ING Disease

Right now, for various reasons, I'm not writing. This isn't as fatal as it sounds; I have a good dozen or so stories ready to go and I'm busily polishing them, perhaps in some cases just a touch too much.

I've discovered that I have a touch of ing disease. "He put the key into the lock, running up the stairs to get his jacket." Unfortunately, these events happen in order, but the ing construction implies simultaneity. I found a lot of that in amidst my sex scenes, so I've spent my time usefully cleaning up tenses and fixing character continuity issues. The character Wren changes bust size three times in the course of her series, and Wish's vocabulary gets significantly more mature even though it's not supposed to. The latter I can probably work with; Wish is under the impression that the biocybernetics she has installed won't let her mature and she's happy with that; the fact is, however, that she is maturing and she doesn't understand what the biocybe is doing or is supposed to do.

But I'm happy because I'm at least getting it done. The work is slow. Editing always is.

One of my tools for this process is a program I wrote called makework. It's a simple bash script that copies the contents of my Working directory, scrubs it, and puts it into a directory accessible by my narrator suite, the HTML-izer optimized to handle raw text rather than the usual XML. This means that block quotes and poetry and lyrics don't come out right, but I rarely use anything but plain text. It also handles LaTeX conventions for emphasis, which I use when I write. The "final review" of a story is always done in a browser to see what it'll look like when you guys get to read it.

Makework sucks. It blindly copies the entire working directory into a temporary to do scrubbing and analysis, then creates the index for narrator, then copies the scrubbed copies into the webserver folder. On my little laptop, this inefficiency can cost time and serious battery power.

So I re-wrote it in python. Since the index is the last thing written, I compare it's last modify time to everything in the working directory and only process those that have changed. And since it's written in python, there's no context switching or pipe buffering.

Ah, I enjoy my geekiness some days...

Does Flash Really Suck This Much?

So, the other day I downloaded a flash that I don't pretend to understand since it's in Japanese and way too fast and uses a much larger vocabulary than what I've covered in Lesson 1-29 so far. But it was fun and the tune was catchy

Out of curiosity, I turned my attention to disassembling the flash and examining the contents and I discovered, to my horror, that the flash was full of jpegs and pngs that never appear in the actual video. It seems to me that the Flash compiler that Macromedia ships will blindly accept anything you add to the manifest regardless of your actual use of it anywhere in the driver script.

That's ridiculous. Especially since most modern compilers know how to dike out unused code; it should be obvious to a decent compiler, especially one that has to residence the entire object in RAM at compile time, that there are objects in the source tree that never get exercised, and should not be included in the distribution.

Advertising and Food

I was listening to NPR the other day-- one of their later-at-night talk shows-- and I heard a woman who had recently written a book about how advertising encourages kids to eat fatty foods and bloat up say, "Well, it's easy to blame parents."

Oh, and it's not easy to blame big companies and advertising? Of course it's easy. Companies are individual entities with limited budgets to afford lobbyists, whereas there are millions of parents and collectively they have much more time, can amass many more voices. Say something about how "parents as a group are failing their kids" and you get some dander mighty quick. It's not a nice thing to say. As one nutritionist put it recently, "Most parents of my acquaintance tell me they are constantly arguing with their children over food choices," she writes. "Many prefer to reserve family arguments about setting limits for dealing with aspects of behavior that they consider more important."

If there's anything more important to teach a child than "Don't commit slow, grinding suicide by obesity," someone tell me what it is.

My favorite quote from the show: "Over the past twenty years the family dog has also gotten progressively heavier, and I doubt he's being influenced by advertising."

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So, there's this big argument about whether or not Ronald Reagan belongs on the ten dollar bill. But Jim Henley has a better idea: Ray Charles on our money. ALL our money.

Yeah, and.... ?

Hopefully, more reliable than Ken Brown:

Money, Sex, and Happiness: An Empirical Study, by David G. Blanchflower, Andrew J. Oswald.

This paper studies the links between income, sexual behavior and reported happiness. It uses recent data on a random sample of 16,000 adult Americans. The paper finds that sexual activity enters strongly positively in happiness equations. Greater income does not buy more sex, nor more sexual partners. The typical American has sexual intercourse 2-3 times a month. Married people have more sex than those who are single, divorced, widowed or separated. Sexual activity appears to have greater effects on the happiness of highly educated people than those with low levels of education. The happiness-maximizing number of sexual partners in the previous year is calculated to be 1. Highly educated females tend to have fewer sexual partners. Homosexuality has no statistically significant effect on happiness. Our conclusions are based on pooled cross-section equations in which it is not possible to correct for the endogeneity of sexual activity. The statistical results should be treated cautiously.

Whirlwind cooking...

"Fukui-san!"

"Go, Ota!"

"Iron Chef Elf has just taken the bacon out of the frying pan, wrapped in a layer of paper towel, and left it in the sink. Using that same pan, he has tossed in a chicken breast. Meanwhile, Iron Chef Omaha has just finished blending together chicken, diced apples, and diced onions, and is now forming them into heart and animal shapes with a cookie cutter."

"And what are they doing now?"

"Elf is tossing together a mixture of yogurt, blue cheese, mayonnaise, and black pepper."

"Hmm.. Some kind of dressing?"

"Maybe. It sounds yummy, whatever it is."

"And now Omaha is frying the shapes she made."

"Oh! Like a pate'?"

"More like croquette, I think."

"Iron Chef Elf... whoa, what was that? Fire over on Omaha's side."

"Quite dramatic."

"Elf has chopped the chicken and torn up the bacon and put them in this bowl here with seeded tomatoes and torn romaine lettuce, over which he has poured the blue cheese mixture. Meanwhile, into the carrots he was steaming earlier he's mixed white wine vinegar, olive oil, pepper, garlic, and oregano."

"I'm confused. Is he making two salads?"

"It does seem that way, doesn't it?"

"Ahhh, I see. The chicken is going into sandwiches, and the carrots are a side. The smooth, heavy flavor of the chicken and bacon will be offset by the sharp lightness of the vinegar."

"What would you drink with that?"

"I'd recommend a sweet drink, perhaps a shirah or a rhysling. Or a berry beer."

"It's amazing what they can make in half an hour. I don't think I could prepare ramen that fast."

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Grrr... I have this annoying deep-tissue itch right between my left shoulderblade and my spine, and it's driving me nucking futs!