Coyote Cartography

As usual, I’ve been very lax in updating this. I may make an effort to start making this a weekly thing again, finally, but no promises. Here’s an overview of what’s been going on recently, at the least…

Most immediately, about two and a half weeks ago I woke up with a stiff neck. No big deal, right? Well, as the days went on, it didn’t go away, and it seemed more like a pinched nerve. Or a shoulder… thing. Then a shoulder thing that involved limited movement and excruciating pain. On Memorial Day I went to a nearby hospital for an evaluation—the walk-in clinic nearby was closed for the holiday (!)—and got the helpful diagnosis of “muscle spasms,” caused by a pulled trapezius. Okay, maybe so. But the pain didn’t really go away completely and the range of motion didn’t really come back, either. A week ago I went to a chiropractor, after doing a little bit of due diligence to find one with a fairly good reputation who focuses on what massage and skeletal manipulation could conceivably help with (i.e., back and shoulder pain) rather than sounding unduly homeopathic.

Is he helping? I’m not sure. He’s not hurting, but from all appearances I have a “frozen shoulder,” which could take months to heal.

Welcome to middle age.

Anyway, on other fronts… my contract with the startup that I went to work for in February ended at the end of April, and I still have not been paid. I knew this possibility going in—that’s what “deferred compensation” means, after all—so I’m not upset. (Which is not to say that I don’t want the money.) However, I’m firing up the engines for looking for work again, getting my resume back in order and starting a long-delayed revamp of my personal web site. I’m not really sure what I’m looking for at this point; I don’t know how much of a picky bastard I can afford to be, either. But part of me wants to be doing consulting work more than doing full-time work. I could definitely be comfortable on a lower annual income than what I made last year—again, which is not to say that I wouldn’t like to make that much or more on a regular basis, but I really do like the freedom to set my own hours and working conditions. I want to work my own way, to other people’s deadlines. (Deadlines are, I have learned, pretty necessary to me.)

A couple months ago I started trying to force myself to write at least a half-hour every day. It doesn’t matter what the writing is, but notes and research for writing doesn’t count. This has actually helped—I’ve written several vignettes and stories and gotten more regular at updating my other blog. The shoulder injury has broken my concentration on non-blog writing but I’m trying to get back on that horse, too, so to speak.

Claw & Quill is still only moving forward in fits and starts. I admit my motivation to work on it has been relatively low the last few months; I’d like to find something to relight that fire, but at this point I’m not sure there’s anyone out there actually clamoring for it. What the fandom has for showing off stories is probably in the “good enough” category, and I’ve been at a loss to define just what it is that’s going to make people want to migrate to C&Q if it were actually finished. (If you think this is a blatant call for encouragement and reassurance, you are by and large right.)

There’s a few of you who I really only keep track of through LiveJournal these days (or Dreamwidth, which I still haven’t really made the mental shift to, even though I suspect there are many of you I should actually be reading there instead of on LJ). Many of you have become almost as bad about updating as I have. Some of you have moved to Twitter—as I’ve mentioned, it’s great for small stuff—and some of you, well, I’m not sure about at all at this point, as you don’t write much here, don’t tweet much and don’t seem to ever be available on IM, which about exhausts my ability to spy on you. I hope you’re all doing well!

After eight and a half years and 192,000 miles—yes, that’s over 20K miles a year—I’d started looking about for a new car to replace my Acura RSX. As much as I liked it (and the engine still seemed to be in pretty good shape), it needed work: squeaky brakes were a must-fix and tires were due to be replaced within the year, and it had annoying and expensive non-critical problems: a blown air conditioner compressor and an ugly dent in the passenger side door. A median estimate for all that would be around $2500, notably more than the car’s actual value at this point.

I’d made a short list of cars to look at—the Ford Focus or Fusion, the Mazda 3, the Hyundai Genesis Coupe. Nothing by Honda, Toyota or Nissan particularly grabbed me this time, which surprised me. (Which isn’t to say that I’d turn down a 370Z, but it’s out of my price range.) The Hyundai appealed to me as something similar to the RSX but more powerful, with rear-wheel drive, and just an all-around great driving machine. And even less practical than the RSX. The Mazda 3 surprised me by being as interesting as it was—for what’s basically Mazda’s answer to the Accord, it’s aggressively styled, has some interesting standard electronics and even with an automatic transmission is as responsive as the stick-shift RSX. (And it’s a five-speed auto with a “manual shift” mode, to boot.)

The Ford salesman was pretty cool, managing the neat trick of seeming laid back and attentive simultaneously. He didn’t fail to close the sale—the car did. It may be that nearly nine years with a quasi-sports coupe has changed my perceptions, but the Fusion seemed to take the steering wheel and accelerator as suggestions rather than commands. It’s a distinctive ride style I imagine some people would like, to be sure, but those people are not me.

I hadn’t actually expected to buy a new car now, either way, but Mazda was offering a 0% APR deal expiring on Monday. Gnaw gnaw gnaw. So I took a deep breath, went back, signed all the papers, drove away from the dealer five minutes before they closed, and the car immediately died.

No, seriously. A mile away from the dealer the “check engine” light came on, which isn’t necessarily serious, but so did the “automatic transmission malfunction” light, which is drive to the shop now do not pass go do not collect $200 serious.

As you may guess, this caused a great deal of stress for me, and more than a little consternation at the dealership. Their service department wouldn’t re-open until Monday (yesterday). I got a loaner then—apparently a very ad hoc “don’t strand the customer” choice of cars, as they’d actually just closed when I rolled the ailing car back up—and then swapped it for a somewhat more official “drive this while we figure out what’s going on, please” loaner on Sunday.

To wrap the story up somewhat more quickly, yesterday I checked in with the service manager in the morning, who optimistically said, “It’s probably just a loose connector.” I wasn’t so sanguine, and had been preparing myself to politely but firmly suggest that perhaps they should look into getting me a different car. As it turned out, the return visit in late afternoon made that unnecessary. When I walked in, they greeted me with, “We’re getting you another car and it should be here in a couple hours.” They couldn’t determine what was wrong with the original car (“something’s wrong with the transmission”) and didn’t want the deal to be permeated with lemon scent. I’ll give them points for handling it proactively.

So, bottom line: new car. Payments for five years, but slightly less than the payments on the RSX were, and with no interest. A lot of the gadgetry that’s become standard in the last decade, too—the advancements are remarkable. I may be a nerd and post pictures later.

I’ll take it out for a long drive—well, maybe not for three weeks: this upcoming weekend is booked for Mother’s Day stuff, and the weekend after that I’m keeping open for potential visitors.

After that, though, I drive somewhere stupidly far away.

(Also: props to Menlo Mazda and Jessica, the saleswoman there who helped me out and handled what’s surely on the list of Things You Do Not Want To Go Wrong With Your Sale with grace. And, if you’re in the market for a Ford, Zach at Sunnyvale Ford gets cool points. Hopefully he won’t lose them when I say I’ve bought a Mazda elsewhere.)

After tracking down a somewhat baffling "encoding error" all my journal entries have been imported here. What this means... I still don't know. This is more of an issue for my Claw & Quill group, I suspect -- while the groups and the friends have both been imported, anyone on the C&Q group would still have to authenticate with their LJ address to read those posts, I believe, because Dreamwidth currently can't map the LJ OpenID URLs to Dreamwidth accounts. Such is life.

I'll have to investigate things here more fully when I have the time; it doesn't look to me like, at this point, it's really possible to just do everything on either DW or LJ and have it tied to both gracefully -- I can't read LJ friends from my DW friends list page, for instance. Yes, I could subscribe to everyone as an RSS feed, in theory. In practice, hahahaha right like that's gonna happen. (I don't know why LJ doesn't just provide an "authenticated friends page RSS feed" so instead of having 100 feeds for 100 friends, you have one feed for all your friends. You know, just like the friends page.)

…but not as brief as a tweet.

Work has been busy the last few weeks, culminating in really busy this last week. Today was a coworker’s last day and he was trying to do a knowledge dump while we’re trying to roll out the code that he’d been working on and merge in various fixes that were being stashed away rather than checked into the source code trunk line, because the now ex-coworker was maintaining his Huge Project in trunk. (Why was he not maintaining it in his own branch? I don’t know.)

To add spice to it all, my “other job,” the contract that I started last March or so, is finally wrapping up. Sort of. This means a big push to get it running in production mode rather than development mode. So this has been eating up most of my spare cycles this week. Truthfully there are other projects I’d rather be devoting spare cycles to, but a contract is a contract and all that.

Speaking of C&Q, there will be more to report on that soon. While I can’t say that interest in it has spiked—we’re still flying very much under the radar in most places, I think—I’m getting asked about it more frequently. And there’s work, er, being worked on. (In part that’s why having the other contract pop its up head and demand work on me now now NOW! is so frustrating; there’s only a couple more hills to climb before I can start getting things into a private alpha stage.)

Anyway, on the train now heading home to do Jäger shots and collapse.

I’m kidding about the Jäger.

Probably.

What was the famous Slashdot quote about the first iPod? “No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.”

While I’m not going to predict the iPad will match the success of the previous iP* product lines, there’s a definite party line among the geek crowd that only fashion-conscious fanboys would ever actually buy Apple products and that whenever they introduce a new gadget it’s the Stupidest Thing Ever. If the majority of commenters on Slashdot and TechCrunch did not piss all over a new Apple product, that’s the product I’d expect was in trouble. Given how much pissing is going on around such sites over the iPad, I'm betting the thing is going to sell like crack-infused hotcakes.

Never make the mistake of assuming either of the following:

1. That you really know what a product you've only seen demo videos of is going to be good at. Some things look much better in demos than they really are, and some things have to actually be used to be properly evaluated.
2. That because ultimately a product is not good for you means that it's not good for anyone else. You are not necessarily in the median of the product's target market segment.

(N.B.: I'm not sure I'm in the iPad's target market segment. It's not designed to be a laptop replacement and I'm not sure I need another gadget about. I might rather have it than a dedicated e-book reader, all the arguments for the superiority of e-ink not withstanding, but I haven't been sold on e-book readers yet, either. So.)

Geeze, nothing for nearly a month and a half, and that shortly after a post talking about how I should write here weekly.

As a quick update—which I seriously need to get back into the habit of doing here, don’t I?—I’m heading to Florida starting this coming Friday the 18th, and will be there for a week. My new job is somewhat less crazy now than it was over much of November, but during November it was… we’ll just say really hectic.

It often seems to be the case that people get more done on personal projects when they’re getting busy with other projects, and to some degree that’s even true with me. I’ve made progress on Claw & Quill in the last two weeks or so that I’m proud of, although a lot of it’s awfully nerdy stuff at this point. I’m going to put out another quasi-call for people who are interested in helping with coding. The site’s being written in Python using the Django framework; experience with either one isn’t strictly necessary (although it’s obviously helpful). There’s also going to be call for work with Javascript and jQuery (and jQuery UI), HTML 5, and other such markup-savvy stuff. A couple people have expressed interest in the past in a general way; if you’re still interested—or have become interested since—give me an idea of what you’re actually interested in and I’ll try to bring things to a point where I can start getting people on board shortly after the holidays.

About halfway through October I went up to Seattle to visit shaterri and quarrel for a long weekend, which involved visiting a few Seattle neighborhoods, walking around downtown, and visiting Vancouver and Granville Island. And—unsurprisingly, given that Shaterri is at least as much of a foodie as I am—various restaurants, from Poppy to Spur. I spent some time at Zig Zag Cafe, home of the quasi-famous (and terrific) bartender Murray, and tried Carpica Antica vermouth for the first time, and Victoria Gin, made—I think—up in Vancouver.

Shaterri talks up Seattle so regularly that one wonders if the Visitors’ Bureau is paying him (and if not, why not). But it’s an area that seems eminently worthy of accolades: many walkable neighborhoods, a great culture (by which I personally mean “coffee shops, brewpubs and restaurants”), and very, very green. Yes, it’s rainier and a little cooler than I’d personally prefer, but I suspect if I were offered a job in any major American city of my choice, that’d be the one I’d choose.

Of course, I’ve just started a job in the closest American city to me, San Francisco. This is the first time since I’ve been out here (seven years, as of next month) that I’ve worked in the city, and at least so far I’m really liking it. My commute is the longest that I’ve had time-wise, but ironically one of the easiest: I drive to the Millbrae Transit Station, which is usually about 20 minutes with traffic, then take BART into the city, about a 35-minute ride. Since Millbrae is the start of the BART line, I always have a seat in the morning; I usually start standing on the way home but get a seat before we’ve left downtown.

The office building I’m in is One Market Plaza; this puts me within a few blocks not only of the bay itself, but an amazing array of lunch choices. There’s a food court in the building itself and another one in Rincon Center, the next block over. And a row of restaurants and cafes along Steuart Street. And the Ferry Building sits right across the Embarcadero, with its array of permanent food stands and cafes, and a farmers’ market on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I’m used to taking long lunch breaks to go find interesting places to eat—but now I’m surrounded by them. (I see coworkers bringing their microwave lunches to work and I want to shake them and scream, “You are in one of the best food cities in the world and you are having goddamn Stouffer’s?”)

I’ve written before about my feelings of being tugged toward both urban life and—well, less rural than a particular kind of suburban life, the kind of place where you can see a lot of stars at night but you’re not isolated, where there are homes around but it’s not modern tract housing, and where urban life isn’t more than an hour or so away when you want to spend time experiencing it. (Shaterri’s place is actually pretty close to this ideal.) This job is the most exposure to true urban living that I’ve had—even though I go home to a very suburban community every night.

Yet I think I don’t really want to live in a big city. There are urban places that might tempt me: the Fremont area in Seattle, and I’ve mentioned the Rockridge neighborhood in Oakland before. But San Francisco? Probably not. There’s not much greenspace in SF except in small pockets (and one huge one), it’s very expensive, and even in “nice” areas there’s litter in the streets. That last one is very striking comparing it to Seattle or Vancouver, but it’s not too hard to see even comparing it to other Bay Area cities.

But for now that’s not much of a concern; I don’t expect to move any time soon (I’m about to sign a lease here for another year). I don’t know if this contract will last the full six months—I’ve grown to assume that plans collapse on short notice—nor if I’ll be able to go permanent, but just going the full six months will help my finances considerably.

I’ve been considering trying to make a more concerted effort to write something in this journal at least weekly because, frankly, I need the mental exercise. This is a recurring promise I recurrently break, so no promises, but I’ll try.

In some of the discussion on my previous post, cargoweasel expressed disappointment in the “Avatar” trailer for not having a very alien world or very alien aliens. The Na’Vi are very anthropomorphic and distinctly feline; what we see of Pandora doesn’t look that different from a terrestrial rainforest (if we disregard the huge floating islands). As I wrote in response, first I agreed with this, then upon thinking about it I started to disagree with it, then upon thinking about it some more my mind went off in an only tangentially related direction.

First off, it would be neat to see more alien aliens in science fiction cinema. We’ve had fantastically weird aliens in novels for decades, and special effects technology is certainly at the point where we could realize them on film. I certainly don’t disagree with that premise, and I hope someone takes up that gauntlet. Cameron clearly isn’t.

I’ve seen other complaints about the aliens in the trailer. “If Cameron had any guts, he’d have made the Na’Vi look like slime molds.” “It looks like a Disney cartoon about blue people in a magical jungle paradise.” And this started to raise my curiosity. Why is the way the Na’Vi look a source of negativity?

What I’m considering is that the Na’Vi actually are different than other cinema aliens. I can’t think of another one quite like them. They’re markedly more non-human than Vulcans or Centauri or any other TV or movie alien that audiences are supposed to find attractive. But they’re still beautiful.

They’re beautiful. After decades of xenomorphs and creepy black-eyes humanoids and space prawns, with alien “love interests” always being either conveniently shape-changed to human or basically elves in space, the Na’Vi are just maybe a little more unusual than they’re being given credit for.

And yes, of course someone could make a far more exotic alien that’s still beautiful. The Na’Vi aren’t alien to the point where it requires a substantial amount of work to convince the audience that Jake Sully, the paraplegic marine controlling a Na’Vi/human hybrid ‘avatar,’ can still fall in love with a Na’Vi; any truly “alien alien” would be another matter. I’d love to see someone take on that challenge, but the story that could be adapted to that is probably not “Lawrence of Arabia.” (I think toob was on target with that comparison.)

The reason that many people are taken aback with the Na’Vi—and I’m not thinking of Cargo’s comments, to be clear, but rather the “ick, they look so cute!” comments around the net—is, I submit, that we have a set idea of what makes aliens alien, and that set idea pretty much is: chitin. Chitin and tentacles and glistening ooze, and a scientist character who says “they’re beautiful in their own way” shortly before being eaten. If we’re really lucky, they’ll be omnipotent balls of light who, after we finally succeed in making contact with them, will tell us that we’re not ready yet. We’re willing to accept that as realistic—but beautiful aliens living as hunter-gatherers in a mostly unspoiled world? C’mon, that’d never happen.

I think I’m okay with Lawrence. And while I would like to see more alien aliens, I’m thinking maybe a good first step is somebody finally giving us pretty non-human aliens who aren’t humans with pointy ears and, for the love of God, aren’t frikkin’ bugs. In modern sci-fi cinema, that’s actually bold.

I’ve seen many people refer to RadioShack changing their name to “The Shack” and how monumentally stupid this is, following the lead of Pizza Hut changing their name to “The Hut.” I did something kind of wild and crazy and actually, y’know, went to the company web site to read the press release from August 3:

RadioShack Corporation (NYSE: RSH) will unveil its new brand creative platform, “THE SHACK,” on August 6, supported by an integrated television, print and digital media schedule, as well as a high-profile, three-day launch event taking place in New York City and San Francisco.

“Trust is a critical attribute of any successful retailer, and the reality is that most people trust friends, not corporations. When a brand becomes a friend, it often gets a nickname — take FedEx or Coke, for example. Our customers, associates and even the investor community have long referred to RadioShack as ‘THE SHACK,’ so we decided to embrace that fact and share it with the world,” said Lee Applbaum, RadioShack’s Chief Marketing Officer. “This creative is not about changing our name. Rather, we’re contemporizing the way we want people to think about our brand.”

In other words, they aren’t changing their name. This is a marketing campaign.

I also went to Pizza Hut’s web site, and found a somewhat curt and, dare I say, vaguely exasperated-sounding press release from June 20:

“Pizza Hut is not changing its name. We are proud of our name and heritage and will continue to be Pizza Hut. We do use ‘The Hut’ in some of our marketing efforts,” said Brian Niccol, CMO, Pizza Hut, Inc.

In other words, they aren’t changing their name. This is a marketing campaign.

That we’re so quick to believe that these companies would throw away decades of brand equity for Google-hostile generics says something, surely, but I’m not sure exactly what it says, nor whom it says it about. But don’t be looking for them to be changing their signs any time soon.

Jack in the Box, though? “The Box.” Next month. You heard it here first.

It’s been almost a month since I’ve updated my LiveJournal. I see I wrote then, “I feel like I should be taking an entirely computer-free day, but that’s hard for me to manage.” Both parts of that statement are even more true right now, but especially the first one.

It’s a kind of perverse state to be in: I’ve been working with computers almost daily since I was in elementary school, and while I’d decided I wanted to be a writer by the time I graduated high school the truth is that I’ve always made a living working with computers. I’d decided earlier this year that if I ever went back to school (God help me) it would be to backfill the foundation in computer science that I never actually had. The contract I’m on now that’s not quite keeping my head above water1 is for web development. The jobs I’m trying to get? Web development again. Hell, the main move I’d like to make is from doing PHP-based development to Python-based development…which is something I’m hoping Claw & Quill will help with, since right now I’m facing a chicken-and-egg problem (nobody will give me a job using Python/Django because I haven’t had a job using Python/Django).

And right now I am really sick of staring at computer code.

I’m dragging on the contract work because I’m having so much trouble focusing.2 I have contacts from recruiters that I’m procrasting returning. Granted, in part it’s because the contract work is, as it turns out, likely to run another month, and my assumption that I’d be able to start another job while finishing up the contract work is likely to prove false. But honestly, it’s in part because I just don’t want to deal with code.

I have a friend who’s been a freelancer for years now, doing desktop publishing work rather than coding. I’ve occasionally thought about following in his footsteps for web development/design—and in a way I’m experiencing it now. I can take two (or three or four) hour lunches. I can work at my desk or in the living room or on the balcony or at the Chili’s in San Bruno or pretty much anywhere I can set up the laptop and get email. (When I started writing this I was, in fact, at said Chili’s.)

But really, I’m always on the clock. If I decide I’m just not up to working right this moment, nobody’s going to fire me—but the work still needs to get done. I may be working on a weekend or past midnight. Stuff I need for my job may come on somebody else’s schedule, and it’s somebody who’s paying me, so I can’t just lean across the cubicle wall and say, “Hey, get off your butt.”

People will tell you that the plus of this lifestyle is that you’re doing what you love, and have freedom that you can’t match with an office job. We like to think that working on our own terms is worth nearly any reduction in salary. Well, we’d better think that. I have another friend who’s a tech consultant in Florida. Between him and the friend out here? Most years both of them could be making more money at Starbucks.3

Okay, two isn’t a huge sample size, and I know of freelance designers/developers who’ve raked in the money. But the guys who talk about making more money than they ever did at their office jobs are really good. This isn’t to say the guys I know aren’t good or that I’m not good, but we are not “being actively sought to teach at conferences” good. Being on the 10% side of the Sturgeon Line gets you enough not to be starving and homeless, but you need to be in the top half of that top 10% to keep up with the guys who stayed in the cubicles—and in the top half of that half to be doing it every year. It’s not a pleasant truth, but it’s a truth.

And the really perverse thing is? Right now I’m still in love with the idea of working on my own terms.