18 Feb 2005
Writing

I once had the burning desire to be a writer, and in fact purchased my first "real" computer to whack out the great American Novel. I made it through the first chapter, and then I discovered video games. I got quite good at them, too, even if they were keeping me from my appointed task. But I couldn't beat a game called "Baghdad" on my Commodore. Couldn't get past the dreaded Purple Genie on level 5, and when I asked a friend how I could add more lives or speed to my sprite, he told me I'd have to disassemble the program.

Being an electronics tech, I grabbed my screwdriver and thought I was ready to take it apart, but my friend took me down to the local K-Mart to purchase the Commodore Assembler/Disassembler. I taught myself 6502 assembly language to get an extra life in Baghdad... and the rest, as they say, is history.

Now my software engineering career is gone, via Canada to India, and I've got the farm. I'm making one third the money I was making ten years ago, but I'm three times happier. I never have to sit through endless design meetings with my chickens, and my cows couldn't care less if I have an approved model for feed storage. And one never normalizes goats: there's nothing normal about a goat.

So here I sit, computer on my lap, writing. Perhaps I've gone full circle, and now's the time to write. Or perhaps I'll get distracted by a cow in labor. Whatever. It's a pretty good life, all things considered.

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Some Blog Updates

Man, I've managed to get a lot changed today in my blogging system: much of which won't be noticed by you, the viewer, but which will make my life so much easier ...

First, the things you will notice: two new banners towards the bottom of the masthead. One is for Standard Time, an anti-daylight saving time bunch, and the other is the current moon phase.

The other thing you may notice is that I've restricted the number of stories in the current RSS feed (and displayed on the initial load of the homepage) to fifteen. This is down from twenty, primarily to cut my bandwidth usage a bit. I am starting to get some hits, and it's showing in my web logs.

But the one's you won't see are the best: and I owe a huge tip of the hat to Jan at Secular Blasphemy for it. But in a very indirect way ... in a post today he mentioned how useful he'd found the Google Toolbar, especially the ability to spell check his blog entries. Spelling being a particular shortcoming of mine, I'd love to have a way to spell check entries without using a word processor program. So I went and checked it out. Imagine my disappointment when I found that it will only run with M$ IE 5+ on Windoze ... I only own one Windows box nowadays - the rest are Macs - and I wouldn't run that invitation to viral infection known as Internet Explorer if Microsoft paid me. I'm a Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox user, and a very happy one, thank you. On all my platforms.

But of course, this piqued my interest, and lo! I discovered SpellBound - a wonderful Firefox extension that works exactly the way I need.

But what's even better is another extension I ran across called Feedview. This allows one to view formatted XML feeds directly in the browser, without the silly markup and with very little overhead. So the next time my aggregator breaks I'll have a handy tool to use in troubleshooting.

All in all a very productive day.

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Friday's World

Just finished re-reading Friday, by Robert A. Heinlein. It's beyond a doubt my favorite book by the dean of science fiction writers, but not because of the story. It's a good tale, to be sure, if a bit overflowing with Heinlein's particular sexual predilections, and it lured me in twenty years ago when I first read it. But now the story itself is almost secondary to the effect that the book has on me: déjà vu. The book was first published in 1981. Major plot spoilers are ahead, but I want to try to convey how prescient this book has turned out to be: it's positively eerie.

The heroine of the book, Marjorie Friday, is an AP - an artificial person. Genetically engineered (not cloned) and raised in a creche, she's owned by the "Boss", who uses her for various courier duties. Her engineered body contains a couple of rather special pouches, you see, where things can be safely tucked away from prying eyes.

AP's aren't very well liked in Friday's world: the majority of the population sees them as a threat, both literally (AP's are generally physically and often mentally superior) and economically. The laws against them are fairly draconian, with some going so far as to call for their extermination. They are not citizens of any nation, and are considered property.

But there are a lot of laws, anyway, in Friday's world, because there are an awful lot of sovereign nations. Following a brief nuclear exchange (which led to a few cities being destroyed, notably Seattle in North America) the large nation states Balkanized: and your MasterCard from the Chicago Imperium may not always be honored in the California Confederacy, as the exchange rate between crowns and bruins fluctuates wildly.

But of course MasterCard itself survives. Most all transactions take place using biometrics or smart cards, on the Net. Terminals are literally everywhere in Friday's world: it's Always On.

Friday walks daily with the threat of terrorist attacks. There are religious terrorists, political terrorist and folks who just like causing mass hysteria. Terrorists have already taken down one of the space elevators, and she hates riding the remaining one. So she usually rides the semi-ballistic back and forth from her job in BritCan (British Canada, as opposed to Quebec) to her New Zealand home. The SB's have their problems, though. Sometimes the creatures engineered to fly them (they need super fast reflexes) go kinda bonkers, and passengers and crew get to swim in the Pacific - if they survive hitting the water at Mach 9.

Friday gets a job at one point as a mercenary in a private army that's marching on Chicago. Governments have fewer soldiers than corporations in Friday's world.

To say much more would be to give away the entire story, and I don't want to do that, as it is a very good tale. It was one of Heinlein's last efforts, and is probably not the best book to start with if you've never read anything by him, but the ambiance is positively frightening.

This is about as believable a dystopia as I've ever encountered: it's barely subdued anarchy. And I can see it coming to fruition on an almost daily basis. Heinlein must've used a real crystal ball for this one: read it and fear for our future.

Inspired by Gibson's World from Moore's Lore

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