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

Joe called yesterday. I hadn't seen or spoken with him since that poker night, weeks ago, so that was pretty good. Notably, he said I was insane for agreeing to do another book. I'm glad someone finally has. Then again, he said this while in the midst of his own task of rewriting "Unix Power Tools" for the very same patron.

I can pretend to complain about being so enmeshed in the cult of St. Tim, maybe even moreso since moving out of the office (I passed my four-month anniversary a few days ago), but it'd be a flimsy whine. I'm really happy to be where I am. I think.

Anyway, Chuck says all the editors are stonily silent about our outline proposal, so he's inviting me over for contract talk on Monday. Meanwhile, I've started in on the P&X adds & edits. Making a Schematron example now. Schematron is pretty neat. The end.

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Should I qualify Snake River Conspiracy as Geek Rock? Probably. The booklet art for "Sonic Jihad" contains Mac OS humor, and the hardcoriest (or at lest pottymouthiest) track, "Vulcan", is filled with Star Trek references. Who knows. I like it, anyway.

Attended a poker night at Joe's house. I figured I'd show up just to be social, and maybe mess things up by bringing my copy of Cheapass Games' 'Unexploded Cow', a fine gambling game in its own right. But, after some needling, I bought a dollar's worth of chips, and lost it in three or four hands, along with fifty cents that Joe lent me. My first gambling debt! You all can now say that you were there when prog's downward spiral began. Cut to montage of prog stumbling down a dark street with neon signs, martini glasses, roulette wheels, etc. passing over his shoulder. And we never did play the Cow game.

I was turned off to gambling-for-keeps, even with weenie stakes, early in my career as a gamer, when, in 1994, a friend politely declined to give me back the White Knight card I lost to him as a Magic: The Gathering ante. How uncool, I thought to myself, and never played that way again. (I'd stop playing Magic altogether after a year, anyway, but for different reasons.)

The reason I showed up at all (sacrificing precious BookTime) involved the fact that Joe dangled before my widdle nose the fact that local Perl hackers of high reknown would attend. Since I was thinking earlier today about how conversation I've had with other hackers, even (maybe especially) informal and off-topic ones, have helped me a lot in my book-revision mission so far, I figured The Book would thank me for it. And also I was sick of working on the thing today.

So, I met a bunch of people whose names I won't drop because I hate to sound like I'm name-dropping even though probably nobody who reads this would recognize any of them. (This is a good reason to blog on my home site. So I can not-namedrop where namedropping would matter. Shooah.) But, it was all verra nice. I hit it off with everyone, as is my wont with most people of the non-(insane/boring) persuasion, did in fact talk about the book, and, of course, handed out summore of my silly non-business cards.

Speaking of: I asked Andy today what it takes to make a corporation. From his description, it sounds a lot like registering a domain: confirm that no corporation with this name already exists, pay some lawyer $50, badda-bing, there's your Inc. Now you can do whatever you want with this. Like building a business around it. Or you can just hold onto it and do nothing except have fun making vague plans. Since I'm already doing exactly this with 3 or 4 domain names, why not add a corporation name to the mix? Seriously.

Yesterday was a bad day. I became very sad, and shut down early. Two true facts about me: it's hard to emotionally unbalance me, but if I do lose balance, a good night's sleep always restores it. This is likely a good thing.

Why was I sad? I was thinking about what a wash A.D. 2001 seems to me. I don't feel as if I've done much this year, especially compared to 1999 and 2000. I thought about various decisions I had made poorly, or failed to make at all, and opportunities lost due to lack of strong communication. And this isn't even getting into the bigger stuff of the layoffs and 9-11. I wanted to cry, and wondered at what age I lost the ability to will myself into doing so, or if I ever really could.

Today was a good day. Worked for a couple hours in the 1369 on chapter 7, which is due tomorrow, enough to convince myself that I can turn it in before Monday's done. I should have had it done today, but I ended up sinking half the day into a visit to Joe's. In retrospect, I think of the scenes from the film "Pi" of Max visiting his mentor. Just like this, Joe is a cranky old man (two years older than me) who works in my field, except far more experienced and published, and who gives me lots of curmudgeonly advice, but who also abandoned his most ambitious project when it got too dangerous (actually he dropped his most recent book contract because it got too boring) and enjoys having me over to play our favorite game, Go. Er, I mean Fluxx. And Settlers of Catan Card Game.

However, even though I am, right according to script, working obsessively with my own project, I failed to ride around randomly on the T while staring at a Settlers black knight token in my hand, and then have dreams about finding my brain sitting on the stairs at the Central Square station. Which is good, because eventually I'd find Joe dead in his apartment, slumped over his keyboard while half-written treatise on Man Things Was Not Meant To Know About XML-RPC glowed on his monitor, and his whole Fluxx deck laid out along pseudo-Kabbalistic patterns (his copy of "The End Is Near" would be open next to it, for reference). So that's good.

If I make a movie about XML it will be called this: <:-/>

Stayed home from Rick's housewarming so I could play with the new*new*new XML::SAX Perl module. Since I'm not very experienced with SAX, and since further it doesn't actually come with the documentation packages it's supposed to (grumble... but forgiveable, since it's only at v0.03), it took some extra time to grok, but I think I got it. Emailed Erik and Nat, asking them to sanity check my summary of the module's magic. (Basically, it seems to be just a highly intelligent parser dispatcher, and its handlers work the same as PerlSAX always has.)

Worth noting: on my walk to the cafe, a very little boy was so ecstatic over seeing the snowfall, finally normal weather, that, ignoring his parents' directions to stay put, he raced down his front steps, picked up a double-mittenful of snow, ran up with a huge grin to a total stranger, and got him good, right on the leg.

"Ouch, I've been snowballed!" I said, only slowing my pace a little, to let him scoot past and dive into a whole yardful of new snow. "Oh! Did he get you?" said his mother. I could only shrug and laugh.