I Love Automation

it’s one of my quirks that I love automation in practically every form I encounter it. When you see the things that light me up at work, at home, in side projects a lot of the involve automatic processes that passively make work happen for me. I don’t know why, but this has always been the case for me.

My very first job out of college was doing QC at a pharmaceutical factory. We did mostly liquid chromatography of samples out of in process tanks. Our instruments had autosamplers and if you managed them well, you could make an astounding amount of work happen. I butted heads with coworkers who I thought didn’t deal with these properly. One guy would spend the first four hours of his shift preparing every sample he needed, then load it up and go. I would prepare one sample, get it running and then try to prepare as many as I could before the machine needed the next one. Then I’d load it up, program the computer, and do the rest of them. My whole point was that if the instrument is sitting idle, you are not getting as much work throughput as you could.

Even today, a lot of what I enjoy doing in software involves automated process. In the days before we had thinks like Hudson or Cruise Control, I built and rebuilt automated build systems at multiple jobs. If I started a job and they didn’t have a repeatable, machine driven build process they would have one by the time I left. The idea of doing some work, committing it to source control and having things trigger along the path that result in final product makes me happy.

This is why I was so happy when we got our first Roomba. For years, pushing the button and having this thing clean our floors just tickled me every time. We got a newer version a year or two ago that didn’t work newly as well and it really bummed me out. If we had a self-loading dishwasher it would make me deliriously happy.

A lot of my side projects involve automation of some form another. I’ve just been soft-launching a new one called Buy It at That Price, which is a tracker of prices for items at Amazon that will notify you if the price drops. (Yes I know there are others, I just don’t care and built one too.) I like having robots do work for me, keep track of things. I remember the mythical Apple Knowledge Navigator video and I still want that product. In grad school in 1997, one of my AI projects was a client side webcrawler that would scan web pages (and Usenet!) for information that matched certain queries, and would weight links to other pages based on how well the referring page scored. If I had stuck with that a little harder, maybe I’d have Larry Page/Sergei Brin money. There’s gold in that there automation.

I think I’ll want the robots working for me until the day I die. I only hope that I’m not dying at their hands in some sort of Skynetty takeover. Until then, keep it up, machines! I’ll check in with you when I finish this cup of coffee.

Cerebus TV on Bob Burden

Bob Burden and Dave Slusher Mutually Mesmerized

Around the holidays of 2010, I started watching Cerebus TV, this odd yet compelling video program that Dave Sim publishes every week. Not only have I gotten addicted to watching this show, but I like to watch the very first airing Friday night at 10 PM. When the intro says “It’s 10 PM Friday in Kitchener, Ontario” it makes me kind of happy to be watching at 10 PM Friday. I can’t explain why it matters, but it does. Even though it spends an entire week running on infinite loop, I like that first play.

This week’s episode (will be up until 10 PM March 11th) is about Bob Burden. As it happens, I’ve had the fortune to know Bob a little for over 20 years. It’s not as if we’re close friends or anything, but I’ve been casually friendly with Bob in that way that people on the same convention circuit get. I’ve interviewed him a few times over the years (photo is from one of those at Dragon*Con 1995), and he’s a nice enough guy that when we turn up at the same bar, he always buys me a drink and chats for a while. Even before I knew him that much, I bought comics from him at the Atlanta Fantasy Fair. In 1985, I bought from him the copy of Love and Rockets #1 that I still own today. If I remember correctly, Bob even cut me a deal on it.

I enjoyed this episode in particular of all the ones I’ve watched so far. This is timely, the show will rotate in 72 hours and as far as I can tell there is no way to see older episodes. If you are a fan of The Flaming Carrot, the Mystery Men movie, the Gumby comic books or like me all of the above, check it out.

Separated at Birth?

I’ve blogged recently about comic book artist, publisher and teacher Stephen R. Bissette. This post is an exorcism of sorts because I just want it out of my system. As long as I’ve known Dan Conover, I’ve thought he and Bissette looked a lot alike. Dan is screwing this comparison up recently by losing weight and getting trimmer, as well as clipping back the facial hair to less mountain man proportions. I’m using a picture of Dan that is a few years old just because it makes my case stronger.

I now present, for your enjoyment, “Separated at birth? Dan Conover vs Stephen R. Bissette”:

I once had a conversation at Dragon*Con with my friend and Subgenius luminary Susie “the Floozie” and she was telling me a story about a guy she knew. She said he was a big lumberjack looking guy, “You know, kind of like Steve Bissette.” There ain’t that many people that you can use that as a referent and have them understand, but she happened to be talking to one of them. Rock on, nerdosphere.

Let’s Do It Later

On Twitter I ran across a link to this article on procrastination. I am bad about it, which is a trait I share in common with, well, practically everyone. What I most like about this article is that right up top it addresses the moral dimension. People are so quick in judgement nowadays and it usually involves some sort of “X is so fat and lazy” type generalizations. I’m trying to get better about procrastination, not with GTD (which I have pretty much abandoned as cool but not ultimately workable in my life) but by finally understanding myself enough to know that delay is defacto choosing not to do things. I seldom or never will remember to come back to things so where feasible I’m now shooting for just doing whatever the task is when I think about it. It’s not that I am guaranteed not to do it if I defer but it’s like any missed requirement – the behavior is undefined. I may do it, I may not, I may miss whatever deadline is attached. I finally understand that I have basically the same timescale as George Carlin attributed to dogs – “right now and forever”.

Flickrphallophobia

An incident from my past was brought up at Balticon, in a story that Evo Terra regaled a group with one evening. I’ll give the Reader’s Digest condensed version.

Podcast Expo 2006, it was year two of the Ontario California conference. We were reprising our “spontaneous poolside barbecue feast” of the first year with a less spontaneous version of the same thing paid for by Dave Hamilton of Backbeat Media. Tee Morris gets some sort of spirit of Elvis in him and decides to shed his clothes and jump into the hotel pool naked as a grape. He invites me to jump in, in the most platonic and masculine way one straight guy can ask another straight guy to join him in public nudity. I decline, and my excuse is that I have a condition called flickrphallophobia, which I defined as “fear of seeing pictures of your dick posted to Flickr.” Evo Terra refused to believe that I made up that term on the spot, and I believe we placed a bet on whether Google would find it and he lost it (the second bet he lost in 30 seconds.)

I have told Tee this many many times, but my biggest regret in my 5.5 year history with the podcast medium is that I didn’t just take off my clothes and jump in. It wouldn’t have been that big a deal and I really don’t know what my problem was. Given the opportunity again, I’m opting for shenanigans. However, as the story came up again this weekend we realized that this term still isn’t in the googlosphere and Paul Fischer really wants it so. It was also suggested that the better term is “autoflickrphallophobia”, which would be the difference between fearing any wee wee photos on Flickr vs. pictures of ones own. I coined a term for that person: “redonkulopedantic.”

Westboro Baptist: God Hates Spellcheckers

Tomorrow morning Westboro Baptist will bring their silly hate carnival show to my little town. It’s been disappointing to me how effectively they can play the local media, which has been running news stories about them pretty regularly. They also are playing the people who counter-protest. Their goal is to get people to take them seriously, and the minute you try to refute them, you lose. To argue with them as if their position was one worthy of argument is to play into their hands. To paraphrase Dr. Pauli, “They aren’t right. They aren’t even wrong.” They just are plain acting out for attention, like the troubled kindergartener that pisses his pants to get attention.

It occurs to me that their primary influence is not any other protest groups but Andy Kaufman. I ain’t linking to it, but it’s not hard to find their page with the picket schedule. The entries all contain screeds full of weird typos and the assertion that “God hates you” if you are in one of the groups they hate. As you know, Hate Jesus told his followers “Hate your neighbor as you hate yourself.” Well played Westboro Baptist.

I have years of experience with an attention craving joke religion, namely The Church of the Subgenius. This suggests to me how you might try to counter them. Debating them is the wrong move, you have to fight them on the street theater level. I’d suggest making your own signs and joining their picket line. Some ideas:

  • God Hates Tolerance/God Loves Stupidity and Outrage
  • Gramer and Speling Are Tools Of Teh Devil
  • You Fags Can Suck It (smaller letters) Tonight at the Travelodge, Room 117
  • Repent And Spend Eternity with Assholes Like Us

Over at Laughing Squid, here is an example of a dada absurdist counter-protest. In this case, by making the signs funny the newspeople passed by WBC and took photos of the counter-protest. Attention is their oxygen supply, so cut that off and they lose their breath. I like the idea of trying to infiltrate but that might not be physically possible. There are only a few of them in the road troupe so surely they all know each other. I think swamping them is a fine tactic.

I’m planning on swinging by their protest tomorrow. It’s close to my house, and I’m going to try to get some footage of them. I will possibly use it in the documentary or maybe just to try to make fun of them.

Modern American Polling is Valueless

I don’t know how often I hear about “public opinion polls” on a daily basis. Let’s say a dozen on the average day. Just last night I watched The Daily Show where one of the founding tea baggers was a guest. This guy was using as a basis for claiming Obama as “tyrannical” was public opinion polls showing Americans disagreed with certain decisions. I am here to say that I don’t care what anyone says, i put ZERO stock in any modern American polling.

Just a few minutes ago, I received a phone call from some research firm out of Las Vegas. They asked me some questions. After a few minutes, it became obvious to me that the poll was being paid for by either an energy company or some form of energy industry group. The questions were stilted and skewed towards a point of view. Several questions were phrased in terms of “clean energy” rather than “renewable energy.” What I also noticed is that sometimes the positive options came first, and sometimes the negatives but the first options were always the ones that would be in the favor of an energy company. Not too subtle, dudes.

But here’s the real thing – I have not completed any form of phone poll in years. This one, like every one, I eventually hang up on when I get completely tired of them. I’m pretty sure these pollsters can’t call cell phones, and every call I’ve received has been on our land line. Just with that, the polls have already deeply self-selected for older people by virtue of 1) having land lines, 2) answering the land line and 3) actually taking the survey. At least half of the time they identify as pollsters, I hang up out of hand. Many of the times when they come in with bogus caller ID information I won’t even pick up the phone. Sometimes I’ll take part of the survey like tonight and hang up when I can no longer take having my time occupied in this mind-numbing fashion and for dubious intent. I don’t know who actually is willing to take the time to complete these surveys but whatever data can come of that is nothing I’m willing to admit as valid. If your basis for any decision making is opinion polling, I can tell you that it is full of shit.

CREATE South 2010

This blog has been mostly quiet as I’ve been neck deep in preparation for this year’s CREATE South. It will be tomorrow, at the Horry-Georgetown Technical College’s conference center (the campus by the beach, NOT the one on Highway 501 in Conway.) There is so much good stuff happening in the sessions tomorrow that we all will have hard decisions to make (of the best kind.)

Thanks to all the volunteers and sponsors how made this year both the easiest and on track to be the best one yet. If you can, come out and join us. As I’ve been talking about my new media malaise, CREATE South is what I’m hoping is the shot in my metaphorical arm to rekindle all the things I loved about the medium in the first place. I will see you there.

CREATE South 2010 is Coming

On April 17th, 2010 we will have the third annual CREATE South conference in beautiful Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Our keynote speakers will be Tee Morris and Mur Lafferty, and the day will be filled with talk of new media, social media, technology, art, creativity and how to take your ideas and get them done. Registration is free, the day is guaranteed to be fun and we even feed you. Come join us and you will leave with a full head and a full belly and a full complement of new friends and associates.

The day is Saturday April 17th, 2010. The place is the conference center at the Horry Georgetown Technical College’s Grand Strand campus (one block from Market Commons), 950 Meyers Avenue in Myrtle Beach SC. The mission is fellowship, knowledge, interaction and fun. We shall succeed, and we shall do it together.

Grand Strand Tech Expo

Tomorrow I will be at the inaugural year of the Grand Strand Tech Expo. I will be manning the table for {day job} as well as talking up CREATE South. It should be a fun time and we hope a useful time. If you are around the Myrtle Beach area and will be at the expo, come by and say hi. As a bonus, we’ll have information and stickers available for #MBGeekOut as well.

The Grand Strand Tech Expo is the kind of thing I like to support. At its heart, it has the same motivation as all of these various projects that I’ve been involved with. CREATE South, , the Grand Strand Bloggers et al are all driven by the desire to raise the profile of the Myrtle Beach area in the tech and social media world. The big benefit of these events is giving all of us a venue to realize that we’re all out here and none of us are alone. Rock on.

My Take on Amazon Vs Macmillan

I really honestly didn’t want to write one more consecutive Kindle related post but current events conspired against me with the current dispute between Amazon and Macmillan. I am seeing a lot of analysis from my compatriots in the science fiction tribe, such as Tobias Buckell, Jay Lake, this thread at Making Light. I completely understand all these people being pissed off when their livelihood blips off the map. It sucks but this sort of thing happens when corporate giants clash. It’s the dude who runs the diner by the stadium who is the true victim of a sports strike, and the writers and customers are the victims of the Amazon and Macmillan dispute.

Allow me to lay out a thought experiment I’ve seen nowhere else:

Imagine I am the executive of a large publishing concern. Some proportion of my company’s income flows through ebooks and the majority of that is through the Kindle at the moment. However, I as an executive in my heart of hearts don’t like ebooks. It’s not why I got into publishing, it’s weird and has different market dynamics from what I am used to. Even though I am making some money and the amount is growing, I fear that this is eroding and canibalizing the print sales I consider my real business. What I really wish is that ebooks would go away, but I can’t just pull them from retailers or explicitly state that.

Instead, what I want to do is to find a defensible price to raise end consumer prices that will effectively mean that no one much will buy it. Some hardcore fans will, but the fears about cannibalization will go away because the prices are so close to parity with paper that no one wants the ebook version anymore.

Now, imagine that the retailer won’t play ball with that. They are already willing to eat a loss per unit on sales, and even if I were to raise the wholesale price to them they’d be willing to eat that larger unit loss. What I really want is to change the basis of our business relationship that prevents them from setting the customer’s final price The retailer opposes this, even though this means that instead of taking a small loss they are going to make a $4.50 profit on each of the higher priced ebooks. They know that there will be a customer revolt and the backlash will take a market they’ve spent years nurturing and put a big hurt on it.

Now, suppose after negotiations reach an impasse, the retailer wants to signal seriousness to me, the publishing executing. They could choose to delist my firm’s ebooks as retaliation except that would give me exactly what I want. In this particular thought experiment, if the retailer were to try to apply coercive leverage to me, it would require them to also delist electronic and paper copies of books to have any effect on me, because my real end goal is to get ebooks delisted while keeping my hands completely clean.

::End though experiment::

Most of the commentary of my tribe seems to focus on how uncalled for the delisting of print books was. What I’m trying to present – without any knowledge of motivations of any players involved – a scenario in which Amazon could consider themselves justified in delisting the print books. I don’t want to alienate my friends, but they seem to all see Macmillan as the undisputed good guy and Amazon as the obvious bad guy here and I’m not sure I buy that. Between the two, the company looking out for my particular interests as a customer is Amazon. As RichSPK tweeted earlier today “How does increased competition (Apple’s iBooks to Amazon) result in higher prices to consumers?” That, sir, is an excellent question and one worth thinking about.

Evil Genius Chronicles Podcast for January 10, 2009 – “Ringing in a New Year”

Here is the direct MP3 download for the EGC clambake for January 10, 2010. I take a moment of silence for the loss of Natalie Morris; I play the promo George Hrab did for the JREF; I play a song by Retribution Gospel Choir; I talk about what I hope for 2010 and what I did wrong and right in 2009; I play a song by Fleet Foxes; I talk about using Calibre with my Kindle and also how I both succeeded and failed simultaneously in NaNoWriMo; I play a song by AFCGT and get on with my year.

You can subscribe to this podcast feed via RSS. To sponsor the show, contact BackBeat Media. Don’t forget, you can fly your EGC flag by buying the stuff package. This show as a whole is Creative Commons licensed Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5. Bandwidth for this episode is provided by Cachefly.

Links mentioned in this episode:

Seth Harwood Bum Rushes the Kindle Charts

I stepped up and joined hands with many members of my podcasting community to support Seth Harwood’s Amazon shenanigans. Seth has set up Kindle Commando Sunday where he is encouraging people to buy the Kindle version of his book A Long Way From Disney, which to add to the occasion is only $0.99. I bought it just now and it is whispernetting it’s way to my Kindle as I type. I encourage all Kindlers, especially those of you who just got one for the holidays, to join in and purchase. Not only is it cheap, but you get to use your powers of Amazon chart manipulation for good. What can be better?

PS – It’s working. When I bought it, the book was #642 overall in the Kindle store and now it is #403. Rocket to the top, my friend.

My New Science Fiction Term for a Day Job

Alright, my fellow science fiction nerds. This one is for you. I just coined a new term today to describe my day job. Some people call it that, “day job.” Some call it “the nine to five.” From here on out, I will refer to the thing that pays my bills and keeps the roof over my head as “Subsistence D.” Think of it as a scanner, dorkly.

You are very welcome.

Easy Come, Easy Go

Just the other day I blogged about how happy I was to be able to use Greasemonkey scripts on the OS X version of Google Chrome. This evening I had noticed that there was an update, so I restarted Chrome to pick it up. The problem is, this version (4.0.249.27) disabled extensions in preparation for releasing the official beta for the OS X version. Had I realized that, I wouldn’t have restarted. I’m hoping they turn it back on, and soon. I had to start Firefox today to use the Google Maps -> Garmin GPS integration and it bummed me out. FireFox is unbelievably slow after using Chrome for a week.

New Peakecast is Up

For those who were friends or fan of Thomas Peake or just fans of interesting music, the newest Peakecast has been posted. This is a fitting show to be the second episode, as it was itself a memorial for former WREKster and restlessly creative musician Witt Mills. I urge you to go, check it out and if there is any chance you have any Thomas Peake material recorded, please dig through those boxes in the closet and attic. Give those unlabeled tapes a spin, just in case. One never knows, does one.

Above all, please leave us some feedback. We’re doing this show partly as a balm against loss and partly as an act of defiance against an uncaring universe. Let us know if it soothed or enraged you. I’m deliriously happy with either reaction.

And don’t forget the Peake Foundation. Go out and make a difference where you live. The clock is ticking, we need results by October 2010. What better place than here? What better time than now?

Narrative Grammar

My friend Nicola has a great post today on narrative grammar at her editing site. As I write my NaNoWriMo novel I struggle with this every single paragraph. I’m not an experienced fiction writer so I’m feeling my way through. I have been doing my best to follow some of these advice before reading it. I do pay attention to where my characters are in the space they occupy, and try to make sure that the order of actions makes sense for their viewpoint. I don’t randomly add details, I try to bring them into the flow as a person in that location would notice them, largest and most salient and attention getting things first and then honing in later.

Nicola throws out a challenge to rewrite a paragraph first given to her by Samuel R. Delany. Here is my stab at it:

Harris grabbed the intricate metal handles and pushed open the heavy boardroom door. As he walked in, the sensor circuit transpared the great panes of a huge picture window. He could see the great and silver buildings of the city through it. In the center of the room chairs were set haphazardly around a board table, framed by a gold rug.

For those people doing the NaNoWriMo challenge, I recommend subscribing to the Sterling Editing blog. You’ll learn lessons you need. And don’t forget their second draft special. I’ll be taking that one up myself.

Guy Fawkes Day

Today is Guy Fawkes Day, where depending on your leanings we either celebrate the attempt to blow up the British Parliament building or the failure to blow it up. It can be hard to tell.

I had paid for and was using my logo for years before I realized it was Guy Fawkes. It took a young dude working on an Army bomb disposal unit who I met in Washington Dulles airport. He said that Fawkes is their mascot and started a conversation after seeing my logo. I explained it to the artist as a silent movie villain and only in the airport that day did I realize that the look of the mustachio twirling, tie-her-to-the-tracks villain is pure Guy Fawkes.

Today you can download for free Paul Melancon’s song “Guy Fawkes Day”, which I highly recommend. He’s one of my favorite musicians, so go get this while the getting is good. I love this song, I love his music, go do it.