prog | Entries tagged with the 1369

The girl behind the counter at the 1369 wore a shirt saying 'GO FOR BAROQUE'.

But the shirt was otherwise plain.

I bought this Snake River Conspiracy CD at Disc Diggers yesterday for two bucks. It rox, but I feel bad because it has a 'Hello, I was probably stolen from a college radio station' sticker on it. (Or its semantic equivalent.)

Current Music: More Than Love - Snake River Conspiracy - Sonic Jihad

A 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.

Playing the Hang Out at Cafe card is more complex than it deserves to be, right now. Which cafe is more economical for me to hang out in?

Coffee at the 1369 is $1.10 for a small mug, and 75 cents for a refill.
Coffee at the Diesel is $1.20 for a large mug, and 50 cents for a refill.

I can walk to the 1369, but must either drive or T to the Diesel. Driving costs a modicum of gas, and 25 cents an hour for parking, unless I choose to spend some car karma and park a little further away in a residential area. Round-tripping on the T costs two dollars, unless I get around to purchasing a T pass for next month, in which case it still takes time.

The Diesel's food is far and away superior to that at the 1369, with the exception of muffins.

Show your work. Don't forget to compensate for earth curvature.

Hey, as if reading the sense of wandering loyalties from my mind, the 1369 started to play that wacky song by the Boards of Canada that I like so much. I like this song because it is a homage to the telephone time-telling lady, and the laughter of children, and the word "orange", all at once. And what more do you need to spell Qu-A-L-I-T-Y?

An old guy is saying to another guy: "Suzuki? They used to make them Jap Zeros, you know! That's pretty funny!" I weighed the value of butting in and correcting that he's thinking about Mitsubishi, because my dad (who is also old enough for the word "Jap" to still seem like an in-context invective) once told me this, but then I thought: I wonder if this is another urban legend, and in fact, every successful modern Japanese car manufacturer has an attached story that it used to make those famous WWII fighter planes. Irony is always a strong source of UL staying power. I'll have to look this up.

To his credit, my dad brought this story out when my brother Peter bought a new Mitsubishi sportscar, in order to display approval at his choice, despite the fact that he grew up hating everything Japanese, as his environment expected him to do. "But them Zeros, they was some damn nimble craft, whew, they could outfly anything."

I've been working all day on this section and am just now starting to squeeze out some paragraphs before bed. Probably I'll finish it up tomorrow morning in the 1369. It's nice to make any progress at all, and this particular section is arguably the most critical thing to fix, since it covers a crucial topic but was hailed by all the tech reviewers as being WEAK as it stood, but it's nonetheless frustrating to feel like I've covered so little ground.

I feel I made timing errors again, because at this rate, even if I finish reworking this section by tomorrow morning I am almost definitely not going to be able to hit all the stuff I want to hit before Thursday. But, I don't think I'll ask for an extension, if we do tackle all the major issues by then. The book won't be Exactly How I Want It, but it'll also Not Suck, and, really, I would like it to stop eating my life now, thank you.

So, from that point of view: four more days.

Tomorrow I'm slated to check in with Linda and Erik again, and I'll share this view with them. They'll probably say: sounds good. (Though I may sic Erik on a specific last-minute task or two that I have in mind.)

This morning I finally got around to making an "I'm still alive -- really" post on my home weblog. Didn't link back here, becuase I'm not so sure that all I've written here would meet the jmac Weblog rule: write nothing that I wouldn't want everyone in the world reading. Or as

cthulhia put it better, nothing I wouldn't want everyone in my addressbook reading. In other words, I blog the intersection of all the news I want to tell all my friends, and leave the rest for private communication. I suspect I've actually been keeping that rule even here rather well, but we'll see.

This may be put to the test soon, if Carla gets an LJ account, like I was suggesting to her the other day (before I thought about the consequences on my end). Yep, OK... I can already think of one post that would make her say "grr" at me. Politics.

I think one little thing I will do in the very near future is start up my own little hype machine about The Book. Start small, just with a link on jmac.org, and an image of the nice monkey-encrusted cover.

The 4-digit cafe's carrot raison muffins are THE BOMB, okay?

A reporter sent me mail today about ComicsML, asking for a callback. Interesting. Last week another author asked me if he could use ComicsML as a topic in his book about web accessibility. And I got cc:ed on a mail earlier this week on another person's discussion of comics accessibility. When it rains... It's a good rain, though. You bet your brisket that I leveraged ComicsML in my statement of objectives rewrite. I wonder what will happen next.

Speaking of, I contacted Lenny's daughter, who said she put my letter in Jon's mailbox Monday morning. I didn't see it there then, so yesterday I called Erik and asked him to double-check for me, and aye, there it was. Huh? Well, I fetched it and surrendered it to the Lab yesterday. The lady who received it seemed to have no issues with the fact that it was a late component. All is well.

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

That's awful high, Jason. That's awful high.

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