Paul Kuliniewicz

No, seriously, I hate snow.

Fun fact: do you know what a car buried under two feet of snow looks like? Pretty much like anything else buried under two feet of snow.

I’ve signed up for NaNoWriMo this year in hopes of pulling off a repeat of last year’s effort. As you know, NaNoWriMo, aka National Novel Writing Month, is where a bunch of people try to write a 50,000-word novel(la) entirely in the month of November. In other words, an average of 1,667 words per day for 30 days.

And even though it’s not a requirement to “win”, I once again plan to post one 1,667+-word chapter a day every day during November. Why? Because I can. Plus, I clearly have no compunction about foisting hastily written unedited rough drafts upon you.

This year’s effort will be science fiction, which really isn’t that different from fantasy — as long as you replace magic with sufficiently advanced technology, most people can’t even tell the difference. I haven’t written an outline, but I’ve got a bunch of jumbled-up ideas about stuff that happens. Renee can confirm I do have a premise for the A plot, at least. And even though I think the better chapters from last year were the ones where I deviated from the outline and winged it, I still need one to make sure the story keeps moving in the right direction, if only to make sure it ends at Chapter 30.

Oh yeah, I need to figure out how it’ll end. I know for sure how it’ll begin, and the stuff in the middle needs to be sorted out some, but the ending is still up in the air. I haven’t even decided whether the main character will last that long.

Deciding on a title would also probably help. At least I know one of the characters is named Dave.

But I’ve got a good 10 days or so before I need to worry about any of that. So is anyone else giving it a go this year?

While everyone is worried about swine flu H1N1 S-OIV and its newfound pandemic status because they don’t understand what the term actually means in a scientific context (see also: theory), allow me to share with you a recent first-hand medical discovery so terrifying you’ll run out to stock up on plastic sheeting and duct tape.

I recently caught a cold. While not a frequent occurrence, I’ve had enough colds over the years to have a pretty good understanding of the progression of symptoms as I experience them: first the sore throat, then the runny nose, then the stuffy nose, each lasting about two days and all accompanied by a general feeling of being mildly run down. At the end there’s a restless night involving a half-awake, half-dreaming state as the infection makes its last stand against my immune system, and in the morning it’s all over.

Thus, when I came down with a sore throat on Monday, my reaction was one of annoyance rather than concern. Tuesday the sore throat started to go away, and Tuesday night I experienced the nocturnal endgame, leaving me feeling pretty decent on Wednesday with no nasal difficulties to be found. Naturally, I wrote it off as a 24-hour-ish bug and figured that was that.

But then on Thursday I got a pack-of-tissues-a-day runny nose without warning! What happened?

Brace yourself, for I can think of only one possible explanation.

The common cold has learned insurgency tactics.

Knowing it couldn’t win a fair fight against the superior might of my immune system, the infection feigned defeat in conventional warfare, instead striking without warning once I had declared victory and let my body begin reconstruction efforts. While my T- and B-cells were busy establishing democracy in my throat, insurgent viruses littered my nasal packages with improvised mucus devices. After a period of mounting civilian casualties (Kleenex are civilians, right?), my immune system revised its rules of engagement and surged in response, apparently successfully.

This is truly a terrifying development in the world of infectious disease. This is partly because our immune systems have not learned the lessons of 9/11 and expect to be able to fight the next disease using conventional tactics. (By the way, there’s actually only one lesson of 9/11: invoking 9/11 makes you automatically win any argument on defense policy. It’s like how the phrase “in these tough economic times” makes you automatically win any argument on economic policy, and the opposite of how invoking Nazis or Hitler makes you automatically lose your argument.)

No, the truly terrifying thing is this: in this strained analogy, my brain is represented by George W. Bush.

Lately I’ve been seriously considering dropping my cable TV subscription. The impetus of this is my Schedules Direct subscription — the service providing TV listings to my MythTV box — coming up for renewal.

It’s hardly as though the $20 for another year is going to break the bank or anything (the banks seem to be doing a good enough job doing that themselves these days), but it does highlight the fact that my TV viewing habits of late have decreased from their already fairly low levels. (Judging from the date of my last post here, so have my blogging habits, but I digress.)

The “dump it” argument is pretty straightforward. The only two shows I really wouldn’t want to do without are The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, and both of those are available on Hulu for free. There are a few other shows I also have my MythTV box set to record, but it’s only a handful. Is it really worth the $56/month charge on my cable bill for what I get out of it? With the savings, I could easily bump up my Netflix subscription (current queue length: 148) and watch most of the shows once they come out on DVD that way. As an added bonus, being able to power down the MythTV box for good would also probably take a chunk out of my electricity bill.

The counterargument, however, is that The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are the only two shows I regularly watch that are readily available online. (Excluding BitTorrent, of course.) While it’s obvious to me that the broadcast model of TV is inherently doomed, we’re still a ways away from the everything-available-online-on-demand world that will inevitably replace it. Not everything shows up on DVD, and even then there’s a fairly significant delay before they’re released. Plus, I’d pretty much lose the ability to watch something live, in the rare event I want to do that.

Besides, for the time being, “online streaming video” is de facto synonymous with “Flash”, and performance of Flash on non-Windows platforms is notoriously awful. As in, unable to play videos off of Hulu full-screen without skipping even on a recently-acquired laptop, when even my five-year-old former laptop could play non-Flash videos full-screen without having to step up the CPU speed. (YouTube videos might play fine, as long as you don’t do anything else while it’s playing. Like move the mouse at all. Seriously.) That’s assuming, of course, that the Flash plugin doesn’t crash in the first place. You know how Firefox these days runs plugins in a separate process? Yeah, you can thank the Flash plugin’s stability for that.

On top of all that, I just know that if I call the cable company to cancel my TV service, they’re going to jack up the charge for Internet service with the excuse that the rate I have now is part of a package deal.

What I’ll probably end up doing is renewing Schedules Direct and keep doing what I’m doing now, but keeping an eye out for any changes that might shift my decision the other way. Unless someone can come up with a convincing argument in the comments to do otherwise.

After a blissful several-month absence, unsolicited credit card applications are now appearing in my mailbox once again.

I may have the perfect anecdote to describe the average Maryland driver’s complete inability to handle any winter precipitation on the road, despite how getting snow or ice isn’t that unusual during winter.

This morning, there was maybe an inch of loose, powdery snow on the ground. On my commute, I had to change lanes to avoid a car jutting halfway into the right lane after having failed to allow for adequate stopping distance. Just before I passed, said car was in turn rear-ended by another car who likewise had failed to allow for adequate stopping distance.

… is going to be 1920×1200, thanks to having bought a new laptop.

*rimshot*

Apparently I haven’t posted anything since finishing this year’s NaNoWriMo. I guess after all that I ran out of words for a while. Or got lazy. Whichever.

I bought a laptop to replace kryten, the tablet PC I had gotten after learning how to B.S. my way through computer science and mathematics. (That is what a B.S. degree means, right?) Four and a half years later, it’s rather underpowered for some of the things I want to do. So I bought a new laptop and, following the naming convention I’ve used thus far with my computers, named it queeg. I’ll write more about it later once I’ve finished putting everything on it through its paces. Maybe.

And though I’m not in the habit of the pointless tradition of making new year’s resolutions (aside from the occasional cliché monitor joke seen above), it is about time for me to get more serious about the software development I do in my free time. I let far too much time lapse between Music Applet releases, and I still have yet to set up an actual bug tracker for it. Which is still more than I can say for efforts like Wallace, Old Lady, or Dennis, none of which I’ve so much as touched recently. And even that’s still more than I can say for other stuff I want to write, like an online Tron game, or an OpenID provider that uses client-side TLS certificates for authentication, or other things I can’t think of at the moment but that I know I’ve wanted to make.

So in 2009, I’m going to push at least one of those vaporware projects to completion. But first, get Music Applet 2.5.0 finished and released.

In other words, I resolve to be way more productive in terms of software development in 2009 than I’ve been in 2008, even though I’ll have precisely 24 hours 1 second less time at my disposal.

Blogging? That will remain as sporadic as ever.

I finally got around to cleaning off all the bird droppings on my deck. I learned a few things in doing so:

• Over time, the piles of bird droppings form a histogram of where the birds like to perch.
• Birds prefer hanging out on the rafter above the north end of my deck.
• Individually, bird droppings don’t have much of a smell. En masse, they do. Here, en masse means about one and a half dustpans’ worth.

Now you know.

This weekend I went to the National Portrait Gallery to see the famous portrait of the only man more patriotic than George Washington playing baseball while duct-taped to Abraham Lincoln: Stephen Colbert. Or, more specifically, the portrait of him standing in front of a portrait of himself standing in front of a portrait of himself, hung above his totally-real fireplace during the second year of The Colbert Report.

As fans of the Report know, after being rejected by the National Museum of American History (like anyone really cares about a pair of red shoes), Colbert’s hackey sack skills persuaded the director of the gallery to display the portrait in no less a place than the restrooms just outside the Hall of Presidents:

I can assure you, the portrait is every bit as magestic in person as it was on the Report, with the added benefit of ready access to indoor plumbing. The portrait itself is ridiculously popular — apparently the NPG’s attendance has doubled since it went on display — and is in a comically bad location, with the walls of the lavatorial nook blocking any lateral visibility of the portrait. But that’s not stopping thongs of Heroes and It-Getters from flocking to see it and, naturally, have their picture taken while standing in front of it. Or at least, trying to do so before someone who’s entering xor leaving the restrooms unwittingly walks into the shot.

If you want to get in on the magesty yourself, keep in mind you have until April 1. No joke.

Fun fact: the portrait of Benjamin Harrison on display in the Hall of Presidents is on loan to the Smithsonian from Purdue University’s Harrison Hall.

What does it mean when your fortune cookie is empty?

This weekend Phil Plait (of Bad Astronomy fame) and PZ Myers (of Pharyngula fame) were in DC for an Americans United meeting, and during their down time Saturday night had a meet-up for readers in the area. There were probably around two dozen or so people there, crouded around a chain of tables of such length as to probably not be favored by the local fire codes.

I know it’s somewhat cliched to point this out, but PZ Myers is vastly more quiet and reserved in person than one might expect from reading his blog. I mean, he hardly even killed any kittens while I was there, though he was sporting a shirt I’m nearly covetous of. I did learn, however, that he may be at risk of becoming the god of zebrafish religion, what with his zebrafish ascending to a tank called “heaven” after their role in an experiment is over to live out the rest of their days.

As for Phil Plait, he was at the opposite end of the table chain from me most of the evening, so I didn’t hear much of the conversations he was involved in, aside from complaining about the baggage handlers at BWI and the lack of direction coming from the upper levels of NASA. He was signing copies of his old book, and PZ was signing (or maybe defacing) them too, for no reason aside from not having published any books himself. (Had I had a copy of the bible handy, I would’ve asked PZ to sign it, if only to see what his reaction would be, considering.)

I also learned there’s still a fair number of people on the Metro even at 11:30 at night.

Renee asked for it, and guess what I found lurking in the depths of holly’s hard drive? (Where by “depths”, I mean in a clearly named subdirectory under $HOME.) The novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo 2002!

How long ago was 2002? I wrote the novel in StarOffice, of all things. This was back before OpenOffice.org existed to any great degree. Fortunately, I had generated a PDF version of the novel too. Unfortunately, the quality of the PDF was atrocious, since I think I printed to file and then converted the resulting PostScript to PDF via ps2pdf; and I did that because StarOffice’s native “Export to PDF” feature looked even worse.

Fortunately, the current version of OpenOffice.org has a usable “Export to PDF” and can open StarOffice files. Unfortunately, I had uninstalled OpenOffice.org some time ago, probably to free up a good 300 MB of disk space and because I almost never used it. So guess what got reinstalled on kryten to make a legible version of the novel that you’d actually be able to open?

Sheesh, the lengths I go for you people.

I also kept a log of my progress as I wrote. Look on my writing speed, ye mighty, and despair:

Nov 01:     0 today;      0 total
Nov 02: 1,834 today;  1,834 total
Nov 03: 2,314 today;  4,148 total
Nov 04: 2,062 today;  6,210 total
Nov 05: 2,400 today;  8,610 total
Nov 06: 2,431 today; 11,041 total
Nov 07: 2,093 today; 13,134 total
Nov 08: 2,402 today; 15,536 total
Nov 09: 2,013 today; 17,549 total
Nov 10: 2,455 today; 20,004 total
Nov 11: 2,093 today; 22,097 total
Nov 12: 2,403 today; 24,500 total
Nov 13: 2,824 today; 27,324 total
Nov 14: 2,018 today; 29,342 total
Nov 15: 2,101 today; 31,443 total
Nov 16: 2,141 today; 33,584 total
Nov 17: 2,055 today; 35,639 total
Nov 18: 2,141 today; 37,780 total
Nov 19: 2,269 today; 40,049 total
Nov 20: 2,031 today; 42,080 total
Nov 21: 2,005 today; 44,085 total
Nov 22: 2,173 today; 46,258 total
Nov 23: 4,330 today; 50,588 total

For the adventurous, you can read Save Point in the new collector’s “legible PDF” edition. Be warned, though, that I myself have never read it, let alone edited it any, so there’s no assurance of any quality whatsoever. But seeing as how I was posting it on the Internet as I was writing it back in the day, any possible embarassment has already been done.

For those two lazy to read 50,588 words, here’s the four-word synopsis of the plot: “Self-inflicted Groundhog Day“.

I donated blood recently. What makes this particular instance notable is that I learned first-hand why they put a tarp down on the floor in the donation area.

I knew things weren’t going to go well when I saw that the technician was having a really difficult time trying to find where to stick the needle. As in, spent a good minute working on that problem. I’ve donated many times before, but that’s the first time I ever witnessed that level of effort being exerted to find the target. So, either the physiology of my arm radically changed since the last time I donated, or the technician who was going to stick me wasn’t very good.

Given that I generally try to avoid radiological sources, and I haven’t wandered into any Level 4 Biohazard labs recently, I was leaning towards the latter. But at that point, what are you going to do?

Now, I readily admit that I am a wuss. I always make sure to look the other way when they do the needle stick, and never look back until they have the thing over it in place. But I haven’t found any good ways to disable my tactile sense, so I still noticed that there was also an unusual amount of activity going on with that needle.

Then I heard the technician call someone else over for help. At that point, in a moment of weakness, curiousity got the better of me.

Now, as an aside, I would like to remind the reader that blood, like IP packets, does not just get piled onto a truck, but travels through a series of tubes. The standard blood donation procedure augments this general paradigm by running a tube from your arm into a bag. And, when you think about it, a bag is nothing more than a fat little tube with one end blocked off. So, if things are going well, your blood should always be in a tube of some sort.

When I looked back at my arm, the first thing I noticed was that a fair amount of blood was in fact not in a tube at all, but had instead gotten spread out one way or another over my arm.

I remarked, “Ooh, that doesn’t look good.”

The technician quickly assured me that everything was under control, and by the way, maybe you would like to look the other way for a little while longer?

Since I didn’t get a look at what happened after that, I’m going to assume that someone competent got the needle properly in place and stopped any further bleeding. Well, any further unintended bleeding, at least. Soon after that I noticed the technician wiping something up off the floor directly below the arm in question.

So, now you know why they put that tarp down.

For the record, the rest of the donation proceeded relatively uneventfully, aside from the technician having to repeatedly adjust the pressure to hit the sweet spot of continued blood flow without the arm going numb. Which was also something I never had happen any other time I donated.

Plus, obviously, I survived, so there is one thing about the whole ordeal that went right.

In retrospect, I’m not sure I want to know the story behind why, during the screening process, that technician donned a face mask clearly labeled “Splatter Shield” when doing the needle stick for the iron test. You know, where they have to squeeze your finger to coax out a couple drops of blood to fill a pipette via capillary action? I mean, how high does one’s blood pressure need to be to make that precaution necessary?

** You are receiving this message because your @purdue.edu e-mail address
has been scheduled for DELETION sometime after November 5, 2007. **

Considering that I graduated back in May 2006, this suggests that Purdue keeps your ITaP e-mail account active for 18 months after you leave. For comparison, the Comp Sci department finally got around to shutting down that e-mail address of mine sometime last month.

So, in the exceedingly unlikely chance you’re still using one of my old Purdue e-mail addresses for something, you better get into the habit of using my current, oh-so-hard-to-guess e-mail address (hint: firstname at lastname dot org).

The good news, of course, is that once Purdue finally stops forwarding my mail from that account, the amount of spam I get will go down significantly.

So apparently, the Small Press Expo is going to be this weekend in Bethesda. I’ve only taken note of this because Howard “Schlock Mercenary” Tayler and Jeph “Questionable Content” Jacques will be exhibiting there, and at the very least I don’t think Howard Tayler makes it out this far east very frequently.

However, that’s also about the extent of my interest in the goings-on there. I mean, I recognize a few of the other names that’ll be there, but they don’t register much more than a meh. So, is it worth driving down to the D.C. area (including — ick — a stretch on the Beltway and/or a really long ride on the Metro), finding parking, and paying a day’s admission to see all of two exhibitors? Which I guess would involve waiting in line, buying their merch, and having it signed, presumably in that order? (Not having been to a convention type thing like this, I don’t know for sure.)

Plus, the idea of going down around D.C. for the third time in one week isn’t terribly appealing either, but I’m open to being convinced to go.