Reinventing Me http://reinventingme.posterous.com A new life. New experiences. posterous.com Fri, 08 Jul 2011 12:16:44 -0700 Book Review: A Spy At Home by Joseph Rinaldo http://reinventingme.posterous.com/book-review-a-spy-at-home-by-joseph-rinaldo-56514 http://reinventingme.posterous.com/book-review-a-spy-at-home-by-joseph-rinaldo-56514
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Try to put yourself in the position of a retired CIA operative, returning home to his wife and son with Down syndrome (resulting in early-onset Alzheimer's), endeavoring to do his best to look after them and ensure they are provided for. Now, just to make things a little more difficult, imagine our retired spy has managed to embezzle a little under ten million dollars from his employer. Such is the premise of A Spy at Home, the first novel by Joseph Rinaldo, already published as an eBook. Mr Rinaldo explains how he is uniquely qualified to write this book, raising a daughter with Down syndrome and witnessing the effect of Alzheimer's on a family member, and indeed cryptically states that he'd prefer not to disclose the sources of his espionage-related knowledge. This intriguing combination of plot and story sounded unique and intriguing to me, so I happily accepted the author's offer to write a review.


The juxtaposition of a "tough guy" job with the emotional concerns attached with mental disability made me immediately think of Regarding Henry, penned by writer J. J. Abrams in a dim and distant era long before Lost. It's not a common combination of subjects, and surely presents the author with some difficult challenges. The author deals with these issues very well by writing the book as our retired operative's memoirs, only to be released to be read in the event of his death. In the preface, the narrator tells us that, yes, he is dead; yes, his son was a surprise; and yes, he's the one that killed his own wife. With those revelations out of the way, the book proceeds in whydunnit style, with the narrator telling us about events as and when he remembers them, indeed apologizing for his lack of strict chronology very early in the book. It's a very stark contrast between the strict mental conditioning required for his day job, and the day-to-day stresses and strains of looking after his son, whose welfare becomes more and more of a challenge as their lives go on.

The book does not go in for large amounts of descriptive passages; it is indeed intended as a memoir rather than a flowery novel, which can at times leave a very dry delivery but does, for the most part, definitely give a realistic feel and a feeling that perhaps some of the events reported have their basis in fact, written precisely as our narrator would report them, grappling with his own emotional detachment due to his job. This does result in a couple of areas where things are ambiguous; for example, it is apparent that some time passes through the story as the child Noah grows up, gets a job and goes to work, although I never quite felt sure exactly how old he was. Likewise, exactly when the story takes place seems a little unclear, although it is evidently in a near present due to the computer hackers that form an integral part of the espionage side of the story. That part of the story was also delivered in a gritty way - there was no attempt to picture the spy business as anything glamorous as in the movies, rather a day job whose employees have the same concerns as most of us, such as whether their families are eligible for benefits. The lack of description does make it a little difficult to feel for the characters; we only get to experience their situation. There are a couple of inclusions in the book which I felt did detract from the overall story. There are a few very awkward sex scenes; nothing particularly explicit, but extremely clumsy and they do not add anything to the tale - excluding them would have left the book accessible to a young teen audience which would be just as interested in the novel's parallel subjects. There are a couple of places as well where I feel the author slipped out of character for a moment and managed to let his own political viewpoint slip out, albeit briefly. I can't help feeling it is a line an editor would have removed before going to press. Overall, the writing and copy seemed good with only a couple of minor errors. At the time of writing, the book is available in Kindle format for $1.99 on amazon.com. These days, I feel it's difficult for authors to get the pricing right for novels published digitally; far too many fall into the trap of practically giving their works away and underselling their hard work. For the reader, however, this is surely a bargain.

The book does indeed raise some difficult ethical questions; we find ourselves wondering whether any amount of money would make a difference in this situation, and we are sympathizing very much with a father who, while he may be used to overthrowing foreign regimes and all sorts of covert operations, finds it ever more difficult to look after a son who recognizes him less and less and is constantly worried exactly how he will be cared for once the father passes on. Watching the story unfold as one tragedy follows another, all against the backdrop of possible discovery of the theft of the money and trying to find ways to put the money to work without raising suspicions, one feels the greatest sympathy for the characters, although curiously it is not so much for Noah and his condition, but for his father, for whom no amount of training could prepare him for the trials and tribulations he is to face as a spy, at home. It's a good story whose major strength to me is the realism of the characters dealing with very real lives without expecting the plot to magically resolve itself in the closing chapters. Mr Rinaldo's own experiences evidently do show through in the writing here.

Joseph Rinaldo currently lives in Nashville, Tennessee. From this most American of cities he writes about the internal turmoil in the CIA, and about pirates on beautiful family-filled lakes. You've probably heard that authors write what they know. Think it's true?

A Spy at Home is available from amazon.com in eBook format for Kindle and compatible book readers.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/602890/115587423.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5AkWC4VyJ4yZ Chris Nash darlingman1970 Chris Nash Tue, 03 May 2011 22:13:37 -0700 Chest Pains? Don't hesitate. Get to an Emergency Room. http://reinventingme.posterous.com/chest-pains-dont-hesitate-get-to-an-emergency http://reinventingme.posterous.com/chest-pains-dont-hesitate-get-to-an-emergency
12 lead electrocardiogram of a ventricular tac...

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A few days ago, I sent a text message to my fiancee while at work, and just happened to mention that I was experiencing "chest pain". That choice of words is very important. I didn't say indigestion, or heartburn, because, well, I simply don't get them all that often. What followed was a blinding panic, of which the details have now become incredibly hazy, and to most of which I was completely oblivious. I simply walked over to the first aid cabinet, took myself an antacid, sat down, and continued to work. I proceeded to make my scheduled phone call and carried on as if nothing untoward was happening. I sent what I thought was a reassuring text message to say that I was OK, it was nothing, and it would pass. Yes, I agreed, this probably was the worst case of heartburn I'd ever experienced, and yes, I was a little surprised that it had pretty much been with me all day, actually, now I think about it, maybe it started last night, and nothing had shifted it. But I was OK, absolutely, and with that supposedly-reassuring message, I continued with my work day.

I've only recently joined the ranks of millions of people "my age" who have to take medications to manage their health. For far too long, I've been of the opinion that, if I don't feel good, I should simply take a tylenol and just "get on with it". Anything more serious than that, well, that's what sick days are for. Up until this year, I can't even remember the last time I went for a routine doctor visit, or a check-up. It was quite possibly back when I was under the protection of Britain's National Health Service, and I haven't lived there for fifteen years. Doctor visits have been something only "sick" people do. Perhaps then, I was overdue for an awakening. Of course, I have far too many risk factors. I'm overweight, I was a heavy smoker since being a teenager, I have a family history of high blood pressure. It turned out, in fact, that wasn't the whole picture. My triglycerides were astronomically high; so high, in fact, that my cholesterol readings wouldn't even show up through them, and no lifestyle changes could possibly bring them down rapidly enough. My doctor promptly put me on medication for the trigs, and pointed out that just because my blood pressure was the same as I'd ever seen it, that didn't mean it was "normal". Even considering all these risk factors and my new medication regime, I still didn't find any reason to be perturbed that afternoon.

My work day certainly was not going to continue as normal. As I continued with my scheduled phone call, other calls were incoming. I must admit, I have probably had about three incoming calls in the past three months. Three within a few minutes seemed, well, a little unusual. Never mind; they could leave a voice mail - I'll pick it up later. Next, instant messages. One from a contact in the process department. "Are you there?" - what's this? Did I not fill out my forms correctly? "Please, answer me." Yes, I'm here, I'm fine. What is all this fuss about? Another IM, this time from HR. "Do you need us to call you an ambulance?" Of course not. I'm just a little uncomfortable, that's all. The facilities coordinator walked into my cube to "check" on me. Yes, I'm here. Oh yes, I'm fine. Nothing to worry about. Erm, what's going on? "Your fiancee called the front desk, distraught that she couldn't get a hold of you." I looked at the blinking light on my phone handset. "She's left work and she's on her way here. Since you won't take an ambulance, she's going to take you to the ER herself."

I sighed in complete disbelief. I'm fine, this is nothing. The phone rings, one more time, and this time I answer it. It's C, driving up the interstate, absolutely frantic with worry, crying. Once again, I'm trying to explain. I'm OK. This is nothing. It can't be anything serious...

Can it?

Or is it?

I must point out, I've been in "emergency" rooms a lot, lately, and it's always seemed like something of an oxymoron. You go in there and register, which involves sitting in the waiting room and filling out paperwork, which you duly hand in, to be told to sit back down. Perhaps what seems like an hour might pass, before you go into the little entrance room, get your vitals taken and an initial assessment, and if it's apparent you're not in any immediate danger, then it's back to the waiting room again. Eventually they take you back to an exam room, where you may eventually get seen, and, more than likely, depending on what other poor souls are in that night, it may be a couple more hours before you might get some pretty ordinary pain medications, perhaps some cursory first aid, and then you're sent home.

Not this time. My feet didn't touch the ground.

My vitals were taken the moment I walked in the door. Before I knew it, I was swept into an examining room where a huge number of sticky electrodes were waiting for me. I needed to use the restroom, desperately. "I have to go", I pleaded, only to be told, no, let us do this first. The electrodes were stuck on me, in places I'd expect, and other places I never thought. My ankles? Why are they putting electrodes on my ankles? Suddenly, I felt considerably less confident than I did earlier that this was nothing serious. Can I go to the restroom now? Please? Paperwork swept under my nose, quickly and efficiently. "Do you have a religious preference?". Oh my God. Suddenly, it seems perhaps I do. Not tonight God, please, not tonight. Restroom, now, quickly. I believe it might have been a few seconds too late, but any embarrassment for that seemed irrelevant now. More staff awaiting for me, seemingly right outside the restroom door. Shirt off, arms above head, two chest x-rays, one from the front, one from the side, don't even bother getting dressed. Slip on this very fetching hospital gown, and straight to an exam room, covered in sticky monitor pads. Oh no, not a needle. A blood sample drawn. I must have encountered fifteen different members of hospital staff in the space of a few minutes. Results, back already. EKG appears normal; chest x-ray is clear. Troponin levels OK. Troponin. A substance measured in nanograms, that's capable of determining whether there has been any cardiac muscle damage. Not just to show whether you're having a heart attack, but maybe even if you've already had one. For the first time, that possibility struck me. The damage could have already been done; and, of course, I broke down and cried.

The emotions of the experience were thoroughly draining; finding out that I was indeed OK had an effect on me I didn't expect. I became indignant, upset, even angry at all the fuss. Over "nothing, nothing at all". It all gushed out of me later that evening, in a fit of unexpected and unjustified rage, one that, for the second time in a day, brought C to tears. Once spent, once exhausted, I finally took the time to sit up and listen, to see what had just happened from her perspective. Then, and only then, did it completely sink in just what had happened; more importantly, what could have happened. After waiting too long to find each other, one of us could simply have disappeared; the two of us could very easily have become just the one of us, just the one, in a blink of an eye. Every second mattered; every moment; that's why there was no delay, no hesitation from the wonderful staff at El Camino Hospital. And yet, for several thousand seconds before that, I had dismissed it all as nothing important, nothing significant - yet, very easily, there could have been nothing left at all.

What have I learned from this experience? Two things - first of all, if ever your partner is getting frantic, and desperately telling you what you need to do, listen. Listen very carefully. Think exactly why they're saying these things. Don't be selfish, because if you don't take notice, that's exactly what you're being. They know exactly what they're talking about, whether they happen to be a nurse or not. But, more importantly, if you feel a pain in your chest, then don't hesitate. Don't brush it off as "just indigestion". It could so easily be something far more serious. It took my emergency room experience to appreciate that.

This has been a public service announcement.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/602890/115587423.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5AkWC4VyJ4yZ Chris Nash darlingman1970 Chris Nash Sat, 26 Mar 2011 22:34:24 -0700 Book Review: "A Trace of Smoke" by Rebecca Cantrell http://reinventingme.posterous.com/book-review-a-trace-of-smoke-by-rebecca-cantr http://reinventingme.posterous.com/book-review-a-trace-of-smoke-by-rebecca-cantr A newspaper crime reporter scans the photographs of the unnamed dead found drowned in a river, posted in a police station. One photograph particularly catches her eye; she recognizes it as her brother. He had lived a colorful life, performing his drag act and associated with several perhaps dangerous gay lovers - at this point, perhaps this sounds like a formula for many a contemporary novel, but for Hannah Vogel in A Trace of Smoke, things are far from formulaic. It is 1931 in Berlin, the Nazis are on their way to power, and, furthermore, she and her brother have lent their identity papers to a young Jewish couple who are at that very moment escaping to New York. Add a father looking to bring justice to the rapist who attacked his daughter, and a child with a birth certificate claiming Hannah and her brother are his parents, and the scene is set for a story that includes its fair share of surprises.

Rebecca Cantrell places her story with research and attention to detail, and not more than a little homage to such iconic portrayals of 1930's Berlin as Cabaret. The result is the events are effectively placed against a backdrop of real places and events, however without too much in the way of dry factual details. This results in a portrayal which is evidently a work of fiction: in fact, the actual historical background seem very unobtrusive and perhaps a little sparse. For the reader expecting a historical novel, this may be somewhat disappointing; there are just enough details provided, but only just. At first I struggled with this and wanted more, but after a while the reason for this becomes clear. Location is secondary to character in this novel. The end effect in fact is that the backgrounds are portrayed very much in gray, almost as if they were shot in black and white, with the characters standing out in bold color. In particular, there are splashes of red throughout, signifying passion, intrigue, and of course blood. These splashes of red reminded me very much of the way that odd glimpse of color was used in Schindler's List, or to denote something supernatural as in The Sixth Sense. It comes across as a very effective part of the storytelling. The factual and historical background is dour; the characters themselves deliver the color. For the curious, there is a welcome glossary at the end of the book.

One of the most enjoyable parts of the story is the overall pace at which the story unfolds. At first, the tale is somewhat slow and sluggish. The narrative has to fill out the background information for Hannah and her brother, and their fellow characters in the story, somewhat mechanically at first. It seems to take a few chapters for things to get started. Again, this may be disappointing to the reader at first, but it results in a clever build-up of pace that is maintained for much of the thirty chapters. It seems Hannah's challenges increase, step-by-step, one at a time, throughout the book, reaching a breakneck pace for the big resolution of the story. Before long, what could have been a murder mystery plot brings in potential blackmail, priceless gemstones, a scandal involving a high-ranking Nazi, the peculiar child who believes Hannah to be his mother, and enough loose ends to draw us towards a conclusion which leaves just as many questions answered as unanswered, ready for the sequel, The Night Of The Long Knives.

Above all, the outstanding part of this novel is the sympathetic character of Hannah Vogel herself. It would be very easy for a novel in this setting to portray every one of the Nazis as wicked and evil, but Hannah's eyes are just as capable of seeing good and evil in all the characters she meets, even each of the growing list of suspects in her brother's murder. In particular, she finds herself very much aware of the contradictions that many of the characters face when trying to reconcile their lives and beliefs with the events that unfold around them. The story is very much one of conflicts between prejudices, and one which is far richer in the intricate relationships between human beings than their politics. Hannah is an absorbing heroine, and not without her own flaws; her fellow characters are all multi-dimensional, resulting in an enthralling and captivating read.

Interested in A Trace Of Smoke? If you have a Nook or compatible eReader software that can read LendMe books, my copy of A Trace Of Smoke is available to borrow. Just join or log in to bookfriend.me, and search for the book. If it's still available, it's yours to read for one week.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/602890/115587423.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5AkWC4VyJ4yZ Chris Nash darlingman1970 Chris Nash Thu, 10 Feb 2011 22:55:18 -0800 Aneurin Bevan, The National Health Service, and a Trip To The Doctor http://reinventingme.posterous.com/aneurin-bevan-the-national-health-service-and http://reinventingme.posterous.com/aneurin-bevan-the-national-health-service-and
Statue of Aneurin Bevan in Cardiff Queen Street

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The collective principle asserts that... no society can legitimately call itself civilised if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means.

That's a quote from one of my heroes - Aneurin Bevan, voted in an online poll as the number one Welsh hero, beating out competition even from luminaries such as Tom Jones and Richard Burton. Bevan had worked as a coal miner since the age of 13, and as a union official found himself leading the local miners in the 1926 General Strike. Three years later, he became the Member of Parliament for Ebbw Vale, a post he held right until his death in 1960. He was known for his supreme oratory, regularly exchanging verbal blows with his long-time political enemy, Winston Churchill. 

But Bevan's enduring legacy is the formation of the United Kingdom's National Health Service, achieved when he became the Minister for Health and Housing in Clement Attlee's Labour government after the conclusion of the Second World War. He saw "the sale and purchase of medical practice as an evil in itself" and sought instead a program that was "free on the point of delivery". Ninety-seven percent of the British public were signed up within a month of 5 July 1948, the date when his National Health Service Act came into force. While the NHS has often been under attack, most particularly in the past thirty years and especially since healthcare reform has become a topic for discussion in the US, it has endured. In general, most British people are content with their system; during 2009, Professor Stephen Hawking went on record saying that, without the NHS, he wouldn't be alive today. In recent comparisons with six other wealthy nations, the United Kingdom's healthcare system ranked second overall, and number one when it came to efficiency. (The US, the country with the most expensive healthcare system in the world ranked last overall, and at best next to last in any of the dimensions of the study).

OK, I've made my point. I'm a product of that healthcare system. It was there for me when I came into the world; it saw me through my first 25 years as, overall, an exceptionally healthy individual. It's the reason both my parents are cancer survivors. And yet, it seems nobody can even mention healthcare without it becoming political. Why is that? You wouldn't expect your doctor to talk about politics, would you? Today, though, that's precisely what happened. I did something today I have never been able to do since moving to the United States. I went to see a doctor, without actually being ill - well, except for some little minor annoyance. (Cooties, I'm sure. Girl cooties, no doubt. Or her dog. Or her cat.) Why have I never been able to have preventive medical care up until now? Because, quite simply, I couldn't afford it. The last thing I wanted to hear this morning was a treatise about how "socialized" healthcare basically can't get to you until you're about to kick the bucket, and about the superiority of a system for which your insurance would "probably" pick up the tab, and if not, there were plenty of other programs.

He's absolutely right, of course. This is indeed a free market economy, and, as such, standard rules apply. As a paying customer, I am this doctor's employer. I was dissatisfied with his work, and I didn't think he was right for the job. So I did what any free market employer should do with that kind of employee. I fired him. I'll be seeing another doctor for my next visit.

He didn't even address my cooties either, but did suggest I could invest $110 for a slip cover for my bed sheets.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/602890/115587423.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5AkWC4VyJ4yZ Chris Nash darlingman1970 Chris Nash Wed, 02 Feb 2011 22:17:24 -0800 Two navigation technologies, three centuries apart http://reinventingme.posterous.com/two-navigation-technologies-three-centuries-a http://reinventingme.posterous.com/two-navigation-technologies-three-centuries-a
This blue plaque remembering John Harrison is ...

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(Disclaimer: Although I am employed by Telenav, Inc., a company specializing in GPS applications, there is nothing proprietary included in this article - it is all information readily available from sources such as Wikipedia).

Navigation has changed quite significantly over the years. For quite some time, mariners have been able to calculate their latitude - their distance north or south of the Equator - with reasonable precision; just measure the angle of the sun above the horizon when highest in the sky, adjust for the tilt of the earth and the progress of the seasons, and, with a considerable bit of geometry (quite literally) out comes the result. It takes quite some effort to compute by hand, but such an essential requirement at sea deserves that much attention.

Establishing longitude, however, is a considerably more challenging proposition. In theory, it's quite simple, provided you can accurately tell the time. The notion of time zones is familiar; with every degree of longitude one travels east or west (about sixty nautical miles at the equator), the times of sunrises and sunsets shift by four minutes. In other words, if an accurate clock was set in Greenwich and taken on board a ship, observing the sun at noon and checking the time difference gives the longitude. The problem, though, is to find an accurate timepiece, particularly one that would operate satisfactorily on a ship with wide ranges of temperature, humidity, rough seas, and so on. Measuring longitude precisely was so important to navigation that the British Parliament passed an act in 1714 establishing a prize, worth millions in modern terms, for anyone who could suitably make progress in this field. John Harrison was a man who dedicated his entire life to this problem, making succession after succession of better and better chronometers; quite a tall order for the times. The terms and conditions of the prize required an accuracy better than sixty miles for an Atlantic crossing before any money would be paid; as mentioned above, that requires the clock stays within four minutes of true over the entire trip.

Nowadays, with atomic clocks and GPS, it seems the problems of three hundred years ago are far behind us, but in fact, even GPS depends on something very similar to the longitude problem. While most people have some ideas exactly how GPS works, there may be some surprising details. Basically, GPS satellites transmit time signals. A receiver can read the time signal, compute exactly where the satellite should be at that time based on its known orbit, calculate the time the message took to arrive and hence the distance to the satellite, and, with a bit of triangulation from multiple satellites, work out exactly where on the Earth the receiver is. At least, that's the theory - but, with a little thought, you'll realize that can't possibly work.

Radio waves travel at the speed of light, three hundred million meters per second. Even if time measurements for GPS were accurate to a millionth of a second, that's three hundred meters - hardly the sort of accuracy everyone expects from their navigation devices. And the quartz crystals in our mobile devices - yes, those very same quartz crystals that were vaunted for their accuracy when they were included in digital watches - are nowhere near as accurate as that. (The important thing about quartz crystals is not their accuracy - it's that they're ridiculously cheap). If the clocks in the mobile devices drift, it would be very difficult to compute a position on Earth; in fact, the position calculated would be thousands of miles off and maybe not on the planet at all. So how can GPS achieve the results with the accuracy we're used to? Is there another John Harrison who found a way to measure the time more accurately?

Almost. Instead, the problem is solved in a slightly different way. Instead of using GPS to locate our position in three dimensions (which would in theory take three satellites), we have to also locate ourselves in a fourth dimension, time, which takes four satellites. In essence, while our devices will incorporate an error in any time observations, that time error should be pretty much the same for all of the GPS satellites that are being observed. The time error produces what is known as a dilution of precision. The more satellites that can be seen, the more precise the calculable result. Although it might seem that your GPS device or navigation program can position you precisely, it requires a considerable number of measurements from ever-moving satellites to get that precision, not to mention a fair amount of mathematics. Something worth thinking about, when you find yourself literally holding what was once a secret Department of Defense technology in the palm of your hand.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/602890/115587423.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5AkWC4VyJ4yZ Chris Nash darlingman1970 Chris Nash Wed, 02 Feb 2011 21:49:06 -0800 Infographic: Travel and Vacation Statistics http://reinventingme.posterous.com/infographic-travel-and-vacation-statistics http://reinventingme.posterous.com/infographic-travel-and-vacation-statistics

Source:Online ClassesTravel and Vacation Statistics

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/602890/115587423.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5AkWC4VyJ4yZ Chris Nash darlingman1970 Chris Nash Wed, 02 Feb 2011 21:38:53 -0800 Infographic: Online Schooling - Visualizing Pi http://reinventingme.posterous.com/infographic-online-schooling-visualizing-pi http://reinventingme.posterous.com/infographic-online-schooling-visualizing-pi

Online Schooling - Visualizing PiSource: Online Schooling

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/602890/115587423.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5AkWC4VyJ4yZ Chris Nash darlingman1970 Chris Nash Wed, 12 Jan 2011 22:33:00 -0800 A Better Way Of Doing Business http://reinventingme.posterous.com/a-better-way-of-doing-business http://reinventingme.posterous.com/a-better-way-of-doing-business
Day 040/365 - The First Circle of Hell: Greed

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In the build-up to the holiday season, I was fortunate enough to be following a sneak peek preview of a most intriguing novel, Steve McAllister's The McAllister Code. I'll try to describe the book here, but that won't do it too much justice. Simply saying "It's about two wise-cracking aliens who visit Steve and convince him to write a book that will turn his hometown of Sarasota, FL into a marketing mecca" seems like it wouldn't achieve too much, but that's exactly what the book is about.

Or rather, that's what the book isn't about. There are several other recurrent themes throughout it, some striking, some novel, and some that will strike a chord with many readers. (There's my plug: go buy the book as I intend to, and tell @inkensoul I sent you). One theme Steve reiterates is something that I have believed for a long time. Businesses can be successful without being evil. For a long time it has been held that the "greed is good" images perpetuated in the Nineties were the model of how businesses should compete; win-lose, zero-sum games, triumph or die. One of Stephen Covey's seven habits is often quoted as "strive for win-win" yet only recently have companies appeared that can actually thrive on that model. It takes a huge amount of nerve to be the first adopter of that kind of policy and exchange short-term gains for long-term successes for all. It seems to be the sort of strategy that is only successful, once everyone accepts it. Although I was intrigued, I must admit, I had my doubts that such businesses could be successful. Yet, even as I read the daily excerpts from Steve's book, I ran into the following three quite remarkable examples.

Firstly, I'd like to mention Qualatek, right here in Hollister, California. My change in circumstances recently meant that C and I ended up sharing a laptop for a little while. This was quite an enlightening experience for C, as, suddenly she discovered that sharing a computer with a code monkey is quite a proposition as the poor machine begins to grunt and groan under the strain. I believe it lasted somewhere around a week before the monitor gave up the ghost. A quick peek inside seemed to confirm that it was a worn-out cable; it also confirmed what I believed about the interior of laptops. Nobody in their right mind should try to get inside one. It takes a can opener, and the number of bits and pieces is simply mind-boggling. Hence I started on my search for a repair professional, which is relatively easy, provided you don't mind being treated like dirt. Typically, computer repair folks will charge you the earth for an initial 'diagnosis', after which they'll then tell you what you might expect to pay should you decide to repair it or not. You're out of pocket immediately. Both C and I have had bad experiences this way that have left a terrible aftertaste. Enter Nick from Qualatek, who quite happily accepted my initial diagnosis, sat on an eBay auction for the missing part over the Christmas break, ordered it without even setting eyes on the machine, took the machine to fit it, and let me know that didn't cure the problem, then ordered a new display - all without any strong-arm or hard sales tactics. The whole experience has built such a level of trust that I know he is going to fix the problem, competently and economically, and I won't hesitate to recommend him to everyone. A wonderful way of doing business.

That "change in circumstances" I mentioned above was finding myself unemployed just before Christmas. Of course, everybody makes a comment that it's a terrible time to find yourself out of work, as if there was ever a good time, as if your sudden lack of a paycheck would overshadow the festivities and that would be the only thing on your mind. Of course, it's true it isn't a good time to be looking for work - but for many other reasons. So many corporate HR departments and recruiters are taking time off for the holidays that getting a response from anyone is difficult in itself. In December, I made something like sixty submissions to many and varied companies in the area, using the big-name job search sites that everyone has heard of. In the midst of all this I discovered Jobfox, and can certainly testify to its effectiveness. Like the other sites, there are benefits for premium membership, offers for resume writing services, and so on - of course, the companies have to make their money - but I was most surprised at the level of questions required during my initial sign-up for an account. As a result, the opportunities I was offered, which from the other sides were simply the same old stale postings that I'd seen throughout Christmas, were new, fresh, and more importantly, precisely targeted to my skills. The other sites had been fruitless for a month. It seemed within a week of Jobfox, I was well on my way to securing my current post. (Another mention here of course goes to my new employer, who distinguished themselves by acting surprisingly quickly over the Christmas and New Year break while other companies and recruiters let the holiday slip by).

Finally, one more mention of how human ways of doing business really make all the difference. We ate at Flames in San Jose after one of my job interviews, and were amazed at the friendly atmosphere, quality (and quantity!) of food on offer. We had a good conversation with the table server about where I had been that day, and wishing me good luck in my search. Of course, a recommendation for a restaurant always comes with a risk. You wonder whether or not your experience was a one-off; whether next time you go there it will not meet expectations, or worse, you take someone else there and things are terrible. C and I decided we were going to take two of her sisters there for their dinner after arriving in San Francisco airport last week. Fortunately, the food quality met - no, exceeded - our previous expectations, everyone enjoyed the food and the atmosphere. The biggest surprise though was most unexpected, the table server from our previous visit recognized us, asked me very directly and specifically about whether I had had any luck in the job search, and remembered so much from our previous visit. He surely had served hundreds of people in the interim, yet remembered everything, treated us well, and of course earned his tip. That's service, and that's a better way of doing business for everyone.

The coconut pie was wonderful, too.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/602890/115587423.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5AkWC4VyJ4yZ Chris Nash darlingman1970 Chris Nash Sun, 02 Jan 2011 19:09:27 -0800 It's No New Year's Resolution, It's More Than That http://reinventingme.posterous.com/its-no-new-years-resolution-its-more-than-tha http://reinventingme.posterous.com/its-no-new-years-resolution-its-more-than-tha
Two New Year's Resolutions postcards

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Oh, there were so many blog posts to read in my reading list yesterday, all with so many familiar titles. It doesn't matter the style of the blog; the commercial, the personal, the fiction writers; one subject dominated over and above anything else yesterday. New Year's Resolutions.

I suppose I ought to get one thing straight before marching on. I'm all for any exhibition of resolve, a commitment on the part of the individual to achieve something, ambitions, affirmations. By all means, make promises to yourself for the coming year, and if January 1 is the trigger that's needed to make that happen, so be it. But there's an implicit assumption in that "New Year's Resolution" phrase; The whole concept is weighted down by the cynicism that, in all honesty, the resolution won't be kept. There are plenty of statistics to bear this out; about one-fourth of the resolutions are broken within the first week, and over half don't make it past the first six months. On the plus side, it's generally considered better to try and fail; going through the motions of setting a resolution does improve your chances of achieving something; setting concrete, measurable goals (such as an amount of weight to lose by a given time) makes success far more likely as well.

I haven't made resolutions officially for many years; not since I was a child. The nearest I got to a resolution was a commitment to keep the diary filled out that my grandmother had given me for Christmas. The realization that my twelve-year old life wasn't all that exciting meant this was one of those resolutions destined not to make it past the first week. This year, I did toy with the idea of resolving to update my blog daily. It's now January 2. Whoops. The important part though about a resolution shouldn't be whether it's tied to a date; it's something you can choose to do, any time. I chose to stop smoking, and that had nothing to do with the calendar. I chose a gym membership and I chose to go there and exercise. (I have also chosen not to go there on many, many mornings). The element of choice is important. Even when circumstances seem beyond your control or are outside your sphere of influence, you do have a choice whether you wish things to stay that way.

Originally, the purpose of this series of blog posts was to track significant changes in my life, opinions, and environment, to see how they affected me personally and professionally. I'm just beginning the third year of that change; I could never have foreseen any of this. It started in 2009 with a commitment to expand my horizons; push myself professionally; try some new ventures; start writing and blogging the way always said I would; meet some new people. It was all a question of outlook; diverting my gaze somewhere other than the navel I'd been focused on, seemingly for years. I didn't commit to any particular change, but change did indeed happen. There were professional successes, and more than one or two destabilizing events at work. There was a fair amount of self-improvement; I read more, I studied more, I played more, and, quite unexpectedly, my world changed virtually overnight as my partner and I found each other. 2010 began with promises to each other; dedication to face the hardships and obstacles ahead, to get through them together, to make the journey next to each other and to experience so many 'firsts' together; birthdays, Christmas, and New Years.

And now, 2011. There are still challenges to be faced. These are new challenges brought upon by these still recent, astonishing changes; few of them have been easy, some have been painful, and others are accompanied by hostility. On more than one occasion, and from more than one direction, we have felt ill at ease; believing that forces outside us were at work, pushing against us, putting our resolve to the limits, and sometimes leading to disagreements. We never thought we would be immune from argument, but were resolved to keep communicating. Between ourselves, we manage just fine. When it comes to others, it is more difficult. We discussed this in detail yesterday morning. No matter what darkness, what wickedness, or what other feelings of opposition get sent our way, we will send them back. With love.

It's no New Year's Resolution. It's more than that.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/602890/115587423.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5AkWC4VyJ4yZ Chris Nash darlingman1970 Chris Nash Thu, 16 Dec 2010 18:37:09 -0800 The Leftover At The Bottom Of The Sink http://reinventingme.posterous.com/the-leftover-at-the-bottom-of-the-sink http://reinventingme.posterous.com/the-leftover-at-the-bottom-of-the-sink
Dishwasher, open and loaded with dishes

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It was always the same.

Loading the dishwasher was never a glamorous job, but it was something I'd learnt to make the most of. I felt something of a oneness with the dish brush, the handle filled with the vivid purple soap, dispensed through its all-too-worn brushes with a squeeze of the handle. I'd joked that I wanted a new one of these for Christmas. In a way, though, I'm not sure if I could handle that. This brush and I have been through a lot together. A lot of cups with all manner of clabber at the bottom of them; plates with remnants of food I can't even remember eating; cereal, stuck to the bottom of bowls with incredible resolve. They ought to stick those heat tiles on the space shuttle using soggy corn flakes. They'd never have any problems with them coming off, then.

The top shelf was always the easiest. First the cups, once, of course, they'd been retrieved. The ones that had been sipped out while watching TV, left on the coffee table; the ones on the bedside tables that had held our midnight sleepytime drinks; those which had inexplicably ended up in the other room and been forgotten about, sat there abandoned. There was surely some moral about what labor-saving devices had done to our society, here. That so few of us could completely fill a top shelf with soiled cups from one load to another? That seemed something like inordinate extravagance. I remember the "good" old days, only having one cup, one bowl, one plate. If they were clean, I ate. If they were soiled, that was a meal I missed. Nothing was more encouraging than hunger to make sure the chores got done.

The bottom shelf followed, by now, I was well into the swing of it. The plates, encrusted with the remains of the meals, got a cursory rinse and scrub with the brush before getting loaded in, then the various kitchen miscellany; the mixing bowls, the measuring containers, the smaller saucepans, the cheese grater, all jiggling and jostling for position between the tines of the lower rack. A small optimization exercise; it was surely possible to get them all in, get the entire sinkful done in one go. It just needed a bit of creative packing, that's all. This smaller container could go under this larger one; there, plenty of room. Next, the utensils, an easy enough job. Picking them up, meticulously yet subconsciously sorting them, putting the forks into this side of the basket, then the knives, then the spoons.

There it was again. As always, the same leftover in the bottom of the sink. The unidentifiable lid, seemingly always filthy. It must be part of the food processor, but I never knew where it belonged. I scrubbed it briefly with the brush, placed it in an empty slot on the top shelf, put the soap tablet in, closed the lid, and started the machine.

It was always the same. But perhaps this time, I would learn something new.

Unloading the dishwasher was never a glamorous job, but it was something I'd learnt to make the most of. The organizing, the putting away, the making the most of the space we had, all seemed to bring its own reward. The cups and glasses never seemed to fit back in the cupboard where they belonged; the plates balanced precariously; the storage containers were just squeezed in wherever space remained. One day I'll reorganize this cabinet. Not today. And last, but not least, the leftover. The curious lid. I took it and placed it next to the blender. Someone else would know how exactly it fit.

"It's very clean," the familiar voice uttered. "You do such a good job with that, every time."

"Thanks, love," I replied sheepishly. "I still don't know where it goes, though."

"Back in the sink. It's the plug to the waste disposal."

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/602890/115587423.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5AkWC4VyJ4yZ Chris Nash darlingman1970 Chris Nash Wed, 24 Nov 2010 23:27:49 -0800 Writing Workshop - Imagine 2018 http://reinventingme.posterous.com/writing-workshop-imagine-2018 http://reinventingme.posterous.com/writing-workshop-imagine-2018
This is a Treo 650 Smartphone from the OpenCli...

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Josie over at Sleep is For the Weak put forward a set of writing prompts based on words found while walking around the city of Glasgow. I choose Imagine 2018 as an excuse to get, well, a teensy-weensy bit speculative.

"Dad, I wish you wouldn't insist on real-time." The acute barbs in the voice came across very clearly, even through the right-angled digital packets getting reassembled and decoded in the earpiece. "It's so twentieth century, ya know? And it means I just have to squeeze you between customers, so I'll have to hang up when the next one comes. It's just, like, so inconvenient."

I sighed deeply. "You know I can't stand voicemail tag. And with news like this, I figured it was worth a call, Sugarplum." I heard a grunt on the other end of the line. "I wish you had told me personally. It's a bit of a shock to find out your daughter is getting married through a status update." Already the grunt on the other end was turning into a rebuke. "Dad, don't call me that any more. Especially not any more. I don't want Squid to know that's what you call me. I am twenty-five, you know. Not some kid. And don't even start on that 'you'll always be my little girl' routine. Been there, done that. And as for the status update, well, that's how everyone else found out, too. You're not the lone stranger.  That's the way these things are done these days, you old fart."

"What about S.P.? Can I still call you S.P.? So tell me about, erm, did I hear right? Squid? What kind of a name is that. Where's he from? What does he do for a living? How long have you known him?" I heard a bleep at the end of every question; my daughter was bookmarking my sentences again. I knew what was coming. "Well, number 1, what about it? Number 2, sure I guess. Number 3, yes. Number 4, well, that's his screen name, yes he's got a real name Dad before you ask but, well, I don't think that's relevant, he doesn't like it. Number 5, he's from Lincoln, or somewhere like that. Number 6, you're not going to like this, he's a social marketer. And number 7, we've logged about five hundred hours so far."

"He's a spammer?"

"I knew you'd respond like that. That's why I wasn't going to tell you. Social marketer, Dad. It's not the same any more. It's a good job, he makes good money, you couldn't even guess how well he does. And yes, just like you, he has a job that didn't exist when our parents were growing up. Just like everyone used to call you a code monkey or a computer junkie. I know you hated that. Don't you complain about what my generation does with their online presence. It's all stuff your generation invented, anyway." It was the same irrefutable "everyone does it" speech I'd heard over and over again. I wasn't going to encourage it any more than I had to. "Oh," I responded, obviously crestfallen.

"You don't sound very happy."

"Let me see. You're getting married to someone who's real name is 'irrelevant', who you're not sure exactly where he lives and you talk about how many hours you've 'logged'. To be honest, it doesn't sound like you're very happy. Aren't you going to have a proper wedding?"

"Hey, remember Mitzi? From school? She's married now, and they'd only logged fifteen hours. And, if by 'proper wedding' you mean inviting everyone to see it, well, there doesn't seem much point, does there? Oh don't worry Dad, we're going to have it done all legal, properly, and even get all that religious stuff dealt with. We've got a mutual follower who does the ceremonies all the time. He can telepresence us both onto screens next to each other, and he'll podcast the entire thing. Of course, we'll share the file with everyone, so there's no problem. You won't miss any of it."

"And then what? Is he moving there to be with you, or are you going out to Lincoln. Nebraska? There's probably more than one, you know." I had a funny feeling this was going to be a pointless question. "Is it Nebraska then? Oh no, neither of us is moving. He's got far too much concrete investments in his home town, he can't possibly just up and leave them. I think he's got a cat as well. Or a dog. No, it's a cat. He couldn't just move. And his Mom I think. That wouldn't be fair on the cat. And I couldn't possibly give up this job, after it took me so long to find it, could I? You wouldn't want me doing anything foolish. We've decided that as long as we both move each other up out of our nights and weekends lists and into our free call 24/7 groups, that's all we need. And no, before you ask, I'm not going to change my name, either. You can't even begin to imagine just how many online accounts I've got in this name. I don't see the point in changing them." "What about kids?" "DAD!" she yelled at me down the line, before the question was complete. "What do you think this is, the dark ages? We're getting married. It has absolutely nothing to do with whether we have kids or not. You can do one with or without the other, you know. We've never thought about it."

I couldn't stand it any more, I had to say my piece. "This isn't the way I saw things happening, S.P. I remember that evening, all those years ago, when I brought you and your mother home from the hospital. You know ever since then I've been thinking about this moment. And the moments to come, where you'd be there in your dress and I'd offer you my arm and walk you down the aisle to give you away. By the sound of things, that's not going to happen. You're going to be 'telepresent' and 'podcasted'. To someone who's idea of commitment is moving you to a list of names where he doesn't have to pay for telephone and video chat. I don't see what was wrong with the way things used to be. Where you'd meet someone, for real, in the flesh, go out for dinner and a movie several times, talk, get to know each other better, learn everything about each other, share everything, your entire lives, your complete existence, struggle together, bring up kids, and meet the challenges head on, at each other's side. This way you kids get together these days, it really doesn't sound like a happy ever after."

"You mean, like you and Mom?"

"Point taken." I said no more.

Why not go ahead and join in? Check the prompt page for instructions, and remember to add your link on Thursday.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/602890/115587423.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5AkWC4VyJ4yZ Chris Nash darlingman1970 Chris Nash Thu, 18 Nov 2010 20:17:37 -0800 Writing An Adaptation Is Tougher Than You Might Think http://reinventingme.posterous.com/writing-an-adaptation-is-tougher-than-you-mig http://reinventingme.posterous.com/writing-an-adaptation-is-tougher-than-you-mig
Hotel Dusk: Room 215

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I recently got my hands on a video game for the Nintendo DS entitled Hotel Dusk: Room 215, for an extremely competitive pre-owned price at the nearest GameStop. It describes itself as an interactive novel, even going as far as getting you to hold the console just like a book and write notes in your detective's notebook using the stylus and touchscreen. One of the most pleasing things about the experience for me was to discover that, perhaps for the first time ever, the tag "interactive fiction" seemed appropriate. Hotel Dusk is not so much a video game with an underlying story, but more a novel that just happens to be presented on a handheld console. It is by no means perfect, but all too often the storytelling in video games is sorely lacking and seems very far down the priority list for the software development companies. In many cases, story is incidental, which is probably why video game titles typically make some pretty lousy movies. In this case, though, the gameplay is secondary to a competent story, certainly one that could stand up with some of the paperbacks you might pick up in an airport bookstore at least. At some point halfway through the novel - yes, I'm not even going to pretend it's actually a video game - I did in fact realize that it would make a good, old-fashioned, dead-tree book, with of course a few tweaks here and there. There are plenty of plot devices that only work within the concept of a video game, and in a book would make no sense, but they would be relatively small cosmetic changes to suit the medium. I began to wonder whether perhaps that had been done by CING, the Japanese development company who produced Hotel Dusk and a couple of other similar titles. Sadly, CING filed for bankruptcy a few months ago, and so it's quite unclear exactly what the status is of their intellectual properties. (If anyone out there does know if there is a written version, I'd appreciate finding out about it). In theory, the story must have already been written during the design phases for the Nintendo version. Would it be difficult to flesh it out into a novel?

This month, while it seems everyone else with writing aspirations has taken leave of their senses and given NaNoWriMo a go, I've been investigating writing at my own pace; looking into suitable tools and software, experimenting with a few exercises, and trying out a few sites. I've been participating in sprints, trying to get as many words down on paper, and even tried a bit of flash fiction, a six minute story or two. Today it occurred to me that the prologue to Hotel Dusk is a video cutscene that takes perhaps about six minutes to run through, and I began to wonder again about a paperback adaptation. In brief, here's what happens in that first six minutes.

Firstly we see the skyline of New York on December 24, 1976. A phone rings in the police department and Detective Kyle Hyde answers it, surprised to hear from someone called 'Bradley'. Next, we see Hyde on the docks, pointing a gun at a character whose back is turned to us. Hyde fires, and Bradley falls into the river, yelling the name "Mila" as he falls. Hyde wakes up from his flashback. It is now apparently three years later. Next, we see a shot of early morning in Los Angeles. An authoritative gentleman named Ed answers the phone and takes an order. he asks his secretary Rachel to get a hold of Hyde; we see Hyde get a beep on his pager and throw it down in the car seat next to him. A slide tells us it's now 4pm in Nevada, where Hyde pulls into a gas station, returns the call using a payphone, and gets some grief from his boss before being told he has a job, to pick up a package and an order sheet at a place called Hotel Dusk. Hyde gets back on the road, passing a young girl in a white dress walking along the roadside. Once he arrives at the hotel, Hyde gives us some exposition as how he quit the New York Police Department and moved out west, and is a door-to-door salesman for an outfit called Red Crown, but occasionally his boss gives him some quiet jobs on the side, while he looks for his missing partner, who apparently he believes isn't dead after all. The hotel door lies in front of him, and a click starts the game (or novel) for real.

There it is, the first six minutes of the title. One thing should be clear; what appears above is not what you would want to read in a book. This would by no means be sufficient for a written treatment. I could have gone into more detail, explained every shot, every camera angle, and every detail that appeared on the screen, but it still would not constitute written storytelling. The fact is, even though something like Hotel Dusk tells a story, it does so with other mechanisms than just words. Furthermore, even if you try to substitute the images, the sound effects, or the music with words, what you have is not a particularly palatable story. (What you have is a description of a video game). At this point, I am desperately trying to avoid using the horrible word "multimedia" - media is, after all, already plural - but there are several key areas where the storytelling medium makes an enormous difference. We should not be surprised. We might expect a good movie to be two hours long, but the book that it was based on might take ten hours to read in actual reading time, perhaps spread over a few weeks' bedtime reading. A good video game may occupy us for as much as forty hours (personally, if a video game doesn't absorb me for as much as that, I feel somewhat cheated by the purchase, and if it goes on for much longer, I simply don't feel like it's worth the effort). Adapting one of these forms to another is not a simple job. This is why screenwriters have to work so hard adapting books into movies. The changes (or omissions) that were made  in the Lord Of The Rings movies, for instance, were not done lightly, but reflected tradeoffs between what the different media allow. It's also typically why adaptations to and from video games are always a bit fraught, simply because there is very seldom as much effort gone into the adaptation. Rather cynically, slapping the movie artwork onto the game cover will typically sell the game, no matter what its quality. Even when there's already a good story to work with, as with Hotel Dusk, writing a book version would be non-trivial.

Let's consider what we would need to do to that "just the facts" description to turn it into a suitable book prologue. That skyline shot of New York needs to somehow be conveyed into words. We have to paint that picture, verbally only. We need to describe the sights, the sounds, the smells; what the weather is like on that day. Do we have to be accurate here? Will some know-it-all go and look up what the weather actually was that Christmas Eve? There are obvious ways we could communicate it was Christmas; perhaps we need to add a Santa character in the street. We similarly have to do the same with the police department, somehow transition our focus to the individual building, get us inside, describe Kyle Hyde, his desk, his co-workers, his surroundings, whether he smokes, a few touches here and there to convince us it is 1976. We have to explain the tone of Hyde's voice; we have to decide what our point-of-view is for this scene. Are we narrating in Hyde's first-person perspective, or from a narrator's viewpoint? We have to be especially careful here; it is quite convenient for a video game to show cutscenes from a third person perspective but the actual user interaction is first person. In a book, it might not be particularly comfortable if we flip between the two. We have all the scene setup work to do again at the docks, another character to describe, events, emotions. This is a relatively short yet dramatic scene in the flashback, and presumably we'll be revisiting it several more times in the story to follow. Then again, somehow, we have to get us to Nevada, and indicate three years have passed, presumably draw attention to some changes in Hyde's character or looks, some other way to indicate the passage of time, then communicate the details about his employer in Los Angeles. Do we even explicitly write that scene in the book? Won't that be awkward, if we intend to write the exposition in first person? (Or will we have some sort of Blade Runner "director's cut" to handle this?).

That's a lot of questions to answer for what ends up being a very tiny bit of the story - the 'trailer' for what is to come - and some of those decisions will radically impact the rest of the book were you to actually go ahead and do so. It's all too tempting for a writer to believe that adapting existing material might be a shortcut. Indeed there may be some elements such as plot for which a pre-existing work may make significant contributions. However, the actual craft of writing still needs to be done; the description, the communication, the physical effort of getting the words down, but above all doing so in such a way that entertains and enthralls the reader. I am still intent on doing my prologue exercise at some time, but I am quite sure it will be considerably more effort than the six minutes it runs for.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/602890/115587423.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5AkWC4VyJ4yZ Chris Nash darlingman1970 Chris Nash Mon, 15 Nov 2010 21:52:56 -0800 Writing Workshop - Red http://reinventingme.posterous.com/writing-workshop-red http://reinventingme.posterous.com/writing-workshop-red
A red leaf in the mountains of Utah.

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Josie over at Sleep is For the Weak put forward a set of writing prompts based on movie titles - I'm choosing Red as my prompt.

I paused for breath, and kidded myself that the air was getting thinner. It really wasn't that hard of a climb, and the altitude could not possibly be that great, but the side of the hill was steep and the first snowfall of the winter was making it treacherous underfoot. As I rounded the corner onto the final climb of the trail, I look across at the skylift that had been out of operation now for the past six weeks. Anyone who wanted to get to the top of the hill would have to come up the same way I was struggling with. I wondered how many people would try it at this time of year; there were certainly no others to be seen. Not so long ago, there would be people milling in all directions here, but at that moment it seemed I was the only human being for miles around. My fingers and toes were growing numb, the cold was beginning to make its way through the rest of the layers that swaddled me from head to toe. I stamped my feet to dispel some of the numbness, exaggeratedly clapped my hands, and took a slow, deep breath, exhaling, seeing my spirit floating in the air in front of me, until a cutting wind bit across my face, blew the breath away, and started one of the skylift chairs swinging. The creak of the swinging chair broke the silence; in the stillness I heard the sounds of birds who had elected to stay through the winter, scared out of their hiding places by the sound of dislodged snow. A tiny piece of bare metal showed through, painted red.

The natural bridge loomed above me, somewhat intimidating. I still had the most difficult part of the climb to go; the steepest part of the rocks, the most difficult place to find a footing, and a tight squeeze through the crevice between the stone walls. A long time ago, this was the only way up here. There were no steps carved into the rock back then; no cast-iron railings along the side of the path which admittedly still required a significant amount of fitness on the climbers' part. The sight at the top was seen by precious few, but it was not long after those first explorers described what they saw that a way was found to open up that vista to all. I would guess it was the description of the sky bridge colors in the fall that motivated them to create the other way up, so everyone, from the smallest of children to the frail and elderly could take in the view, provided they could overcome any fear of heights they might have. In September and October it was at its most spectacular, all golden yellows and oranges and reds. Yes, the reds.

I had made it to the top, and stood precariously near the edge, next to a tree stripped bare of its leaves. Last time I was here, this tree was aflame. Now it stood here, seemingly lifeless, symbolic of everything that had passed in the two months since the last visit. Two months to the day, apparently. I had not even realized that until this moment. Just two months before, the outlook was incredibly different; breathtaking, vivacious; everything now was sullen in comparison. I trudged onward, more and more dispirited. I paused at that branch. Do you remember the one? Of course you do; it struck us both that day how red that leaf was, the leaf that wouldn't keep quiet and insisted you took its picture? That photograph made the perfect last shot in the photo album, didn't it? No, that's right. The last but one shot. But there was no red leaf there any longer. Anything red on this hillside has long gone. The little red car is not in the parking lot at the foot of the hill; I remember how enthusiastically we had agreed on the color at the rental desk. That little red car, or that little red leaf, or that little hint of red in our cheeks; they simply weren't there any more.

The experience was meant to be cathartic. I had planned to come up here and see that tree, that branch; look down on that parking lot, that skylift, stand where we stood, and bury the past once and for all. Things had indeed changed, just as surely as time had passed. The red that was there was long gone, and seeing this would surely purge those scarlet memories? I must admit, it was hardly the greatest of ideas. The color had indeed disappeared; the first snow had injected some additional finality into the picture, but it was far from final. The tree on the top of the bridge knew all this, and had known it year in, year out. It only seemed to be lifeless; a mere charade, just enough to get it through the darkest of moments. It would survive, awaiting for the return of the warmth, when it would stretch, imperceptibly, absorb every caress of the sun's rays, thrive once more through a spring and summer, and, when the fall colors returned, it would be red once more. Underneath that mantle of snow and ice, the certain processes of life were continuing; underneath the layers protecting me from the cold, a heart was still beating, a heart that knew that not only would it heal with time, but somehow would once again experience joy. At that moment, I knew I would experience the red again, and next winter, it would not fade.

Why not go ahead and join in? Check the prompt page for instructions, and remember to add your link on Thursday.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/602890/115587423.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5AkWC4VyJ4yZ Chris Nash darlingman1970 Chris Nash Thu, 28 Oct 2010 21:23:20 -0700 California Fall Color http://reinventingme.posterous.com/california-fall-color http://reinventingme.posterous.com/california-fall-color Moving somewhere new can be difficult. A lot of difficulties are obvious; learning to navigate in a new town; getting used to what times the stores shut in a small town compared to a big city; doing what you can to feel "at home."

Other things creep up on you, and are harder to deal with.

Fall has always been my favorite season. The cooling temperatures, the wind blowing, but above all... changing colors. It's been somewhat difficult to find fall hasn't really started yet here, and it's almost November. Leaves that change aren't indigenous to this state; you have to look in yards and subdivisions. Even so, "fall" is usually confined to a week in December; the briefest glimpse of color, until a gust of wind heralds winter and takes them away. My birthday falls in autumn; and all I wanted this year was those colors to come. Today I took a walk and got treated to some. I hope you enjoy them, too.

Img00319-20101028-1256 Img00320-20101028-1259 Img00321-20101028-1306 Img00322-20101028-1310 Img00323-20101028-1314 Img00324-20101028-1315 Img00325-20101028-1316 Img00326-20101028-1317 Img00327-20101028-1318 Img00328-20101028-1319 Img00329-20101028-1320
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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/602890/115587423.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5AkWC4VyJ4yZ Chris Nash darlingman1970 Chris Nash Sat, 23 Oct 2010 21:24:58 -0700 Na. No. Wri. Mo. No. No. No. No! #nanowrimo http://reinventingme.posterous.com/na-no-wri-mo-no-no-no-no-nanowrimo http://reinventingme.posterous.com/na-no-wri-mo-no-no-no-no-nanowrimo
240/365 National Novel Writing Month begins

Image by owlbookdreams via Flickr

In about a week from now, an enormous number of otherwise sane adults will take leave of their senses and begin acting like a bunch of six-year-olds.

No, I'm not talking about Hallowe'en. I'm talking about National Novel Writing Month. All of a sudden, these folks will commit November to putting 50,000 words down on some sort of paper, without editing, in order to be able to say straight out that they are a "writer" and have completed a "novel". There's a perverse logic to dedicating a whole, specific month to the cause. There's brotherhood, and solidarity. Everyone is advised to find themselves a writing buddy, and go out and tell their friends and families exactly what they're doing. The idea is, if you now drop the ball, the embarrassment of not being able to follow-through on something you committed to would be so much, it keeps you going through this 1667 words per day marathon. Oh, that's including Thanksgiving. And Election Day. And National Men make Dinner Day. And Cook Something Bold And Pungent Day. No excuses. In effect, for a month they'll force themselves back into doing Composition homework, just like they were back in school. Family, relationships, presumably work and sleep, might have to get put on the backburner. Understandably, people's opinions vary on the effectiveness of #NaNoWriMo, as to whether it is indeed the right way to get a novel out of someone. Let's face it, everybody has a book inside of them, and for some of us, perhaps inside is where it should stay.

Ironically, there's been an account on Twitter that was intended to do some warm-up work for the November crunch which actually convinced me that #NaNoWriMo was something I really didn't need to be trying. @NaNoWordSprints has been offering timed writing sessions of 15, 20, 30, or occasionally more minutes on several evenings. The idea is, against the clock, get down as many words as you can. It's helped me on a couple of evenings to get over writer's block when I've been trying to get a blog post down, and it's taught me that the actual quantity of words needed to get through NaNo is something that I can reasonably achieve. The quality is questionable, of course, but isn't that the point? But, more importantly, what the sprints have shown me is, if I put my mind to it, it really doesn't matter whether it's November or not. If it's something I want to do, I will be able to get the words out, without a problem. Of course, writing a novel is something I have managed to go through four decades of my life without actually doing so far. If I really, truly, wanted to have a go, I am quite competent and have sufficient self-control to make sure I do it, without any exterior force or artificial time limit pushing it out of me.

In a momentary lapse of reason, I signed up for #NaNoWriMo. It happened just like any other Internet fad, to be honest. A friend gave it a shot last year - a successful shot, it turns out - and this year I heard about it and thought, "Why not?" What of course I didn't do before clicking on that tempting sign-up button was think about a more important question. Why? I don't think I have to necessarily put out 50,000 words of my unedited ramblings in order to be called a "writer", any more than I would have to record a win at Talladega to be called a "driver". I write, therefore, I am a writer. (I drive too, and I'm lousy at that). Whether it's good or bad, or fact or fiction, a novel, a blog, or a grocery list, it's still writing. I don't have a Pinocchio complex - it's not like I sit around all day wishing that I could be a "real writer", while at the same time am worried about whether anyone will laugh at my efforts. It wouldn't have to be a novel, either, if I wanted to write. I tried @6minutestory as well, which is completely the opposite proposition. Take a visual or verbal prompt, write as much as you can in six minutes, and then walk away. I've only given this a try once, mainly because I'm a horrific typist, but I wasn't too displeased with the result. There's a lot of good flash fiction out there, and some writers who are exceptionally skilled in the art of getting short stories written quickly. There seem to be plenty of online publications that are after all kinds of short stories; if I wanted to write one of those, again, it's up to me to just go right ahead.

It doesn't matter what kind of writing it is. Novels, short stories, even blog posts. The only thing that is preventing me from achieving any of them, is me; not whether I have signed up to some site or not. So now, right now, I'm actively chickening out. #NaNoWriMo? No, no, no, no.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/602890/115587423.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5AkWC4VyJ4yZ Chris Nash darlingman1970 Chris Nash Fri, 22 Oct 2010 21:21:37 -0700 Fourteen Hints To Keep Your Password Safe http://reinventingme.posterous.com/fourteen-hints-to-keep-your-password-safe http://reinventingme.posterous.com/fourteen-hints-to-keep-your-password-safe
Diagram of the sending of spam e-mail.

Image via Wikipedia

It happened all very suddenly a couple of days ago. I was working away when my phone vibrated in my pocket; just a couple of buzzes, an incoming e-mail. It could wait until I was no longer in the middle of composing a thought; nothing is that urgent, surely. Then two more. And two more. And two more. By this time, I was distracted enough and continued to count; all in all, a dozen of so e-mails had arrived. No doubt they would all be spam, sent to me by some annoying robot out there; or newsletters, of which I've lost count to how many I've signed up for; or drops from mailing lists, same as the above; or a flurry of recently-approved comments on a blog post I've been following for months and can no longer remember. More than likely, though, it was spam. I've been getting quite a lot of that from my sister's e-mail account recently, and, joking aside from her that her concern for her older brother's health needn't extend to sending me deals on little purple pills, they've been getting annoying. I mention them, she denies all knowledge, and concludes that what I'm saying is, in fact, impossible. She doesn't even get to use her computer that much, she doesn't have a virus on it, so how could anyone be getting mails from her?

Enough was enough, I had to check the incoming mails, and discovered they were all bounces from the "Mail Delivery Subsystem", seemingly, mis-addressed mails that were sent from my account. I looked a little closer and discovered a pattern, I even recognized some of the addresses as typos I had entered at the computer several times before; accounts of friends that were no longer active. The body of the mail was, as expected, spam; some ridiculous so-called "deals" on consumer electronics. The embarrassing thing was, these mails had apparently been sent from my e-mail account. I logged on to the computer to check, and, sure enough, a copy of that mail had been sent to everyone in my address book, from my e-mail account, and was in my Sent Items folder. It was as if someone had logged right into Gmail and done it on my behalf. Sure enough, they had. At the bottom of Gmail there's a link that lets you verify details of connections. It confirmed that an address in China had logged onto my account a few minutes earlier - which meant, they knew my password. I quickly changed the password, maintaining a clear head to at least do that much. After that, I began to worry. Had I used that password anywhere else? What of my personal information was compromised? Could the attacker have done more damage during their visit than send out a few annoying e-mails - which I'm sure have impressed the heck out of my family, friends, lawyer, employer, butcher, baker and candlestick maker?

Here's the kicker. I pride myself on not being a fool. I must admit, when studies come out that say a huge percentage of people's passwords out there are vulnerable to simple guesses, I puff my chest out a bit because I'm not one of those. I do a lot of this for a living. I'm perfectly aware of the risks. And, sadly. I'm also extremely imperfectly human, and I cut a few corners here and there. Purely for convenience, you understand. For freedom's sake, for my personal enjoyment - surely, there's no need to be paranoid all the time, is there? If you live every moment in fear, that's hardly living at all! But I had to face it. A password that I thought was safe was compromised. My e-mail password, as well, which, let's face it, is pretty much the keys to the kingdom. Anyone could browse through my inbox and sent items; they could determine other places I had accounts and submit "forgotten password" requests. Perish the thought, they may already be in those places; maybe I used the password somewhere else? Maybe that's where they stole it from? And, embarrassingly, I honestly didn't know how much damage they were capable of. What I did know though is one of the addresses the spam mail was sent to was Posterous, which meant the spam mail was already posted onto my blog, and it would even be announced on Twitter.

I began to simmer down for a little bit. The address in China was probably just one of many that wasn't necessarily after my personal secrets. What they wanted was the ability to push out their spam mails, and perhaps harvest a few more candidates from my address book to continue their routines of password-guessing. They must have guessed my password, which surprised me. Or perhaps they'd seen it somewhere, which worried me. Having an account which they could robotically abuse to send mail through was the gold they were after; however, a human hacker would, most likely, have wanted to be more malicious. I could be comfortable for a moment. I'd stopped the problem, and realized that I really needed to rethink my password strategy. I thought I was secure; but I wasn't. I'm not naive; after all; but what I have been is complacent. Here's a list of hints about passwords we all ought to know, but perhaps a reminder is worth having. And, they're a reminder to myself, because I've been guilty of most of these, which meant I got caught by this latest eye-opener.
  1. Your password shouldn't be a word. Of course not, and there's a simple reason for this. Depending on how you count them, there are only about 175,000 different words in English, and it's not that hard for a computer program (or an organized cracking effort) to try them all. However, even quite recent research has shown not many people take this advice consistently. In fact, there are still accounts out there whose password is, yes you guessed it, "password".
  2. Mixed case, numbers, and "special characters". This has been common advice for a long time now, and most people think throwing a few of these into their password is enough, especially since most websites now either recommend or insist on it. Of course, it's not much of a stretch. If our happy hackers can run through all the English words, there's not much stopping them making the obvious substitutions and trying those, too. "P@55w0rd" really isn't that much more secure, after all.
  3. Why not a pass phrase? If you're partial to verse 11 of Coleridge's The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner, why not make that your password? And if the site has a maximum length of password, you may want to ask why - the most secure passwords should be irreversibly 'hashed' into a code that doesn't care how long what you originally typed was. (If your site has a small limit, you may wish to ask them why).
  4. Don't fill out those "security" questions. These are, without a doubt, the biggest sucker trap ever invented. You don't know your password? Well, that's OK, what was the color of your first car, again? Suddenly, all security disappears in favor of something that is ridiculously easy to guess. If you're a celebrity, those security questions may even be answered on Wikipedia. Type something in these fields that has nothing to do with the question, and is just as cryptic as a password; if possible, put complete junk in these fields and look for an alternate means of password recovery.
  5. Never use the same password twice. Seriously, never. It only takes one of the sites to be broken into, and you can be sure any leaked password will be tried in other places too. Perish the thought if the password you were using in that fun game in some Internet backwater is exactly the one you use for your bank account. This is the place where most people wimp out and claim that's "too much effort". It's not, providing you have a suitable "password keeper" program that stores all your passwords, securely. You just need a master password to access them. Done correctly, if you only access sites from one computer, you never even have to see or type the passwords stored. (Of course, mentioning a password keeper program reminds me, it goes without saying - don't ever write your password down anywhere!).
  6. Never "remember your password on this computer". Again, this is rank laziness so you don't have to enter it next time. The problem is, there's often multiple ways of doing this, such as a checkbox on the web page or the password store built into your web browser, and you can't possibly know how secure these methods are. Of course, if anyone gets a hold of your computer, they're not secure at all. I once bought a computer from a pawn shop and was amazed at what was still on it. This one is also particularly important if you have a smart phone that has remembered passwords. What happens if you lose it?
  7. Honor and respect corporate policies. There's a reason why your employer wants you, for instance, to change your password every 30 days, and it can't be the same as the last four you used. Nor should you abuse that and change it four times in a row to reset it back to the same as it was...
  8. Don't do obviously stupid things, particularly with your phone. "Just send a text to your bank and get your balance instantly". Right. That sounds secure... until you lose your phone...
  9. Put a password on your screensaver or phone keyboard lock, as well. It should stop people getting anywhere should you lose physical access to the device, and every little bit helps. Of course, don't rely on only this!
  10. Don't rely on the other guy. It doesn't matter who they are; even the biggest companies have made security foul-face-up-books in the past. And I really don't care what operating system or type of computer you use; that just tells me you are refusing to accept responsibility for your own security as well. I could quite easily have been upset with Google for letting someone several thousand miles away log into my e-mail account at the same time I was already logged in, but that was my fault.
  11. Check out the sites you use for possible security loopholes. For instance, if they can send you an e-mail to retrieve a lost password, then they are storing your password somewhere, which is evidently a security risk. A lot of sites - particularly message boards - got their software from precisely the same place, and any security loopholes have likely already been exploited.
  12. Don't confuse awareness with competence. A site that suggests you use "letters, numbers and special characters" on the login page might not necessarily be more competent, simply because they're iterating common advice.
  13. Password policies shouldn't be a secret. If a company won't tell you exactly what they do with your password, that's about as effective as keeping a magic trick a secret. it's only magic, while you don't know how it's done. Once you know, the illusion is shattered. And remember, the sort of attackers who are after your password are precisely the kind of guys who can get jobs working on the code for these places.
  14. Don't underestimate the bad guys. Password-stealing is big business, and the players in this arena are exceptionally, exceptionally smart. Don't get arrogant and assume you won't fall foul of them... because that's precisely how you will get caught out. Don't contradict any of these points, even if you think "Oh but number X doesn't apply because..." - are you sure?
One extra point I'd like to throw in. The security landscape is always changing. Not so long ago the computing power to try all the words in a dictionary would have been prohibitive. New attacks, new attackers, are coming up all the time. We were watching Catch Me If You Can this weekend, an excellent movie based on a true story of check fraud and confidence tricks. Yes, check technology has changed a lot since the sixties, when the movie took place, and so many of the loopholes are no longer possible - indeed, the perpetrator invented some of the security systems that banks use today. However, human nature hasn't changed at all; social engineering is still the most effective means of getting by security. The last time I needed to get through a door I didn't have access to, I told the secretary that "she looked different. Is that a new hairdo? Wow, it really suits you!" and she let me straight in. Flattery just might get you anywhere.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/602890/115587423.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5AkWC4VyJ4yZ Chris Nash darlingman1970 Chris Nash Mon, 18 Oct 2010 22:46:44 -0700 How To Get A Head In Blogging http://reinventingme.posterous.com/how-to-get-a-head-in-blogging http://reinventingme.posterous.com/how-to-get-a-head-in-blogging
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He's about sixteen inches tall. He weighs about sixty pounds. And he's an original; the prototype, from which my dear friend Chuck created the mold. He is, at this precise moment in time, homeless, kicked out of my old office 2200 miles away. I'm not sure exactly how I am going to get him here, if I am going to get him here at all.

Chuck was always a bit of a polymath; a software engineer who was also an artist? Unheard of, surely? But Chuck was all this and more. He'd even attained something akin to notoriety; his work featured in the local paper's art competition seeking an inventive portrait of nudes. His kids suggested that would be "dirty", so he used this theme to make a sculpture of a nude with a toilet seat and two plungers. His prize was to be pictured in the Sunday supplement with his award-winning piece, naked of course, but oh-so-tastefully done. If he would sit still for long enough, he'd tell you about his next project, before he moved on to something else. I was revving up to do the voice-over for an animated feature he was about to create; I'd be playing a narcileptic rooster named Colin. With a British accent, for some reason. I think there might be a joke in there somewhere at my expense, I'm not sure.

Then, there was the Moai head. I'm not sure what was the initial motivation to start making them; but I do know he did intend to produce one at full scale. I'm not sure how well that would go down with his local neighborhood of curtain-twitchers; they were the kind of folks who required planning permission for you to paint your front door. This guy here is about one-sixth of full scale, which means a full-sized one would have ended up weighing something like seven tons. That was the point where Chuck concluded that, if he wanted a real one, he'd have to make it hollow. Meanwhile, he geared up to make the miniatures; from this original came the mold, and from the mold would come a whole army of them, setting solid on his garage floor while, in that great American tradition, his motor vehicle sat out in the driveway.

Chuck moved on, and we lost touch. The last I heard, he was working in Louisville. And, just like the countless times I've done this before, I remained confident that we shared enough common acquaintances to remain in touch, and, somehow, I ended up with my not-so-little friend here, complete with Chuck's signature on the bottom. Of course, the remaining in touch never happened; and now, I've moved a rather long way away. My former office neighbor Dan contacted me this morning. There's been a bit of office musical chairs going on, and my concrete buddy is now outside in the hallway, seeking a new home. What on earth am I going to do with him?

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/602890/115587423.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5AkWC4VyJ4yZ Chris Nash darlingman1970 Chris Nash Thu, 14 Oct 2010 22:35:11 -0700 The Story Of Our Miracle Rose http://reinventingme.posterous.com/the-story-of-our-miracle-rose http://reinventingme.posterous.com/the-story-of-our-miracle-rose
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The picture accompanying this blog post shows two new roses with a remarkable tale to tell. At least, it's remarkable for us. It just goes to illustrate the sort of things that happen to us on a regular basis; sometimes, it seems our lives are filled with the most unusual and yes absolutely unlikely events. I'm not sure if there's any explanation for this; the best one that we have come up with is the smaller rose is, quite simply, a miracle. The larger rose, is, in fact, the younger sibling. Here's their story.

One of the first things we did once we started living together was go out and buy some roses. C has always had some impressive roses in her garden; mine, well, less so; but between the two of us, we wanted to have some significant new rose bushes in the back yard. We had a mooch round the nursery, agreeing what we wanted were roses that were fragrant. All too often, particularly with modern hybrid roses, they are grown for looks but it seems they are bland, if they have any fragrance at all. In addition, roses have caught our eye by name. We picked up a "Lasting Love", a fragrant medium-sized red rose; "Midnight Blue", tiny purple blooms that had a spicy scent; and one other. The names certainly were important to us, but something happened with the third one. The name was on a nursery sign which we had to leave there once we checked out, and, by the time we had got home, the name was forgotten. I have a funny feeling it may have been "What a Peach" - that was a name that caught our eye - but that rose never turned out that way. It produces large yellow flowers with a very fruity fragrance, so we've decided to name it "Lemon Pudding".

We cleared spaces in the flowerbed for these three new bushes, and, after some initial shock, they've been doing very well. 'Lasting Love" tends to peek one bloom or two regularly into our bedroom window, while "Midnight Blue" often explodes into dozens of tiny flowers. "Lemon Pudding" often catches us unawares; it seems yellow roses come and go quite quickly. One day, there's not even a bud. The next day, it's in full bloom, and a day later, it's gone. I've been doing my best through the rainless summer season keeping them watered and trimmed, and they're doing well, but we were still missing the rose we wanted; something fragrant, something orange, and something "peachy".

We scanned some online catalogs to see what was available, and one promising location caught our eye; a family-run rose garden, relatively nearby, one that would make a pleasant afternoon drive. We set out to check the roses out, excited at the prospect of a grower who was interested in raising traditional roses rather than more modern hybrids. The route twisted and turned, climbing up into the hills, narrowing, through beautiful redwood scenery, and we found ourselves at the bottom of a steep drive. At the top, it seemed there was nobody to be found. The house was perched on the top of a hill; quiet. It seemed like the home of a recluse. A simple sign posted on the gate told us that the garden worked on an honor system. If you call ahead and ask for what you want, it should be here. Take it, leave your details in a drop box by the picnic table, and leave. We began to feel a little uneasy. As we walked around the garden, it gave us the unnerving feeling that it was abandoned. It did not seem well taken care of. There were roses that needed watering, treating, trimming. Another patron turned up, as mystified by the whole setup as we were. Disappointed, we turned to leave.

We weren't going to be thwarted quite so easily, so we started reading and researching. I found out a lot about yellow and orange roses. Apparently, the first attempts to produce them were not entirely successful. The color was not too difficult to produce, but often, the scents were unappealing, in fact, some early yellow roses were said to have a scent resembling... well, rotting flesh. As I began looking for traditional roses, I was somewhat surprised to find I had a namesake, Mr Nash, which was, indeed, a yellow rose. We've added that to our list of roses to find at some point, but still, the perfect orange rose seemed like it would be quite a search. C began to look for growers further north, Oregon, Washington. Perhaps their cooler summers might yield us a rose that we'd be able to keep going, with a little TLC. Again, it seems, coincidence struck again. A company called Heirloom had a rose that sounded exactly like what we were after, called "Fragrant Cloud", with a color and scent that was described as "apricot". I doubt I'll ever get the name of this thing right. Every time I think of it, I get confused with the heirloom tomatoes and the Apricot Cloud breakfast treats that we've been picking up at the Hollister Farmers' Market all summer. Our order went in, and the nursery told us to wait around three weeks for delivery. We received confirmation it would be dispatched on July 28, and we just needed to wait for the UPS man to deliver it.

A couple of weeks passed, and there was no rose; and, were it not for far too much crazy Real Life Stuff going on, we would have followed up on it sooner. Towards the end of August, it was evident that the rose was not going to arrive. C contacted the nursery again and asked for the status of our order. They confirmed it had indeed been sent, UPS, on July 28, and, seeing as it hadn't arrived, it had evidently been lost or destroyed in transit. After a little bit of back-and-forth it was agreed the only thing they could do was dispatch another, and told us to watch carefully for deliveries. It must have been left out on the doorstep one day when everyone was busy; August was, for one reason or another, a stressful month for us. Almost by accident, we spotted a box about a foot long and a few inches square tucked under the doormat; that wasn't what we expected. The timing was absolutely awful, coinciding with perhaps the most stressful experience of our lives together to date. Opening this box and seeing a tiny seeding rather than the established bush we were expecting did nothing to improve our demeanour. We gave the poor thing a good soak after its obviously tortured journey in the back of a sticky UPS truck, and planned to put it in good soil and a pot the next morning. It would be some months before it would establish, surely? It turned out, though, the plant has been remarkably robust, and indeed is already well over a foot tall and beginning to bush out. Our initial disappointment hasn't held water; it looks like this will be a wonderful rose to add to our garden and will bloom beautifully next season.

That, though, is not the remarkable part of the story...

The end of September saw a significant anniversary for us; one which we were hoping we could celebrate, at least modestly, for we have several things we need to save for. There have been a few other significant life events to mark in September, and, one day, a package appeared on the table by the front door, seemingly from nowhere. We hadn't ordered anything, but there it was, another box, about a foot long and a few inches square. It seemed that the first rose had finally got to its final destination. Tracking had told us that it had made it to the UPS depot in the town twenty minutes away immediately after its dispatch. We could only guess that for the past two months this poor thing had been lost in a sweltering warehouse, or rolling around, unnoticed, in the back of a van or underneath the driver's seat. The mystery was solved. All that remained for us was to unpack it from the box and give it its last rites. As we opened the box, dry soil, desiccated, began to tumble out of the tiny pot. We caught a glimpse of the stalk, wilted, pathetic.

And one, green, leaf. Somehow, incredibly, it was still alive. We hurriedly ran outside and placed it next to its older sibling, and gave it a drink that it had evidently been waiting for two months to get. Over the past two weeks, the new growth on this plant has been nothing short of miraculous, It's been facing a miniature heatwave, an Indian summer on California's Central Coast, but that's OK. Roses love the heat and the sun, provided they can get enough water (but, they don't like their roots constantly soaked, either). There's no smoke and mirrors involved here; the invoice and the packing materials said, sure enough, that the rose had left the nursery on July 28. We're keeping the invoice as a memento, and the rose is growing from strength to strength. It's something of a miracle, along with the events it commemorates.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/602890/115587423.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5AkWC4VyJ4yZ Chris Nash darlingman1970 Chris Nash Sun, 10 Oct 2010 23:44:02 -0700 Is yWriter 5 The Novel Writing Tool For You? #nanowrimo http://reinventingme.posterous.com/is-ywriter-5-the-novel-writing-tool-for-you-n http://reinventingme.posterous.com/is-ywriter-5-the-novel-writing-tool-for-you-n
Snipywriter5

Whether you're new to novel writing or have had some previous experience, one thing is quite certain. You are unlikely to get very far with such a complex project if you simply decide one day to simply "go for it," open a new file in your favorite word processor or text editor, and simply begin typing. There is a lot of planning, organization, and discipline involved in managing what can very easily become a very unwieldy task indeed. Most text editors are very useful when it comes to editing words and lines. They are not quite as convenient when it comes to chapters and scenes. And - perish the thought - keeping your entire novel in a single file is asking for trouble. What if your computer has a hard disk failure and the file cannot be opened?

Spacejock Software's yWriter 5 is a freeware answer to many of these problems, using a software engineer's perspective on the file management problem. Computer software is typically developed by dividing the project into many small files, and keeping all associated information with each component together in one place. Moving the components around within the project is then relatively simple. In yWriter 5, the same idea applies to the various scenes that make up a novel. Each scene is a separate text file that may be edited standalone (in either the built-in or an external text editor), and then scenes may be ordered, moved or assembled as required into chapters. Editing tasks such as moving a scene earlier or later in the book becomes a very simple task indeed. many of the menu options suggest that the software has been regularly used for entrants in National Novel Writing Month, and as such, features have been added in response to users' wishlists. The yWriter program is available for Windows, but by using the Mono emulator software, it can also be run on Linux and Mac OS X platforms. It requires a rather large .NET package from Microsoft to already be installed, but most modern Windows installations will already have this present, required by other common software.

If your experience with word processors is limited to gargantuan office software, the word processing features of yWriter 5 may seem a bit spartan. The editing environment is quite reminiscent in simplicity to simple programs like WordPad, for instance. There is limited support for formatting and editing, and even though there is a spell checker, the option to enable this comes into effect only when a scene is saved. There are no squiggly red or green lines appearing beneath your text as you type here. This is intentional; the point behind the software is to free you from the technical details and just allow you to simply write, as undistracted as possible. Nor will yWriter write the novel for you. It does not provide any creative input for you, write your plot, or come up with a story - that is all your responsibility. All the software attempts to do is to make the technical and management aspects somewhat easier, and give you easy access to some useful tools that will help you write your latest blockbuster. One thing to remember as well is the program is designed only to manage the "getting the words out of your head" part of the writing process; any paper output it produces is purely for preview purposes. Do not expect pretty output from this program; that is way beyond its scope.

However, yWriter 5 does more than allow you to write text in scenes. It serves as a place to gather and collate all your ideas relating to your novel as you write it. For instance, you may keep track of characters, locations, and items as they appear in each scene, and keep track of whose viewpoint each scene is written from. You can add notes, reminders, even images that can serve as your inspiration or research for each part of the novel; jot down ideas about goals, conflicts, outcomes, and the time at which each scene takes place; mark up the scenes as they pass through the editing process, and even rate them subjectively on up to four user-defined scales for such metrics as tension, humor, or quality. The software is cleverly designed to make all of these features available, but purely optional; furthermore, the features may be used in the way the novelist wishes, rather than forced into a particular usage pattern. For example, one user of yWriter submitted a translation file that converted the novel-writing program into a tool that writes sermons. At this very moment, this review is being written in yWriter, with each paragraph in its own file. This allows me to check the word count to make sure I am writing a review that's balanced and sufficiently informative.

The best things about yWriter 5 is the author - not only a software developer but also a published novelist in his own right - evidently encountered a lot of the common issues with the development of a novel and put his software development abilities to finding suitable solutions, rather than marketing gimmicks that do not help with the task at hand. The most important feature for a writer surely has to be to present an undistracted environment in which to write, and the yWriter editor certainly satisfies that. It is easy, almost immediate, to get to use and the management of scenes and chapters is exceptionally intuitive. However, along with that simplicity are also a wealth of features which are not just there for added complexity, but are genuinely useful. I must admit, the more I use the program, the more features I find and the more uses for them. What is more, the features have evidently proven useful to a community of both amateur and professional writers alike. It can read your scenes aloud, which is an interesting means to identify issues. One impressive feature is the program can be run from a USB flash drive, allowing you to easily move your work environment from one machine to another. The program automatically makes backups of your work, as well as automatically checking for software updates. It prints out reports, including a work schedule, so the writer knows exactly how much effort is required to meet that deadline - or listen to the whooshing sound it makes as it passes them by.

With so many features, the elements about yWriter 5 that I did not like seem relatively insignificant. There were some times, for example, when closing the text editor, that the parent screen did not regain the focus and reappear as the next logical place I'd like to give my attention. This caused me to have to go look for it in my taskbar, which broke my concentration in a program that, as much as possible, allows me to focus on the writing and not so much on the minutiae of operating a computer. There's a preview window for scenes on the main window, which in fact I can place a text editing cursor, but text cannot be typed there, although it would seem that would make sense. I'm a little curious about the decisions to automatically backup the files in the background as the user works. The files seem to always be compressed into zip files' this seems not only a little awkward to retrieve the files in case of an emergency, but also somewhat dangerous - a corrupted file might render all the contents irretrievable. On the one instance where I did purposely crash the computer in order to test this feature, finding the file to recover was not an intuitive process. One thing to remember, this is a free program. The help files are a bit skimpy, although the program is supported by a fairly active - and quite enthusiastic - e-mail group, which may be able to answer any questions.

I must admit, in a very short time I have become quite a fan of yWriter 5. I am very much in agreement with its concepts of how to manage and handle projects; indeed, it is now something I use daily for even small projects such as writing this very review. I'm discovering more and more features as and when I need them. and have yet to find the software lacking. Perhaps yWriter 5 is precisely the tool that you are looking for. Check out Spacejock Software for more reviews, details, and to download. As the developer himself claims, without yWriter, he would never have become a published author.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/602890/115587423.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5AkWC4VyJ4yZ Chris Nash darlingman1970 Chris Nash Sat, 09 Oct 2010 23:15:57 -0700 Teaser: Action at a Distance: The Casino (fiction, #nanowrimo) http://reinventingme.posterous.com/teaser-action-at-a-distance-the-casino-fictio http://reinventingme.posterous.com/teaser-action-at-a-distance-the-casino-fictio
card game Blackjack

Image via Wikipedia

This is a scene from a story I've been thinking about writing called Action at a Distance, and I had even considered doing it for National Novel Writing Month. This is a test scene that I wrote up to find out how many words I would use, how long it would take, to get some idea of how much of a story I'd need to plan ahead and upfront. I haven't decided yet whether to continue with the story. Let me know what you think of this teaser.

Steff and the rest of the girls from the DMV walked out, purposefully, onto the casino floor, and glanced around trying to pick out their "marks" for the evening. They each had their preferences; some of the girls preferred the more hectic and noisy side of the room where the roulette and craps tables were; most of them though stuck with blackjack. Steff had found the blackjack tables were by far the safest bet for her evening's entertainment. Even the most addicted gamblers on the other tables knew what they were playing was a game of pure luck, as they blew on their dice before they rolled, or crossed their fingers as the ball made its orbits around the wheel; games of pure luck, with rules that favored the house. No amount of noise and bravado could change that; the personalities at those tables would be too dangerous. The blackjack players were more scientific, more analytical, and yes, more often than not, thoroughly wrong in their strategies; as a rule, though, they were much safer. There was far less of a risk for a blackjack mark to turn dangerous; there was far greater a chance of winning your way into their confidence relatively quickly. Just one suggestion of a better play would win you into their confidence. The blackjack players were also there for the evening. They had a fair idea of how good they were, or otherwise, and how long their money would last. provided they stuck to that simple strategy outlined in that "For Dummies" book they'd leafed through, they could expect their money to last the evening. They were here to have a good time; not necessarily to win.

The girls had been doing this same outing every other Friday night for a little over a year. Steff was now the de facto leader of the group; she'd been there right from the start, when they had come up with the idea of casino night. It was a pretty simple idea; each of the girls would take a modest amount of betting money and their gambling knowledge up to a table to join an unaccompanied male; get said male to buy them their drinks for the evening, have a little fun gambling - it didn't need to be anything more than that. In fact, it was much safer that it wasn't. The girls still remembered what had happened to one of their number a couple of months back, when she picked a far too young and handsome gentleman as her mark. He was too smooth. She didn't even recognize the danger. No, it's far better to head for the balding, the middle-aged, the overweight. If you could stand listening to their complaints of how their wives didn't understand them, they would quite happily keep you in drinks for the evening just for bringing them luck. Showing a bit of cleavage never hurt, either, although not as much as the croupiers. That was just plain sleazy.

Steff pulled up a stool next to her chosen mark for the evening. She had already seen him make a couple of fundamental betting mistakes; he was a rather round gentleman in his early fifties, and unlike many of the sharks on the casino floor, he was still wearing his wedding ring. Everything about him said safe; everything about him said boring, as well. He would likely have a bad case of halitosis and, depending on how drunk he was, would subject Steff to tirades about his home life and flip-out wallet photo albums of his kids whom he'd sent away to college for a ridiculous amount of money that would have paid Steff's salary for ten years. Safe was the most important thing, Steff remembered, and from the pile of chips in front of him, he could certainly afford to buy her a drink or two. She exaggeratedly swayed a bit on her stool; it never hurt to make the mark think she'd already had a bit too much to drink that night. The man nodded at her, gave her a quick look up and down, not particularly lecherously, Steff thought. He was safe, all right.

It didn't take long before Steff had an opportunity to start up a conversation about the game. The dealer was showing a six; the man was dealt an ace and a seven, and he immediately decided to stand, just as Steff expected. Eighteen is eighteen, after all. Steff's cards were a four and a five, and she elected to double down. The man raised his eyebrows slightly, as if he had never heard the term before. She placed a second one dollar chip in the circle in front of her, and took her one and only additional card, a seven, giving her sixteen. The croupier turned the hole card, a queen, and mechanically turned the next card, a jack, a dealer bust. Steff and the gentleman took their winnings, and as she pulled the chips towards her, she addressed the man. "You really should have doubled down too, you know. You could have made an easy extra fifty bucks there."

"Thank you sweetheart. I'll try to remember that. The name's Solomon Braunschweig. You can call me Solly, if you'll let me buy you a drink." Bingo. Steff beamed, knowing full well she was going to be kept in drinks for the rest of the evening, and more than likely she would get to help Mr Braunschweig play out some of that enormous pile of chips in front of him, as well. This was already turning out to be a very economical evening's entertainment. "I'm an agent," Solly continued. "Actually you might have heard of one of my acts, Russ Bradford?" It was, of course, a rhetorical question. To be on the Strip and not have heard of Russ Bradford was unthinkable. He had by far the most successful act around, and you couldn't turn your head in this town without seeing one of those enormous billboards with his ridiculously oversized glasses and googly eyes. "Actually," Solly hesitated slightly, "Russ is my only act. And he's pissing me off. He's going to blow this sweet number he's got, and that'll be both his career and mine down the toilet."

"How dreadful!" Steff responded in something approaching mock despair, swaying a little extra for effect. It seemed she would be better off acting a little bit dumb this evening. This guy was far too serious, and he wasn't going to need her to be too interactive. He just needed to pour out his woes to somebody. "I'm Steff," she responded, "and by all means, erm, Solly, I'd love to have a drink with you." Solly flagged down a server, who it seems already knew he wanted the double Scotch sitting on her tray, and Steff stated she would love a margarita silver. Solly looked at her, a little conspiratorially. "I was looking for someone like you this evening," he leered, and this time, when he glanced up and down her, Steff definitely felt like she was being undressed with his eyes. "You're a nice-looking girl, and, after that double down, I know you're smart. Maybe you can listen. What do you know about quantum mechanics?" Steff struggled a bit to maintain her dumb act. Probably the best response to a mention of quantum mechanics at the blackjack table would be not to even flinch at what an unexpected phrase that was. "I have no idea what you're talking about," she lied. In order to keep the drinks flowing tonight, it was in her best interests for Solly to see her as a bit of fluff, not as the geek she really was. After all, she'd learnt that blackjack strategy card when she was only seven years old.

"Russ is driving me absolutely crazy. You ever seen his act? 'Course you have. Everyone's seen his act. You know he only has one trick? Everything he does, right, it's all about those two blessed rings. The hand on the other side of the stage trick. That basketball trick. The one where he reappears at the back of the audience. It's all the same trick, there's two rings. Something goes in one, and comes out of the other. One trick. One of these days, some single mom from Iowa is going to spend all the child support on bringing some precocious snot-nosed kid to the show, and he's going to work out how it's done. He won't hesitate to point out the Emperor isn't wearing any clothes, and bam! That's it. Russ is finished. I'm finished. He needs something else. Another trick. Or maybe some piece of...." Solly's eyes roamed down the front of Steff's dress, "...erm, an assistant or something. Give the audience something else to look at." His eyes were now wandering all over Steff's legs by this point. "Much safer than white tigers or something. And do you know what he says to me?". He took a breath and downed his Scotch in one gulp. "He has the nerve to say, it isn't a trick. He says... it's real. I mean, is he crazy? Of course it's a fricking trick. This is showbiz. We're no fools, you know."

Steff fidgeted uncomfortably. She'd felt Solly's eyes lifting up the hem of her skirt, and at the same time he was rambling on about some magic act, yet there was something about this story that was intriguing her. "What's quantum mechanics got to do with this?" she asked, in a desperate effort to both express her curiosity and yet conceal her knowledge. Solly grabbed another Scotch from a passing server, and once more downed that in one go. "So I ask him how it's done. He says it's all about quantum mechanics, something called action at a distance. Take that hand across the stage trick he does. There's two rings. He holds one in one hand, and the other one is at the side of the stage. He sticks his arm through one ring and, sure enough, it comes out the other ring. This is what he tells me, he says, they're the same ring. That they're actually connected, and that somehow space is curved or some other scientific claptrap so when his arm goes through one ring it comes out the other. So I says to him, I say, Russ, look, don't treat me like a fool. If you don't want to tell me how it's done, fine, but don't BS me. And he has the nerve to tell me he's telling me the absolute truth. What a load."

"No, it isn't," Steff answered excitedly, and before she realized it, she had completely dropped the bimbo facade that she was planning to uphold for the rest of the evening to keep her in drinks. "Spooky action at a distance, I've heard that before. It's something Einstein said about an experiment in quantum mechanics that, well, would cause him all sorts of trouble with relativity. There's some smart things you can do with particles, you can split them into two, separate them over great distances, but they remain entangled with each other. So entangled that, if you do something to one, it instantaneously affects the state of the other. Even if you do something as simple as look at it, it affects the other one, immediately. They can be at opposite ends of the universe, and they're still connected, and the information travels from one to the other instantly. Faster than light. And that was bad news for Einstein." She coughed, realizing her cover was blown. "At least, that's what I've heard. perhaps this is what Russ is doing. Perhaps he has somehow found a way to split one ring into two, entangled ones. They look like two, but really they're the same one. If he touches one, he's really touching the other. If he passes through one, he emerges through the other. Of course, it makes no sense. If he could really do this, surely the military would be all over him, rather than he being in some two-bit...." Solly coughed. "...two-bit sideshow. It's surely a trick, Solly."

"I need to know how it's done, sweetheart," Solly answered, with more than a touch of sincerity and even urgency in his voice. "I need to know, and you can find out for me. Here's a ticket for his next show. He always gets an assistant from this seat in the auditorium. Best seat in the house. He'll have to give you some clue how it's done. Here, take this and buy a new dress for it. A bit shorter would work. Will you do this for me?"

Steff was lost for words.

What do you think? Any comments, suggestions, or thoughts greatly appreciated!

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/602890/115587423.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5AkWC4VyJ4yZ Chris Nash darlingman1970 Chris Nash