The Den of Ubiquity

10:54pm: Thrice Spoken, Once Fulfilled
As some of you may know, my job is disappearing over the next little while. This is not because I'm getting fired, or laid off, or anything like that. Unless you could say that the company is "downsizing" all the way to a size of zero.

Last Monday they (the two co-owners) called us (the two other employees) into the boardroom for a meeting, where they announced they were shutting down the company. They cited a lack of profitability, though the fact that the CEO had a heart attack a year or two ago but had to return from retirement due to our perpetual staffing problems probably also contributed. So we were given our official notice. For Mark, the other employee, this was only a week, since he hadn't been here that long; for me, after ten and a half years, this was more like eight weeks, which takes us to mid-November.

It's not like I don't have things to do, either. There are of course calls coming in from a bunch of our customers trying to figure out what's going to happen, how long they'll be able to keep getting support, and whether they want this "source code" stuff that we're offering. Two of our biggest customers have some ongoing issues we want to settle if at all possible. Both of them have inquired into whether I'm interested in working for them. One is in Calgary, and other has an office, at least, in Sherwood Park, but I think I'd rather explore other options first. I'm also learning PHP in an attempt to either convert our existing Java/JSP/Struts stuff to something that can be put on a public server, or at least learn enough to teach our co-owners (who will be keeping some of the web stuff going) how to do it.

I'm feeling fairly upbeat despite the impending unemployment. Actually, I tend to enjoy unemployment, or "24-hour leisure time", apart from the lack of income, which tends to worry some people, like my wife and family. But apart from that, it's been over ten years since my last job hunt, and things have changed in my favour. For one thing, I have ten years more experience, am ten years wiser, and the like. Also, the Alberta economy is still booming, so it looks like there's a plethora of job opportunities out there. I may be able to pick and choose. I may not be forced to, say, uproot the family and move to Calgary just to be able to work. (The way that, eleven years ago, Nicole and I moved back down to Edmonton from Grande Prairie.)

I've redone my resume, and rediscovered (while sending off my first batch of job applications) how much I hate writing cover letters. Seriously, I have severe trouble not coming off sounding either stilted and awkward or overly familiar and unserious. I tend to err in the direction of the former, frankly. I don't have an interview suit right now, though, and probably will have to frantically go buy one in the near future. It's a bit of a waste, since I sincerely hope not to have to actually wear a suit at work if I can at all avoid it, and I don't even know anyone who's planning on getting married in the near future.

There are some things I will miss about this job. While not everyone got along with the co-owners, which is one reason for the perennial staffing problems, I was just fine. I also wrote a heck of a lot of code--I counted 123,000 lines in one project, and while a lot of that is shared with other projects, a lot of it has been rewritten multiple times, so it's not really a very useful metric...but still, a lot of code. I suppose some of it was written by other programmers, but not as much as we might have liked. One reason I anticipate some demand for my services from our former customers, and they haven't even seen my source code yet...

Anyway, there was also a casual working environment--I never got any kind of problem about dressing casually or skipping shaving for a few days. Admittedly, I never wore ripped blue jeans or pajamas to work, or spent a week without bathing, or anything like that. I also got to listen to music in my office (once again, it wasn't Opeth at top volume or anything like that), got a number of "raises" in hours so that I was working 31.5 hours/week by the end, and even underground parking for the last few years. I'm hoping that I will be able to find at least some of the same things at my next job. Oh, yeah, and a decent salary would be nice too. And maybe some things that Kakari didn't always come through on, like medical benefits, direct-deposit paycheques, and programming projects that I was genuinely interested in.

So any of y'all in the Edmonton area who know of software/IT type job openings, feel free to let me know. I've seen several on monster.ca already, and given a few more leads, so like I said, I'm feeling pretty good about this thing, but it'd be nice to have steady income. Though a few weeks off wouldn't go amiss either...

---

In other news, since I got Spore I've barely been playing Sims 2. We'll see which one wins out in the long run, but so far Spore is fun. I've got about ten games going right now, of which two are up to Space Stage. It already seems to me that Space Stage is the main point of the game, since it's much more open-ended and elaborate than the other four stages. Civilization Stage in particular seems almost vestigial, one reason why it's my least favourite of the stages. (The other being that it forces you to design all sorts of buildings and vehicles. Maybe some people consider this a selling point, but I don't. I either slap together something quick and stupid, or steal someone else's from the Internet. If that's supposed to be most of the fun of the Stage, then it's wasted on me.)

But more on that some other time, perhaps. Must job hunt. Yes.

10:53pm: What's He Building In There?
Time, apparently, for another Sims update.

( Warning: information of limited interest within. Read with caution. )

9:59pm: Waving Goodbye With An Absent-Minded Smile
Since you're all clamoring to find out what's going on with my Pleasantview Sims, I'll bow to the demands of my fans and bring you up to date.

( Warning: information of limited interest within. Read with caution. )

9:43pm: Around The World On The Wings of A Jet
Well, I don't seem to have received any hate mail or death threats about the huge meandering post about my Sims that I made a little while ago, so I'll take this as a sign that they're not offending anyone and do more.

( It is getting boring. If you keep reading, you will probably fall into a pit. )

11:21pm: Split The Dawn In Half
Since I've been spending most of my free time playing Sims 2 these day, I thought that I might try to write a blog entry about it. I got very long-winded, though. If you're not interested, most of it will be hidden under a cut so you can skip the rest of it now.

( Seriously, I ramble on for pages. You're probably not that curious. )

9:03am: All of Our Hidden Demons Evaporate
Sometimes I get these urges to be creative. To do something, to make something, to write something. Unfortunately,this almost always happens while I'm at work.

I'll be sitting there, staring at the computer screen, knowing I should be working on whatever coding/debugging project(s) I've been assigned, but all I feel is this creative urge. Which I pretty much always have to quash down or sublimate in some way, because, let's face it, that kind of creativity is not what I'm paid for.

This never really happens at home. Maybe that's because I actually have the freedom to satisfy the urge at home. Which I don't generally do by writing, no, because that's Hard Work and Not Fun. Instead I usually satisfy it by playing games, particularly "god games" like The Sims 2 or something. Or making lists of things. Or even tinkering with my solo Lorenai or Atlantis games.

One of these days I won't have to go to work all the time, and I wish that there was something I could with a decent chance of making that day come sooner. Time to buy a lottery ticket, I guess.

---

My reading habits have undergone another change in the last little while.

At some point when I was younger, I read everything in the order I bought it, pretty much. It took a while before I had enough of a backlog that I wasn't finished reading everything before I bought more books, but even by the time I went to University I had multiple boxes of unread books.

Then I got more complex, interspersing rereads and magazines, promoting certain choicer books into a "Priority" slot, etc. This got more intricate, until I decided to subdivide my books into different types--fantasy and SF series, authors Nicole had recommended to me, Canadian authors, etc. I would then read those types in a set order.

I bogged down on this eventually, because in the end I didn't want to read each type of book equally. Finally I just decided that I would have one of each type of book available to choose from, but I could choose freely from that shortlist which one I wanted to read next. And that was my system up until a little while ago.

First of all, I reread the Harry Potter series shortly before the seventh book came out. I reread them close together, but with one non-Rowling book between each one. Then, after Robert Jordan died, I decided to do the same with the Wheel of Time series. More recently, I had the urge to reread Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan series, in chronological rather than publication order as I had first read it.

You see, in the last few years I've found myself buying fewer and fewer new books, and those mostly from known authors. It may even be that I am actually starting to slowly catch up on my unread books. I used to care about that, someday thinking that I might catch up. Now it doesn't really concern me at all. With our recent attempts to weed out books that we don't think we'll ever reread, I've been thinking more about what books I would like to reread, and the list has been growing. On the other hand, a lot of previously unread books, especially lesser ones by authors I don't like as well or haven't read before that have been sitting on the shelves waiting to be read for ten or fifteen years now, tend to go right into the weeding pile after I read them.

So now I've made it official--every second book I read is probably going to be a reread, for the foreseeable future. I just reread Deathly Hallows again, I'm working on Tigana right now, and after that I'll probably to C.J. Cherryh's Chanur series. I'll be reliving my past, essentially, and I guess that doesn't bother me. I'm not as adventurous as I used to be, I suppose, and who cares? I still probably have read more books than 99% of my acquaintance, and I haven't come even close to reading a tiny fraction. I can't read everything, and I have more trouble finding new books that I like, so I'm to pull back for a while.

9:44pm: The Gift Moves On Regardless
We are pleased to announce the birth of Jinian Pearl Humphrey, at 2:42 PM on Friday February 8th 2008. Jinian Pearl weighed 8 lbs. and was 20.5 in. in length. Mother and baby came home from the hospital today, and the baby is resting in the baby carrier on the floor beside me right now while mother catches some Z's. Apparently she (Jinian) did not let her mother have much sleep last night; sleep deprivation is always a hazard for the first few days of having a newborn, at least until the colostrum runs out.

She was induced, the same as the last two; at one point we were scheduled to have it done on Wednesday, but the hospital turned out to be overbooked and Nicole's obgyn was convinced that she'd be more ready in another couple of days. Well, Jinian made it down the tube pretty quickly on Friday, but unfortunately Friday was when the -40 wind chill decided to return to Edmonton for the weekend. Brrr. Bad winter, no biscuit.

The boys are excited about the arrival of the new "baby Ewok". At least since we put up a bunk bed in Simon's room and moved Luke in to clear his room for the new nursery (with a ton of help from my mom and stepdad), they've been Ewok-crazy. "Return of The Jedi" is the only Star Wars movie we have; in my opinion, it hasn't aged well, but the boys like it, especially the Ewoks. They've decided they're "baby Ewoks", living in a treehouse (the bunk bed), and so they've been looking forward to the arrival of the new baby Ewok. (Luke, ever contrary, declared last night that Jinian was actually a "little Ewok" since "baby Ewoks" were boys.) Nicole is "Mama Ewok", and I'm "Dada Wookiee" because I refused to be an Ewok.

In related news, having just finished reading Dragonsong and Dragonsinger to Simon, I decided I'd read him Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper, and he's certainly enjoying the Fuzzy scenes so far. I'd say this is one book that could conceivably be made into a good movie one of these days, though it probably won't be. (And speaking of books made into movies--"Jumper"! Woo-hoo! Hope it doesn't suck!)

Still mostly Facebooking, but I thought I'd announce this here for my LJ friends who don't Facebook, and for more details for those who do and have only seen my status-line announcement so far. Since we now have a digital camera, and I have snapped a few photos in the last couple of days, I could be posting some here...but I'm not. I haven't actually gotten around to figuring out how to download pictures from my camera to the computer, though I'm confident it won't be that hard. I'm just that lazy.

Typing one-handed now, as Jinian began to fuss in the carrier and is now snoozing on my chest. For the curious, I got the name from Sheri S. Tepper's _Jinian Footseer_, one of my favourite books for many years, whose titular protagonist is spunky, resourceful, intelligent, witty, and charming. Meseems a girl could have a much worse namesake. Previously I had some reservations about the potential nickname "Jinny", but J.K. Rowling has won me over on that score. Facebook only comes up with with four other Jinians, so it's still quite rare, but with a girl that's easier to get away with. Hopefully she'll like it.

Ooh, Imperial Galaxy is back up. Must dash!

7:12am: Follow The Crowd That Looks Like A Sheep
I've been spending a lot of time on Facebook recently, as some of you may know. I've done a few blog-type posts over there, but I keep feeling guilty about having abandoned this account, especially when it's got a feed set up so posts here automatically go on Facebook... So it's possible I may still post something once in a while.

So let me go on about the fall TV season so far.

Monday has been a busy night for us, with "How I Met Your Mother", "The Big Bang Theory", and "Heroes". Let's not forget that "24" is due to return, that "Sarah Connor" show may be on Monday, and we've also tried two other Monday shows, "Journeyman" and "Samantha Who?".

"How I Met Your Mother" is still doing quite well. There is an implicit promise that the mother in question--Ted's wife-to-be--will show up sometime this season. Which is a good thing, because there's only so long you could carry on the conceit otherwise. The narration-from-the-future thing also allows them to do occasional flashforwards, which they've done a few more of this season already.

"The Big Bang Theory" is so far holding its own. Let's face it, as a former(?) physics geek myself, I knew I'd other love it or hate it. So far at least they get the science right, and while the characters are still over the top in their out-and-out nerdiness, there's still elements of familiarity. And the scientific references are mostly spot-on. My only quibble so far is that Sara Gilbert's female physicist character is just a wee bit too clinical about her sexual needs. Oh, and bonus points for the Barenaked Ladies theme song.

"Heroes" is still holding up in the second season. The fact that Hiro and Peter are off on their "solo" adventures is a little bit annoying, but it does keep them from dominating the main plotline the way they did last season. They are probably the two most powerful heroes, so this gives the rest of the cast a bit more room to manoeuvre. Last season they pulled it off, so let's see if they can manage it again.

"Journeyman"...well, first of all, it was on at 8:00, which meant that we had to tape it because the kids were still up. That's a strike against any show right now, quite frankly, because the rest of our schedule is so busy. Secondly, it didn't start out all that engaging. The character leaping around and having to change someone's life looked like a little bit too episodic, and quite frankly I didn't take to the character at all. The lovely Moon Bloodgood, who brightened up "Day Break" last year, would have been the major reason to keep watching it, but all it took was forgetting to tape the second episode, and we shrug and move on, breathing a sigh of relief for another hour freed up in the week's schedule.

Ditto for "Samantha Who?" I'm a sucker for amnesia plots, in general, but it might be stretching it to call what happened in the first episode a "plot". Done as a "modern" sitcom with no laugh-track, it couldn't quite decide what it wanted to be. At the end of the episode I had little clear idea which of the characters introduced, apart from Samantha, were going to continue. By far my favourite was Tim "Tuvok" Russ's doorman, but he by himself wasn't enough reason to keep watching. I predict an early demise for this one, but I could be wrong.

Tuesdays we pretty much have "Reaper", which is pretty solid so far. First off, as an old Twin Peaks fan I'm glad to see Ray Wise back at his affably villanous best at Satan. Missy Peregrym is believably cute as the love interest, and Tyler Labine as "Sock" is like the next generation's Jack Black or something. While it does have a certain Buffyesque appeal to it, it might need to break out of its mold a little bit. The "demon of the week" could get stale and confining, especially since, if you think about it, every single escaped soul has shown up in Sam's own hometown. The ongoing plotlines are developing slowly--the recent introduction of the contract will hopefully help supplement the Andi thing, which quite frankly is sometimes winceworthy. At least in the last episode Sam's been specifically instructed to not tell her what's really going on, so at least he has a better reason for it now. I look forward impatiently to her actually finding out, though. (I think Sam just needs to invent some second job that his Dad's landed him with, or something, or at least something vaguely believable, because otherwise the stupid lies just get ridiculous.)

Wednesdays...we tried "Bionic Woman", but while we did make it to the second episode on that one, I was perfectly willing to give it up. The first ep was just too dark and depressing and dreary, with Miguel Ferrer (another old Twin Peakser) the only hint of colour, and only for his ruthless amorality. I didn't take to Katee Sackhoff's character--and quite frankly, I wouldn't say that Starbuck is my favourite on Battlestar Galactica either. Plus, the whole Jamie having to lie to her sister thing would also get old pretty fast too.

What really convinced us to drop it, though, was the wonderfully quirky "Pushing Daisies". It doesn't seem to have that much in common with Twin Peaks, but somehow it's offbeat enough to feel reminiscent of it anyway. Anna Friel and Kristin Chenoweth are both hot, and I hope to keep seeing lots of the aunts, Ellen Greene and Swoosie Kurtz. Even the narrator doesn't bother me too much, although the measuring ages down to the minute has already gotten old. Extra points for inclusion of musical numbers, especially the well-telegraphed excerpt from "Birdhouse In Your Soul" in the last one. While it has potential to be very episodic, the episodes so far have far from disappointed.

"Scrubs" just came back, and with a bit of a melancholy turn, as J.D. resigns himself to a loveless relationship with Kim and Elliott aborts her own loveless marriage with Keith. One hopes it will eventually perk up in the last season, though it may have just jumped the shark. I mean, there's going to be another baby showing up soon...and what happened to the last one? Where was Isabella? She's not going to do an Emma and be an invisible baby who doesn't impact her parents' lives, is she?

Finally there's "Moonlight" on Fridays. Having just given up on "Blood Ties", this one was a much fresher look at the vampire thing, and I'm digging it so far. In fact, when we missed the one episode, I went and searched for it on BitTorrent and we sat and watched it on the computer. I hope it stays around for a while.

9:47pm: Just thought I'd mention, in case you hadn't heard...
J.K. ROWLING RULES ALL!

4:43pm: It's been three months since my last post, and of course it's awkward trying to figure out how to get back into it after that. So I'll make my cue from kjc007 and just post a bare list, with few comments, of what I've read since I last told you what I was reading. At least the fiction, since I still, for some reason, don't track my nonfiction the same way.

Though I can tell you that recently I read The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond, and Dreaming In Code by Scott Rosenberg. The former is actually Diamond's first book, so bits of it seemed a little superfluous after reading Guns, Germs And Steel and Collapse, but I found it a very interesting, and humbling, way of looking at the human animal. The latter is a very interesting look at an ongoing open-source programming project from the inside, with all sorts of notes on programming that made me nod my head frantically and read them out loud to my wife. Both books highly recommended.

But back to the fiction, numbered from the beginning of 2007, with short, hopefully low-spoiler comments because the longer ones are too much work:

9. Glen Cook:Ceremony--finishing off his "Darkwar" trilogy/novel-in-three-volumes
10. Stephen King:Wolves of The Calla--Part V of "The Dark Tower"
11. Barry Hughart:The Story of The Stone--sequel to Bridge of Birds, and pretty good
12. R. Scott Bakker:The Thousandfold Thought--third book, and probably not conclusion, of "The Prince of Nothing"; not as good as the second, probably because this time I was expecting closure and didn't get as much as I was hoping for.
13. Gideon Defoe:The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists--a library book, very short, and excruciatingly funny. And first in a series.
14. Edward Willett:Lost In Translation--Not in a series at all. At least so far. Odd, isn't it?
15. Lemony Snicket:The Hostile Hospital--Eight book, I believe, in that series. Why am I not finished reading it yet?
16. Linda Smith:Talisa's Song--Second in that series.
17. Terry Pratchett:Thud!--I think I'm finally caught up in the Discworld series. If you don't count Wintersmith.
18. Cory Doctorow:Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town--Also not in a series, but a wildly surreal and bizarre book.
19. John Steinbeck:East of Eden--Not his best, and IMHO a bit heavy-handed.
20. Tanya Huff:Smoke And Mirrors--Second in its series, and pretty good.
21. Vonda McIntyre:Transition--Second in its series; it suffered mostly from having been too long since I read the first one, and having too many characters for its length.
22. Karl Schroeder:Sun of Suns--First in its series (though there may be sekrit links to his other novels), and pretty damn cool, one of those high-concept swashbuckling novels.
23. Mark Z. Danielewski:House of Leaves--Much better and more readable than I thought it would be, considering how much it plays with text layout, footnotes, and multi-level stories.
24. Dave Duncan:The Alchemist's Apprentice--A light-hearted mystery set in Renaissance Italy. Has a sequel coming out.
25. Dick Francis:For Kicks--I'm almost out of Dick Francis. He better hurry up and write some more. Also, we should see about getting him some immortality serum.
26. Michelle Sagara:Cast In Shadow--Her new series is not quite as dense as the Sun Sword, but not quite as fast-paced as the fantasy procedural it should be.
27. C.J. Cherryh:Cloud's Rider--Second in this series, and last so far, but I would actually like to see more set in this intriguing world where all the species on the alien world are telepathic.
28. Peter Watts:Blindsight--High-concept, and very, very unsettling book about the pros and cons of consciousness. Nominated for just about everything, as far as I know.
29. Terry Pratchett:Diggers--After we read the first two Bromeliad books to Simon, he went and finished them on his own. I thought I should get around to doing it myself. Not as good as the first one, though.
30. S.M. Stirling:A Meeting At Corvallis--Third in the "Dies The Fire" series, and unfortunately no better than the second one. I might be getting a little tired of Stirling, or he may just in a bit of a slump after his Nantucket series.
31. Terry Pratchett:Wings--Third in the Bromeliad; better than the second, but still not as good as the first. Has a good ending, though.
32. Julie E. Czerneda:Regeneration--Conclusion of this trilogy. A little bit disappointing, though. For one thing, an implicit promise I detected near the beginning of the book, that the main character would go to a certain place and the resolution would happen there, was misleading, because all the plot happened on the trip. And there was far too many pages of quirky aliens before we got back into actual tension and excitement. Unsatisfying.
33. Erin Hunter:Into The Wild--Another series Simon's really into, a sort of fantasy series involving cats living in the wild (but in the human world). Not too bad, though detectably juvenile.
34. S.M. Stirling:The Sky People--Yes, I read another Stirling anyway, mostly because we had them both out from the library. This one is faster-paced than the other one, set on a Venus populated by Neanderthals and dinosaurs, and is first in a series, but it took me forever to get through it. For the sequel, I think I'll wait for the paperback.
35. Spider Robinson:Very Bad Deaths--Just started this one, but so far so good.

By the way, the even numbers from #10 on are all "Aurora" reading--books by Canadian authors published in 2006. And I've still got at least five or six more. I never get them all read by the nomination deadline, and there's always a few from the finalists that I haven't read yet.

Hopefully I will post again sometime soon.

9:27pm: Scratches On The Libel Belt
I found a book of "Japanese Puzzles" on a Chapters bargain rack a couple of weeks ago. This doesn't just have your Kakuro and Sudoku, no sir. This one's got, if not the whole works, at least a lot more of it--Slitherlink, Light Up, Nurikabe("Islands In The Stream"), Hanjie("Paint By Numbers"), Hashi, etc. Some of them have connectedness rules--Nurikabe, Slitherlink, and Hitori--which can be very helpful.

I'm still in the Easy section. I find the Slitherlink puzzles interesting, but they still take me hours to finish, which makes me think that I'm missing a few basic principles. I seem to get to a point where every loose end seems to have two possible paths onwards, sometimes quite divergent ones, and there's nothing to choose between them. Eventually I manage to find one that causes a closed loop or a dead end, and I can fill in a little more, but I feel like there should be some way to speed up that process.

Nurikabe got a lot easier when I discovered online one of the rules that they'd neglected to mention in the book(no 2x2 black squares). Hanjie I was familiar with from before, so I'm probably having the most fun doing those, though they are the most frustrating when you've made a mistake. I'm mostly just skipping the Kakuro and Sudoku, since I have enough of those in my other books. Light Up I don't find particularly challenging, and there's only been one Hashi puzzle so far, which makes me think that they're all in the Hard section. Oh, and then there's Hitori, which seems deceptively simple.

---

( I ramble on about Sims 2 some more. )
I had a bit of a scare a couple of days ago. I was trying to get into the Goth household, but whenever it started to load it it would crash. Sometimes it seemed to get farther than others, but never far enough. Now in my Testing Grounds neighbourhood, where I've been playing fast and loose with cheat codes, it got to the point where sometimes I'd crash the computer when I exited a household, but I hadn't done those kind of shenanigans in Pleasantville, certainly not with the Goths.

Googling in desperation, I saw a few message-board posts saying that the way to fix the problem was to update your video drivers. I've only had my computer for about a year, but I figured it was worth a try anyway. I downloaded new drivers, and the installation instructions told me to uninstall the previous ones first, then reboot, then install the new ones. That sounded a bit weird to me, especially the part about not having any video drivers, but I went along with it. Of course, after the first reboot I was at 640x480, with all my desktop icons smushed into twice as many columns, but the reinstall went smoothly, I restored my resolution, and what do you know? The Goth household didn't crash! In retrospect, the problem probably was that I had one of the Sims' stereos on, and trying to bring up the sound may have caused it to crash. But updating the video drivers may have freed up a tiny bit of processing speed or something. I dunno.

By the way, how precisely does it determine where to put your icons when you shrink your screen resolution? Every time this happens to me, I swear that I can't reconstruct their original positions from the reduced layout. They never end up in quite the right place. Maybe I should save a screenshot every time I rearrange my icon layout or something. (Or maybe I should create a desktop with sequentially-numbered icons and experiment and see if I can figure out the algorithm, and more importantly, its inverse.)

7:45pm: The Flower of Carnage
Last week I managed to see two movies, one with Nicole and one with my dad. We are so far behind on movies, even just the ones that we want to see, that it's not even funny. But movies are now firmly behind TV on our list of things to watch.

My dad's birthday was on the 12th, but he was in town on the 14th so we had him over for supper then instead. Then we did our Valentine's Day movie date on the holiday Monday, seeing a matinee and going for supper afterwards so that we could still get the boys home and send Simon off to school in the morning.

We went to see "Stranger Than Fiction". Both being writers, the premise sounded interesting, and we were not disappointed. Will Ferrell did the uptight IRS guy meeting the free-spirited Maggie Gyllenhaal excellently, but that was just the plot of the novel he was in. Emma Thompson as the neurotic writer was maybe a bit cliched--I mean, not every single writer in the world is stuck banging out their words on a manual typewriter, nor do we all go through dramatic writers' block. Similarly, the thought that a publisher would actually send someone to her apartment to help her finish her novel struck me as unlikely.

Dustin Hoffman was good as the literary professor that Ferrell turns to when he starts hearing the narration. He takes the bizarre situation more or less in stride, dealing with it as both a serious problem and an intellectual exercise.

The cause of the weird crossover of the fictional world with reality is never really dealt with, but the character wrestling with knowledge of his own impending death, and the author struggling with the reality of the character they're trying to kill, are both well done, and are really the heart of the movie. I wasn't as sure about the professor arguing that the death will make the book a masterpiece. But overall it was a good movie; it reminded me somehow of "Click", and even "Groundhog Day" a little, and I liked both of those. Now maybe we'll have to try some other Will Ferrell movies and see if he's any good, or if he just lucked upon a good script this time.

My dad and I went out last Thursday. That's become our birthday ritual--he takes me out for a movie on my birthday, and I take him out for one on his birthday--one Nicole doesn't want to see, in both cases. We decided to see one of the Oscar nominees, which was fairly safe because Nicole's not really big into "Oscar material", though have started to enjoy watching the ceremony.

We ended up seeing "The Last King of Scotland". I would probably have been just as happy to see "Dreamgirls" or "The Departed", but this one worked out best schedulewise. I thought that Forest Whitaker did a great job as Idi Amin--if it hadn't been for his telltale drooping eyelid, I would never have suspected it was him. (I'm happy that he won the Oscar, though I wasn't impressed by his speech.) A bit of a harrowing story, but I was expecting nothing less. A little bit fictionalized, of course--the young Scottish doctor who was the main character apparently didn't exist--but it resonated nonetheless.

One of these we really have to see "Dead Man's Chest", though. Before it gets totally spoilerized for us.

9:28am: The Cosmos And The Teacup
I was sick last Thursday and Friday, and Monday was a holiday, so I effectively had a five-day weekend. And I spent a lot of that time, of course, playing Sims 2. It's like it makes a little happy buzzing at the base of my skull whenever I play it or something. I might have overdone it a bit, because even by Monday I was starting to consider doing other things. So I catalogued the rest of that big stack of new CDs that's been sitting on my shelf for a couple of months, and ditto for the books on the filing cabinet. ( But I'll still blather on about the Sims for pages if you're really curious. )

In other news, Nicole's pregnant again. Let's see if this gives us impetus to, say, clean our house and buy a bigger one, now that we have a deadline.

5:13pm: Covered In Civets
Seems like it's been a while since I posted here, again. Seems like every time I sit down at the computer, the thought of 'Sims 2' sends a little happy fizzing to the base of my spine, so that's where my time's been going.

But I'll spare you from an update on that. Instead, I'll do the belated Friday Five from thefridayfive.

1. How often do you typically shower/bath?

I like to take a bath every two days. Rarely less, but sometimes I'll stretch it a day or so if I have trouble fitting it in to my schedule.

2. Do you prefer showering or taking a bath?

Bath, definitely. They're more fun, and I can linger over them in a way I can't with a shower. Oh, it's true, the water cools off, but still, there's more of you covered by it, so at least you were warm at some point. Also, try reading in the shower. (Okay, I confess it's been years since I read in the bath.) No, I just never developed the habit, so perhaps my showering skills are a bit lacking. But it does me fine, except when I go visiting some benighted household that doesn't have any baths, like my mother's.

3. What's the longest you've ever gone w/o a shower/bath?

Can't think it'd have been more than three days. I don't do camping or any other get-away-from-civilization activities. There might have been that one winter in Grande Prairie when the water main froze...

4. What's your favorite personal hygiene product?

"Down Under Naturals" Citrus shampoo. They discontinued it a few years ago, so I've been making do with Kiwi, but I did like the citrus aroma.

5. Do you shave your leg and/or beard? If so how often?

I shave my face in the bath, about every other time, so that makes it four or five days in between. It doesn't grow very fast, and my workplace is tolerant of stubble.

9:31pm: Water Falls And Fire Flies
Since I don't feel like duplicating my efforts and wasting bandwidth, I'll just note that I posted my thoughts on the Barenaked Ladies concert last night on last.fm.

7:48pm: Blue Moon Swamp
I finished reading the Science Fiction of The 40's book. It wasn't bad, though I found "Venus And The Seven Sexes" a little bit on the painful side of satirical. Several stories I could have sworn that I should have read before, but they didn't seem familiar while I read them. Maybe I just have a MLAS.

One of my co-workers was talking about Eragon a couple of weeks ago, comparing the book to the movie, and seemed surprised when I told her I hadn't actually read the book. She just assumed that I'd read all the big books out there, especially the big YA books. But I haven't read that one, or Artemis Fowl, or any of the Geronimo Stilton, though I have read a bunch of Secrets of Droon and Magic Treehouse, and am working my way through the Lemony Snicket books. (Still not up to The End yet.)

So, thinking of that, I started reading The Merchant of Death, the first book in D.J. McHale's "Pendragon" series. I'd bought a special $2.99 promotional copy of it a while back. So far...it's not doing much for me. I mean, for one thing, if you're gonna have a character who has a secret destiny in another magical world, he should be a misfit, right? Someone who's never fit in? In this book, he's a basketball star at his school(he's 14), and the book starts with him kissing the girl of his dreams. Okay, his friend back on Earth(who keeps receiving missives from him, and investigating the mysterious disappparance of his family on his end)is more of a misfit, but he doesn't get a secret destiny, does he? At least not so far... I'll tell you, what's the point in being an outcast if you don't have the consolation that at least the cool kids don't get cool secret destinies? Only half kidding here. But this makes our protagonist reluctant to get involved and more interested in trying to get home (since he doesn't know it's not there anymore), which is a bit annoying.

As a result, I've been going to my nonfiction backup book, which at the moment is Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture, subtitled "How big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity." Lessig is, among other things, the chair of the Creative Commons Project, and an actual bona fide lawyer, so he has some interesting thoughts on copyright law and its implications for culture. And it's conceivable he won't be that sympathetic to the RIAA, given the fact that he's already brought up the Jesse Jordan story, of a university student who got sued for music piracy because he built a search engine. It's full of bits that I have to stop and tell my wife, so it promises to be a good read. Sorry, Pendragon.

---

Is it just me that gets annoyed whenever networks muck around with their TV schedules? It's not just moving a show from one timeslot to another one on a semi-permanent basis(which caused me to miss a lot of "Scrubs" episodes), but the one-time things, especially the ones that they don't announce in advance.

I mean, on Sunday I was expecting "Studio 60" to be on at 8:00 on CTV the way it usually is, which is when the VCR was set for. Instead, probably because of that stupid football game I couldn't care less about(though it did make a funny "How I Met Your Mother" episode), it was on at 9:00. After "HIMYM", I happened to notice that it was on, halfway through. We knew it was also on on Monday, but we're already watching and taping so much other stuff on Monday that we weren't sure we'd be able to fit it in, so we watched the second half of the episode. We did tape the first half on Monday night(it's on at 11:00 on the American station, which is just one of many reasons why we watch the Canadian broadcast instead), and we'll watch it tonight and see if we missed much.

Last night it was also announced that "Heroes" was going to be on at a "special time" next week, 8:00 or something. Except that according to my usual TV lookup site, it's still listed for 10:00, so I don't know what the hell's going on there. Is the site just working on old information? It didn't say anything about the "Studio 60" rescheduling when I checked it later. I've started setting up weekly recording schedules on my VCR, but that only works when the same shows are on at the same time every week... Do TiVo people have problems when shows are rescheduled? Do they get the updated times, or tape the wrong thing? Just wondering.

Oh, and next week there's two hours of 24, for some reason, as I was just reminded. That'll be wonderful. I mean, I like all the shows we're watching, but I like my non-TV time in the evenings as well. That's why I'm not really weeping for "Six Degrees" and "The Nine", or most of the other swiftly-cancelled shows from the past. We're still watching "Battlestar Galactica" and "Angel" on DVD, but at the rate we're going we can only fit in one of them every week.

Another reason to wish for summer, I guess.

9:31pm: Bridge And Tunnel
I've been sort of studying up on the Barenaked Ladies in anticipation of going to see them in concert on Wednesday. That is, I've been listening to my entire collection, in random order, of course. The newer albums(I downloaded the full edition of
"Barenaked Ladies Are Me" months ago when it came out online)because I don't know them as well, and the older ones because I like them.

I did this before the Garbage concert I saw a couple of years ago, though there were a lot fewer songs. I've got 125 BNL tracks, and I only had 38 Garbage ones, and I haven't been dedicating myself to it wholeheartedly. In fact, at the end of tonight I'll be less than halfway through, and I anticipate spending most of tomorrow night playing more Sims 2, so I won't be listening to it then.

Well, I suppose I could, but I probably won't. Since I started on last.fm, I've developed some complex rules related to what I "scrobble" to the server on their site. For instance, I don't scrobble CDs that I've borrowed from the library or someone else, because they're not part of my collection yet. If I download MP3s, I'll listen to them before I burn them to CD, and then I'll listen to the CD to make sure it burned properly, but I'll only scrobble them the first time so that they don't get overrepresented. If I buy a new CD, then I'll scrobble it when I listen to it, though, because I can skip the first step.

I still don't tend to take the initiative and actually decide what I want to listen to, except in the most general way. First, I'm listening to my entire collection in a systematic "once-each" way, trying to convert the vinyl/cassette portion of it into a digital format as I do so, or at least as much as possible. That's mostly what I listen to at work; I'll burn a bunch of files onto a DVD-RW once a month or so and bring them in. I also listen to new CDs and library CDs there, even though my computer's CD drive is starting to go a little wonky.

At home I'll generally listen to newly-downloaded stuff, or, sometimes, completely random shuffling of my overall playlist(with my favourite songs and artists I want to support and keep high on my last.fm charts weighted a little more heavily).

Rarely do I actually try to assemble a playlist based on what I actually "feel like" listening to. Perhaps it's because I have little experience actually telling what I feel like. I still like to give everything equal weight. Which usually means that the newer stuff takes a long time before I've actually listened to it enough times to get to know it, because the older stuff has been through more cycles, back when the list was shorter, and gotten more listens.

Still, a few times recently I've gone quickly through the audition-buy-burn cycle. I hear an album on library CD and like it, then discover it's on eMusic, where I currently have a 90 download/month subscription, so I download it right away, listen to it, burn it, listen to it again. And then it could be three years before the album comes around again in the cycle, though a random shuffle might pop up an occasional track here and there. Maybe I need to make up a "don't know as well" playlist and shuffle that one. Might be worth trying, though not all the time.

By the way, I have no idea who's opening for BNL on Wednesday. Last time it was Chantal Kreviazuk, but considering she's in town a week later, and in any case is a bit bigger than she was three albums ago, I doubt it. I hold out long-shot hopes for Ridley Bent--his album is called BLAM!, and the latest BNL album is "B.L.A.M."...but he's probably a little too obscure, not to mention a little too foulmouthed. Pity, I think he'd be fun. Maybe it'll just be The Brothers Creeggan or Kevin Hearn's band or something--the "in-house" opening act. Or maybe it's just them. Well, either way I'm sure I'll enjoy it.

7:51pm: Raspy Incurving Hooks
Simon invited me to join him and Luke in a game of "Clue" after I got home from work. Not under standard rules, though. You deal out all the cards, which determines which characters and weapons you get, and which rooms you can put them in. After that it seems to be freeform interactive storytelling.

Simon and I had a discussion about the D&D statistics. Col. Mustard would be a high-level fighter, Mrs. White a cleric, Mr. Green a druid, and Prof. Plum a wizard, but we weren't as sure about Mrs. Peacock and Ms. Scarlett. Maybe one a rogue and one a monk?

As far as the weapons, the knife was obviously a sort of dagger, and the revolver perhaps a hand crossbow with exploding bolts. The candlestick, Simon insisted could light, so it was like a flaming mace. I wanted the wrench to be more like a flail, because having all the blunt instruments as maces seemed a little boring. (I've long found it a little bit dull that there are three blunt instruments in the Clue weapons.) And the lead pipe could perhaps be a staff. It's a loooong lead pipe.

---

Tonight? "Iiiit's GROUNDHOG DAY!"

10:15pm: The Wind Is Blue
I haven't been keeping you up to date on my reading, and that's just a shame.

Odd Thomas is a bittersweet sort of book. It's got more than its share of laugh-out-loud turns of phrase, and a winning first-person narrator, but it's just as dark as your average Koontz book, if not more. It's not what you'd call lighthearted at all.

After that I was still feeling indulgent, and so I treated myself to rereading The Gap Into Ruin: This Day All Gods Die, the last book in Stephen R. Donaldson's Gap series. Good stuff. I wish Donaldson wrote more space opera. One of these days I suppose I should check out the new Thomas Covenant book, to see if it's any good. Frankly the Covenant books are my least favourite of Donaldson's works, but it might have picked up a little.

Now I'm being a little more dutiful, reading an anthology called Science Fiction of The 40s, edited by Frederik Pohl. (Martin H. Greenberg coedits, but then it's hard to do an SF anthology without him, and Joseph Olander too.) Pohl is ideally suited to the job, since he claims to have read every SF story published in the 40s. Now think about that for a moment. Is there anybody who can claim to have read all the SF published in the 1990s? In the last year? I mean, let's be fair and count Star Wars tie-ins here. Anyway.

So far it's pretty good. It's actually amazing how well some of these stories have aged, though perhaps that's what Pohl was picking them for. Most of them aren't especially prescient, though I was impressed at an offhand reference in Clifford Simak's "City" to a teenager listening to loud music on the radio. This story was published in 1944, when there probably was no such thing as loud music on the radio, so I think that's pretty shrewd.

Lester Del Rey's "My Name Is Legion" was quite interesting. Written before the end of WWII, the story posits that Hitler escaped to Switzerland at the end of the war, but tried to return to power. He was "aided" by a man with an unusual time machine, which could summon future copies of an object to the present. Hitler, who doesn't see the implications of this, agrees to let himself be "duplicated" this way and thus form an army...not realizing that he is now dooming all of his future timeline to loop over and over in this same day until he dies. (Conversation of energy, schmonservation of schmenergy.)

---

The Sims is still occupying most of my mind, buzzing in the back of my brain when I'm not actually playing it. So I feel I must give you an update on that as well.

I've started the second generation in my Legacy Challenge neighbourhood. Elstree Azpiazu managed to lure Pedro Fernandez (I renamed all the NPC sims, and I forget who he is in the default neighbourhood) into her lair, and after a couple of false starts managed to marry him. I still have some trouble keeping my parties from ending up as Disasters, but I'm learning. They were a little strapped for cash, but the hot tub bought with Aspiration Points helped a lot.

Then they Tried For Baby a couple of times, and ended up with...twin girls! That'll give the family a bit of a start. I'm not sure how many people I'm going to keep in the house at a time, though; I gather that you can move people out, but once you do they don't count for the challenge anymore, and you can't move them back in. Anyway, it's a major handful keeping up with the twins, and still try to get the parents to a)work and/or b)sleep. Luckily Elstree had a lot of paid vacation time. Pedro's in the Culinary career track, and a bit of a klutz, having gotten demoted to Drive-Through Clerk at least twice through those evil Career Chance Cards. (When will I learn to just click "Ignore"?) The twins, Niamh and Bronwen, are finally almost into childhood, which means another birthday party... I learned a lot about toddlerhood this time, including the proper use of the high chair, and the education toys (both girls now have Charisma and Creativity of 3-5...).

In Pleasantville, Romilda and Don Lothario still aren't married; I'm waiting to see if Romilda's fear of commitment will fade a little bit. Plus she apparently caught a cold at work, so she'll actually be able to legitimately Phone In Sick. I hadn't spent too much time with David Harp and the Brokes since they moved in and baby Roy was born; Brandi Broke wants 10 kids, apparently. Well, we'll see about that.

I need to come up with matches for all of the Pleasantvillers. Dustin Broke and Angela Pleasant are one couple, and Lilith Pleasant and Dirk Dreamer are another, though I gather that teen love affairs fade a little once you reach adulthood. Then there's Lucy Burb and Alexander Goth, who haven't quite reached teen-age yet, and the other two Broke boys who are even younger. I can keep the Caliente sisters in cold storage for them, I guess. There's NPCs too, of course, but I'd like to avoid those if I can, in this neighbourhood, at least. I'm more interested in weaving together the families as much as I can. And I'll try to preserve at least one of each surname. Oh, I suppose Cassandra & Darren goth should have some kids, too. When I have time. Raising kids is hard work, both in the Sims and outside of it.

I still haven't managed to figure out how to age NPC children and teens, even with the Mirror of Mind Control. I gather there's some cheat code that comes with the University expansion pack that might do it, but I'd rather stick with the baseline pack for now, because I don't feel like I've begun to exhaust its possibilities yet. We'll see how long that lasts.

Simon and Luke have tired of it a little bit. Simon has gotten back into Space Empires III, which Luke still finds dull, and Luke has been asking for more Neopets games, which is mostly okay. As long as he doesn't get back into the Atari games.

9:48pm: Grass Swept The Neighbourhood
Completely forgot about rabbitholeday this weekend. Oh, well. I was only going to try to do some cut-up thing anyway.

---

One thing that bugs me, as someone who has taped a lot of records and is now burning a lot of MP3s onto CD, is that manufacturers of recordable media, or more accurately packagers, don't always provide you with enough space to label it effectively.

A 90-minute cassette tape could generally fit about 11 songs on each side, allowing a little over four minutes for each one. More than that if you're doing early Beatles or the Residents' "Commercial Album". Maxell, as I recall, tended to include a "J-card" with room for twenty songs, ten on each side. The inside of the J-card was wasted on stupid information about the audio characteristics of the tape. So I didn't buy Maxell very much. (For years, in fact, I bought boxes of 10 Sony 100-minute chrome tapes, before they stopped making them.)

Recently I've been buying 15-unit boxes of Sony CD-Rs. They come in a variety of colours, and they have a little tear-off pad of label sheets with plenty of room to write on both sides. While I don't feel compelled to fill CD-Rs to capacity the way I did with tapes, I do try to fill up assorted CDs to the brim, which is often around 20 tracks.

My latest box of CD-Rs only had ten discs; I was at a different store or something. Not only are they not multi-coloured, but their label sheets have room for 14 tracks...on one side. The other side has the warranty in three languages plus little diagrams showing you what you shouldn't do to your CD. Except I already know all this stuff.

Luckily I had some leftover label sheets from some Verbatim data CDs I burned a while ago. Those have plenty of room for 19 tracks.

Of course, the way they package these things often leave you with no way to tell how much space they have for labelling, so it's just trial and error. There should be a wiki somewhere where this kind of information can be REVEALED to the PUBLIC.

10:20pm: Physically Fit
My dad got two DVDs for Simon and Luke for Christmas--"Shark Tale" and "Madagascar". He also gave us a portable DVD player, thoughtfully just before the seven-hour drive up to my mom's place. We had some problems setting it up; there was no place to easily attach it so that both kids could see it, so it was precariously balance between the front seats, the earphones didn't work properly, and it took Nicole (I was driving) a while to find all the volume controls so they could use the external speakers. They watched "Madagascar", which we'd previously seen in theatres, and it kept them quiescent for a while.

They tried watching "Shark Tale" one afternoon at my mom's, but they lost interest partway through. None of us had seen that before, and Nicole and I still haven't, so maybe we should try to sit down with it as a family movie one of these days.

The portable DVD player has been nice, since if the boys disagree on what they want to watch we can put one on the couch and give the other one the portable. For the last Cult of Pain meeting, we sent the boys up to watch a movie in Simon's bedroom, which kept them out of our hair.

"Madagascar" is their current favourite movie. Well, it's indisputably Luke's, and Simon is willing to tolerate it, I think, in order to watch the "Penguin Christmas Caper" short. I think they've watched it four or five times this week. It's been a while since something has caught their fancy quite that much. Quite frankly I wasn't as keen on the movie myself, but I do love the Penguin short.

Luke discovered that I could do a good voice for "Skipper" the penguin, so now he keeps pestering me to play Penguins. I'm Skipper, Nicole is Kowalski, Luke is Rico, and Simon is Private. Though sometimes we switch around if we're bored; I do the best Skipper voice, but sometimes I get tired of being pestered. And sometimes it's easier to get them to do something if you ask them in penguin character. But it can be wearing.

Also, I seem to get "I Like To Move It Move It" stuck in my head an awful lot these days.

9:31pm: Up Against The Wind
Well, we managed to miss this week's episode of "24", the first after the four-hour season premiere thing.

See, on Monday Nicole was so tired that I suggested that she go to bed early, rather than staying up to watch either "24" or "Heroes" at 10:00. But I never managed to set the VCR to tape "24" at 8:00, so we had to watch one of the 10:00 shows after all. We opted to watch "Heroes" and tape "24".

Now the 10:00 broadcast of "24" was on Fox, which is Channel 16. The 8:00 one was on Global, Channel 8. I set up the VCR to tape Channel 16 from 9:57 to 11:02 (I always like to leave a few minutes of leeway, since our clock isn't always synched up with the networks).

Our VCR has a little quirk, though. It's quite an old one, really, and it's almost amazing that it's still around and as functional as it is--which is pretty good, considering. It's old enough to remember the days when sometimes TVs weren't hooked up to cables, but had devices called "antennae" that tried to conjure TV signals out of thin air. For some reason, it has two modes, "TV" and "CATV". "TV" is the antenna mode, which is equipped to handle channels 2-13, which is all that the old-style TVs could deal with. "CATV" is the cable mode, which can handle all the way up to three digits.

When it's unplugged, it always, always reverts back to "TV" mode. In fact, we bought another VCR for a few years because the only way to set it back to "CATV" was via the remote, and when the remote got sucked into the couch (it turned out later) and we were desperate to tape "Babylon 5" on The Space Channel, we just got a new one. That one's dead; this one's still around.

But it got unplugged after Christmas, when my brother was using his laptop in the living room.

And "CATV" never got reset.

So all it taped on Channel 16 on Monday was a bunch of static. (Which our VCR always displayed as blue...which gives a whole new meaning to the William Gibson line about "the colour of TV tuned to a dead channel".)

Fox.com has the episode available for view on its Myspace page...for U.S. residents, which it was able to determine that we were not. Global only had a few highlights, so we watched that, for the lack of anything better.

We missed several episodes in Season 2, as I recall, and still managed to finish out the season. So we'll still go on with it. But it's still annoying. This kind of thing is one reason why I've been starting to set up the VCR to tape everything we watch, whether we plan to watch it live or not, because that way at least it's there.

Of course, we could always look at DVR's, too.

8:46pm: Vitamin Z
One of the things I got for Christmas was a couple of Sudoku books, one of which was half Kakuro as well. I also got Nicole a couple of such books, including one with "Godoku", which is just Sudoku with letters instead of numbers, and some 4x4 Sudoku.

I can't help being bemused by the whole Sudoku fad. I've been doing puzzles for years, ever since I as a kid, off and on. I've also long been bemused by the fact that every puzzle book publisher has to call them something else, which I always presumed was because of some silly trademark laws or something. So my favourite puzzles as a kid were Skeletons or Frameworks, or sometimes even Fill-Ins, though those tended to be denser and more crosswordlike.

I think it was somewhere in my teens that I became fond of Cross Sums (as at least one publisher called them). These are the puzzles now known as Kakuro, but I still call them Cross Sums. As opposed to Sudoku, which, while I recall seeing them in puzzle books before I ever heard the term Sudoku, didn't have a name that I was nearly as attached to. In fact, I can't recall what their old name might have been. ("Number Place", maybe?)

I'm working my way fairly steadily through the Kakuro/Sudoku book; I've still got a way to go, but so far they're not too challenging. I've even learned a few Kakuro techniques that I hadn't used before, but these puzzles are still pretty simple. I don't like Sudoku nearly as much, but it's okay. I foresee that when I run out of the book with Kakuro in it, I'll go much more slowly through the other one. Or if they start to get too frustrating.

5:08pm: The Serpent Is Rising
Have to post early today, since the Cult of Pain meeting is tonight. At our house, too. Nicole, despite being sick, did a fantastic job of cleaning up at least the living room yesterday, even with our vacuum apparently dying. (We're not sure, but we may have bought it just over a year ago. What kind of warranty period did we have, I wonder?)

The writing exercise we'd agreed on last month was to write the beginning of a novel that we've been putting off starting. This is a bit of a problem for me, because quite frankly all of the novels that are on the back burner already have beginnings. It's just the rest of it that they don't have. (And, of course, the NaNoWriMo "rule" of starting fresh has kept me from going further with any of them so far.)

Finally I decided to work on one called "Windwalker". "Windwalker" was a novelette that I wrote years 'n' years ago and was informed was the first part of a novel. At some point I did write the beginning of the first scene of that novel...but I can't find it now, so I get to write it over again.

Who knows if I'll keep up with it. After all, I still haven't finished Bleen, my NaNoWriMo novel from 2006. Nor have I done any writing to speak of, apart from writing exercises, since the end of November. This is pretty much standard behaviour for me. I should maybe reread the "Windwalker" novelette, because skimming over it to try to remember some character names, I found more than I remembered in it.

All this writing is keeping me away from my Sims, though. All the Simming I've done in the past two days has been with the Twip family for Luke. (Query: Why are there no starting homes costing less than 20,000 Simoleans, available on the Lot Exchange? I hate building my own. Grump.)

9:27pm: Oginga Odinga
Today I managed to finish reading Nova Express. It was probably the least favourite of the three William S. Burroughs books I've read to date.

The other Burroughs I've read--Exterminator! and The Place of Dead Roads are later books, and he relies less on the "cut-up" technique. In other words, there is more prose and less quasi-random arrangements of words. The latter, not being prose, must fall under the category of "poetry", being words arranged in a given way to provide a certain effect. That effect may be as random as a Pollock(?) splatter-painting, but the artist surely has an intent.

So it boils down to my problem with poetry. I don't get poetry, on most levels. When I'm reading, my brain is working more linearly than laterally. When I hit a block of poetry in a book, I tend to skip over it. This may be a shortcoming in me, but I'm comfortable with it now, and I just tend not to even try poetry.

Oddly enough, I don't have nearly as much of a problem listening to poetry. The parts of reading Nova Express that I enjoyed the most were those that I recognized from having heard them on one of the Burroughs recordings I have. Those, I tend to enjoy listening to, and there the cut-up technique doesn't work that badly. I can enjoy the arrangements of words, and appreciate the segments that turn up more than once. But when I read one of those paragraphs of fragments separated by dashes--I think that most of the periods in the book come in the oft-repeated phrase "Mr. Bradly Mr. Martin"--my eyes start to skid over them and my mind wanders.

Maybe I'll try some of his later stuff sometime. Maybe someday I'll try watching the movie based on "The Naked Lunch". If I could get recordings of Burroughs reading all of his books, I'd probably prefer that, but I suspect that that doesn't necessarily exist. (Could anyone else pull it off? Not sure.)

Needing a change of pace, I've picked up Odd Thomas by Dean Koontz as my next one. My wife loves this one, and it does seem like a more light-hearted sort of dark thriller for Mr. Koontz. Should be good.