Often I think that blogging is a narcissistically inane activity - blathering about one's activities ad nauseum seems a little soul sucking (actually the political blogs are worse). They're great for procrastination (this post is a good example of that), but what other value does chattering into the ether have?

My mother has kept a journal for over 35 years. Everyday, she writes in a big black book. Everyday, for 35 years. That blows my mind! I certainly don't have that kind of discipline. She's recorded every mundane detail of our family life, every childhood milestone that my brother and I had, every daily high temperature from wherever we lived at the time. It's a massive chronicle of the life of one family, and will probably be of immense interest to family members down the line. But she didn't do it for the hypothetical them, she did it for herself. Memories fade, so it is useful to core dump them from time to time. My blog will help me remember this time in my life.

More than that though, I've come to realize over the past couple of days, that each tidbit of a thought is of interest to someone somewhere. Maybe not now, but someday. There are so many people creating content now (web 2.0, version 1.0 was structure), and so many people consuming content, that there is this irreversable flow of information. I'm moving to Hawaii partly because I can support myself entirely with online information creation. The wonks call this the information economy, the new goldrush, I call it the freedom economy (yup, narcissistic nymnatatilating). Many people still cling to gray cubes like tiny corals, but there's waves to catch beyond the reef and not a crash in sight. I'm going surfing dammit.

In other news, my friend Monica has agreed to be my guinea-um-actress in my as yet unwritten short film. I didn't even get to the part where I offered lunch; she was really enthusiastic as soon as the word "film" left my mouth. I'm going to start with test shots to see how far I can push the camera, and then I'll write around it's capabilities - no point in getting (overly) frustrated! Foley, voiceover and music are going to be an integral part of the film. Since I can't record sound when I shoot, it'll be tricky to design the sound to match, but I think it will be ultimately freeing.

I did a test shot of basic motion, camera still, with my godson Aric the other day. The light was poor and the flash took too long to recycle. The end result was jumpy, and it looked like a reject from America's Funniest Videos. It's a shame to have an SLR with some seriously sweet lenses and have the shots come out looking like microwaved video. I'm either going to have to pose actors for each frame, or just use strong sunlight. But, it's good to know that kind of thing now.

Okay, I finally got around to fixing my books page - and to practice what I preach, it is database backed. Granted, this might be overkill for a mere two books, but I'm very optimistic that there will be more in the future. It also helps fortify the information against future attacks from more Stalin worshipping script kiddies (rrrrr). I still have to do my email and txt pages, and most disheartening of all, the "other writing" page. I'm also thinking of pitching the link to my gallery and sketchbook, and making an art section which will include those pages along with music and -possibly- short films, cause,

I want to make films, not just write them!

Not that anything I've written has been produced yet. Seriously, now that I have a digital SLR camera that can capture 250 frames at extremely high resolution, and way more an smaller res, I'm really fighting the urge to make tiny sets and do stop motion animation. Actually, I think it would be more time-effective if I did full scale stuff with actual people. I'm very shy about asking people to help me with my "art" projects, but my friend Monica at work has experience acting - her ex-boyfriend has made some short films, and he put her in his stuff. Gosh, that sounded sort of seedy, but it's not. Maybe if I bought her lunch she might agree to spend a couple of days putting something together.

I just watched the short films by David Lynch (not for most people, but I thought it was a treat), and I think he started making films while he was doing the "real job" thing. He said that he just caught the bug after making the short film "Alphabet", and just sort of decided to jump in after that. Before that, he was just playing around experimentally with the medium.

I particularly liked his approach to sound. So many of the films released commercially have a homogenized sound. I'm sure this is just to make sure that the sound doesn't detract from the directness of storytelling, but Lynch uses sound effects sometimes in place of dialog, and as a result is able to communicate a subtlty of emotion that most actors can't convey just with dialog and acting. And really that's the heart of it - a film needs to connect to directly to the mind of the viewer, so that the viewer can put him or herself in the shoes of the characters. The events aren't happening to the characters, they are happening to the viewer. That's why we all trek to the Sacred Temple of Flickering Light. We want to be Wolverine, Bridget Jones, or Harry Potter for a couple of hours of our lives.

Lynch also used flat continuous tones of sound, sometimes almost inaudible, that really helped to create a sense of tension. I thought that was just so cool. Anyway, I think sound is too often forgotten as an integral part of cinema.

I just noticed that the latest Google ad to pop up on my site is for a Phoenician singles website. How did the great and powerful oracular one deign to bless my blog with such an ad? One mention of the word "unmarried" (in a positive context mind you), and Google decides that it defines my content. Oh no.... I've just mentioned it again. What about all the times I've mentioned monkeys? How come there are no monkey ads? Surely someone somewhere must be selling monkeys. Even if they are just of the sock variety.

Ah, I think I'm supposed to be doing something much more important right now....

This post is mainly for my Dad, who has been sending me a lot of photos lately, and who I want to encourage to create his own website, so that all may view any images he wants to share at their own leisure. Without clogging up people's email accounts. HINT HINT.

The far image was inspired by a PBS documentary on Andy Warhol. Both images were taken with my Canon DSLR, in the mirror, cause I'm a readily available, easy to work with model that doesn't require fancy water or a frou-frou dog (purse rat?)

My friend and fellow writer Matt Bullock was recently musing about how he should write a movie about his life (not a bad idea, since at 21, he's already led a very storied, gonzo life). Some of my other friends were musing about what famous actors would play whom, but when it came to me, they were stumped. The best they could come up with was "a pre-lesbian Rosie O'Donnell". !?!? Really?!?!! Gosh. Not that I have anything against her, but I never *thought* that I had anything at all in common with her. Apparently, my most distinguishing characteristic is my "quirkiness". Quirky? Loveably eccentric maybe, but quirky?! And of course, that led to Rosie O'Donnell. I suggested Zooey Deschanel. They countered with Renee Zellweger. But, she walks kinda funny...

Of course, the point is moot, because if we got everyone that had been suggested (Kevin Bacon, Joseph-Gordon Leavitt, Drew Barrymore, Jennifer Jason-Leigh, Jessica Alba, George Clooney, Matt Damon, Edward Norton, John Goodman, Kevin Smith, and I guess, Rosie O'Donnell), the budget for the film would be 300 million. That doesn't include the dangerous stuntwork. Maybe Matt should make a stick-figure animation of his life.

I just took about a hundred photos in the space of 20 minutes. Since there are so many, I've decided to spread the pixel love and post some stuff on my Deviant Art page instead of my gallery.

Must go to bed now.

Thanks to my best friends, Sam and Steve, I have new camera gear - the intention being to do photography professionally while I'm in Hawaii. It'll be a complement to my teaching and writing (which will make me 100% self-employed).

I got a Canon DSLR which works with the Canon lenses I already have. It has become increasingly difficult to get decent film processing lately, and rarely can I find the exact film I want at regular stores (somehow, I always find the trip to the camera store humbling and intimidating). All in all, despite the cryptic and badly laid out manuals (thankfully I can read kana), it's been really easy to set up and use. I'm very impressed. The best feature though, is the diopter on the viewfinder. As my eyesight has gotten worse, my pictures have gotten blurier (I hate using autofocus). Now with the diopter, I can correct for my vision problems, and shoot without wearing glasses.

I've been lusting after a macro lense for years, and I got a Sigma macro as well. The picture of the plums was taken with the macro.

After I recieved some much needed, but completely unexpected encouragement, I finally was motivated to get over my fear of letting this story go out into the ether. I submitted "Factory Day" to Interzone in the UK. I've also been scribbling away at "Autopsy", but I need to take some time to sleep! I think my writing gets stranger the more sleep deprived I am.

I talked to my mom last night, and she said that her brothers and sisters took the death of my grandmother rather well, but all the cousins had a hard time of it (my brother and me included). I'm not sure if that's just a generational thing, that we haven't been as exposed to death, or if it says something about my grandmother. I've always considered our extended family to be a strong matriarchy, and she was the head of the family.

About two hours ago, my grandmother died of complications from hip surgery. She was 90, 60 years older than me, and 30 years older than my mother. She was my only grandparent.

My grandmother went out lucid and fighting, typical, because she was quite stubborn (though kind). She was interested in science, and one of the last books she read was "The Elegant Universe" by Brian Greene which I gave her. She was intelligent, an avid reader, and liked science fiction among other genres.

She had a hard life - a rural childhood lived in poverty, an awful marriage to a horrible man, childbearing woes, single motherhood on welfare (with 8 kids) in the forties and fifties. Her later years were her better years. She ended up owning her own home, and was completely independent into her late seventies. She drove a Saturn like me (and probably picked the brand because of the sciency name just like I did).

When I was a kid, she had the patience to french braid my hair. I once had to share a hotel bed with her on a roadtrip, but she kicked me out after a few minutes because I tossed and turned incessantly. I got to sleep on a lumpy fold-up cot instead. She was the first person I talked to on the phone (those old dial phones). She introduced me to tea drinking. She gave me lacy underwear for my 15th brithday (I was shocked!). She was really tall and gave squishing bear-hugs.

She always wanted to go to Hawaii, but by the time I had the means to do anything about it, she was already too frail to make the trip. Last year I decided to move to Hawaii, but writing DTP got in the way, so I had to postpone. I can finally make the trip now - and I will be going in January. I'm not going to let anyone or anything get in the way of the things I want to do and the places I want to go. If you think about it, a lot of things have changed since my grandmother was born, particularly when it comes to the rights and freedoms of women. I have the choice to live a life unburdened by marriage or children or tradition. I've been living that life, but I'm shedding that last veil of timidity, by far the hardest to remove.

The photo is of my mother and grandmother a few years ago.

I meant to post a link to this site a few days ago, but I've been dealing with an increasingly irate electronic tiger (or rather, several of them). Maybe monkeys are a better analogy. Several, scratching, spitting, screaming, beady-eyed, frothing at the mouth, angry electronic monkeys. Yeah.

Anyway, dgeek.com is the website of one of my favorite (or perhaps favourite) actors, David Hewlett. This is the guy who wrote and directed "A Dog's Breakfast". The cool part is that he actually digs open source, and uses open source stuff on his site. He is very deserving of his moniker.

In other news, no sooner was "Factory Day" finished that I started another short story. Apparently these stories don't realize that I don't have the time to write them, but they somehow force me to do so. "The Autopsy" is yet another alien invasion story (YAAIS?), and I finally realized why this theme has been so prominent in my mind. The story was conceived on September 11 - and the alien invasion theme is my subconscious dealing with the attack, just as my writing as a teenager dealt with nuclear holocaust was a way of dealing with my traumatic childhood. I've realized that I don't deal with helplessness very well (or authority for that matter). Alien invasion is the perfect analogy for discussing the pointlessness and indeed alieness of terrorism.

There have been several things I've wanted to get done this week, and none of them involved reconstructing my website. That said, it has been an opportunity to tinker with some pages I wasn't quite happy with. So far though, the only thing I've got back up besides this blog is my gallery - and I'm still not completely satisfied, so it will probably change as well.

Anyway, you know how you learn about some concept for the first time, and then suddenly you see it everywhere? When I did the book review for "Quantum Enigma", I learned about the Everett interpretation - the theory that reality in the universe is constantly branching with each possible choice - a.k.a. Many Worlds. I knew about the theory (in fact, "Free Will" was written with the theory as a central premise), but I didn't know that it had a name. The Everett interpretation challenges the Copenhagen interpretation, which is basically, "the weirdness of quantum behavior is what it is, and there is no point poking about to find out why". Everett actually bothers to answer why, and if you think about it enough, it begins to make sense (especially if you've read the book "Flatland").

Okay, so this evening, I'm flipping through an anthology of Poul Anderson stories, ironically titled "All One Universe", that I recently picked up for a paltry fifty cents, and in one of his story introductions, what does he discuss but Everett vs. Copenhagen. Bizarre. Yesterday, I was reading this book about consciousness (embarrassingly, from a metaphysics perspective, but in my defense, it was ridiculously comprehensive, and it's for a story I'm writing, so there), and in the back there's an appendix on eigenvectors and eigenvalues (a.k.a. wave functions). What does the writer happen to mention? Everett vs. Copenhagen. Now how many wave functions had to collapse to produce that series of coincidences? This fate vs. free will theme is getting strange!

It turns out that all my index pages got borked. I've removed all the hacked pages, but I'm not sure that my host is aware of what's been going on. Hopefully I won't have to recreate content - now I must slap my hand to my forehead for not backing up more recently. Doh!

My site just got hacked by some idiot in Turkey! Apparently, they like Stalin. I'm posting this to refresh my main page.

I finally finished "Factory Day". It's a nice relief, though it is always surprising how stories seem to finish themselves. I might scheme and plot, but in the end the story seems to have a life and a direction of its own that can only be found in the writing. Now I can move onto other things. I've been thinking of renaming "Magnus" "Skin", though there are 8 movies already with that name (oddly, none are pornographic, or if there are, they're not listed in IMDB). Two of those films are about skinheads, which is interesting. Magnus is still the name of one of the main characters, but "Skin" is more descriptive on many levels. I'm still debating the issue.

Unless you are writing a thesis, you don't need to be tortured by jargony definitions of database normalization. Here is my commonsense version I use in my class:

Normalization is the process of structuring data to prevent errors in a database.

That's it essentially. To normalize you must:

• Remove repeating groups of information. For instance, if you have a customer that has two addresses, put the addresses in a separate table instead of accomodating both in the customer table (and what happens when you get a customer with only one address, or one with three?)
• Each attribute must depend on the primary key and only the primary key. If an attribute depends on a foreign key, wouldn't it be better to move it to the other table? If it doesn't depend on the primary key, that means that the information isn't relevant to that table.
• The primary key should not contain meaningful information. The only function of a primary key is to uniquely identify the information in a table - that's why it is usually just an integer.

After some technical difficulty, I was finally able to post my lastest article, a book review of Quantum Enigma. There are also new RSS feeds for the site (such a relief).

In other news, I've been able to get some work done on the story "Factory Day". I had wanted to have it sent off by now, but the extra time spent steeping has been very good for the story, though now it is hovering somewhere nearer to horror than it is to dark fantasy (that line is pretty blurry as it is). The more I reflect on it, the less guilty I feel for having so many concurrent stories going around in my head. I tend to sprint when I write, but that's only because the threads get to gestate when I'm not writing. At least, that's how I'm attempting to justify breaking my own deadlines.