Year: 2003

Laralee: Kyra, can you go and pick up your toys?
Kyra: No, but thank you for asking.

I just read some articles about online book publishing. Very interesting concept, and one which may be taking off. Apparently some authors (and publishers) have decided that making texts available– for free– on the internet is a way to generate free and rampant publicity, and also a way to potentially boost printed sales because people who enjoy the online version may go out and buy the printed version.

It’s a wonderful thing to see, particularly in a day when digital rights management has become a bunch of big companies blustering about how their multi-billion-dollar business is doomed because a handful of people are swapping files. The enforcement of digital rights has degraded into threats of legal action and other bully tactics.

Soon we may see music artists moving their wares online as well, and as the movement gains momentum we’ll start using the global network the way it should really be used.

Last night I posted a job “opening” for a PHP/MySQL developer to help me in my busy times. I made it very clear that I wanted experienced PHP/MySQL programmers, and that I don’t have any steady work– just intermittent projects.

The posting has been sitting out there for a few hours, and not surprisingly I’ve been inundated with resumes. Many of the people are well-qualified, and I’m trying to sort through the ocean of mediocrity to find the gems who would be exactly what I need.

Several interesting responses:

* A Romanian company who says I should consider using Romanian developers because the pay rates over there are much lower. (This guy also called and left a long message in broken English.)

* Someone who said, and I quote: “In your list of absolutely required skills you list MySQL, which I lack…”

* Several people who are new to PHP but seem to think “absolutely required” somehow equates to “just learning”.

Laralee: “Hey Kyra, Dad’s home!”
Kyra: “Was he gone?”

Ouch.

For the second time ever, I decided to read Slashdot. It’s one of the most popular geek news sites around, and if I want to stay on top of the not-quite-news stories I should probably expand my reading horizons.

I was amused to find someone had posed the question “What would ‘The Lord of the Rings’ be like if someone besides Tolkien had written it?” The responses were riotous, with one of my favorites being Dr. Seuss:

Gandalf, Gandalf! Take the ring!
I am too small to carry this thing!

I can not, will not hold the One.
You have a slim chance, but I have none.

I will not take it on a boat,
I will not take it across a moat.

I cannot take it under Moria,
that’s one thing I can’t do for ya.

I would not bring it into Mordor,
I would not make it to the border.

Either I have plain bad luck with Windows, or Windows just plain sucks.

Today I spent about four hours trying to install Windows 98 on two sort-of-old computers from my friend Kindra. She needed ’98 so her kids could play their little educational games (which don’t run under the NT family). It seemed like a simple request, but turned into a nightmare of reformat-install-fail repeated again and again.

After four failed attempts on one, I finally gave up, wiped the hard drive, and gave it to her in the hopes that some CD she had at home would be adequate to the task. The second computer failed twice before it reluctantly accepted the OS.

Don’t even get me started on how much easier and faster it would’ve been to install Linux on both of those machines…

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’!”