A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

Today was wacky. A kerfuffle resulted from volity.com's highly intolerant mailserver refusing an important mail from a client several days ago, due to the fact that the mail was sent from a hotel with a reputation for spam. The client didn't see the bounce message that the server instantly shot back at them, so they didn't know that I never read the mail. Come Monday morning, frolics abounded. By Monday evening, everything's settled, insert folk juju-dispersal here.

Then had a good Volity meeting. There's only a few steps left before the alpha, which is now slightly late if you want to be a bastard and hold me literally to the dates I called months ago, but it's gonna be close-enough-dammit. Cross your fingers.

During the bits of downtime today, I worked on updating my professional presence. Following a conversation I had with taskboy3000 last week, I'm switching my self-assigned title to "Software Consultant", and have been busily retouching all my resumes and linkedins and such appropriately. I also redid my contracting consulting page, expanding the portfolio section and dropping a lot of the technobabble and buzzwords, reckoning that the resume's a better place for that stuff.

Need to redesign jmac.org. I am tired of the "Big Gray 7" layout that's, what, four years old now? On pages like this, that top bar is just oppressive.

It was all right.

Here's the card I handed out. Note the changes in font and self-description - thanks to y'all for your suggestions. Actually, this isn't quite the card - after toggling for a while I ended up adding the line "& consultant" from the original design back in. But, eh.

As before, I met a lot of very nice people and had some enjoyable conversations, but didn't walk away with any solid leads. I felt I got my money's worth in exposure and inspiration (see below), but unless I get surprised by the calls flowing in I doubt I'll attend another for a while.

Inspiration: I was one of only two self-described freelancers in a crowd of about 100. (Coincidentally I sat next to the other one, a photographer.) I felt a little exposed, having no company affiliation. I've been toying for a while with the idea of naming my consulting business, even if it is a sole proprietorship. Now I really do want to.

And then park a domain for it, and maybe ping Volity's lawyer and accountant about it. This feels right, to continue following this path, and not just keep what is let's-face-it my actual paying job this weird half-hidden thing. It's what I do to make money, and if I advertise this fact, I can make more of it. Not millions, but good enough for now. And if Volity Games should slyly suggest that it's this new company's largest client, and insinuates itself in some murky "internal billing" column, well, that's just fine.

And I'll tell you what: it beats workin'.

More self-promotion. This is the page that I want a nice photo of myself on. Everyone likes a handsome hacker.

(To whom it may concern: let me know if I shouldn't bandy about Acadia Net's logo like that. And / or if there's a better URL to link it to.)

Went to a William Gibson reading and signing of his new novel Spook Country at the Brattle yesterday. I often attend readings at SF cons, but it's been a long time since I stood in line for a signing, since I usually don't go for that sort of thing. But what the heck. I bought a book and thanked him for his work, and he thanked me for thanking him.

dougo warned me that he's not the best reader and it's true; his reading-voice is oddly monotonous and I found myself overlaying an imaginary soundtrack of how I'd read it, though I'm sure he pronounced all the long Eastern European names and words better than I would. The Q&A was fun, and he ended on the anecdote (to back up his claim that prescience isn't his strong suit) that he's seen a 12-year-old read through the first 15 pages of 1981's Neuromancer and declare "Oh, I know what's happening; there's something wrong with the cell phones!"

To me, the main delight of observing Gibson's career in SF is that he started out by writing about a fantastic-scary digital age that was 20 or so years away, and subsequent novels tended to stay at that absolute position in the future, with their depicted technology gradually coming into synch with real life's developments. In his current series - whose settings are now the year before each book's publication year - the characters have adventures with Web forums and Final Cut software. It's nonetheless as much a Gibson novel as ever, because the characters' relationship with the online world is as important to them and to the story as it was to any goggle-wearing "decker" in his first books.

Not going to start the novel until I finish I am a Strange Loop, though.

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Have heard nuthin from my one client for two weeks now, which is a little strange, even given my mail to them halfway through that I didn't mind the break because of a period of intense Volity work. Just mailed em to say that I was RW&A for more tasks, and to please tell me how they foresee deploying me as we move into autumn. If they're going to put me on hold, I'm going to have to look for another income source.

* There's an really annoying bug with volity.net that isn't going away no matter how often I think I kill it. I am feeling really spring fevery and don't wanna fix it, but this afternoon's really the best time to do it.

* Ha ha ha I fixed it in the time between I wrote the above paragraph and now. No more blank game records.

* misuba sent the Andys and I some core web client code. We're going to look at it tonight duirng our regular biweekly meeting. The goal is to get a "Hello World" working demonstrably enough that we can check the whole thing into public Subversion. It's very important to me that this project go beta this year.

* Mailed first invoice to the new and magical client today. Mixing the advices of a random web page and taskboy3000, now that I have a plurality of clients I have stopped serially numbering my invoices and instead switched to the format TLAYYYYMMDD, where TLA is some three-letter code that reminds me which client this is. The date is the date I mailed the invoice. (Though it occurs to me now that there ought to be another digit there in case I need to mail two or more in one day. Hm.)

* Here is a talk by Vernor Vinge titled "What if the Singularity does not happen?" I listened to the MP3 version while lightly dozing on my couch below an open window last night.

* I am swinging back into a more active interest in transhumanism. I think step one is to investigate just what my feelings are. As much as I find attractive, there's a lot I find repellant, embarrassing fairly tales out of a 1988 issue of Omni. I owe myself an essay. The possible key phrase "make your own damn afterlife" came to me today, which appeals to me for personal reasons, though I'm not sure it fits perfectly.