Chalain

Keep Writing! Keep Writing! Keep Writing!

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 23:36:12 GMT

NaShoStoMo is a month-long challenge to write 30 stories in 30 days. The rules? Must be at least 200 words long, so none of this cutesy 12-word crap. And it must have a beginning, middle and an end, so none of this 1000-word vignette/visual tone-poem crap, either.

When I was a kid, my grandmother invited me to her writer's group because I was SO talented and SO creative and SO bright. So I wrote a story. I was maybe 13? 14? Old enough to be insufferable yet young enough to still be fragile. Six women over 40 and one 13 year old boy. They tore it to shreds, like a pack of harpy dingoes going after a paraplegic baby. I was old enough to know I was too old to cry, so I didn't.

I didn't realize this, but I stopped writing that day. Oh, I tried. Creative writing in high school was very difficult for me, and now in my old age I can see that it was because my inner editor was ratcheted up to "never let this happen again" proportions. In college I blossomed when I discovered first essays and then technical writing, where the subject matter was defensible as "craft" rather than "art", and I found that, fiction notwithstanding, I loved to write.

I started using Ruby around the same time I started blogging, and I spent most of 2006 appearing on hacker news and the programming reddits. I even made the front page of slashdot once, with "So Beautiful, So Disturbing" but even then, when everyone yelled at me to keep writing, I just couldn't. So though I still had an active muse and could produce good prose in bouts of epiphanic ecstasy, I was still trapped in a need to ALWAYS write good stuff.

And then I turned 40. 3 days later, NaShoStoMo started, and the watchword from day one was "some of these are going to stink, and that's okay".

For some reason, this unlocked me.

Last week, I sat down and tallied up my entire life in fiction output, and realized that between age 5 and age 40, I wrote less than 10,000 words of fiction. That includes my story at age 13 and "So Beautiful, So Disturbing".

So that's what NaShoStoMo means to me. I don't care what I'm writing is crap. Most of it is, in fact. All of it needs editing, and most of it isn't worth the time. But it EXISTS, and I made that happen. I am writing. That's all that matters to me right now.

In the past 27 days I have written over 33,000 words, and expect to knock down another 7,000 by Saturday.

Suck it, dingo harpies.

Keep writing,

David

Plotting Short Stories

Sat, 16 Apr 2011 20:36:18 GMT

So I'm doing NaShoStoMo, and it's WAY harder than I thought it would be. The rules are simple: for every day in April, write a short story. It must be at least 200 words long and it must be a complete story with a beginning, a middle and an end. I have discovered something: It is really hard to write a complete story in 200 words.

Wait, no. Correction. It is easy to write a 200 word short story. It is incredibly hard, however, to engage the reader and make them care in just 200 words. Want proof? It's actually quite easy to write a complete story in just a few words. In fact, here's a complete short story I wrote in just six words:

"Guess what number I'm thinking. 42."

Is this a complete story? Sure. It's an Idea Story; the main character starts out with a question that gets answered in the thundering climax of the story. Okay technically this story does not meet the requirements for NaShoStoMo (ignoring word count) because it does not have a middle--that part in which the protagonist struggles to achieve his or her goal, raising the stakes and building towards climax.

Okay, fine. Here's a character story--one in which the main character can no longer tolerate her status in a community that matters most to her. The story begins at the moment she starts the change, she meets resistance, and finally is accepted at a new status. I'm sorry to give away the ending in advance here, but this story is for instructional purposes not for your entertainment. Also, because it's a character story and we need a full arc in which the character's resolve is tested, the story is longer. I have had to resort to using EIGHT words.

"I'm trying out for cheer."
"No!"
"Yes!"
"...Okay."

Now here's something interesting. Yes, I wrote this story as a joke, and yes, it's uninteresting, which is sort of my whole point. But do you notice yourself being piqued just that little bit more by this story? It is in fact more interesting. The guess-my-number guy could be anybody. He is faceless and boring. But here, in an instant, you know that the main character is a shy teenage girl trying to break out of her shell. Notice that in the story, she does not actually try out for cheer--she merely convinces her friend that she is going to. If that really is the whole story it's not exactly the biggest character shift you'll ever see.

But it does make me want to read more story. I want to see if she goes through with it. I want to see if she's willing to put in the hard work athletically and if she's willing to work up the courage to walk into a gym full of cheerleaders—girls who have already ascended to that higher social status—and dare to try out.

This leads me to the discovery of an interesting rule:

Good short stories make you want more story. Bad short stories make you want the rest of the story.

If the reader loves the mythos and wants more of the world, then it's a good story. But if you set the reader up for a much bigger payoff than you actually deliver, you have (in the words of Orson Scott Card) "started one story but finished a different one." Recently I wrote a fun little story about Frank, a sort of "Eeyore Unicorn". Howard Tayler recently tweeted about his kids working out the specific mechanics of the mythology of the dietary practices of Unicorns. This made me wonder aloud, and then in story, if an unhappy unicorn could in fact still drink rainbows and poop butterflies.

(Update: I talk so much about Unicorn that you might as well just read it. Here you go: Unicorn—go ahead and read it now, it's only 350 words and I'm about to spoil the ending in literally the very next sentence!)

My story was very short and the answer was no; the punchline of the story was that because Frank was unhappy, he could drink rainbows but could only poop drab gray moths.

Sandra test-read my story against the toughest audience possible: the Tayler children themselves, the very inventors of the mythos. They laughed when she read Frank's lines in her Eeyore voice, and they giggled when Frank pooped moths. But then, upon finding that this punchline was the end of my story, the children unanimously cried, "That's IT?"

I have more story to write, it would seem. And that's a problem, because I'm already at 350 words and this new story feels closer to 1000. Not that this is bad; but it's 3x longer than I wanted it to be. Set up the joke, tell the joke, walk away. But the shape of the tale I set up with Frank was much larger than the story I finished. The question I set up and answered—"Can an unhappy unicorn poop butterflies? No"—was overshadowed by a grander question, accidentally set up: Can Frank overcome his unhappiness? Suddenly this short story, with its tiny question, is leading you to a much bigger question, one in which this short story is only the opening scene. (Note: I plan on rewriting Unicorn in this longer form. The grander question is a better question.)

So, taking a good short story and making it very short is hard. Blaise Pascal once famously wrote, "I am writing you a long letter because I have not the time to write you a short one." Alan Perlis once quipped, "A computer program is not finished when there is nothing left to write, but rather when there is nothing left to remove." So it's a bit like Jenga: The story is improved if you can remove a word or a sentence without losing any of the story itself.

Can it be done? Absolutely. One of the toughest story forms to tell short is the Event Story. Think Lord of the Rings, here: Something is wrong with the order of the world, and we have fallen from a Golden Age into the modern age of unrest and strife. The story ends not when the main character completes his quest but rather when the original order is restored—or when the forces of good are tragically defeated and the new age of chaos reigns uncontested. To tell a story like this in a very short form, you're going to have to make the reader do most of the work, make them imagine the bits you're not telling. But if you can make them care with what you do write, the reader is happy to do this work themselves. This is how Ernest Hemingway tells a Tragic Event Story in just six words:

For Sale: Baby Shoes. Never worn.

This story doesn't qualify as a NaShoStoMo story either, because we don't know what the middle is. But we know that the story is about parents trying to have or raise a child, and losing it as a baby. This touches us deeply, and so we imagine the rest of the story ourselves.

I'm going to stop here. Not because I'm out of things to say but because I've already run too long. I could probably find some things to remove without losing the point, but hopefully you've already realized that I am not good at short-form writing. Which is sort my entire point in attempting NaShoStoMo.

Short stories are easy. Good short stories are hard work. And the only way to get better is to practice.

NaShoStoMo: Success

Sat, 02 Apr 2011 17:17:41 GMT

So, yeah. Gonna do this NaShoStoMo thing. I'll publish something here if I think it's interesting. This story is terrifying to me because I wish it could be true....

NaShoStoMo Day 2

Success

Doctor Samson tapped his metal fingers on his desk, like tiny gavels. "Try it again," he said. "What do you want?"

"I don't want to be smart," I said. "All my life, everyone's told me I'm smart. But I'm washing dishes at the Night-Timer when I can't get a shift waiting tables. Does that sound smart? I don't want to be smart."

"I'm afraid I can't help you with that," he said. His gentle face wrinkled slightly into a kind smile. "You're not listening to me."

"I AM listening to you. I—"

He rapped his fingers again on his desk, interrupting me. "Try it again. Tell me. What do you want?"

I blinked, then tilted my head. "What DO I want..." Doctor Samson nodded encouragingly. "I... I want to be successful," I finally said. "And happy."

"What if you can't be both at the same time?"

"Then I pick successful."

"An odd choice. Why not happy?"

"Because I think if I can be successful, I can figure out happy on my own."

Doctor Samson's white eyebrows went up. "Now THAT is the most interesting answer I've heard all month! All right. To business, then."

"You'll help me?"

Samson straightened up in his chair. He spoke loudly, no doubt for a logging microphone. "My name is Doctor Emmanuel Samson. I am a licensed electrophoropathist, and I consent to treat Aaron James Francis—" he looked meaningfully at me, eyebrows raised. I nodded. "—for Type II depression and an interesting case of Type II demotivation. Aaron James Francis, do you consent to treatment?"

"Yes."

Something behind me in the room made a tiny, disapproving buzz. "State your name. It's a binding contract. And a little louder, if you please. The pickups in here aren't so good. Aaron James Francis, do you consent to treatment?"

"My name is Aaron James Francis! And, um... yes!"

He paused, and when the room said nothing back, he seemed satisfied. He rolled up his sleeves, and I could see the graft line on his forearms where the full cybernetics began. He dipped his hands into a greenish antiseptic fluid, then opened a drawer and withdrew a bundle of electrodes and a paper gown.

"If you want to be successful, change quickly," he said. I did, and returned to the chair.

He smiled kindly again as he approached me. "Don't be alarmed." He began fastening restraints around my arms. The chair had unrolled webbing by my hands and feet. "You have Type II implants," he explained. "This... will take a while."

Three days. Three days I'd been in this madman's office. The chair would shock me if I tried to sleep, and I hadn't eaten. He'd come in only to give me water and change the bedpan. I'd shouted at him, cursed him, called him a quack. He never spoke. He seemed to be waiting for something.

The door opened and Doctor Samson came in with my water.

"My name is Aaron James Francis and I no longer consent to be treated!" I shouted.

Doctor Samson laughed, the first sound I'd heard in three days. "Your consent has already been given," he said. Then he left. With the water.

Later. Much later. My thirst felt like it was burning a hole through me. Samson came in. On the tray, the single glass of water.

Samson paused. I said nothing. I just wanted the water.

He seemed satisfied with this. "I'm sorry, Aaron. I really am. I don't want to do this to you. But I'm afraid that all this is necessary. Type II implants are notoriously stubborn," he said, as he held the water close to me. "They can't be reprogrammed directly. You can only access them through the neuronal axes. Once you stop fighting me we can begin."

I just wanted the water. "I won't fight," I said. "Please, just let—"

"Shhh," he said, as he lifted the glass to my lips. "You're not ready yet, but you want to be. That's a good start."

Later. No idea how long. My personal brain butcher was back. "How are we feeling today?"

"Fine," I lied. "I'll do whatever you say. Just do your thing and let me go."

Samson made a clucking noise. "Such stubborn little implants, aren't they?"

"How are we feeling today?"

"Awful," I said truthfully. "Look, I get it. Brainwashing. Can you just program me to kill the President or whatever it is you're trying to do and get it over with?"

"Goodness! I don't even want that thought in your head," he said and turned away.

"Wait!" I cried, but the door was already closing. "I'm sorry!"

He was gone a long time.

I hated my implants. Stubborn, he'd said. They were the reason I was stuck in here. I needed to get them out, that would be the first thing once I got out of here. If I ever got out of here.

I realized Samson was flashing a light from one eye to the other. I had no idea how long he'd been there.

"Ah, you're lucid," he said. "How do you feel?"

"Have to... get implants... out...."

"I know, I know," he said, like a grandparent consoling a child. "And maybe someday you'll even be able to afford that. Won't that be nice?" He patted my hand and I gasped as waves of sensation shot through my body.

"Yes!" I cried. "Please! Anything!"

"Almost ready," he said, withdrawing his hand. Emptiness filled me immediately.

"No!" I sobbed. "Please... anything!"

"Almost ready," he said.

He was back, and this time I knew he would help me. Not like before, not like when I was bad. Not even like when I knew he would help me and then he didn't. This time I knew. I was ready. This time I knew.

"Aaron," his voice said. So kind. So protective. "I'm going to tell you to do something."

"Yes," I said.

"I'm going to tell you to do something, and you are going to believe with every fiber of your being that you have to do it."

"Yes."

"And you WILL do it. As much as you can, as hard as you can."

"Yes."

"You will be happier, and more successful as you do it, Aaron."

"Yes."

"Are you ready, Aaron?"

I knew it! This was it! "Yes!"

He touched my face and neck, pressing metal fingers against my skin. A tingling sensation flowed through my whole body, pleasurable, almost painful. My entire being was keyed up like a microphone ready to receive. He would speak, and I would become whatever he wanted. Anything.

"AARON JAMES FRANCIS?" he said slowly. The sound of his words thundered through my soul and I could feel tears begin to stream from my eyes.

"Yes," I gasped. "Yes, please, yes?"

"WORK. HARDER."

I screamed.

Critical Chain Analysis and Morning Routines

Sat, 29 Jan 2011 22:45:49 GMT

Chaliren and I are a well-matched pair. She is organized, I am messy. She is responsible, I am creative. She is efficient, I am... well, I'd say I have more fun. But there is one area in which I am astonishingly more efficient than her: morning routines.

I don't know if she's slower than average in the morning, but I've always been able to go from the bed to out the door in a very short time. (That is, if I'm in a hurry. I'm not compulsive about it. I am content to laze about in the mornings as well, and I have been known to sit on the bed with one sock on and the other in my hands for minutes at a time.)

Anyway, here is the morning routine I had my senior year in high school, when my first class was early morning physics, which started at 6:55am:

6:34 Alarm goes off. Proceed immediately to kitchen and put a pot of water on the stove to boil. Head to bathroom and shower. 5 minutes.
6:39 Dry off and don underwear, proceed to kitchen and drop a package of Top Ramen into the now-boiling water. 1 minute.
6:40 Return to bedroom. Get dressed and grab my backpack, which has my physics book in it so I don't have to stop at my locker. 3 minutes.
6:43 Sleepily stand next to stove and wait for ramen to finish cooking. The "3 minute" promise on the packet is a lie. 1 minute.
6:44 Drain and prepare ramen. Drop an ice cube into it to cool it off. Eat. Rinse bowl and pot and put in sink. 2 minutes. Yes really.
6:46 Drive 3.5 miles to school at 32mph, which was 7mph over the speed limit. 6.5 minutes.
6:53 Park car and walk into school. Less than 1 minute.
6:54 Arrive at classroom with seconds to spare before 6:55am bell.

Yes, for a while I really did set my alarm for 6:34am and yes, you really can prepare and eat an entire bowl of ramen in 2 minutes if you drop an ice cube into it first. Eventually I moved my alarm back to 6:30 to allow for slipups in the schedule (one time I missed breakfast because I forgot to turn on the heat under the pot), and then to 6:21 so I could hit snooze once and wake up less abruptly.

I habitually drove 7mph over the speed limit at that age because I found out that most of the officers in Moab would not enforce the speed limit until you were driving 8mph over.

And finally, no, I don't do this in the mornings unless I have to. I have discovered over the years that rocketing out of bed and straight into work, while a useful skill at times, is a poor way to prepare for a productive day. But it can be done, is all I'm saying. :-)

Hey. Quit Being a Dick.

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 02:43:04 GMT

So I guess today was the day for taking the piss out of Dave. I didn't get the memo, but then again, this seems like the kind of event where you wouldn't notify the guest of honor until they arrive. Like a surprise party, I guess, only for giving me shit. A surprise shit party. Yeah, that about sums today up.

Okay, so here's the thing:

Fuck you guys.

Actually, that's not the thing. I just wanted to get that off my chest. Here's the thing:

It's time to stop being a dick.

If you think I'm talking to you, if you think you did something to piss me off, even if you didn't even talk to me today, then I *AM* talking to you. Don't ask me if you did something to offend me, because you know who you are and if you're even wondering about being who you are, then you know what you did even if you didn't do it to me, and your doing of the thing you did needs to stop. I kind of got lost in that sentence there. Anyway, the point is, if you're feeling at all guilty, you need to GO RIGHT NOW and DO SOMETHING NICE for somebody.

Find a stranger, or even a friend, and pay them a compliment. Spend some time with a loved one who misses you. Do something beautiful and worthwhile with the next few minutes of your life.

Your karmic account is overdrawn. Go fill it up.

Oh, and not with me. I'm still pissed. Maybe at you.

Go on, git.

Good References

Wed, 29 Dec 2010 01:17:40 GMT

Good friends are good. So, I'm bidding on this short-term contract project. (As an aside: wish me luck!)

Anyway, I was just talking with my friend and former employer Don, asking him if I could use him as a reference for this contract. I told him about the project, about the solution I was pitching, and also about what I had told the client about the work Don and I had done together.

"Look," said Don. "Here's how my standard reference conversation for David Brady goes. It goes like this:

"...hello? Yeah? Yes, I know Dave. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Okay, look, how long are you planning to hire him for? Two months? Okay, yeah, if it's just for two months, I can be a great reference for him.

"Well, see, the thing is, about the end of Summer, I need to hire him back, so I can't in good faith recommend him to you if you're going to want him that long."

Good friends are good. I laughed, and then Don got serious. "You're laughing. But I have done this to you before. And, as I recall, it worked."

Indeed it did. And as I recall, I worked for Don again that Summer.

Wish me luck. Good friends are good.

Oh, and here's to next Summer.

Enough Crimefighting, I'm Going Vigilante

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 22:38:57 GMT

I have had a fantastic time at Public Engines working on CrimeReports. When I started, they had a small dev team laboring under thousands of lines of legacy code. They used Subversion. They coded in whatever technology the previous teams had left behind: PHP, Python, C#.NET, even a tiny image processor written in C.

We moved to git, successfully convinced management to let us throw out the PHP code and replace it with Rails with a Flex frontend, and consolidated everything into those two technologies except for the Python piece (which is installed at nearly a thousand Law Enforcement Agencies across the country).

Last Tuesday, we shipped and are now in public beta.

Unbeknownst to me, management had been looking at financials and fretting considerably. My manager had pushed hard to convince them to delay the layoff until we actually had a product to sell. Upper management agreed, but that only bought a little time, not a reprieve. Two days after shipping management had to make the hard call.

This move guts the engineering team pretty hard; the senior Flex developer and the only other Rails dev with more than 6 months' experience were cut in this move. The remaining team will certainly have a challenge to rise to going forward.

But they can do it. I can't say they're the finest team I have ever worked with, but that's because the finest team was truly legendary, while this team was merely very excellent. They can rise to this challenge and they will.

Public Engines will now become a fond memory for me. It's one of the best teams I've ever worked with, fixing one of the most messed-up products I've ever seen. And we did it! We shipped! We got it out the door, and though they've gutted their own engines, there's enough there to sell that marketing can now save the company.

Good luck, you guys. I wish you all the best.

As for me, I'm going to take a few days and work on some open source projects, especially TourBus, because it really needs some loving attention. After that, we'll see.

I'm leaving behind a great company and some great people. I will miss being able to say "by day, I fight crime." I guess it's back to the nighttime vigilante gig for me.

Vegan Tikka Masala

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 20:05:27 GMT

I've been experimenting with vegan food lately, not out of any sense of morality but rather for the health benefits. I'm also getting back on the Eat To Live diet, which is even more strict than veganism, so I go vegan when I need to splurge.

That's pretty scary, now that I think about it.

Anyway! I made a tasty vegan Tikka Masala today:

1 medium onion, diced
1 Tbsp canola oil
2 Cans mixed vegetables
1 Can garbanzo beans
1 jar of Mr. Kook's Tikka Masala sauce
Lots of broccoli - Half a pound? 4 cups chopped, maybe? A medium head?

1 Cup (dry measure) basmati rice, cooked

Start cooking the rice. I use a microwave cooker, so I know I've got exactly 25 minutes to prepare the rest of the meal.

Cook everything for the sauce in your deepest pot--at least 3Qt. Put the oil on high heat. Quickly dice the onion and drop it in. The oil should be hot by then so it should sizzle nicely. Reduce the heat to medium, and stir, you're going to keep those onions going until they're glassed. I like to go a bit farther until they start to brown, it really releases the flavor. Stir often or the onions on the bottom will burn.

Once the onions are glassed and browned, drop in the beans, veggies, broccoli and Tikka Masala sauce. The sauce sticks to the jar, so I like to put a cup of water in the empty jar and shake it up, then dump that into the pot. Stir often, and wait for the rice. Basically once this is hot you're ready to eat.

This whole pot feeds about 8 people, 4 if they're hungry. The WHOLE THING, rice included, clocks in at 2200 calories, so 1 good-sized serving is only 275 calories.

ETL Version: Skip all the cooking and just eat the broccoli. You can't have anything else. 25 calories.

"Normal"

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 06:58:56 GMT

I just spent 20 minutes standing inside the screen door onto my rear patio, porch light on and flashlight in hand to attract bugs, a jeweler's loupe headband on my head to study the bugs that land on the screen, and every so often flicking a bug on the screen, knocking it directly into the gigantic web that a garden spider has strung across my entire back doorway.

Yeah, that's normal, right? Normal people do this.

Great Basin: Pretty Great Actually

Sun, 15 Aug 2010 18:05:43 GMT

Yesterday we went to, but not into, Lehman Caves. The caves are in Great Basin National Park just over the Nevada border, almost exactly 200 miles away from my doorstep. We didn't get to do any of the things we wanted to, got to do a lot of things we didn't expect, and had a pretty great time.

Of course, all this travel is spurred by having The Camera on hand. As I mentioned over on InsectPOD, my mother recently received a Canon EOS 5D Mark II camera as a gift from a friend who told her "Learn how to use this so you can teach me how to use mine." Very shortly thereafter she handed it to me and said "Learn how to use this so you can teach me so I can teach him how to use his." Anyway, this is a many-thousands-of-dollars camera that, coupled with many-more-thousands-of-dollars worth of macro lenses, has enabled me to get such incredible bug pictures that I have restarted InsectPOD. As a result of this, and the fact that Liz' favorite hobby is going for long drives, our weekends have been spent road tripping to photograph bugs. In the past 2 weekends we've been to Thanksgiving Point, Tracy Aviary, Antelope Island, and now, Great Basin National Park.

Liz and I had intended to get out around 10am, but somebody (who shall remain nameless to protect their innocence, Liz is already pretty pissed at this person as it is) slept in and couldn't get moving in the morning, and we ended up getting on the road a little after noon. We were worried that we wouldn't make it on time; Liz remembered as a girl going to the caves and being turned away because they got there at 4:05pm and the last tour was at 4:00. 200 miles is not a problem in four hours, but remember this is on highway 6, not on a freeway. I am happy to report that HWY 6 was largely uninhabited—and thus unpatrolled—yesterday, and we made pretty good time. We hit the border around 4pm, which happily rolled the clock back to 3pm as we entered the Pacific Time Zone.

Along the way we stopped for a few minutes by a sunflower patch. These would normally be covered in spiders and dragonflies back home, but we were in the middle of the desert and dragons do not venture far from fresh water. The sunflowers were covered in ladybugs and annoying little flies; they were being nectared not by bees but by these huge, weird wasps with black and blue stripes.

Also along the way, we discovered a cheese factory desperately on the run from its own reputation. That's a long story, though, and I'll tell it later. To sum it up: we bought some cheese that probably does not have any fly poison or glass shards in it.

At the park, we stopped at the GBNP Visitor's Center and gawked at the shockingly high prices. We did buy some water bottles, however; $12 a pop was pretty steep but we'd been looking for that particular style of wide-mouth liter bottle for a few years now. I photographed three species of ant in the parking lot. I noticed that every harvester ant I saw was carrying dead insects instead of seeds. Creepy!

Once we were done resting at our rest stop, we headed up to the caves to discover that, although the tours now ran through 4:30 and we were an hour ahead of that time, all the tours were full. A guide suggested we take the scenic drive (it's a small park; they only have the one) and maybe hike to the glacier lakes. Yes, there are glacier lakes in the middle of the Nevada desert. That's sort of why this little mountain in the middle of nowhere is a National Park. I did not check to see if there was an actual glacier, but there was still snow on the north face of the mountain.

The scenic drive was, for lack of a better word, scenic. By the time we got out to hike, we were losing light so I didn't get too many pictures. I did photograph a 2-point buck eating an aspen sapling from 10 feet away, though. I mean I was 10 feet away from the buck, not that the buck was 10 feet away from the sapling. Though that would have made for some more interesting pictures.

Nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom

On the way home, every quarter mile or so there was some tiny critter sunning itself on the road. I also nearly ran over two rattlesnakes and an iguana (or one HUGE horned toad, not sure how big they get but this guy was easily a foot long). I apologize for missing the rattlesnakes. I couldn't quite see the tiny critters zipping past them at freeway speeds, and I finally thought "if those are scorpions, I want a picture of one for InsectPOD!" At the next one, I stopped and got out.

It was a horned toad:

The terror of Highway 6

The little guy's eyes were slitted shut and he didn't react to us approaching at all. He didn't seem to be breathing, and at first we thought he was dead. But then I noted that his appearance was completely lacking in the squished and/or flattened department. I nudged him with the lens and he startled awake! He waddled a few inches... and then promptly fell back asleep. I picked him up and held him up for the photo above. His behavior was so odd, I figured he must have wandered onto the asphalt to warm himself for the evening, and gotten more asphalt heat than he bargained for and gone into a heat torpor. We set him down by the side of the road—close enough that he could zip back out onto the asphalt if he wanted, or duck into the grass and hide otherwise. We jumped back in the car and headed home.

So... yeah. We didn't get to see the caves, and I didn't get any bug pictures up in the basin itself. But along the way, Liz and I read our church lessons, finished two books on tape, and chatted happily about everything from baby names to 70's TV shows. And I got to touch a horny toad. The day was so full of things we enjoyed that we didn't even notice the disappointment not getting to do the things we set out to achieve.

Life is good when the win outweighs the fail.

How To Teach Grizzly Hunting

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 03:30:23 GMT

You know the recipe for grizzly bear soup, right?

1. Hunt and kill a grizzly bear.
2. The rest is just a soup recipe.

It's a metaphor for a lot of situations in life that have one or two really hard problems surrounded by dozens of easy problems. It's a reminder to not get hung up on the easy problems when you need to be paying attention to the hard problems. Conversely, the lesson is also that if you can solve the hard problem, the easy problems will reveal themselves to be, in fact, easy.

Two guides recently tried to teach me to to hunt grizzly bears.

The first guide sold me a machine that would make great-tasting grizzly bear soup at the touch of a button. It's easy! Grizzlies go in, you just push the button, and great-tasting grizzly bear soup comes out. I bought the machine with eagerness, in my mind already savoring the taste of the grizzly bear soup that was soon to be mine. But the machine didn't work quite right. For starters, grizzly bears wouldn't come near it. I tried baiting the machine, but the grizzlies would climb out, so I had to shoot them and dump them into the machine. Then the soup came out hairy and gristly, so I had to skin and butcher the meat before putting it in the machine. Then the soup came out raw and greasy, so I had to cook the meat before putting it in the machine. Then the soup was too thick so I added water. Then the soup was too bland so I added spices.

Finally I was getting great-tasting grizzly bear soup at the touch of a button! All I had to do was put great-tasting grizzly bear soup into the machine and push the button.

I wish I could say that this was a story of how I learned to hunt, kill and prepare grizzly bears on accident, and the machine just led me to each problem in turn. But it didn't. All along it obscured the fundamental principles behind grizzly bear soup production. Finally, in disgust, I returned the machine for a refund.

The second guide made no such promises. In fact, the first thing he said was "hunting grizzly bears is hard, dangerous work. You gotta keep your eye on the grizzly at all times, stay alert, and react to his movements. And that's all I'm going to say about that. You're here to learn to hunt, so let's go hunt."

He did have some things for sale, of course. He sold me a book about finding grizzlies, tracking them, learning to see them hiding in the thick underbrush. He sold me a kit to keep my bullets dry. He sold me a sling to help me carry my rifle more easily. He sold me warm pants so I could stay on the mountain longer.

But he never sold me a grizzly bear, or a machine to turn them into soup. All he said was, "hunting grizzly bears is hard, dangerous work." We both knew I was there to hunt them; he was offering not to do it for me but to help me do it myself.

I realized something profound from this second guide: If you're going to teach somebody to do something hard, help them keep their eyes on the hard problem. Don't obscure it with false promises that it's going to be easy if it's not. If there are a lot of easy, little problems to solve that make solving the hard problem more easy, DO feel free to give good solutions to them.

His products did not get returned for a refund, and I have been content with them. I'm still not very good at making great-tasting grizzly bear soup, but I'm getting better and better every day.

And yes, he sold me one other thing: a great-tasting soup recipe.

InsectPOD is BACK!

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 17:38:05 GMT

It looks like I have about 20 pictures to run, so I'm gonna run them. Please tell your friends that InsectPOD is back--a lot of folks have unsubscribed from the RSS feed and have no idea it's out there again.

Thanks!

Tell your friends InsectPOD is back!

InsectPOD is Coming Out of Retirement (Temporarily)

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 17:46:31 GMT

We went to visit my parents this weekend, mostly to break the news that our adoption is finally moving forward again. (Yay! Go us!)

While down there, Mom handed me a camera. She had borrowed a Canon EOS 5D from a friend. This thing is the Lamborghini of digital cameras, and I rushed right out to shoot bug photos!

InsectPOD is coming out of retirement, at least for this week. Response from fans has been gratifying and overwhelming, making me strongly consider starting it back up full-time. Not to fish for compliments or anything, but encouragement is certainly worth trying. :-)

On Responsibility: The Great Kite String Experiment of '79

Wed, 12 May 2010 19:11:49 GMT

Ahhh, nostalgia....

In 1979, I was eight years old and, for some reason, in possession of about a dozen spools of kite string. For those of you with impoverished childhoods, kite string is cotton twine with about a 20lb test that comes in 400' (122m) rolls.

At age 8 I was basically every Calvin and Hobbes strip ever. I was tow-headed, hyperactive and dangerously precocious. "Dangerously precocious" was something my mom once said to my babysitter. She wasn't bragging, she was trying to warn her. The babysitter would learn. But that's another story.

Anyway. I had just learned about levers and pulleys, and my 8-year-old brain was fizzing with this magical concept that I would later come to know as "mechanical advantage". I was home alone after school, and I set to work in the living room. I threaded string from the TV across to the recliner, back to the VCR, then over to the end table, up to the potted plants... I continued until the spool ran out. Then I tied on another spool and continued this way until ALL of the spools had run out.

The room looked amazing. With over a mile of twine hanging in a criss-crossed spiderweb in the air, it looked like Spider-Man had made himself a hammock.

I remember thinking, "Wow, that looks like a hammock..."

I was 8 and scrawny; I weighed maybe 80 pounds. The twine was perfectly distributed across its anchor points. I gingerly eased myself onto the twine and, amazingly, it held my weight. I sat there for a few minutes thinking "this is really cool!"; then I climbed out and began the process of winding all the twine back onto the spools.

The First Rule of Responsibility is this: "Out of Sight, Out of Mind: If they don't know anything happened, they won't hold you responsible for it."

Later that night, mom was home, and we were talking. I don't remember what about exactly, but she started talking about taking responsibility for things. It was the sort of talk you get when you're in trouble, but I remember that it was a happy talk not an angry talk. Somehow all of this boiled down in my mind to "I can do creative and interesting things as long as I fix anything that gets broken."

Of course this made me think of the kite string experiment, which I had cleverly concealed. "Let me show you something!" I said and ran off to retrieve the twine.

Mom watched patiently as I wound the string; she assumed I was just making a big mess of string (read: "art") but since we had had our talk she stayed silent and let me have my fun. Soon I was finished. I stood back and she admired my work.

"Wow, that's pretty neat," she said.

"Now, watch," I said, and jumped into the center of the string web.

I wonder if time slowed down for her, if she had this slow-motion replay of a four-foot tall boy flying full-length, superman-style, through the air, towards a tangle of string that was tied to every electronic device our family owned...

The room imploded.

The VCR, end table, potted plant and dozens of books shot into the center of the room forming a pile on top of a very startled boy. The end table slid about a foot; the recliners scooted an inch or two, and the TV did not move at all. Back in those days TVs were furniture: they came in cabinets that sat on the floor and weighed a couple hundred pounds.

I don't remember what the aftermath was. Mom was probably mad, but I don't recall getting a particularly harsh punishment. I remember the potted plant tipping over but I don't remember having to clean it up. I do remember that the VCR was now in multiple pieces.

VCR's were not yet mainstream back then; the BetaMax vs. VHS war was just beginning. Our Magnavox VHS recorder was the pride and joy of Dad's entertainment system. It cost over a thousand dollars, and that was in 1979.

Mom knew just the right thing to say to a frightened boy: "Your father is going to kill both of us when he gets home."

I carefully examined the pieces of the thousand-dollar VCR, and noticed that the detached pieces were all plastic, and had tabs that were meant to fit into slots on the front of the machine. Some delicate fiddling got them all snapped back on. I held my breath as I turned it on and tested all the buttons. The device was unharmed.

Thus I learned my Second Rule of Responsibility: "Hide the Evidence: If you can fix it before they find out it's broken, they won't hold you responsible for it."

I spent the next hour cleaning up. The string had become tangled, so scissors were required; this prevented me from attempting to refine the experiment. Mother would later embargo my attempts to stockpile kite string in sufficient quantities to do anything interesting. By the time Dad got home, no traces of the incident remained.

I sat, terrified, as Mom chatted with Dad about his day. Any minute now, Mom would inform Judge Dad of the events that had transpired. It was all my fault, so she would probably seek the death penalty. But Mom said nothing. At one point I caught her eye and nodded towards Dad with a questioning look on my face. Mom's eyes went wide and she shook her head.

The Third Rule of Responsibility is this: "Don't tell Dad: No seriously, even Mom is afraid to do this. Don't tell Dad."

I would learn many more rules of Responsibility as I grew, including some real gems like "Try To Fix It: You would be surprised how good at carpentry, masonry, plumbing and even electrical repair an 8-year-old can be when death is on the line" and "If All Else Fails, Try To Blame It On the Cat: Why oh why did I have to be an only child?"

Yes, those are real rules I learned from real experience. But each is another story. Anyway, the important thing is that this all started on that day back in 1979 when mom tried to tell me something or other about responsibility, right before I destroyed the living room with kite string.

Moving my Blog (Well, Technically)

Fri, 09 Apr 2010 04:54:33 GMT

Hey Gang,

I'm moving my blog to http://www.heartmindcode.com/ . Well, technically. Or rather, I'm moving the technical aspect of my blog there.

Look, it's complicated.

The past couple of years have been really interesting for me blogwise; I found out like so many others that Twitter rots your ~~brain~~ blog. I think I've settled into a rhythm there, though, and I'm starting to get that itch again that 140 characters just can't scratch.

More importantly, I've discovered that I need to step up my blogging game to a more respectable level. I'm not going pro or anything, but as a friend told me recently, "Dude, you used to be on reddit and slashdot every other week. You should do that again." Having a separate blog for technical stuff will let me just geek all the way out without frying all the aunts and grandmas here on LJ.

I'll still post here from time to time, and I actually expect my LJ output to go up, but expect the content here to be more personal and less technical; I'll be using LiveJournal for more of a, well, a journal now rather than a blogging platform.

I just put up my first post over there; if you're one of my geekier readers, please wander over to http://www.heartmindcode.com/ and bookmark my rss feed. As always, any comments or advice are welcome.

Wall of Flames

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 02:10:59 GMT

I have two rules when it comes to eating spicy food:

Never Back Down. I have proven to myself repeatedly that it's all just a matter of mind over pain, and that I can get anything, at any heat level, down my gob if I really want to.
Never Brag. Because I have also learned that two minutes of "mind over pain" is often followed by ten hours of gut-wrenching regret.

There's an unwritten third rule, which basically says "Don't Tell People These Rules", because every time I have, some jerk ends up seeing how far I'm willing to go with Rule 1. I am retiring both rules here today, the first one because I'm telling the whole world about it and the second one because, well, I've earned it.

Yesterday I won China Wok's "Wall of Flame" challenge.

My endorphin-fueled hot sauce addiction comes in waves, and I was just starting into a solid round of saucing when I found out about the challenge. I read about the challenge on Larry Correia's blog (which is a hilarious read). My so-called "friend" Randy Tayler told me about it, and then of course, dared me to do it.

Jerk.

Here's the challenge: You eat a plate of insanely spicy food. If you can eat it all in 30 minutes, you get your meal free, you get your picture on the wall, you get a $50 gift certificate, and you get to come back and compete on TV when 'Man vs. Food' comes to the restaurant.

Well, I was already in good form with hot sauce... so I decided, what the heck. I started training in earnest, bringing hot sauce with me to meals and spicing things up in utterly insane ways. I ate a lot of Thai food and added habanero sauce to everything else. On Friday I put a tablespoon of Blair's Megadeath sauce on a cheeseburger and ate it. It turns out, that was the hottest thing I ate all week, including the challenge. Oh my head that was hot. For those of you understand the Scoville Scale, Blair's Megadeath is 550,000 Scovilles.

The day of the contest, I decided to "warm up" by eating a teaspoon of Dave's Ultimate Insanity sauce. I had forgotten the Blair's at work. (Note to self: get the sauce out of the fridge before somebody hurts themselves.) Dave's Ultimate is about 300,000 Scovilles, so this was certainly enough to put the hurt on me:

The careful reader will note that there's only about half a teaspoon on there. This is because I zapped myself, and then decided it wasn't enough, so I did it twice.

I am such an idiot.

...Idiot like a fox! See, when you eat crazy hot stuff, your body reacts by releasing endorphins. Your body suffuses with this happy warm glow (hint: this rush is why I get addicted to hot sauce!) and more importantly, your tongue goes a little bit numb. My plan was to be pre-numbed just a little bit and to already be in the "hot sauce happy zone" when I arrived at the restaurant.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Don't try this! I had never tried eating such a large quantity of straight sauce before this, and about two minutes after this photo was taken, I doubled up in agony. My mouth had become accustomed to straight habanero sauce, by my stomach hadn't. My gut tied itself up in intense cramps, I broke out in sweats, and I lay on the floor in the bathroom for five minutes wondering if I had injured myself too much to compete. Happily, after five minutes, things settled down and I was okay. But still, don't ever try eating this stuff straight. Put it on some food at least, to give your poor stomach a fighting chance.

Anyway, after that little interlude, I got underway with Randy and my wife Liz, and we made the 90-minute drive to Layton, Utah, to the China Wok II restaurant, located at 1266 South Legend Hills Drive.

I told Colby, our friendly waiter, that I was there for the Wall of Flame Challenge, and he gets all serious and starts going over the rules. "Their meals are normal price," he tells me gesturing at Liz and Randy. "Yours will be $10." I nod agreeably; hot sauce is not cheap and it honestly sounds like there could be several dollars worth of capsaicin extract on my plate. I also found out later that, for safety reasons, the owner of restaurant tests every dish to make sure he's not killing the patrons. He puts one spoonful of hot sauce in the contestant's meal... and then he eats two spoonfuls himself. This is the other reason I try to never brag: There is ALWAYS somebody out there crazier than you.

Actually, I just thought of a really good rule of thumb: If you think you're the craziest dude in the world, you should go to a crazy contest to prove it, because there you will meet the guy running the contest.

Anyway, it's all nods and smiles, and then Colby hands me The Waiver I have to sign. I am not kidding:

I laughed at this, and then flipped the page and saw the actual verbiage of the contract.

I love the bit where I am waiving the right to sue them for attempting to resuscitate me. I laughed, a little less heartily, perhaps.

Anyway, I signed the waiver . Colby then points at my water glass and says, "Just so you know, you should only look at that glass. You're only allowed one glass of water, and that's it right there." That sobered me up a bit.

We ordered our food. The Wall of Flame challenge allowed me to pick any dish I wanted; they spice it up. I ordered the orange chicken, partly because I love orange chicken, and partly because orange chicken is a very sweet dish. You know the old trick of eating bread to calm down a hot sauce? Well, it turns out that sugar is even better at it. (Try it sometime: eat a hot pepper and then take a lick of pancake syrup.)

My aforementioned and still so-called "friend" Randy Tayler came along to point and laugh. He also got the orange chicken. You will notice in a moment that my dish looks considerably more... well, I think satanic is the right word here.

My wife Liz came too. I thought she was there for moral support; it turned out that she was there for exactly the same reason as Randy. She got the sweet and sour chicken.

And then, the moment we were all waiting for....

SURPRISE! It's not just a plate of orange chicken. It's not just a plate of orange chicken doused in molten lava. It's a pound and a half of food! At this point I know I'm in huge trouble, because I am not a fast eater. I would have trouble eating this meal in 30 minutes even if it had no spice on it at all.

But I gave it my best try.

The training paid off. The sauce, as prepared in the final dish, is by my estimate between 150,000 and 250,000 Scovilles. It is INSANELY hot. We shot video of my entire meal, and the entire time I am rocking, fidgeting, stamping my feet, etc. I did do one thing that intrigued the owners, however: I didn't touch my rice, soup or egg roll.

The side dishes are there to give you "control rods" to slow down the nuclear reaction in your mouth. If the dish is too hot for you, a bite of rice will cool it down a lot better than a sip of water.

The thing is, I knew I probably didn't have enough time to eat everything, so I didn't want to fill up on rice and leave half the chicken behind. So I tucked straight into the chicken. I ate maybe one forkful of rice through the entire meal. I didn't even taste the soup or egg roll. My plan was to finish the spicy food and then just glomp the side dishes all at once.

This strategy attracted the attention of, well, everyone. By the time I was 25 minutes in, both waiters, the cook, and the owner were standing by my table watching me plow straight through the chicken. (This was entirely due to my valor and bravery. I am sure it had nothing at all to do with the fact that we were the only people in the restaurant. Shut up.)

I finished the hot stuff at exactly 30 minutes, stuffing the last bite of chicken in as they were counting down 3... 2... 1... etc. I still hadn't touched the rice or soup or egg roll. I thanked everyone for a good game, and acknowledged that I had not, in fact, won the challenge. It was just too much food.

The cook agreed, but then spoke briefly with the owner in chinese. "Here's what we're gonna do," he said. "You did not win the official challenge, but it's obvious that it was the quantity. You handled the spice just fine. So here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna declare you a winner and put your picture on the wall with a time of 30:00. We're not going to give you the $50 gift certificate, but we're going to give you your meal free, and we're going to take your phone number. When Man vs. Food comes, we're going to invite you back to compete with the rest of the winners."

Holy crap, did he just say what I thought he said? Holy crap, he did!

I won!

I think I'm the only person to get on the wall by TKO rather than outright winning, but I'll take it!

On the way out, I asked for more details about the Man vs. Food challenge. Colby said that they will be "stepping it up a notch" for the TV challenge.

I think... I think I'm glad I just retired my two rules. They're going to call me... and I'm probably going to back down.

Gold Star

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 23:46:26 GMT

I just successfully trolled myself.

Today is Tuesday, December 22, 2009. I just reached page 328 in my journal, upon which I found this note:

I had totally forgotten about it.

And yes, I get a gold star. (I am gratified that you had to ask, however.) I'm going to stick it in my journal and date it, so the next time I flip past that page, I'll remember how hard this made me giggle. [Edit: As you can see, the gold star is already affixed. I lost this photograph when the shinybit.com servers were wiped out. I retook this photo on 2011-01-05]

What I do at my job

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 05:20:25 GMT

Wheedle-DEET. "Hello," said the program I wrote, "It is 10:17pm. The iPhone server is dead."

I write programs. Making servers go is not my problem. But that doesn't mean I can't write programs to watch servers and let me know when they stop going.

I stared at the message burning on my phone in the darkness. It was 10:17pm and I had been, miraculously, sound asleep. I decided it was probably a fluke. It happens from time to time. I thumbed "Dismiss". Darkness swept back into the bedroom. I dropped the phone and fell instantly back asleep.

Wheedle-DEET. "Hello, it is 10:18pm. The iPhone server is dead."

Crap. This time after tapping "Dismiss" I opened our application. It hung on startup. Sure enough, no server to talk to.

I went into problem-solving mode, which is to say I stared at the ceiling, thinking. We had just launched the app that day; about a thousand users had downloaded it and were now without service. From watching the server logs I knew that there were probably 5 people trying to use it right then.

The server had been up for a couple weeks, but now that real people were using it new behavior could surface causing problems. My program on the server could run into all kinds of new and interesting trouble that I hadn't thought of. It looked like I would have to get up and actually do some work.

But wait... Justin said he was going to upgrade something on the server. He'd have to reboot it, is all. This would stop my program, and the little monitor program I wrote wouldn't be able to talk to it anymore, and it would get lonely and call me. Justin was probably upgrading the server right then in order to stay ahead of the "real" traffic coming in the days ahead.

Crap, I realized, there's no startup program for my program on that server. He'll reboot the machine, and it will come up, but my program won't start. iPhones across the world will continue to not work, and more importantly, my little monitor program will continue to be lonely--and it will continue to call me. Every sixty seconds. Justin would not know how to start my program, so I would probably be getting a phone call from him any minute.

"All right," I thought. "I think I have everything on my laptop to start my program. I just have to go downstairs and log in, and..."

The display on my phone, painfully bright in the darkness, was showing 10:19pm. It was 10:19pm, and my little monitor program had not called me.

I thumbed the button for our app again. It came right up and started working. "Bless you, Justin, you clever little monkey," I said. I could ask him how he figured out how to start my program in the morning. I dropped my phone and fell asleep.

The next day Justin stopped by. "Great work with the server!" I told him. "I was worried you wouldn't be able to start the program because I never left instructions--"

"I didn't do anything," Justin said. "It just started working."

I stared at him. I glanced over at my computer, at the screen monitoring my program, to make sure it really was running.

Then it hit me: there's a program that starts automatically when the server starts, and I told that program about my program. That program started my program for me when Justin restarted the server.

I raised both fists in triumph. "I AM A TINY SYSADMIN GOD," I cried. "A tiny one, mind you. But still."

I write programs. Making the servers go is not my job. But when the servers don't go, my programs don't go, and that is my problem. So I write programs that talk to programs, and programs that watch other programs talk to programs, and still other programs that tell other programs to start my programs. And a little program that calls me on the phone when it gets lonely.

And that's what I do at my job.

For those wondering, this is a true story. It happened last night. For those wondering what a sysadmin can upgrade in less than two minutes, the answer is "the number of CPU cores and RAM available to a Virtual Machine". (I wouldn't put it past Justin to get real work done in 2 minutes either, though. He knows his stuff.)

I wrote my first iPhone app last night!

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 17:45:35 GMT

Hello world is so passé. This screenshot was taken from my actual phone, not from the simulator. I'm a real developer and everything!

And yes, the app works: it gets me kisses. :-)

Apparently the place to blog about Facebook is LiveJournal

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 22:35:52 GMT

(Note: I tried to post this to Facebook but apparently when they say 'status updates' they mean short ones. Geesh, if I wanted a short limit, I'd have posted this to Twitter.)

Okay, FaceBook friends. I love you all dearly, like my children, you know that? But I really don't give two poops--not even two very tiny poops, I'm talking tiny like rabbit poops here, you know the kind, about the size of an M&M, and I mean the plain ones not the big peanut ones, that's the kind of poop I am talking about, what I am trying to say is these hypothetical poops (that, again, I do not give!) are very, very tiny--about your FarmTown or MafiaWars or PillowFights status. I come to FB to check up on people and my live feed is completely useless, plugged up with all these stupid status updates.

I'm not complaining. I'm asking for help. I'm not asking people to defriend me en masse. What I'm asking is: Does anybody know a way to filter that stuff out? I would love to see pictures of your dog, or hear about your hiking trip, or read your random status updates. You know, stuff about YOU. That stuff's okay. It's good, even.

But I swear to God if I find another stray cat from your FarmVille I'm going to leave its head on your FarmVille porch and hang its entrails on your FarmVille tree arranged in the shape of a smiley face.

And the same goes for that damn goldfish. Only probably on a much smaller scale, you'd never be able to see it on your tree. Or maybe I'll do it the same way but leave a post-it on your mailbox that says "Hey, look at your tree."

2L Water Bottles: Towards a Better Placebo

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 19:21:36 GMT

This one's just a titch too long for Twitter. :-)

I ran my wetware under a debugger and made an interesting discovery.

I've been trying to kick my soda habit. I drink Diet Caffeine-Free Cola, and I drink so much of it that I just drink it straight from the 2L bottle. I go through 1 or 2 bottles a day.

I quit the sugar because it made me fat. I quit the caffeine because it was making me irritable. Now I need to quit the cola because it's damaging my teeth. (Has been for years, and now it's gotten bad enough that I have to do things about it.)

I have tried quitting in the past. I'll grab bottled water from the fridge, I'll drink ice water from a mug. A weird thing happens: I just don't feel like I'm drinking anything. I can literally pound a liter of water an hour for four hours, and the whole I time I still feel thirsty. What gives?

I came down to two hypotheses:

1. I am chemically addicted to the bubbles, coloring, and/or aspartame. Not much I can do to test this theory except go through withdrawal.

2. I might be psychologically addicted to drinking from a 2L bottle. Like a cigarette smoker needing something to do with his hands and/or mouth, this would be replaceable with a simple psychomotor placebo.

So yeah, the upshot is: initial tests are promising. After emptying a 2L of soda last night, I filled it with water. It's on my desk now, it's 1pm, I'm less than halfway through it. I am feeling well-hydrated and not at all "starved" for my soda fix.

I love running my brain under a debugger. Go me! :-)

Neologasm

Tue, 19 May 2009 18:54:28 GMT

Today's new word: Gyniferous. /guy-NIH-fer-us/ Literally, "lady-bearing" or "a woman-carrying region".

P.S: bonus neologism: neologasm, though apparently I'm not the first to think of it.

Git: How To Merge a Remote Fork

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 16:46:05 GMT

James Britt just updated the documentation to TourBus for me, and he pushed the changes to his own fork. Here's how I pulled it into my own repository without forcibly overwriting my own work until I was ready to merge it. James' fork is at http://github.com/jamesbritt/tourbus.

Comments are welcome, especially if you know a better way to do it.

In English: Add a remote to my local repository, for James' remote. Fetch his changes. Diff his changes against master. Assuming approval of his changes, check out master, merge james' master, and push it.

In Bash:

$ cd tourbus
$ git checkout master
$ git remote add jamesbritt git://github.com/jamesbritt/tourbus
$ git fetch jamesbritt
$ git diff jamesbritt/master
$ git merge jamesbritt-master
$ git push origin master

[Edit: Thanks to Markus Prinz for pointing out the needless tracking branch. I have removed it.]

[Edit: Markus also points out that you can skip the git fetch jamesbritt step if you use -f in the preceding step: git remote add -f jamesbritt git://github.com/jamesbritt/tourbus]

If you need to make changes to get their stuff before merging and you don't want to do it on master, you should make your own story branch for it:

$ cd tourbus
$ git checkout master
$ git remote add jamesbritt git://github.com/jamesbritt/tourbus
$ git fetch jamesbritt
$ git diff jamesbritt/master # eep, weird changes seen
$ git checkout -b fixmerge # I'm on master, so this will branch from there
$ git merge jamesbritt/master # now we have a master + jamesbritt/master merge. Make changes as needed, then
$ git checkout master
$ git merge fixmerge
$ git push origin master

Deliberate Practice vs. Read a Book Practice

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 17:19:50 GMT

Giles Bowkett recently blogged about "read a book" practice, and said that it was the opposite of "deliberate practice". A reader named Colin asked why. My reply to Colin was over 200 words long, so I decided to make a blog post out of it instead.

Colin: The "read a book" practice tries to reduce conscious behavior to a reflex; "deliberate practice" tries to increase the precision or accuracy of a behavior by increasing conscious focus.

The two are indeed related, but I see a clear difference in my own practicing. If we consider performance as some output achieved for a given input effort, then "read a book" practice is trying to achieve the same performance for very little input, while "deliberate practice" tries to increase the output.

Another way to look at it is this: suppose there were a dance step that Fred Astaire did not know. He would begin with deliberate practice until he had increased his output--his ability to perform a given step. Only once he could perform it flawlessly would he attempt to internalize the step to an unconscious reflex.

I set a goal this year to release code every single day, a new feature or a bugfix or a significant refactoring. Every single day. I started using CalendarAboutNothing to track my progress. The first week or two I found that I had to deliberately focus on shipping small quantities and not holding myself back waiting for a bigger, "more meaningful" commit. By the second month, I found myself internalizing the habit, and found that I could conceive an idea, write it, and ship it as a complete feature in just a few minutes.

Another example of deliberate practice involving passages you already know is when you play a piece over and over again focusing on some aspect of your playing, like focusing on rhythm or breathing, or even trying to play a complicated piece in double time to make the normal time piece feel slower and easier to navigate. I'm starting to try this in my daily coding, focusing on specific aspects like test coverage or exploring new libraries.

Sorry for the long ramble, but to sum up: deliberate practice is how you get to the next level of ability; read a book practice is how you make your current level of ability seem effortless. Definitely related, but not the same thing.

I Spoke at MountainWest RubyConf

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 00:41:21 GMT

I spoke at MountainWest RubyConf 2009.

TourBus is a stress testing tool for the web. I was out sick the day I was supposed to speak, but when I came back on Saturday, they let me speak during lunch. If you want to hear me blather about optimization and scaling, and then about a hack I wrote to help do it, by all means check it out.

Other notes:

If I had had slides, I would not have forgotten to post a link to TourBus. You can get it here: http://github.com/dbrady/tourbus - Patches are welcome.
The oatmeal confusion at the start is from a quote I gave in an interview months ago. I said that I had a bit of a hero worshipping complex, and I would pay good money just to hear Jim Weirich talk about oatmeal. Jim heard this and said he was changing his talk to include oatmeal references. Then a few other speakers starting adding oatmeal to their talks and, unbeknownst to me, a whole "oatmeal meme" sort of got started. That is why, when I am looking confused you can hear someone in the audience say "You started it!"
Yes, that is a Hello Cthulhu shirt I am wearing.
Yes, I grew those ridiculous sideburns just for the conference. I call it the LOLbeard. And after the conference, I kept it because I like it.
Special thanks are due to Confreaks for recording my talk, and to MountainWest RubyConf for hiring them.