I came across the following blog entry skimming the list of most-recent blog entries on livejournal. It cracked me up. All it said was:
guess what i found out today? apparently, i’m in love with a stripper.
How’s that for news!
It’s March!
March is here and that means that spring is just around the corner! End of March/beginning of April is one of my favorite times of the year. It starts to warm up, the cold days of the winter disappear, replaced by green. Grass starts to grow fast. For nearly 20 years, I missed this living in Southern California, but I’m savoring it now!
First draft of “Graveyard Shift” is in the can
I finished the first draft of “The Graveyard Shift” just a few minutes ago and at 16,500 words, it’s about the longest story that I’ve ever written. About 85 manuscript pages. It also needs a lot of work, especially in pacing, character development and the resolution to the story at the end. But all-in-all, I think it’s a pretty good story. It’ll probably take me a couple of weeks to get the thing proofread and get the second draft written. Then it’s off to F&SF (and if it’s rejected there, to Asimov’s). I’ll print out the manuscript tomorrow.
On deck is a mainstream yarn about a minor-league baseball player, his aunt, and a “lost” memory from his childhood. I have no idea where I’ll send the story, but I’m going to write it nonetheless. If nothing else it will be good practice. Short too, maybe 3000-4000 words. My working title for it is “Muscle Memory” and I’ll start it tomorrow or Thursday.
Posting comments
Hey, when you post a comment, can you at least indicate who you are, you know, maybe sign your name or something. I’ve got anonymous comments turned on, mainly so that people don’t have to get a livejournal account to post, but it would be nice to be able to tell who is posting what.
Of course, maybe you don’t want me to know who you are, but come on, we’re all friends here.
Looking for this booklist…
Last night, before dozing off, I was scanning blogs and came across an interesting looking reading list of books. It had a domain name of something like bestmustreadbooksever.com or something like that. I made a mental note to remember it because I wanted to compare it to my own list to see how many of those books I’ve read. I just tried finding it again and couldn’t. I spent 15 minutes doing all sorts of google searches. I checked my browser history. It’s gone. Maybe I dreamed the whole thing.
Indeterminite and stateless
Those were the watchwords of my day at work today. One of the projects on which I am working involves integrating two systems that don’t talk to each other. One system is an off-the-shelf meeting room reservation system; the other product is a tasking application–a helpdesk trouble ticket system. Integration went pretty well, until a few weeks ago when I found it difficult to update the tasking system when a meeting room changed in the meeting system. The reason for this is that only viable method for doing this is through an “indeterminate” or “stateless” mechanism.
Today, I more or less caved in and went with a simpler solution. It’s a little more painful for people who will be servicing the tasks creating by the system, and it is certainly a tactical solution, but it will work.
And yet, I feel defeated. There should be a way of making this work the way I want it to work, but I can’t get enough information about how the meeting application works to figure out what that way is. I’ve read through thousands of lines of their code–it is literally scattered about my office–but I just can’t figure it out. As a completist, I feel frustrated. As someone who is working toward building a system that all people who use it will be happy with, I feel like I’ve let some people down. But given budget constraints and time limits, there’s not much more I can do at this point.
I’m going to try finishing up “The Graveyard Shift” tonight. But I need to relax, wind down a bit first.
Almost done with “The Graveyard Shift”
One more session and I will be done with the first draft. I did about 2,000 words tonight, putting the story right at 15,000 words. I figure another 1,500 or so will finish it up, at least of the first draft. I reached the climax tonight, but I had to stop in the middle of it because I am just plain worn out. So I’ve got to try and wrap things up tomorrow. (Ideally, I’d like to finish the first draft tomorrow because I’ve got this notion of 1 story/month, but if I carries over a bit, that’s fine too. The next big task will be reading 80 manuscript pages to see how well the thing flows in its current form.
I did my 90 pushups. I’m beat. I’m off to bed. (And hopefully, to sleep!)
A quick and dirty I.Q. test
Okay, okay, I saw this and couldn’t resist taking it. I rushed. It shows. Here are my shameful results:
| Your IQ Is 125 |
 Your Logical Intelligence is Below Average Your Verbal Intelligence is Genius Your Mathematical Intelligence is Exceptional Your General Knowledge is Exceptional |
(Incidentally, the one and only time I took a real I.Q. test in school, I scored 129–and it’s always frustrated me that I missed 135–what’s needed to get into Mensa–by 6 points. Not that I put any value into this stuff anyway.)
The Rainbow Room
Reservations have been made and the date has been set: April 8, 2006 8:30 PM at the Rainbow Room Grill on the 65th floor of Rockefeller Center.
I almost always celebrate my birthday pretty low key, but recently, I got the idea to live a little this year. So I invited some good friends who live in the general area, as well as Jen, Jason (and Doug, if he can make it) to an elegant dinner at the Rainbow Room Grill. I’ve always wanted to eat at one of these elegant, old-style New York restaurants and The Rainbow Room is that kind of place. Gentlemen require dinner jackets; no jeans or t-shirts. Ladies, of course, can dress as they like. The food looks outstanding. It should be lots of fun and I’m looking forward to it.
Giving up trying to sleep
I’ve tossed and turned since waking up at 1:30 AM, nearly 3 hours ago and have finally decided to give up trying to sleep. It doesn’t happen very often, but I know when I’m beat. I’ve decided instead to read for the next two hours until I have to get ready for work.
Nightmare
I woke up from a bad dream about 45 minutes ago, laughed it off, got some juice to drink, and now I can’t seem to get back to sleep. I’ve got to get up in 3-1/2 hours. Go figure.
Full compliment of pushups!
I finally did it. My goal all along has been to gradually work up to a total of 90 pushups a night, spread over three sets of 40/30/20. I just completed a full compliment of all three sets for the first time tonight. And you know what, it felt pretty good. Here on out it’s just maintaining the 90 pushups and adding in some additional weight training. And cardio once it starts to warm up a bit more.
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