Writing Links

Erik (not the hairy Swede, but the author of science fiction books), read a short story of mine today. I'd given Klund the story to read before, but it was significantly different by the time I handed it to Erik. I'd added some personality to the main character and wove the bits and pieces together more solidly, as well as shredded the last third, which I always felt was the weakest part. I'm still not 100% sure it isn't, at its heart, a retelling of Star Trek I, but I think I buried that thread deep enough that it stands on its own now.

A bit of writing got me digging around again.  I've always dragged my stories with me, from desktop 1, to desktop 2, to desktop n, to laptop, to Dropbox.  But I've got a lot of old material that needs reviewing, despite knowing what I want to work on next (scifi book - it's already 1/8 done, and there are enough notes to flush out the next 180 pages.  But I have to finish the bits and pieces I'm supposed to be pulling together with Ming and Erik [the Hairy Swede this time]).  So this evening I was poking around, organizing interesting publishing and agent links.

• http://www.openculture.com/2012/01/writing_rules.html - an excellent compilation of writing rules by various authors.  I like "never use a verb other than said to carry dialogue."  I'm pretty sure I avoid that rule all the time.  I also like Gaiman saying if someone tells you to fix it, it probably needs it.  If they tell you HOW to fix it, they're probably wrong.
• http://www.sfwriter.com/agent.htm - Robert J. Sawyer talking about how to find an agent.  Apparently "never use a Canadian" is valid advice.
• http://www.meetup.com/MNspec/about/ - the local Meetup group.  It doesn't seem particularly active, although the links for local authors has been updated recently.  
• Minn-Stf - the Minnesota Science Fiction Society.  I get Einblatt, but I can never bring myself to attend an event or convention. I don't even like obsessive bicyclists, and I'm one of them.  How well would I do with obsessive science fiction writers, each with a particular niche.  I think it's funny that their "very sporadic webzine" hasn't been published since before I was born.  Literally.  Ha!  That's some Shakespearian humor.
• http://www.duotrope.com/ - how to search for publishers of fiction.
• http://critters.org/ - a scifi, fantasy, and horror workshop on the web.  You critique and get critiqued.  Haven't tried it yet.
• http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mslee/mag.html - speculative fiction markets compiled by Mary Soon Lee.
• http://www.hughhowey.com/ - Erik (the writer) indirectly sent me this.  A blog by the guy who self-published "Wool" to Amazon.  He breaks down the sales math on Amazon here.

Sudden Lovelys, Brian Laidlaw, and Paul Doffing

Saturday night, Eryn, Pooteewheet, and I went to the Northeast Social Club for dinner, and then to the Ritz to see Paul Doffing's album release.  The Sudden Lovelys were playing as part of the event, and Eryn had been asking if there was a way to see them that didn't involve a bar at 9:00 p.m.  I have to say, seeing three very good acts perform in the Ritz Theater with only a few dozen other people around, and the bar open and serving Sweet Child of Vine...that's definitely the way to enjoy music.

Brian Laidlaw was on first and played a number of tracks from his album wolf wolf wolf.  There were a lot of great songs, and Eryn particularly liked a number of them, including The Last Known Whereabouts of Amelia Earhardt, which includes some rather peculiar lyrics about poets, although you can't find them on his site.  Ashley (Ash) Hanson sang with him, and they harmonized well together.  I've never heard the Dusty Porch Sisters sing before, but perhaps I'll have to watch for them performing locally.

Brian said he plays at The Amsterdam in St. Paul.  He  has an  upcoming performance with Alicia Wiley who I went to see at Barbette, but the acoustics weren't that great.  So I'm looking forward to hearing her at a venue designed for sound.

The Sudden Lovelys performed next.  Eryn's favorite moment of the night was when they changed up their set to play a special request and played Dirty Rotten Apples, which she'd asked for between sets. Paige and Danny make me appreciate that local singers in person almost always sound exactly like they do on their albums, if not better. Eryn jammed along to most of their songs, even though it was almost 10 p.m.
And Paul Doffing was the man of the evening. I'd never heard anyone play a 12 string guitar before. It was absolutely beautiful. Particularly on the acoustic songs, his fingers crawled all over the strings. Made me appreciate exactly how far it is from my puttering around to being amazingly good. Peshtigo Fire, despite the fact that he told a story that has Eryn constantly talking about P-shit-go Fire, is excellent and you can hear it on his site. And it's not too often you can add a song about great fires of Northern Wisconsin to your list of music. Eryn kept her eight-year old self up until after 11:00 p.m. So that should give you an idea of how much she liked it.

Twilight Struggle

Saturday, Troy invited me over to play some war games, and we agreed on Twilight Struggle, which I've never played before.  He played the US.  I play the USSR.  Had history gone according to our game, the cold war would have ended by 1969 with the USSR winning before Reagan ever had a chance to muse about Star Wars.  Besides.  In our alternate reality, the USSR owned the space race.

It was an interesting, card-driven game, where the goal was to use the cards in your hand in conjunction with placing influence points on a world map to influence the various areas of the globe to follow your ideology, while avoiding the catastrophe of nuclear war.  Think risk, but shorter (particularly if you only play six of the ten turns), and much more interesting.

My strategy was to push for victory points at every turn, which seems like a good strategy.  But it's a better strategy if the dice and the cards seem to be falling in your favor and your opponent forgets for a turn that a military operations differential at Defcon 2 or 3 can net you a few extra victory points (that's much more obvious when you're playing).

My favorite milestones of the game:

1. Refusing to influence Malaysia to be communist.  A personal homage to Ming.
2. Getting African scoring, because I threw my "left over" points all over Africa.
3. Keeping the defcon at 2 most of the game, just above nuclear war, because no one dukes it out during defcon 2, so no one takes over Africa.
4. Troy totally side swiping me in Central America/Mexico which turned on me like the Germans were hoping they'd turn on the US due to the Zimmermann Telegram.  
5. Getting South American scoring and realizing that my total lack of presence there was still more than Troy's presence and that it was enough to win the game.
6. Backing up my indignation at the U-2 Incident by encouraging UN intervention in the Ussuri River Skirmish.  The US can suck it - China will never be their friend, U-2 spy planes are pieces of junk, and I deserved a lot of victory points for my commentary on the subject.
7. We Will Bury You! - the card said I would.  I did.
8. The uncomfortable-ness that accompanies playing Missile Envy in a mano-a-mano war game.  This was the the card that would have placed the ending of the cold war the latest in our game.  It's noted that it took place in 1984.  So Reagan would have been president, and The Gipper would have been the president that lost the Cold War.  Shame.  But I quote the Missile Envy card, which you have to trade with each other (Troy played it!), "(1984) A term coined by Dr. Helen Caldicott, it reflects the general feminist critique that the Cold War was driven by male ego with very Freudian undercurrents.  When one examines the terminology of "deep penetration" and "multiple reentry" one wonders if she had a point. Caldicott went on to found Physicians for Social Responsibility, and her book became a rallying point within the anti-nuclear movement."

Excellent game.  Definitely something worth playing again.

Webcomics

I thought today's Snarky was funnier than usual.  But then it was more manager-centric, and I'm partial to those.  I was worried no one would appreciate the boundaryless humor, but it was retweeted at least once.

I don't think Snarky's art is necessarily better (although Lupi of Altered Aesthetics did a fine job - we just don't have color and stick to a limited set of single panels), but I generally enjoy our humor better than 99.5% of the other comics I run across on the web.

• For instance, Web Comic Wednesday, five tech-based web comics.
• Five obscure humor web comics
• The best webcomics according to PC Mag (arguably, a better list, as XKCD is on it)

Books - Recommendations from Various Folks

A lot of my time has been spent lately thinking about what I want to read next.  I dare say I spend more time worrying about what I want to read than actually reading.  One of the developers I work with solved part of the problem by writing his own book and publishing it on Amazon.  So I'm reading Erik Hyrkas' Tritium Gambit.  Unfortunately, it's a damn quick read and after a (week) day I'm already half way through it.  I'm enjoying it so far. Sort of Men In Black, but with aliens instead of humans, set in Minnesota.  I hear it may be free for your Kindle on Amazon this weekend.  $0.00 is a pretty good deal.


And I also read the Leviathan series - Leviathan, Behemoth, Goliath - by Scott Westerfeld.  Mean Mr. Mustard recommended it.  Young adult, but well worth the read.  Puts The Hunger Games to shame in my opinion.  Not nearly so whiny.  And that's from someone with a predilection for dystopic literature (so I'd trend toward The Hunger Games).  It's a steampunk alt history novel about WWI being fought between Darwinists, who manipulate life, and Clankers, who manipulate machines.  The lines follow the political lines of WWI (Britain/Russia = Darwinists, Germany/Austria = Clankers, US/Japan = amalgam), but it's much more complicated than that.  He does a great job of interspersing actual history with his steampunk vision.  I've been harassing Eryn and my wife to read it with assurances that they'll love it.

I read this article, about what book introduced various authors to science fiction and fantasy.  I'm interested to read The Wonderful Trip to the Mushroom Planet and Planetoid, The Riddle-Master of Hed, and The World of Tiers.  I apologize with characteristic Minnesota niceness to Galen Dara, but no one should consider their intro to sci fi to be Anne McCaffrey and The Wheel of Time.

I think this article on alternative families in fantasy and science fiction only told me what not to read.

Which brings me to the icing on the cake.  David Brin wrote a damn splendid write up of his favorite sci fi books.  In categories.  Huxley.  Banks.  Vinge.  Heinlein.  Bear.  Asimov.  Niven.  Sheffield.  Wilson. Gaiman.  Mieville. Haldeman. Dick.  Westerfeld!  This is a f*ing fine list.  The only immediate book that jumps to mind that I disagree with is Harry Turtledove's Great War Series.  And to be honest, I don't know that it's a bad series.  I only know I hated the first book of the World War series so much it still makes me angry.  Mean Mr. Mustard can attest to that as I brought it up outside his workplace.  The only book that ever made me angrier was a Hammer's Slammers book by David Drake a friend game me where the protagonist was rewarded for trying to rape a lesbian by having sex with her and her partner in the end for saving their lives. Ick.  Anyway - Brin's list.  Print it.  Read all of them.  It's the best list I've ever seen.

And finally, something for the not so scifi/fantasy inclined.  Beyond Budgeting: How Managers Can Break Free From the Annual Performance Trap by Jeremy Hope and Robin Fraser.  It comes to late for this year's review process, and I haven't read it yet, but it came highly recommended by the speakers at the Code Freeze Conference and it's on my Kindle (iPad).

And 30 Books Everyone in Software Business Should Read (and why).  This is actually a very good list as far as software development lists go.  Spolsky's books were important to me, and I still quote them and explain to people how the ideas in his books explain much of the software we work with every day at my workplace.  I've read a number of the others on this list and I'm currently reading the Pragmatic Programmer.  While developer books can quickly show their age, if you get past worrying about the specifics and focus on the generalities of what never changes, you gain some valuable insight.

Code Freeze 2012 Continuous Delivery - II

Presentation number two of Code Freeze 2012 was Michael Nygard who spoke on "Dev Ops Cooperation at the Worst of Times" or, as he called it, "When the fur flies." Michael is the author of Release It! by the Pragmatic Programming group, in case you're familiar with the book. His presentation was less "how to" and more "what  happened."  Anecdotes about a situation he was in where (product) life when horribly wrong, how it went wrong, and what they did to compensate.  And subsequently what the efforts to make it right meant to company culture (a focus on heroics and looking for the next hero).  It was a good talk because, if you work for a large company, it seems very few people talk about the bad stories at work.  Why? Because the people involved in the bad stories and the bad decisions are still there and possibly in executive management and they don't want to be reminded that something went wrong and cost millions of dollars.

To summarize Nygard, I state what so many people have said before, small teams often work much better than large teams.  And although he spoke to the connection between Dev and Ops and the collocation of both, to me the real point is that no project stands on any one team alone, and the more you understand the stack and the role of others and work with them to identify the connection points, the more success you'll have.  As he said, organizational boundaries can become process boundaries and while it might seem like that's the sign of a organizational maturity, it is anything but.

Nygard had quite a bit of advice on the interaction of Dev and Ops (and other teams).  He reiterated there is no "they" and there should be no stereotypes such as "ops is crabby."  And the reverse is true, Ops shouldn't complain about "my poor system" and try to shield it from the "hordes of developers" intent upon subverting it by talking about putting developers in jail with no sudo rights.  Some software solutions rely on hardware solutions.  Some hardware issues can only be resolved by working with the developers and understanding what the conditions the software was architected under.

Nygard listed four traits he feels are necessary for effective DevOps:

• Culture
• Automation
• Measurement 
• Sharing

He also listed the types of folks he prefers to avoid.  Among them are "function point project managers", a term I hadn't heard before.  It refers to project managers who see the date as the overriding rule for a project to which all things should take a back seat.

And he mentioned the attrition rate for developers (coders) is very high in the first three years, and 50% by year 10.  I'd be interested to know where he got that statistic.  I'm obviously an example, as I moved into system training (with some development) by year 9 (at my current employer, if you include contact time), and management by year 11.  But I haven't given any thought to whether that holds true across most folks I know.  Ming obviously.  Erik not (in my opinion.  He still codes).  Mean Mr. Mustard not.  But then again, that's 50%.

The one thing I found humorous about his presentation, rather than his general humor, including a Magic The Gathering card of The Machine That Goes Ping, was his diagram of the usual dev ops interaction.  I've recreated it as best I can from memory below.  I find it ironic that on the U of MN campus, someone is diagramming Dev Ops interaction as a glory hole.  If you're not familiar with the term, look it up.  Just not at work.

Reason 1000 or so not to own rental property

I think we're truly slum lords now.  If the big "bitch" on the wall wasn't proof enough, perhaps the fact that there's so much trash next to the house is (I did pick up trash when I was there in the fall.  This is new trash).  And no, the renter didn't send us a photo of the graffiti.  I heard about it from my neighbor (who owns the rental house next door) who drove Eryn and I to coffee this morning when he caught us walking because Pooteewheet had both sets of car keys.  His ex-wife (who helps with the rental properties) sent me the photo. So tomorrow I get to talk to the Apple Valley police and then try to find matching paint that will no doubt peel off because it's too cold to paint. But will at least obfuscate the word.  I'd have been down there today, but my new project at work was kind enough to have a prod issue and a developer on pager unreachable by pager.  I'm not looking forward to de-bitching in the dark.

Code Freeze 2012 Continuous Delivery - I

I went to Code Freeze 2012 at the U of MN this week.  I've been going for years and although some years are better than others, I generally walk away with something worthwhile.  This year's topic was "Continuous Delivery", a subject I'm very interested in as, before I was moved off the desktop products I was managing, I was trying to get them up to speed with Continuous Build and Continuous Delivery.  There were almost 13 separate products without unit test that were deployed to the desktop: e.g. 64 bit windows, 32 bit windows, Windows 7, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Office 32 bit, Office 64 bit, Office 2007, Office 2010, and a variety of other configurations.  One of the more amusing days was when a customer called to complain that our product didn't work quite right under Parallels.  As if we'd tested that configuration given we weren't testing anything other than manually over a two week period.  Embarrassing.

The conference was better than usual, with presentations by Jez Humble of Thoughtworks, Michael Nygard who wrote Release It!, Jenna Pederson (can I say cute local developer and not get in trouble? She's more than cute...her brain is cute, as proven by her blog and, I could add, Jez Humble was good looking as well, and had a better accent...perhaps that protects me from developer sexism), David Hussman (he of the many "dudes"), and John Penix of Google.  It made me appreciate that no system was so legacy-ridden or large that it couldn't be refactored.

Jez Humble (not a consistent blogger) of Thoughtworks was not only informative, but incredibly funny.  He's a walking series of sound bites on legs.  One of my favorites was about Agile, "Everyone's taking orders standing up instead of sitting down."  Or, "We shouldn't have to come in and sit in a data center for the weekend.  Life shouldn't be like that."  Word.  And, after talking about a dev ops moment in which dev ops said "no thank you", he clarified, "They were operations people...they were not that polite."

Jez talked about lean software development, quoting Eric Ries, a proponent of a Minimum Viable Product.  For those of you in agile, this is the concept that you should always have working software.  And just enough.  I'm a huge proponent of this.  It's perhaps the most important aspect of agile to me.  If you have a project, then you should have short cycles where you provide something that works.  Might not be perfect.  Might not be what you want in the long run.  But it's a deliverable that if you were to put it in front of customers, it might make money.  It gives you a plateau where you can decide whether to continue at all, take a break, fire your developers and hire new ones...some location where you can make a decision and still have something in hand that is concrete.

He talked about flickr.com, where they do 10 releases a day.  When Yahoo picked them up, they tried to change them, but were changed instead.  As is appropriate.

He talked about Poppendieck's Implementing Lean Software Development and the idea that you can measure your product by the amount of time it takes to change one (1) line of code (pg. 59).  Based on the products I managed, 24-48 hours minimum, even if all the Directors and VPs are available.  That's too long. The line should change in 1-2 hours, and the build/test/deploy/test should take another 2 hours.  Max.

And Jez talked about how continuous delivery is composed of three major parts:

• Automation
• Patterns and Practices (the subject of his own book about continuous delivery)
• Collaboration

Sounds about right to me.  If you don't include the perspiration.

Ebony and Ivory...

Ebony and ivory, pancakes living together in perfect harmony...half of these pancakes are Eryn's.  Half are Morgan's.  At least one pancake was left behind with the chips scraped off the top.

Chipotle Reunion

This happened a few weeks ago, but I wanted to a.) get it on my blog and b.) put something on top of the naughty librarian so it's not the latest post for anyone who goes directly to my blog.

My old development and business team, plus some folks who were on the team (business side) after I left, plus some adoptees (Mean Mr. Mustard).  This was our best turnout at the local Chipotle (which opened while most of us were on the project) in quite some time.  Sandy, who was my lead, is holding the camera and, left to right: me (looking sort of Sling Blade or Rainman), Dawn, Christy Twofist, Aaron (whose face is fuzzy if you zoom in - it's creepy, like what you'd expect the truth to be about vampire pictures, that they'd be just distorting enough to fool facial recognition software), Boss, Mean Mr. Mustard, Julie Mousehammer, Flat Chili Monica, and Dan.

Lawbooks - the NSFW Version

In my ongoing series related to questionable pictures I find on the web featuring a certain series of books.  Apparently she was comfortable studying until the jerk with the camera showed up.  Is nude studying covered under Young vs. Arkansas?

Remember to Clean Up

I was going to add this picture to a post about sexy Marvin the Martian costumes after seeing it on the web.  So it's been sitting around on my desktop for weeks.  Isn't she fetching?

But during the time between saving the picture, and this post, I helped a friend troubleshoot a web app.  What the two things have in common is that I tested the upload functionality of the app repeatedly, using this image of Ms. Martian.  So when all the files were dropped back into Dropbox, there were probably 100 copies of this file (part of the upload process was to tag the files with a numeric portion so there wasn't duplication, even if two people uploaded Readme.txt) in the mix.  The Dropbox folder was shared with the friend's client.  Fortunately, while sitting around reading, some part of my brain thought about the picture.  And then I thought about testing the app.  And then I drew the line from A to B (B1..B100).  I'll be interested to know if Dropbox prompts the client with "100 files removed from Dropbox."

Favorite Moments of 2011

I have three favorite moments from 2011, and they're in order, despite that my family isn't first.  I suspect they'll understand, given that the first one is a.) bicycling and b.) with Ming.

1.) Bike the Border with Ming.
2.) Ride from Colorado to Montana with Grandma and Eryn
3.) Orlando with Jen and Eryn

This is not to say I like vacations with my wife the least, it simply points out that bicycling trumps all.

Dr. Who vs. the Ghostbusters

This is for Kyle and his nephew. The 10 geekiest burlesque performances.  Not only is there a dance that involves Dr. Who and his scarf, but a dance involving Slimer and the Sta Puff Marshmallow "man".  Although Data and the Klingon are WAY more disturbing.

Enjoy some uncle/nephew bonding!

http://www.buzzfeed.com/awesomer/the-10-geekiest-burlesque-performances-nsfw

Things I'm learning about Fable II...

Eryn's been playing Fable 2.  It has an MA rating.  We figured we could just walk her through the risque parts and explain the birds and bees.  But I've been reading on line, particularly as I watched a humorous scene the other day where Eryn's spouse kept basically calling her a fame whore and divorced her.  This involved Eryn chasing her husband down a path in the woods and offering him a diamond ring repeatedly, while he initially spat back snarky comments about how much she preferred glory to being married to him, and then just ignored her and stood around in the woods.  I was interested to see if this was a normal part of game play, and came across some game advice:

"In Fable II there is no safe way for lesbians to have sex, the game forces you to have unprotected sex. This results in a high number of STD's on your tracked stats."

Apparently Fable II has a rich environment full of loving relationships:

"My wife hates me in fable 2 i think...? the reason why i say this, my one wife which is in the city after you go to the spire, i married her (she is one of the hookers) and when i try to have sex with her she ignores me and walks away. Also when i give her gifts or do expressions they hardly work. even though the family description says she wants sex, she wont...so is it a glitch or what? and how would i solve it."

Yet, strangely realistic:

"Spouses keep track of how long the player has been married to them, they will occasionally make remarks on the length of a relationship. "Do you realize, we've been together now for three years. People said we would never make it this long!""

At the moment Eryn is downstairs playing Call of Duty MW3 with a shotgun she tricked out herself, and my wife already gave her the "this isn't like real war, in real war people would be dying or dead at your feet, and there would be blood, and soldiers with PTSD, and alcoholism, and dead civilians, and children, and pets," until Eryn looked like she'd curl up and cry, so the MA portion of that game has been acutely clarified for her.  I think Fable II just has a more nuanced and varied set of MA issues to worry about.

Santa and a Very Giraffey Christmas

Santa left Eryn a giraffe hat.  A giraffe pillow.  And a half-eaten cookie.



At Grandpa Larry and Grandma Geri's, he showed up in person to deliver additional gifts.

Books!

I saw this Old Spice advertisement in a gaming magazine.  I can't figure out why our books are on the shelves behind him.  I'm not sure that they pertain to either side of his personality.  But this is yet another in my long line of advertisements and pictures featuring our books.

Little brother?

I walk past this picture at least twice a day on the fourth floor at work. The first few times, I had to stop because out of the corner of my eye it looked like my brother was walking past a creepy picture of Dexter.  This would be a very large version of my brother, but I think it still looks like him.  Looks a little like me when I was 285 and had glasses, if you topped the then me off with the current me's hair.

Lines of thought...

Apparently XKCD and Mitchell and Webb have arrived at the same idea involving alcohol and Microsoft products...

XKCD and the Ballmer Peak:
 


Mitchell and Webb: Slightly less than two points (season 4, episode 4)

Burlesque

I'm making up for missing 9 days of blogging. I'm going to use being ill as an excuse. And the holidays. And all sorts of other things. I have much to talk about. My friend Chris was in town on Thursday. He's the new VP of what amounts to R&D for Telerik (if I was hearing everything correctly). They do .NET controls (from my perspective - they may do other things as well) and are based in Eastern Europe. Very cool job. He, Cookie Queen, Kyle and I went to Brasa for dinner (delicious - glad the waiter talked us into smaller portions) and to the Nutcracker Burlesque show afterwards. The show was peculiar. The first half was fairly boring. It wasn't until the second half that we were treated to the dreidel burlesque dance, the native american skinning a bunny and dancing in his skin burlesque dance, etc. I had warned Chris before hand I hadn't been to this event, and my experience with Nutcracker derivatives was sketchy (search my blog for Nutbuster). But I had a good time once they started embracing burlesque. And the woman who played Clara did a great job. Sort of fetishy on my part I suspect, but I liked that when she was watching the dancers, she was always on her toes, even when sitting behind a table. Sexy. Weirder was that the band seemed to include someone I knew. But I wrote it off because his hair looked longer than I expected. Until I ran into him in the entryway. He's a manager at work. His wife worked for me until recently. Damn strange. In the end, everyone seemed to have fun.

If you don't believe me, here he is, enjoying himself.  Although two people, including my daughter, asked me if the person sitting on his lap was a woman or a man.

And Cookie Queen with one of the male dancers.  I wish he had worn his Superman pouch (I'm not sure if that's exactly the right word...very small underpants, however you paint it), because that was damn hilarious. I did not get my picture taken with Clara.  I just told her I appreciated her performance. She was either surprised (she'd been standing around for 15 minutes) or creeped out by the skeevy old guy who was the only person to tell her "good job".  In the end, I enjoyed it more than I thought I would given the first act.