Notes In The Margin

As you may know, I participate in a project called SFShorts where we write Sci Fi in 140 characters or less. It's a lot of fun.

A few weeks ago, a new member was added to our team, one Hugh Howey, who is an actual real-life science fiction author, not just a wannabe like me. This was very exciting, but I hadn't actually read any of his stuff yet. At Elizabeth's recommendation, I purchased Wool - all five parts - for my Kindle, and on my recent trip, I started reading it.

Wool is a post-apocalypse dystopian novel. Folks live in a subterranean silo, and the rules have to be pretty strict to keep things working smoothly in a completely sealed environment. This gives all sorts of plot opportunities. It is, in short, a gripping book, which I read all the way through and was left wanting more MORE MORE!!!

Hugh is a wonderful story teller. His characters are real people, not flat single-feature personalities, and you truly identify with folks - the good guys and the bad guys - in a way that many authors simply can't achieve.

I will be buying everything Hugh writes, and pestering him to write more. You should too. This is really great stuff.

By the way, for those looking for good books for kids, I should mention that the language is a little on the salty side in Wool, so use your judgement here. Better yet, read it yourself first, and figure out what your kids can handle.

Biashara Street
February 5, 2012 From WeekendWordsmith.com

Step away from the
odour of bodies and exhaust into a

chutney of cardamom
cinnamon
ginger
garlic

Sacks of
cashews overflow onto
floors covered with boxes,
cartons,
and more heaps of
burlap bags
full of jasmine rice,
basmati rice,
long brain brown rice
from exotic places I
dream of going, some day.

In this quarter mile of
dusty street
are gathered all the spices of the world,

from Sri Lanka,
Singapore,
and far-away San Francisco.

Tea, coffee and
cocoa pods
lend their aroma to the
general cacophony of smells,
discordant, but, somehow

a symphony in a thousand voices.

Knowing that school uniforms
are only a street or two over,

I stand and breathe deeply
of the cloves,
curry powder,
and saffron.

For the Weekend Wordsmith - Chutney

I work from home, and our house is not enormous. When I first started working at home, we put a desk into our bedroom, and got a shoji screen to partition the room into two rooms. It's worked pretty well, but there are some drawbacks to the room layout. The room felt rather cramped, and because the desk was just a couple of inches too tall, we could no longer open the window any more.

I've been working that way for a little over two years now, and a few days ago we decided to try to rearrange.

The trouble is, with a lot of bulky furniture, and not much maneuvering space, it's not something you really want to experiment with.

Open Source to the rescue. We downloaded Sweet Home 3D, from SourceForge, measured all of the furniture in the room, and then started moving it around.

Sweet Home 3D has a library of furniture items that you can resize to exactly the right dimensions. You put the outlets on the wall, as well as the pictures, so that you can see whether furniture will block outlets, and whether you're going to have to rehang any of the paintings. You can position things in three dimensions, so you can set lamps on top of tables, or stack crates, and you can see all of this in a 3D model so you know what it's going to look like.

Rather than spending a few hours hurting our backs, we were able to position things exactly as we want them, and plan out how we were going to get things there with the minimal amount of effort.

So, my desk is no longer by the window. (Yes, I could see the squirrels, and they were, indeed, merry.) but also the room feels much more open, and we're not always dodging one another when we walk around the room. The lighting is better, and best of all, I don't hurt all over from having to move the furniture two or three times to get it right.

In addition to the built-in objects, Sweet Home has a community website where people can contribute their creations. I imported an office chair from the website, because the one that was built in didn't look right. There's also trees, cars, and people, if you want to make a model of your entire house and surrounding land.

You can even create a video walkthrough of your room by selecting places to stand, and what direction to look. The software does the rest, connecting the positions smoothly to create a view of the room.

You can see an example of this below - the desk isn't quite right, and I couldn't find a shoji screen, but the general layout is right.

So, over all, four thumbs up from the Bowen moving team. I start work today in my "new" office, and although there's still a lot of stuff still to be put away, it's nice to have it done with so easily.

Today we discovered that someone had vandalized our property. We have a small clearing down by the creek. Someone has cut down our tire swing (yes, definitely cut) and we found the tire in a little fort, across the property line, built out of the boards with which I built Z a fort on our property. Z's fort is completely gone.

The fort has various things spray painted on it, including PENIUS in red spray paint, and "MW3 Rangers" which assures me that it was a boy that did it.

Additionally, they had pulled down several of the hand-carved handholds that I had affixed to two of the trees down there, and broken them into small pieces. The steps and handholds that were undamaged were nailed to trees across the property line with the remains of the nails.

I spent the entire morning in a rage.

It occurred to me a while ago that only an imbecile would steal something and then leave it in plain sight across the property line. This leads me to believe that it was NOT the neighbor's boy, but was one of the other kids from across the creek that come across to play occasionally.

But, still, WHY would someone do this? Why would someone destroy things that I have worked to create. I'm angry. Z is angry too, as he has every right to be. It's not that what was destroyed was expensive, or even that it took a very long time to do, but that I feel violated to have my things destroyed in my own back yard.

I went next door and spoke with my neighbor, asking if his son might shed some light on what happened, but it seems unlikely that he would be so dumb as to steal my stuff and then leave there where I could find it. He didn't seem terribly concerned, which strikes me as rather odd. I would have thought that he'd be concerned about vandalism happening on his property.

I've retrieved the tire. I have not retrieved the wood, much of which is ruined by being painted. I'm still very angry.

I wrote a note, put it in a ziploc freezer bag, and nailed it to the fort, asking the perpetrators to be men and come speak with me about it. I neglected to correct their spelling.

On Wednesday evening, I had the great privilege of being invited to the University of Cincinnati to attend the basketball game against Notre Dame, in the President's box at the arena. In attendance, in addition to the President himself, were various people from, or connected with, the IT (Information Technology) program at the University of Cincinnati.

The IT program covers a broad range of computer technology related fields, and has specializations in networking, databases, programming, and various other areas. Students are exposed to a wide variety of computing platforms, so that they don't get into a job interview situation and have to admit that they only have training on Microsoft products. Or only Linux products, for that matter. A breadth of experience is pure gold in an interview situation.

Hazem Said, the new head of that department, was my kind host at the game, and we talked about a variety of ways that Open Source can feature in an IT curriculum. I'm really excited about the kinds of things that are in the future for this program. We talked about having students participate in healthy, mature Open Source projects as part of their training. This would give them experience not only in software programming, but also in project management, cross-cultural communication, customer support, and marketing, among other things.

When I was in college - which wasn't so very long ago - there were some computer classes, which were mostly programming, but nothing that covered the real discipline of Information Technology in the way that I saw on Wednesday. It gives me a great deal of hope for the next generation of IT professionals that come of this program, and other programs like it around the world.

By the way, if you're ever invited to a basketball game by the head of a University department, do a little research, and don't wear a shirt with the other team's color. (Really, it was an honest mistake!)