Cutting The Cable

You may have inferred the fact that I have recently upgraded a perfectly wonderful MacBook Air to the latest model. And you may also know that I've been geeking with the Raspberry Pi. Implicit in this is my desire to create the perfect Internet/TV lash-up. If you buy an Internet-ready TV, you'll find it has some of the apps you want, but it'll have some annoying gaps that are filled by the Apple TV. And if you buy an Apple TV set top box, you'll find it has more of the apps you want, but other annoying gaps that are filled by the Raspberry Pi. (If you think this is an unreasonable line of reasoning, I agree and I blame my friend Paul.) My days of subscribing to Cable TV are numbered.

So, I've been poking around figuring things out how to plug those gaps.

Since the weather has gotten cold, I don't like to walk outside with my wife for exercise. We have a treadmill and Nordic Trak next to one another, but took out the TV in front of them when television went HD digital a while back. So, I didn't want to be cold when I exercise. and I didn't want to be bored, either. So, this morning after breakfast, I trotted off to Best Buy and bought an open-box Samsung TV. It's not particularly large, and it was reasonably priced. So reasonably priced that I was able to throw in another Apple TV into the deal.

It took a few hours and a bit of to-and-fro with the cables, but I got both the Apple TV and the Raspberry Pi XBMC application going. If you're going to do this, I recommend a TV that implements some form of HDMI/CEC so you don't have to fuss with adding a keyboard, mouse, or other interface to the Raspberry Pi.

Because I got the television dirt cheap, it did not have HDMI/CEC. But I was able to dispense with the keyboard/mouse after I told the XBMC application to let other programs control it over the net. After I turned that on, I was able to download and configure apps for my Android phone and also for my iPad so that each can serve as a remote control That's pretty cool to pick up the cell phone or the iPad when you want to pause a video.

(I got my wife a Nest thermostat for Christmas. So, this morning I turned up the temperature without getting out of bed with my iPad. I love living in the future.)

I made mention of upgrading a perfectly good MacBook Air, because it supports this feature called "AirPlay mirroring." Thus, when I'm running the MacBook Air, I can mirror its display to the television. Anything I can see on my Mac I can also see on my TV without having to schlep a bunch of cables between things. And all the wires are tucked behind the television and its stand the way God intended them to.

In these days of HDTV, I find that I can dispense with a lot of complexity I had to sort out in the 1990s, but I get a lot of new complexity. So, it's a wash. It's amazing how much awesome technology you can get for not much money these days.

With a HDTV, Apple TV, and Raspberry Pi running XBMC, I figure I can have the almost-perfect television-viewing experience...

WHEN I SHOULD BE READING A BOOK.

My 2013 Mac

You must remember I'm as old as dirt. And I've forgotten more about computers than young whipper snappers like you will ever know... he said shaking his cane. The Macintosh computer was invented by Apple so that geezers like me can quietly pass into senility without any need of any of that useless information we've got rattling around our noggins.

The thing about a Mac is that it has a learning curve that is nice and gently sloped upwards until it terminates in a sheer ice cliff. You want to go further than that? Get your crampons and climbing gear. Beneath the friendly, happy bunny face of Mac OS X "Mountain Lion" is a snarling, feral Unix kernel and all its attendant terrors for the uninitiated.

When you buy a new MacBook Air like I did after Christmas, it has this wonderful Migration Assistant that I cannot praise highly enough. It is as smooth as silk and everything you'd ever want when migrating all your stuff from one machine to another. You just hook the two machines together, answer some prompts and wait for all the files to go over from old to new. Walla!

When I went to check how things did, the results were impressive. I couldn't find anything that hadn't been successfully migrated. Bravo Apple. I went on thinking the migration had been flawless until just a little while ago when I went to print something.

It didn't migrate my printers. OK, I can click thru dialogs and redo the printer setup. The two HP inkjet printers that I'd bought in this century were happily configured in mere moments and ready to go.

But then came my HP LaserJet 4. It dates back to when I rebuilt Unix kernels for a living. And it's hooked up to a wireless print spooler that's somewhat less than user-friendly. Set it up perfectly, and all is perfect. Do otherwise, and you are in deep kim chee.

I hadn't sold my old Mac, so I expected to just copy by hand the settings from one bunch of dialogs on the old machine to the same dialogs on the new one. Simple, right?

Well, those printer setup dialogs show all the parameters except the ones you need when you're adding a printer via IP. You need the IP address of the print spooler. You know, the set of numbers you should write down on a sticker and put on the spooler, except you didn't. And you can't see the IP address on the old Mac's dialogs. Grrrr.

The answer was to get out the ice-climbing gear and start stabbing the problem with my ice-axe.

1. First I went into terminal. 
2. Then I went into google to find the right conf file in the CUPS subsystem. It wouldn't show me /etc/cups/printers.conf. 
3. Then I remembered sudo cat /etc/cups/printers.conf | more

Joy of joys, the DeviceURI is lpd://192.168.1/101/L1

Back to my new machine, add IP printer address shown above, and the L1 queue.

That didn't work. Cycle power on printer. That didn't work. Ping 192.168.1.101. No response. That's a clue. Cycle power on spooler. Wait. Ping starts responding. Try to print again. Walla!

So, people say that Unix is not user-friendly. This is not true. It is just very selective about who its friends are.

Assigned Reading

My daughter, wife, and I were comparing notes about the books we were all assigned to read in school. I escaped "Lord of the Flies," and "In Cold Blood," but had to endure "1984," "The Jungle," "Catcher In The Rye," and "The Grapes of Wrath."

(Last night I watched a TV show where Gordon Ramsey witnessed a woman rub red chili peppers into her eyes. My wife just said, "Why?") These books gave me as much literary pleasure as a capsaicin eye-wash.

All of the above were inflicted upon us as tender young high school students without the experience and gumption to cry, "Bullshit!" Such assigned reading easily explains why I chose a career in math, science and technology.

Star Trek techno-babble notwithstanding, science, technology, engineering, and math have the common virtue of having to work.  If you bluff your way through a degree in one of those fields, something big can fall down--say a bridge or a building. People tend to notice those sorts of failures a lot more than when little Johnny doesn't know compound interest or thinks that voting for Santa Claus is sound fiscal policy.

My first inclination is that forcing kids to read lame novels should be a firing offense. On the other hand, lame novels can drive smart kids so far from literature that they'll become Engineers instead. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose.

Let the little dears wait until they are enrolled in a hard-science major and then they can discover Robert Heinlein.

Axe-grinding vs Story-telling

Unless you receive a Federal subsidy large enough to blind you to things like sustainability, liberty, and basic mathematics, you might not like the direction the USA has taken in the last decade or so. Or you might think that the government exists to tax your enemies, subsidize your friends and get large enough to make sure nobody can escape its clutches.

The citizens of a representative democracy are responsible to know what its gubmint is doing and replace corrupt rascals with just statesmen. The only problem is that both parties prefer to put no one but weenies on the ballot.

Let's be clear: I think the Republican Party is every bit as corrupt as the Democrat Party.

This poses a problem for the writer who is also a citizen: what do do about this?
 

I've seen Sarah Hoyt, Ric Locke, and Larry Correia tackle this problem in turn. If you like guns, you can get an articulate argument for training responsible citizens in gun handling, and defense so that the crazed murderer can be immediately confronted with a violent response. (When seconds count, the police are only minutes away.) And if you hate Communists, Sarah Hoyt can regale you with tales of Portugal under the left. I have no doubt that if Ric Locke or Robert Heinlein were alive to day they'd be doing likewise.

I have friends whose politics are as contradictory to mine as night is to day. And they've poured their politics into their writing making all the villains like me and all the heroes like them. This makes their stories as readable as a Jack Chick tract. Tolerable if you agree, intolerable if you do not. The ratio of axe-grinding to story-telling is over ten to one.

I've also seen slightly more sophisticated tales wherein the labels are scrubbed from the heroes and villains, but they act out allegories of good and evil while sermonizing about the virtues of their position. Atlas Shrugged comes to mind here. It's a little better than a Chick tract, but I still skipped past the 20 page sermons by John Galt, et al. Here the ratio of axe-grinding to story-telling is improved, but still heavy-handed.

I thing Michael McCloskey gets the balance right in "The Trilisk Ruins" (5 stars). The gubmint is the antagonist and it doesn't matter whether the administration is Republican or Democrat. (Both parties signed onto the USA PATRIOT Act after all.) The heroes are "criminals" who aim to misbehave. They spend a fair amount of time when they're in civilization scrubbing logs of incriminating evidence and bribing bureaucrats to overlook minor infractions. And they find the Feds like to infect everyone's computer with dormant spyware.

None of this gets in the way of a ripping good yarn. The hero and her handsome male companions go rocketing off into space in search of treasure with the gubmint a few steps behind trying to stop them and/or steal the treasure for themselves. I figured the axe-grinding to story-telling ratio was fairly light-handed, but I should get a 2nd opinion from a statist.

Many times you'll read an SF story wherein the aliens are just like us, but with some prosthetic makeup on their nose and funky jewelry (Bajoran), or pointy ears and eyebrows (Vulcan), or spots on their skin (Trill). Why, you might ask Gene Roddenberry? Because more elaborate makeup and alien get-ups cost too much, he'd say.

McCloskey has no such constraints. He devises aliens with tri-lobed brains, or 20-lobed brains, and he gives them really alien forms. Like 40 limbs, no sense of smell or hearing, but a sense of mass. And he gives this a plausible explanation without getting bogged down in technobabble. High marks for making his aliens alien.

Often you'll read Science Fiction with artificial intelligences and lots of networked computers and there's a sense that technology is just magic with wires. Not so in "The Trilisk Ruins." Communications protocols, encryption, and other terms of the geek's art are handled intelligently without any hand-wavy bull.

"The Trilisk Ruins" is the first novel in a series. If you buy this and like it, be prepared to buy a few more follow-up novels. I just did.

More About Mr. Perfect

I've blogged about avoiding superlatives, and beaten up that nice Mr. Mike Smith about his superlative protagonist.

Just now I found something that underscores what I'm talking about. Here's a link to an article about things overachievers do. It gets depressing at the end when it says they don't write books. Sigh.

The point I derived from this article is that if you're really, really good at X, then you'll be less good at A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, Y, and Z. If that was tedious to read, it was tedious to write. And now imagine that instead of just reading each letter, you were getting a Ph. D. in it? Sounds unrealistic? It should.

If your dashing knight is the best swordsman in the world, then s/he's got no time after swords practice for mastering the violin, or piloting a star fighter, or figuring out how to romance members of the appropriate sex?

If you see any of my ebooks, you'll see the art of Joanne Renaud. We've become friends because I am not an artist. She is. I've hired her to do art for my books. She's good. Yet she reminded me of something that weirded me out some years ago. Did I say I'm not an artist? Keep that in mind.

My sister was cleaning out some of the papers from my dad's house. And some of my teenaged papers were mixed up in them. She sorted them out, and returned them. I saw some landscapes and a picture of a superhero with a jet pack and ray gun.

"Who drew these?" I asked.

"You did," she replied.

I could not imagine any time at which I had been interested in doing something like that. I could not remember making those pictures. They were completely unfamiliar to me. I'm not an artist.

This bothered me a bit and I racked my brain about how these drawings had come to be. Over the course of a couple days I remembered having some time on my hands immediately after graduating from High School and before I started working in my full-time job. In the summer of 1973 I wasn't an artist. I wasn't anything. Just a kid who'd finished school with pretty good grades and a diploma from Kent City High School (The worst high school in Kent County, Michigan back then. I was told.)

In the decades afterwards, I've applied myself to studying Mathematics, Computer Science and Software Engineering. Then I applied myself to writing and storytelling so that my artistic expression is seen in my writing. Not the graphic or visual arts.

Who I am is informed by these activities. The culture of the geeks I ran with helped form my values and attitudes. When I ran into artists in my various writing groups, making purdy pitchers was something they did, not me. Thus my shock and denial that I had dabbled in producing something I was now interested in only as an observer and consumer. This is sort of the inverse of my blog post about reading like a writer.

I'm not anything special and where I aspire to be special, I relate less well to the book-buying public.

I once wrote a writing mantra about making your protagonist someone you'd want to get on the train with. And that means your protagonist has to be someone normal humans can relate to at some level. Stan Lee does this when he makes Peter Parker an awkward high school student. C. S. Forester does this when he lets that nice Mister Midshipman Horatio Hornblower get beat up for doing something right. 

Look again at what those overachievers do: they trim away parts of their life that are unrelated to their goals.

Overachievers are unbalanced characters.

An overachiever in X will be an underachiever in something else. To make your characters believable they must be in this sense realistic. Maybe your ninja is the best swordsman in all Japan, but he sucks at marketing and promotion.

Think about your characters' strengths, and now imagine a list of everything that remains. Regard those things as weaknesses. Sherlock Holmes was an embarrassment to his family when John Watson disclosed he was a flat-earther. Just ask Mycroft.

A Summary of Mantras for the Writer

This post serves as a central point of reference to which all my writing mantras can be linked ad seriatum.

I started this business of writing down my writing mantras and explaining them with a great deal of energy, and I foolishly bundled five of the mantras together in one long post. A few shorter posts would have been better. I calmed down a bit and I wrote a shorter explanations after that.

#1 Work your opening paragraph to death.
#2 Give no excuse to dismiss your work in the opening pages.
#3 Bracketing a story often works.
#4 So does “in media res.”
#5 Make your reader want to “get on the train” with your characters.

These all bear on considerations of the opening for your story. They may seem self-explanatory, but they're elaborated upon here just in case they aren't.

#6 Evoke sympathy for the hero, then evoke identification with his story goals.

Because I was reading like a writer, I realized there was a method to C. S. Forester's madness when he had everyone be so mean to that nice Horatio Hornblower.

#7 A conjunction weakens an utterance.

In the universe of hard-hitting dialog, you will seldom find a laundry list.

#8 Exile “and” from your poems.

#9 Can your poem be rewritten without “I/me/my”? (Universals are not personal).

I clumped together these mantras because they both deal with something I'm less comfortable with and less interested in: poetry.

#10 Adverbs Are Not Your Friends

#11 Put not your hope in adjectives nor prepositional phrases, either.

#12 Modifiers in general should be replaced with stronger nouns and verbs.

#13 Use a thesaurus as often as you drink Tabasco.

The writer needs a vocabulary. With a vocabulary you can know what word has the exactly-right shade of nuance when you want an action, or when you want a being. A lame vocabulary will cause you to decorate your nouns and verbs with crutches like adjectives, adverbs, and propositional phrases. You can't fix a lame vocabulary by going to the Thesaurus.

14    Minimize use of dialog tags.
15    A bit of body language can cue who’s speaking.
16    As well as the intent of the speaker: interrogator vs interrogate-e.
17    “Proper names can cue who’s speaking, Mulder.” “Is that so, Scully?”
18    But if you must use a dialog tag, use “said.”
All these mantras concern dialog tags. Too many of them make your prose wooden. "With some creativity, you can eliminate all dialog tags," he boasted.

#19 Vary your sentence structure.
#20 If all your sentences start with the same first word, see the previous mantra.
See dull sentence. Bore dull sentence. Bore.

#21 There are no new plots, but there are plenty of fresh characters
Here's where I confess the dark secret that lies behind my first Finding Time story.

#22 In every scene, every character should want something.

The unrequited desires of each of your characters are spurs in their sides, the air beneath their wings, and some other metaphors you can supply. These "wants" pull your story forward.

#23 Conflict is always more interesting than harmony.

Just like contented characters are death to stories, harmony is moribund thereto. You should always have some conflict, even if it's just over who goes through the door first.

#24 Action scenes require short declarative sentences.
#25 Short sentences move faster.

Action scenes are fun and confusing. Clarity of expression is always paramount, but action scenes need to convey the tumult more clearly than whether the chessmen are precisely aligned or how they're feeling.

#26 Alternate slow scenes and fast scenes.
Remember how those action scenes are confusing? A slow scene after it is a good place to explain in detail what just happened.

#27 Show, don’t tell. Depict sensa to the reader and let him/her interpret it.
#28 Show, don’t tell. Witness, do not preach.
The reader likes you to interpret the meaning of a scene as much as s/he likes you to chew his/her food.

#29 Read your stuff aloud at least once
The process of speaking the words aloud gives you the chance to hear unfortunate combinations of sounds that can prove a distraction to your readers.

#30 Remove things that “go without saying.”
If a word goes without saying, you shouldn't say it. Many words can be reasonably inferred.

#31 A character acts toward a goal because s/he is motivated, but faces a conflict.
You have to give your characters reasonable motives for their actions. Combine them together and you have the architecture of the story.

#32 All these mantras have exceptions.
The idea is not that the mantras become false, but that there are domains where they are less effectual, and that there are other mantras that may be more effectual at that point. The wise writer then chooses a trade-off that best improves the story.

#33    Everyone’s writing stinks until they write a million words.
Don't take my word for it Ray Bradbury said it. If you disagree, write a million words and compare your output before and after.


#34 If you are right and the group is wrong, nod, smile and slowly back away.
If you turn your writing group into a debating society, you're missing the point.

#35 If two different groups say the same thing, you really are wrong.
You are in a writing group to hear what the voices inside your head are not saying.

#36 Others who ignore these mantras will get published ahead of you. 
You can do everything right and find someone who doesn't may get ahead of you.

#37 Read like a Writer.
To a writer, reading is no longer a passive leisure pastime, but an opportunity to steal learn.

#38 This list is not finished...

The Monster Hunter Series

As a tender lad I had nightmares fueled by a combination of 1960s Cold War hysteria and Evangelical apocalypse preaching. The end-of-the-world nightmares were particularly frightening because the ground would crumble beneath my feet. I feared falling into the abyss.

Until I learned that I could fly in dreams. And then ground crumbling beneath my feet became an annoyance. That's what I told my kids. Just learn to fly. But my daughter dreamed of monsters and I told her to dream up a gun to shoot it. There are not that many problems in my dreams that cannot be solved with a sufficiently large calibre gun.



I don't know whether Larry Correia learned to destroy the terror of nightmares this way, but he writes like it. I've read four of his novels, and reviewed them. And I decided I should create a single place where you can link them:

• Monster Hunters International
• Monster Hunter Vendetta
• Monster Hunter Alpha
• Monster Hunter Legion

I hope you'll enjoy them as much as I did.