Scam

Hello friends, pals.

Yes, I should have noted yesterday about GWB saying some stuff wrt: the Mideast Thursday that possessed an angle opposite of Ari's earlier statement. What was going on there, exactly? I do not know. Anyway, I must rescind my earlier cynicism. (Shee, I'm so bad at being negative, even when I try, the world adjusts itself so that I'm wrong. Then again, maybe I possess a mutant power to improve situations by fuming at them from afar. I must cherish this and use it sparingly, even so.)

I watch SNOW out the café windows with some amusement. Earlier today I walked around in the clear, cold weather, silently relishing New England's make-up-your-mind-already spring weather (same as in fall), and noted that it's not really spring unless there's one last whee-who-cares snowfall. Bah, not this year. It's been a bone-dry winter; why would there be the usual finale? WRONG WRONG WRONG. Though it lasted only a few minutes, there t was, and me am happy at the order of things.

This evening I finished reading through Apple's "Object-Oriented Programming and Objective C" book, one of the many big chunks of documentation that comes with OS X. The title is practically longer than than the content; Objective C really is pretty simple.

Blessedly, the book aimed towards people who had "an acquaintance" with C programming. Which is to say, maybe not able to sit down right now and write a temperature-converter program without peeking at someone else's source code for hints, but also not one to break out in a panicky sweat at the sight of an #include directive. I have read two books on C but have never really had need to write a program in it, so the knowledge atrophies. Happily, it doesn't go away... it just gets buried under a lot of mental sediment.

I'm collecting ideas for Mac OS X programs I'd like to see that don't sound too hard to implement. Some of the conjectured applications are potentially useful to other people as well, and these I think I'll tackle first, with the goal of releasing them as shareware.

Open-source hippie M gave me the dirtiest look yesterday when I lay out this plan to her. It is a bit funny... my grumblemumbling about the shareware-only culture on the Mac changed the course of my life three years ago, when I started the open-source Mac catalog, and attracted the sorts of attention that put me on my present path. I suppose I could make the software open-source and also shareware... I think even the GPL supports that strategy. (NO FREE BEER for YOU)

The point, though, is that I'm getting used to this idea of making a thingy and then earning money via people buying copies of it. If you look at it the right way, it all seems like a big scam, both with book royalties and shareware payments. Just kick back and do nothing, and the checks just roll in! Right in the mail! Wow! (After you sink months of full-time, uncompensated work into it, anyway.) FIRE YOUR BOSS!!!11!

Seriously, though: if, a year from today, both books are reasonably solid sellers (neither chartbusters nor flops) and I have one piece of useful shareware to my name, will all that net me a living income for a while? I would like to think so, but I'm still totally unaware as to the scale of these sorts of things, both in the height and the length of their earnings curve. With P&X in the bag, though, I should get a hint shortly, eh?

I recall feeling great jealousy for Adam over in the IF Scene when he announced on Usenet that, after seeing his first advance check for his first novel, he knew he would never have to work again. (He is the same age as me, which really helps get the jealousy/self-doubt going.) At the time, I thought he meant that he received a check for a million bucks or something; I now know that he most likely meant that his chosen career path of a novelist had been officially validated, so he could expect to support himself indefinitely so long as he kept writing. Could I take that path as well? Hum. There's my Plan D.

It would be wonderful to get a bunch of money that said "congratulations, you are set for at least a year." I could, in theory, put off job-hunting yet more and work on cool, world-improving projects for a while, without feeling like a total loafer, before that curve squeezed to a trickle and I'd have to start thinking of more scams to pull.

Hmm, look at all these unhatched chickens. Get them out of my sight