Last night my daughter decided that she wanted to take the whole family and go to Marie Callender's for her birthday dinner. For some reason, which I've yet to fully figure out, I ordered a steak, medium rare. What I got was a well-done hamburger. I thought about sending it back, but my kids were already done with their meal by the time I got mine, so that wasn't really an option.
Speaking of the kids, initially they all wanted to order macaroni and cheese. It clearly states on the menu that it's Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, which means we would have spent $4 a plate for something you can buy at the store for 75 cents a box. Fortunately, we managed to talk them in to chicken strips and fries, still something we can do pretty cheaply at home, but at least the horrible deal we were getting wasn't quite so transparent.
Since Christmas is on a Saturday, tomorrow is the day I get off. The day after Christmas I leave for a week long skiing and snowmobiling vacation, then of course, there's New-Year's Eve and New-Year's Day. The upshot of all this is that the next time you can count on a blog entry will be January 3rd, though I might pop on during the vacation and post something (then again, I might not). So whomever you are and wherever you are, have a Merry Christmas (and while you're at it read about some ridiculous attempts to get people to stop saying that.)
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Ross
My daughter had her very first piano recital last night. I may be biased when I say this, but she was obviously the best of all the kids preforming. Afterwards I did some last minute Christmas shopping and then headed over to the Office Max where my friend works to see if I could pick up some book shelves and a desk for the office. I spent nearly an hour agonizing over which desk to get before finally getting a big L-shaped one made of glass (or at least the top is glass) along with three book shelves. Once I got home I stayed up until one putting together one of the book shelves. The molding may have been a mistake.
See, without the molding you slap some shelves in between the two sides and you're done. With molding every single shelf, side, top bottom has to have the molding attached before it can be put together, and though I really like the cam screw system for putting the shelves together, after you've done 28 of them your wrist is pretty sore. But I have to say the molding does make it look pretty nice. With all the furniture purchased I'm hoping I can get everything done before I leave on vacation, which would make it acceptable for me to play my game while I'm away. Course, maybe I shouldn't get it done since I really should be writing while I'm on vacation.
I found out something interesting today. Go to Google, type "french military victories" and hit 'I feel lucky.' The result will probably not surprise you. Sometimes computers can uncover truth only guessed at by the population at large.
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Ross
We had my family's Christmas party last night. I made out pretty well: I got some biking gloves, the Annotated Lolita, Gigantic: A Tale of Two Johns, a couple of other DVD's and a B-52's CD (Time Capsule), plus a bunch of other cool stuff. Of course, my wife had already bought Lolita and Gigantic for me, so that threw a little wrinkle into the holiday spirit. It also illustrates one of the weaknesses of the Amazon Wish List (though I assume they consider it a feature). If you buy the gift from somewhere other than Amazon (say OverStock.com) it does not indicate that on the wish list.
In other news, J.K. Rowling finished Harry Potter book six and it scheduled to be released on July 16th (you can order it from Amazon right now for 40% off). I think that may be one of the strengths of the Harry Potter series, that unlike some series (*cough*Wheel of Time*cough*) it has a definite end, of course. I'd be willing to bet significant amounts of money on seeing some other books in the Harry Potter world within a decade of the end of the first series.
The thing I'm actually the most curious about is how long the book ended up being. I have noticed that most successful authors exhibit a trend towards increasing longer books. Certainly J.K. has thus far fit the model, though it's hard to imagine her topping the 870 page whopper that was book 5. In any case, I'm not ashamed to admit that I'll be one of those lined up at midnight on July 15th...
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Ross
My mother-in-law secured a condo for the weekend, so my wife took the kids and left me to get some stuff (mostly writing) done. As such, it was a fairly productive weekend. Not as productive as I had hoped, but I tend to be overly optimistic about those sorts of things, so on the balance I got quite a bit done. One of the things I mostly finished off was my Christmas shopping, which meant going downtown on the Saturday before Christmas (I was going to be downtown anyway for a Christmas concert), which is not for the faint of heart.
Just before I went to leave I discovered that I felt a little queasy. It took me a moment to realize that this wasn't because I had drunk too much milk (I'm slightly lactose intolerant, but isn't everyone. My hyper-lactose intolerant Korean friend sent me to this site the other day, pretty funny) or because I was coming down with something -- this was the queasiness caused by being nervous. I was nervous about trying to get some shopping done on the Saturday before Christmas. I guess on reflection when you think about the parking and the crowds, that's perfectly understandable.
The other annoyance at the moment is the fact that I have a video game which I'm not allowed to play. I bought it as a reward (a carrot) for finishing the organization of the office. I'm basically done except that I have to purchase the new furniture (mostly bookshelves) and in between all the Christmas stuff going on, I may not have any time until January 3rd... You can imagine how having an unopened game sitting on the shelf...mocking me...would cause me some distress.
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Ross
I'm going to get this out of the way early: I woke up at 5:30; you know how it is, "no rest for the wicked." One story that hasn't gotten a lot of coverage is the situation between Japan and North Korea (the AP story I linked to was only picked up by two newspapers, as far as I could tell). Apparently, there's a dispute over the remains of a Japanese national who was kidnapped by the North Koreans.
See, the North Koreans turned over some remains, but they weren't who the Koreans claimed they were. So Japan was going to impose sanctions, but North Korea said they would consider that an act of war. Now they have a tendency to do that a lot, but I still think that when a nuclear power on the verge of collapse starts talking about war that it might merit a little more mention in the mainstream press, wouldn't you?
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Ross
Short on time, so I only have time for one brief topic: The Wizard of Earthsea miniseries the SciFi network just did. I had a co-worker tape it for me and when I arrived this morning the tapes were waiting for me on my desk. One other thing was waiting for me, an article by Ursula Le Guin on how the SciFi Channel had wrecked her books. I was very interested in what she had to say, but after reading it I was kind of unimpressed. Her central argument was that they didn't get the racial make-up right. Well one could argue that they didn't get the racial make-up correct in The Magnificent Seven either, but that didn't keep it from being a great movie.
I guess one of the problems I had was that I had never paid much attention to the skin color of the characters in the book. So I'm far more interested in plot elements that were changed or events that were re-ordered, than I am in whether Ged was too white. And isn't not paying attention to skin color precisely what I'm suppossed to be doing? I'm so confused...
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Ross
It's nice to see that the last few comments about my writing have gotten some comments, even if some were needlessly cruel (Geshin, I'm looking at you). I think the comment about the state of the economy was very astute, although the numbers I'm citing are from a submission which closed in July of 2003. There are a lot of facets to the economy, but I think unemployment rate would be the number that mapped most closely. In the months preceding the MoP open call, unemployment hovered around 6% (with a peak of 6.3% in June) and right now employment is at about 5.4%, according to the BLS. So that's good news for me I guess.
Geshin pointed out that it doesn't really matter how many submissions there are because a) I can't do anything about that (mostly true, but stay tuned for my newest website WoTCNovelOpenCallisaFraud.org) and b) that I should be focusing on the quality of my own submission (also true). Yes, the contest is more of a race than a head-to-head match, but it's a lot easier to get the best "time" if you're racing against a field of 20 than a field of 20,000. I did find out that the contest has gotten pretty wide exposure on most of the main writing boards out there (which I scrupulously avoid, but that's a topic for another day, maybe tomorrow), which will certainly increase the number of submissions. I guess that's bad news...
I don't have any great links today. But I guess them's the breaks. I was, however, impressed by the headline FARK used to announce Anna Kournikova's marriage, "Anna Kournikova's single Dazarova, secretly Wedserlova". That's it for today.
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Ross
Last night I got double the amount of writing done (actually revising) I had scheduled for myself. Not bad, if I do say so myself. It may be too early to tell, but I think I'm better at writing consistently than I was the last time I tried. Of course, it would be pretty sad if after a year and a half of blogging every day I wasn't at least a little bit better at writing on a schedule. Part of the reason I pushed myself yesterday is that I wanted to finish revising the first chapter so that I could get it out there to my 'readers' (the people who've agreed to help me with scathing criticism and much-needed editing).
While I was writing last night I paused briefly (while chatting with someone who's also considering entering the open call) to estimate how many submissions I thought WoTC would receive. One of their previous open calls, the "Maiden of Pain," got 498 submissions. Of course, there are two big differences between that open call and this one. That open call only required 10 pages, not a completed novel; that would obviously have a tendency to depress the number of entries. The other big difference was that "Maiden of Pain" had a specific theme and a specific setting already specified, while the current call is "write whatever you feel like as long as it could be shelved in the science fiction/fantasy section," so that would obviously have the opposite effect. The question is whether the reduction caused by the length will be greater than or less than the increase caused by the more open specifications.
Obviously I hope that the net balance is fewer entries, but in my gut I think there will be more. So lets say there's a thousand. Then the question becomes, what sort of entries will those be? A lot of the freelancers I know are already so booked with projects that they're having difficulty finding the additional time required to write a novel on top of everything else, whereas whipping out the 10 pages necessary for the MoP open call was no big deal. My analysis would be that even though there will be more entries in the novel call, there will be about the same number in both that are truly competitive, which I'm going to peg at a 1/3, or 166. Obviously that's just me pulling numbers from where the sun don't shine, but don't you feel better for having waded through my meaningless reasoning?
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Ross
Apparently the link I posted to the Wizards of the Coast Open Call I'm planning on entering didn't work. Clicking on the link, it appears that somehow a space got in there right at the end. Looking at the code, I didn't see any extra space, so I'm not sure what's happening. So in any case, I'll post it again, http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=books/main/opencall2004 along with the actual URL; hopefully that will work. As far as the writing itself goes, there's good news and bad news...
The good news is that, as far as I can tell, I'm a much better writer now than I was ten years ago when I started this book. Of course, that's the bad news as well, because most of the stuff I have from back then is going to need some serious rewriting before it can be used. Another piece of bad news is that while I managed to get the writing I had scheduled done on Saturday, that was basically all I got done and I didn't get a chance to do any DireKobold stuff. But I did have a commitment that got me up at 4:45 and lasted until 9 and then I was busy from 4:00 in the afternoon onward with another committment and hopefully, as I get back into the swing of things with writing it will go more quickly.
Finally, I would just like to link to one of the many stories about the 10-year old girl who was hand-cuffed as a result of an asinine, idiotic, repugnant zero-tolerance policy at a Philidephia elementary. To describe as moronic taking away a 10-year old in hand-cuffs for bringing scissors to school is to slander morons everywhere. But perhaps the word hasn't be invented which describes this in the terms necessary to encompass its full depth of idiocy. But speaking of morons, let's see what morons.org has to say on the subject.
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Ross
Well, since the announcement of yesterday I have spent most of my available time getting all my ducks in a row. That sort of thing is both gratifying and frustrating. Gratifying, in that through the mere process of organization it almost feels as if the job is all but done. Frustrating, when you realize that not only is the job not done, but that you're wasting valuable time not doing the job. Still, without a certain amount of organization the job would never get done.
One of the things I'm going to try in an attempt to make my life more effective is establish a strict sleep schedule. It's my hope that if I go to bed and get up at exactly the same time every day that I'll be able to get by on less sleep and thus increase the amount of time I have available. This is not to say that I don't have a fairly set sleep schedule already, but as with everything, it could certianly use some improvement. Right now my plan is to be in bed at exactly 11 and wake up at 6:30. Now I go to bed at approximately 11 though sometimes as late as midnight and wake up at 7:20 so that should give me an extra hour each day right there.
I plan to spend that hour making sure I get breakfast every morning and also exercise. There seem to be various schools of thought about whether exercising helps you get by with less sleep, but my own experience is that you need more sleep, but maybe that's just until the body adjusts. In any case, I think it's worth a try. Regardless of how many projects I have going, it's pretty difficult to argue that I couldn't use some more exercise. Finally, I leave you with a link to an article in the Christian Science Monitor on advances being made with Fusion Power.
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Ross
For quite a while I've been meaning to post a DireKobold update in my blog, and every time I think about doing it that thought has immediately been followed by, "Yeah that is a good idea, but there's not real rush... it can wait until tomorrow." By now dozens of tomorrows have passed and I need to get off my butt and do it. Part of the problem is that the news isn't that great. But it's not all bad either. It is what it is I guess, a reflection of me, a decidedly flawed individual with more than my fair share of lazy genes...
Okay, that may have been overly melodramatic. Let me back track a little bit. Shortly after GenCon 2003 I realized that the initial business model I had come up with was not going to work, or in any case that I did not have sufficent capital or time to wait for it work (if in fact it ever would). From that point I began to cast about for a way to make it work, from the perspective of the money and time I had to spend on it and from the perspective of my loyal subscribers. The resulting dead space has felt like the trenches of World War I: a desperate muddy stalemate with only occasional visits to the mademoiselles and the hope of American intervention keeping me from dying of despair. Okay, maybe that metaphor died while still in the mud, but hopefully you get the point.
Recently I had an idea which might in fact be the salvation of DireKobold; unfortunately it's not at a stage where I can talk about it. Yes, I know, saying stuff like this is fantastically annoying, but the alternative is to keep my mouth shut and give you the impression that I've done nothing. This idea is taking up the vast majority of whatever discretionary time I have, and as result there hasn't been much to see on the front end. For that I apologize, (yet again) but there actually are a few things coming up. Next week or the week after that I plan on putting up a redesigned DireKobold.com. Okay, maybe you're thinking whoop-de-do, but it is pretty cool, primarily because it was designed by someone other than me. Also come Hell or high water, I will put out a Xenogenic NPC this month (you'll understand this better next paragraph). And the Adventure Path will get completed, probably just not anytime soon...
All of this was done in preparation for the big announcement. In addition to the "idea" I'm working on, a new Xenogenic NPC, and a website redesign (not to mention work, family, cleaning and organizing the office (i.e. hundreds of books), playing the occasional game (all work and no play make Ross a dull boy) and a host of other things too tedious to list) I have decided to enter this "open call". I have a novel I've been working on, on and off for 15 years and despite what can only be considered impossibly inconvenient timing, the "open call" opportunity is just way too good to pass up.
The skeptics (and the realists and probably even the optimists out there) will be saying that all this can't possibly be done, and who knows, maybe they're right, but every so often (and maybe you've experienced this) you end up with so much to do that you become unbelievably effective. I guess it goes back to the saying "That the busiest man has the most time." So we'll see what happens. One of the things I'm going to need to do is focus my creative energy (I heard you guys laugh) on writing the novel, which means that blog entries, while not going away, may be more sporadic, shorter and if such a thing is possible, of poorer quality.
That's all I have to say for now, though I had hoped to say more (or at least elaborate more). As usual send hate mail to president@whitehouse.gov.
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Ross
My friend Ed corrected me on my Planned Parenthood claim, using the statistic that 4,000 abortions are performed each day. That sounded really, really high. But everywhere I looked on the web, the numbers seemed to support this figure. But I'm still skeptical (though obviously less so). One of the things that really puts my skepticism into overdrive is the figure the CDC provides (that previous link) of 1 abortion for every three live births. Which means every time you see three kids together, somebody, somewhere, aborted one. I'll be honest, I'm having a really hard time wrapping my head around that one.
Of course, if I want to continue to argue that those numbers are inflated, I have to be able to offer at least some rationale for where the inflation is coming from. I thought maybe it might be an overly broad definition. According to the website, "Legal induced abortion was defined as a procedure, performed by a licensed physician or someone acting under the supervision of a licensed physician, that was intended to terminate a suspected or known intrauterine pregnancy and to produce a nonviable fetus at any gestational age." Kind of the only wiggle room I see is the term "suspected" and the phrase "any gestational age," but at most, that shaves of a percentage here or there, but it's not going to cut the number in half...
I guess I have no other recourse than to assume that the numbers are pretty accurate. Which would further mean that I was wrong. Now there's something you don't see every day... (Or is it "There's something you see every day"? I can never get that right.) I did think that Ed's comment that the Pro-Choice people were selectively breeding themselves out of existence was trenchant, and, dare I say, humorous...
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Ross
Today I thought I would start off with a link rather than end with one. Today I would like to direct your attention to a column by Professor Mike Adams. As arguably the last conservative left anywhere on any college campus, his columns would be hilarious if they were not so tragic. This particular one is on the double standard employed when defining what a hate crime is. Good stuff (with the exception of the claim that Planned Parenthood has killed more people then Nazi Germany -- that seems spurious, particularly if you lay any of the 15 million Russian dead at their feet).
I donated platelets yesteday. I had a really hard time picking a movie. Firstly, because the movie I really want to watch, Enternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is forever out at the satellite center despite the numerous times I've asked them to bring it back, then one of the phlebotomists insisted on standing over me while I made my selection (I'm often surprised how easily I get performance anxiety). So I finally selected Spartan because one of my friends recommended it. I was a few minutes into it before I realized that he had already forced me to watch it. I guess it couldn't have been that memorable.
When it was all over, I ended up watching Terminator 3, which was better than I thought. Of course, like all time travel movies, it had its problems and paradoxes, but I liked it better than a lot of them. Terminator decided to use what might be called the historical inevitablity school of time travel, which is basically you can fool around with the time line a little bit, but some things are so huge that they happen no matter what. Not the best way of doing time travel, but not the worst either.
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Ross
A co-worker and I were talking earlier today about his first VCR, which apparently cost $3000 back in 1980 when it was purchased. My boss interjected that back in 1980 he was still on the family farm, where they didn't have a TV nor apparently even a radio. I joked that if they were that cut off from civilization they might still have a couple of English airmen hiding out in the basement, waiting for the war to get over. At which point my boss mentioned that in actuality when he had returned to visit the farmhouse (by then under new ownership), he had found messages carved into the walls of the attic by the French resistance. Which, when you think about it, is actually pretty cool. The only history I have in my house is a record of furnace maintenance from the 60's (if it's even that old).
History is really one of those things where you wish you had a lifetime to devote to it, and certainly you could spend a lifetime on it and still just have scratched the surface. Part of this longing comes from my continued reading of the Horatio Horblower novels, which I continue to struggle through. After a speedy beginning, I've been reduced by other factors to getting in a few pages between the car and my cube and the obligatory bathroom reading. I must say that until reading the books, I hadn't given a lot of thought to the Napoleonic Wars, but now I'm going to have to add that to the list of things I need to read more about.
In any event, as usual the weekend was not as productive as I would have hoped, but I still got some things done. In any case that's it for today, though before I sign-off here's a link to a story about the Oil-for-Food scandal involving Kofi Annan and the UN. Which I decided to include because it's been sadly under-reported.
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Ross
When the smoke cleared on yesterday's problems, I ended up staying until just after 1 AM, and the problem still wasn't fixed. At around 6 am this morning, my youngest started screaming and such was my curiousity about whether the problem had been solved that I couldn't get back to sleep. Checking my e-mail from home, I discovered that it still had not been resolved. So I quickly showered and headed back in to work. Fortunately, it didn't take too much longer; by 8:30 the problem had been identified and though there was still several hours of clean-up left, the worst was behind us.
As it turns out, one of the companies we work with had put a router on our network. And whether due to catasprophic failure (highly unlikely) or direct human error, it had been configured in such a way as to try to assume the role of gateway for the entire network. As you may imagine, this caused some problems. With two machines competing for the position, all hell broke loose. Three of the guys I work with were here the whole night. By noon today when they were finally allowed to leave, they were pretty punchy.
As far as links, Boortz had a great link to an article written by an Israeli settler. I know a few of my readers also read Boortz, but if you don't or if you didn't follow the link, you should -- it's an excellent article, about a criminally mis-represented segment of the world's population.
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Ross
I'm here somewhat late at work, while some mysterious problem ravages our network. It's not really my area of responsibility, but I'm staying anyway to help troubleshoot and to offer moral support. And perhaps to gain some social capital to counterbalance all that I have spent telling French jokes to my boss (who, as you'll recall, is a frog), which brings up the point of teaching my children a second language. See, despite all my derisive comments about the French, I'm actually something of a fracophile, though admittedly less so in the last few years, for any number of reasons. But my wife would like them to learn Spanish and therein lies the conflict.
I can certainly see the argument for Spanish: for one thing it increases their employability enormously. I can't count the number of times I've seen ads for jobs where knowledge of Spanish is a prerequesite or at least a recommendation, and certainly they'll have a lot of people to practice on. On the other hand, one of my big requirements for a second language is access to great literature in it's original tongue. If my kids learn Spanish all that gets them is Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Cervantes. French gets them any number of authors. Of course, maybe if this is my primary criteria I should have them learn Russian. Apparently, Tolstoy is much better in the original.
Well the problems continue, and despite the time spent waiting I have been unable to find any decent links or at least any decent links that are newsworthy, and having dragged this out for long enough, I think I'll end.
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Ross
I was talking with someone last night and they complimented me on my blog, to which I responded with something to the effect of "Are you serious?" To which they responded that they admired the dedication it took (presumably more than the actual writing). I guess that's sort of a compliment. Speaking of compliments, I wonder how many of my readers are familiar with the term "trade-last"?
As you can see if you follow the link, a trade-last is a sort of compliment rationing scheme. Initially I had been lead to believe, by my wife in particular but by friends in general, that this barbarity was something peculiar just to my family, but as you can see (once again by following the link to the definition), it's actually widespread enough to have made it into a dictionary. For myself, I've become a little bit weary of the system. I hear lots of nice things about other people, but when I offer these to them as a trade-last, the beads of sweat which form on their furrowed brow as they strain to think of something, anything, which under the most favorable light could be construed as a nice comment about me is truly depressing.
Speaking of depressing, some researchers discovered that it takes on average four minutes for a machine running Windows XP Service Pack 1 to be taken over by a hacker after it's plugged into the internet. Apparently the record was 30 seconds. It takes most people 30 seconds to realize that they successfully connected to the internet for the first time.
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Ross