Posts tagged as “We Call It Living”

The Spectacle of the Silver Screen

Published February 6, 2016 by centaur

So I’m continuing my adventures at my undisclosed location *cough* Atlanta *cough* and reporting my activities after they happen, as is my habit when off adventuring when I’m not making a public appearance. And one of the things I enjoy doing when on a trip is, after all the work is done, catching a late night movie. Like, at the theater, on a big screen with a comfy seat and a soda, not on your phone.

I was watching the conclusion of The Hunger Games, and I’m glad I did. The first one was OK, but the second one grabbed me in a way that no movie has since The Empire Strikes Back - not that I haven’t seen better movies, like, oh, I dunno, Mad Max: Fury Road or my favorite movie, Kiki’s Delivery Service - but I felt hooked into a series in a way I haven’t felt in a long time.

Each kind of medium emphasizes different elements - pure audio in radio plays; pure text in novels; an actor’s expressions in theater - and even within the medium of moving pictures, some are better suited to some stories than others. Animation emphasizes the impossible with the tools of graphic design, for example; while It’s possible to make a live action movie of Kiki’s Delivery Service - they did - but they had to work enormously hard to create the imagery that the animation made effortless, and it still doesn’t quite have the same resonance. Even within a particular type of movie, the type of imagery has its own demands. Some images work at any size, others are best left as animated gifs or vines to be played on your phone … and some demand the big screen.

Movies are about spectacle; about imagery that can fill an entire theater. And, in one spectacular moment in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2, in which an enormous tidal wave of oil fills the whole screen and roars down upon our heroes, my breath was briefly taken away — followed by the thought: yes, this should appear on the silver screen.

Movies have more value - in particular, having a shared experience with unchosen strangers, but more importantly, a shared narrative experience that builds a common bond - but it was a late-night show of an end-of-run movie, and the only people in the theater were a bunch of yapping effers in the back row, so that one bit was a bit spoiled for me.

But for one brief moment - actually, for many moments - I felt movie magic through the spectacle of the silver screen.

Totally worth it.

-the Centaur

The Spectacle of the Silver Screen

Published February 6, 2016 by centaur

And the movie delivered something else too: big screen cinema. My buddy Jim Davies has a theory that some kinds of stories are best suited for some kinds of media, and I agree. Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” would not work as a miniseries; it relies on the quick sharp punch of poetic language. Babylon 5, with its A and B endings and epic space battles would only work as series TV. The Martian movie was great, but it lacks the electric punch of that crackling opening “Chapter 1: Log Entry SOL 6: I’m pretty much f*****.” It’s possible to make a live action movie of Kiki’s Delivery Service - they did - but they had to work enormously hard to create the imagery that the animation made effortless, and it still doesn’t quite have the same resonance. Some images work at any size, others are best left as animated gifs or vines to be played on your phone … and some demand the big screen.

But for one brief moment - actually, for many moments - I felt movie magic through the spectacle of the silver screen.

Totally worth it.

-the Centaur

The Spectacle of the Silver Screen

Published February 6, 2016 by centaur

Movies have more values - in particular, having a shared experience with unchosen strangers, but more importantly, a shared narrative experience that builds a common bond - but it was a late-night show of an end-of-run movie, and the only people in the theaters were a bunch of yapping effers in the back row, so that one bit was a bit spoiled for me.

But for one brief moment - actually, for many moments - I felt movie magic through the spectacle of the silver screen.

Totally worth it.

-the Centaur

Back in Business

Published February 4, 2016 by centaur

We are back in business. Apparently it was a temporary database glitch. Time to make sure my backups are up to date. Meanwhile, since I’m waiting to find out where my next meeting is, enjoy a picture of a coffeehouse that I am totally not at right now.

-the Centaur

Weeeird…

Published February 4, 2016 by centaur

… the Library of Dresan is letting me add posts, but all other operations are squirrelly. Stand by.

-the Centaur

Respite

Published February 4, 2016 by centaur

So me and my wife are super cool about most of the things we do - I get home late, she stays up later, I travel for conferences, she travels for work, no matter what’s going on, we get along. But one of the rules we’ve established is to not discuss our travel plans in public until after they happen, unless it’s for a public appearance.

One of the reasons is that she’s an artist, and I’m an author, and sometimes the things that we create can irritate people, and if you publicize your schedule it opens you up to attack. So she’s asked me not to publicize our location or our travel plans. That won’t stop Goldfinger, of course, but it makes it less easy for a determined whacko.

So, I’m … somewhere, to give a company talk, but it’s not a public talk, so consider it an undisclosed location. And I took the red-eye, as is my habit for crossing country, because I hate losing a day. Prior to my talk, I’d lined up a whole day full of meetings with people so I could use this time productively … but as of this morning, all have canceled or failed to respond.

I’ve no worries: if my meetings are all canceled, I’ve got a giant stack of papers to read for a brand new project at work, so I’m covered. But I don’t want to drive away from the meeting site in case my last meetings go through. So I’m nearby, in a coffeehouse, chilling out, waiting to either hear back on my meetings or to get the good news that my hotel has a room ready for me to check in.

And you know what? It’s nice to have a respite, a little time to chill. For someone who juggles a job, writing, a small press, and comic book work, it’s easy to get overwhelmed.

A few minutes to chill is a good thing.

-the Centaur

Uh … What the?

Published February 4, 2016 by centaur

So, as you may or may not know, I’m trying to blog every day this year, and just now, taking a brief respite after my red-eye flight, I decided to extend my tracking spreadsheet from just January to cover February. And when I did so … my tracking graphic suddenly turned into … I don’t know … an origami Pac-Man?

I’m not even sure how this particular chart type could make the above graphic, so I’m not sure how to fix it. This probably should get filed under “if you break the assumptions of a piece of software’s inputs, it will break your assumptions about its outputs.” Best thing to do is probably start over with a new graphic.

-the Centaur

Money From Heaven

Published January 31, 2016 by centaur

I like to pick up coins when I see them, but this is getting ridiculous. Recently I’ve netted 50 cents from money falling from heaven. Today’s find was weird: a quarter in the middle of my brand new copy of Principia Mathematica, Volume 1, which I’m reading as part of my quixotic quest to reinvent number theory for a young adult novel. :-P

Shipped from Amazon. Apparently a reprint (there are handwritten notes in my text which are apparently copied from whatever they used for camera-ready copy for this one). But with a quarter in it, stuck in the beginning of Chapter 3. It survived shipping, survived me carrying it around for a while … how?

The other one was weirder. A couple of months ago, I stepped out of the shower and pulled on a towel. I turned around, and a shinggg sounded, followed by the unmistakable sound of a coin falling to the floor. I looked around and found a quarter, which apparently fell from roughly where the bathrobes hang.

Only … we rarely use the bathrobes. There are no holes in the bathrobe pockets. The quarter fell, like from the air.

Now this is totally possible. We forgot and put a quarter in a bathrobe pocket, and I jostled it. The quarter got stuck in a knot. The quarter wasn’t on the bathrobe at all, and was stuck to the towel. The quarter was on the bathroom windowsill and I knocked it off. Et cetera. Et cetera. There are a thousand “rational” possibilities.

But it was still damn unusual.

Now I have 50 cents. That and four bucks will get me a Starbucks. Until the rest of my grande mocha Frappucinio falls from heaven, I gotta ask: who’s trying to tell me something, and what?

-the Centaur

Haha!

Published January 29, 2016 by centaur

I have completed 31 blogposts for January! (Not even counting this one!) I’m on schedule for my “blog once a day” New Year’s Resolution! Huzzah!

Now only 335 posts to go. Sigh.

-the Centaur

It Always Takes Longer Than You Expect

Published January 29, 2016 by centaur

So my wife and I talk - a lot - about life, the universe, and everything - and we decided we should try to capture some of our thoughts on the matter as a series of video blogs. I grabbed dinner at Aqui, she was grabbing dinner at home, and then we were going to get the studio set up so we could do a test run.

None of that happened as planned.

I was late leaving Aqui; I never got to run all my errands. Sandi started to cook eight-minute paste thirty minutes before I was scheduled to get home; I got home late and she was still cooking. I tried to get the software set up on the kitchen table while she finished up, hoping the two of us would both finish in time for a trial run in the great room which we planned to use.

When our time was up and it was time to go to the gym, I’d never left the kitchen table, and she’d never left the kitchen counter, working on her pasta, watching over my shoulder while I wrestled with the software. I did get it installed, and, in the end, we managed to capture a handful of screenshots and a few short videos, the longest of which lasted only five minutes.

I heard a study once which claimed that when it comes to estimation, there are two groups of people: optimists, who underestimate schedules by a lot, and pessimists, who only underestimate schedules by a little. Both groups in the study failed to estimate the actual time it would take them to complete the task.

This is a natural human instinct. My wife and I have speculated that people wouldn’t really ever take on large tasks if they knew how long they took — certainly in my experience in computing, if you give people a realistic schedule, they’ll either push back or even cancel the project. Now I freely admit I make mistakes - but when I've called bullshit on schedules, I have never been wrong.

Here’s a few rules of thumb for you:

If you’re estimating by the seat of your pants, you’re wrong. It will take longer.
If you need it done in a short amount of time, you’re out of luck. It will take longer.
If you’re an administrator and can crack the whip to get it done, quit fooling yourself. It will take longer.
If you’re estimating based on past experience, and you think it will take less time, you’re kidding yourself. It will take longer.
If you think there’s really good reasons it’s easier this time, you’re even wronger. It will take longer.
If, on the other hand, you’re an expert on this kind of thing, congratulations: you’re the wrongest. Thanks to the process of automatization, through which humans learn to become experts, your mind has abstracted away all the details of the problem so they’re out of sight, out of mind - so what seems easy and quick to you will take longest of all.

There is no substitute for a formal process of estimation. I personally use function point analysis (breaking tasks into small parts, estimating their cost, and applying a function that produces time) and Gantt charts (calendar-like diagrams showing people and length of tasks and their dependencies) to get an idea of how long things will take, and this gets a good estimate, even though as soon as you start work you have to rework the design and throw the Gantt chart away.

This process offends some I know who are really into “agile” development, in which you forgo that kind of formal planning in favor a more flexible approach involving user “stories" - but these people are fooling themselves. The point isn’t the Gantt chart, it’s going through the formal estimation exercise, getting a realistic estimate of both task complexity and dependency chains. I knew agile back when it was called “extreme programming,” and its techniques have only gotten more sophisticated - but REAL, experienced agile development uses a training process to get people up to speed and engages in estimation of the velocity of development. If you ape agile with daily standup and a few post-it notes, congratulations: you’re fooling yourself, your schedule will slip.

THERE IS NO SUBSTITUTE FOR DECOUPLING THE PROCESS OF GENERATING TASKS AND ESTIMATING THEM. If you come up with tasks and score them on the spot, you’re flying by the seat of your pants, and will subconsciously generate estimates that show you will succeed.

You will not.

Once I dealt with a sharp CEO who recognized that I was right when I told him his three month project would take nine months. (I had to literally resign my position to get his attention, but that’s another story.) His response: ok, you’re right, it will take nine months - but we can’t track anything that long. We need three month milestones. Something we can see and manage. That way we’ll know we’re slipping. That’s what we did, that worked - and in nine months, we delivered, in three steps along the way. And, strangely enough, I find this is more generally true: in any given time period, I get about a third as much as I want to - but if I keep at it, and break things apart into smaller chunks, eventually I do get done.

So don’t imagine you can travel in time; instead, realize you need to take baby steps. Break your problem into the smallest chunks you can, relentlessly work on them to get them done, and doggedly track your next steps. You may not produce an hour-long video describing your views on life, the universe, and everything the first time you set out to do it, but maybe you can spend a pleasant evening getting your film studio set up, so that you’re ready to take the next step, when the time comes.

-the Centaur

Pictured: a shot of me and my wife. We tried to take a picture. We expected to take a couple. It took six shots, and I had to composite two of them together with four Photoshop layers to get a good one of both of us at the same time. :-P

The Blog Wolf Pursueth, Doggedly

Published January 28, 2016 by centaur

Welp, closing in on my first month of the “blog every day” challenge, and while I didn’t build that backlog I wanted, I have (with a few lapses) kept more or less on top of it.

I’m at one of my favorite restaurants, Aqui, hacking away on five different projects, trying to finish up them all in the next few minutes before the next thing on my list. I could have gone to one of the two Aqui directly on the drive home, but I headed to downtown Campbell, hoping to have time to walk by a bookstore before it closes (I won’t).

And so maybe it would have saved time to have gone to someplace more convenient.

But there’s something wonderful about going to a new (or at least different from routine place), and something serendipitious about studying how opinions change in human social networks while two tables around me, loudly gossiping and socializing, showed in full-blooded life what my colleagues in the scientific community are trying to understand with math.

Ah, the human mind, the human condition. What a wonderful environment for such a glorious machine.

-the Centaur

Announcing 30 DAYS LATER, a Steampunk Anthology

Published January 28, 2016 by centaur

The small press I’m associated with, Thinking Ink Press, has just announced its first anthology, 30 DAYS LATER, edited by A.J. Sikes, B.J. Sikes, and Dover Whitecliff of the Treehouse Writers’ Group! Check out the Thinking Ink Press announcement for more details, but it should be coming out around the time of the Clockwork Alchemy conference this May.

-the Centaur

Pictured: A clock, image credit: Deutsche Fotothek, downloaded from Wikimedia Commons under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany license. Not the cover or anything, just something I liked - we’re saving the cover reveal.

The Presentation Went Well

Published January 27, 2016 by centaur

The presentation in preparation for which I wrote “Overcoming Writers Block” went well. That is all. Off to the gym.

-the Centaur

Meta-Blogging

Published January 22, 2016 by centaur

free will repaired2.jpg

So, no blogging for me today … instead I want to point you to my wife’s (re)new(ed) blog at Studio Sandi. This for now is an adjunct to her main site, but we hope to shift all the old content from my hacky scripts over to WordPress. Keep watching that space for more news about Sandi’s projects and continued posting of her awesome art!

-the Centaur

I Got Distracted …

Published January 21, 2016 by centaur

… helping a friend with a mathematical problem. More blogging soon.

-the Centaur

Minus One

Published January 19, 2016 by centaur

For the overcommitted, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. My wife practically had a nervous breakdown this Sunday trying to figure out what the next right step for her business is, a discussion which spilled over onto much of our scheduled workday on Monday. I had the same experience this morning, wanting to crash back out - though that may have been related to my loss of three days in this vacation. I thought I was going to be able to take the whole week off, but the way timing worked out I could only take off Tuesday. So when I woke up this morning, I found myself trying to figure out how to do three days’ worth of work in one half a day (since I go to writing group Tuesday evenings) and I wanted to just go back to bed. I eventually picked one thing, but even that’s something that I wasn’t sure I could get done.

That’s where “minus one” comes in.

“Minus one” is a strategy that goes hand in hand with, but is opposite from, “work just a little bit harder than you want to”. Where “harder than you want to” often gets you 10x the reward in 0.1x the time - because our monkey brains often want to quit just before we are about to have a breakthrough - “minus one” handles the opposite monkey instinct, biting off more than we can chew.

So, when you have a dozen things to do, or even just a few, deliberately choose to tackle one less of them than you want to. If you planned to do an working afternoon, a nice dinner, and a movie with your wife, just take on two of those. (We did the working afternoon and the nice dinner). If you planned to tackle cleaning and writing, just do the writing. Even in the writing, I’d plans to drive to a different place for lunch, then to hit a nice coffeehouse to work. I dropped that and went to the Aqui near my house. That’s part of a rut (and I need to write a defense of ruts) but it immediately bought me something like thirty minutes of travel time, and positioned me well to take care of a lot of other business.

“Minus one” is a key thing to take on when you’re overwhelmed. It relaxes you and lets you focus. Humans are consistent underestimators - I saw one study that suggested that both optimists AND pessimists underestimate how long it takes to get things done. You can’t not underestimate - you won’t ever get ANYTHING if you’re honest with yourself about how long it takes, especially if other humans with their monkey brains are involved - so you need tricks to keep you moving.

I use “minus one”. If you feel overcommitted and overwhelmed, you might see how it works for you.

-the Centaur

Taking Care of Business

Published January 18, 2016 by centaur

Spent the holiday Monday working with my wife on the yard, and going to home improvement stores to find things that we could use to improve the yard. That is all.

-the Centaur

Pictured: A texture my wife wanted me to photograph, and a tag for a shed we purchased for yard tools.

Good, Nice, Professional

Published January 17, 2016 by centaur

One of the things they tell you in the writing community is “Good, nice, professional: you need to be at least two of the three.”

What this means is, the writing community is filled good writers, nice people, and competent workers, but it’s also filled with crappy writers, genuine assholes, and flakey losers. You can get away with being one of the bad things: you can be a so-so writer, but be nice to people and turn things in on time, or you can be an asshole but produce great work in a timely fashion, or you can be good and nice but fail to deliver, and people will forgive most of those things and you will proceed, and succeed.

Douglas Adams is perhaps the best known "flakey, but good and nice” guy. The world’s oldest angry young man, the hardworking Harlan Ellison, was known as “asshole, but good and professional” until he gaffed the Last Dangerous Visions anthology project. I won’t disparage another writer’s work, but as a publisher and anthology editor, I can tell you that I’m much more likely to accommodate an author who I know will deliver than an awesome one I can’t count on - and I can tell you that I’ve heard the same from other publishers of anthologies.

This came up because I just had to essentially back out of a project. You need to roll with the punches on an editor’s comments, but what I just received was a request for a spec rewrite more than four months after the article had been approved, and that after a fairly intensive editorial round. That made me mad - but in a broader sense, I understand how it happened: the editor got feedback on another project and wanted to forestall that happening to my article. But I’d moved on from the project, and am neck deep in edits in THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE, which was supposed to be out last year.

I swallowed my anger, thought carefully about the overall problem, and realized that despite what I perceived as an irregularity of process the editor is just trying to do the best job they can the best way they know how. I further realized the primary reason I couldn’t respond was simply my lack of time. If the request had landed in a dead zone, I’d have gladly have given it a shot.

So I wrote the editor what I hoped was a polite but firm note, emphasizing the problem was essentially my other committments. The editor got back to me promptly and was accommodating. I also discussed the problem with one of my fellow authors, who stepped up with suggestions, and we may bring him on board as a co-author so he can take this article the rest of the way.

I’m always angry, and I easily could have blown my stack and really ticked the editor off. But being nice, and being professional, I helped solve a problem, rather than creating a new one. As to whether my article was good … eh, if it ever gets released, be it authored, co-authored, or just salsa on this blog if rejected ... I’ll let you be the judge.

-the Centaur

Customer Service

Published January 15, 2016 by centaur

SO, my primary job is working for this big software conglomerate and I want to make sure that I’m doing a good job so a frequent thing that I do is work later on some evenings “just a little bit harder than I want to” but I’ve found that if you do that too long you can burn out and so — GASP --- you need a way to stop yourself from doing too much.

My preferred technique, in recent years, is the OpenTable reservation. Later in the day, when I have SOME idea of when I might leave, I log in to OpenTable, set a reservation for one of my favorite restaurants, or a new restaurant, just late enough in the evening to still hit a coffeehouse and get some writing done. I know a few places which are open to 11, so if I can eat by 7:45, I can still get a couple hours of writing in. At worst, even at 8:30, I can get an hour of focus at a coffeehouse — assuming, of course, since I use that dinnertime to do my print reading, an hour for dinner.

Assuming an hour.

So tonight, I tried a new restaurant, Bird Dog in Palo Alto, and showed up 15 minutes early for my 8pm reservation (since I’d not been there before, and wanted a little buffer, and I’d finished my work anyway). They weren’t ready for me, so I sat in the bar, had a daiquiri, and read a chapter out of Peter Higgins’ NUMBERS: A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION while listening to a very entertaining conversation between some very, very uppercrust ladies who just might have been minor celebrities. At a little after 8:10, the maître d’ came by to tell me a table would be ready soon. I finished the chapter, then pulled out THE EMOTION THESAURUS and started reading it.

At 8:30, I suddenly realized I’d been there three quarters of an hour and had not yet even been seated.

Shoot. Well, that happens. I packed my books up and asked the bartender for the check. He offered to comp me the drink, but I declined (since I was already running way late and thought I could probably get a quick slice at Pizza My Heart to get back on schedule). The waiter asked me to hang on a bit so he could check in at the host stand, and in moments, the maître d’ had arrived to show me to my table.

They comped my drink. They brought me roasted avocado and flatbread, pictured above. And all of the staff came by and apologized. But neither the comping, nor the apologies, were really needed, or were the deciding factor: when a problem was detected, they fixed it. Now, basically they gave me free appetizers and drinks, but I still had an expensive meal, and I’m likely to come back at least once, or to recommend it, or perhaps even blog about it --- how meta — so they’ll make their money back.

But what strikes me is that property of noticing a problem and expending a small amount of personal and financial capital to right it had far greater payoffs. They didn’t ignore the problem, or just toss stuff at me to paper it over; they fixed it, they acted sincere, and they delivered the rest of their normal service at high quality. I tried to be super nice in response, and I hope we all had a great meal. Their efforts to provide great customer service changed my attitude about the problem, and built a bond.

Later at Coupa Cafe, one of my favorite coffeehouses, I struck up a conversation with one of the staff, and they recommended a new drink I could try. When I got it, the spectacular presentation of my personally recommended drink again reminded how great customer service doesn’t just have immediate benefits for the business; it creates relationships and attachments which are a perennial source of not just profit to the business --- which it does — but of connection in human lives.

And that’s what really makes it all worthwhile. That, and time to work on your books.

-the Centaur

Excuse Me, I Ordered the Large Cat

Published January 14, 2016 by centaur

Busy catching up on writing today, trying to get Chapter 1 of the rewrite of THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE done, plus various small press tasks, plus writing documentation at work, plus getting new tires for my car … aaaa! So here’s a picture of a cat. Also, apropos, of a tire … but that made me think. I used to take a lot of notes - I still do, but I used to too - but a lot of the time a quick snapshot of something with your cell phone can do you one better.

I took a few pictures of tires and of the label on the inside of my door without having to write down any numbers. I then went back to my desk, found some highly rated tires on a web site, found a local tire store online, found the models they had in stock, looked up the old tires I bought for the car to confirm the numbers made sense, and made an appointment. Bam. No paper involved.

It’s amazing to me what can be done with storing information in the cloud, as much as I am a skeptic about it. (And even my complaints about how hard it is to take notes on computers are getting addressed - a fellow author just got a Windows 10 book and claims he now prefers its tablet mode for editing because he can use it like real paper).

But it amazes me even more that when I showed up early for my tire appointment, they fit me in so quickly I had my car and was on my way to work at essentially the time I would have normally have gotten in. As a colleague said, "how many times does THAT happen?" My answer? “ONCE. Just today.” America’s Tire, Mountain View, California. Go check them out.

-the Centaur