Posts tagged as “We Call It Living”

Dragon Con, Dragon Con, Jiggety Jig

Published August 30, 2012 by centaur

Well, it's back again to Dragon*Con, my home away from home in the magical city of Atlanta.

Like Comic-Con, the show at Dragon*Con begins even before you get inside.

Unlike Comic-Con, however, the architecture of Dragon*Con is not awesomely mega, but mega awesome.

From the floor to the ceiling, the hotels of Dragon*Con, especially the Marriott, are awe-inspiring.

It's simply hard to take them in all at once.

In the midafternoon, things are just getting started...

... but don't worry, things will fill up soon enough.

I'll be at the Bell Bridge Books author spotlight on Sunday, hawking STRANDED, the anthology of which I have not yet seen a copy, but whose cover looks like this.

What's even more awesome is the con officially hasn't started yet ... and the costumes are amazing.

Amazing.

Amazing!

I mean, AMAZING.

A-MAZ-ING!

Seriously ... you know.

So, on this first night of Dragon*Con, I've had a great meal...

Powered up with caffeine...

And filled out this, my traditional first post of Dragon*Con!

-the Centaur

Good Parking Karma

Published August 17, 2012 by centaur

Recently I've become more interested in the scientific method, especially after spending a few weeks doing that Prometheus vs the Thing essay. After doing that, I realized that I believe myself to have superior parking skills ... without any hard evidence to that effect.

I have plenty of anecdotal evidence, of course, for my supposed superior parking skills. My wife admires my parking skills. She can't parallel park, whereas I can. Actually, she's not the only one to have remarked upon it - other friends have too, as have strangers. Once, back when I drove a large SUV, I successfully parallel parked it in a tiny parking space with only inches of clearance front and back. Dissatisfied that I was more than four feet from the curb, I then, with a sequence of back and forths worthy of Austin Powers, slid the car sideways to within four inches of the curb. When I got out, the people watching in the nearby cafe applauded.

There's other anecdotal evidence. I have spectacularly good "parking karma". There are at least three different parking lots that my friends avoid that I have no trouble parking at. Part of this is a positive attitude: I believe there are spaces, so that helps me find them. Part of this is patient strategy: I know there's flux in almost any parking lot, so I don't get frustrated and drive off just before a space opens. And part of this is again skill: I know certain tricks for parking, like backing into a narrow space so my passenger door aligns with the other car's passenger door, and I can leave more space for my driver door and the driver next to me. I enjoy finding the space that other people can't find and don't want to park in and taking that.

But this is all anecdotal. I've never done a scientific survey of parking skills and compared my abilities to the population mean. I've never even tried to define the term parking skills in a way that would make a concept of superior parking skills meaningful. It's just an egotistical little belief I've picked up over the years. Just like the "parking karma," an unscientific concept if there ever was one.

But I do have a good time parking, even today, in a lot so busy my friends often complain that it's hard to park, I squeezed my car into a tight space today, a narrow, angled space a larger SUV drove past. I had to slide my car in and out of the space three times to align properly enough that I could get out of my car, because the car to the right was angled over the line, into my parking space.

But I parked. And when I got out, I checked. The car to my right could still open his door just fine.

-the Centaur

Pictured: a different parking situation, in which some car far to the right had leaned out of his lane, and all the subsequent cars had to either keep parking at an odd angle, or drive on by. Other cars drove by; I parked just fine. Good parking karma continues.

A Man After My Own Heart

Published August 16, 2012 by centaur

I don't know what it is about people born about the same time as me, like John Scalzi and Warren Ellis and Richard Evans, but ever time one of them creates a groundbreaking game, gets nominated for the Hugo, wins an award or lands on the moon, they always make me feel like I've been sitting on my ass.

Well, John Scalzi has beaten me to the punch again, this time by eerily mirroring events from my own life and blogging about them while I'm still digesting the events. He recently found a small stray cat, and blogged that has he decided he's going to trap it, get it fixed and possibly tame it, because he'd "rather be a sap than have a dead kitten on [his] conscience."

Boy, do I know this feeling. I also have "cat lover AKA sucker" written on my forehead, and I and my wife have been going through a similar arc. We spent the last three months socializing a little spray monster we've taken to calling Loki, and yesterday my wife took him to the vet to get him his shots and fixed. My wife thought it worthwhile to share some of what we've learned that made us choose to trap, neuter and release him, even though it might scare him off.

We strongly suspect Loki is the brother or cousin of Gabby, the gold cat above that we adopted about two and a half years ago. While their coloration is starkly different, both are highly vocal longhaired cats with similar tails that seem to know each other. Loki's tail has thinned alarmingly in the above photo, but they looked even more similar a few months ago.

Loki isn't a feral cat: he's a stray---that is, an abandoned cat. Feral means an unsocialized wild cat which wasn't raised with human contact and won't approach people willingly. Loki? After some initial skittishness, probably caused by either abuse (he's afraid of feet) or our initial attempts to chase him off (after another stray cat invaded our home and attacked my wife), Loki's approach distance rapidly dropped to zero, and he can be petted, picked up and will even lie in your lap. More tellingly, he knows how to claw and bite without ever drawing blood---a sign of early exposure to humans. Loki was someone's pet, once.

Now he is again. We don't know if he can ever become an indoor cat---he was a little spray monster, and when we realized he was coming in through our cat door and making our other cats spray, we had to eliminate the door. But clearly he'd come to rely on our home for a food source, and even when he was skittish, he meowed piteously, trying to beg even as he ran.

So, back to John Scalzi's plan: he's dead on the money. Even if you don't want a stray cat in your yard, it does you no good to get rid of it. Not only is it inhumane, all you're doing is opening a space in the local cat territory map for some other, possibly more annoying cat to come in and take it. The right thing to do is TNR: trap, neuter, return. This preserves the local territory, so no more cats move in, but stops the cats from breeding out of control and taking over the local wildlife.

We just spent several hundred dollars on examinations and shots for our three cats plus examinations, shots and neutering for Loki, but if you're not planning on keeping the cat, there are probably local animal shelters who will do the neutering for a much more reasonable fee. And unless the cat is a sweetie, there are good reasons not to keep him.

If a cat you're trying to tame becomes approachable, great; but don't try to tame one that's obviously feral and wants nothing to do with people. The cat that attacked my wife, Graycat (pictured above) was so close to feral that only I could handle him, and that was with gloves. I was making progress at it---I could pet him, even play with him with toys outside---but that emboldened him, and he came into our house, fought with our cats, and then tried to attack my wife. She had to fend him off with a broom, not hitting him but trying to push him away---and then he attacked the broom, before running off. Sadly, we can't deal with cats that attack us, and had to have him put him down.

It's better to make a judgment call, which John Scalzi is currently doing with his skittish kitten. I wish him the best of luck with that! As for us, we're hoping Loki comes back. After the neutering, we released him, and he hasn't yet returned. Sad to say, neutering can permanently change the personality of a cat for the worse; my wife has had two cats "ruined" by bad vet experiences.

Still, our vet is good, and Loki took to it better than our three other little monsters. Here's hoping he returns, that he stops spraying once the hormones drain out of his system, and that he finds a good life here. But regardless, we've done our duty: we've made his life better, at least for a while, and cut back on the local cat proliferation, at least for a bit.

Here's hoping he forgives us for that, and comes back for the love. And the can food.

And the laser tag.

-the Centaur

Pictured: assorted furmonsters. Loki, Loki and Gabby, Graycat, and Loki again.

UPDATE: He came back!

Twice. And he's more affectionate than ever (though you can't see that in these photo :-) ...

I think it's safe to say he's here to stay.

Back to Comic-Con

Published July 10, 2012 by centaur

It's back to Comic-Con this week. I have no appearances, no obligations; I even sent the revisions of "Stranded" to the editor before my departure, so it's just a fun week soaking in the concentrated geekery of one hundred and fifty thousand of my spiritual friends. I don't even know the schedule of the con yet; here's to having fun.

I do have to say it's getting ridiculous in size, though. Hotel rooms aren't quite as bad to come by as Dragon*Con - which you need to order a year in advance, whereas Comic-Con opens up hotel rooms at more like six months - but the ticket procedure is crazy. If I wasn't going as a professional, I wouldn't be able to make it; I logged on as early as possible that morning and still failed to get a normal ticket. I don't know how other people do it, but clearly, one hundred and fifty thousand of them do.

Still, the programming is great, the dealer's room is awe-inspiring, and San Diego's Gaslamp district is a wonderful place to hang out with friends for dinner (or even to retreat to with your laptop when inspiration strikes and the lines and crowds are getting a little too much to deal with in the Convention Center).

Here's hoping the Comic-Con team can find a way to continue to offer this wonderful event!

-the Centaur

“Stranded” back from the editor!

Published June 21, 2012 by centaur

"Stranded," my young adult space pirates story set in the Library of Dresan universe, has been provisionally accepted by Bell Bridge Books and I'm responding to the edits now. It's set in a distant future where humanity has spread through the galaxy in two groups - one, the Dresanians, citizens of the grand and sparkling intergalactic civilization known as the Dresan-Murran Alliance, a mammoth polyglot alien culture of which humanity is the tiniest part, and the other, the Frontiersmen, humans who fled the Allied takeover of Earth to found their own civilization at the edge of the deeps --- but at least it's human.

What happens when these two groups collide?

Serendipity snapped her fingers. The map of the Alliance collapsed into the tiny glowing sphere, which leapt from the tree and flew into her hand. Tianyu scampered up onto her shoulder and rubbed her cheek, and Serendipity rubbed him back as the farstaff chimed.

“Let’s go on an adventure,” Serendipity said—and in a twinkle of light, they disappeared.

An adventure she wants? An adventure she'll get.

If the editor and I can beat the story into shape, it will come out later this year in an anthology called STRANDED, and later my space pirate sequence of stories will be collected into a novel called MAROONED. The alien child pictured above, Norylan, is actually from the sequel to "Stranded", "Conflicted", which will form part 2 of MAROONED. Got that? Good.

All coming Real Soon Now to a bookstore or ereader near you!

-the Centaur

Pictured: Norylan, a child (sort of) of the Andiathar, the dominant species of the Alliance, drawn by yours truly while working through story notes, photographed by my phone (you can even see the shadow of my hand in the original shot below), and colored (also by me) in Photoshop as an experiment for doing "quick" (ha) art for a blog post. There's a lot I'd like to do to fix this piece of art, but then that would fail my intent of making this a quick experiment.

Scam, Shame, or Simply Expected?

Published May 6, 2012 by centaur

I've just come across two instances of friends and colleagues getting bitten by bad products ... and the companies involved putting the bad product straight back on the shelves. First from my friend Jim Davies:

http://jimdaviesrants.blogspot.com/2012/05/reselling-bad-product-after-returns.html

Unfortunately, the game did not work. I cleaned it and tried several times, to no avail. I planned to bring it back. And even though I had no reason to suspect Chumleighs of any foul play, just to make sure I never bought that particular disc again I put a tiny dot of ink on the case insert in a place I would remember later. They gave me my money back. Just today I was browsing, and there was the Hulk game. With the same dot. I told the clerk that I'd returned this game and was disappointed that it was back on the shelf. She said that it might be a different copy, and I told her about the dot. She took the game to the back, and discussed something with somebody, and then put it back on the shelf, right in front of me.

And from fellow transhumanist Elf Sternberg:

http://elfs.livejournal.com/1504793.html

We tried playing it in the Playstation 2, then the Lasonic (which will try and play a frozen pizza, that thing's amazing, pity about the heat buildup issue...), and finally out laptops. Not even Handbrake could make it past 1:10. I called RedBox, and they were very kind about giving me two coupons (no refunds, sigh): one for this film, and one for any other film I wanted. Then she said, "Make sure, if you try and take another copy out, that you take it out before you put this one back, or it will just give you the one you have already tried." I expressed surprise. "Doesn't it know the disc is unuseable?" "When we send someone to service the box, if it is present we will take it out. But while it is in the box, it is considered in circulation."

Ouch. Needless to say, neither of them were happy.

I, in contrast, have had good experiences with returns. The image pictured is a cracked Kindle DX I got from Amazon that they replaced almost instantaneously. I buy a lot of electronics gear from Fry's, which has a generous return policy and often (seems) to put stuff back on the shelves because people can't distinguish between "this is incompatible with my setup" and "this is broken". And I buy a lot of used and discount books, including one recently from Kepler's, where I found a book I bought for a dollar turned out to have a missing section due to the printer error.

I didn't complain - I needed the book to help my wife out with a problem and the section I needed was mostly intact - and felt like, "hey, I got this for a dollar". I felt like, hey, this is simply expected. But should I have felt that way? Shouldn't the book have been marked? And shouldn't Jim and Elf have the expectation that the games and movies they buy or rent are in good condition? Even if many people bring things back as bad when they aren't, shouldn't there be an expectation that if someone reports they've tried a game or movie in a dozen machines that yes, it's probably bad? Can't stores have a machine to test their product?

I don't buy the argument that "it would cost more money". I buy the argument that the people who're running the businesses or even the local stores don't want to be bothered. That they'd rather follow procedure than be flexible enough to handle anything more than the default case. I've seen a lot of this attitude recently. I don't think it's new, but I personally have seen more and more of it, where people in charge of systems only want to satisfy the lowest common denominator. Often that means they're doing things efficiently and cheap - but if the cost of efficient and cheap is selling crap products, I think the cost is too high.

Or is that even fair? Stores know they're going to get returns. They plan on it. They even gave Jim and Elf their money back (Elf, with some extra). So you can expect to get crap from time to time. I guess what's bad here is that the system has all the information it needs to do better ... and simply doesn't. It would have been easy for the woman at the game store to toss the item into the garbage or the "for sale - damaged" shelf. It would have been easy for RedBox to mark a video with a damaged bit. That's what rankles here ... when we know what we need to know to do better ... and don't.

Sigh.

-the Centaur

We Interrupt This Broadcast … to Bring You Art

Published April 26, 2012 by centaur

A pause, however brief, from THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE. My wife Sandi has worked the past week collecting over two years of new pictures documenting her work as a faux finisher and artist, and I've just updated our gallery software to support detailed thumbnails (as shown above). After a long night's work, I've uploaded all this new hawtness to Sandi's newly refreshed website, studiosandi.com. New, improved, with her California Contractor's License number, 966222:

Now serving all your faux finishing, decorative painting, muraling and fine art needs in the Bay Area.

Soon back to your regularly scheduled clockworks...

-the Centaur

Too Many Projects … or an External Memory?

Published March 14, 2012 by centaur

Anyone who knows me in detail knows I'm a pile person. You can see the all the windows open above, but that's not the half of it: I had 14 tabs open in Firefox, 3 windows with 17, 13, and 3 tabs open in Chrome, and ten windows open in Finder, Mac OS X's file browser. I hammer my operating systems, loading them with as many windows, programs, files and fonts they can take.

But it's not just operating systems. I've got a huge folder of todos in my jacket pocket, a pile of books in my bookbag, on the table, in my car. My library, office, spare office and even kitchen table are filled with piles, as is my desk at work.

On the one hand, this could simply be because I'm a hoarder and need to learn to clean up more, and maybe I do. But most of the piles are thematically organized: in the shot above you can see (slightly overlapping) piles for a young adult and urban fantasy series, an art pile, a pile of bills, CDs being organized, and so on.

Some of this is, again, a product of mess, but the rest of it is a deliberate strategy. A collection of books on a topic serves as an external memory that augments the goo we have in our heads. This is part of the theory of situated cognition, which posits that our memories are elaborated through interaction with the external world.

William Clancey, one of the founders of situated cognition, puts it this way: his knowledge of what to take on a fishing trip isn't in his internal memory: it's in his fully stocked tacklebox, which represents the stored wisdom of many, many fishing trips; if he was to lose that tacklebox, he'd lose a portion of his memory, and become less effective.

My toiletry bag for flying serves the same role. Its contents have been refined over dozens, maybe even hundreds of trips. It doesn't just have a toothbrush and toothpaste, contact lens solution and hairspray, it has soap, shampoo, cough drops, nail clippers, bandaids and more. If I forget it, and try to recreate the toiletries that I need for a trip on the fly, I almost always have to go back to the store.

Situated cognition has been challenged, and I couldn't find the perfect reference that summarized what Clancey said in the Cognitive Science Brownbag talk I attended at Georgia Tech so many years ago. But I know how I work, and I know how it's influenced by that framework.

When I'm tackling a project, I build a pile. It might be a pile of tabs in a browser, folders of links in my bookmarks, files in a directory, books from my mammoth library. These serve as references I use to generate the text, the material I use to generate my writing, but they also serve as something more. They serve as a pointer to return me to an old mental state.

If I have to close my browser, reboot my machine, put a project aside, switch to another book, I can keep the pile. I have mammoth collections of files and bookmarks, and a mammoth library with something like 30 bookcases (that's cases, not shelves). And when I'm ready to reopen the project, I can start work on it again.

I've done that recently, restarting both my work on the "Watch on a Tangled Chain" interactive fiction and an exploration of programming languages - one project I hadn't worked on for a year, and one maybe for several years. But when I found the files, I was able to resume my work almost effortlessly. With physical piles of books, the process is even more joyful, as it involves reading snippets from half a dozen or so books until I'm back into the mindset.

So thank you, my poor processor, my crowded browser, my packed library. You make me more than I am on my own.

-the Centaur

GDC 2012

Published March 6, 2012 by centaur

The Game Developer's Conference 2012 ... it begins:

GDC is an amazing conference for game developers. Imagine a film conference where Steven Spielberg's keynote is likely to be followed by an indie filmmaker roundtable discussing how you could shoot on the cheap without a license, where almost everyone at all levels is hobnobbing on the same floors. Translate to games ... and you get the idea.

I come for the AI Summit, which is generally of very high quality. I won't post any pictures of teh slides, except the one above, which gives you a flavor of the kinds of talks they've had over the past few years (not just at the AI summit, of course, but usually in the programming tracks). Ok, wait, I will post one more to give you a little more flavor:

A lot of the people in game AI say "they don't do AI"---one of them said today Academic AI and Game AI share only two letters---but I'm afraid I can't agree. I'm interested in Game AI because it's AI that has to work, which is refreshing after years of arguments between symbolic/neural fuzzy/scruffy mathy/empirical logical/architectural oh would you all please shut up about how you're better than each other and make something that WORKS and get back to me thank you very much. Not a problem at GDC!

On the first two tutorial days (Monday and Tuesday) it isn't so bad (oh and hey there Apple logo! Nobody's fooled that you're trying to horn in on our event for free publicity), and it never gets like Comic-Con ... but by the end of the week it becomes a zoo. Here are a few tips to surviving it. First, if you want lunch at Chevy's, sneak out during the Q&A of the pre-lunch session before it ends up looking like this:

Second, park in the 5th and Mission garage, and if you do, it has many food options. Skip the uber-long lines at the Starbucks in the morning (sorry, guys!) and either hit Mel's Diner (with the fastest bussers in the West) or grab a bite inside the Moscone Center itself. Also, note the excellent 'wichcraft sandwich shop across the street as another food option.

While the snacks in the Moscone Center are good, my kerfinicky stomach does not leave me able to recommend the (actually not bad) lunch they provide on site, so I usually forage for food, at Chevy's, 'wichcraft, Mel's, the restaurants of the Metreon next door, and if you parked at 5th and Mission, note the Bloomingdale's across the street? That's actually part of a huge Westfield mall, with an excellent, giant food court hidden therein that somehow I've missed all these years.

There are more tips ... like hit the GDC Bookstore the first day to pick up t-shirts and schwag, but wait until the Exhibit Hall opens later in the week to score deals direct from the publishers and only go back to the GDC Bookstore if the publishers are missing something (they will be) ... like make sure you give yourself four to six hours to hit the Exhibit Halls, that you check out the Independent Games demos, and be sure to hit the AI Roundtables if you're into that sort of thing, which is a gateway into the AI Programmer's dinner, which led to me being able to ask the developer of some of the software I use a question today because she knew me from previous years. So be sociable! That's half of what this conference is for!

But the biggest tip for someone like me, who lives an hour and ten minutes away in no traffic, or two hours in morning traffic?

Get a hotel right up the street.

More news as it happens. The AI Summit has been very quoteworthy so far and I've taken a lot of notes.

-the Centaur

How Crazy is Comic-Con?

Published March 3, 2012 by centaur

How crazy is Comic-Con registration? I logged on at 8:00am this morning to get in the waiting list and by the time I cleared the "waiting room" for the signup page (at 9:10ish) it was completely sold out. This is what I saw when it finally "let me in" to register:

I hate to do it, but I have to lay the blame squarely on Gmail. Comic-Con sent me a registration form, I clicked on the link at 8:00am, just like they told me to ...

The wait is over! Comic-Con 2012 badges will go on sale at 8:00 a.m. PST on Saturday March 3rd, 2012. To access the EPIC online registration website, click the following link: (link deleted for security reasons)

. The link kept timing out, as one might expect from an overloaded system, but after 5 or so minutes of click ... timeout, click ... timeout, I started to get suspicious.

But the problem wasn't in the site ... it was in something Gmail was doing to the URL. Clicking on it didn't work; copying the link location didn't work. Copying just the text and pasting it ... got me in at 9:10AM. Too late. Ah, Gmail, can't live without you, but every once in a while...

BANG! ZOOM! To the moon. Oh well, here's hoping I get in as a professional like I did the last two years ... this year I have even more claim, I guess, as I have a second book out, appear in two more books, and am involved with Blitz Comics. Crossing my fingers! -the Centaur Pictured: Lots of stuff. Fair use and whatnot ... parody, informative commentary, transformative and educational uses, and so forth.

Involves politics, but not really political

Published March 3, 2012 by centaur

Andrew Breitbart is dead at 43. He was apparently a conservative commentator; I wasn't too familiar with him except for some of the scandals he broke. But the point, as John Scalzi said, is that he was 43. I'm used to hearing about accomplished people who are much younger than I am ... Larry Page, Britney Spears, Christopher Paolini, that last born when I entered high school. Occasionally people in that age bracket die. It's a damn shame, everyone says, they died so young. But when Andrew Breitbart died, while it was clear that he died young - to the point of spawning (what at first appear to be ridiculous) conspiracy theories - no-one is too surprised. Because a male's chance of dying of a heart attack triples when you move up to 35-44 year age bracket, and triples again when you roll over into 45-54. I'd enter some snark about white males like myself being worse off, but it doesn't seem to be the case. So Andrew's about the right age where people should start worrying about dying of a heart attack. So am I. God speed, Andrew. And may God be with us all. -the Centaur Pictured: a memento mori featuring my cat, Caesar, curling up in the lap of luxury next to the skull of one of his less evolutionarily successful distant relatives. Looks like Caesar had an easier time taking down that giraffe than his buddy there.

Five Favorite Noises

Published March 2, 2012 by centaur

My friend Keiko started a meme over at Write to The End: what are your five favorite noises? The rules:

Don’t take too long on it. I’d say post your list within 24 hours. And don’t worry about trying to get your absolute top 5 favorite sounds ever. When you’ve collected 5 sounds you love, just post the list. We know this is just for fun, and we won’t hold you to any of your stated favorites. (And if you think of 5 more, you can post those, too!)

My favorite noises are:

Gabby's Purr

Dad's Whistle

The Enterprise Going to Warp

The Sound of a Lightsaber

The Engines of the TARDIS

Runner up goes to the weird noise I can make in my throat.

-the Centaur

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternally Inspiring Tome

Published March 2, 2012 by centaur

This is the book that got me started on artificial intelligence ... and now has inspired me again to attack my craft with greater vigor. I was writing an essay for The Centaur's Pen column for the Write to The End site and realized it depended on a concept - true, but unprovable theorems - which isn't in wide circulation. So I've started an essay on that topic for this site, and decided to go reread Gödel, Escher, Bach, the book which introduced me to the concept.

At the writing group, the topic of the essay and Gödel, Escher, Bach came up, and we all started discussing how intricate, how rewarding, and how friendly Hofstadter's immense tome is. It's a work of genius that continues to stagger me to this day. And then my writing friends told me that in the new edition there's a foreward with the entire back story of how the book came to be.

I picked it up last night, and reading the new intro I was gratified to learn that I understood his basic thesis - that conscious intelligence arises from bare matter by grounding its symbols in correspondence to reality, then inexorably turning that grounding inward into a spiral of self-reference with no end. Hofstadter and I might disagree about what's sufficient to produce conscious intelligence, but we'd just be quibbling about details, because I think he nailed a necessary component.

But after the intro of the foreword, when I began to read the story of how this 750 page long Pulitzer Prize winning book started its life as a 20 page letter that Hofstadter decided needed to be turned into a pamphlet, I was stunned.

He wrote it in 5 years.

Well, it actually took 6 to complete, because he typeset it himself---through a happy-but-not-at-the-time accident, twice---producing an amazing work that was polished far beyond his original intention. But he wrote it while in graduate school, while teaching classes, while traveling cross-country. He put it down for a bit finishing his PhD thesis itself, but basically the book's a white hot blaze of inspiration polished to pure excellence.

I'm inspired, all over again.

-the Centaur

The Big Apple

Published February 18, 2012 by centaur

Prior to Thursday, I'd visited New York maybe five to seven times ... all total for probably less than 24 hours. Maybe even less than 12: four, or maybe 6 brief layovers, and one 6 hour trip for a product announcement when I worked for Enkia, where quite frankly I should have stayed home because I just stood behind our CEO Ashwin in a show of support and then missed my scheduled interview because me and my interviewer couldn't find the Enkia booth. So I felt I'd missed out.

But now my beautiful wife works in upstate New York, and for a rare occasion knew what her schedule was, so we're taking the weekend off together in a belated birthday / Valentine's Day / repeated honeymoon extravaganza. And the first thing you notice about New York? The traffic sucks. HA! Not really, I've been to Boston, Atlanta and San Francisco, not to mention Athens and Tokyo, so the traffic here is just fine. No, no, the first thing you notice in New York is the buildings.

Like Chicago, New York has wonderful architecture, but where Chicago is ornate, New York is monolithic.

Spires stretch again and again far up into the sky.

The second thing you notice is how friendly all the people are. Unfortunately I'd been prejudiced against New York City by a few bad encounters with arrogant New Yorkers - one of whom called Atlanta, the ninth largest city in the U.S., a "small town." I shouldn't take offense at that, of course, but having been from a town less than a tenth of the size of Atlanta ... and knowing that THAT wasn't even a small town, I had the temerity to correct her ... at which point she seriously tried to defend that proposition, demonstrating in one short conversation that she had no knowledge of small towns, the properties of the power distribution, or the concept of orders of magnitude (and this from a supposed math major). One bad encounter led to pure prejudice, I admit it. Well, actually three bad encounters - two involving traffic cops waving cars into places they shouldn't have gone. So three bad encounters led to pure prejudice, I freely admit it.

So I was expecting the worst when I arrived ... but in my whole time here everyone has been so nice.

True, there have been a few stereotypical "New York Characters" lurking in the backgrounds - clueless traffic cops who waved cars out into oncoming traffic, a pedestrian who blithely walked out into traffic and then kicked at the car that nearly ran him over, an 'ey, buddy, watch where you're going' wiseguy in a cafe, and an overweight construction worker who looked straight out of central casting. But they've been extras, off the main stage.

The cab drivers are all nice, and even roll down their windows to give directions to other motorists. The waiter at a tiny cafe which charges outrageous New York prices is careful to list every separate charge "because I don't want you to be surprised" and to warn diners if they've ordered a dish that might take longer than the others. Parking garage attendants say "hey, no problem buddy" when you've unexpectedly got to hold up the line a bit to remove something from your car. Bookstores don't ask you to check your bags; bookstore clerks try to be crystal clear about what they can and can't look up for you out of the textbook computer. Shoe salesmen don't take offense at "made from real leather, made in the USA" but actually help you find things, and chat with you about the music while your partner tries on shoes. Even the security guards were really nice.

So yneh, stereotypes of New York. Pfui on you.

The next things you notice are the vibrant street culture and the vibrant mix of people. The bottom levels of every building seemed filled with shops, restaurants, and what have you, and the people milling about are more varied than almost any other place I've been to save perhaps Washington D.C. or global monuments like Stonehenge, Loch Ness or Olympic National Park.

Like other cultured urban centers I've been in, such as San Francisco, certain parts of San Jose, and certain parts of Atlanta, there's a definite ... cultural class barrier. It's hard to describe, but the first time I went to Santana Row in San Jose I definitely didn't feel welcome: there was a certain snootiness, or projected disapproval, for people who didn't quite fit in.

Unlike my beloved Santana Row, however, where I still don't feel like I fit in because I'm the guy lugging the bookbag looking for a quiet corner coffeehouse while everyone else is trying to look hip, young and single, in New York I find it is pretty easy to look around, to see how people are adapting to their environment, and to fit right in.

Or maybe I'm just a goofball wearing a scarf because it was frigging cold (but not like Boston).

There are many beautiful things we've seen in New York ... gleaming skyscrapers, ancient buildings, wonderful restaurants, variegated shops, the Stomp show and many, many people in fantastic clothing and even more awesome boots. :-) But the thing I'm most interested in? Well, you guessed it: the books....

Tomorrow it's the 9/11 Memorial, the Metropolitan Museum ... and whatever else we want.

-the Centaur

Quit Procrastinating

Published January 28, 2012 by centaur

One of the most important things a creative person needs to learn is to recognize when you're procrastinating. For example, I often have ideas to put on this blog - two or three times per day - but I'm a quiet person, and I think far more strings of speech than I ever put to paper. So it's important for me to blog whenever I can.

So I've had several blog ideas today - "Getting Traction", "Logic Versus Rationality", "Rating Your Own Work (and How I Rate)" and the one I just thought of that made me open Ecto, "Advantages of Offline Blogging Clients" and its companion piece "How to Use Photoshop Filters and Photo Booth to Make Watercolor Art Because You Don't Have Clip Art Handy."

All of these are procrastination.

I owe my editors feedback on Traci Odom's reading of the audiobook of FROST MOON. I didn't get to send it after I finished it because I finished it at 3 in the morning in the hospital and then spent the next day getting my loved one back home safely before hopping on a plane and getting back to all the work delayed by this unexpected trip.

During this whole family quasi-emergency this week, I deliberately focused on taking on tasks like listening to FROST MOON or blogging or cleaning up my hard drive, all of which didn't require building up a lot of mental state, which made them ideal for tasks for sitting up next to a hospital bed ready to help at a moment's notice.

But the operation's over, the result's a success, the loved ones are back home and my reading's done. When you've got an outstanding task that requires thought, it's SO EASY to switch gears to something that doesn't require a lot of mental effort. But no. Not this time. Time to write the notes, record the pronunciations, send the email, and get this audiobook out the door.

Finish blogpost hit Publish.

-the Centaur

The Stack is Growing

Published January 27, 2012 by centaur

FROM THE WRITER'S ANONYMOUS 12-STEP SUPPORT GROUP MEETING: Hi, I'm Anthony Francis, and I'm an author. ("Hi, Anthony!") To feed my addiction, I get stuff published.

My first published novel, the urban fantasy FROST MOON featuring magical tattoo artist Dakota Frost, won an EPIC e-book award. It's out in paperback, Kindle, in German as SKINDANCER, and soon to be audiobook thanks to the wonderful reading skills of Traci Odom. The second book in the series, BLOOD ROCK, came out last year to good reviews, and the third book, LIQUID FIRE, will come out later this year. A spinoff series starring Dakota's daughter Cinnamon Frost, HEX CODE, will come out next year, also part of a planned trilogy.

One of my short stories, "Steampunk Fairy Chick," was recently published in the UnCONventional anthology. The story, featuring steampunk adventurer Jeremiah Willstone, is based on a novel called THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE (again part of a planned trilogy) which I've got in rough draft form with a possible release late this year or early next year. Another of my short stories, "Sibling Rivalry," was published in The Leading Edge magazine in 1995, but is now available on my web site. I also write flash fiction. One of my flash shorts, "If Looks Could Kill", was just published in THE DAILY FLASH 2012 (pictured above) and another, "The Secret of the T-Rex's Arms", was just published in Smashed Cat Magazine.

My nonfiction research papers are largely available on my research page, including my nearly 700-page Ph.D thesis (hork). I and my thesis advisor Ashwin Ram have a chapter on "Multi-Plan Adaptation and Retrieval in an Experience-based Agent" in David Leake's book CASE BASED REASONING: EXPERIENCES, LESSONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS, and Ashwin, Manish Mehta and I have a chapter on "Emotional Memory and Adaptive Personalities" in THE HANDBOOK OF RESEARCH ON SYNTHETIC EMOTIONS AND SOCIABLE ROBOTICS.

I have more writing in the works, including a novelette called "Stranded" set in the Dresanian universe from which this blog takes its name, and more writing on the Internet. But what I list above is The Stack At This Time - what you can get in print. Enjoy!

-the Centaur

The Centaur’s Pen at Write to the End

Published January 21, 2012 by centaur

I'm part of a fantabulous writing group called Write to the End that meets at Mission City Coffee. This group, which started at Barnes and Noble at Steven's Creek before the economy and contracting book market convinced B&N to cut back on their community programs, has been the best thing for my writing productivity since ... well, ever. I'd even stopped doing National Novel Writing Month until I started attending the WTTE, but now I do Nano every year ... and go to the writing group almost every Tuesday. SO ... it's now time to give back. I'll be doing a monthly column on the WTTE blog titled "The Centaur's Pen." In it, I will write about writing: about why to write, what to write, how to write, how to edit, how to get published --- and how to behave AFTER you get published. Now, I am not a great writer, but I'm trying very hard, I think about writing almost all the time, and I've spent a lot of time talking to other aspiring writers and learning about the art, craft and business of writing. So I hope my insights will be of use to you!

January's inaugural article is on "Learning from Publication:" how seeing your work in print can be an opportunity to improve your craft, even though you can no longer change it. An excerpt follows:

Recently I wrote a short story called “Steampunk Fairy Chick” for the UnCONventional anthology. Even though the story went through many revisions, lots of beta readers, two editors and a copyeditor, when I read through my author’s copy I found there were still things I wanted to change. Nothing major—just line edit stuff, a selection of different choices of sentence structure that I think would have made the story more readable. I can’t react to this the way I would with a draft; the story’s in print. And I don’t want to just throw these insights on the floor. Instead, I want to analyze the story and find general ideas I could have applied that would have improved the story before it hit the stands—ideas I could use in the future on new stories.

To read more, click through to Write to the End and "Learning from Publication." If you want to read the story the article is talking about, click through to Amazon and buy the UnCONventional anthology (in print or ebook). Enjoy! -the Centaur

A Toast to 2011

Published January 1, 2012 by centaur

It's the last post of 2011, but I give you no year end summary, no predictions for the future.

We've celebrated a lot, but there's not even a party today, just chilling with my wife, remembering good times.

I just send you good wishes, and wish you happiness in the holidays, however you find it.

Because, Lord knows, there are a lot of ways, now more than ever.

So from all of us at the Edge to you and yours, a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

-the Centaur

Yosemite puts the awe in awesome

Published December 14, 2011 by centaur

Awesome is a word I overuse, wearing away its original meaning of "breathtaking."

Yosemite, now Yosemite is breathtaking.

Hey human, get off my lawn.

Unlike the Grand Canyon, which is overwhelming in its detail, Yosemite's beauty comes from its sheer variety packed so close together.

Truly God's Country.

-the Centaur

Aptera … Gone

Published December 4, 2011 by centaur

I am SO not surprised. This will be a bit ranty for me; it's taken from an email I sent to friends and lightly edited for tone so I don't get sued. For those of you who don't know, Aptera was a manufacturer of a proposed electric car, and they've gone belly-up. From a recent article in Wired:

The truth is, Aptera always faced long odds and has been in trouble for at least two years. The audience for a sperm-shaped, three-wheeled, electric two-seater was never anything but small. It didn’t help that production of the 2e — at one point promised for October 2009 — was continually delayed as Wilbur ordered redesigns to make it more appealing to the mainstream. Aptera had a small window in which to be a first mover in the affordable EV space, and that window closed the moment the Nissan Leaf andChevrolet Volt hit the market. At that point, Aptera teetered on the brink of irrelevance. Eventually, though, Wilbur realized the 2e would never be anything but a niche vehicle and switched gears, something potential investors made clear must happen. They wondered about the market demand for such a funky vehicle and the long-term viability of the company if it didn’t expand its product lineup.

I don't want to get off on a rant here, but let's be clear about this. I WAS GOING TO BUY THE CAR, but couldn't because Wilbur ordered a redesign. So his company was out $20K that went to Toyota (actually the Toyota was more expensive). A lot of other people had plunked money down for the car - more than 3000. They had to refund a non-trivial number of deposits. So Wilbur ordered a redesign of a vehicle FOR WHICH HE ALREADY HAD PREORDERS keeping it out of their hands. I read a prescient article, somewhere on an Aptera board or something, in which a ranting techie unexpectedly nailed it: Wilbur came in, changed the car to "prove" his auto design chops or something, and killed the company by derailing the ongoing production. Oh wait I've seen this movie: Tucker: The Man and His Dream. Now, I wasn't on the inside of Aptera, and I don't know what Wilbur faced, so I cut him some percentage of slack as an armchair quarterback. "That having been said," it seems clear that a driveable electric vehicle was delayed to market for reasons as ridiculous as enabling users to go through a drivethrough.

For months we have been receiving important feedback from you, our depositor community, and we have come to realize there were flaws in our initial product assumptions — specifically as it pertains to satisfying the needs of real-world consumers. Our greatest degree of learning came just a few months ago when we asked all of you to participate in a brief survey. This critical piece of research requested insights about your expectations for our company and our products, and we discovered a notable disconnect between our product plan and realistic expectations. Some modifications had to be made. For example, you helped us realize that some trade-offs for convenience (like being able to grab a burger in a drive-thru) might be necessary to make the ownership experience more palatable, even if it cost us a couple tenths of a point on our drag coefficient.

Yes, the Aptera should have been able to receive a burger at a drive through. But at the mythical 300mpg why didn't you just SELL ME THE DAMN CAR and iterate on the next version. Heck, the first Prius was butt-ugly, not the gorgeous (and spacious) Kensington blue mouse I currently drive. No, you don't want to sell a car that will catch fire or anything, but you can't fix everything - and if you try, you lose. The best is the enemy of the good. And the marketing language we see above is classic, CLASSIC spindoctoring which sounds SO similar to the "we've made our decision and we're going to stick to it no matter whether it really makes sense" situations that I *am* personally familiar with. Interestingly, I've heard similar stories about tech leaders who focus on the appearance of their product to investors ... or, sometimes, just its appearance. I don't mean Steve Jobs focusing on pixels in icons because he wanted the experience of his product to be perfect; there are some wannabe Steve Jobsen clients-from-hell in the Valley who focus on the pure appearance of the product and not what it actually did or how it affected users - and things always get derailed as a result. Worrying about whether consumers will like the door of your car is appearance. Worrying about what investors will think about the marketability of your car is appearance. Sixty million dollars in potential gross revenue from three thousand prepaid customers was reality, and Wilbur threw that money on the floor. Aptera, you're missed. Your cars, which I never even got to drive, most of all. -the Centaur Pictured: the Aptera prototype on its visit to The Search Engine That Starts With A G. And no, I never got to drive it.