Random Rambling

After Libya…

2011-03-23T22:46:00.001-04:00

Take this for what it is worth, but there’s scuttlebutt that Muammar Gaddafi has been offered the lead role in a movie about Geoffrey Rush doing the lead in a late life biopic about Bob Dylan if he takes early retirement and leaves office peacefully, or at least, more peacefully than he has been recently.

There’s no word on whether or not he’s taking the offer seriously, but I’d say it is a bit avant-garde.

New work in progress...

2011-03-19T21:33:00.000-04:00

In a moment of pique, I bit the bullet and laid down the money for a domain and began a new blog over at One Damn Balloon. Actually, there are two blogs and more to come. The new work is at Outpost Earth. I will blog here general nonsense, while writing related to fiction and/or non-fiction will go there.

Writing in Progress

2011-01-10T17:43:00.000-05:00

I've permanently shelved The Killer's Killer as a movie because, well, it is very hard to do a suspense-horror film that goes towards the gory and shocking side without it just being torture-kill-porn. I don't want to do Hostel. I don't want to do Martyrs. I don't want to do a story that is just a framework for hanging meat that used to be living human flesh on. In fact, I'd sign a pledge to never write any such script if anyone wanted to form such an organization that would encourage abstinence from that genre.

Would that every writer would.

I'm working on a Blake Snyder-inspired story. Not about Blake, but about a subject he tossed out in Save the Cat when discussing mumbo-jumbo and what audiences will accept. Yes, vampires AND aliens. So far, the aliens are more interesting to me because they can be truly different without needless questioning. Vampires used to be human, so other than needing blood and not liking sunlight, what excuse do they have for becoming lecherous sadistic bastards overnight? I go the other way with my vampires; they are simply everyday folk with different issues.

Taking my own advice, I'm writing the novel and then condensing a script, MAYBE. It's a big maybe because I'm not sure anyone will want to do it and if the novel gains any sort of positive response, I'm unlikely to relinquish the slightest control. I have a certain idea in my head of how they are and what they are like, these characters of mine, and I write based on that. Besides that, I see it more as a television series than a movie. Why? It has a lot of stuff to cover.

I am exploring bisexuality, infertility, slavery, social-individual relations, cultural clashing, sexual maturation, friendship and love across species, and more. One of the most important characters is a hedonistic mad scientist sort whose species are true hermaphrodites, another is a formerly childless but now foster parent to a child from another species entirely, and that son of hers is several hundred years old but is developmentally equivalent to a human teen, one of whom he has become infatuated with.

The vampires are less fun, but that's only because they are more normal. They are Stoker-type vampires in that they can exist in sunlight, but other than that nothing is mystical about them. They move fast, they're strong, and very smart only because they are... wait for it... the result of a contagion from off-world. As a matter of fact, that contagion is continuing to spread across the galaxy as an army of ghoul-like aliens from various races attacks and destroys world after world.

I condensed into this two other storylines regarding a peaceful alien species and their one-time occupiers, as well as the psychics from DEMO on whose campus the house is found the previously covered alien outpost. Now, I think I have enough in one story to make it worth working on. IF I can stop rewriting chapters.

Cannot ping across wireless access point?

2011-01-03T17:31:00.000-05:00

I'm throwing this out there for those of you who might need it.

When you convert a wireless router into an access point, the instructions are usually pretty straightforward. What they usually lack is a very important step: you need to move the Ethernet line that homes it back to the main router. Wireless routers almost always have a WAN Ethernet port and one or more LAN Ethernet ports. The router won't connect to its source be it cable modem or DSL unless that connection is via the WAN. However, when used as an access point, things change.

From the research I've done over the last week, even when changed from router to access point, the WAN port still behaves differently. ARP broadcasts are not properly directed over that port, some firewall functionality seems to remain. Belkin routers certainly fit this bill. Port scans to find specific services such as a media server on the LAN don't work. Ping doesn't work. You can surf though a machine connected via the access point, but that's it.

The solution? Move the Ethernet line to one of the LAN ports. Now, media servers are found, pings go through.

So the rule is, if you have a wireless router and are going to use it as an access point instead, with it homed back to a main router, move the Ethernet line over to one of the LAN ports. If it has one LAN port, connect that to a small switch and put the line in one of the switch ports. You should now be able to ping.

Be Your Own Hero

2010-12-23T20:40:00.000-05:00

When people ask me who my hero is, who my idol is, I say without hesitation, me.

Some people regard this as narcissism. I ask, why? The response usually is, because you can't be your own hero, you can't be your own idol. Why? The response is invariably, you just can't. I understand what is going on behind their eyes, even if they can't put it into words. On the surface, just behind their teeth, unable to be gotten out, is the idea that an idol or a hero is someone who is better than you. More than that, is the assumption of others always being better than you, which is one of the many character defects of the human race. That is, assuming that one is lesser than others or some other by default. It wasn't Christians or Jews who invented the idea of assuming intrinsic guilt or failure on one's own part; they merely embraced it culturally. Collectives of all sorts have a tendency to encompass and amplify the most common aspects of the comprising individuals. Feeling bad about oneself is one of those commonalities of humans.

More to the point, it has a function that people rarely think of, and that is this. When someone else is your hero, your idol, you are putting the bar to be lived up to on them. The responsibility is theirs, not yours. They have to live up to being what you imagine they should be, which in turn is based on what you need in them, whether you understand it or not. No weight at all on you, you are free to embrace the position of the lesser, being their lesser, while being the expectant and demanding other at the same time. You get to be the nattering mother asking why you're not a doctor. Why didn't my hero do whatever instead of taking a bribe or cheating on his wife? No one ever asks that of themselves in that same way.

When you are your own hero or idol, you put the weight on you. You keep conscience in the picture. You are the one not cheating, not taking the bribe. And when you let yourself down, you can change that. You can atone. In an honorable society, one attempts to be what they would want themselves to be in terms of character. This doesn't mean being the life of the party, a famous rapper, an Olympic athlete, or comedian. All of those things say nothing about their character, which you will eventually find fault with. It means those little things that you expect of them. Never taking the payoff, never backing down to the bad guys, never being a bad guy. These are the right ways, and when we do wrong, we become wrong, so we will live this way no matter what. The only one you can be assured of having any influence over in this is you. Not the famous rapper or the Olympic athlete.

Be the person you wish others would be, and if what you want of others you cannot manage yourself, then don't hold them responsible when you don't hold yourself. As an example, faulting the wealthy for having money you don't and saying they deserve to be taxed... consider if you would think, in their shoes, that the money you earned that year should be taken away from you. You are of course a liar if you say that it should.

Your money is your money. My money is my money. Neither of us is more or less deserving than another of having what is ours taken by those whose it is not. When something is taken from someone without willful agreement and just compensation both, that is called stealing. You would not want your flowers taken from your yard because someone with less of a yard thought you had too many flowers. That's not for them to say beyond their personal opinion and certainly not to be acted upon. Does the government ripping out your flowers on their behalf make it right? Government represents the people, therefore, if the people aspire to being honorable, that which represents them can be no less. Therefore, the government taking it makes it no more right than your neighbor. Stealing is stealing.

However, we have egged each other on to envy and jealousy, siblings to greed. It is not greed to want to make a lot of money or own a lot of cars. Greed is the exclusion of all other matters including ethics and morality from the acquisitiveness. It is not money that is the root of all evil, but the love of money, to the exclusion of all else. I want a million dollars. Killing people or stealing is not an acceptable way to do it. Conscience stays in the picture. The desire for anything, including morals and ethics, cannot be to the extent that the chase for them counters them and all else of all importance. We hold ourselves as right and just for hounding those we call guilty, to the point that we exclude compassion and sympathy, and in this, become guilty ourselves. It isn't different with money. We envy, we are jealous, and we hold those with more as guilty and hound them, excluding compassion and understanding. Most especially that of the fact that their money is not our money. We had no right to their stuff, therefore, however much they have, is not our business.

This blindness brought on by our self-righteous envy and jealousy, this embrace of green eyes, has only come back to harm us. Where do we think that the money came from? Do we even think about it? Much of it came from doing business and investing in business. Consider that for a moment. Think back to when you ran a lemonade stand as a kid. When mom couldn't get you to the megamart, or at least that large grocery store, you may have walked to the convenience store nearby which had of course higher prices for cups and packets of drink mix. They have less buying power, they buy in smaller lots, so you pay more. Also, they are smaller and farther apart, so the diesel or gas and wear and tear on a vehicle to get small lots to them, drives up costs. No big trailers, just small box trucks bringing a few things in stop and go traffic.

Anyhow, you probably raised the price of your cups by about five cents. Why? Because pennies are less likely to be had than nickels. Nickels are nice round figures. Two cents more per cup and drink, you raised your prices by five cents to cover the costs, and, not accounting for the loss of business due to the higher prices, you made a three cent a cup profit. You were merely accounting for a previous profit of six cents being cut by two cents to four cents, but added three cents and got seven cents a cup. It only made sense.

Well, when you shift the tax burden onto those who can pass it along, they will do no different than you did. Congratulations. Your envy and greed, your holding others to standards that you would never hold yourself to, has resulted in you paying the higher taxes of those people. In trying to avoid having your stuff taken by government, you had it taken by government through those people you wanted to shaft because you envied what they had. Now they still have what they had, and you have less of your own.

Did you forget the Aesop's fable about the dog, the bone, and the reflection in the pond?

This is an example of the consequence of not being your own hero. In wanting others to take the hit instead of yourself, in wanting others to live up to the standards instead of yourself, we have a world where we suffer that which we attempted to impose on others, as sure as the sun comes up.

We can do better than that.

The Middle Finger of Creation

2010-11-14T20:06:00.000-05:00

I was surfing around and noticed this in a Wikipedia article on molecular clouds.

Today is the meaning of life.

2010-10-10T17:31:00.000-04:00

Today is October 10, 2010. 101010. Taken as a binary number, that is 42 in base-10.

You may now spend the rest of your life searching for the question that goes to the answer.

Outstanding Ad to Remember This November

2010-10-07T02:49:00.002-04:00

Where have I been?

2010-07-01T20:05:00.000-04:00

I don't know. I've been too busy to check. Between classes, job hunting, writing, health issues (I'm on blood pressure meds for old folks, yay!), and research on a dozen different things, I've been way too busy to blog.

So, I will get back to posting something or other as soon as I have time. I'm working on some good things, and some sort of eh things, and will post something when I get some time. It's been a long year.

Archetypes, extremities, and spectra

2010-01-02T03:28:00.002-05:00

Archetypes, extremities, and spectra

It seems to me that humans in their ability to see the other in themselves and themselves in the other also have another quality and that is to see extremities in all things along a more or less one dimensional element, a line. They see a line as an extension between two zero dimensional elements, the binary opposites they inherently begin from. In entertaining the conception of self, there is the infinitely degenerate and the infinitely elevated. Similarly, in the other there is the same set of extremities and linear path between them. In this, it is hardly surprising that the conceptions of G-d and Satan would come about.

Indeed, man treats good and evil from the start as diametric opposites and absolutes and only when faced with need for nuance will man admit to a spectrum of either and grades of them. This is more evil than that.

While extremities might be experienced, they are, short of absolute experience, inferred things by way of cognitive notice of difference between two quantities and quantization of their qualities. It is both phenomenal and noumenal. That is, it starts as phenomenal and is made noumenal by the action of the human mind to clarify the perceived differences between the states.

Once the purely theoretical world of the noumenal has been entered, it is of little effort to extrapolate to the far reaches of the perceived scales and imagine what the phenomenal embodiment of that construction would be. With respect to good or evil, what do we imagine to be the end extremities of their area, and why? Further, what do we say by these and are we listening to ourselves?

A New Level of WRONG

2009-12-22T18:51:00.000-05:00

http://movies.ign.com/articles/105/1056962p1.html

The new Kick-Ass movie trailer featuring Hit Girl.

Your young sons might just need therapy folks.

The Phone Company sues The Phone Company

2009-11-04T12:39:00.001-05:00

AT&T sues Verizon over TV ads - Network World

Is here an emoticon for a laugh this big?

Meanwhile, memo to Sprint. I am seriously considering dumping you dolts after more than five years of constantly escalating costs and no attractive services or device offerings. I checked the Pre’s specifics and it is extremely lacking. Verizon’s Droid might get my business really soon. Get moving!

The more I study psychology...

2009-10-28T14:24:00.000-04:00

...the more aghast I am at humanity.

We have had a growing understanding of our drives, but it seems we have very little will to put this knowledge to practical use.

For instance, I have all my life been against the death penalty. I am a conservative Republican with a slight libertarian bent by nature, but the death penalty has always struck me as hypocritical in the extreme. While others point out that killing to avenge killing makes no sense and do it with the superficiality of angry children, they are not wrong. If preservation of life is the point, and we cannot bring back the dead by any action including the death of another, then for what reason are we truly taking a life?

The closest I have ever seen honesty is in the death penalty proponents who say that it is an expression of society's revulsion to murder and their need to express their outrage.

Is that last part, expressing outrage, not the essential reason for honor killings, revenge killings, and the like? Do we as a society say this is proper? No, we say that feelings, emotions, are not enough. Defense of self and or others is the burden required. Not our emotions which we can with time get over and deal with.

Are we saying the society as a composite of ourselves somehow transcends this and society's collective emotion is not something we as a group can stand up to when we as individuals are expected to?

If so, why do we hold ourselves as a society to standards of any kind?

Or is it that we are afraid of the collective of our selves and seek to mollify it with a sacrifice?

Or is it in reality that we do not want to give up on the exercise of our emotions in the revenge, in the act of killing, and we are too much the cowards to admit it, too much embarrassed by the truth to admit it, and feel that under the cover of the unthinking collective we feel empowered to kill when otherwise we would lack the courage of the singular revenge killer?

Do we hold ourselves cheaply for this? Do we find ourselves lacking by not killing?

I find that whether in the singular or collective, the mere emotions are not enough to justify killing. As we know all emotional, cognitive, what have you, moments are accompanied by a process commonly called dealing with it, and at the end of those chains we internalize the new state of affairs and our emotions pass and the past becomes a record of what was, and as we commonly say the past cannot be changed but only used as a lesson to the future to avoid. I find the lesson is that the other before us did not stop and did not let the moment pass but acted on it, obsessed about it, moved ahead with it.

Why is it so much more right for us to do what we fault the murderer for?

What do we teach ourselves in doing this?

We mourn for the living, not the dead. The dead no longer care. We care, but we adjudge the caring insufficient provocation to take another life. We should hold true to this judgment and not act in abject hypocrisy to do that which we find fault in others for.

Rainbow in CT

2009-10-13T23:53:00.001-04:00

I had just picked up a family member from work and done a little shopping at WalMart when on the way home a short distance away, I saw a rainbow and quickly pulled over to snap some shots. To my surprise and joy, it grew rapidly. Yes, it was a double rainbow as you can see below. At its maximum extent, both bows were complete and the foreground one very bright.

Is the iPhone hurting AT&T's brand? WHAT BRAND???

2009-10-06T01:12:00.001-04:00

Is the iPhone hurting AT&T's brand? | Signal Strength - CNET News

Are we talking about the same AT&T that gave raw Internet backbone traffic feed to the NSA for analysis?

Are we talking the same iPhone from the company that sues ANYONE who uses an Apple in their logo?

I cannot for the life of me figure out why I would care about these two companies. One is a long time proven by their actions anally control freakish bunch of pretentious poseurs who are outclassed by the Linux community daily, and the other is a rapidly resurrecting revenant that we were supposed to have chopped up and buried the pieces of at different crossroads decades ago.

Good luck with that: F.T.C. to Rule Blogs Must Disclose Gifts or Pay for Reviews

2009-10-05T22:47:00.001-04:00

Advertising - F.T.C. to Rule Blogs Must Disclose Gifts or Pay for Reviews - NYTimes.com

They’re going to enforce this on the forty bazillion blogs how?

They’re going to hunt down anonymous bloggers hosted overseas and prove they’re Americans subject to American law how?

Here goes more of our tax money to fight a fight that’s not only unwinnable but not even fightable.

Big Black Cock For The Ladies

2009-10-02T17:42:00.001-04:00

It’s amazing the things they allow to be seen by just anyone at the Berlin Fair.

Creepy Idea: Enhanced Fiber Junk Food

2009-10-01T22:43:00.004-04:00

POP FUCKING TARTS?

“You know honey, I don’t recall the last time Cindy went number two.”

“Maybe that’s because she’s sixteen and has been housebroken for thirteen and a half years and doesn’t see a need to tell you about every time she makes boom boom?”

“Don’t be an insensitive wise ass.”

“Sorry, I’ll try to care.”

“Look, our child’s digestive health is important. Do you know what can happen if their bowel movements aren’t regular enough?”

“Taking a dump like your Uncle Bernie?”

“Besides that.”

“I’m sure they cover this in health class at some point.”

“Maybe we should try to substitute some of the food in this house with enhanced fiber versions.”

“As the late great Dennis Wolfberg said, ‘it’s one thing to be regular, it’s another to be UNSTOPPABLE!’”

20% of your daily fiber per serving and you know kids will mow down an entire box at once. That’s 80% of their daily fiber need. Give them a bowl of Fiber One and you’re talking 100%+ of their daily needs and they haven’t even gotten to lunch yet.

Add snack bars, breads, etc.

At dinner, you make them eat their vegetables.

If your kid isn’t crapping three times a day every day, they’re dead. If they are, they soon will be dead.

You know folks, had my mother bought this kind of thing I’d have insisted on her seeing a shrink.

Can we get a grip already?

How I formatted a montage with contiguous voiceover...

2009-10-01T22:11:00.001-04:00

Yes I know center justify isn't the same but deal with it.

The point is to show what I got from the various websites, The Screenwriter's Bible, and The Hollywood Standard. This is what I came up with.

The content needs some touching, some revising of dialogue inline with the imagined character's personality and voicing, but other than that it works for me for now.

I felt that the (CONT'D.) was gratuitous and annoying and the (V.O.) is similarly, but I am keeping it for the moment unless someone can come up with an action line indicating all of it in voice over without a dreaded "we" line.

MONTAGE - MARK'S FAMILY HISTORY

-- EXT. AN OLD GYPSY VILLAGE IN THE MOUNTAINS - DAY - People are on the streets conducting their daily affairs but with noticeable speed and concern on their faces as artillery explosions begin to be heard somewhere far off

MARK BARKER (V.O.)

My father was Roma, a gypsy.

-- EXT. AN OLD EUROPEAN COTTAGE - DAY - A young boy is busy putting household items on a cart and artillery explosions sound in the distance

MARK BARKER (V.O.)

He was born somewhere in Hungary and he and his parents captured in Romania by the Nazis and sent to one of their many camps along with thousands of other gypsies and millions of Jews.

-- EXT. A NAZI WORK CAMP - LATE AFTERNOON - Hundreds of people in drab dirty work camp garb stand with blank expressions on the other side of barbed wire

MARK BARKER (V.O.)

Somehow he stayed alive long enough to see liberation by the Soviets while his parents didn't. He escaped the Russians and headed west as fast as he could as he said, and didn't look back.

-- EXT. AN EASTERN EUROPEAN MOUNTAIN ROAD - SUNRISE - The young boy is a few years older and carrying a satchel over his shoulder towards a small city as others similarly

MARK BARKER (V.O.)

Along the way he met my mother in France...

-- EXT. PARIS ALONG THE SEINE - SUNSET - The young boy is a teen now and walks hand in hand with a teen girl who also carries a cloth bag over her shoulder

MARK BARKER (V.O.)

...and they continued his single minded move westward to the United States where they changed their names and became citizens as fast as they could manage and my father immediately showed his gratitude by joining the army and going to fight in Korea.

-- INT. A LIVING ROOM COFFEE TABLE OVER AN OPEN PHOTO ALBUM - NIGHT - The couple are now older and leafing through their photographic memories among which is a large group shot of US Army soldiers holding up their unit flag between them in the field

MARK BARKER (V.O.)

Every Fourth of July he was the first one on the block to have his flags and bunting up and when they moved to a larger house in a better neighborhood, he installed a flagpole in the front yard where every morning he stopped to salute the flag before heading for work.

-- EXT. THE BARKER PARENTS' FRONT YARD - MORNING - Mark's father sets his briefcase down and salutes the flag and there might be a tear in his eye

MARK BARKER (V.O.)

Unfortunately, my mother was unable to have children and after years of trying they gave up and I was adopted in 1965 at the age of two.

-- INT. THE BARKER PARENTS' LIVING ROOM - LATE AFTERNOON - Mark as a toddler crawls around the floor amongst toys and his mother sits close by knitting

MARK BARKER (V.O.)

While I was an only child, the only thing I was spoiled with was my parents' love. They sunk every penny they had into our home and their business selling carpeting and later on hardwood flooring and tile. My father brought me into the company and its the only job I've ever known or wanted.

-- INT. BARKER CARPETS - NIGHT - Mark and his father exchange paperwork over their desks which are butted against each other face to face and Mark slaps the desk and holds up a paper to his father who gives him the two thumbs up

MARK BARKER (V.O.)

Like my mother, my wife and I were not blessed with children by our own efforts but forced to take steps and we worked long and hard to afford In Vitro Fertilization. After two tries we were rewarded with fraternal twins, Danny and Brenda.

-- EXT. THE BARKER HOME FRONT WALK - MORNING - Young DANNY and BRENDA BARKER stand in their school dress outfits on the first day of school as HOLLY (30s) snaps several shots with an old Kodak Instamatic camera

MARK BARKER (V.O.)

As my parents did, we spoil them with nothing but love and they are two of the finest teens any parents could have.

-- EXT. THE BARKER HOME FRONT WALK - NIGHT - Teen Danny and Brenda sneak around the bushes from opposite sides of the house and run into each other at the base of the porch stairs where their SHOUTS OF SURPRISE cause someone inside to snap on the porch light and they both bolt

MARK BARKER (V.O.)

Even if I'll never be caught dead telling them that and letting it go to their heads.

Mark Barker looks out to see no one at first but turns and looks suddenly as the CRASH of a trash can breaks the summer night's stillness

END MONTAGE

Just wanted to say about Zombieland...

2009-09-27T23:21:00.000-04:00

I downloaded the script and read through it today and am very impressed. I suggest you might as well.

Find it in the Z section of this.

It was a really good read.

BA in Psychology here I come! Maybe!

2009-09-26T23:44:00.001-04:00

I filled out the initial applications last night for an online university after it came down to either psychology or information technology. I thought long and hard and realized that my discomfort with the entire tech industry rests on the fact that as a customer facing person for so long whether on the phone or in their homes and offices, I know far too much about the psychology of the management of the industry as well as the customers and that viewpoint has preoccupied me for years now.

Instead of being concerned with the tech and that’s it, I’m concerned with the thought and reasoning processes of the people on both sides.

Since I am also exploring consulting as well as looking for an interim networking gig, and breaking into screenwriting, I figure that the psych course is the better of the choices. If successful, I graduate with a BA which many employers illogically want to see without any good solid reasoning as to why, and I get some actual structured training in the field to organize my existing knowledge and experience.

Over the course of this I am looking at over $60,000 in costs, but if I can get some screenplays finally down I’m relatively sure I can get one or two optioned or bought. The ideas I’ve got are not all winners, but I am confident some of them are.

Yes, Murder Suicide sucks as a title, but trust me the story is good. DEMOn is coming along and The Killer’s Killer is overall sound. I’ve got some other ideas jotted down that could be really good as well.

I just have to stay in front of the keyboard and practice, practice, practice.

Blue screen of death strikes at Stop & Shop

2009-09-26T23:07:00.001-04:00

Oops.

Definitely not what you want to see when you need sales in the books and videos aisle.

Suggestive product placement is alive and well…

2009-09-26T23:00:00.001-04:00

I went to the Durham Fair with my wife this afternoon and noticed this in one of the dealer stalls.

I’m not sure how well this is going to work to sell handbags to women. Replace that with a beer and put her in a bikini and you’ve got the start of a good ad campaign.

Why does West Hartford Public Library have a statue of Superman’s father doing “pull my finger”???

2009-09-26T22:49:00.001-04:00

Failure to anneal results in failure

2009-09-26T22:13:00.001-04:00

As you can see here, my wonderful Mongoose is indefinitely off the road pending finding money for a skilled aluminum welder.

In this closer shot of the mount base, you can see that the tube literally cracked and tore like simple sheet metal right at the base of the weld. Had the factory bothered to anneal this correctly, this would not have happened.

You can bet I was surprised when there was a loud bang and my bike came to a screeching halt under me nearly throwing me over the handlebars.

Even so, it is a good model of Mongoose and I am going to miss it as the last of the good weeks of weather go by and we head into winter. I was able to take it through woods over roots and rocks without a hitch as well as cover a total of over one thousand miles of commuting to and from my old job.

Oh well.

Well, this is what Blogger and HTML does to a Celtx export…

2009-09-24T00:08:00.005-04:00

I know, horrible in both layout and the content. Okay, so the content is not that horrible. As to why it is so bland... it's because small claims court is exactly this boring. You go in, wait a while, get called, and if the judge is one of those smart ones that advises people to hash things out in the hall and come back in to give them a chance to not waste the court's time, then it's over and done with each party saying they agree. Like saying "I do" at your wedding, but with less lengthy and less painful results.

EDIT: The really bizarro thing is that the first heading where it says COurtroom it actually says COURTROOM in Celtx, and the web browser preview but converts everything after CO to lower case when published.

EDIT EDIT: Oh screw it. It freaking sends the whole thing to the left.

          INT. COURTROOM - DAY
          WIDE: ENTIRE COURTROOM FROM THE BACK OF THE GALLERY FACING
          THE JUDGE

          A female JUDGE (50s) with red-brown hair sits at the bench
          head down and writing as people in the gallery in the
          foreground fidget but no one says anything. MARK BARKER
          (30s-40s) sits to the right of the room holding a manila
          folder full of paperwork and glances over to his left at the
          plaintiff MR. CALLAHAN (60s) who is looking at the judge
          from behind his lectern.

                              JUDGE
                         (looking up and back and forth
                         between plaintiff and
                         defendant absently)
                    Alright then. The agreement
                    specified is so ordered and will be
                    entered into the record. Your money
                    will be released within three
                    business days Mr. Barker.

                              MARK BARKER
                         (standing up)
                    Thank you, your honor. I promise I
                    will pay.

                              JUDGE
                         (head back down and writing)
                    I trust that you will Mr. Barker.
                    Have a good rest of the day and
                    good luck to you sir.

          The Judge waves as absently as she glanced at the
          participants and sounds as overworked as her less than
          perfect hairdo would indicate.

                              MARK BARKER
                    Thank you.

          Mr. Callahan turns and offers his hand to Mark who accepts
          it before speaking in a subdued voice.

                              MR. CALLAHAN
                    I'm sorry for your loss, Mark. I
                    really wish the business could have
                    gone differently.

                              MARK BARKER
                         (finishing the handshake)
                    Me too. I would have paid you
                    earlier like I said but-

                              MR. CALLAHAN
                    I understand completely Mark. I'm
                    just glad you have your father's
                    estate settled and are on a new
                    start. Take care of yourself now.

          Mr. Callahan looks into his paperwork on his lectern and
          then turns to Mark who is on his way to leaving.

                              MR. CALLAHAN
                    By the way Mark, if you're not sure
                    how this works, the court will be
                    sending you paperwork on the
                    judgment and your agreement. It
                    will recommend forwarding a copy to
                    your bank just in case so be sure
                    to do that.

                                                          CUT TO:

          INT. COURTHOUSE HALLWAY - DAY
          MEDIUM CLOSE UP: COURTROOM DOORS

          Mark walks out with a look somewhere between gratitude for a
          near-miss and the resignation of a man mounting the gallows
          and heads for the elevators and WE FOLLOW him.

                              MARK BARKER (V.O.)
                    It's not the sort of situation I
                    ever pictured for myself all those
                    years ago sitting on my father's
                    lap as he told me all about the
                    business I would inherit, but I
                    suppose it could be worse.

          Mark taps the elevator button a couple times and taps his
          right foot for a few moments and then checks his watch which
          causes his paperwork to fall out of the manila folder.

Excellent Advice

2009-09-23T23:30:00.001-04:00

Screenwriters! If You Want to Write a Movie, Write a Book

I would add that the biggest reason to do this is that we do not write books in third person present tense but third person past tense. We say that John walked across the room and peeked between the blinds and not John walks across the room and peeks between the blinds. We’re telling the reader that something happened, not directing someone to do that thing.

When we write a screenplay, we will be directing no matter what anyone says. And directors write when they illustrate the screenplay with choices of direction and camera angles. Can’t be helped.

This is another excellent example of Script X-Ray by the way.

Murder Suicide Work Continues

2009-09-23T19:54:00.001-04:00

I’ve decided that I will go ahead and add in bits and pieces of my own recent experiences to dress up the desperation for the central characters, such as court cases, collections and layoffs. In addition, I’ve realized we need something else to give currency to their desperation and connect them with the kids so as to make it as least plausible that they’d be so desperate to joke about insurance fraud to give the kids a nest egg, and that would be dedication to their children. I’ve decided that they had to fight hard to get by as children, and had to fight hard to have the children, and so of course are justifiably worried about their children and do not want them to go through what they did.

So as not to lay too much pipe as Snyder would have warned, I have to spread this across the dialogue through proper openings inviting them to mention the facts of their situation and not put it all right up front. We might not meet the other central character who is the man who offers them an alternative.

I’ve got that down.

Already down are the basics of the scam and the sequence of events from the hatching of the plan to the cliffhanger where the house blows up.

Yes, blows up. Cliché, but what isn’t?

More news on this project as I go. I am going back and forth from Notepad to Word 2007 to Celtx to Five Sprockets and trying my best to get this done before the end of October.

My big conceptual stumbling block is how much camera direction to do. Leave it at general shots and leave the fine grain stuff to a director or myself if it gets bought and I’m asked to dress it up, or do every little shot back and forth.

Probably somewhere in between from my research so far, but I do have certain shot styles in mind for certain scenes based on movies I’ve seen before and places I’ve been and things relevant to the scenes like bathroom doors in the background from where we can see a character approaching behind another character’s back.

We’ll see.

Procrastination or Freeze?

2009-09-23T16:35:00.001-04:00

Anyone else get this?

Lately, I sit down and try to write and do anything else but. I surf, I listen to music, I play games and don’t write. I go to the woods for a walk, and there I conceive all sorts of things. Then go home and fail to write it down.

I feel like Serendipity in Dogma. I can come up with ideas, but when I try to write them down…

It’s not so much putting it off nor is it so much of a freeze. It’s somewhere in between. I sit before the computer, I start up the word processor, and then there’s a minute or two where I sit almost motionless. Then I take a deep breath, realize I’ve blanked, and turn off the word processor and open up Firefox.

Strange thing is, even web surfing to sites I used to enjoy is boring. I go mostly to blogs of other writers and to I Can Has Cheezburger and then sort of spiral down slowly into doing nothing but staring at the screen.

Been like this for weeks now and I can’t figure out why.

Why Your Internet Sucks, Part I

2009-09-22T20:26:00.001-04:00

Here is the biggest reason your Internet sucks. Are you ready?

GO LOOK IN A MIRROR.

No, really. That person staring back at you is the biggest obstacle you will ever have to getting Internet service that works. It is the truth, no matter how hard it is to hear it, and given that it is the truth my best advice is to get over that and learn to be your Internet service’s best friend.

This is directed mainly at SOHO/SMB people but also applies somewhat to home users, just so you know.

Your first mistake is the same first mistake you make in so many other situations, the question of “Why me?” to which I reply, “Why not you?”

What makes you so special that problems should not ever happen for you? Get down off your Lady Godiva routine and accept that bad things happen to good people’s Internet service. It gets slow, it goes out, it has issues with various protocols like mail or web, and it sometimes does things you can’t seem to put a finger on. This is just the nature of the world.

This first step will clear the first stumbling block of dealing with whatever has gone wrong. The longer you go “oh why me” and not “okay what seems to be the problem” the longer it will be until it is fixed.

The second mistake is the same second mistake made in many areas of endeavor from plumbing to car repair, “I can’t do this.” and that attitude is a self-fulfilling prophecy every time. If you assume that you can’t, you cut off being open to any possibility that you can, and thus will cut off being open to solutions when they present themselves.

You must start with the attitude that you can. This will help increase your perceptions and attentions, and if you do this stuff long enough, you begin to see why things are the way they are, and you will some day think, “We can remove two whole switches and still aggregate our traffic without noticeable degradation and then use those switches for the new office.” Way to go you.

The third mistake is a follow-on from the first and is given oomph by the second. It is the mistake that someone, in this case your service provider and any related entities, owes you something.

They don’t. Period. Full stop. End of discussion.

Further, the oomph comes in when in having assumed you cannot do something, that someone else must, and therefore you are damn well going to make them do something and contractual or ethical obligations be damned. You want it now!

I have news for you. Your ISP has anywhere from fifty to five thousand other people that same day with the same whiny bitchy attitude as you are about to call them with. They don’t care because they cannot afford to.

If they truly gave as much of a damn as they like to say in their flouncy customer service way, they’d be insane. You aren’t a friend, or family, or neighbor or anybody to them. You’re paying them for a service which has as much of a record of perfection as your phone or power.

That service goes from Point A to Point B via a whole shitload of places that are subject to trucks hitting them, backhoes cutting through them, and equipment just up and dying for no apparent reason. If humans as wondrous as they are still up and die just like that, how much more reliable can a pile of silicon circuits be? At least you don’t have five to forty-eight volts DC plowing through you at all hours for six straight years.

The people who get that service at every layer of the network as they refer to it are only human. Remember that time you backed over your son’s tricycle or your sister fell down the stairs and landed on your school science project before you could get it out the door?

SHIT HAPPENS. You’re no more above this than your neighbor, your ISP is no more about making mistakes than you or your neighbor, and for that matter neither is the router manufacturer’s firmware programmer. Sometimes the code just doesn’t behave.

Further, there’s no guarantee someone else won’t be a schmuck and make a mess of the network either by accident or by purpose. Distributed denial of service attacks, DDoS, happen. As do people too incompetent to use BitTorrent without self-throttling their own bandwidth usage.

On top of this, if you are using a competitive local exchange carrier (CLEC) like Covad, the phone company might just for any or no reason make a mistake or purposely foul things up. Sometimes that purpose is to replace an entire cable trunk to a neighborhood and it doesn’t get done when they wanted to. Oh well. Other times a central office (CO) gets flooded like those in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. Do you really think someone is fixing your DSL when the entire local landline phone system is kaput? If you do, I would like to talk to you about a multilevel marketing venture involving your checking account and a Nigerian bank.

My advice to get to where you can handle these issues is to assume the worst not only can but will happen and probably right when you need to get a mass mailing out to your investors. Then to go over your LAN and WAN connections to take inventory of what is on your premises and thus, possibly, within your sphere of influence. Finally, consider any ways you can make it better. Yes, I will help you figure this out. Somewhat. You have to learn to make friends with the future’s collective experience bank: Google and the web.

When I was a call center support tech, people always missed out on the power of me kicking their issues back by pointing them at their cheap-ass Linksys router: IT’S ONLY BROKE UNTIL YOU FIX IT. Once you decide to stop putting it off, complaining and feeling sorry for yourself there’s nothing to do but spend two hours buying a new router, hooking it up, and thinking about where to store the box it came in just in case you have to return it.

And you might. So hold on to receipts too.

So in a nutshell the first step is two-pronged: learn to accept bad things as an inevitable feature of life, and learn to deal with what is in your sphere of control. Within your sphere of control: your equipment and your attitude towards your ISP. Outside your sphere of control: your daughter’s fiancé she just surprised you with on spring break vacation.

Next time, a little bit on what the ISP techs have to deal with in order for your to find a little understanding for people who bust their ass for you.

Sneaking away from Sodom and Gomorrah

2009-09-21T15:37:00.001-04:00

As I write I am presently on the deck at Lyman Orchards finishing lunch with my wife after the anticlimactic court case of me versus a creditor. Money was seized from my bank account, I disputed that, they didn’t, and so I will get all or some of that back and enter into a payment plan of my own without it being a part of the court record, which is bizarre as I went in willing to do $X per week until paid and the lawyer for the creditor didn’t even ask the court to enter that. Just release the money and good luck.

So I feel like Lot having gotten away from a terrible fate.

I’ve been reading the required Syd Field and trying to consider everything in breakdowns of scenes and thinking back to a commercial shoot I attended as an unpaid flunky at a department store chain, and though today’s case was less than an hour from arrival to see you later, it would have been two or three days of shooting for all the action and reaction shots.

I’m not used to thinking in those terms but am getting there. And each event I go through, I am watching carefully for all the point that are made in story writing how-to books.

It’s driving my wife mad.

And so I join the wireless age!

2009-09-20T16:18:00.001-04:00

Right now as I speak, I am kneeling in grass and dirt, and dictating this blog post from the middle of a wooded nature trail. In just over one month, I've gone from being chained to a desk to being fast and free.

I may not have a job, but as the Primerica people say, a job is a JOB: just over broke. What I've needed is a career. Screenwriting may be that career. Or I might return to networking. I am still looking for a network job. I am not sure. The only thing I do know is that I was very unhappy for a very long time and fooling myself in believing that I was somehow holding on and buying time.

The only thing I was doing, was spinning my wheels and not doing what made me happy. In the entire time at my previous job I did not take one vacation, did not go to the coast, did not visit relatives, and generally circled in a decaying holding pattern.

It was killing me inside. I know that now. If there's anything this wireless technology teaches me, it's that even if the Internet is a part of my life professionally from here on out I can reach it wherever I go and the two do not have to be separate.

I'm recalling that line from Ghost in the Shell where The Major leaves Battou in a replacement body. She mentions that the net is vast and wonders where the newborn goes from there.

So do I.

Story, story, story... Copacabana!

2009-09-20T00:51:00.000-04:00

Yes, Copacabana.

Go listen to Copacabana and see if the lyrics don't elicit a story in your mind. That is what the spoken dialogue of your screenplay sans sound fx should do. Not just tell the story, but by the actors' recitation imply a lot more. They can only do so much. The rest has to be in what they say.

That I think is a goal to shoot for. As much as I hated listening to Manilow thanks to my mother and sister and their two to one margin of control over the one and only portable radio in our house, I have to salute him for Copacabana.

Don't Be Afraid

2009-09-19T15:22:00.001-04:00

It came to mind moments after banging out the bit about the murder and ejaculation that people might be a bit creeped out by that.

Here's the reason for the scene: the killer attempts to blackmail people out of jobs so he can take their places. In trying to dig up dirt, he realizes that what the dirt says about these people is a very seriously provocative thing and that his moral disgust, as twisted and perverted as it is in a killer like him, needs to be exercised and acted upon. One victim is a truly self centered slutty bitch who has been even more ruthless in ladder climbing than him, and has total disdain for the men she sleeps with and belittles him and his performance in the bedroom after sleeping with and drugging him to steal his money, yet she pretends respectability at a business he was shut out from by her actions.

Another actually killed his own predecessor to take his job and challenges the killer claiming he has no balls which is a sore point for him as he feels henpecked and put upon already. Tied to a chair the victim shouldn't be so cavalierly abusive with him and in revealing his own crime, makes killing him seem like a done deal.

The last one is as I said a pedophile who is strictly a pig who looks to manipulate and dominate others as his true primary form of gratification. When he manipulates the killer into going against his usual sexual orientation and having oral sex with him, and casually and calmly brags of his silver tongued speaking and perceptive reasoning abilities, he goes too far by including that the killer is no different and is another conquest for him.

After finishing the victim off, he really finishes him off with a knife and then in a sense of victory and conquest of his own, mixed up as his sexuality and mentality is, and he floats through reasoning and surfs right through social mores and taboos in his mind like a tsunami overwhelming a breakwater, he gets off to the epiphany that doing this, hunting down and killing bad people who masquerade through life is perhaps what he was meant for. He finds then the comfort and end to his inner conflict, though the solution is to any normal sane person the worst possible one for society.

How do you come up with this? You simply think the way deranged and mentally unstable people think and how they think is easily found on the web. You consider natural human drives, human bestial reactions and actions, and when you come to the idea "but that's not right" you ignore it and continue on. This isn't about you. It's about that character. It's not "what would I do", but "what would this person do" and you have to stick with that however hard and shocking it is.

Most people won't because it reveals to them the capability of thinking like any of the crazed people we read about in the news. That is a scary thing, to find commonality with a serial killer, with a rapist, with an unabashed predator against his own kind. We don't like to feel those emotions and you can hardly avoid them when digging in the character's head. However, you must keep in mind three things.

You're writing a fictional character, not a fictionalization of yourself. You're merely using your own cognitive powers to flesh that character out because you don't have an all purpose AI program to impress these qualities on to create a simulation. This is not Star Trek and you don't have a vastly powerful computer with a holodeck. So you use what you have which is your boundless imagination.
These characters are not as shocking if they aren't human in most respects. If they don't have that sense that this could be your neighbor or someone you could encounter, they don't have the impact. Hannibal Lecter has that impact. He is someone that could easily be sitting there while you lay out your peccadilloes on the leather couch. Your own humanity is part and parcel of your cognitive boundaries, circumscribing it with your nature, and so is necessarily imprinted on that creation. Don't be afraid, you can pull the finished mask off and go back to being whoever you are. Keep in mind the first thing I said above and it will slip right off.
If you can see the commonality between you and your potentials on the one hand, and an execrable character on the other, you can reconnect with something sadly lacking in this impersonal world and that is your sense of empathy. If we cannot see ourselves in the other and the other in us, and see to where we can and should feel for these people who've lost their way into the realms of insanity, we will forever be undone by them when they appear in our midst.

To deal with a thing one must understand a thing and this writing experience connects me with the shocking and revolting people I read of in the news and instead of being moved to righteous anger and desire for revenge, I am moved to firm resolve in the belief that they are a danger, but that we should do no more to remove them from being a danger than is necessary lest we in getting caught up in that emotional sweep to feeling instead of thinking, become like them and as society reaches any norm, then those who are destined to rise above society to infamy must be that much more outrageous than society is.

The worse society gets, then so much worse must must the outrages be to get that society's attention.

We should have compassion for the human being that is lost. By all means we should remove such people from society and lock them away and study them, but we should also have a sense of loss for what they never were and should have been instead, and treat that loss with reverence and in doing so endeavor to head off other people from reaching their breaking point, and to reinforce each other with encouragement and hope instead of the despair we so often hand out to each other which is a very powerful impetus to madness.

After all, when you spend your life following all the rules and doing no wrong and suffer anyways, then why bother following the rules any further? That idea is growing in our world today and it is one that we need to yank back on. We need to get a grip on ourselves and each other. Bad things happen to good people but when good people do not have other good people to shelter them and comfort them, then being bad people seems much more attractive.

We can make a better world, but we have to see where we can become the sort to make it a much worse world to understand where the life changing pitfalls are and how to prepare for them and how to ameliorate the results of them so as to not fall down into chaos and despair where nothing matters and we no longer feel a connection with others. When we reach that, we become this sort of character. Some reach it easier than others, but if we know we as a society are ramping up the outrages and provocations we must realize we are slowly running through the easily affected and twisting and deforming more stable people until none are left and our new norm is this sort of darkness. We need to pull back from this festival of nihilism and cynicism before we make people like this character.

Which would you prefer? Never triggering these sorts or waiting until they are triggered and then we give them the death penalty after they've had a dozen victims? Small comfort to the victims I am sure.

We need to pull back, and so, we must learn why, and thus we must confront our fear of seeing commonality with these characters, so that we can reestablish a linkage with them and the chain of events and experiences that made them into that and could one day threaten to make us into that, or the victim of the next one to snap.

So don't be afraid. It's only fictional characters doing things that frighten us because we can all see ourselves in that position and it disgusts us. That we are still disgusted and frightened by these actions is a very reassuring thing. It means we're not too far gone. So don't be afraid to brainstorm characters of depravity and evil. It can be a learning experience.

The Hardest Part For Me

2009-09-19T14:43:00.000-04:00

I am by nature fairly creative and a pretty good storyteller. You have to be when you work inside the homes of people doing network installations or taking phone calls in a service center where while waiting for the results of automated tests, you have to chit chat and keep people amused. Having been writing for my own amusement since I was in grade school, it works out pretty well as a creative exercise and gives you many opportunities to draw upon your first best source of material, your own life both past and current.

Since the month before my layoff, I conceived four stories that I believe will make excellent movies. The Killer's Killer, Murder Suicide, and two which are ideally sequels, about a serial killer in the making who starts with an attempt at revenge on his former employers that becomes an inadvertent murder, and concludes with his hamfisted attempts to blackmail his way into a new job that ends in several more murders. Just yesterday afternoon, I conceived a new one about a cynical and oblivious reporter for a small rag of a newspaper who goes undercover in a growing cult movement to expose the leader and finds that the cult is window dressing and the cult leader really does have powers and isn't what he was thought to be.

Granted, each one still needs a lot of knocking together with scene choices, breakdowns into shots and so on, but that's where I break down.

Script writing is not hard to learn. The mechanics and formatting I mean. I've been a programmer several times in my life and it's a matter of using what interpreters and compilers will regard as legal, then what actually will be the best for the performance of the application taking operations necessary to decode your code into machine instructions into account, and then finally what other developers to come will find readable when they need to improve on it long after you're gone. All of this leads to a certain style as rigid in the end as The Hollywood Standard. It might not seem so to those who've casually dabbled in programming, but the script for Terminator 2 and Independence Day are very similarly constructed even if what they encode creates two different movies.

What is hard for me is actually sitting down and writing when so much else is on my mind. I pace, I web surf aimlessly, I go to the mall and people watch, I listen to music, and other activities hoping I will get into the right frame of mind for creativity. Yet, it is not creativity that I lack. I conceive characters and premises and the like with great ease. I see a wide variety of actors playing the parts I come up with and I can see radically different ways a story can go with a totally different actor than intended. This leads to further creativity and brainstorming. Soon I know every character like the back of my hand and all the points of their stories and world.

It's the actual banging it out process that I find so nerve-wracking. The biggest reason off the top of my head is that I am preoccupied either by work when I have it, or the lack thereof, and as always bills. If I won the lottery, I might not bother writing for all the things I can do with money instead of writing.

The other reason and this is almost as important, is that when you put things down in ink or electrons, it solidifies from imagination into the realm of done and gone. It's over. Set. No more changes unless you want to do a lot of hard work to rewrite it all, and knowing full well that a better idea might come along as you go you look ahead to that need to do that hard work and you decide, why bother putting it down at all.

Ah yes. Making money.

I know that making large amounts of money is not the best reason for going into the business, but I also know that my ideas are really good ones. I've been told so by people I meet and tell the stories to. They all tell me they'd either pay to see that movie, or they'd boycott it for the shocking nature of it. When a story includes a man having his first homosexual sex with an admitted pedophilic predator and then gutting him like a fish moments later and finishing by ejaculating over the fresh corpse, you expect that kind of reaction. Trust me, there's a reason for that scene.

Another reason I have confidence that these ideas are worthwhile is that they are inspired by the society and entertainment already out there and thus about as likely to be successful as anything else that was.

Lastly, I am confident that the ideas are good because they were formed independently of formulas and beat sheets, and conceived in the mind's eye visually as if watching a movie already made and then pushing things around in my mind until what I think is a result as watchable as anything else is achieved.

That being said, it's the getting it down frozen in place. Like programming, it is to nail jelly to a tree. The idea is great, the envisioning of the final product is awe-inspiring, and the middle part is a large foggy area that seems to be hiding great cliffs and chasms needing to be crossed in the nude in a snowstorm.

I'd rather goof off and create in my mind. Wouldn't we all?

Nevertheless I am continuing to put items down. Scenes, characters, etc. The Killer's Killer involves Maverick speaking in allusion through terms that have to be decoded which he only knows to do because his masters operate that way to avoid incrimination. I have a couple ideas there that are so-so creatively and I am looking for better. Murder Suicide is lacking a good title and I am almost obsessed with avoiding cliche titles. The two others I mentioned with the idiot killer are without working titles, but have a lot of key points and murder events down and the characters largely firmly in place. It's throwing the bits together that is going to be the real labor for me mentally.

Anyone who has written a great program in snatches on napkins and backs of envelopes but then took five months to tie them together in an IDE knows what I mean.

Oh well. Just rambling.

I meant to post a little on why people truly love certain horror villains like Freddy (he kills one of Johnny Depp's more annoying characters, that alone is endearing), Jason (he kills the hottie type people about to get busy when we aren't getting any), and so on. It's easier to ad-lib it in conversation though. Well, it's better than asking "how's the weather" for the trillionth time.

The biggest problem with screenwriting and screenwriters is…

2009-09-18T00:44:00.001-04:00

…there are so few people actually just fucking WRITING STORIES.

Since when did everything on screenwriting, book writing, etc. turn into formula texts? Fine, you’ve got acts and you’ve got transitions, you’ve got formatting and you’ve got structure, BUT DO YOU HAVE A STORY???

In reading through the many books on screenwriting thus far, it has occurred to me that they are in some way giant Mad-Lib® pads and a movie from hook to climax could be thrown together that otherwise said and did nothing for anyone.

Then I considered some of the films of the past few decades and realized I was right.

So before you write a screenplay, come up with a story.

One of my favorite movies

2009-09-18T00:11:00.001-04:00

My Big Fat Independent Movie (2005)

That is all.

Vista Does Not Suck Part One

2009-09-17T15:57:00.000-04:00

Okay, I've said it and I am proud of it.

Vista does not suck.

SPEECH RECOGNITION
As you may recall if you've read any of my blog, I used Windows Vista Speech Recognition to dictate a post. Well, what you didn't know is where. I did it from where I am right now which is my front porch in Meriden only ten feet from traffic. Not bad on a laptop with built-in microphone, huh?

DRIVER INSTALLATION
Unlike in Windows XP which involved visits to the websites of Samsung, Microsoft and Sprint, simply plugging in my data cable at the USB port and to my cell at the other end was enough to get Vista to go out to find all necessary drivers from Microsoft. Within minutes I'd created and tested a dial-up connection to my home cable provider and hit GMail. Painless and easy.

So far, I am liking Vista a lot and have to say it is definitely not as bad as many made it out to be.

Murder-Suicide Update

2009-09-13T23:54:00.000-04:00

I am having a few problems with the Five Sprockets layout and my laptop's display of it so I will have to do most writing offline as it were and then copy-paste updates into it.

As usual, I have to bang out writing first, then format into script standard.

I'll let you know when I have more.

And yes, Murder-Suicide is a working title but I really like it.

Why follow your own blog?

2009-09-13T20:10:00.000-04:00

Because it's there, that's why.

An Entirely New Project at FiveSprockets

2009-09-13T18:29:00.001-04:00

Murder Suicide@Five Sprockets.

I came up with this idea while wandering around a fair with my wife this afternoon, and after we came home I sat down and forced myself to bang out the plot in three hours. Sure, there's a lot of finishing to go, but it's the best start I've managed in at least... three weeks.

Murder Suicide, a dark comedy for the current economic apocalypse.

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We the unwilling…

2009-09-13T16:59:00.001-04:00

We, the unwilling, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much, for so long, with so little, we are now qualified to do anything with nothing.

-Attributed to Mother Theresa among others

I cannot be the only one to have noticed the dreadful employment requirement creep in IT, most especially the MCSE/CCNA combo requirements.

For less than the price of either.

We all know that years and years ago, the professional job market became for lack of better words, either retarded or insane or both. I still remember help wanted ads in 1995 requiring right there in black and white, five years experience in Windows 95.

Uh, right. I’ll just grab a TARDIS. BRB. AFK 5YRS.

The first peeve is my usual and longstanding one, namely the Cult of the Collegiate. This is the complex of common assumption that if you can hack college and come out with a degree, that you must be something special. Actually, all it means is that you can subordinate every element of your being, your very self, and then turn around and pretend that you were just jerking off the professors when you paid lip service to their politics whether real politics or the inner politics of their field whether science or sociology.

Were you really? Were you really the subversive revolutionary you pretended to yourself all that time, when you told yourself you just had to swallow your pride for four years and then you’d be the trend setter?

Likely as not and probably more than that, you were just jerking yourself off. You have the alphabet soup started and where are you? Still chasing the standards set by people in charge and people in charge does not include you. Until you’re in your forties or fifties and a member of the senior executive staff, you’re just another sled dog and how are you liking the scenery back there in line anyhow?

By that time you are one of those people too hopelessly connected to the Matrix to ever be disconnected. Congratulations. You’ve achieved a new level of Same Shit Different Day, and you’re shoveling out shit designed by someone else, even when you are the CEO. How does that feel to be the Guy In Charge and you’re still doing the bidding of a retired predecessor sitting on a yacht down in Miami sipping margaritas? While you’re in his old job pulling sixty hour weeks and attending twenty pointless meetings a week on top of it no less.

If that’s your dream boat, feel free to chase it. You’re not hurting me one bit so have at it, but consider the way you’re reinforcing the false equivalence between college attendance and the ability to think on your feet. College rarely involves taking an exam at 0320 on a Sunday in a co-location while someone repeats the line about time being money as you attempt to rebuild a failed switch in record time when the firmware to flash it with has to be downloaded to your laptop via dial-up and NOC can’t remember where they put it before a server failure two weeks earlier at HQ on the other side of the country.

My solution was to drive home forty plus miles and have it emailed to me as soon as they found it which happened to be within minutes of me getting there. Since I had cable, it was a few seconds and a few minutes more for enough alternate firmware versions and config scripts to have ready to try to make sure my drive back was going to be a high probability of success.

I was also able to hit the head and to recharge my Thermos® while home as well. Yes, it was two hours but the download via dial-up would have been four hours and I would have had to either take a leak in the corner or brave the ILEC bathroom and at the time, there was a palpable aura of unfriendliness there from the locals towards their new owners at SBC.

Anyhow, the short story is that college is a lab exercise in a place where the most dangerous thing is the professor’s ego and your temptation to look at the hooters of that girl sitting one row down and three over. When you can take your exams in a strip bar surrounded by naked women with some dipstick two thousand miles away chattering at you with the mic on his headset so far away from his mouth it might as well be wherever you are, after two days without sleep, then tell me college is so important.

The other thing that is grinding my gears is the “Must have three to five years Active Directory Experience / Must have three to five years Cisco Switching and Routing Experience” clusterfuck.

Thirty-six workstations? Check.

No IP blocks owned, much less advertised? Check.

What the fuck do you need ROUTING skills for???

Switching skills? Go to Best Buy, buy some switches, hook them up, go to bed. Done deal. For fuck’s sake…

Active Directory? It’s ONE part of the entire Windows experience® and not even the most important one. If you’re that paranoid and neurotic over your company log-ins, and you don’t even have a VPN to let people work from home, and your Internet access is on the other side of a Linksys router with no inbound NAT mappings, my security concern would be, “do you have locks on your doors? Yes? Good. We’re done here.”

Anyone who can stomach enough Linux to set up a SAMBA server can grab a book and keep it near for moves/adds/changes and be done with it.

That would be me by the way.

“But we might expand next year and add another office in Torrington.”

We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it Mister Business Giant. In the meantime, all is working, the backups are done, and everyone can surf. The firewall and content filter are performing just fine. Email is streaming in. We’re fine. Content. What did you need the MCSE and CCNA skills for anyhow?

Oh yeah, to justify the $85,000 a year you aren’t paying me because I took $45,000 and a percentage of shares of the presently and for the foreseeable future worthless stock.

I get an MCSE or CCNA or both and you might be allowed to talk to me for $75,000 a year.

So stop over thinking extreme possibilities and get back to your actual business which last I checked is insurance sales, or merchandising, or whatever it was. Did you forget that the IT was just an infrastructure element and not the entirety of your business no matter what the …For Dummies books or Computerworld articles said?

Yeah, put the Computerworld down and step away from the desk. If I see you with that again, I’m telling your wife you read it for the ads and that’s why she hasn’t seen a dinner date from you in three years. Come to think of it, get the fuck out of here and have a night out with her. I have to rebuild the firewall and that’s an all-nighter. Good thing you picked me up for salary and not hourly, huh?

Blogger Tags: MCSE, CCNA, college cult, requirement insanity, adaptability, quick thinking

NO NO NO NO NO! WHY IS BOORMAN RETREADING EXCALIBUR AND NOT ZARDOZ?!

2009-09-12T19:37:00.001-04:00

There. I said it.

I want a remake of Zardoz, not Excalibur.

Why?

One, the name Excalibur only conjures references to an adult video distributor and a not very often bought model rocket kit from Estes which earned its low purchase numbers by being badly designed. I know, I had one and the forward swept wings blew right off the sucker. Elmer’s Glue is just not up to certain impulse loads.

Two, Zardoz is easily the more interesting of the two not for the least of which reasons is that Charlotte Rampling is still fairly hot to this day and could play a Renegade in the remake. Sean Connery could as well if such a coup could be scored but I don’t find him as hot as Charlotte. Sorry.

Three, I hated Excalibur for the Merlin character outfit. Nicol Williamson wearing the ultimate tinfoil hat.

Not that the tinfoil hat is bad in and of itself, but because it was already used years earlier on a Dungeons and Dragons miniature from Grenadier that anyone who ever collected miniatures in the late 70s will remember as soon as they see this picture. Let’s leave sleeping design theft where it is.

Four, Zardoz is a pre-existing riff on the Wizard of Oz and so pre-empts the then Sci-Fi Channel’s “Tin Man”, a movie with a supremely eclectic cast and Zooey Deschanel once again not getting naked and at this point if she doesn’t soon, the phrase “over-exposure” is going to start being muttered even by drunken teen males the way they are starting to do amongst themselves regarding Megan Fox. Yes, lack of exposed naughty bits is over-exposure for female faces, but such is the sex drive and sex sells, and you’ve been told that by more impressive people than me.

With my luck, it would be Jim Carrey as Zed.

He can’t say that, can he?

I did, so deal with it.

No, I don’t want Gerard Butler as Zed. I haven’t actually thought about it too much but the mustache and hair are not a hard requirement. Just no clowning. So Jim Carrey is right out.

Hmmm… Ben Affleck? Put a beard on and maybe beg him to do that thing we call acting and put on an aggressive but bewildered countenance… I can see that.

Okay, maybe you can’t but it’s a thought.

Why am I frightened that Singer is going to want to do a retread of Sam Neill’s Merlin characterization?

I need a drink.

(My initial info so far around the net indicates Boorman is involved. If so, I repeat my plaintive NOs twice.)

One thing about Windows Vista Speech Recognition…

2009-09-12T18:49:00.001-04:00

Don’t have Yahoo Launchcast running at the same time. The results can be very annoying.

Yeah, I know. Stupid me.

Unemployment Reconsidered

2009-09-12T17:46:00.001-04:00

I was going to write a daily journal of my unemployment experiences and feelings about the loss of my job, but I decided that's been done to death.

Besides, that's probably not very interesting considering that the majority of Americans are probably experiencing the same thing one way or another. Even those who are employed probably feel very much as if they were unemployed, thanks to the grim economic news.

I know that if I were unemployed I certainly would not want to be reminded of that by reading some blog about it. And as I am unemployed I certainly don't want to write about it.

So instead, I have decided to return to a project that I began before I was laid off which was what I hope to be a twisted story of a man who deals with unemployment in a very creative if violent way.

In fact, this character straddles two stories which were well back to back, or so I am thinking right now. The first story is about how he deals with the desire for revenge that all people laid off must feel to one degree or another, especially when laid off from a job where the management was shall we say less than kind and mistreated and took for granted this person for a long time. And of course he hamfistedly fouls it all up in a suitable violent manner.

The other story is about a man's search for a new job to support his wife and new child. After a long and fruitless search, he hits upon the idea to try blackmailing people out of their positions. If I tie the two stories together, then blackmail becomes a part of the previous story which helps to establish the killer's character. The killer also manages to foul this up as well with a good amount of murder and mayhem.

I've got most of the ideas pretty much solidified in my mind right now as to the basic course of events. It just remains to write them.

I'm also working on two ideas for television programs, one of which is a project that I’ve dreaded because I'm not keen to put a vampire story into an over-saturated market, even though the entire story is about a vampire who doesn't regard vampires as any different than humans. The working title is “Not A Vampire Story” for that very reason.

The other is my favorite project which is all about the ramifications for causality of psychic phenomena where telepathy and seeing the future and past are concerned.

I also have several other ideas that I am mulling over.

I know it has been said that writers are unemployed whenever they aren't actively being paid to write. Is a painter also unemployed in between sales of his paintings? I guess so. Maybe. However, if the total yearly income is sufficient to cover all the bills on time, and afford insurance, then I don't see a problem with calling it that.

By the way, this post was dictated by Windows Vista speech recognition. It takes a bit to get used to, but the recognition seems to be getting better as I use it. I certainly hope that Microsoft includes this feature in Windows seven.

The Killer’s Killer

2009-09-07T18:04:00.002-04:00

Logline: A secret society of brutal killers and their sadistic masters is being exposed by perhaps their greatest operator in his bid to either prove his supremacy or crown his successor as The Killer’s Killer.

Not bad I think, but I probably could work on it some more.

This is in a nutshell what the story is about. A society of killers for decades had through rivalry and one-upsmanship achieved a pecking order where mastery was earned. In the 1930s, that was replaced in a purge by one ambitious member with a system where the killers were reduced to little more than pawns and the masters bought their way to leadership with a blood sacrifice and money.

The killers are born by contract to surrogate mothers, taken after birth to be raised from then on in a system of conditioning through violence and torture to be broken of all humanity. They are turned into the ultimate sadomasochists, and made to enjoy suffering and the dishing out of pain. They are through this rendered fearless and beyond intimidation. The idea of possibly being caught or killed doesn’t frighten them. They kill on command and will do so in the most disgusting horrific ways not only without flinching, but with a sense of enjoyment and satisfaction. There are no boundaries to their victims. Any one, of any age, is game.

They have one rule: obey the masters without question. They will kill themselves in brutal agony gladly should their master order it. They serve under a standing order of never killing without order to do so, but when ordered to, rejoice in the slaughter.

Now their most prolific killer has begun hunting the other killers and their masters and terminating them. Since the masters have been known to kill each other in their rivalry, this is not unknown, but since none of them are taking credit for it, it is a matter of worry.

The problem killer, Maverick, has achieved a transcendental epiphany after one of his jobs where he begins to believe there is a higher order and higher message being sent through the masters’ training of the killers and their method of operating. When he accidentally comes across information about the truth of the masters’ change from competing killers to mere manipulators of others, he becomes convinced that he and his fellows are inferior and order must be restored by creating killers who are their own masters again.

To this end he begins drawing in an FBI agent working a small Midwest field office by sending her details of his killings and the inner workings of the society but after two years of no connections being found between the claims and actual crimes, he is believed to be a lunatic and a fake. Valerie on the other hand believes in him being what he seems and is determined to hunt him down.

As Maverick crosses the USA on his final tour of carnage, carrying out ordered slaughters along the way as well as creating his own targets and killing at his own whims, Valerie finally pieces together where he is going and what he is doing but for reasons known only to her, misleads her fellow FBI agents and sends them elsewhere while she herself goes to have a showdown with Maverick where she will learn horrible things about her family that Maverick hopes will make her into what he needs most. Justification by either providing his greatest challenge, or his successor.

So that’s just one of the idea I am working on. I will be working on this via fivesprockets.com as time and energy permits. See you there.

Things NOT to do when you're laid off...

2009-08-31T22:30:00.000-04:00

It came to mind that I might want to write up a small list of observations of things to NOT do when you are laid off, which might make your time a little easier. That you should file for unemployment, check out the welfare assistance agency and the like, those go without saying.

DO NOT look at former coworkers' instant messenger status on your instant messenger. You'll only wonder which of them are logged on at home after being similarly canned, and which are still sucking up and getting by. You don't want to keep engaging in that sort of torture.
DO NOT email former coworkers much less former managers looking for gossip on who else got canned or what is now happening or anything along those lines. In fact, DO NOT email former coworkers and/or managers AT ALL. The ONLY exception should be when you're asking for a reference.
DO NOT waste time holding on to old web links to your former employer's web sites, extranet sites, etc. and delete them all. You know they will have removed your access before you stepped off the property so there's no point in going up to them and thinking about how you used to log in to them every day.
DO NOT spend any amount of time talking to family or friends about the experience OTHER THAN as self-analysis in working through the many emotions you are no doubt feeling.
AVOID reminiscing about ANYTHING to do with that job.
DO NOT waste time thinking about how bad they wronged you and how much you wish you could go back and never get laid off or worse yet how much you wish you could get revenge.
DO NOT go into massive new deeper debt. The government has the police powers of the state to extort money under pressure from the populace. They call those taxes. Their income source never completely dries up and governments generally outlast corporations so whatever debt they incur is not a permanent issue for them. It is for you. Seven years is a long time on a credit rating. Enough for housing values to implode by the time you're a candidate for refinancing.
DO NOT go crazy cutting off all your services and expenses to nothing. Take your time, be methodical, and set schedules of when something can no longer be afforded starting with the least worthwhile going first and the most useful going last, but of course balanced between costs.
DO NOT get drunk. Trust me, once is twice is three times is alcoholism. It gets easier every time and it is $20 for two beers and two hard liquor drinks for my wife including tip. Every night makes over $8000 a year to turn our livers into something to show the kids at school as an example of why drinking in excess is bad for you.

I know that's a small and not very in-depth list of things to NOT do, but these are the ones at the top of my mind.

You're welcome.

"I'm thinking, I wanna, get up in Kira's ass."

2009-08-31T20:43:00.000-04:00

Robot Chicken, in case you've been under a rock, is among the most inventive and creative of shows out there for the late teen to, well, my age bracket and this video is an excellent example of why I believe it. Modern rap meets Jim Henson as T-Pain gives a rapping rundown of the essential plot points of The Dark Crystal. Watch the video. It is priceless.

Of course, this is not the first time they've done something like this. "Table Be Round" was a mash-up of "Baby Got Back" by Sir Mix-a-Lot and Malory's King Arthur done by the good Sir himself.

While many will think this is nothing for their kids, it's hardly the worst thing going and given all the other messages we send most especially the lack of art and music instruction in public schools today that were standard and prized when I was young, it's actually a pretty good show for teens and everyone else.

Elsewhere in this weekend's episode, a reference to Two Girls One Cup and really, after Time inadvertently drew inspiration from the infamous "goatse", what else is new?

Layoff, Day 1

2009-08-31T00:03:00.000-04:00

I was laid off on Thursday and count that as my first day of this layoff. I only put the blog in place today, or yesterday if you want to nitpick, and will have to sum up the previous days.

Day 1
I was asked to "aux out" as they call it when you work a call center and having just watched a coworker walk out with his desk packed up, I knew what the somber voice and serious look on my manager's face meant.

Led into a unused office, formerly that of a long departed vice president, I was asked to sit before the HR lady from way out west. I saw her coming out of the unit director's office that morning when I arrived and I knew nothing good could come of it. She's not trotted across the country for no reason and insurance sign up days are every year earlier in the summer.

She was the usual HR person, not extremely polite nor impolite, just mechanical and to the point with the declarations such as "separation effective immediately", "force reduction", and "last day". I felt like I was a child again, being told something I didn't want to hear about something that was not my fault and how I was going to be punished anyhow. That was my first feeling.

What had I done? My manager sitting next to me said it wasn't performance related and that I'd been doing a good job. Sure, right, pull the other one. If you don't think personal politics are involved, you're obscenely naive.

Once they fly the HR person out, the fat lady has already sung and is enjoying champagne with her inner circle of favored fans at the after party. There's no point in arguing or fighting it. Even so, I shuddered and nearly vibrated as the next part of hyperventilating began.

My wife has various medical issues and I cannot afford to lose insurance for her sake. The idea of losing my house entered my mind. Oh my G-d.

After a minute of stunned signing of various pieces of paperwork my trusty bravado and cynicism kicked in and I tossed off the pages as quickly as I could sign them, gave a verbal slap to the HR lady when she attempted to talk down to me, and then took everything in hand and went back to my desk where I began packing.

It took about a half hour and the director, who had formerly been my manager, had a smile on her face like people do when a hated enemy is getting put to pains. I noted it and invited her to lay into me but she played innocent very badly in an intelligence insulting way and I think she lacked the guts to have at me as no one who knew us could doubt she wanted to do deep down. She never understood me and I never appreciated her but then I am a proficient technical person and believe when your job title says "technical support" that giving good verbal head to ignorant and rude people is not at the top of your things to do. She believed otherwise.

I said my brief goodbyes and even did a funeral dirge "dum dum de dum da da dum dum dum dum dum.." as I walked out with my boxes in tow on a company cargo cart to the car of a family member who hot footed it over as I had only my bike with me. It turned out that there wasn't enough room in the car, so I stuffed it with my boxes of stuff and rode my bike home for that one last time from the job which had so given meaning to the Primerica joke about job meaning "just over broke".

In all the years I worked at this company, I watched what had been a really good CT based company go from struggling to survive an economic downturn specific to the telecom and Internet stocks, to struggling to survive its own struggling, to struggling to struggle. It was a constant swerving of one set of stupid ideas to another and dodging one set of enormous waves of customer service cancellations to another. I strongly recall our former customer service manager and how he used to throw up his hands with over four hundred cancellations per month and how we had no advertising or marketing or sales to speak of to counter-balance that. The imbecilic faith in the idiot concept word of mouth was strong with them and never really was countered despite insincere half-hearted tilts at sales pushes every year.

Any child knows that if you want more cars to find your lemonade stand, you put a sign at the nearest crossroad with a big freaking arrow in the direction of your yard. When that starts to work, you relocate to the crossroad itself while leaving your little sister running the original stand to catch the local traffic. Location, advertising, hard work, enough change to go to the arcade and play pinball all Saturday afternoon. This was completely lost on those in charge of this incorporated debacle and I said so to them many times.

It did not endear me to them, but I am too old and my family too important to suffer quietly as I sit at home imbibing and destroying my liver one night at a time.

Hitting the ground running, literally as my brakes don't work well and my driveway slopes down, I locked up the bike and went in to tell the wife about it and not to worry and about all the things that came to mind on the ride home. Then it was downstairs to my den and to hit the job sites in a strangely triumphant sense of victory and send my resume thinking, "I'm not done as long as I'm breathing."

I sent out six resumes to six job adverts that very night.

Why Wojciehowicz?

2009-08-30T23:29:00.000-04:00

I decided to use that name because my last name is Polish and everyone always has to have me spell it to them and they still don't get it. After that, I usually feel compelled to remind them of Barney Miller and how Max Gail in the character of Wojciehowicz would always tell people that it was spelled just how it sounded and then hold up his desk name plate.

More than once the thought has occurred that I should get paid for all the advertising but it's thirty years out of date and I don't think anyone has sought out the DVD collections based on my off-hand anecdotal eccentricity. Nevertheless, I strongly recommend buying them over at Amazon or anywhere else you can as an excellent example of television comedy writing.

I still won't get paid and you still won't be able to spell Wojciehowicz right the first time on a dare, but you'll get entertainment and some education.

Writing Is Where You Find It

2009-08-30T23:16:00.000-04:00

Bob laughs and as he tries to stop only succeeds at a long giggling while Jim looks on expectantly.

BOB

So she made this fudge and I swear to you this is true.

JAMES
(expectantly)
Yeah?

BOB
She made the fudge in the shape of little football players. And she's a real big Packers fan, so she made little icing football outfits on them just like the Packers.

JAMES
(confused)
So?

BOB
Packers made out of fudge. She couldn't understand why everyone was laughing all night long.

JAMES
Oh... Really?

If you need this one explained, then you're either too old or too young and if you don't think it is funny you've got thin skin.

I wrote this over drinks with my wife tonight at the local bar while I was watching various football and baseball games on the screens all over, which I have to say are a really nice part of the bar's retrofit.