Occasional Comment

I didn’t get my blog post written last week. Now it is time to write a post for this week. I’m going to try to write last week’s post, this week’s post, and at least a first draft of next week’s post this afternoon. That is about three hours work and it is almost two o’clock as I start writing. I tend to work better under a deadline. The key is, I have to hold myself to that deadline. I gave the members of my weekly writing group the URL for my blog. Maybe that will help make me accountable for posting my entries on time.

I made a commitment to myself last December that I would post a blog post a week this year. Until last week, I managed to keep that commitment. I intend to do better starting today.

It’s not that I don’t know how to do something on a regular schedule like this. I write a minimum of 750 words a day in my journal. That is a place for me to record private thoughts and to develop ideas that may later become stories or essays in more public venues. I have written 750 words a day in my journal for 1449 consecutive days. Now I just need to make time to write a blog post every week.

I blog for several reasons. First, to practice writing in a public venue where other people can read what I’ve written. This tempers what you write. Some times, I find, it tempers it too much. I have opinions. I should not hesitate to say what I think. If someone disagrees with me, they are welcome to write what they think in their own blog. But there is the fact that I want people to read what I write and enjoy it. It is a difficult balance to hit, being honest about what you think and believe without being offensive about it.

Another reason I write is for practice writing on a deadline. It is obvious that I need more practice at that. The other benefit of practice is it helps you improve the quality of your writing. I write much better now than I did a year ago and much better than I did ten years ago. I’m to the point now where I’m concentrating more on improving the more abstract issues of plot and character than I am on the fundamental quality of my writing.

I also write to leave my mark on the world. In science there is a truism that if you don’t publish a result, it might as well not have happened. In the case of writing, if you don’t publish your writing, you have no proof you ever had those thoughts or even existed. It’s a flawed attempt at some sort of immortality but it is the best I can do right now.

I am beginning to doubt whether the Singularity will happen within my lifetime. I had such high hopes of achieving what I call function immortality, that is you live as long as you don’t destroy yourself in a catastrophic accident. Even then, if you have made a sufficiently detailed backup of your mind, you may potentially live again. You will have a discontinuity between the time you made the last backup and the time the backup is restored into a new body.

Such is the way my thoughts flow in this time of deadly pandemic. It can’t help but inspire thoughts of mortality and dreams of immortality. Besides, what else do I have to occupy my time while I am practicing self isolation? Stay well, wash your hands frequently, wear a mask if you have to go out and stay home if you don’t.

We were sitting at home one weekday morning fairly early in the self isolation period and the power went out. I looked at Pam and she looked at me and we had the same thought. All of our cooking devices are electric except for the fireplace. Now I am sure that we could manage to cook in the fireplace in a pinch but it got us talking and thinking about alternatives.

A couple of days later I was surfing the internet and found a nice gas grill for a very good price. We talked it over and ordered it and a cover for it. This wasn’t our first grill and our old grill had died an early death due to exposure to the elements. It came with free shipping. So, Friday morning, the UPS truck pulled up and delivered it.

I asked the delivery driver to put it in front of the garage on the driveway. I have been building a lot of gardening apparatus for Pam and have learned that putting things together with small parts is better done on concrete than grass. I finished working from home and even mowed the yard before I got down to the business of putting the grill together.

The first thing I noticed was that the box was a lot heavier than I expected. I finally decided to cut the corners of the box and leave the cardboard as a padded surface to work on. The next thing I discovered was that there were a lot more parts than I expected. I found the directions and discovered that I needed a Philips screw driver and an adjustable wrench. After securing the tools, I started sorting the parts.

At this point I have to say that the thing was very sturdy but simply constructed. I followed the instructions meticulously and only had to back up and redo my work on a couple of occasions, once when I put a piece on upside down, and once when I didn’t understand that a piece was supposed to be bolted in place between two other pieces.

The box said it should take forty minutes to put together. After an hour and a half of assembly, I was only half finished and it was getting dark. I gathered the unassembled pieces together and rolled the entire thing into the garage to finish up the next day.

The next day, I was so sore and it was so hot outside, I decided to put finishing assembly off until Sunday. Sunday afternoon I rolled everything out of the garage and after another two hours and a skinned knuckle, I finally got the thing together. I didn’t strip any bolts. I didn’t have any major parts left over. The manufacturer had kindly provided one spare of each kind of nut and bolt. I had exactly one of each.

I had this wonderful sense of accomplishment. And the new found security of knowing that if we had a long power outage, we would be able to cook on our new grill.

I’m a day late posting this blog. I’m giving myself a break and hoping my reader(s?) will forgive me. We’re all a little bit overwhelmed right now. I am amazed that I’m managing to be more productive at home than I had been at the office before social distancing started. Part of it is that I have learned to focus on the task at hand better in my office. Part of it is that I don’t want to be seen as a slacker by my coworkers. But the most important reason is that it is something constructive that I can do in response to this situation.

I’m afraid that most people don’t understand how long this campaign is going to take and how bad things are liable to get. I saw a video back on March 11th explaining the exponential nature of the growth of the COVID-19 spread. I’m not a doctor. I’m not even a mathematician. I’m a Computer Scientist and I understand the meaning of exponential growth. I went to work the 12th and told my boss that I needed to self isolate. On Friday the 13th (apropos, eh?) my company announced that everyone who could work from home, must work from home until further notice. I guess there are those in management that understand the meaning of exponential growth too.

I don’t plan to spend every blog talking about the pandemic. There are other more interesting topics to write about. It is, however, the elephant in the room right now. I want to take this opportunity to express my reaction to the way our nation and its leaders are failing to make responsible decisions about how to address it. The actions of our president is tantamount to manslaughter. He has no interest in anything other than how to secure a second term in November.

I’m considering the various possible outcomes from worst to best. In the worst case, Pam and I will both come down with the virus and die. Short of that, one or the other of us will die and leave the other to deal with life alone. Barring those dire circumstances, there will be more or fewer of our family and friends that don’t survive. This is the most likely outcome. We’ve already had deaths and will continue to have more deaths until we can stop the spread of this virus.

That is going to take discipline and sacrifice. I don’t think many people realize that. I know it has been slow dawning on me. I find myself going to the door and opening it when the delivery person brings a package. I need to start waiting until they get back to their truck before I open the door. We have ordered delivery more than I’d like to admit. It occurs to me that every time we do, we risk infection from some symptomless food preparation person. I’m not blaming them. They are just trying to make a living. I’m blaming me for taking unnecessary risks of infection.

In recent days, we have been cooking more. I have been eating more than I strictly need to. This is one of my reactions to anxious situations. There are several bad consequences of this. First, I’m diabetic and it tends to keep my blood sugar higher than it could be. It also tends to increase my weight. And it reduces the contents of our pantry faster than need be. We need to stretch the ingredients in our pantry as far as they can possibly go. There may come a time when replenishing the pantry is difficult if not practically impossible.

I doubt the worst cases I’ve described above will occur. But they are possible and I want to take steps now to prepare for the eventuality. I’ll be back with less bleak observations and topics in the future. It has helped me understand my current state of mind to write this post. I hope it has helped you consider your situation.

Take care of yourself and your loved ones. Wash your hands frequently. Maintain social distancing. And most importantly, stay home. Help save the lives of our medical professionals.

We’ve been hearing the phrase “the new normal” for quite sometime now, often in regard to the way politicians are ignoring the conventional protocols of government, not to mention blatantly ignoring the constitution of the United States and the laws thereof. But that isn’t the usage that I want to talk about. I want to talk about the impact of the pandemic on our grossly unprepared medical system. I want to talk about the lethal effect of the head-in-the-sand attitude of science deniers on a naive and trusting populace.

The truth of the matter is, we have been barreling toward another, different disaster for years now. The climate is changing. At this point it doesn’t matter if the change is due to man made abuses of the environment, we’ve got to do something about it if we expect to survive the global catastrophe that is coming.

In a way, the pandemic is a good thing. It is an immediate reminder that if we don’t make use of the advice that scientists give us, we are doomed to endure the consequences of that hubris. Scientists have been advocating the preparation for a global pandemic such as we now find ourselves in the middle of since the first Bush administration. There has been some attention given to the matter but not at a high enough priority.

And then when the current administration took office, one of the first things it did was reverse some of the meager progress that had been made. Science can help save us but only if we heed the warnings that our scientists give and allocate sufficient resources to counter the challenges that they warn of down the road.

One of the frustrating things about the situation is that if we heed the warnings and take the suggested steps we won’t see that the predictions were right. Only if we ignore the advice will we see first hand how bad the situation will get.

At present, the new normal is avoid public gatherings, wash your hands at every opportunity, don’t touch your face, and what ever you do, when it comes time to vote, vote the science deniers out of office. Humanity won’t survive many more administrations like the one we have endured for the past four years.

The combination of the rainy weather and the self isolation that we’re practicing to try to avoid the potentially deadly effects of COVID-19 has found me spending more time than usual at my computer. I started working from home on Thursday morning, well in advance of the beginning of the exponential growth of infection. I hope the measures that have been put in effect manage to help us avoid the potential devastation that the virus threatens. Only time will tell.

I have been thinking a bit about creativity in general and writing in particular. As I was writing an entry in my journal while listening to a livestream on the Reina del Cid channel, I recalled something that I’ve known for a long time but haven’t thought about recently. The best lyrics tell stories. They are more constrained by their form than prose stories are but the same principles that I’ve been studying to improve my short stories apply equally to writing songs.

Another thing that I’ve known for a while but keep forgetting, the more constraints you place on yourself, the more your creativity seems to be stimulated. Constraints come in all sorts of varieties. You may be constrained by the length of the piece or the audience. You may be constrained by the genre or the vocabulary. The list of possible constraints is virtually endless but the more constraints that you put on yourself, the better the results seem to be.

Even though my commute is only twenty minutes each way, I find those forty minutes give me time to play my guitar and other things that have been falling off my plate lately. I’m lucky in that I am working on a project that is already widely geographically distributed so that it is just as effective for me to work from home as it is to go in to the office. I expect after a week or two of this I may start to get cabin fever and miss seeing my other colleagues but being able to reduce my chances of getting sick are much appreciated.

I have a number of writing projects that I’m working on but I’m going to reward myself when I meet my writing milestones by spending time writing songs and recording them with Garage Band. It’s been a long time since I’ve done that. I’m looking forward to it.

I don’t usually think of myself as an introvert. I get lonely when I’m stuck for long periods of time alone on a project. But in this case, I’m looking for the silver lining. Spending time on my computer writing, composing, reading, and all the other things that I don’t usually have enough time for is going to be a good consolation prize for having to be isolated for a while.

This will give me an opportunity to get ahead of my publishing schedule and get a couple of blog posts ready for weeks when my schedule makes it difficult to write a post. That will help me meet my goal of posting a new post every Monday. I was going to say for a year but I don’t intend to stop then.

This pandemic is not the first that humanity has faced. We are better informed and in many ways better equipped to deal with this one. Maybe we don’t have enough resources to meet the challenge of the worse case scenario but if everyone keeps calm and avoids crowds and washes their hands frequently, perhaps we can curb its severity.

It’s a strange question to ask. The fact that you’re reading this implies that you have some kind of an idea of what a blog is. The problem is, a blog is whatever the owner of it wants it to be. This can vary widely from blog to blog and even between posts on the same blog. This post is going to explore the types of content I might post here and why.

There are two broad categories of blog. The first is the link blog. A link blog consists of short entries that identify an interesting topic and links to other sites on the web that deal with it in greater depth. Link blogs often have multiple posts per day.

The other category of blog is the essay blog. It typically has longer posts than a link blog. It may have links to other sites but it is itself a more in depth treatment of its topic than is typical of a link blog post.

It is probably obvious to those of you that have been reading this blog that I tend to write essay posts here. But that is only one dimension characterizing blog posts. Another way is by the unifying topic that the blog covers, sometimes referred to as “the beat” in newspapers and magazines.

The obvious unifying factor of most blogs is the perspective of the author. This isn’t necessarily the case though. Some blogs are written by multiple authors each giving their perspective on a common topic.

I have proceeded so far this year on the theory that publishing a post on a regular schedule was more important than trying to establish a theme beyond my personal interests. I’m trying to get a couple of posts ahead so that I don’t feel so much pressure to get something written and posted by Monday.

I used to write a lot about computer languages and application software that I liked. Lately I have become less focused on programming and more engaged in writing fiction. This changes the topics that I think about a little.

I am learning the structure of a short story and how it is similar to and different from a novel. I am learning how to get a reader engaged in your story and deliver a satisfying ending. I am learning how to build a fictional world and the people that inhabit it. It is so different from writing software and yet there are amazing similarities too.

I don’t plan to post much fiction here although you never can tell. I will definitely let you know if the piece is fiction. I suspect there are better places to share fiction. Perhaps I’ll build a home page for my writing and point to it from here.

What with the effect that the Corona virus has had on the stock market and the fact that I keep reading advice from established writers that says “keep your day job”, I think I’m going to push off retirement a couple of more years. Every year that I keep adding to my retirement fund makes the prospect of writing for a living seem more feasible. If I can ratchet my retirement fund up to the point where I can live comfortably on it, I can use my income from writing, such as it may be, to invest in promoting my writing. I’ve never gone to many conventions because I couldn’t afford to. I’d love to be able to go to them and take it off my taxes as a business expense.

Another benefit of postponing retirement is that I can spend my spare time getting better as a writer so that when I do get ready to write full time, I’ll have more experience and maybe a sale or two under my belt. I know. You can’t make any sales if you haven’t made any submissions. I’m getting there.

One challenge in putting off retirement is finding time to work full time and go to all my (and my wife’s) doctor appointments. I’m lucky there in that my employer is very liberal in their flexible work schedule policy. The other thing that I appreciate is that they have changed from having sick leave and vacation to having one combined paid time off (PTO) bucket. They are also letting us take PTO in tenth of an hour increments after the initial hour. That will help.

Another issue that I have is avoiding exposure to the pandemic du jour. It’s not that I’m that afraid of them but rather that by working with people that have children, I am routinely exposed to any illness that is going around. My wife has a number of autoimmune disorders and is often left with a compromised immune system. My employer is very understanding about telecommuting but there are certain things that can’t be done remotely. I will be glad when the bulk of my work can be accomplished from my home office.

The final issue that I’m struggling with is the fact that I’ve never been self employed. My ignorance of basic business operations is staggering. I’m scared of failing not because I’m not a good writer but because I’m a lousy businessman. I guess I’ll focus on becoming an excellent writer and do what I can to improve my business acumen along the way.

I understand you can hire business managers. You need to have a business in the first place for that to make sense though. Kind of like the reason I’m not looking for an agent yet is that I’m not producing product that an agent could sell yet. If I make a sale on my own, maybe I’ll look for an agent.

Then there is the other approach to the business. The dreaded self publishing. Publishers do a lot for a writer. If one decides to self publish, one takes on the responsibility of doing everything that the publisher normally does for an author, provide an editor, a copy editor, a development editor, book designer, produce the book, distribute the book, etc. You have to know a lot more about publishing and work a whole lot more on the aspects other than writing which in itself is hard enough.

To conclude, I am overthinking things (again). I need to let the problems arise before I worry too much about them. In the mean time, I intend to enjoy the process of becoming a better writer. If I didn’t enjoy writing to begin with, none of this would even be an issue.

Often times places that have meant the most to us in our life tend to vanish from the landscape over time. Right after I graduated from High School I got a summer job at a western theme park in Cave City, Kentucky, called Guntown Mountain. It was perched on top of a large hill that passed for a mountain in the central Kentucky karst. That first summer that I worked there, there were only two ways to the top, a chair lift which was the typical means of transport, and an extremely steep unpaved road that required a four wheel drive vehicle and lots of chutzpah to navigate.

When I arrived, the park had been open a week and the rest of the crew had fallen into the rhythm of the shows. This being my first job, I was excited but unsure of what I was in for.

The cast lived in apartments on the mountain, with the exception of Jerry, the manager, and his wife and little boy. I brought a bag of clothes, two guitars, an amplifier, and a box of miscellaneous posessions. We carted them all up on the chair lift. I jumped on a chair with one of my bags. My dad stayed at the bottom and loaded the rest of my stuff on subsequent chairs. When I got to the top, the chair lift boys helped me pull my stuff off the chairs and stack them next to the gate to the town.

The town consisted of a saloon, a simulated sheriff’s office, a simulated bank, and various other buildings that contained simulated shops with antiques for the visitors to look at from the doors opening onto the boardwalk. There was a grave yard with wooden grave markers with humorous epigraphs on them behind the main buildings in town.

In the back of towns were several more buildings that served as apartments for the crew on the inside but were painted to look like period businesses, e.g. a blacksmith’s. There was an outdoor theater that was used for a magic show and a small shooting range where we demonstrated the Kentucky Long Rifle.

I was quickly indoctrinated into the profession of gunfighter and played the role of the kid in most of the gunfights. It was fun shooting the revolvers loaded with blanks. Less so falling on the limestone covered ground that had only a thin layer of sawdust sprinkled over it.

Integrating myself into the saloon show proved even easier since I had been performing in musical ensembles and plays for almost a decade. The rest of the crew were college students for the most part, as I would be come fall. They had the advantage of several weeks of rehearsal prior to the park opening but I dove right in and was up to speed in a couple of days.

I spent two summers working at Guntown Mountain, that first summer when I was eighteen and two summers later when I was twenty. Those two summers and the intervening summer when I performed much the same duties at another park, Kaintuck Territory, located in Western Kentucky near Kentucky lake, were some of the best times of my life. Those places were special and yet they are no more.

Kaintuck Territory has vanished into the wilderness of Western Kentucky while Guntown Mountain has finally gone out of business after struggling under several owners and several different themes, most recently featuring a haunted house. They haven’t had gunfights or saloon shows there in years. They say you can’t go home again but in this case, I really can’t.

Quite early in my career as a computer programmer I came to the realization that the computer was a kind of universal machine. Given the right peripherals, it could print books, play music, build cars, and so many other things that one might imagine. In fact, imagining it was the first step in accomplishing it with a computer. With computers the key was to associate binary numbers with ever more sophisticated abstractions until you subsumed the problem domain in your digital model.

In recent years I have become aware of the fact that there are different categories of software. There is entertainment software that has little in the way of safety concerns associated with it. I don’t think anyone has ever been killed because of a bug in a game.

Then there is the other end of the spectrum, safety critical software. This includes such domains as automobile engine software that can cause an engine to explode if the parameters are set too far from nominal. Or flight software that can mean the difference between a safe landing and flaming death.

Between these two extremes are various levels of concerns when it comes to software accuracy. One of the examples in this middle area are financial programs that, while they can’t directly cause death, can reek havoc with peoples lives and reputations.

Software is comprised of a broad spectrum of applications each one with a more or less safety critical implication. One size does not fit all. Some software can be churned out as fast as the programmer can hit the keys with minimal programming and no one will be hurt. Other software needs lots of analysis, study, and design, followed by careful implementation and test. And even though all of this is done, we are still going to find bugs in the system. Software is a reflection of the programmers mind and all minds are flawed to some degree or another.

There are steps that can be taken. Breaking things down into small, clear steps, ensuring that multiple people examine code and understand it so that they can help catch errors before they can escape into production systems. And a commitment to professionalism by programmers on a par with our fellow creators from other engineering disciplines.

For the bulk of my career people have been amazed that computers can do the things they do at all. We are only now beginning to ask the more important questions about which tasks should be entrusted to computers and how much are we willing to spend to get software right. We have spent so many years on the quest for ever more impressive features we have forgotten the principle of staying with software that has proven to yield safe results. Forego some of the flashy features in order to ensure the soundness of the features that are already implemented. And remember, just because you can solve a problem with a computer, doesn’t always mean you should.

I’ve been thinking about planning and scheduling lately. No, not in the sense of writing software to automate some of the more tedious aspects of planning and scheduling. Although, the thinking I do about planning my time to allow me to make progress on all of my writing goals and creating a schedule to allow me to ensure I set aside time to work on them will undoubtedly help when I turn my attention to writing software of that sort.

I’ve done a reasonably good job of writing a minimum of seven hundred and fifty words a day in a journal for the past ten years. Usually, the goal here is to empty my mind of the various detritus that clutters it up and keeps me from focusing on creating stories and essays. On occasion though, most notably during National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo as it’s often called), I use my journal habit to help find time for a more focused pursuit, like writing the aforementioned novel. The point is, I’ve developed a habit of writing my journal every day. Now, I need to figure out when I’m going to set aside time to write fiction on a daily basis.

But writing fiction isn’t the only activity vying for my limited time. There is also rewriting, editing, proof reading, and all the other incidental activities requisite in producing a polished, publishable product. And that is not even considering finding time to write and lightly edit the weekly blog post that I committed to this year. The one that you are reading right now in fact.

I have good intentions of writing several blog posts in advance so that I don’t get in a time crunch and find myself writing my blog post at the last minute in order to publish it every Monday at noon as planned. That hasn’t happened yet although I do have some hope of getting a few posts ahead before we get too much further into the year.

Dwight Eisenhower once said “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” It has taken me a while to appreciate the wisdom behind that statement. The way I’ve come to understand it is that the process of planning forces you to think about how to accomplish the activity you are undertaking. The plan that you come up with is merely one way of accomplishing the task. There are other ways of doing it, some better, some worse.

When you set out to execute a plan, you discover all the details that you overlooked while planning. The good news is, you have given some thought to the details that you didn’t overlook, thus reducing the amount of work you have to do while replanning in the moment. Also, you have practiced thinking about the problem so you have a better idea of where to start when you are considering how to proceed when you are replanning.

Habits help. If you can do something every day for two weeks, you will have established it as a habit. Once you have established a habit, adding a new aspect to that habit is a lot easier than establishing the habit was initially. For example, I have a strongly established habit of writing a journal entry every day. When I decided to add a practice of identifying three things that I was grateful for each day, I tagged that activity on to the end of writing my journal entry and established the habit immediately.

Take time to list your goals. Then prioritize them. Take the highest priority goal and schedule some time, fifteen minute a day perhaps, to dedicate toward achieving that goal. Keep that daily commitment for two weeks. Soon you will have achieved your highest priority goal. Take the next goal on your list and do the same with it. You’ll be surprised at how quickly you will start achieving your goals.