The Wheel Weaves as the Wheel Wills

What that means is that the greater Pattern of life has it’s own design and we just have to learn to ride it.

Robert Jordan passed away yesterday, of a rare blood disease. The author of the Wheel of Time series was 58. It looks like from the rumors floating around WoT fan sites that he spent the last few months working on the long awaited book 12, as well as dictating all the notes anyone would need to finish the book should he die. Now that he has passed on, we’ll have to wait and see how things work out.

If the work is handed to another author, who would you like to see finish the series?

I have too many thoughts

The funny things is that I never have them while I’m sitting at a computer wondering what to post.

In the mean time, let me tell you about Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman. The first Gaiman book I read was American Gods, which took me all of 24 hours to consume. (If that) The next tasty morsel was Neverwhere, a wonderful modern fairy-tale set in London and London Below. (“Below what?”, you might ask. London, duh. Read the book.) I held off reading Stardust until after I saw the movie. (My friend had never read the Lord of the Rings trilogy when the movies where coming out, he decided to wait until after to read them since we all usually love the book way more than the movie. So this way he enjoyed the movies without feeling like they ruined it.)

And just today (at about 2am) I finished Neuromancer by William Gibson. You know how some people have managed to go through life without seeing some iconic movie, like Star Wars, and we all think that while they deny it they must be Amish? Not having read Neuromancer and liking Sci-FI books is kind of like that. It was great. I can only imagine what reading it when it first came out was like. Technology has caught up to it in a lot of ways. It’s even surpassed it in others. The size of Case’s deck (PC) seemed large to me. And the need to physically ‘jack in’ every time they wanted to access the Matrix was kind of funny. (As I write this from my laptop jacked in to nothing at all.)

I have to admit, that Neuromancer was not the first Gibson book I’ve read. I started with Pattern Recognition, which is a great look at emerging trends, patterns, and some cyber sleuthing. Next up is Spook Country.

On an unrelated note, I was having lunch with a friend and RSS feeds came up. I used to use Sage, which is a very light-weight Firefox extension, but I would read feeds on 3+ different computers and keeping the read history synced was tedious. I now use Google Reader (which I love). If you read any kind of RSS feeds, the I highly recommend you try it out. Since it’s web based you don’t have to uninstall your current RSS aggregator. Just try it for a week and you’ll see how clean and wonderful it is. The drawback used to be that it’s a web app so you can’t read off-line, but it is a Google Gears compliant app so the answer is now, “Sure, read off-line all you want.” For more Google Gears info, go here.

~ Akanthos

Men go crazy in congregations but they only get better one by one.

Godspeed my brother

Today one of my best friends is leaving. He’s going to Texas for two months of training and then he’s heading to Iraq for a year. Needless to say we’re worried about him. All politics aside, I sincerely hope for a swift and peaceful end to the conflicts in the Middle-East.

As one friend leaves and others are more and more busy with their own families and lives, I’m deeply saddened that things will never be the same. However, I know that even though the nature of friendship can change over time and distance, it doesn’t have to lose it’s strength and power. Over the years I credit the influence of my friends with saving my life on many occasions. To me, regardless of time and distance, we will always have a bond. We’ll always be family.

In the book Magician by Raymond E. Feist, a group of friends meets just before leaving for a journey that ends up separating them for 10 years. The character Roland raises his cup and toasts to Friendship. They all toast and make this solemn pledge, that I now make to you my friends:

No matter where we go, no matter how many years pass, never again shall we be without friends.

Godspeed, my brother.

Twitter: A lazy mans blog?

Take a few moments and go to Twitter.  It’s kind of like a blog, but really really short.  The idea is that thousands of people all over the world are answering this one simple question:  What are you doing?  If you don’t have time for a blog, but want to have your own space to comment on whatever, this is pretty cool.

Bye, Joefish

My little nephew, Joseph, who is all of two years old, came into town last week with his mother to visit while his dad was at their new home getting things ready for them. You see, he’s just got a new job in Princeton, New Jersey. They’ve been living in Boise while he finished school, but now he’s done and landed a nice job. They’ll actually be living in Pennsylvania, just over the border from Princeton. So my sister and Joesph come to visit while the moving truck traveled across the country. It worked out since this weekend we celebrated my grandmothers 80th birthday. My sister and my grandma have always been close and had an extra special bond. It was good that she was here in town for that.

In the mean time, I was trying to teach Joseph some bad habits to take with him. (Did I mention that I’m the “crazy uncle”?) One thing he now does that I think is hilarious is called ‘puppy kisses’. This started with Jumpboots kids. They were teaching their first little girl to do Eskimo kisses and butterfly kisses. So I asked her if she knew how my beagle puppies give kisses, to which she said no. I then licked her face from jawline to hairline. She screamed and giggled, wiped it off and then ran over to give mommy a puppy kiss. This is now one of ‘my things’. One of those signature things that I teach my nieces and nephews. (Mostly because their moms disapprove) So I made sure that I spent some time encouraging Joseph to give puppy kisses to mom, grandma, basically everyone.

One of the funny things he does is he pronounces his name as Joe-fish , rather than Joseph. He’s a cute kid. I miss him.

Oh, the humanity

As Jumpboot was asking, I thought I would give you all an update as to how well the 3 in 90 project was going.  Not so good.  I had some really grand ideas about writing more this semester.  My class load is a little lighter so I thought I could handle and additional project with no problem.  But there was/is a problem.  Several, actually.

1) I’m lazy.  When I don’t have to do anything, lately I just want to do nothing.  This wasn’t always so.  It just seems that the last few years have sucked my will away.  I blame the education system.

2) Narrow windows of opportunity.  Writing is a creative endeavour and creativity isn’t something you can really schedule for 10:50am to 11:00am Monday through Thursdays and 1:00 pm on Friday.  I have a real hard time getting three pages of anything that even I would read again later.  I suppose the objective of this project isn’t the content, but to create the habits, so this may be a lame excuse.

These both may just be lame excuses, so I’ll see what I can do about them, but I’m not doing so well on my novel.  I should have about 100 pages so far and I have 21.  Not so good.  Although that’s 20 more pages than I wrote last semester.  Yay!  So while I hate the setbacks and the sometimes feeling that this is all for naught, I do like that I’m not completely stagnating my creative writing.  The next few weeks are much more routine and mellow, so I’ll do my best to catch up on those other 80 odd pages.  Irregular reports to follow.

Hi-tech torture

I’m taking college algebra this semester. Yay. One of the interesting things is that all our homework is submitted online. The website that we use to do that wanted to install a whole bunch of crap on my PC. It uses all kinds of Javascript and ActiveX controls. All the things that make my skin crawl. I’m a bit of a security paraoid so when I have to allow all this stuff I lose sleep. Not to mention that the site is damn picky about the format and syntax you use to submit your answers. Its frustrating to get the right answer but the system tells you that you’re wrong because you have an extra space after a comma. Lame.

In other news, I’m going to go ahead and try the 3 in 90 thing. I think three pages is nothing.  Even if it’s crap, I’ll still have something to work with, some starting point for later. I liken writing to using a pottery wheel. Most people think you can just create the final shape right away, but you really need to start with a big lump. Once you have most of your material out on the wheel, you can see what you need to add or remove and gradually you shape the story. Now some people are better at this than others, and some people don’t even write this way. But this is how it works for me, and most people I suspect. Isaac Asimov was said to type using a roll of paper, rather than sheets, so he could type non-stop. Afterwards he would junk entire chapters if needed. The important thing is to get whats in your head onto the paper.

Anyway, wish me luck.

Yup. This is me.

What Kind of Reader Are You? Your Result: Dedicated Reader You are always trying to find the time to get back to your book. You are convinced that the world would be a much better place if only everyone read more.
Literate Good Citizen
Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm
Book Snob
Fad Reader
Non-Reader
What Kind of Reader Are You? Create Your Own Quiz

Crashed but not burned

My coworker has a nice new Volkswagen Jetta GLI.   It’s an awesome car but I’m starting to think that it’s cursed.  He’s gone through three windshields and had serious door dings pulled out and retouched twice.  He loves the car and tries to keep it nice, and yet it seems like every time he gets it detailed or something repainted, the next day there is a new tragedy.  Well, today he wrecked it on the snowy roads.  It may be totaled.  He may think this is s bad thing, but I think this is his chance to get away from that cursed cared.

Happy New Subjective Increment of Time!

Sorry about the huge sabbatical. Last semester was 17 credit hours and work was 30 hours a week. I have only 14 credit hours and about 24 work hours a week this semester. So it’s practically a vacation. I should stock up on suntan lotion and trashy paperbacks. Or graph paper and college ruled notebooks and migraine meds. They’re almost the same things, really.

So I’m thinking of participating in 3 in 90. The idea is to write 3 pages a day for 90 days and see what you can do. It seem more of an exercise in will power rather than improving your writing. Just to get you to put something, anything, into words. This is mostly to the good but for those of you who are just using that “I’m a writer” line to get chicks, the gauntlet has been thrown down.

I have some more beagle pics and updates, but those will come in a day or two. In the mean time, Peace be with you.