We dug up sod and planted the garden this weekend. It’s much larger than the small patch we had at our old townhouse. This year Dena is planting potatoes, carrots, onions, and tomatoes. The old garden only had room to plant a couple tomatoe plants. We should have a good yield this year, as long as the gophers don’t dig everything up.

We’re about halfway done with our landscaping projects for the spring. I need to get some of the decorative bricks that they sell at Home Depot to line around some of the flower beds and garden. A few more weekends and we should be finished.

I managed to get in some writing today, despite the landscaping and holiday. I wrote a few more paragraphs, but more importantly working on revisions as I go, cleaning up the first page of the story. I have a solid idea of the course the story is taking now. I’m working through the first draft now, and should be ready to submit it to group on the May 8th meeting. There, I’ve done it. I’ve set a deadline. It’s not an unrealistic one. Two and a half weeks to write a few thousand words. I need to finish what I start, finish my revisions, and start submitting things. My stories won’t publish themselves.

The last few weeks have been a bit of a blur. One after another, things happened that completely interferred with anything remotely related to fun. My day job moved to a new office last weekend. Physically, it is only a few hundred feet down the hall, but we had to move roughly thirty machines, three racks, and coordinate the transfer of 5 T1 lines, all with minimal downtime. The move took nearly twelve hours on Saturday, but it is finished. I even have my own office, to which I will be eternally grateful.

Dena’s car has been acting strangely lately. Despite new tires and breaks, there was still a persistent squeal whenever the car turned right. Then, late last week, the ignition froze up while Dena was running errands. After twenty minutes of trying to force the wheel to turn and free the ignition, it turned. With nearly 115,000 miles on it, we decided to call it quits and get a new car. Dena is now happily driving a 2003 Kia Optima SE V6. It’s a nice, classy-looking car. It’s more compact than her old Chrystler Sybring Convertible, and actually fits in the garage without me having to knock out a wall. I expect this one to last much longer than the previous vehicle.

To top things off, I had to miss my writers group meeting last Thursday. That was made worse by the fact that I had a story up for critique. That’s been postponed to the next meeting.

Taxes. Let’s not mention taxes, or the large checks we had to write yesterday.

Speaking of writing, I have two new stories on the burner. One in-group, and two more waiting for revision. I don’t have any set deadlines for when they’ll be finished, because I seem to miss every one I set. Instead I’m just going to keep plugging away at it, until I feel like one is ready enough to submit. I am starting to make more time for writing, now that things have settled back down again.

Some of you may have noticed (and a few have chided me) that I haven’t updated the blog recently. Things have been very frantic lately, and things have been neglected. This is just a quick note, since it seems the rest of the recent content has fallen off the front page. I’ll make a more detailed entry later today.

I fully support freedom of speech and the right to protest, but some recent events have really raised my ire. We were watching the news on Thursday night and decided to turn on some regular television. We flipped the channel over to he local NBC station out of Chicago, but were in the middle of an interuption. A group of around 1,000 protesters flooded Lake Shore Drive, a major road that runs alone the lakefront. NBC had a camera on the scene and was panning the ground. Protesters were walking among the vehicles, pounding on them with their hands.

A protest organizer with a bullhorn challenged police to try to shun the image they gained from the 1968 protests. Police waded into the crowd to grab the protester.

The thing that bothers me is that these protesters crossed the line. They went beyond expressing their freedom of speech by blocking vehicles and taunting police. The following day, protesters gathered downtown and tried to block the entrance to federal buildings by laying down in front of the entrance, forcing police to restrain them and drag them away.

I understand the desire to have your voice heard, and protesting is a natural extension of that. Holding a captive audience, taunting police, and other acts of so-called civil disobedience do nothing but hurt your cause. It takes away from the credibility your voice might have had otherwise.

Being the news junkie that I am, I’ve scoured the web for good news sources. Mainstream media outlets are easy to find, especially thanks to news.google.com. Finding reliable streaming audio or video seems to be much more difficult.

CNN has a free audio stream, but it seems to repeat the same news over and over. The BBC has a video stream, but I had problems with it staying up. It would time out every few minutes. MSNBC has a video stream, but it suffered under heavy traffic as well. I finally jumped on the WLS-AM stream. They were rebroadcasting the ABC news feed for most of the day, but eventually stopped and returned to normal programming. It’s understandable, considering the volume of people who go online for their news now, especially from work.

The other overlooked news medium is IRC. CNN has a chat server at chat.cnn.com, but they seem to have frequent problems keeping the headline stream running. I came across an IRC feed second-hand from Fox News today, but I don’t know where the original source is from. If I could find that I’d turn it into an applet of some kind. Oh well.

I’ve been lucky to suffer little from seasonal allergies. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for our cats. I returned home from work tonight to find my poor kittie sneezing and rubbing at one watering and swollen eye. He seems to get the brunt of the feline allergies. Two or three times a year he mopes around the house looking generally pathetic and meowing for attention, so I give him some wet food and give him some sympathy.

His sister kitty, Min, is pathetic all-year around. She suffers from allergies, too, but not nearly as often or severe. Of course, I suspect she thinks it’s the end of the world for her. She’s asleep against me right now, laying on top of my arm. She’s actually quite adorable.

We’re doing a DVD marathon today, a rare but welcome break from work. This morning we visited the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College, dedicated to the works of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, among others. I took more pictures this time, with my new digital camera. I’ll post those in a few days.

We’re watching the four-hour extended edition of Fellowship of the Ring now. For the intermission we will order take-out from Gen-Hoe, the best Chinese restaurant I’ve ever eaten at. Then we’ll finish the evening with another round of the trilogy. *cough*

The weatherman forecast a beautiful weekend, but so far it has been rather questionable. We woke to a fog that lasted for the entire morning. It eventually burned off, but the damage is done. We were at least ten degrees below the original forecast in the 60’s. Hopefully the fog won’t be an issue tomorrow. They are still calling for a 65 degree day, which will be excellent weather for working in the garage.

I’m working a late night at Ditto tonight, finally rebuilding replication between some of my databases. It’s boring, painfully slow work that makes me respect competent Database Administrators even more than I already do. While SQL Server does it’s thing, I’m watching The Matrix on my iBook, and I have two stories to critique for group tomorrow night. At the rate replication is going, I’ll be here half the night, so I should have plenty of time to get it all done.

On Monday, Trey mentioned something in his journal that struck a chord. Losing interest in a story once you’ve put time and effort into it. The same thing has happened to me with Temperament. I was enthusiastic writing the first draft, and even while I was marking up the copy for edits. Somewhere through making the edits, though, I realized something was missing with the story. It was too clichè, too much like every other fantasy story I’ve read. Trite. I came to realize something. The traditional fantasy genre, i.e., swords and/or sorcery in a medieval setting, has been played out ad nauseum. I don’t think the genre as a whole has been overused, but the traditional setting has. One of the things I’ve seen lately (which doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s new, just new to me) is traditional fantasy elements in a more modern setting. I also have some pure science fiction stories in my head that I’d like to explore.

Writing is about expression and exploration. We keep writing and adapting, because that’s the way it is meant to be.

Quite a bit has been going on lately. Enough to keep me from updating this. Life comes in waves. At the crest we are so consumed with activity that we can barely acknowledge things that we would otherwise like to. At the trough we are in such a lull that, while there is so much we could do, we waste that time trying to decide what to do. The trick with riding any wave, though, is to stay as close to center as you can. But fall off this wave, and there’s no getting on another (unless you think about it from the meta-physical sense).

To begin my tale of woe, I have to report that work is getting busy again. Despite my saying that I was going to cut back on the contract work, I’ve been flooded with bug fixes and feature enhancements from one particular client this last two weeks. I’ve managed to close out the largest of them, but I’m still looking at several days work before that’s off my plate again. I then have a second project that I’m supposed to help estimate and split up the work on, but it’s desperately lacking fully-defined requirements, so any estimate I could give would vary wildly based on what they really need. And finally I got a lead on a fun little contract. It’s a difficult task of image processing/filtering and optical character recognition (ocr), but right up my alley. If that one comes though, that’ll be another few weeks of work. All of this, and Ditto is getting busy. We’re still planning to move the office, and working through the paperwork and red tape to move five T1 lines. There are several new projects coming up that are going to take some time and they keep hinting at wanting us to work ten-hour days.

Another Semi-Os meeting this week, and I still don’t have my story, Temperament, cleaned up enough to submit it. I finished the first draft what seems like months ago, and I’m slowly working through it, rewriting and editing. Once I do manage to finish this draft and submit it, I am going to go back to an earlier story I submitted to group, make one more pass and clean it up, and then send it out. Once these two fantasy stories are out of the way, I’m going to spend some time on more modern, speculative stories. I’ve been reading some different styles of writing lately, most notably some of William Gibson’s books and Neil Gaiman’s 
American Gods. I had so much fun with the Jambalaya story that I want to experiment some fantasy and science fiction in a much more modern setting.

Spring is slowly beginning to show itself. Sunrise was at 6:11 a.m. this morning and my previous pattern of waking with the sun is holding true. As soon as the sky lightens up my body starts to wake me up. This morning it was 5:55 am, and that will only get earlier as the new season takes hold. I’m trying to take advantage of the extra time in the morning to write. If I can work for an hour in the wee hours of the morning, and another at lunch, then I should be on a good pace again.

In the end, there is no one to blame for my lack of time but myself. Like the surfer riding a wave, we each must take hold of the reigns and ride life to its fullest.

I’ve been really busy the last week or so and haven’t been as diligent in updating this as I should. I’m going to just braindump a bit to get it out of my system.

Ditto has been keeping me fairly busy. We’re preparing to move into a new office. We’ll be in the same building, in a much bigger and nicer office. The task of coordinating the transition of the T1 lines, network, hardware, air conditioning and electricity for the server room. To top it off, I had to rush into work Saturday morning for a minor emergency. Luckily it turned out to be something simple.

I’m disappointed in myself. I have been working on Temperament for two months now, and I’m still working on cleaning up the first draft enough to submit to the group. I’ve got a clear idea of what I need to do to finish it, I just neeed to make the time.

I’m now writing regularly for Ars Technica. I’ve been doing the occasional review or news post, and I’ll now be doing some feature articles. I’m aiming to finish one article per month. I’ll be writing on a variety of technical articles, which will be right up my alley.

I often get distracted while writing on my primary laptop. It’s the same machine I use for work, and the availablity of my development tools, games, and email tend to have a negative effect on my word count. To that end, I picked up a shiny new iBook today. It’s ultra-portable and light, weighing in at 4.7 pounds. It has a five-hour battery life, perfect for escaping to some dark corner to write in solitude. I got a nice discount on a copy of Office X with it, so I’m totally set to write without distractions. I’m quite excited about it.