Author: francis

I’ve recently got into the habit of having a Free Mind window open as well as my editor or whatever, it means I can jot things down in a mind map so I can go back to them later. It works with programming and development work too, obviously not the same mind map.

I also use two screens (but my new work laptop’s wide screen is pretty good on its own). The map in one screen and the document or editor in another. Pretty good. I use the Windows XP desktop manager power tool (look it up on Google). This means that I have 8 screens.

I general screen set 1 is email and stuff, 2 is Windows media player, 3 is development work and 4 is things like DOS windows running Apache or Mongrel. Works quite well for me.

MS Word is annoying me though. I want to split the screen vertically and have different parts of the document on display (particularly useful with a new wide screen – you could have 3 different parts of the document on display). But it only allows you to split vertically – sigh. It’s interesting but I think one of its antecedents was Emacs, and you can split that every which way from Thursday, even have different windows onto the same document.

I might see if there is a Word document editor that can do this. I have’t the energy to write my own… 

I got a cheap CD of The Hounds of Love. Which I’d only been trying to find the tape for a couple of days earlier. I’d forgotten how good she was/is. She can sing she has feelings that she’s not afraid to express. People used to mock her for this, but I love it. Talentless journalists, who cares what they think?

After hearing Kate again I realise why I find Beyonce and Anastacia (however the hell you spell it) hard to listen to. They have no softness in their voices at all. Anastacia , to me, just brays loudly and angrily like some kind of demented alto donkey with a deviated septum. Beyonce has a lovely voice but just shows off with it. There’s no depth there. Kate’s voice has range and softness, she can even scream in tune. Can you imagine the other two singing songs about serial killers (Mother stand for comfort)? About William Reich’s cloud bursting machine seen from the viewpoint of his young son (Cloudbusting)? Hey baby, thanks for the shag – erm, what was your name again, and, look at me, I’m beautiful are’t I? That’s about all they know, poor dears.

Just listen to Big Sky – the range, the sheer bravery. Wow.

I have a strange fondness for Running Up that Hill. I used to wish I could make the deal with God and change places with my poor father, so this song always makes me sad. Cloudbusting touches me in a similar way, too, just saying to could even make it happen – life is magical. I had’t heard all of the bonus tracks, the solo version of My Langan Love is superb.

I found a great quote form Dustin Hoffman the other day:

There’s a rebirth that goes on with us continuously as human beings. I don’t understand, personally, how you can be bored. I can understand how you can be depressed, but I just don’t understand boredom.

It’s interesting, be obviously never worked in my last job! The boredom, I think, comes from a lack of control. It’s really a kind of anger born of frustration. Most people don’t realise this and because they can’t express their anger directly it becomes a kind of cynical disassociation. Because it’s really anger – flight or fight – it makes you tired.

Pause for the jet …

For those of you who don’t know, this is my current novel. I finished the latest draft a couple of weeks ago but was’t happy with it at all. It did’t end properly and I used another character to narrate us past the boring bits (or at least the I-want-to-finish-this-quickly bits). The end is way too flat and boring now. Have spent some time mind mapping and thinking (see freemind , useful tool) and will start writing this section from scratch. I’ve chopped the old end off and will re-glue it when it fits. Probably in a few weeks’ time.

There’s also several thousand words from the earlier draft I took out that may now fit in the larger scheme. Work!!! Hey ho. I’m going to need to create some kind of catalogue of the parts and where they were used. It’s hard to do this properly because I’d rather just write it. 

I tend to work in fits and starts and sometimes the narrative breaks down because I re-introduce an idea later and don’t refer back properly. It will need to flow, which is why I need the catalogue. I wish now I had written the damn thing in some kind of markup language because it would be easier to manipulate than a huge Word document. Not sure I can face exporting it and reformatting everything. Not now, anyway.

I did once have an idea where I would chop it up into its fragments and write a program that put each strand in linear order (with some jumping about) and then intermingled them. Every time you gave it a different seed for the random number generator you’d get a different book, or turn of the linear ordering as well. This has appeal and might work if it’s ever published as an exercise on the web. Not right now though, I need to write or invent 20,000 words and replace the weak ending.

I’m enjoying it, which is the main (and probably only) important thing. 

I’ve been reading a lot about the Pragmatic Programmers using TextMate on Macs as their preferred environment. I wanted to see what this was like but could’t because I can’t afford a Mac at the moment.

Discovered the ‘E’ text editor , which is TextMate compatible and pretty good. It will run TextMate bundles and so on. One of the wrinkles is that it uses Cygwin to do its automation, which I always use. But, of course, it therefore wants to run Ruby in that environment and gets very confused when it finds the Windows version, which gets confused by the Cygwin paths.

So, you need to install the Ruby that comes with Cygwin. Fire up the setup program and you’ll find Ruby under interpreters.

Next you need Ruby Gems and Rails – have a look here for instructions. You essentially need to download the gems distro and run ruby setup.rb when you’ve unpacked it – this will put gems into your Cygwin area too.

I intend to run Rails native windows and use the Cygwin Ruby for ‘e’ automation.

By the way – if you see a message saying something like “ubyopt invalid optio” then you need to go into your system settings and get rid of the environment variable RUBYOPT. Cygwin ruby is confused by it because you have’t got gems installed yet.

Have fun. 

I’ve had a look at RadRails and one of the other Eclipse tools but don’t like them very much. Mainly because the code editors don’t do indent properly, which just gets on my nerves. They’re OK. 

Carrying on from previous entry: I’m still not well, on day 5 now. My ear infection decided to check out the other ear and then move down into my nose (gave me a stinking cold). Almost OK today but get a little dizzy when I move about. I’m having a lot of trouble writing this because my short term memory is fragmented and motor skills not what they should be.

Read Neal Stevenso’sCryptonomicon while I was ill. Enjoyed it, but not as much as his later stuff. I think he was still finding his voice a bit when he wrote it. Not sure but think it was the first book after Snow Crash, and in terms of ambition and writing several more levels of magnitude beyond it – he does carry it off brilliantly, just not as smoothly as in the later work. I also like it when a writer knows his grammar and words and uses them well, and he does. Starting to want to look at codes and keystreams now but keeping myself back. Recommend Snow Crash, if you are a computer type, rip roaring and very funny. Some of the reviewers on Amazon can’t get the joke though, which is a bit sad.

Archive Fragments

I need about another 20k words to make it work properly in terms of size. Have been reading up on submission sizes and e-submissions and at 48k it’s not quite long enough. Needs to be 60-100k. I have the material outline but have been too ill to do much about it.  Hey ho. I probably cut 10k (and wrote 5 or so new) from the 2006 draft because I thought it did’t carry the story, but not sure I will put it back in. New material is needed, and I probably need to do some research.

Java is NOT Object Oriented!

See http://www.archive.org/details/DanIngal1989 , way way back in 1989! Everything should be an object. Also note the way that, in the factorial example he gives the integer quietly changes from a small integer to a large one without any messing about, true polymorphism – Java does not do this. So Smalltalk, Python and Ruby meet his criteria, Java does not. Java kept that C++ nonsense about handling types differently. It’s also interesting (in the Q&A section of the talk) to note that he thinks that strongly typed variables are pointless – but you do need to be able to to typeof to ensure that the object will meet a predefined contract.

I found this from http://www.cryptonomicon.net/msh/.

Got head hunted by some people that I was interviewed by a while ago. Will involve yet another small pay cut, but I’ll be using half the petrol and I did some calculations that imply I might be slightly better off, in fact. Also the car will last a bit longer, which is’t a bad thing. They’re using Ruby on Rails as their technology base at the moment but are, in fact, technology agnostic. The main thing is delivery and keeping customers happy.

I’ve been reading Emotional Intelligence recently and was very taken with some of the ideas in it, got it in an omnibus edition with Working with Emotional Intelligence, and have just started into that one. It’s funny how you recognise at least some of your own faults when you read a book like that. A good friend gave me a pointer about how to succeed in business: when you meet with a customer remember that they’re talking to you because they have a problem, you need listen very hard to them and keep quiet until you know what it is. Two ears and one mouth; use them in that proportion.

Off work today with an ear infection – this looks bad because I had a day off last week with a recurring sinus problem and have handed my notice in. Both bouts of illness are valid. I’ve not been taking my supplements and it shows. It’s funny how you get so bored with stuff like that, even when you know that it helps your general health no end. Humans are creatures of habit but I do get so tired with things, even when it’s supposed to do me good. Exercise and so on. I can’t eat the same cereal every day: it drives me insane after a while. Sameness is a disease that makes you think you can draw some kind of comfort from it, but it’s a trap that will bind you to the same mistakes over and over again. I think this is why I like kayaking – the river and the wave are never the same twice, you always have to think a bit every time … and why I don’t like things like running.

Going back to my bed now. And take my supplements.

I think that I did’t explain the whole suicidal thing properly. When I said I wanted it to stop, I meant the grasping and yearning for things. It occurred to me in the car on the way to work I had’t explained it properly.

You see a pretty face and want to follow it, you hear of wealth and freedom and you want it, you are stuck bored out of your mind when you’d rather be writing songs or anything else.  I don’t just want these things with a kind of “would’t it be nice”. I yearn for them – a terrible hunger that drives me nuts. I think it drives us all crazy but most people are’t aware of it.

It’s the wanting I get tired of. That barrier between self and other. The wanting the other to be complete. That’s when oblivion starts to look appealing. But I’d rather look for Nirvana, where the flame of wanting has been blown out, and you can just be. Without all of the other crap. And help others with their pain.

Nirvana is a tall order.

But that’s what I meant anyway.

Trying very hard to be a Buddhist but …

Jon was playing in the park with some of his mates. Sitting chatting and an older boy ran up and “borrowed” his bike. All £350 worth. It was paid for by Jon from accumulated years of birthday money, and he really loved it. Cycled off with his mate. Both lads around 16, dark hair, skinny, wearing blue and grey striped shirts. Jon described the thief as “looking a bit simple”, whatever that means.

We drove around (as did one of the other dads) but the scumbags were long gone.

So, if you live in the Birkenhead area and someone offers you a black Giant GTX bike with a non-standard chain guard. Please contact me with the details and I’ll pass them on to the police.

All my life I’ve been on the receiving end of this kind of thing – they were very lucky I did’t find them because I’ve calmed down now. Fancy being on the receiving end of my lifetime’s worth of anger and irritation – bet that would hurt. I’m also glad I did’t find them, because I’d have had to face the consequences of acting out my anger and that would have been bad. They were very lucky that Jo’s friend’s dad did’t find them – he was incandescent with rage at people picking on 12 year olds, and does’t have my religious beliefs!

Hey ho, rang police, will make insurance claim etc. etc. etc. Now we can’t go cycling at the weekend on our holiday – very annoying.

Waiting for the cops to call because they are supposed to call if a theft has witnesses … yeah, well, maybe … 21:30 now. 

It’s dark now

(o where are you sweet knife)

(I hear) singing in the street

(with your bitter edge)

(Out) in the shadows of the night

(little blood gush orange juicy)

Pastel neon dream away

(cut me now, cut out the endless pain)

No sleep again – so lonely next to you

(sweet knife cake cutter)

Cut me now

(rain again to wash it away)

Come again some other day

(rain rain)

16 October, 1998

My mind has been in a strange state for quite a while. I’d be lying if I said I was suicidal, but the thought of suicide keeps cropping up. It’s more of a call to me to understand death properly and maybe come to terms with what happened with my father’s suicide when I was 8 years old.

I will be 48 next birthday, so this time next year it will be 40 years. I remember it was spring or early summer. I’m sure that I could find out the exact date because he was relatively well known and it was in the papers at the time.

His act was never intended to hurt anyone. This is the irony of it all. He thought it was for the best – what pain he must have been in, poor man. It beggars belief. Recently my darling son helped me discover that if I am rejected it makes me fly into a rage. Now I know to try and catch hold of it. I think that this is because of the pain that still resonates after all this time and shapes my personality.

I fell out with my sibling because of this, my anger got away from me. There was a whole lot of buried stuff from more recently, say 30 years, that I had forgotten about – because it was embarrassing and humiliating to remember it – and suddenly it was important, then their carping and constant criticism made sense. I was rejected, in a calculated and very clever way. I responded with this unknown rage, a bad bad bad idea, and we can no longer communicate. This makes me feel terribly sad, a dear friend reminded me that this life is too short for this stuff. But my sibling manipulated me into giving them what they wanted – they are much cleverer than me, but what use is it?

All I have left of my father, at least directly, are some silver cuff links with a fish motif. He was a psychiatrist and wrote some books that were classics in their day. They were later brought up to date by a colleague and became Fish’s Outline of Psychiatry and some other titles that escape me now but I have my mother’s copies of them on a shelf somewhere.

He was a good man and did his best. My mother told me that one of his patients had said to her how much he had helped. But in those days, 1968, there was no proper treatment for manic depression. The modern drugs that everyone gets worried about did’t exist. Depressives would eventually do themselves in unless they were watched very carefully, and of course his position as Professor made it hard to insist that he went into hospital under supervision during his final days. We no longer remember wards full of people with catatonia and other distressing conditions because the drugs stop it happening.

I did’t get his intelligence. I am quite clever but not in his league. Not sure that I care about this very much. It did’t do him much good. Nor my sibling.

The lesson he taught me:

First you must learn to love and forgive yourself before you can love anyone else.

I paid a high price for this knowledge and now try to live by it every day. Now I am aware of the unconscious rage it no longer controls me. Just makes my tears flow.

If anyone gets a little comfort from these words – good. 

Blessing all.