clientsfromhell:

Client: You should have indicated a problem with the app sooner.

Me: It was only just made available to me to launch. As soon as I saw the problem, I flagged it.

Client: But you should have looked for a problem sooner.

Me: I just saw it for the first time. I wasn’t involved with the project…

I’m in the process of reading my new copy of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn [Robotic Edition] by Mark Twain, edited by Gabriel Diani and Etta Devine. The book is the successful culmination of a Kickstarter project where Diani and Devine planned to re-issue Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with the N-word replaced by robots. And I have to say they did a phenomenal job.

I’ve only gotten through the first couple of chapters and I almost missed the first instance where the word robots was used because it was so perfect.

Ms. Watson she kept picking at me and it got tiresome and lonesome. By and by they fetched the robots in and had prayers, and then everybody was off to bed.

Around the same time I heard about the Kickstarter, I read an article about a publisher who planned simply to replace the N-word with the word “slave.” To me, that evades the issue of “the word”. The word slave doesn’t evoke the same hate or prejudice that the N-word really evokes. In the preface to the robotic edition, Diani and Devine use R2-D2 and C-3PO as examples of robots who are, in essence, slaves. They call Luke “Master” and they are purchased by his uncle.

I don’t know that this more than replacing the N-word with slave, but it certainly seems more current, while adding a certain tongue-in-cheek political commentary.

Postscript: It’s a little funny that the Brewster Rockit cartoon for this morning is very apropos.

I’m writing this post using only the voice recognition software that I just installed. I’m using Dragon NaturallySpeaking version 11 and giving this a bit of a test drive. I’m hoping that by being able to just speak some of my thoughts that I might be able to write a little bit more and a little bit faster. I think this will take me a little bit of getting used to. I have to talk much more slowly and clearly than I’m accustomed to, and I have to think about punctuation at the same time.

It’s funny, I thought that by being able to speak and not have to type that it would be faster but now I find I have to have all of my thoughts ready to be spoken before actually “writing.”

But all in all there is very little that this has gotten wrong. I have had to capitalize a little bit and punctuate a little bit, but it got most of the words right. And I can even use commands like “select all” to select all the text. I could even select backwards two words and bold. That didn’t work out quite so well, but pretty close.

I will try to use this software for the next little while and do most of my writing just by voice. I guess we’ll see what happens.

Update (2011-12-11 11:25): Yes, the next day. I’m in the process of uninstalling and reinstalling the software. It came up with some kind of “process is locked” error that came with no help and no Google solutions worked. I’ll keep you posted.

Update (2011-12-13 19:23): A couple days later. I’ve reinstalled the software and tried it now three or four times after restarting the computer and everything seems to be fine. I’m going to stick with this voice recognition software that I’m in fact using to write this update.

I read an article about social media connections and brain size that indicated that people with a large number of social media connections (e.g., Facebook friends) have a larger volume of grey matter in the amygdala than average.

I found it very interesting because I recently unfriended a number of friends on Facebook and stopped following a number of people on Twitter. I wondered what the correlation meant for me, having had a large number of connections and consciously choosing to have fewer.

I’m not sure if it was because of this, or because I missed the updates from friends, or for some other reason entirely, but I’ve chosen to reconnect with many of the unfriended, and I’m beginning to follow Twitter users again. I’d like to believe that I will be more selective about the connections I make, so I won’t be inflating the number just for the sake of a large number. But I also think there’s something comforting about having a large number of friends. I also like having even that tenuous connection so that when something comes up and I want that connection, it’s there.

I happened to hear Peter Gabriel’s In Your Eyes on CBC Radio 2 this morning, and of course it reminded me of the 1989 John Cusack classic Say Anything…. I don’t know that I’ve ever actually watched the movie all the way through from start to finish, but I’ll always remember one of the best movie quotes:

I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don’t want to do that.

As a career, I’m glad I don’t do any of those things. But as a regular person in society, I don’t think I can get away from it. And considering Lloyd Dobler has a boombox and a car, I’m sure he has a few sold, bought, or processed items.

I just read a short 37Signals post about how “[t]he next morning has a way of telling the you truth.” It’s a good, quick post that doesn’t continue ad nauseum and undo the good advice with a bunch of nonsense.

The first comment caught my eye (“I’d also add: Take a shower.”) and reminded me about how much I like contemplating things in the shower. I’ve come up with a lot of good ideas and real solutions by letting the idea percolate while the hot water wakes me up and starts my day.

Unfortunately, sometimes I realize that I’m standing in the shower thinking, and then all I can think about is the Jane’s Addiction song.

I’m not going to pretend that I’m going to get much further in writing this novel, I’m barely at 5000 words. But I’m going to keep plugging away and see how it goes. Here’s another, hopefully not the last, short excerpt from The Minus Men.

Mac also had a hired gun in Steve Wong. A big, muscular man with a shaved head and full beard, Steve was intimidating. He also had a fierce temper, a short fuse, and was always armed. Steve had worked with and for a few different criminal organizations, taking time every now and again to train with martial arts and other weapons experts. If you put an apple on your head, Steve had a way and a weapon that, from a few centimetres to a kilometre away, could take it off without you knowing. Steve preferred to use live targets, but he was content to practice with apples; he had never really liked apples.

Alrighty, it’s been a poor couple of weeks, with many more things other than writing occupying my mind and time. I’ve written a few things, so here’s another short selection from my very short novel.

The Demeter wasn’t a big ship, but it was plenty fast, and nimble. It didn’t hurt that Mac’s choice of pilot was exceptional. No, Mac wasn’t the pilot, but you’d expect that if he called someone exceptional it was probably himself. No, Kurt Billington, Billy, was the pilot. Kurt had raced rocket cruisers on Macedon when he was kid. Then flew in the Confederation Space Force for a few years, with dogfight training at Rhodes Flight School, and had graduated to driving for dignitaries, resulting in some interesting avoid-and-evade tactics. Finally, Billy came out of the second civil war bitter and jaded, preferring the challenge of illicit activity over routine patrols.

Alright, so the story of poor Carter McGill, betrayed and framed by his brother, forced to go on the run to save himself, is going nowhere. So I’ve started something new. I’m counting all the original words, but telling a whole new story.

I’ve moved into science fiction, with a slight Western feel. Yes, like Firefly. Who doesn’t love cowboys in space?

So here’s an excerpt from the story, called The Minus Men:

Mac hated being called captain. Sure, it was his ship, but he had won it at the faro tables in Marathon. It was not exactly customary to bet spaceships, but Marathon was not exactly the kind of place that bothered to enforce the rules. Even the android dealers and pit bosses were programmed to overlook certain behaviours. But count cards at the blackjack tables and you would be out on your ass just as if you were on New Vegas.

Now there was a planet. The whole place was just casinos, hotels, and showgirls. It was just a little too full of Confederation patrols. No, Mac preferred it out here on the frontier.

Out here is where Mac could ply his trade most efficiently. His trade? Oh. Well, I guess I can tell you. Mac was a smuggler. What did you expect? He was certainly no travelling doctor. Although, he could often supply a cure for what was ailing you.

It was just that kind of activity that had Mac spending a lot of extra time out here lately. For some reason, he had at least two Minussers hunting for him. If there were two that he was aware of, there probably more, but he wasn’t really interested in finding out how many more.

The two he’d run into were on Athena. They’d looked like exactly what they were: two men intent on subtracting Mac from existence. To them he was just another name to erase from their list.

Once Upon a Time and Grimm are both new television shows that I quite enjoy, but for which I only see limited success, unfortunately. Both are modern retellings (is that a word?) of fairy tales, or rather stories that bring fairy tales into the modern day.

In Once Upon a Time, the land of [Disney] fairy tales has succumbed to a curse put on it by Snow White’s wicked stepmother, the Queen. All of the characters have been transported (?) to the “real world” town of Storybrooke, Maine, where they are oblivious to their past. The only person who knows what’s really happening (apparently) is the transported Queen’s adopted son, Henry Mills, who is the son of the daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming, Emma Swan. The prophecy around the curse is that Emma will return after 28 years to break the curse.

Given the story line presented in the very first episode, the story has to end, which I can’t really see the show going much more than one season. Beyond that, I think the story will simply drag on, and become nothing more than a soap opera, or become like Lost, a meandering, confusing story with a wholly unsatisfying conclusion. I certainly endorse it for now, it’s fun and interesting and mildly compelling, but once the curse is lifted, and especially if it isn’t, it may lose its charm.

For me, Grimm also has a limited lifespan. The protagonist is a Seattle-area police detective with ties to the Grimm family who were not only storytellers, but monster-hunters, too. The detective investigates murders and missing persons cases that inevitably tie to fairy tale monsters, like the Big, Bad Wolf (blutbad), or the Three Bears (jagerbar).

I’m sure there are a large number of Grimm fairy tales whose monsters and villains can be adapted to fit within the show. But I can see the writers and producers stretching pretty far fairly soon to include some of the monsters and villains, and reaching into some pretty obscure tales, as well. I think it’ll be fun for a while, but will drag on after too long.