Archive for books
Gaming, Misc Projects, Jobs, and Media (a.k.a. I Suck At Making Relevant Post Titles)
My current site project right now involves bunches of icons, and I wish I had more time for it. I’m also trying to get myself in gear with the Amazon Breakthrough Novel contest. I’ve never written a pitch before and it’s a tough slog at this point. My writing tendencies are entirely too stream-of-consciousness for their own good, and I need to focus more on a decent packaged whole when I write. In other news, I’ve eaten Mexican food every day this week except yesterday.
I finally beat Oasis on Insane. Were this 2004, when the game actually came out, it would likely be much more exciting. Nonetheless, Oasis has provided me with months of gameplay, and was totally worth the $6 I paid for it. On a similar note, rumors have it that a version of Civilization will be coming to Facebook this June. Aside from my occasional Scrabble obsession (and whenever someone flings a Pathwords invite at me), I’m not a big Facebook gamer. Yoville got tedious, and I haven’t logged into my account in months now. There’s a bunch of others (Mafia Wars, Farmville, etc.) I signed up for, played once, and then promptly forgot about. I think a problem with these games is that they’re mostly about doing the same thing over and over to acquire more stuff and build your character. None of which is all that interesting to me. One thing that is immensely interesting, however, is Civilization.
Job prospects = still slow. Didn’t get the job I interviewed for this past Friday. They might have a temporary use for me for a project that may or may not happen, however, which would be nice. I’d like to get more hours at Liberty, as though the pay is meager, it’s actually pretty fun to jump around by the side of the road all day long. Also, I don’t think I’ve ever felt this healthy in the middle of winter before.
I wish another Chick-fil-a would open up out here. This is because I want to do another First 100. Preferably without the blizzard this time around. I also really just want to eat chicken constantly, because it is so freaking good.
I finished reading “Jonathan Norrell & Mr. Strange” by Susanna Clarke recently. It was fabulous, a very British early 1800’s take on magicians and magic, quite long and involving with quirky characters, I highly recommend it. I’m currently reading “Nature Girl” by Carl Hiaasen, which is quite funny.
Finished watching Evangelion. Apparently the ending was poorly executed due to budget issues, and I thus need to see a movie called “The End of Evangelion” for proper fulfillment. I really liked the concept behind the ending, and we can hopefully get our paws on the movie sometime soon. Started watching Bleach, am enjoying it but with mixed feelings. The more it veers away from the “I need to kill this giant Hollow” plots, the more I like it.
Oh yeah, I totally scored some free fabric off of Craigslist. Giant bag, some scraps and some decent-sized pieces. I’ve got a pair of black shorts with a drawstring that never really fit me right, and I’ve got this great idea to convert it into a skirt, adding some fabric to the bottom in ruffles or something. I’ve got plenty of fabric to do this, now it’s simply the matter of locating said shorts. There’s this black hole that follows me sometimes, and likes eating things I’d prefer not to have eaten. I picked up a tank top from Old Navy with the final dregs of my gift card, and as a tank top it’s entirely too long, but with some fabric on the bottom it would make an awesome dress. I need to find a fabric really similar to the tank top’a fabric to execute this, however. Now, once I have made these items, I need to find or create circumstances where I would actually wear a skirt or a dress. Pants are just such a nice default, but it’s a shame that I keep making all of this crap and never wear it anywhere for the most part.
Oh yeah, crispy chocolate in my near future. Old Towne Arvada is having some sort of chocolate festival, whereupon I will enter items into their cookie contest and, with any luck, will win a giant pile of chocolate. Which would be good timing, as our Christmas chocolate is slowly running out!
Ads and Jobs and Books and Such
So I’m distracted on the internet, reading some news article on the ABC website, when I notice an ad for some ponzu lime sauce in a side banner. Now, I got to go to the Pacific Mercantile Market in downtown Denver yesterday (which has the best selection of Japanese products I’ve ever seen, incidentally). And, in order to get there, I had to research where the place was online. And, while there, I saw ponzu sauce and contemplated if it might be good. So now part of my brain is wondering if cookies have logged my interest in Asian groceries, and the paranoid part is wondering if too much time on said internet has lodged cookies in my brain that captured the fact that I was contemplating ponzu sauce the other day. Incidentally, the sauce does look pretty good.
It’s also an ad I don’t mind. Like, in an ideal world, more ads would be like this. They would say ‘hey, this product is pretty good and you might like it’, rather than preying on fears and paranoias. While I’m glad that a lot of the “hey, look at this closeup of stomachs” ads have disappeared, I am rather weirded out by their being replaced with “Hey, look at all these closeups of teeth” ads. And those really weird “Obama wants moms to go to schools ads” (though, at least they’re not repulsive like the teeth ads, for whatever it’s worth). So, I could clear out my cookie cache and be whacked with all these lowest common denominator ads. Or I could leave it in the hopes of more ads for Kikkoman sauces and other things I might actually have an interest in trying. Though, then I’d have to worry about that whole “people who like food probably also like weight loss, lets use this ad to make them feel fat!” Or, you know, I could just use Firefox, and block all the ads. Unfortunately, Chrome is far far faster then Firefox on my computer, the speed is addictive. I still use Firefox as Firebug is indispensable for design, but at some point I became a Chrome convert. In any case, this is also a reason that, on my websites, I only use text ads. I fear the teeth and the bellies and those weird 3d dancing women that Obama desperately wants to get degrees.
In other news, I had an interview two days ago. Spontaneously, I might add. I called, and got to come in the next day. It ranks up there as one of the more bizarre interviews I’ve ever had. I barely talked to the company’s owner, and in fact spent most of the time being interviewed by a guy who’d only worked there one day – who had replied to the same job posting on Craigslist that I had replied to. Definitely a start-up feel to the place, and I’m thinking the owner only recently decided to bring in some in-house web people. It’s in Boulder, so a bit of a drive, and the pay is less then I’d hope for but more then I’d fear. However, one of the advantages of a more chaotic startup environment would be that I’d have more control over my projects and could more directly influence the direction of a company. However, all of this is pretty moot as I have not heard back from them. C’est la guerre.
Now, I’ve got this book where, to get it published, all I need to go is hop over to Createspace and hit a series of buttons. But I’m not letting myself do that until I’ve fixed the storypath system I originally built it on. Everything lives in one database table in disgusting piles of arrays. It’s getting cleaner, though, I’ve got three tables full of neat, clean data, plus three classes where before there were none. I wish I’d been able to wrap my brain about object oriented PHP sooner, really. But there’s a lot of bugs, which I’m slowly hashing out. Stupid bugs. Rewriting gobblydegook is about as bad as scratching the whole thing and starting over, unfortunately. Yup.
And, on a final note, I didn’t touch Nanowrimo yesterday, and haven’t touched it today yet. Mind you, this post already contains over 700 words, so some of it is me being a slacker on the things I should be focusing on. However, there is a write-in at the library tonight, so hopefully that will help. Unfortunately, teeny netbooks are not really designed for speedy typing, but it works.
Halloween and Burritos and NaNoWriMo, oh my!
So Halloween was fun. I dressed up as a purple raccoon, which I think I’ve done for the last 4 years. See, I put some decent effort into making the ears and tail back in the day, and I would consider it a tragedy to not have continuous opportunities to wear said ears and tail. Aside from misc cons and clubs, there’s only one day you can get away with wearing such a getup, that day being Halloween of course, so I feel the need to take advantage of it when I can. Maybe in a few years I’ll get bored and decide to be something else, we’ll see.
Drew was spectacular as a vampire: he wore khakis and gobs of glitter.
We went to the Nanowrimo pre-party in someone’s basement, which was fun. Lots of niblets plus socializing and such. It took me most of the night to figure out I had “Harry Potter” stuck to my back. Started on the book at midnight, only to lose battery power at 1:00 or so (silly me didn’t bring my cord). At just under 4000 words now, am a little closer to having a plot even if not all the way there yet.
Oh yeah, and we have a ginormous number of burritos. You know how Chipotle was doing their “Dress like a burrito, get a free burrito” deal on Halloween evening? We hit four Chipotles. Thus, 8 burritos. Unfortunately, they’re not as good reheated, but they’re still pretty tasty.
Adventures in unpacking, future adventures in writing, etc.
We are 99% unpacked. This is an achievement, as we didn’t reach that state at the last apartment until about 8 months in. I am super happy with Drew for being rather gung-ho about getting everything out of boxes and onto shelves and such. It also helped that we got a ginormous 7′ x 3′ bookshelf off of the free section of craigslist. It clears the ceiling by about a few inches. I’d love to get rid of the other shelves and just have a second shelf like it, it makes that corner of the apartment feel like a library (possibly because we’re about 84% sure the shelf originally came from some sort of library!). We’ve got partial ghetto apartment going on, as videos are hanging out in shelves made of boxes, but we’re working on that part.
NaNoWriMo is coming up in less then 10 days now, and both Drew and I are gonna do it this time around. I wanted book #1 to be out of the way before book #2 got started on, and I’m just waiting on proof copy #3 (the final one, at least it better be) to come in the mail. Assuming that’s perfect, I can set the book for sale on Createspace and Amazon. Then comes the fun part of figuring out how to market one of these babies.
Twilight (the last post about it, honest!)
I finished the series, finally. It was addictive to the end. In some ways satisfying, in other ways rather frustrating. I wrote a rambling review of it on Goodreads, should anyone care.
I will include a brief snippet here, something that in scanning over reviews of the books I just hadn’t seen touched on at all.
“One thing about the books that I do appreciate is this: In many fantastical pieces of fiction, there’s a central character who ends up being the savior (Harry Potter, Frodo/LotR, Neo/Matrix, Rand/Wheel of Time, etc etc). That character is usually “different” in some way or another that ends up saving everything, and that character is consistently male. It was a breath of fresh air to read something where the character with the awesome powers who saves the day is actually female.”
Job hunting, Florida, and more Twilight
So I spent a bunch of time finessing my resume, seeking out references, trying to figure out how to write a salary history that doesn’t make my actual salary history look wacky, and writing the perfect cover letter, all for a job that sounded rather ideal. I submit the materials, only to get an email back soon after stating that the position had already been filled. Which was a surprise to me, as the position was still listed under the “Employment” heading of their website. Ah, waste of time. I suppose I at least have a cover letter and resume with more finesse at the point, at least. Am still snouting around for other jobs. I’ve gotten rejected by a few, have heard nothing from others, and have also gotten vague “We’ll contact you if something comes up that fits” messages from recruiting agencies. No matter what, we’re vacating this apartment in two months and heading westward, so something needs to rear it’s head at some point in the near future. If not, I can always get a job driving a van or something, and write lots of PHP in my off time to keep up skills, in the hopes of acquiring employment at a time when not everyone else in the entire freaking universe is also attempting to acquire employment. I have the advantage of being a cheap bastard, so my standard of living never bothered to increase along with my salary. While I’d be a bit sad to need to take a job that isn’t exactly what I want and that pays less, I’m not going to be suffering economically or anything.
In other news, in a few weeks Drew and I are gonna head off to Florida. He’s got multitudes of grandparents there, as well as a friend or two, and I have a penchant for palm trees. We’ll have couches to crash on, and a tent for nights when we don’t. Aside from obligatory stops at Shake and Steak that Drew requires, I figure we can hit grocery stores and fruit stands for food and be cheap that way. Gas prices are rising a bit, but still under $2 a gallon around here, which still seems incredibly cheap compared to the almost $4 a gallon we were seeing not too long ago.
I’m also wanting to bike to Williamsburg sometime soon. Haven’t done a long ride in awhile, and I really need to stretch the ole legs a bit. Also need to consider other closer adventures, like biking to Regency or something.
So I finished reading New Moon. I liked it better then the first Twilight book. Still full of drama by the bucketloads, but less of the *long stare….dramatic thoughts…..glancing away…..dramatic thoughts…* and more of the *dramatic misery….time to do something really stupid that will entertain the reader!….holy cow, wolves!…*. Mostly, it’s just got more action, along with a main character that actually isn’t all dramatic (well, for the first half of the book, at least). They’re working on a New Moon movie, and I really hope it’s better then the freaking Twilight movie, which was aesthetically pleasing, but that’s about it. It’s like the director(s) took all those godawful long pauses in the book literally and stuck every one of them in the movie. Err, to be honest I only got about halfway through the movie because my brain fell out at some point.
Next up, I’m reading either some sci-fi book about bears, or another fantasy Bujold book (“Paladin of Souls”), which I’m really hoping is more enjoyable then “Curse of Chalion”. If only I didn’t compare everything else she writes to the Miles books.
Art, Books, and Cats
I sold the piece I entered up in Baltimore, this piece to be precise. I won’t be sure of how much I get for it until I get the check (it was an art auction), but it’s at least 50 bucks (I started at $100, and the gallery keeps 50%). Entirely too little, based on the amount of work that went into it, but at the same time, it’s a piece that I don’t like as much as others, and is thus not very likely to be in my wall anytime soon. And thus, $50 in my pocket sure beats a painting sitting and collecting dust in the closet. Better for me to have one less thing to keep track of, better for the painting to have someone that appreciates it more then I do. I’ve got scans as well, so I can continue my magical fantasy of selling prints of all of this stuff to eager buyers.
I finally got around to reading The Tipping Point, which gave me mild Freakonomics flashbacks and makes me want to go prowl around the social sciences section of Ye Local Library. Also need to get ahold of the two pre-Miles Bujold books at some point. Read her fantasy book “Curse of Chalion”, it was OK but fantasy just doesn’t seem to be my cup of tea, methinks. Either that, or I’m reading the wrong kind of fantasy.
The cats were getting all yowley last night and staring at me with googoo eyes, as it was dinner time. So I got out my camera and decided to mess with them. They’re so used to eating out of the bowl, I wondered what would happen if I just laid the bag of food down in front of them. Took them awhile, sniffing around and staring at me and such, but eventually they figured out what was going on. Kinda.
They each managed to nibble a little bit, then wandered off, apparently bored with the exercise, deciding that waiting for dinner wasn’t worth dealing with this weird bag that also extruded food. I want to put little saddles on them and get gerbils in cowboy hats to ride on them.
Sushi and Twilight!
I’m gonna totally spam now, but I made some super awesome sushi the other day and wrote a post about it at my food blog, so go check out my super fun sushi time if such things intrigue you!
By the way, I finished the first Twilight book. I don’t think the writing is terribly good, but the end really managed to hook me and I now desperately need to get ahold of book #2. Too bad that all of the library’s copies are checked out. So now I just need to find another person that’s trying to sell their copy for $5 (which is how I got the first one).
Miles, Mucous, and Mewling
The flow of items from my sinuses out the exit holes has begun to slow. This pleases me. So, in theory, at some point the evacuation will be complete, and I can get back to life as scheduled. My toilet paper rolls have been very stoic through all of this. I, uh, don’t buy tissues. I figure that anything that’s good enough for my butt is good enough for my nose. The thing is, there’s multiple types of ‘disposable soft papery absorbent material’, the notable ones being toilet paper, tissues, napkins, and paper towels. I find that I can easily combine the first two into one and have no problems. I know of various folks who combine the latter two, using paper towels for napkin-related purposes. While I have done this on occasion, I must confess to being a veritable napkin fiend, and have a definite preference for them for all of my mouth-dabbing needs.
Drew and I have been making great use of the Henrico Public Library system as we crush through the Miles books at lightning speed. I just killed off ‘A Civil Campaign today’, and it was delightful. I will be sad when I run out of Miles books, as I want be a mercenary and go to fancy Vor parties and hang out with hermaphrodites at the Orb. I suppose that is the problem with books that are good to escape into. Also, I find that this is the good part of reading certain other sorts of books, such as pretty much anything by Jane Austen. I read them and think they are exciting while reading them, but am otherwise perfectly glad to not be living in 19th Century England as a young lady whose sole purpose in life is to find a good husband.
On a related note to the first part of the preceding paragraph, I can’t believe that vorkosigan.com is actually available. I’d get it if I could figure out a decent use for it. I love to make a good website and all, but I’d need content first, and the only think I can think of is a resource website, of which there are already a few. Mind you, they look like they haven’t been updated in about 10 years, designwise, but the content seems more or less updated. Anyhow, I’m gonna randomly brainstorm for content and see if I can think of anything creative or interesting, as I could use another site for my portfolio.
My latest hobby, at random, is cat tents. I will come across a cat that has decided to take a nap on a chair or couch. I will then pile the areas around that cat up will pillows, and then drape a blanket over the area to create a tent/cave. It is very cute and sometimes the cat will leave and then come back. Works for both cats as well. You wanna know something crazy? There are some people that prefer kittens to cats. I feel that this is crazy talk. The kitten is the pesky little thing you put up with until it finally blossoms into a lazy huggable cat.
Oh yeah, and I finally figured out (more or less) how to make a passable pad thai! Yay!
