NaNoWriMo

Just realised, never posted bout finishing the evil book project. It's finished, done, over with and smells like a big pile of horsy apples. It is crap, but I did enjoy writing it, and achieved the desired effect of having written my first ever book. Woohoo!

Writing another one might take a slightly longer time though.

Prague again

Been about four years since we were here, but still a nice city. Not quite as cheap as it used to be. The conversions work out at something like:

Previous: ~30 Kč = €1
Current: 24.5 Kč = €1

Value for money - dinner for two (mid range Chinese restaurant):

Previous: ~€20
Current: ~€35

So while the currency exchange hasn't changed a lot in the intervening time, the actual worth of the Czech currency has definitely improved.
I especially saw this in two examples: Taxi from airport to hotel - €28, two English books (Roald Dahl, nothing overly special about them) - €30.

Not quite the treasure trove of cheapness that it used to be. However, beer is still ridiculously cheap, averaging about €2 for .5 litre in restaurant/pub.

Ambiance: Christmas markets are pretty and festive and so on, but couldn't really see a hell of a lot worth buying. My money stayed in my pocket, only reappearing when beer was in the offing.

We've been here a few times by this stage, and have always had fond memories of the place, but I'd say this may be the last one for a while...

Novel writing

Day 11 of NaNoWriMo project and all's going reasonably well. Missed two days last week, but divvied up the work between remaining days of this week, so all going ok. Came across great site, very simple idea - Write or Die - gives you changing colours and countdowns till your alloted writing time is up. Really handy - got 2000 words written today using it in just under an hour, whereas yesterday was closer to 2 hours for a lower number due to faffing around.

Amazing what a deadline can do to your concentration. See NaNo widget on right for current word count.

Meeting the Man

Image by kwc via FlickrWent to the launch of Mr. Gaiman's newest, The Graveyard Book, last night. Great experience. Was initially worried I wouldn't get in because it was a ticket event, but turned out I needn't have worried (or turned up quite so early...) as tickets were just to get a seat for the reading.

Listened to the Master read from his new piece (unfortunately I'd already read the book while in the que, got bored waiting), and he then did a Q&A. Some other git got my question in - Neil spent a month recently in China on a research trip, and wanted to ask was this for his latest work and what type of effort would it be - and he stated that it will be a non-fiction book revolving around mtyh, 7th (I think) century Chinese legend, and various such things. He has a very distinctive sense of humour, warm and dry at the same time, almost giving the impression of being a big kid who's delighted that people came to see his latest fun and games. ( The picture here is not mine, but was similar enough that I thought it added to the post, thanks to original photographer linked at photo)

He told several funny stories, my favourite of which revolved around the two versions of the book, one illustrated by Dave McKean, long time collaborator, and one by Chris Riddell. Story goes like so (as far as my caffeine addled wits can recall):
Neil and Dave standing talking at the official launch of The Grveyard Book when Dave's young son comes barrelling up: "Daddy Daddy!! Guess what!! Look, the book was illustrated by Chris Riddell, he's like my favourite illustrator ever!!". Silence from Dave, the kind of silence that can only be produced when horribly embarassed by a well meaning loved one. "Can we go and get him to sign my book daddy, please please please??". "um, yeah, sure.." says Dave , and allows him to tugged away by his wide-eyed little boy, presumably glowing beetroot red. If I was Neil at this point I would have been rolling on the floor, struggling to breathe as the tears of laughter course down my face...

Someone also asked will he ever go back to comics, to which he replied that he was currently extremely behind schedule working on 2 part Batman story, apparently on page 25 of 32. Of part 1. Something to look forward to....

Neil very generously agreed to sign anything bought in store last night, plus 2 other items people had brought along, which suited me perfectly as I had bought the book, plus brough my copy of Absolute Sandman Vol. 1, and my copy of 1602. Signed all 3, and did little sketches in Sandman and Graveyard Book, see pictures below.








A very fun event, and massive thank you to Neil for taking the time out to talk to everyone, and spend so much time signing and personalising sketches/messages for everyone.


I am a happy fan-boy.

Perception projection

Thought struck me today while waiting for the train - I had, as usual, my head buried in a book, and when I looked up to check if the train had arrived I got a strange sensation of disconnection, almost as if seeing the world for the frist time...

It made me wonder: if we spend some much of our day - buried in computer screen, reading, watching tv - in scenarios where we are effectively projecting our perceptions outside of the body, does it affect your perception overall? It seems to me that this phenomenon could give rise to people feeling disconnected to the real world, and unable to experience the world from an internal point of view, rather than the one we are currently absorbed in.

It was an odd thought, and I dont know if it has any merit so would be glad to hear someone elses opinion on it...

The scary

Image via Wikipedia Its getting frightening now. More so because I'm starting the course in November and still think I can pull off the 50,000 word book. On the bright side the plot is starting to flesh out a little bit, which, on the down side, only gives me a deeper insight into how much more work there is to be done.

Thought I'd start off the day with a little comic talk. Recently bought (had bought for me :) ) a copy of V for Vendetta, and it was the first time I'd read it. Shameful, I know. I saw the movie when it came out a few years ago, and was a big fan, but couldn't understand why people kept telling me it wasn't as good as the book, and why the inestimable Mr. Moore wanted nothing to do with it. I finally get it.


While the film could well have been a decent stand up piece on its own, when compared to the book it was a poor shadow. It lacked the depth and insight into the characters that were the heart of the book, for example, there was next to nothing about the Leader in the film, and Evey's character wasn't correctly intereprated as the terrified child-woman that is depicted through the dialogue and images. All through the book you get a real feel for her character, from the first clumsy frightened attempts to make money selling her body, which dives into not only her despair at her life and all thats been taken away from her, but also the state of the society as a whole. Its the ultimate dog eat dog, survival of the fittest world with the just the faintest veneer of order and civilisation thrown over it.

Coming back to finish this post after a few days of hiatus and hangovers. Its amazing the extra insights into someone's work you can gain given extra time and re-reading. One thing that struck me this morning is the relationship between Cain and Abel in Sandman. Cain is the elder domineering, generally assholey dude who murders his brother on a regular basis. But wha tyo've got to consider there is the vicious cycle that he finds himself in. Back in the dawn days he killed his brother in a fit of rage and so became branded for all time as the first muderer. This then plays out over and over again in the dream. But, and this is the important bit, you get occassional flashes of insight into the character that speak of an unholy amount of pain caused by this recurring action, and the odd flash of tenderness towards his half-wit fluffiness and light brother, who basically just wants them to be friends. At times it seems like he wants to break out of it but, knowing that he can't, it just serves to make him all the more bitter and enraged. I've re-read it a couple of time and, as I say, this just came to me this morning. Amazing what careful thought can give you.

New project

Decided to sign up to NaNoWriMo, a novel writing competition type thing. Its an interesting idea, and something I've wanted to do for a long time. Basically the idea is to produce a 50K work in one month, November, without editing, rewriting etc., just get the words out.

Should be fun and extremely painful, specially considering thats the month I start my Masters as well. Ah well, they say the best thing to do is pile on the work, helps motivate you to get going at it. also, posting my intention publicly is an added incentive to actually write the damned thing, as terrible embarassment would ensue otherwise...

Thinking of a fantasty type thing, because I have this strange idea that it would be easier than writing a Sci-Fi novel. It will be fun coming up with the ideas and plots anyway. Blogger has very nicely provided me with links to various book writing tools I see... Fun...

Derailing the train of thought

Image via WikipediaSo here we goes, a test to see how well the train of thought can handle a very large black coffee first thing in the morning with no effort at censoring the brain diarrhea. Mmmm lovely words.
This morning I'm attempting to build stuff, which can get on your nerves pretty quick when each build process takes about an hour, and its someone else's code your building so you got no gaurantee it'll actually work, gah people, so sitting around waiting for stuff to finish gets real old real fast.
On my right I can see Zemanta is pulling all sorts of strange images and related monkey poo, its funny cos the stuff its coming up with is just as disjointed as the gibberish I'm writing. Read an interesting comic there yesterday, "Death - the time of your life" by Neil Gaiman, gives a quick insight into the life of a gay singer and her lover, and what happens to them and their friends when Death, portrayed in this case by a teenage girl (I think), or a gothette as described in the book. Pictures of Mr. Gaiman in various states of rough looking-ness have now appeared. I wish I could get away with writing stuff and looking like that all day. Sweeeeeeet....

Was also reading stuff on lucid dreaming, something I've long been interested in. Imagine being in a really cool dream and being able to take control of it, going on a wild rampage through the solar system, trying to make the sun go nova. Actually there's an interesting thought, if you could take control of your dreams and do anything you wanted, in an environment where there can be no consequences, what would you do? Would you go on a murderous rampage, slaughtering millions for the hell of it? Imagine yourself to be a giant zeppelin, possibly made of lead, that farts its toxic wayt through the sky causing untold disasters? Or would the fantasies be.... naughtier? Untriguing....

Damn caffeine and its wearing off-ness.

So lets say the new iPhone launched on Tuesday, that being two days ago, by the way if I was an early adopter I would probably be WHOPPINGLY pissed at Apple right about now, and you've decided you can't live without one, and like me are too cheap to sign up for a long and expensive contract to get one, just how long do you think it will take the new beasties to appear on eBay? A swim sounds good right about now actually.

Clever lad that I am I managed to bust my glasses last Friday, and (should've gone to SpecSavers) had no spare pair to tide me over. I'm quite lucky in that my perscription is pretty light, so I really only need them for computer work. On the downside I'm a Software Engineer so computer work accounts for approximately 9 hours of my day. Went to SpecSavers on Tuesday and got a new pair, two actually, substantially stronger and sturdier than the last ones, so hopefully the ear piece coming off in my hand wont be such a problem.

Something else I was about to write has just disappeared.

Came across "The Lives of Others" group blog there recently thanks to a friends page (Prototype of a Person) and its a really interesting blog, a fascinating project. Obviously one of the appeals of the web is anonymity and the ability to say what you normally couldn't, but with this one there's got to be an element of group think kickin in at some point? If people are posting regularly to this thing, is it possible that the tone and content of the posts will begin to influence each other so that the blogs will become more and more similar so that the many becomes the one? Will each poster be able to maintain their individuality or just become part of the gestalt?

I'd love a really good speech to text interpreter so I could spew this stuff out nice and fast and top of the head instead of having to slow down and do it all throught the irritation of the keyboard. A neural interface would be good too.

Comics Rock. Redshirts are expendable. Buy low.



My brain hurts now.

Lego hacking tomfoolery

Image via WikipediaI love the way that there are so many other people out in the world who love to dig in to a beautiful piece of tech, in this case the LEGO Mindstorms RCX kit, and do all sorts of weird and wonderful things with it.

I got a set a couple of years ago from my girlfriend for Christmas, and at the time, because the bundled software wasn't the may west, I wasn't able to do a lot with it. Since then I've branched out a good bit into the wilds of open source code and custom hackery and discovered LeJOS (lejos.sourceforge.net). At it's core its a tiny JVM, based on (drum roll please) TinyVM . There are versions available for both the RCX, the older model that I've got, plus the NXT, the oh so wonderful beautiful shiny, fandiddlyastic new one that comes with aaaaaaalll sorts of goodies. There also other packages available in other languages, such as C#

What this gives you is the ability to write your own Java code to make the funny wee robots do damn near anything. The new version gives full access to the bluetooth commands (I think..) , so if you went with this OS, you'd be able to do fancy stuff like construct a motion detecting robot that looks like Johnny5 (God bless this woman, she is a LEGEND), that fires off lego rounds and chases people around the room. (I think I'm drooling on my keyboard...)

There's also a handy wee Eclipse plugin for both the RCX and the NXT that will do all of the interfacing between the machine and the brick for you, meaning that all the programmer has to do is write the damn code.

I've gotten all of the underlying basics up and running on my home system, or I had before it presented me with a delightful BSOD. Luckily I run an Ubuntu dual boot, and all of the shiny bits run under that too so I can just shift over. Whenever I actually get around to creating something useful is a whole other story. See related articles for other fun.



Note: Google just handed me this lovely little snippet of Lego-like goodness. Oh the fun we could have.....

Related articles

• Lego Warehouse
• Lego at MIT
  

Youngest Nova

This is pretty cool. Youngest supernova in the galaxy was recently found to have gone boom approx 140 years ago, called G1.9+0.3 and located about 26,000 light years away. There's a section in that article stating that "Astronomers have been puzzled, however, by a shortage of young supernova remnants in our galaxy. Only half a dozen have been found, as opposed to the more than 30—roughly two a century—predicted to exist." To my flighty imagination that conjures up fun images of star harvesting, artificial star longevity and so on. Or even fleets of Vogon destructors farting about in the sky, quietly demolishing solar systems while no-one watches.. Imagine the fun you could have spinning wild ideas around over a drink or fifteen:


AlienDude1: "My round"

AlienDude2: "Cheers buddy"

AlienDude1: "So what should we do with that crappy little yellow beastie sitting out in the Orion arm?"

AlienDude2: "Come on man, we've been working all week, no more work talk!!"

AlienDude1: "No seriously, we could have some fun with this one! Remember that time you got wasted and spread those black holes around the galactic core and used them as pockets for a giant pool game?"

AlienDude2: "How was I supposed to know they'd join up!! Not my fault the whole damn core is collapsing, blame Supply, they left them lying around!!"

.....

AlienDude2: "(Smirks) It was a good game though, right? Did you see that last trick shot? Knocked two gas giants and three moons into that star!! It flared like a bad fart after a hot curry! The rings were still spinning on the way in..."


AlienDude1: "Let's make this one a game of explowhumping planets!!"

.....

.....

AlienDude2: "What?"

AlienDude1: "You take a planet, right, and pump it full of custard. Then you spin them round their orbits real fast, and tilt them around so they spin out, and see which ones collide first!!When they hit the explode apart, and cos they're full of custard they just go 'whump'!! You can bet on the winners and everything, it'll be great!!!"

.....

.....

AlienDude2: "You seriously need to get out more"




Ah the fun of aliens that are just like Dublin Corporation workers...

What makes a good story

Recently subscribed to Neil Gaiman's blog, and reading some of the comments on it and what people have to say on other sites it got me thinking.

I'm a big fan of the Gaimanator's work, so much so that I've just ordered over €100 worth of his work off Amazon, including Vols 1 and 2 of The Sandman. Never read it but I hear its fantastic work. I already have several of his other works, including 1602, a fantastic piece set in 1602 in the Marvel Universe.

Frequently people write into him asking, How can I become a good writer, What are your secrets, blah blah blah, and to do him credit he doesn't just tell them to fup off, he does give a reasonable answer to people. But a separate question still stands of what actually makes a good story?

For me personally, its got to have characters with real depth, or at least the possibility of depth. Characters that are blatantly two dimensional are, to put it bluntly, crap. Similarly the universe it's set in needs to provide a convincing backdrop to the story, so it can't be hard sc-fi set in pinky pony land. You've got to have some real meat to the story, something that will draw you in and hold your attention, something that will physically stop you from putting that beast down until youve milked every last drop of literary goodness from it.

The more I write and think about this, the harder it actually appears to be to quantify... Obviously there are always different criteria for different people. Some of my favourites would include the almighty HitchHikers Guide to the Galaxy, the Discworld series, a short story called Flowers for Algernon, I am Legend, and sweet Jeebus too many to write down. But its an interesting subject, one of those things that drags you off on a tangent and wont let you go.

Maybe that means that the question itself qualifies as a story :)

Quality of life vs. Love of the job

We've all heard the ads on TV recently about work life balance, about how everyone should take time to ensure that their work doesn't overshadow their personal life. For a lot of people this can be a major struggle. The average person gets up early, goes to work, spends the bulk of the day there, and then returns home through another painful commute, to find that there is really only enough time to have dinner, crash out in front of the TV, and go to bed.

Obviously in these cases measures are needed to redress the balance, whether it be working shorter hours, working closer to home, or just structuring your days better to avoid the feeling of living a life that consists of work-bed-work-bed... For most people this is the case and with a little effort it can be done. But what about the people who don't feel any such problem, the people who, instead of having a job, have what can only be termed as a vocation?

Take, for example, programmers. As a group, especially the nerdier of the bunch, we tend to have an almost obsessive desire to learn more about our chosen profession, its no hardship or effort to take some of our vanishingly small amount of personal time to do something work related, because its not just work related, it is, in a very real sense, who we are. The typical nerd/programmer will think nothing of taking the time or effort after work, or on the weekends, to play with some new technology, or language, or just do something that's fun. I recently got it into my head that it would be a great idea to program my LEGO Mindstorms kit using Java, and try to find some way of adapting it to be accessible over the web. This could take days, if not weeks, of work, but it doesn't matter because its part of who I am.

So, in this case does the work life balance matter so much? Or is it in fact a case of the balance being reversed, where the old impression of nerds ("You need to get out more!!") applies? Its a subject that could probably do with some investigating, and more than likely already has, but its still interesting to think about.

Preferably inside, where I can get a good solid WiFi connection ;)

An effort to seem intelligent

	Mixture between nanotech, architecture, and nature, with a little ethical focus on the side. Recently talking to a friend of mine (architecture student, big into the archy scene) who mentioned a couple of projects he was working on, which I'm not going to give away here, but it got me thinking about the possible overlap between certain disciplines. That and the horrendous amount of sci-fi I've read. Lets say that some time in the near future the problem of true Von Neumann systems are cracked, giving the human race the power to manufacture at a molecular level. This basically gives us a capability to build practically anything, producing numerous paradigm shifts in several fields, from the a shift to the rod logic style computing as envisaged in Neal Stephenson's "Diamond Age", to the biononics (nanodevices operating and interfacing at a deep biological level) shown in Peter F. Hamilton's "The Dreaming Void", to the more mundane efforts of reprogrammable clothing , and even way up to environmental scrubbers. There would also be major shifts in materials science, as materials which are now being manipulated at a molecular level now display a whole host of new physical properties, for example the surface tension of a water droplet all of a sudden becomes a major factor. The question then arises - if we suddenly arrive at a point where we have the ability to do, almost literally, anything, what is to stop people from doing it? Now this isn't entirely a bad thing, as we would see an explosion in human creativity, vast new areas opening up for expansion, medicine advanced exponentially, and so on, as well the ability to create almost any structure and have it be smart, self-maintaining, and reconfigurable at the drop of a hat. But there is also the flip side of this - what if some despot gets his grubby hands on it and decides to key a nanobot keyed to mangle DNA with certain characteristics, say blue eyes... While the ethical issue has always been a bit of a laugh to most people, it will become more and more relevant as time goes by. As a species, large scale ethics is not something we're particularly good at, the analogy I generally prefer is that if the human race were a single person, it would be a teenager battling through the latter stages of adolescence. Now to tie it all in: at the beginning I mentioned nanotech, architecture, nature and ethics. Lets say for example that someone was to design a house, a free standing configurable house, that incorporated both nature and nanotech in its design. Lets say it was a 2 storey edifice with living roots instead of foundations, which provided heat by geo-thermal tapping, water directly from the root system, oxygen from plan life living in and around it, a wildly variegated ecosystem of, say, savannah flora and (small obviously) in one area, heat gathering/shedding plants growing from the roof, a whole host of different ecologies co-existing symbiotically in building. Such a building could even incorporate food production into its design. The nanotech within the structure would be responsible for managing, monitoring and maintaining such a diverse ecology, as well as for providing all the elements a technological civilisation would come to expect, communications, computing power, entertainmet. It could even be intelligent, self-aware. Such a house could be very well be viewed as "smart", self repairing, eco friendly, etc... It could even be considered, in a very real sense, to be alive. Yay the pundits cry!! Utopia has been discovered!! But what happens if this smart, self-renewing, self-maintaining, self-aware edifice decides that it doesn't want anyone living in it? Do we declare this a travesty and force our view on it, or possibly worse, eradicate all traces of intelligence and self-awareness from it, thereby committing genocide? Numerous people, much cleverer than me, have debated the possibility of an AI conflict, and the various benign or apocalyptic outcomes thereof, so I'll keep my nose out of it, thank you. My question instead is at what point do we take stock, sit down and make a rational and mature decision as a society that this is what we want to do? When do we take responsibility for what we are trying to do, and lay ethical ground rules for the creation, development and treatment of these new entities? The sooner the better I would think.