Month: January 2003

We rented “Minority Report” the other evening. I’d been interested in seeing it since it first came out, but the classic theater price dilemma kept us from seeing it on the big screen. Now that I’ve finally seen it, I have to say that it’s a great movie. Very suspenseful, and the mystery of “whodunit?” kept us guessing until the end. I was impressed by a lot of things in the movie. Some general comments:

1) I like how Cruise’s eyes changed to dark brown when he got new ones. Attention to detail. It would’ve been even better if, at the end, he had one brown and one blue– since he had kept one of his originals.

2) Whoever played Agatha did a great job. Maybe in real life she’s pretty and funny and whatever, but in the movie she was very much what you might expect of the precog.

3) The special effects were very good. I really dug the computer screens that were projected on glass or just into the air. And the way they manipulate data is fun– sliding stuff around with special gloves.

4) The police airships reminded me of Boba Fett’s Slave I starship.

5) The whole movie was colorized weird– very grey-and-blue. At first it annoyed me, but then I realized if they’d made everything really bright and cheery it would’ve clashed with the mood of the story.

So all in all it was a lot of fun. Now I just have to read the Philip K. Dick short story it’s based on…

The week Alex was born, I made up my mind to finally write a full-length novel. I didn’t want to do it for publication, riches, or fame– but because I had some great story ideas (just concepts, actually) and wanted to put them to paper. I spent a few days laying out the plot and the characters and even the world where they occurred. It was, of course, science fiction and therefore had to take place in the far future on some far-flung world of the galactic empire. I even started writing, but after twenty or thirty pages I simply ran out of steam. Over the years those ideas have festered, the plot has evolved, even the characters have changed. And every time I try to dive into it, I find myself stuck beyond a few chapters.

As an interesting side note, one of the three main characters in that story was named Kyra al-Kii, and a year and a half later I took that name for my daughter. So now it might look strange to have a heroine named for my daughter, but the truth is that it’s the other way around. That’s when I really decided Kyra was a cool name, and what better use for it?

Anyway, the years– almost six of them– have rolled past, and I’m no closer to finishing the novel. I’ve added to the concepts, but my biggest hurdle (and a constant weakness of mine) is that while I have some really fascinating plot lines, I haven’t figured out how to tie them all together into a coherent, gripping, sensible story. It’s like I have pieces of twenty stories and need something to bring them all together into a saga. I don’t know if that’s how most novels are written, but I suspect not. I’ve read books about how to write novels, and all of them suggest planning chapter-by-chapter, describing characters on paper before even beginning to write about them, and really thinking about the story and finding its weaknesses and “dry” parts so they can be improved.

So the ideas are still there, the ambition is still there, but I simply haven’t dedicated the time and energy to do it. I’ve always said that my goal in life is to spend my retirement years (hopefully not too far away) sitting on my big house-encircling porch, in an easy chair, clicking away at a novel on my laptop while the sun setsover the mountains in front of me. That image is so vivid in my mind that I can almost picture the place I live, and the setting I’m describing. Of course there’s a long and not-so-fun road to get there, but if things go really incredibly fantastically well I could be there someday. Time will tell.

Tonight I was working on some stuff, and Alex needed me to come upstairs. With a little help from mom, he called my cell phone and I answered.

“Hello?”
“Hi dad.”
“Who is this?”
“Alex.”
“Alex who?”
“Alex Schroeder.”
“I don’t know anyone named Alex Schroeder.”
“Yes you do. I’m your kid.”

Alex: “Kyra, you’re a pooter.”
Kyra: “You shouldn’t call people that.”
Alex: “Why not?”
Kyra: “Because it’s not a nice word.”
Alex: “Yes it is.”
Kyra: “Then call yourself a ‘pooter’!”

The tally is in. This year I sent 8,024 e-mail messages. That’s an average of 22 messages every day.

Yikes. No wonder I feel out of touch when I’m on vacation or whatever, and can’t check my e-mail for a day or two…

So at 2:00 this morning the city of Boulder lost power. It was out for three hours, during which time the facility where I’m co-locating my web servers had a diesel generator running. Around 4:00 the generator sprung a fuel leak and shut down, so my UPS batteries kicked in. They lasted a little over half an hour, and then all my computers shut down.

When the power came back on, four of my systems rebooted themselves. The other two didn’t. This was, of course, a problem– those were the database servers. I woke up to clients calling and asking where their web sites were.

Although this is really just a case of bad luck, it goes to show how complicated it is to keep servers going all day, every day. Fortunately my clients are understanding; they could easily fly off the handle and scream at me about incompetence…

Today I was struggling with writing some web code that would work in both Netscape and Internet Exploder. Of course Microsoft has put together their own little flavor of Javascript, so the stuff I was writing worked just fine in Netscape but gave big ugly errors in IE. When Laralee came into the office and asked how I was doing with stuff, I explained my woes. Her response about Microsoft:

“They’ll burn as stubble.”

For the first time, Alex read a book entirely on his own. It’s part of a big ol’ collection called “Learn to Read Storybook” or something. I had it as a kid, and my mom copied the first few (easy) stories and bound them. He breezed through the first one, even though it was mind-numbingly dull:

I see a bee.
I see a tree.
I see a bee fly to the tree.

It goes on for about fifty pages. However, these are all words that are easy for kids to figure out, and Alex did it. I was pretty proud.

I hope to have him reading “The Lord of the Rings” next spring.

Win the battle, lose the war?

I was in court yesterday, suing a former client who refused to pay for work I’d done. After a year and a half of broken promises, I finally went to court over the issue. I won– by default– because the guy didn’t even bother to show up. Yippee, I should get my money now, right?

Of course not. Now begins the exciting process of “discovery” where I submit papers to the court (at cost to me, of course) to force him to reveal his debtors– clients or otherwise. I could also ask for bank account numbers, but I have those. The problem is, I called the bank to see if there’s enough money in the account to cover the court-ordered payment, and there isn’t. He could easily open a new account somewhere, use it instead of the old one, and I’d never know. More to the point, he could refuse to disclose his debtors and I wouldn’t have anywhere to turn to get the money.

So I’ve learned, through hard experience, that you can be a complete idiot and refuse to pay for things, and in the end you can get away with it. The only way I’ll ever see my money is if I persist– perhaps over the course of a year or more– and in the end it’s a question of whether it’s worth my time and headache to collect.

Sigh.