on standard 8.5x11 paper. It's actually less than the cost of taking the file down to Kinko's and getting it in 8.5x11 spiral bound. And yet it appears to be as good a quality as you'd get from the larger publishing companies.

I begin to see why I hear some authors talking of self-publishing their next books, though I don't know if they'd be using this company. It's not necessarily that they'd make more money this way, though they might, just that many authors quietly talk of how they've been screwed over by publishers, both from bad marketing and how the basic business model of bookstores is frequently fatal to B-list authors.

Of course, the publishing industry isn't all bad. Just like the music industry, it provides a filter which is of at least a modest value, and perhaps more importantly, it provides a good structure for matching authors, editors, artists, and publishing managers. I just wish it didn't abandon the editing process for its A-list authors. (No offense to these fine storytellers, but you phoned in that last book, and your editor should have told you that.) It's just that the business model seems not to be working out that well for many of the authors. It might be ripe for a shift in the next twenty years, but that doesn't mean we'll actually see it or even recognize it until long afterwards.

But I suppose what really prompted this entry is that last year I popped down to Kinko's to get a spiral-bound printout of my NaNoWriMo 2004 output, just to get a printed record of it. (IMO, paper lasts longer than bits.) It cost close to $20. I could have done the LuLu thing for about half that. I'll be remembering that come December 1st.

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October 14, 2005

Boobs for Bourbon St.

Now here's an idea I think we can all get behind. Boobs4BourbonSt.com is asking for two kinds of donations. First, they want you ladies to send in anonymous pictures of your flashed flesh, that's right, your boobs -- beads are optional. Second the want us guys... ok, they want us all, to send donations to some of the accredited charities (Red Cross, Bush-Clinton, etc.) in order to see the boobs.

How much more New Orleans can you get? (Ok, we could toss in corruption and police brutality, but let's hold it at the boobs.)

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October 02, 2005

Xena: Warrior Planet

In an earlier post, I mentioned the discovery of a tenth planet in our solar system. It now seems that it has a moon. But the real newsworthy item is that the pair (planet and moon) are being unofficially referred to as Xena and Gabrielle by the science team.

Can the Luke and Leia binary system be far behind?

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September 30, 2005

Stunning nebula

Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day is particularly good today.

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September 24, 2005

Porn star vs. Pop star

Here's an interesting little quiz: Porn Star vs. Pop Star. You're presented with a series of body shots (faces obscured) and have to determine if it's a porn star or a pop star. I don't know what's scarier, that this is actually a reasonable challenge in our world, or that I got 10 out 10.

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September 11, 2005

Katrina fundraiser

This guys is going to send a buck to the Red Cross for every comment he gets this week. Go ahead and leave a comment. It's for two good causes: Katrina relief and exponential math education.

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September 09, 2005

Fewer Katrina Dead than Feared?

FYI, I just got this off the Reuters feed:

In New Orleans, hopes rose that the number of dead might not be as high as initially predicted. Rescuers were only now beginning a methodical house-by-house search of the city for victims' bodies.

Thousands had been feared trapped in the poor, mainly black blue-collar neighborhoods, where many did not have the means to evacuate ahead of the August 29 storm, when most better-off residents fled.

"There's some encouragement in the initial sweeps. ... The numbers (of dead) so far are relatively minor as compared with the dire predictions of 10,000," Col. Terry Ebbert, director of Homeland Security for the city of New Orleans said at a news conference with other city officials.

They're not giving a number for this lower estimate, but I still think this qualifies as good news. In some corners, I'd been hearing estimates as high as 35,000.

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September 05, 2005

Orfunner

I'm back from my weekend at Orfunner. It was a much more laid back event than Flipside and in some ways more enjoyable, though much less of a spectacle. I took more pictures this time, but I'm not sure how well they turned out yet.

Very, very tired.

More later.

Oh, and my Mid-life Crisis Countdown is now under two years. Woohoo!

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August 29, 2005

Live Strong counterfeiters confess

In an earlier post, I called out the despicable practice of selling counterfeit LIVESTRONG bracelets, a product meant to raise money for Armstrong's cancer charity that in some cases was just lining the pockets of some counterfeiters. Those particular ones were in China, but some local ones have now found genuine trouble with the law.

Six people have pleaded guilty in New York to charges relating to the sale of thousands of phony LiveStrong wristbands.

New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer says the six also have turned over almost 112-thousand dollars to the Lance Armstrong Foundation, which markets the real LiveStrong bands. Authorities say undercover investigators bought a thousand of the bogus wristbands from a Manhattan storefront in March. They say they found 81-thousand more there and at a home in Queens.

The authentic wristbands sell for a dollar each and intended to fund Armstrong's Austin-based foundation, which provides services to cancer patients.

The Austin bicycling great started the group after he defeated cancer and won a record seven Tour de France titles. About 55 million genuine LiveStrong wristbands have been sold since the campaign began in the spring of 2004.

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August 03, 2005

Astronomy Picture of the Day

I believe I've mentioned Astromony Picture of the Day before, but in case you're not grabbing its RSS feed already, at least check out today's picture. It's especially cool.

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July 31, 2005

Planet X!!!

It looks like we've got a tenth planet circling way out there, and it's at least as large as Pluto, probably much bigger. And no, it's not some wacked out relgious cult or desparate SF author making the claim. It was a JPL effort of computer analysis that turned it up.

I'm not that up on my Roman mythology, but who's left for naming planets after? Bacchus, Juno... maybe Proserpine would be more appropriate. Or maybe we'll get to visit Vulcan after all?

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July 27, 2005

A new low for counterfeiters...

While I'm very much opposed to various form of IP piracy and IP theft, this particular bit of counterfeiting is a new low. Here's a story from the WSJ (not sure how long the link will be live):

Mark Cohen, avid cyclist and top U.S. counterfeit fighter in China, has seen a lot of fakes. Fake car windshields, fake drugs, fake Rolex watches, fake Hollywood DVDs. He has seen Chinese companies masquerading, in toto, as American ones.

But what really got him were the knockoff "Livestrong" bracelets that started popping up on the streets here a few months ago. The Texas-based Lance Armstrong Foundation, named for the seven-time Tour de France winner, sells the popular yellow wristbands for $1 a pop to raise money for cancer research.

Slightly off-color versions now go for about half that price in Beijing, with nothing left over for charity. "That, for me, was a new low," says Mr. Cohen, who first saw the knockoffs at Wind Speed, the city's premier bike shop. "Everyone was impressed I had a real one."

That really, really sucks.

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July 26, 2005

Annoying radio ads

I've been listening to a modest amount of radio lately as I drive, and I've run into a couple of ads that have annoying me mildly. Read on for a couple of mini-rants.

Hey, everybody, look at my shiny new medical degree! Let me cut into your face!

There's this ad for a new cosmetic procedure called "thread-lift", and they're calling it the "lunch hour face-lift". Ok, sounds interesting, and quick. A great grind-them-out assembly-line system.

And to prove that the doctor knows what he's doing here, he boasts of having done sixty of them. That's right, not just fifty or fifty-five, but sixty!

Excuse me, but if this is the kind of thing you can crank through in an hour, and you're saying you're super experienced at it, like something you're doing everyday, then shouldn't you be bragging about having done hundreds? Or over a thousand?

Instead, I'm left with the impression that he's been doing this for, golly, two or three whole months! That's who I want to trust my face to.

Oh yeah, that's the kind of physicisist I want pointing a laser at my head!

In an effort to move me away from glasses to laser eye surgery, they're reminding me of how my summer fun is always being ruined by having my glasses fog up everytime I go inside.

Inside? I don't know about anyone else, but my glasses fog up when I go outside. In fact, I'm pretty sure the physics of it requires that in the summer. My glasses are cooled inside in the dry A/C'd air. I then take them OUTside, and the moisture in the warm humid air condenses on my cold glasses.

So, with that grasp of thermodynamics, is this the guy I want to point a laser into my eye?

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July 22, 2005

Missed my Blogiversary!!

Oh man, I just realized that I missed my one-year Blog-anniversary. I'd marked it on my mental calendar for this past Sunday, the 17th, but I forgot. I've had a lot on my mind lately, so I've been forgetting a lot of stuff.

But anyway, I've had this blog up for a year now, with 340 posts and about 6600 visits. Many thanks to Marvin who pointed me towards several resources and to HappyTester who got me started over on LiveJournal almost two years ago.

Well, anyway, not all that much to say about it, but I'd been thinking about it.

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Austin Bay

I added Austin Bay's blog to my sidebar a while ago. He's a journalist/columnist who writes mostly about national security issues. He's also a reservist who has done a tour in Iraq and also been there as an embedded journalist. He tends to write from the right, but since he's also out there on the battlefield, it's clear that this isn't just political posturing.

He just got back from a recent tour of Iraq and Afghanistan and has been blogging up a storm, so I thought I'd point him out. In particular, a recent post points to a story of courage and compassion under fire that highlights the best of our soldiers.

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July 20, 2005

Scotty, Beam Me Up!

James Doohan, a.k.a. Scotty, died this morning.

Starfleet will miss him.

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June 28, 2005

A quick tour through site statistics

Every once in a while I take a quick glance at my site statistics, mostly on the lookout to see if I'm approaching my bandwidth limit. I'm not.

But it also shows up some interesting things. For example:

• The biggest consumer of bandwidth this past month was my explanation of Annakin's immaculate conception, all because I linked to it from one LJ comment.
• Apart from just direct requests, i.e. people hitting the URL directly or by bookmark, some of the most common "referrers" are image search engines. Now, I don't think these are just the indexing bots, since I see those showing up elsewhere in much higher numbers. These are actual click-throughs for people looking for an image. To which I must ask, what images are people searching for and finding on my site?
• I took a quick look through the most common search strings in hopes of solving that mystery and was startled, amazed, and a little disappointed. The current top 5 search terms are: football cheerleader, felching, Colin Powell, Bush Pussy, and male cheerleader. The previous champion, muppet porn, has fallen all the way to number 8.
• I probably need to look at reorganizing some of my category archives, particularly the wordy ones. At present, if you go the Narrative or Politics archive, you get a single, huge page with everything but comments included. I might switch those to only showing what's in the lead-in entry (vs. the extended entry), but I might also want to time-index some of them. Alas, I'm not sure MT supports the time-index in category archives. We'll see.

That's it. I now return you to your previously schedule program: Bush and Colin Powell Felching Cheerleaders.

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June 26, 2005

My mother would be proud...

It's a medium length survey for a weblog study that MIT is doing. The most interesting bit for me was a section on people you know, how you know them, and whether or not you met them online. The interesting thing about it is that while I've been actively using online forums for over twenty years (going all the way back to an active BBS-life in the 80's), I was not able to answer a single one of their questions with, "Yes, I met them online." For someone who uses technology so much, I appear to be rather biased towards the flesh.

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June 15, 2005

How bad can it get? Pretty good, that's how bad.

Here's a recipe from some guys who went to the illogical extremes to answer the question: What is the most delicious worst thing for a human that can be made on a grill?

Check out The Hot Dog Rollup.

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May 31, 2005

Back from Flipside

I'm back from Flipside, and I am tired. I didn't take a lot of pictures, but I did take a few. Madison, Margarita, Lena, etc., if you came this way looking for your photos, email me or comment here, and I'll be sure to send them on their way. I have email for some of you and should be sending them shortly.

Here's one shot, however, that I figure I can share with all:

Thanks to all the rest of the crowd at Inner Stellar High, and I'll be in touch with those that I can.

I'll post something more coherant later. Or not. If you've been to Flipside, you'll understand.

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May 14, 2005

A bottle in front of me...

Those of you familiar with my long battle with Lucasholism already knew that this was going to be a difficult time in my life. Well, I now have a ticket to a Wednesday midnight showing in front of me.

Where's that intervention you promised?!!

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Happy Birthday Marvin!

I just wanted to wish a happy birthday to Marvin, blogger extraordinaire! He is now officially one year closer to asking for that immortality serum.

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May 13, 2005

Have I given up writing for rendering?

Another render... two in one week, but no, I haven't given up writing in favor of rendering stuff. It's just that lately work has been lots of reading docs, writing proposals, etc. At the end of the day, I'm pretty much "written out", so working on visual rendering projects has been more relaxing. I suspect that will slack off once the heavy coding gets going again since that tends to engage my right brain much more.

So anyway, here's my latest offering...

Father, Forgive Me (Click on the thumbnail to see it at full resolution.)

I'd been thinking of some kind of crucifix pose for a few weeks, and this is what I ended up with.

Originally, the figure was going to be holding two katanas, stretched out like that, their blades arcing downwards, but once I got the draft of that, I found that it looked far too martial, as if the figure were preparing to attack.

Plus, it threw off the vertical aspect ratio of the cross, and I couldn't find a good way to lengthen the central line. Then, when comparing the sword-draft with an earlier rough-draft, I found that I like the open hands better. The open, relaxed hands give it much more a feeling of surrender and release that was closer to my original intent.

In other news, I've given MAW the weekend off. She hasn't had a real break from the kids for almost two years for various reasons. But this weekend, she's off in a hotel, reading a book and ordering room service. I would have done it last weekend for Mother's Day, but I was out of town.

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May 11, 2005

Exercise fights depression?

I ran across this article in the Wall Street Journal the other day, and a web search found the same thing in PsycPort. Basically, some evidence is showing that regular exercise fights clinical depression.

...an altogether different treatment that shows tremendous promise in alleviating depression has gone largely unnoticed. That treatment is exercise. A growing body of medical literature, including at least three 2005 studies, is showing that aerobic routines as well as weight lifting are effective at combating depression. In addition to the famous "runner's high," or endorphin surge that provides a temporary mood lift following a workout, the studies show that there is a round-the-clock relief that sets in several weeks after the establishment of a regular exercise routine.

A study in the January issue of the Journal of Preventive Medicine suggested that a half-hour a day of exercise six days a week - which is the amount the federal government recommends for all Americans - might be ideal. Comparing two groups of depressed patients, the study found that the group that performed only 80 minutes of exercise a week received little to no mental-health benefit. But the three-hour-a-week group had a substantial reduction in symptoms. The study concluded "the response and remission rates in the (three-hours-per-week) group are comparable to other depression treatments, such as medication or cognitive behavioral therapy."

I mention this because a number of my friends have been battling depression for some time.

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May 09, 2005

10 Days and Counting

It's now only ten days until Revenge of the Sith, and the pre-release spoilers are flowing. As such, I'm withdrawing a bit from my usual internet reading because I hate spoilers.

[It's not so much that I love surprises, just that the storyteller has crafted the story to reveal things to you in a specific order. That's what telling the story is all about, and I believe in letting someone tell the story they way they wrote it.]

Basically, George Lucas has only one more chance to make it up to me for everything from Ewoks to Jar-Jar to mitichlorians, and I'm not going to let some overzealous reviewer mess that up.

Hence, if there's something you really need me to know in a timely fashion, don't rely on your blog/LJ to communicate it. Just email me instead.

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May 04, 2005

Take me out to the ballgame

I'm enjoying a nice, quiet, rainy San Francisco morning out here, and in about ten minutes, we're heading out to the baseball game.

At least we'll be in one of those luxury boxes eating and drinking all day. Some of us might even go over to the window to see if they're playing.

The real shame is that I'll be there, in Oakland, in the Colliseum, the very heart of the Raider Nation... and it's baseball season.

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May 01, 2005

Off to California

Blogging will be light for the next week. I'm off to my California office for business. If anyone wants to visit MAW while I'm gone, I'm sure she would appreciate the company.

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April 29, 2005

Funny Quote

Just passing it on:

We like the often misunderstood European style whether it is in photography, film making or art in general. When Europeans do weird, it seems like art. When Americans do weird, Michael Jackson happens.

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April 25, 2005

AggieCon and my Secret Project

I spent the weekend in College Station for AggieCon 35(?), and this time I entered the art show. That was my secret project sucking up all my free time. I entered five pieces but only sold one. Still, it was enough encouragement to try again in the future.

Here are the five pieces I entered. Click the image to see a high resolution version:

Two Sides This is the first piece I did, and I posted it here before when I did it. This is also the one that sold.

Homesick I travel for business a lot, and what I miss most are my kids. Yes, even more than MAW. . The Day Her Replacement Arrived This one originated with a family in the background and the robot being all left out, but I ended up with this somewhat bleaker and sinister (and a little more humorous) take. A long time ago in a bedroom far, far away... I've always had my suspicions about Anakin's immaculate conception. Guardian Someone crossed the wrong guardian angel.

You can look at some of my other stuff at my Renderosity gallery.

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April 20, 2005

Question for you English majors out there...

I've got a question that's been bugging me for a while, one of those "I used to know this... really."

In the classic tragedy structure (I'm thinking Shakespeare, etc.), there are some common elements. I seem to recall that there's something called the "tragic flaw" in the main character... stuff like that.

My question is about the point of no return. In a tragedy, we see that things are getting into trouble, but for a while there's still hope that it might turn out for the best. Then there comes a point, an event, after which the tragic end is considered unavoidable. Typically this is around act 3 of 5 or 2 or 3. For example, in Hamlet, this would come around the "To be or not to be" speech, when Hamlet could have has his revenge but didn't, or in Romeo & Juliet when Romeo showed there could be peace between the two houses, but then Tibalt killed Mercutio, sending things out of control. Anyway, I recall that this point had a name, specific to the context of a tragedy's structure. What was the name of that point?

Anyone?

(I'm still geeking out so badly over the coming Revenge of the Sith that I'm wondering where this point will come for Anakin.)

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April 19, 2005

I am officially Lucas' bitch again

Oh man, I'm off the wagon in a big way. I just spent twenty minutes watching Revenge of the Sith trailers, and I'm actually now counting down the days until its release.

I just hope someone is there to help me pick up the pieces on May 20.

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April 06, 2005

Wiki After Dark

I ran across this link somewhat at random, but here's Wiki After Dark, a Wikipedia clone filled with "adult" advice, on everything from learning to deep throat to special exercises you can do to improve the quality of sex. Clearly, the site is still in the early stages and doesn't cover such wonderful topics as felching or muppet porn.

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April 04, 2005

Bloggers bypass gag order

Here's a couple of links to an interesting blog-legal development. Apparently there's a major political scandal underway in Canada (first I've heard of it here under my rock), and there's a gag order preventing the Canadian press for reporting much on it during the investigation. That order, however, has not prevented an American blogger from publishing information from what he considers to be a reliable (and leaky) source, nor has it prevented Canadians from discussing the issue on American-hosted blogs.

Check it out: Beat to Quarters, Part 1 and Part 2.

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March 30, 2005

RSS Package Tracking via Bloglines

I'm waiting for a software package to arrive, and I just got my packing number yesterday. Then this morning, Bloglines announced to me that they can track packages via an RSS feed. I tried it, and it works. Very slick.

But mostly it reminded me of how MAW and I compared package tracking to little blogs for boxes. After that comparison, I wrote a little blog while waiting for my camera last summer. Here's a repost to get it into my new blog:

And so I present, the short blog of a package called 650152785933.

July 13, 2004, Tuesday, 6:44pm

Wow, here I am ready to start my trip. I'm all packed up, and I'm even bringing my new camera. I can't quite see my ticket, but it's tucked safely in my breast pocket. At least the ticket agent was nice, and it looks like I'll be taking the FedEx shuttle bus to the airport. Of course, here in Harahan, Louisiana, that's a bit of a drive.

9:13pm:

Ok... a little hitch. I have to wait for a bit of a transfer, but there's lots of other packages around to talk to. One of them is even going to Paris. Ooo, I hope I get to go to Paris someday. Ok, here we go again.

11:21pm:

If I read the signs right, I'm in Kenner, Lousiana now. Still no sign of the airport. I guess we're just going to be taking the bus for part of this trip, but it looks like maybe we're going to have just hole up here for the night.

July 14, 2004, Wednesday, 5:59am

All right! A fresh cup of coffee, and we're on our way. I didn't get a seat next to that cute Paris box this time, but this crate's going to California. He's got his surfboard and everything!

9:30am

Wow, Memphis! Maybe we'll get to out to Graceland! Hmmm, but it looks like we've got to hang out a while in... well, it looks about as organized as baggage claim. I was smart though, cause I only did carry-on.

3:29pm

Ok, I've got my boarding pass, and I'm getting onto my flight. It's a short hop to Austin, TX. My seat's a little closed in though, and none of the windows are open. I must be flying on Funsaver fares or something.

5:54

Damn but Austin is hot today. It's like 100 degrees out here, even hotter in the shuttle bus. Still, Austin, live music capital of the world! That should make up for missing Graceland.

9:11

Baggage claim took forever again, and me with just my carry-on! It's too late to get a hotel now, so it looks like we're just gonna hunker down here for the night.

July 15, 2004, Thursday, 6:34am

Man, I just gotta say, FedEx has the freshest coffee in the world. I'm feeling on top of the world. Plus, it's at least a little cooler in the bus this morning.

8:02am

Ok, we're pulling out at last. I wonder if we'll get to see the capitol building?

11:05am

Finally, it looks like I'm here. A bit more rural than the brochure suggested, but it's nice. Big open sky, pretty lake... I'm glad I brought my camera. And hey! This totally hot, red-headed chick just signed for me. Wow. Maybe I'll get to take her picture if you know what I mean. (wink, wink)

11:45am

Hey, who's this guy? Is he the red-head's brother? No! Oh my god -- it's the jealous husband! He's standing over me with this strange gleam in his eye, and... and... he's got a KNIFE IN HIS HAND!!!

AAAAGGGH!!! I'm being gutted here! Someone call 911!!

And now, he's reaching inside... I don't know how much more of this I can take! Where's that travel agent!

My camera! That knife-wielding hoodlum is stealing my camera! My brand new camera!

12:02pm

My life is ruined. Here I lie, a mere shell of my former self, tossed aside like so much garbage.

I so wanted to see Paris.

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March 29, 2005

Blog! Of! Fortune!!!

I just ran across the blog of Pat Sajak of Wheel of Fortune fame, and it surprised me. First, it's not a "look at me!" blog, but a "let me speak" blog -- at least the segregated "Sajak says..." political section. Second, he's both a celebrity and a conservative. Third, for someone whose job qualifications seem to be a winning smile and a strong spinning arm, he knows how to string them thar words together fairly well.

I particularly enjoyed his piece on celebrities and politics.

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March 28, 2005

More linky goodness

Passing on more links:

The Mission Beach Sandman who's mission in life is now to make sand paintings at Mission Beach. (Hat tip to the cheese mistress.)

Astronomy Picture of the Day... here's a neat one in particular. It even comes in a convenient RSS feed.

This interesting photo gallery of people's "transparent" computer monitors. (No, they're not really transparent, but it's an interesting effect.)

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February 24, 2005

So bad it stings...

An acquaintance of mine is rising in the world of SFWA, and one of his more recent projects was a sting operation played out on a vanity publisher. The publisher (PublishAmerica) claims that they are not a vanity publisher. Instead, they claim they are looking for “that one special author who is going to make our day.”

To test this, several SFWA authors put together a novel so astoundingly bad that it could suck the quality out of any library, a virtual black hole of bad writing.

It contains such gems as

She struggled to remember, to make her mind vomit forth the information she knew it had digested at some point.

Or...

He sat stonily and goggled explicitly and gaped impassively as if he were a fish precipitously extracted from its appropriately aqueous environment.

And such grammatical contortions as

Although her eyes opened, crinkling her short hair trigger. What could be she purred and soon they make such a minute observation?

Once completed, they sent it off to PublishAmerica for publication. It was immediately accepted.

Read more of the backstory and the aftermath once the sting was revealed.

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February 17, 2005

Personal Roundup

No great procolamations or punditry today. I'm a little under the weather and decided it was time for a roundup of personal points.

• Tommy's health continues to improve. It's now been over a month since his last serious vomit session. He weighs over twenty pounds now, and is walking fairly well. Also, feeding him is no longer quite the battle it once was since he eagerly accepts most of it and is even feeding himself to a large degree.
• I finally reorganized my neighborhood's website into a MovableType blog. It has two kinds of content, really: reference and ongoing. Trying to manage the ongoing content (news, events, etc.) by hand had become too much of a hassle, so I figured it would be better to push the reference content into the blog and then let it do it's normal thing for the ongoing content.

  I did pull a few neat tricks that I haven't done here. Notably, I treated different categories very differently. The main page is not a full mix of categories. Instead, it shows two distinct sections of "News" items of the last 120 days, and "Events" items that are dated in the future. Even the category archives had distinct formats. A few of those tricks may migrate back here, but I'm still experimenting.

  I don't want to link to it from here because I don't want to advertise my physical address on this site, but if you're a fellow MT-blogger and want to see a few tricks, I'll point you that way.

• I'm thinking seriously about getting involved in some kind of land deal for Flipside. I'm still running the numbers for feasibility, so no committments yet.
• My dad's health seems to be improving. This recent chemo pill seems to be doing the trick. The big tumor is now too small to detect by touch, and the little ones had already disappeared on the last CAT scan. They can't do another CAT scan for about a month or two due to the amount of radiation involved.

  He's still recovering from the pneumonia, but he's off the chemo pill for now and getting stronger. The last scan did show something on his stomach, and they're going to do a biopsy on that to see what it is. It could be a minor ulcer for all they know. But all in all, he's improving and starting to talk about making another trip here to see his grandchildren.

• I've gotten more serious about doing that comic strip. I've registered my domain -- no, it's not muppetporn.com -- and figured out how to structure the site for easy maintenance. I've also scripted out about thirty strips, almost all of them panel-by-panel.

  The main problem, as usual, is that I can't draw worth a damn, but I intend to use the computer to generate my graphics for me. I know the Poser package fairly well, but I need to learn a few time-saving tricks. In particular, the comic is the perfect application for saving off established characters in different versions (different outfits, hairstyles, physical conditions, etc.) as well as various settings (the diner, the living room, etc.) and then just mixing them up for a quick render. Alas, I haven't learned how to save-off these setups.

  I was thinking of it in terms of a 3x/week thing, not a daily. Once I see how long it takes to make a strip, I'll have a better idea. My time is very limited, so I have to do this "on the cheap" as far as time goes. It's just that I keep running into little short gags or observations that would be great in a comic strip form, but just don't fit into a more general blog. Anyway, if I can create the first month or so without pulling my hair out, I'll put it up. Hopefully, I can stay sufficiently ahead of the game so that it's never a rush to do tomorrow's strip. That's something I definitely don't need.

That's it for now.

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February 11, 2005

Second thoughts on tit-for-tat vs. master-slave

In an earlier post, I shared news that the reigning champion of the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma problem, Tit-for-Tat, had lost to a new Master-Slave strategy, and then I opined that this bode ill for society at large.

If carried into the real world (as tit-for-tat was), it would imply that the path towards greatest community efficiency is for most of us to become utter slaves to an annointed few, with those annointed cannibalizing their own ranks when the slaves were depleted.
...
However, I do not think that individuals will volunarily subordinate their self-interest to play the role of slave in this master-slave strategy.

But then I realized that we were already pursuing the Master-Slave strategy, though we more commonly refer to it as "breeding". In this strategy, its adherants are divided into two groups, parents and children, and they then pursue the Master-Slave strategy. Despite the common teenage complaint, it is the parents who have assumed the role of slave and the children who ironically have assumed the role of master.

Think about it. A parent willing makes great "economic" sacrifices for his child. This includes cash, of course, but it also extends to such intangibles as time, services, and physical health. In game terms, the parent almost always "cooperates".

Meanwhile, the child makes very few to no contributions along these lines, providing negligible income or services. This lessens as the child grows into adulthood (i.e. household chores), but it never comes close to evening out (i.e. college tuition). Thus, in game terms, the child almost always "defects".

And despite my assertion that humanity has too much self-interest to voluntarily subordinate themselves to such a strategy, it appears that billions are doing so, and most of those currently enjoying the "master" status are in fact looking forward to taking on their role as "slaves". With about six billion adherants, this strategy is serving our genes very well.

I guess it just took a month of sleep deprivation to drive this one home.

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February 09, 2005

Tom-Walk

Tommy is walking!

(He still thinks he has to hold on to something, but as you can see, he's easily fooled.)

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January 27, 2005

Texas Flu Shots

I just ran across a local article:

The shortage is over and everyone over the age of six is encouraged to get their flu shot. The announcement from Texas State Health Services ends months of limiting it to just senior citizens and other high-risk people. Texas becomes the 19th state to lift those restrictions.The flu season runs through May. so it's not too late to get the flu vaccine and still have it do some good.

Considering how sick I've been the last few months (but not yet with the flu), I may very well do this.

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January 23, 2005

Comic Conpiracy?

This is mostly for you folks in the Austin area who subscribe to the Austin American Statesman, but the rest of you will still appreciate the irony.

Have you noticed that the comics have been getting smaller and smaller over the years? Have you also noticed that the Sunday comics page seems to attract ads and flyers like leeches on a hemopheliac? You have noticed how the these tiny comics are getting harder to read with each millimeter lost?

Now, what are those ads for?

Eyeglasses and Lasik surgery.

I leave the conspiracy theories to the astute reader.

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January 21, 2005

High School

I just skimmed an article by Paul Graham (of Bayesian Spam Filtering fame) giving advice to high school students on finding their way: What You'll Wish You'd Known. The article looked midly interesting, but the real gem was the final footnote:

Your teachers are always telling you to behave like adults. I wonder if they'd like it if you did. You may be loud and disorganized, but you're very docile compared to adults. If you actually started acting like adults, it would be just as if a bunch of adults had been transposed into your bodies. Imagine the reaction of an FBI agent or taxi driver or reporter to being told they had to ask permission to go the bathroom, and only one person could go at a time. To say nothing of the things you're taught. If a bunch of actual adults suddenly found themselves trapped in high school, the first thing they'd do is form a union and renegotiate all the rules with the administration.

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January 13, 2005

Moss mock moon merits mulct

I just missed Randy Moss' mock moon in the Vikings-Packers game this weekend, but the NFL decided it was worth a $10,000 fine.

The league didn't want to hit Moss with a major fine or suspension out of concern that such a move would simply bring more attention to an ugly incident, one that NFL execs hope just goes away.

On the one hand, $10,000 for pretending to moon someone is a lot of money. On the other hand, this kind of thing is getting out of hand, and I don't think the Green Bay fans are going to see this as anything more than a slap on the wrist. They may even look back on it the way we Cowboys fans remember Terrell Owens' little stunt on the sacred ground of the center-field star. From the point of view of this Cowboys fan, that one has not just gone away.

Personally, I think the $10K is too light. Maybe going too heavy-handed without prior warning would not have been fair either, but I think the league needs to make it clear that these kinds of hijinks are UNacceptable and will be punished severely -- think in terms of multi-game suspensions, not just dollars. (My favorite punishment for this kind of post-score incident would be for the officials to erase the score and hand the ball over.) Otherwise, I fear it's going to get worse... a lot worse.

If it does, someday a player like Owens or Moss will run into a fan like me... drunk, angry, and carrying a baseball bat with a grudge. I'm not really a violent man, but I know some Cowboys fans who would love to do some "reconstructive surgery" on Owens' knees. I'm not trying to pave their way with advanced forgiveness, but the league needs to come to grips with the same problem facing criminal law through the ages. Lax enforcement breeds vigilante justice.

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January 11, 2005

Star Trek fans with WAAAAY too much time on their hands...

I ran across Star Trek New Voyages today, where some fans seem to be creating seasons four and five of Star Trek (the original series), with new actors in place of Kirk, Spock, etc. It's strictly not-for-profit, and I guess Paramount hasn't sicked the Jem'hadar lawyers on them yet.

It looks like they've only got two episodes so far, and I went ahead and downloaded them. I skimmed one and watched the other, and... and... you know, they didn't suck all that much.

First of all, the acting is bad, though I've seen bits of Xena, Hercules, or Andromeda that aren't much better. Clearly, these aren't pro's. They're fans. However, one episode did have cameo's from two pro's, including one reprising his original role as Commodore Decker from "The Doomsday Machine".

Second, for an amateur production by fans, the sets are amazingly authentic. The attention to detail was phenomenal, especially on the bridge. All the controls and panels were spot-on matches, and I've watched enough Old Trek to know what I'm talking about.

Third... did I mention the bad acting? Oh, ah yes, well, the cinematography was a little weak as well. I mean, it wasn't all jittery or out of focus, but several scenes were shot with one camera panning that IMO should have been shot with multiple cameras/angles with cuts between characters. Also, the lighting was amateurish at times. Some shots showed harsh shadows behind characters, where a good studio lighting system would have had much better fill lights.

But finally, Gene Roddenberry would have painted himself green and donned that Orion slave outfit to have had the effects that these guys did. It's amazing what 30+ years of CGI advancement can do on a budget. For the most part, they matched the classic look of the effects, except instead of looking cheap, they looked good. My only complaint was that the animator got a little too jazzy in some of the starship movements in combat. Yes, I know it's not a model on a stick, but it's not Luke Skywalker at the helm either, ok?

Still, if you're a fan, it's worth checking out.

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January 10, 2005

Swag Among Sweg

For grins, I set up a shop at Cafe Press:

Swag Among Sweg

I'm really just using it for one-off's of stuff for me and my kids, but why pass up the opportunity to poison enlighten a few other minds?

It's seductively easy. I spent more time in Photoshop crafting an image than I spent creating the actual shop and physical item. I cannot yet speak to the actual quality, but I'm checking them out.

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January 06, 2005

Goodbye Garfield!

The L.A. Times has dropped "Garfield" from its comics to make room for new, fresh talent. While some might decry this as an attack on a classic, I applaud it. In the last decade, "Garfield" has become so repetitive. Basically, it's the same four jokes over and over:

1. Garfield is fat and lazy.
2. Jon is a loser.
3. Odie is stupid.
4. Uh... did I mention Garfield is fat?

But heaven forbid we cancel it! After all, "It's Garfield!"

Blech!

(Alas, I could make the same complaint about "Cathy", "Ziggy", and "Hagar", but they don't have cats.)

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January 01, 2005

Christmas/New Year's/Tommy Wrapup

Just a little wrap-up of little things over the course of the week.

Christmas:

• I received opposing Star Wars gifts: a copy of the Star Wars Bastardization Special Edition DVD's and a "Han Shot First" t-shirt.
• We're still opening the kids' presents. Everyone wants to buy presents for little kids, and with three, the loot adds up. We opened about half on Christmas morning, but the kids became overwhelmed by all the new stuff. The rest are being opened at a manageable pace.
• A big winner was a harmonica in Sammy's stocking. He hasn't figured out how to use it yet, but he keeps giving it to me to play it. That part is great, because I'm having so much fun with it, I wish I'd gotten one in my stocking. The downside is that he's also shoving every other toy at my mouth in the hopes that I can cause it to make wonderful noises.
• With one thing and another, I'd put off my Christmas shopping until almost the last minute, so I ran out to hit several stores on December 23rd. The crowds and traffic were about as bad as I expected, but I still did pretty well. The really annoying part came halfway through when a purchase at Linen's and Things triggered a call to the credit card authorization center. No, I hadn't hit my credit limit or anything. Rather, their computer had flagged my card for suspicous activity, i.e. last-minute Christmas shopping. :P
• Of course, the best part of it all was that I had my family home for Christmas. In that respect, the best present came early when I got to tuck Tommy into his own bed on the 22nd.

New Year's:

• MAW is going to watch UT in the Rose Bowl this afternoon, so I'm going to have to be Mr. Mom and do my best to keep the kids from interfering with that. In return, MAW gave me the morning to piddle away in my office without kids. Thus the surge of entries. I just hope I can convince them all to do something calm and quiet after their naps. Yes, I know. I'm doomed.
• Seriously discussing the whole New Year Resolutions thing for a moment, I've taken a page from the annual performance review at work and dealt with the Resolutions in a useful way. For the last few years, I've made my resolutions not as the typical "I need to change my entire life" cry for help that lasts two weeks but more of a "these are my performance goals for the coming year" approach. I make sure they're specific and measureable, and I keep tabs on them over the course of the year. I was running in the low 40% ratings for a few years, but for the last two years I've broken through the 50% barrier. This year I hope to break through 60%.
• For the first time in several years, I did not get an Olivia calendar this year. Lately, Olivia (or at least her calendars) has been on a Betty Page fixation. It's not that the pieces aren't well done, but I never found Betty Page to be that sexy, at least not for twelve months a year. I've decided to let Janesko fill the cheesecake slot in my calendar rotation this year.

Tommy:

• Tommy continues to improve. We had one bit of projectile vomiting on Monday, but only the occasional bits of spit-up since then. Even that's been cutting back. More impressive is that he appears to be much more energetic now and is now exploring more.
• We got a scale on Tuesday, and we're taking twice-daily measurements. Kudos to Special Addition Maternity for opening half an hour early to rent it to me.
• Since we now control both the schedule of his feedings and the timing of when the weight is taken, we've been able to damp out a lot of the measurement noise that we were getting at the hospital. They were taking one measurement a day with no correlation to his intake or diaper schedule, and even then they weren't always sure he was being weighed on the same scale. At home, we're weighing him just after waking up (pre-breakfast, post-overnight diaper) and just before bed (post-meal). That gives us a low weight and a high weight, and we're using the average as his weight of the day. With enough data, we'll be able to toss in some moving averages and trend-lines for the weight gain. The goal is for him to gain 30g a day, and at that rate, he'll be a black hole by his birthday. Er... make that 30 grams a day, not 30g. Anyway, so far, so good, but we don't have a long enough history to say for sure.
• We still don't have much of a diagnosis for what caused the problem in the first place, only a mild to moderate case of reflux. He's taking Prevacid for that, and it seems to be helping. Kudos to the compounding pharmacist at Quick Pharmacy in Round Rock who bumped me to the head of the list in order for Tommy to get his medicine on schedule. A tip to the rest of you: if you've been given some medicine in a hospital and also a prescription to continue it after you leave, get the hospital to fill the prescription. You never know when they've prescribed something so rare or unusual that only three or four pharmacists in the city can fill it.

And that's it. Enjoy whatever break you got.

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December 30, 2004

Tsunami Relief

The latest death toll from the December 26 earthquake and tsunami is 120,000. At the rate it's climbing and with the high risk of disease in the disaster area, it might reach as high as 200,000 before it's over.

While nothing we do can replace these lives, we can help the survivors stay healthy and rebuild. President Bush has promised $35 million as a down payment on aid, but we all know it's going to take more. Write your Congress critters if you want to spur more government action, but you can take some direct action as well. While the Red Cross is far from my favorite NGO/charity, in international disaster relief, they're the main player and will use any donations pretty well.

If you want to make a Red Cross donation, Amazon has set up a page to make it easy. When I first saw it yesterday it was at $900,000. When I looked this morning, it was at $4,279,442 and climbing, and that was from only 71,000 donations -- about $60 per donor. Given how many of us do our Christmas shopping there, hitting ten times that amount does not seem unrealistic.

So, if this seems reasonable to you, give, and spread the word.

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December 22, 2004

YATU finale

My family is home.

Merry Christmas!

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December 21, 2004

YATU redux

Tommy lost about 90g on Monday, but after the 300g gain on Sunday, the docs were forgiving. They'll want to see a gain on Tuesday, but I'm worried. The feedings on Monday and Tuesday have been getting harder, so I fear we may see another slight loss on the Wednesday morning measurement. Even then, I may push to have him discharged. All we're using the hospital for at this point is the daily weighings, and I believe we might have better luck getting Tommy to eat more in the familiar environment of home. He can get weighed at the doctor's office, or if nothing else, I believe I can rent an appropriate scale from a medical supply company.

I just want to bring my family home.

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December 20, 2004

YATU: Yet Another Tommy Update

All around good news this time. Tommy gained 300 grams Sunday, so he didn't have to get a feeding tube today. If he gains at least 30 grams (yes, just 10% of Sunday's gain), both today and tomorrow, he might be released on Wednesday. My only worry on the measurements is that the required gain is in the noise. A single wet diaper constitutes a 30 to 90 gram loss, so we have to shoot for a 100-200 gram gain. As a result, we're feeding him like crazy with six daily meals in the 175-250 gram range. He's starting to resist, and I sometimes think that each spoonful is offering the stuffed Monty Python diner a "waaafer thin mint".

Also, both MAW and Sammy have gotten over their fevers. She spent about five hours down at the Brackenridge ER, but I think it was good for her. If nothing else, it was five hours that she could just relax, knowing that I was taking care of Tommy. (Cue the cries of "My God -- Dan can't take care of a baby!!!")

So, it's back to the hospital tomorrow for at least the morning. That way I can be there when the doctors make their rounds. If all is on track, I can then pop back to the office in the afternoon.

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December 19, 2004

More Tommy news...

Tommy got off the IV late Saturday, and with some medication has been keeping food down, so we’re doing our best to fill him up with food with a target of 1600 calories a day. (I believe sedentary adults are supposed to target 2000 calories.) The problem is that just overnight w/o the IV, he lost a little weight, so we’ve had to really push the foods to try to get him to hold his weight or gain weight. If he keeps losing weight with just eating (no IV, etc.), then he cannot come home. The big question is going to be what his weight is Monday morning. If he has gained weight, then we might be able to bring him home as early as Monday or Tuesday. At least that’s what I’m guessing. The hospital staff has been very non-committal. However, if he has lost more weight, they’re going to put him on a feeding tube and will likely keep him in the hospital through Christmas. I’m going to try to get down there very early in the morning to make sure he gets another good meal before the official weight check.

The big wrinkle to all this is that MAW, who has been staying with Tommy at the hospital, is now quite sick. She went in with symptoms of a head-cold, but is now coughing a lot and was running a 103 fever as I left tonight. I have similar symptoms, but much lighter, and my temp is yet to crack 100, so I’m crossing my fingers and taking lots of drugs. I’m hoping it’s the flu because all the kids have had the flu vaccine. On the other hand, Sammy (our eldest) has been running a fever all weekend, so it could be something else entirely.

The main problem is that MAW is now too weak to really manage Tommy’s care and feedings. When I asked her for an update this morning, she told me that a doctor had come by but she couldn’t remember what the doctor had said. So, I’m going to need to spend the bulk of Monday at the hospital. If nothing else, it will let MAW go down to the ER to see a doctor for herself. She has a history of lung problems, but she won’t leave Tommy without me there.

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December 18, 2004

Another Tommy Update

It was a mixed day for Tommy. He had to go back on the IV for a while in the morning but was then taken off. The new IV location is in his scalp, and he's not trying to pull at it, so at least he's not in restraints anymore. That alone has significantly improved his disposition.

The problem is that they want to get a lot of calories into him, and he's refusing the high-calorie formula. A good sign is just how much strength he has to fight taking the formula. It took both MAW and I to even attempt it, and I don't think we got more than a single cc into him. It's not just us giving up easily. A nurse had tried to get it to him and gave up with the comment, "If the doctor wants him to take this formula, she can come give it to him herself."

The good news is that the docs say he's stable enough to just try to feed him what he usually eats and see how it goes. Kimm had been visiting, and she went out to buy some of Tommy's food, and he ate about 140 calories worth of fruit and rice cereal and kept it down for at least two hours. I'm presuming he kept it down permanently, but that's all the information I have. MAW is very tired, so I'm trying not to call when she might be sleeping.

Today I brought Catherine and Grandpa with me, and it was good for her to see her mommy and her brother, but she's too much of a handful to keep track of in that environment. I'll be going back tomorrow, but I'll be going alone.

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December 17, 2004

Tommy Update

My son Tommy is now off the IV, which I'm interpreting as good news. There's still no word on when he'll be released or even what conditions they're waiting for, but at least they're going to see how he fares on just trying to eat.

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December 16, 2004

Tommy is in the hospital

My 14-month-old son Tommy is in the hospital. He's been vomitting off and on for a little over two months, and it eventually got so bad that he became significantly dehydrated and also lost about two pounds.

He is now stable, though he's still weak and very uncomfortable with the IV and the restraints that are keeping him from pulling it out. We're now going through a series of tests to diagnose what's causing the vomitting, since no one thinks it's just a persistant stomach virus anymore. I suspect he'll be in the hospital until they get a diagnosis, and that will take at least a few days.

Any of you Austinites (downtowners especially) who want to visit MAW at the hospital, get hold of me for the particulars.

For the rest of you, any prayers, mojo, or cosmic influence would be appreciated.

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December 13, 2004

Thank you faithful readers...

I just wanted to thank my faithful readers, who in five short months have made DanAmongDen.Net the 146,486th most popular site on the web.

Oh boy... 146,486th. I feel so... so... man, you guys suck. Couldn't you at least have gotten me into the top 100,000? Jesus H "Super Savings" Christ! I ought to fire you all. [Note: this paragraph uses the <sarcasm> tag which is not supported by all browsers.]

Hat tip to Adam for passing it on.

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December 09, 2004

Lego Clock

Here's a fellow who's made a 7-foot tall grandfather clock completely out of Lego parts.

And it works! It uses a weight driven pendulum to drive the gears and can run for about 13 hours before the weight needs to be reset.

Be patient. It looks like the site is being Slashdotted.

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December 08, 2004

Zoom Quilt

Here's a really interesting art project called the Zoom Quilt. You can zoom in forever, seeing a range of images that look like a mix of Escher, Dali, and a pint of absinthe. Here's a captured, lo-res sample:

(another hat-tip to The Keeper)

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December 03, 2004

Cluster Ballooning -- Un-Fucking-Believable

Remember the tale of the guy hooking helium balloons up to his lawn chair?

Well, these folks have turned it into a sport. Check it out.

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November 30, 2004

#*(@&*ing Spammers

Due to an overactive and persistant spammer, I'm closing comments to all but registered users until I get a comment spam solution in place.

Update: I installed a security code script in my comments pages, so now you have to enter a 6-digit code to post. Sorry for the extra hassle, but after getting 400 comments about online Texas Hold'em in 24 hours, I decided it was time for the big stick.

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November 29, 2004

NaNoWriMo, Complete & Post-Morten

Well, it's a day early, but at 50,029 words, I'm declaring my NaNoWriMo effort complete. I have confirmed my count with the official site, and you can view my profile for a little out-take. I've even downloaded my little "NaNoWriMo Winner" icon and included it in the sidebar.

Read on for a post-mortem, complete with a pair of charts.

Here's a chart of my progress throughout the month.

As you can see, I was behind for most of the month. I started off with a pretty nasty cold, and then there were the big crunch times as work every Thursday and Friday. Fortunately, I was able to pour it on over the Thanskgiving break. I had suspected I would not be able to but this turned out not to be the case.

That chart provided a bit of motivation, but it was purely of the stick variety with no real carrot. All it showed me was that I was behind, but it provided little real feedback on whether or not I was on track to catch up in time. About a week ago, I added a column to my spreadsheet to compute my "moving goal". That is, given how much I've written so far, how many words must I write each day to finish on time?

That turned out to be a very useful and motivating chart. While just having the current value is useful, it was very motivating seeing what the future values would be, i.e. if I stop writing right now, what will tomorrow's moving goal be? Likewise, if I write nothing tomorrow, what will the moving goal be the day after? And after that? And so on. Had I done this on Day 1, it would have ended with a moving goal of writing 50,000 words on Day 30. Thus, any progress I made lowered those future goals visibly. Of course, to make it a bit more readable, I clamped it between 0 and 5000 words. So anyway, here's the chart as it stands at the end of the project.

As you can see, instead of rocketing up at the end, it now dives to zero at the end, since my moving goal for tomorrow is zero. I'm done! The really motivating thing about it was seeing very clearly what I knew intellectually, that every day I beat the moving goal, I forced the purple curve downwards. The message was clear: Work a little longer today, and tomorrow will be easier. You can also see how my cold at the beginning and the two crunch periods at work forced the purple curve up. Those were somewhat unavoidable, so I don't know if having the chart early on would have helped me get in the words.

Since I’m using some of the metric-styles we use at work, I figure I’ll also include the usual post-mortem of what worked and what didn’t.

What Worked:

• Dolly Madison donuts at half-past-midnight.


• The habit of keeping metrics gave me a realistic view of my situation throughout the month.


• Using bracketed notes at the end of the file for ideas for the next scene(s). This would look like:

  [dinner w/ Sally, short talk about party, then to the art show, meet other welder, talk about stuff, get ditched by Sally]

  That allowed me to have an idea some near-future scene and get it out of my head without losing it. I would also use this to flesh out the rest of a scene if I had to quit in the middle. Then, when I came back later, I was much less likely to face the writer’s block of staring at the blank page, because I had notes on what I was supposed to write next.

• Building a file with names, places, etc. to refer back to. Unfortunately, I tended to only add items to the file after I’d had to go back through the text to look them up once or twice.


• Avoiding contractions. This was accidental, but it did boost my word count. I have some characters who, for valid story reasons, needed to have a very formal, stilted conversational style at times. While everyone else made liberal use of contractions and slang, these folks would avoid them when they needed to speak in that style. After a while, “it is” vs. “it’s” starts adding up.


• Getting in a short session in the morning. When I really started making progress towards the end, I would do a quick session before 9am. I’d only get 200-500 words out of it, but it made a big difference when I would sit down in the evening and know that I’d already taken a bite out of the daily goal.

What Sucked:

• Watching my weight go up with my word count.
• Knowing that I had to make some progress every, single, FUCKING DAY!!
• Not getting to read. One of the big things I gave up this month was my hour of reading before bed.
• Not getting to see MAW. One of the other big things I gave up this month was spending time with MAW in the evenings after putting the kids to bed. Instead, it was right back to the NaNoWriMo mines.
• Not getting to blog. Man, but it was hard holding my political tongue during some of the military/political/social events in the last month. Watch out, because as soon as I no longer hate my keyboard, I’ll be coming back with both barrels.
• Going to sleep at 1-2am and getting up at 7am.... for a month.
• Missing Ken on Jeopardy, though that had more to do with work than writing.

What I thought would suck, but didn’t:

• I actually managed to do this without it impacting my work schedule. I thought it would, but it didn’t.
• I also got to spend about the same amount of time with my kids as before. There were a couple of evenings and weekend afternoons that I snuck off for a bit, but very little. Spending time with the kids was actually a pleasant break. Ok... so Sam missed a few baths, but that’s about it.
• I thought I was going to have to sacrifice quality for quantity, and ultimately, I refused to do so. NaNoWriMo was mostly a motivating tool for me to make progress on this novel, and I was more committed to getting the quality story done than to actually reach the 50,000. There’s still some cleanup to do, of course, but by and large, the writing was up to my usual quality. On the other hand, that’s not necessarily saying very much, now is it?
• I thought MAW was going to kill me. She didn’t.
• I thought this long stretch was going to be boring and filled with things irrelevant to the larger plot, but my muse surprised me with some extra characters that are now essential to the plot. Once it’s finished (knock on wood), I’ll ask someone to read it. Then I’ll ask them to imagine it without the characters A, B, and C.

Where Do I Go From Here?

Well, I knew that this novel wasn’t going to be complete at 50,000 words or even it’s real current size of 63,500 counting the pre-existing work. At present, the story is between a third and a half done, so I think I’m looking at about 150,000 words. That translates into about 450 pages in paperback format. That seems a little long, and while I can look at bits of text or dialogue and think that, yes, I could tighten that up some, I also look at areas where I think, my God, that really needs more explanation or just some background color. On the flipside, 450 pages is not uncommon for SF novels these days, and that’s what this is. Actually, for some authors who have moved beyond editing – you know who you are – double that length is the norm.

So, I’m going to plod onwards. I had wanted to finish this novel this calendar year, but that now appears impossible. Even another NaNoWriMo effort would only get me into the final third. Still, I think I might shoot for finishing it by March 1st. That would let me go at a slightly saner pace of 1000 words a day, and I can crank that out in an hour and a half. After that, I don’t know. I’ll want to get a couple of readers to tell me whether or not I’ve made a complete fool of myself, but even after that it just might sit on the shelf. It contains certain elements that may limit its salability, but then again, those very same elements might sell well in today’s cultural climate.

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November 27, 2004

NaNoWriMo, Day 27

Finally, after eight days of steady progress (and no hump-day at work) I'm caught up. With 45,576 words, I'm just a hair ahead of schedule. Still, I'm aiming to finish on Monday lest a crisis on the 30th kill me at the last minute.

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November 25, 2004

NaNoWriMo, day 25

After six straight days of between 2200 and 2500 words each day, I'm getting caught up, now just one and a third days behind with 39396 words. Of course, there are only five days left, but the 2200 word pace will still get me there. The worrisome bit is that while I'm driving hard towards a particular plot point that's about 5000 words away, I'm a little fuzzy on what comes just after, but for now I'm just moving forward and trusting to my muse.

My muse is an interesting lady. I'd call her a bitch, but I don't want to offend her right now. Here's an example of the interesting curve balls she throws at me. For background, I tend to structure stories in such a way where "things get worse" three times before the protagonist ultimately succeeds or fails in his quest. It's a common structure that works well and is documented succintly in Writing to the Point, by Algis Budrys.

The plot point I'm driving towards is one of those "things get worse" moments. The interesting bit is that when I got started moving towards it, I wasn't really satisfied with it as being something sufficiently "worse". I also had the problem that I needed to fill some plot time and pages while various things sorted themselves out on their way to this point of something getting worse.

I didn't know what I was going to put in there, so I just started going. Early into this, a character popped into an elevator as the doors were closing. She added tremendous color to the background world and led us two other characters without whom this story just wouldn't be what it's shaping up to be.

All three of these characters have led me to what is now the thing getting worse, and it's far worse than the thing I had originally planned. Ironically, I'm still going to do that thing, but it's so tame by comparison that it's actually going to be the thing that pulls our hero back from the edge of defeat to push on through the rest of the book.

And all of this because a character I had not yet imagined called out, "Hold the door!"

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November 20, 2004

NaNoWriMo, Day 20

As you can guess from the chart below, Thursdays and Fridays have not been kind to my NaNoWriMo efforts. Those are the big crunch days at work, and I've been needing to work late a lot. After closing to within two days of being on schedule, I'm back to being over three days behind with only 27,837 words as of tonight.

While this Thursday won't require me to work late, this is the big family feast, so I don't know how much time I'll get late in the week.

On the plus side, when combined with the 13,500 words I had coming in, this is now the longest piece of fiction I've ever written, eclipsing a novella I wrote back in 1987.

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November 17, 2004

Han Shot First!

Not that I'm making a blatant wish-list plug (MAW... hint, hint), but for any self-respecting Lucasaholic (recovering or not), this shirt is a must-have:

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November 15, 2004

NaNoWriMo, Day 15

In retrospect, it strikes me as particularly cruel and shortsighted for them to place NaNoWriMo in November, packed with a big holiday weekend and right at the start of the winter cold and flu season. I think, instead, it would be much better in January, with the holidays past us, our immunities up, and all of us riding on the commitment buzz of our New Year's resolutions -- plus we'd get an extra day out of it.

Well, the good news is that while I'm still battling this cold, I think I'm turning the corner. After two days of total crappiness combined with some overtime at work, I had fallen as far as three and a half days behind, but I've had three good days since then, including a monster 3000-word day today, bringing me up to 21,013 words. I'm still almost two and half days behind, but I'm getting my energy back, and the words are flowing well.

I just hope I can keep it up, because the style has to change a bit moving forward. I've been chronicling events as they happen since the story has been covering a transitional phase in the character's tale. This works well with my narrative style, which is heavy on dialogue. Now, however, I need to move across larger pieces of time, so not only must I do a different style, but I must switch to it without being too abrupt.

Still, I'm very pleased with how the story is shaping up.

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November 10, 2004

NaNoWriMo, Day 10

Well, this cold is still kicking my ass, but I'm holding steady at about two days behind. Here's my progress chart so far:

That's 12,875 words as of tonight.

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November 09, 2004

NaNoWriMo, day 8

I'm battling this cold far more than I am writer's block -- so much for catching up over the weekend. I went into it on Friday about 2 days behind, and I'm still about two days behind at 9528 as of last night.

At least when I'm getting the time, it's flowing fairly well.

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November 07, 2004

#@^$%! Cowboys...

I just want to know how many times Keyshawn Johnson has to fumble th