reesesWeb

Yeargh. As you can see from the picture above, the very top of the page exported by Delicious Exporter, I've been scanning books, dvds, and cds into Delicious Library. Those figures above indicate the number of books, dvds, and cds that I have sitting in my home office. (Which is just a spare ensuite bedroom off the living room where I can contain my messes and Kat doesn't have to see them.) I haven't even hit the living room yet, which is where most of the cds, dvds, and a little less than half the books are.

I don't know why it is, but Mathematica really encourages you to obsess about getting your program down to one line, where one line might be 500 characters and ten screen lines long. Part of it may be the crappy Notebook "IDE", which is great for linear reasoning and an interactive evaluation shell, but horrible for programming. I do know that every time I write something, I notice at some point that I've just been making my program shorter and shorter, until it's as close to one line as possible, even if pulling things out into functions would make more sense. Those of you who have seen my code in other environments know I prefer to follow the Smalltalk model of lots and lots of tiny functions, preferably with no side effects.

<Dread> geezus, my C sucks now
<reeses_> yeah
<Dread> isn't there an ord function of some sort?
<reeses_> I hate when I try to write something
<reeses_> and it takes me 100x as long as it should
<Dread> yeah
<reeses_> ord?
<Dread> you know, get the ascii value of a character
<reeses_> umm
<reeses_> dude
<reeses_> you're not asking that, are you?
<Dread> oh
<Dread> wait
<Dread> ok, shoot me now

One nice thing about doing on-site consulting for a long period of time is that I now know the location of the trunk release button in just about any domestic Ford or GM car with a sticker price under $35k.

Did I say "nice"? I meant "pathetic and a perfect way to encapsulate my experience and reduce me to tears".

19319 words and I hate this book. It's becoming a chore to spend the thirty to forty minutes a night to churn out 1500 to 2000 words to keep the quota up. I despise derivative works and this is rapidly becoming one. If I showed it to anyone else, I'd fully expect to hear,"Hey, isn't that like that (movie|book|drunken night you and I spent with that donkey-loving stripper in Tijuana)?"

Talk about throwing votes away. If John Ashcroft had announced his intended resignation three days ago, GWB would have won by 10%.

10,082 words, and I am a little relieved. Not for hitting the 20% point, but because I was worried about the pace of the novel. At the end of the seventh chapter/beginning of the eight, I had created most of the drama that I had anticipated cramming into the entire novel. My pacing was a little fast, and while I think I could fill in some gaps, honestly, the drama I had intended for the arc for the entire novel wasn't really 'dramatic' enough.

So, fortunately, tonight I had a little more inspiration, and what was going to be all three acts, will now be the first act. I should wrap up "act one" by 15,000 to 20,000 words, which puts me on an ok pace for 60,000 words or so.

7012 words and I've had to ice my wrists for the first time in my life. Three hours total work so far, laptop keyboards aren't the best writer's tool out there. My fingertips started tingling in that I've-read-about-carpal-tunneling way, so I'll probably slow down a bit after tonight. I had hoped to finish the first draft soon enough to get 60-70k words done by the 19th, so I'd have a week and a half to revise, but I may just coast in with the rough draft on the 30th.

Wow, 4173 words of poop in about two hours of typing on day 1. It's like the longest blog entry I've ever written, and about as relevant. I'm discovering that I tend to make choices that require extensive elucidation, which of course cranks up word count. I'll probably poop out this weekend, so we'll see how close to 50k I get. It reads right now like a bad jr high creative writing exercise, as my two lines of dialog suck goat arse.

Sure, I'm comparing it to the Martin Amis book I read on the plane this morning, but if you're not going to compare yourself to someone