Urgle. "Just draw it." Aimee'. Cartoons.

Growl. I tossed and turned for three hours last night, not actually getting to sleep until 1 a.m. or so, and then I spent the rest of the night dreaming in code. Not good code, mind you.

It is a tenant of web developers, perhaps less rigid today than in 1997, that "Photoshop is not a web development tool!" The reason behind this tenant is simple, and tragic: in 1997, clients would come to developers with a photoshopped picture of what they wanted the website to look like, the developers would strive like Hercules to make it so, the limitation of HTML would make that development impossible, and the client would get pissed off and renege on the contract. So developers got smart: no more photoshop for layouts and they, not the client, would do the prototyping to get buyoff.

I hate this part of my job. I'm not a good artist by any stretch, and now my boss wants me to "do it in photoshop, show us what you want the system to do for the next rev. I don't want to see you running anything except photoshop for the rest of the week."

And a photoshopped image doesn't do anything. It doesn't show the liveliness of the system, the intense use of dymanic screen real estate, the ease-of-tranformation or any of the accessibility issues that the text document. It just sits there. And it is with these that I must get acceptance to do a new rev.

There are two kinds of people in the world: the literate and the visual. Those who watch TV, and those who read. While I do both, it is in reading that I get the most pleasure. Linux is the OS of the literate-- one must be able to read, and write, and think complex thoughts, to get it off the ground. Not so true anymore, but it was never true of Windows and Macintosh-- those are for the TV generation, who just want to watch the show. I can write specifications and write code that creates the imagery and functionality I want, but when I'm asked to "just draw it, it'll be faster--"

Bleah.

---

On the other hand, I have written nearly 6110 words into chapter two of Aimee': The Bones of the Dragon, the second Aimee' novel. I'm aiming for 30,000 words with this one, so that's not technically a novel, but it's gonna be close. I'm retconning the universe a bit; Barraminum is the capital city of a five-century-old colony of the Empire of Cortane. This gives me room to make the universe more interesting; there's more stuff in it than the totally trad extruded fantasy product that was the first novel.

I finished the love scene in this chapter and then (speaking of television) pulled up the Teen Titans season 2 episode 5, Fear Itself on my laptop while I waited for the bus. Billions of dollars in hardware, millions of miles of cable, three billion CPUs performing a billion operations a second each, and my cadillac laptop tricked out with the latest and greatest drivers-- all to get caught up on a cartoon I missed the first time around.

On the other paw

It does seem to me that I've done a lot this week. I did get the requirements done as asked for by management after all, doing a blend of gimmed-up components with some scripts and some style sheets and then screen-shooting them into the mock-ups, with different colors and all. So I did my job.

I also pushed the envelope, asking them to think about doing things in shockwave, for example, or java, or something more dynamic. I demonstrated some multi-layer tasks that could be even more cool if I had the right tools. I also showed how I could auto-detect for lots of plug-ins, and why it's not a good idea to automatically include shockwave or java if it's detected (doesn't scale well with CSS, so it isn't ADA compatible). I also told them to contemplate remote calls with modern, object-oriented toolkits, so we could do configuration with native tools rather than HTML.

In the meantime, I wrote a wrapper for the Usenet Binary Harvester, a nifty tool for sucking audio and video out of usenet. It has two flaws: a cryptic command line, and a huge freakin' cache of articles one has seen but not yet downloaded. The wrapper provides the most common commands, automatically wraps 'and' commands, since I use the -I inclusion-only command a lot, meaning "I want only these files", and I sometimes screw up the syntax for "this and that", and compresses and decompresses the caches for individual newsgroups. The caches are very regular and compress really well. I saved something over 216MB, which is ten percent of my hard drive!

I also patched the bittorrent client. Some downloads take a long time and I was tired of trying to figure out what "113 hours" meant, so I hacked in a "if it's more than 24 hours, show it to me in days" line.

I wrote some 6500 words this week, and tomorrow is yet to come. I'm actually happy with this draft; the last two sucked like our president's nose at a line of cocaine. I've read two books: Robert Harris's Pompeii and H. P. Lovecraft's The Dunwich Horror.

I got the laptop and my handheld talking again, so I downloaded Charlie Stross's A Colder War, hacked the HTML for very-long-line-length, then pushed it through txt2pdbdoc and transferred it to the handheld. Yay, I can read it now. I did the transfer on the bus while I watched the end of that Teen Titans ep I started watching this morning. And I fixed full-screen viewing on the laptop. Tres' cool.

I'm on page 44 of a 70-page textbook for improving one's handwriting, and I've started to notice that it's working. I've dedicated some 20 minutes a day, that's all, in the past two weeks to this project, and it really does make a difference. I even bought one of those $2 calligraphy pens, since the last 10 pages of the text are on calligraphy. I also bought this stunningly beautiful journaling notebook from Kyokuto papers; A-5 size, 5mm spacing, crisp and smooth. Like my Clairefontaine lab notebook, a true fetish item. (Now fallenpegasus has to convince me that pens are just as fetishy.)

And I've transferred the first eight cassette tapes of Pimsleur's Learning Japanese onto CD, and made it through the first three. That's a real breakthrough; I've had those tapes for forever, but since I didn't have a tape player in the car or anywhere else to practice dialogue aloud, they've languished on top of my filing cabinet forever. Now I just slap them into the CD player and go.

I gave Omaha a break yesterday by taking Kouryou-chan out to our favorite indoor park, and to a restaurant. Kouryou-chan's been eating like a horse the past three days, which makes up for the last week when she was sick and not hungry at all.

All in all, I can't really complain about how much I've gotten done.