In the yeeeear 2525
Feb. 20th, 2002 04:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
progA smart person of whom I think highly just posted a fatalistic message to a mailing list discussion about palindromic timestamps, doubting that humanity will survive to experience 2112. This attitude, epsecially in such a person, I find deepy disappointing.
Sitting in the 1369 now, in the rear corner, very comfortable.
How are the books doing? I'm supposed to be drafting up changes I want to make to the current P&X draft while it's moving through copyedit. I have maybe ten days before Linda starts sending mush-mush email at me, so I'm taking it easy. Maybe too easy. But, yes, I am feeling quite done enough with that book. The only changes I know it needs are code tweaks. (For instance, super-reviewer Mike Stok pointed out to me how nearly all my example programs that take filenames as arguments would choke with files named "0", since they check the command line values for truth, instead of for definition. I'd say something sarcastic about how I must accomodate readers who'd knowingly name a file "0", but I block myself by imagining a half-dozen murky situations where this might happen to a sane person. So be it.)
Meanwhile, Chuck has my revised outline, which I mailed on Saturday. Or so I think. I haven't heard from him since we last met Friday, which is unusual.
It's interesting to compare Linda and Chuck. So far they both seem really laid-back, but Linda prefers to take a hands-off approach with her writers, always available for communication but rarely starting it herself, while Chuck has so far been a lot more proactive with me, forwarding lots of thoughts and ideas my way and scheduling meetings, at least for the first couple of weeks after he first popped the question to me. He has said that he's been increasingly busy very lately, and that's probably the whole reason for his sudden lack of response. It won't hurt to pong a ping his way, though. I really want to get started! (And get a check.)
I've decided to next try wrapping my head around AppleScript Studio, Apple's new suite for developing Cocoa applications in humble AppleScript. I think this would serve as a fine introduction to Cocoa and Aqua programming in general. Mastering this would get me familiar with all of Next/Apple's magic IDE tools and hooks a lot faster than I would coming at it from a purely Objective C angle; AppleScript is a much simpler language, and an interpreted one, meaning less groveling over syntax while I learn. Nice.
While here at the cafe, I opened a packet brother Ricky mailed me, and which I happened to have in my backpack. It conatined some extraordinary things: a short letter from Ricky, a Philip K Dick fanzine from 1989, containing an outline to an unpublished PKD novel, and two cute-yet-austere black-and-white photographs I have never before seen of Baby Prog playing peek-a-boo, one with blanket on head, one with blanket not on head. Ricky has never sent me interesting things before. How random! Belated happy Chaoflux, brother.
Sitting in the 1369 now, in the rear corner, very comfortable.
How are the books doing? I'm supposed to be drafting up changes I want to make to the current P&X draft while it's moving through copyedit. I have maybe ten days before Linda starts sending mush-mush email at me, so I'm taking it easy. Maybe too easy. But, yes, I am feeling quite done enough with that book. The only changes I know it needs are code tweaks. (For instance, super-reviewer Mike Stok pointed out to me how nearly all my example programs that take filenames as arguments would choke with files named "0", since they check the command line values for truth, instead of for definition. I'd say something sarcastic about how I must accomodate readers who'd knowingly name a file "0", but I block myself by imagining a half-dozen murky situations where this might happen to a sane person. So be it.)
Meanwhile, Chuck has my revised outline, which I mailed on Saturday. Or so I think. I haven't heard from him since we last met Friday, which is unusual.
It's interesting to compare Linda and Chuck. So far they both seem really laid-back, but Linda prefers to take a hands-off approach with her writers, always available for communication but rarely starting it herself, while Chuck has so far been a lot more proactive with me, forwarding lots of thoughts and ideas my way and scheduling meetings, at least for the first couple of weeks after he first popped the question to me. He has said that he's been increasingly busy very lately, and that's probably the whole reason for his sudden lack of response. It won't hurt to pong a ping his way, though. I really want to get started! (And get a check.)
I've decided to next try wrapping my head around AppleScript Studio, Apple's new suite for developing Cocoa applications in humble AppleScript. I think this would serve as a fine introduction to Cocoa and Aqua programming in general. Mastering this would get me familiar with all of Next/Apple's magic IDE tools and hooks a lot faster than I would coming at it from a purely Objective C angle; AppleScript is a much simpler language, and an interpreted one, meaning less groveling over syntax while I learn. Nice.
While here at the cafe, I opened a packet brother Ricky mailed me, and which I happened to have in my backpack. It conatined some extraordinary things: a short letter from Ricky, a Philip K Dick fanzine from 1989, containing an outline to an unpublished PKD novel, and two cute-yet-austere black-and-white photographs I have never before seen of Baby Prog playing peek-a-boo, one with blanket on head, one with blanket not on head. Ricky has never sent me interesting things before. How random! Belated happy Chaoflux, brother.