…just passing though…

Tonight’s blog entry is brought to you by half a bottle of vodka; which though a rather vague unit of measurement, will have to suffice. Let’s just say we’re all “cool and froody” at this point in the evening. “You mean everything’s under control?”  He looks around, shaking his head dismissively.  “No, that would not be cool and froody.”

I’ve always loved that portion of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  Everything spiraling out of control, yet the dialog remains very focused and in control.  That is how I imagine each and every one of us lives our lives day in and day out.  Though it might not necessarily be a reality, this is the world I choose to live in.

 

“Airwave” by Rank 1

Some day I hope to have a writing project, whose appeal is wide enough to necessitate an obscene bidding war for the movie rights.  I have no interest in personal financial gain, but would like to be in a position to buy the total world wide rights to this track—to be placed in said project. In my mindspace, Danny Boyle directs the flick; as I have no one else better to choose at this point.

Unlike the theme music to the last few Boyle movies, I find this track to be rather optimistic and uplifting. Sunshine was fucking wonderful, but that is not my scene.   In my minds eye (*sigh*) I write uplifting scenarios. I find the ultimate sacrifice, of ones life for the sustained future of humanity, to be utterly ridiculous.  The theme results in somewhat passable art, but falls short of what science fiction should be.

We need to challenge the viewer/reader to imagine where we can go in the near future.  What did Gravity do to expand our imaginations? Nothing.

Danny, if you’re reading this, the manuscript is almost done (looks over the note spread across his desk, and has no idea how this could be a reality).  Let’s do lunch, or some shite.

 

 

81 Words Part II

Two more…  because, why the hell not?  I find the whole experiment to be horribly restrictive. This might be a necessary evil–  not entirely sure.  I lean more toward 188 words being effective for this sort of thought/writing experiment.

 

Lyon

Jake stared at the assortment of passports which partially covered the 9mm on the bed. He hated guns. “One last score,” she had promised, as she left the hotel. The proximity to the airport would guarantee a quiet escape, she promised; though the incessant noise had kept him awake those last two nights. The femme fatale allure had worn thin, and though he enjoyed the rewards, he knew inside she would never walk way. It was time to go it alone.

 

5:01am

A quarter of a bottle of scotch remained; his resolve deflated as he stared at the incomplete text. His attentions had been divided by the modern vices that never encumbered the greats of the past, Twain, Hemingway, whothefuckever. Sounds, tweets, drunken rants posted by friends across the interwebs and joined by his own inebriated observations.

He looked between the near blank Word document and to the sad remains of his bottle. Empty and near empty; happily one could be refilled tonight.

 

81 Words

… 81 Words is an interesting writing exercise.  Andrew Flynn pointed me in this direction.  His first book 188: MICRO-STORIES FOR YOUR MACRO-BRAIN is a collection of stories, each 188 words long.   Although I have yet to read it, I find the idea very interesting from a writers perspective.  Even if you even suspect you might have been bitten by the muse, and would like to try your hand at writing, I would urge you to try it out.

It should be noted…  the writers on the site are strangely, how should I put this, hmmm….  well they’re bad. The only conclusion I can reach is that the owners haven’t correctly reached their intended audience over the first four months of operations

My first two submissions are below:

Morning After

She started fully awake, her nude form awash with sweat. The moon’s meager light outlined his now still form beside her. The night before came back slowly; a club somewhere, her friends danced, laughter, drinks, sweat, she danced, more drinks. She had met this man lying beside her, his face came into focus in her head. She wondered why the sweat between her fingers was thick and sticky. As she licked her lips, the taste of iron danced on her tongue.

Saturn V

A safe distance away, under the hot muggy Florida sun, we watched the rocket rise off in the distance, long before we heard the roar of her engines.  I looked up at my father, a smile beaming on his face, his eyes transfixed on the spectacle. In that moment, a feeling of absolute contentment settled over my twelve year old soul. We were here together now, watching history unfold before our very eyes. Everything that happened before, was of no importance.

On Spirituality, Class Warfare.. and other such nonsense.

My wife and I do not discuss our ideas of spirituality with each other.  Okay, I concede the point; I avoid this discussion like the plague with all people in my life, due to my own self-doubt as to my own convictions.  I like to play it fast and loose with concepts such as gawd, the afterlife and karma.  I think that putting any of these concepts into concrete defined ideas in my head, let alone speaking of such matters out loud, would give the concepts too much power in my daily affairs.

One idea that my wife often speaks of, and not to deaf ears I might add, is the idea of manifestation.  I am probably going to butcher the intent of what her belief, but I am going to describe my interpretation none the less.  The concept centers on focusing on a set goal or objective, to the extent that the worship of the idea becomes the focal point of your existence.  You therefore manifest this change, idea or goal from your imagination onto the world around you.

I might poo poo such new age publically (fuck, and privately for that matter), but there is something to be said for this idea; as we see examples of it all around us.  I am not speaking of some extreme interpretation of this idea; such as a group of teenagers sitting around a fire, chanting some name of some pagan god and attempting to conjure said god out of the fire, or some shite.  My interpretation is much simpler and more practical in our day to day affairs.

A few weeks ago, I got into a discussion with a few friends on the topic of the class divides that keep the rich and the poor separate.  Quite a few of the participants were of the sort who believed that class and race were givens inherited at birth that totally determined our fates at the end of the day.  I had a fit hearing these words uttered out loud, without a sense of irony or mirth.  People still believe that sort of shit?

In America, there is a knee jerk reaction on all sides of this discussion to only frame the conversation in terms of race.  What seemingly gets lost, is that race is how the issue of this economic and social divide presents itself in America; it is not the root of our societal woes. What needs to be accepted as a base premise is that even though each and every continent, nation, city, neighborhood has its own problems that are very specific to these microcosms, there is a commonality between all societal divides.

Let’s face it, the enlightenment and the social revolutions that followed did not totally displace feudalism. I am of the belief that you can have no pure concept, no pure revolution because the end result is always resting on the cancer of the past.  The end result always has traces, and far more than the new society that emerges ever would want to admit, of the society that came before. At this point, feudalism probably touched 90% of the world population in some meaningful long lasting way, prior to anything any of us would considered enlightened thinking ever had a chance to appeared on the scene. There was always an entrenched establishment that might have shared power with the masses, but these elite never disappeared.  This fact gets lost on the average discontent member of ALL societies.  They immediately fall upon whatever knee jerk reaction might be the most obvious explanation of the divides they see in their day to day lives.

We circle now back to my interpretation of manifestation.  I believe that one of the primary reasons why all of these issues persist is due to the fact that we continue to impose these simplistic interpretations onto the world around us.  We get caught up in the issue of divides, we manifest this as a base condition to each other and we rarely make an attempt to just fucking get on with it.

When Life Hacking is Really White Privilege https://medium.com/get-bullish/a5e5f4e9132f

The story at the above link really got my mind churning. I have to say from the onset, that I know two “white” traders who used to work on Wall St who have since returned to Buffalo.   Though they are two distinct personalities, there are commonalities between them.  Neither had any experience in the industry prior to relocating to NYC.  Both were young and full of energy when they decided this was their route to riches.  Neither could be described as having grown up poor, although one came from a lower middle class background.

One key component of their success whilst in NYC was their ability to impose their wills upon the world around them.  Fuck, with one of them, I was totally convinced that he lived in a solipsistic fantasy world prior to moving to the City; one in which his success was a foregone conclusion. He knew his smile and his words could charm anyone, and I witnessed this power in action in many sorted circumstances (one of which kept him out of jail at 18 just by convincing a cop to ignore the huge bag of coke found lying on his passenger seat when pulled over for having a tail light out).

What seems to get lost on the masses, the ones who become deluded into a world view that these people are somehow privileged because they were white or rich or both, is the interpretation that these fuckers walk on water because they know they can.  The thought alone somehow sustains the reality.

I find it hard to believe that Jay-Z wouldn’t behave in a similar fashion to the white trader if he needed to mail an item and was in a hurry.

To conclude this aside, both returned to Buffalo when their charm ran out.  One could no longer function due to a drug addiction.  The other could no longer sustain the illusion because they gained a conscience, of sorts.

“Don’t Be Evil”

In closing, the neo-rich didn’t get rich by being nice people.  Bill Gates or Richard Branson might seem like interesting rags to riches stories, but I strongly suspect they would not be the sorts of people you’d want to hang out with and have a few drinks. You can transcend class but probably at a huge cost to what you feel is your humanity.

Most people who achieve a low to moderate level of success probably have utilized this mind over matter trick without even realizing it.  Fuck, there have been hundred if not thousands of self help tapes that have echoed this same idea.  It resonates to all of us because deep down we know there is some truth beneath the surfaces, when you scratch at it a bit.

The down trodden are exactly that because they believe that is all they can ever amount to

2014

Well hello 2014, nice to meet you.  Tis the time of year where spontaneous self reflection abounds.  The transition from one silly calendar you bought 14 months ago to a new one that has been sitting on your desk, seems to induce a state of near pathological reanalysis of a persons place in the world.  The only events which seem to cause identical symptoms, albeit much more extreme, are the deaths of a loved one or the loss of employment. 

 

Don’t get me wrong, I am all about self reflections; but I believe these processes should be ongoing throughout the year and not done in one fell swoop.   The fact that the suicide rate increases and people just fall dead (at least in my family) at this time of year, seems to indicate that there is something very unhealthy in the practice of putting so much stock into this one artificial demarcation point.

 

With each inquiry as to what my New Year’s resolution would be, I would feel my blood pressure spike.  There are many things I would like to change, but the fact that so many people thought I should share them out loud, in order to make the desire to change real, or some shit, struck me as ridiculous.  Yes, mom, I’d like to quit smoking, but I am not quite ready to put my crack pipe down yet.   Yes, wifey, I’d love to be organized and helpful around the house, but again my addictions (writing and incessant self reflection – not sure which is worse-  not even sure there is a difference)  seems to get in the way of being a neater, more organized person.  

 

I was reminded endless of my failed 2013 New Years resolution, one that was made for me, all throughout the course of yesterday’s festivities.  My own sense of failure at continuing to smoke probably made the comments and snipes from the crowd seem more relentless than it was in reality. The whole time my brain is screaming, there are more important things that need to change prior to the elimination of my primary coping mechanism.

 

I hadn’t complained about a little change in my daily environment to any of the people who were reminding me of the failed 2013 resolution and attempting to make it a do over for 2014.  Today, is the first day of the smoking ban on all properties associated with my current place of employment.  It’s as if things in my life have become metaphors. 

 

The ban itself was announced just prior to the chaos that ensued two months ago. As a result, most people at my company have had other things on their minds; so that denial of this new paradigm came with ease.  It is going to be very interesting, as a study in human behavior, how people will react.  I believe the vast majority will make an attempt to attack the coping mechanism itself than the root cause.   I am imagining the 10-20% of the people who still smoke getting into their cars every two to three hours, driving off the property to safer harbors, but I am not sure how long that pattern of behavior will last.

 

I am also interested to see how I will react to this as well.   I feel as if my own actions are wholly unpredictable, as I am actively aware of what any possible outcome signifies in the grand scheme of things.  At some moments, it seems like it’s a choice between a career and a silly habit; at other moments it seems like the choice between a stressor and a reaction. The reality is both cause cancer, and if that reality really sinks in, I am not quite sure where I land.   

 

DAY 57 – Change in Focus to Things which are going Right

Dear Diary,

Upon further reflection, with a tad bit of denial mixed in, I am opting to take the high road and cease obsessing about organizational incompetence.  Life is far to short to get bogged down in ultimately meaningless minutia.  One way or another, my relationship with corporate America is nearing the end of it course.  Further analysis is unproductive…  and I am rather annoyed with myself for getting bogged down these last six or seven weeks, both mentally and emotionally.

The only bone I have left to pick with the world as a whole is a perception that the lack of a finished piece of literature on my part is perceived as “writers block.” This blog entry is probably totally lost on its target audience, as for some reason they do not read it. I do not suffer from writers block…  the closest I come to that sort of state is my poor utilization of free time. This can always be traced back to a declined ability in letting the negative day in and day out shit that we all go through, get shed and washed off of me when I have an abundance of free time.  If anything, I have the opposite of writers block; whereas I have an over abundance and methods of execution of ideas and characters. I unfortunately do not suffer from hypergraphia, so that the vast majority do not get captured in any organized fashion.

Hell or high water, 2014 will be the Year of R.A. Smith. Axiom is half done.  I have two collections of short stories that will get released long before Axiom is complete.  Vice will probably end up being the first, as its the most therapeutic for my person.  “The one that has yet to find a name” is fully formed and just requires a little tender love.   Those that have read the core story have echoed my reaction in that it needs to be expanded into a novel in its own right.

What I want most for Christmas, is an editor who will stay the course.  Applications will be accepted.  That is all 🙂

 

Long Time No See

What started as a simple year end prep project at work, took on a life of as its own (as these things will). Don’t want to bore with the details, so I will tell you the moral of the story ahead of time if you do not feel like reading on.  It is this: moving some code from a development environment to your production client without doing full spectrum testing is never a good decision.

I am not a software engineer (though I play one on TV apparently) so please excuse my botched use of terminology and places where I make up words for certain concepts that actually have accepted names by software community as a whole.

Whilst doing the prep, it was realized that our SAP production client was not configured past the end of 2013.  In the first week of December, we were all alarmed to discover that the code we needed to continue running payroll and a few other modules started referencing the first month of 2014 (due to design flaw).  As the system didn’t contain the tables necessary, we rushed to move the tables necessary out of development.  While this ‘fix’ enabled us to start performing day to day activities again, the new tables didn’t quite sync up with existing the tables we had been utilizing in 2012 & 2013. As a result, the production client then kept attempting to sync past periods with its new disconnected reality leading to all sorts of unintended consequences.

There were work arounds to keep the data in sync, as we attempted to create permanent fixes in development environments, but they were very manual, time consuming and at the end of the day really only made the issue much worse in the production environment (as they A- didn’t really fix the problem in any sort of long lasting way for any of the data- there was good chance that data that was corrected would have to be corrected again in subsequent week   B-if they did correct the issue in the short term, data could not be fully synced with these new tables as they referenced periods in time prior to implementation in 2012 that just didn’t exist and couldn’t be created out of thin air because of SAP’s need to have constants. In short, you could retroactive correct the disconnected reality in the short term.. but if you went too far back prior to the start of system clock, terminal issues stared arising  C- the parts of the system the work arounds were applied to put that data into a state that would have to be “undone” when and if a fix ever moved out of development.

Which then brings us to the topic of development. Let me give you a little bit on the lay of the land.  We implemented SAP in 2011 with one consulting firm.   To say this was a failed implementation is to put it kindly, as not only did it failed, but we were utilizing this highly flawed product for over a year for payroll where as other modules of our business remained in our legacy (old for you laymen out there) system.  In order to do year end activities for 2011, we had to move all of the payroll and subsequent financial data from our newly implemented system back to legacy system when the books closed on 12/31/11. This “reverse implementation” was a lot of fun and I highly recommend it to any one out there with sadomasochistic tendencies.

We did another implementation in 2012 with another consulting firm that was slightly less flawed in that it brought all other components of our business out of the legacy system.   At best, I can say that this implementation was flawed.   At that point, and even now, my opinion on the implementation of 2011 clouds my ability to judge the 2012 implementation as harshly as I probably should.  But it really was a rush job- without the full scale testing that probably should have occurred.

At the beginning of 2013, after numerous issue with the 2nd implementation, we went right to the source and brought SAP themselves on board to do a full scale analysis.  What they found was alarming, but not exactly shocking as I knew where we were failing from a methodology and design stand point. The majority of the code in the 2nd implementation was just reworked code from the 1st and not really a full scale implementation in and of itself.  Fine.  We gave the 2nd consulting firm a limited window and budget to get the job done.  But the employees of SAP who took a look at the system and at us were all rather alarmed at what they found.  More alarmed than we had ever been simply because the 1st implementation clouded our judgement of where things currently stood.  Sort of like a heroine addict who quits the smack by becoming an alcoholic,   You have replaced one problem with another–  albeit maybe on the surface less intense–  but still rater problematic.

2013  was a year of lawsuits between the various consulting firms involved in the implementations and ourselves. Our organization began flirting with SAP to do a real fix of the issues.  The lawsuits left us in a state where we couldn’t really commit to future plans with SAP or anyone until they were resolved… so we just sucked it up and went on with our day to day lives throughout the year.  By October, though I am not privy to the resolution of said suits, or even their current status, we contracted with SAP to get us through the 2013 year end.

SAP approached the situation like all good software implementation design teams would, and pushed us to do full scale testing at all phases.  This was an alien concept for us as the 1st consulting firm never utilized this and though the 2nd consulting firm encouraged it, they didn’t really adhere to this development model. So we have not exactly embraced this philosophy, as we have had limited exposure to it in the past. To prepare for the 2013 year end development. we did client copies of our production system to our development and quality environments for the first time in 2013. The middle development environment, quality, exists to do testing with better data than the development environment, as you should be copy the master data in your actual production environment into it at regular intervals, so that once you move the code out of development and into quality, you get a sense of how it will function with the live ever changing data as it exists in your production client.

That being said, we never have- nor are we currently doing copies of our production environment to our quality environment other then at the beginning.  The one thing that was discovered at that point, and which has even further clouded our adaptation of this development model and has even eroded the SAP developers to continue to enforce this model- is our inability to get these environments to behave identically even after a full refresh.    It makes testing a best guess proposition at best; a “we believe that once we move this code into production it will behave in this manner.”

Now that you have a little more on the landscapes… back to the story. We have these work arounds in production as a quick fix so that the system doesn’t totally implode while we get the table fixes out of development.  Due to a erosion of development protocols after the initial client refreshes that occurred in November, I spent a week breaking out quality environment to get it into a similar state as our production environment.  But I am human- and with all ware, there are too many intertwined moving parts for anyone flesh and blood to be able to be able to track in ones head, let alone be able to actually impose upon anything code driven. The best I could do is get our quality environment into a somewhat similar state as our production environment in terms of data…  the impact of various work around in production, their impacts… their secondary impacts as time moved on after the first event…  and the terminal impacts once the system began looking toward table information that didn’t exist as it was prior to 2012 implementation… yada yada yada.  I halfheartedly suggested a production to quality system copy prior to this…  hoping that SAP would echo this idea and run with it. But I was ignored by people inside my organization and I guess we had beaten the SAP guys down to our own flawed ideas of software implementation at this point.

So I created a best approximation in quality as was occurring in production and ran with it.  By late last week, there were signs from our production environment, that about 5% of our employee population would reach the bizarre (for me the layman) terminal state where the system sought out table data from prior to implementation in 2012, thus the work around would no longer function and the issue of the system needing 2014 tables would present in reverse where it would get out of sync for 2012. I did my best and tested the fixes in the quality system which bore no resemblance to reality, early this week.  I was still getting some puzzling results, but nothing outside of my already lowered threshold for what could be considered a successful fix.

Two things occurred on Wednesday that have changed my view of how I fit into all of this madness  Come Wednesday, I was a little over 75% confident that the results I was seeing within the quality system would fix our issue in production and would probably not result in any additional unforeseen issues. After all, in our production environment, the system was dealing with two disconnected models– one for the future and one that we had always utilized in the past.  The fact that any fix would eliminate this gap between the models was necessary even if it caused other issues down the road.  This gap was causing too many base issues with how the system dealt with time–  and if you know anything about SAP–  you know the fucker is obsessed with time being linear. We had caused a huge disconnect there…  so any fix that closed that gap was worth the consequences it caused.

Okay this is the point where I need to stop speaking in quasi-tech speak and just get to the point.  The first thing was that though it was known that the issue was caused by an initial fix the SAP guys had put in place, there was still errors, though benign, that existed in the data cluster.  I had to point out what they were and how they were caused.  The big issue I have with this was that understanding where these issues came from was important in identifying what caused the issue in the first place.  To not understand the results that were sitting there, in light of having have identifying the cause of the initial issue, fixing that, having a second issue arise due to a disconnect between the fix and the starting point and then fixing that, seemed to indicate a lack of true understanding the software experts seemed to have with the system they were attempting to fix.  I had a, “hey this is way outside my pay grade moment,” where I realized I was functioning in the role of a software consultant to MY firm and not the Payroll Manager I had signed on for.

The second moment of clarity I had, early on Wednesday, was during a status meeting I had shortly after I suspected that our developers didn’t appear to understand the landscape they were encountering.   In attendance were the CFO, my bosses boss, the CIO, who supposedly is the project manager in this madness (“though he had asked me somewhat flippantly in the past if I wanted that role when he had experienced conflict from my boss and the CFO) and the developers. We started off from approach that we could conclude our testing… and push these changes into our production environment prior to running the currents week payroll a few hours from then.  Seemed like a rational approach, as I was fairly confident it wouldn’t make things worse.   Even if it did, we could deal with the consequences as they arose. The developers echoed these conclusions and everyone else present had no experience with the matters as they stood from the troops on the ground.  Though they were innately cautious due to all of the failures in the past, they took the opinions of those of us who had some idea what was actually occurring into account.  They moved on to the stalled year end efforts we should have been completing the previous three weeks.

My focus totally drifted away from the conversation around me.   I wasn’t exactly reflecting back upon the entire two and a half year implementation experience but more focusing in on how it was making me feel.  I looked around the room and realized that the quick fix methodology we had been imploring this entire time was standing in the way to any complete solution we hoped to achieve. A feeling of dread crept through my body as I realized that we had no idea what the fix we had sitting in our quality client would truly do once it interfaced with reality.  Saying I have 75% confidence it will be fine amounted to rat shit, as this was not primarily my job, let alone my area of expertise.

My job lay all over my desk in piles of neglected paperwork. It also was in my inbox in form of emails I should have responded to weeks ago.  My voice mail box was a smoking crater with calls I had been deleting after a week of neglect, in the wholly flawed logic that if it were truly important, they would have called back again or they had finally gotten of hold of someone who could actually help them at that point.

As I really only had a tenth of an understanding of all aspects of the system I was trying to fix, and a 75% confidence level that the fix wouldn’t fuck things up more–  the actual reality of the situation mathematically boiled down probably amounted to the following; I had only a 7.5% understanding of how this change would impact our day to day operations.  I looked at the time on my cell phone and realized we were typically starting our primary payroll by this point in the day. We typically were complete with this process approximately an hour before the drop dead time we had to send information to our bank.  I had an hour of analysis left before I was going to feel fully calm with moving the changes into our production system.

Conversation continued to occur around me as I felt my blood pressure begin to rise. It dawned on me again and completely that I was functioning as a software consultant and my knowledge of how the fucking system actually functioned was not going to improve significantly in the course of the next hour.

It is at this point that I interrupted whatever the room was discussing, totally contradicting the decision we had reached prior about the fix saying we should not move these changes over to our production system.   That we should just run payroll in the current broken state for one more period and move the changes over later.   Everyone present looked at me like I had lost my mind.  The wheels had come off.  I took a deep breath whilst I composed my thoughts and myself a little bit.  I looked back up at everyone and explained calmly (thought in retrospect I might have totally sounded fucking insane) that I no longer had confidence in a lot of our base assumptions and therefore had no confidence in the conclusions were arriving at.  That I had no idea what would actually occur when these fixes made contact with reality.  That if anything unexpected occurred there would be no time to be able to correct matters prior to our real life deadlines.  Though I didn’t expect anything such occurring, there was no reason to believe that it wouldn’t occur…  and based on past experience there was a high probability it would occur.

Everyone just looked at me in silence.  I just looked at the CIO whose final call it was in such matters due to his capacity as project manager.   I didn’t even bother to look to my boss or her boss.  I wanted him to call it.  By focusing on him, I made him call it.  At which point everyone objected at the same time- confused by my apparent 180 on this matter. I stood firm that this was my best analysis of how this all stood.  Eventually they all just talked themselves out of steam and I began to realize to my horror just how much weight my opinion actually carried.  Though I was the lowest pay grade in the room, my opinion carried the day and upon reflection, it has for at least the proceeding year.

Thursday, once our primary payroll was complete, we rolled the changes into production. For the last two days of the week, I have been forcing these changes upon the data in the system.  The entire time, I looked at my job lying all around me from a totally disconnected stand point.   At some point, it is going to have to be revisited.  But now I know I am going to have to take a firm stand with how these matters lay with my management.

Needless to say, from a writing standpoint, I have been stuck in a black hole for the last six weeks.  I am now left to figure out my relationship with my job…  with the company that pays my bills…. And my art….  I now know that these are three wholly disconnected worlds I somehow have to integrate.  At least one has to go immediately…  stay tuned.

Week in Review – 11/08/13

I’ve decided to do a week in review column, to share things which interested me throughout the week.  Hopefully, it exposes you to some new things.

Everyone’s A Terrorist  – I have stayed away from reading and dwelling on the NSA, primarily because it was something everyone had long suspected anyways.  Kind of like getting depressed about the weather, as it is something totally outside of your control.  This article kind of got me, only because it demonstrates the ever expanding use of the label ‘terrorist;’ and should be something that gives us all pause.  It goes back to the old school of thought, and I am at a loss right now to remember its origins; that one of the most effective ways to control a population is to create laws that outlaw things that are so general, that anyone can be labeled a criminal.

Twin Towers Halloween Costume  – staying on the theme of terrorism, comes this story out of the UK.  Two college girls decide to go to a fancy dress party as the flaming twin towers of 911. I am all for tasteless, sometimes very tasteless humor.  If I think this is pushing the envelope a little, you have probably gone too far.  This ranks right up there as dressing as Hitler or a Nazi or some infamous serial rapist as a gag.

Arafat Assassinated by Polonium? – this story rang very true for me, especially as it was during the time where the use of polonium as a tool of assassination was all the rage. There was no to little interest in this story as a topic of discussion.  Which is a little odd.  I think if we watch for future developments on this front, it isn’t going to be as instructive in terms of Arafat’s demise, but instead it will probably tell us a little more about the roots of the other polonium assassinations around that time.

LA Meteor– this was really a non story other than some of the more alarmist statements on facebook and twitter.  My favorite aspect the pic in my link, which floated around the net a few hours after the event.  For quite a while, that picture was being re-posted at what seemed like a 3 to 1 ratio to REAL pictures.  Which tells you quite a bit about the general public’s appetite for the most alarming representation of any story.

Deep Sea Fish more closely related to Human’s than other Fish  Very interesting story about the coelacanth.  The ocean still holds some of the most interesting mysteries yet to be discovered, I believe

The Dream of a Space Elevator is alive and well.  Granted we are no closer to this achievement.   At least people still toss around the idea here and there.

Spidery Comet  No one has any real explanation of what this could be.  Even if it was an ice comet, it’s behavior is a little bit unusual.

……and lastly, I got an odd Tweet ad from KFC advising, “Dinosaurs are alive and well at KFC.”   I initially thought it was some new meme that we are eating dinosaur anytime we eat chicken (which is effectively true due to the close relation).  Watching the video, I am not entirely sure what they were going for….  but I have to say that the idea has always creeped me out a bit.  I can’t really put into words why….

Thoughts on NaNoWriMo

Chuck Wendig inspired me to write about my own experiences with NaNoWriMo after his below blog:

http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2013/10/29/the-nanowrimo-dialogues-day-zero/

For those of you who know nothing about it, which probably is everyone, NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) occurs every November.  It is, exactly what it sounds like. Start and finish a novel during the month of November.  I partook in 2011, only to discover what a daunting task that can be.  Granted it is only ten pages a day that would result in a fairly good sized novel—300 pages 90-100k words; but this is a very daunting task, unless you are a professional writer or unemployed.  For the majority of us, this would require a miracle.

I am not saying it isn’t possible to have a day job and complete a novel in a month.  I just can not do it–  or even come close.  At the best of times recently, I can knock out five pages on a work day, forty on a weekend.  Given those parameters, NaNoWriMo this cycle has 21 work days and let’s call it 5 weekends. If you do the math, I could produce 305 pages in that time frame.   The flaw in that thinking is that I would need an ideal thirty day period.  I can’t even manage a good stretch at this point.   Realistically, what I would be able to produce would be somewhere between a quarter and a half of that output.

….and that is the 2013, me. The 2011 version only managed 30 pages.  I was not exactly crushed as an artist, but I was highly discouraged if I was really cut out for this sort of endeavor.  It did sadly take me a little longer to bounce back then I would have desired.

Two years later, I still have not completed a thing. The big difference is, I am no longer discouraged.  I know I have it in me…  and I know that even the anticipated 2016 version of myself probably could not complete a book during the course of one November.

My advise to anyone participating in NaNoWriMo is this; treat it as an experience to learn something about yourself.  Set the goal of completing the novel during the course of a month.  When you get to page 150, with no end in sight come November 30^th– walk away knowing that if you plug away, it will be done by the middle part of January.  The success is that you are finally writing now.  It will be finished someday.

…and oh yeah—be sure that you have a plan going where the book and the characters are going before midnight tonight.  That is more then a third of the difficulties you will encounter finishing the book.

To Orion in a Bathtub

http://www.popsci.com/article/technology/big-pic-orion-powers?src=SOC&dom=fb

Ir’s a little depressing that after 60 or so years, the Orion capsule is pinocle of space program.  I envision this as nothing more than an Apollo capsule on steroids; sympathizing with the future astronauts who will have to spend months aboard. Part of me realizes that this reaction stems from a desire to rush  more quickly into a future already imagined. Science fiction geeks, me in particular, need to take a step back and understand that humanity has only just taken its first steps in what will hopefully be a grand journey.

If the goal is to get a human to Mars, just to do it- with little or no secondary mission objectives, the Orion will do the job. The American people have other things on their minds than a broader dream.   It is our job as writers to inspire these dreams.  At the same time, we provide an escape from the day to day concerns which ultimately bog down humanities will to get bigger things done.  A slippery slope.