50,179 words. All done. I did it.
YEAH!
I want to thank everyone who encouraged me along the way. I couldn’t possibly have succeeded without you. Thank you!
Month: November 2002
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I’m waiting through the middle just to see how it will end.
Actually, I know how my novel ends. I’ve already written it. My problem now is that when I finished the novel I was at about 40,000 words out of the required 50,000. So I wrote an interview piece, then a two-part lecture piece, and now I’m writing an almost entirely unrelated short story. I’ve always been stronger with the short subjects anyway. Remember, excerpts and (more frequent) updates are on my NaNo page.
A few months ago Justin Emerson, a.k.a. ErMaC of ErMaC Studios, pointed me to one of his music videos as being the one he’s proudest of. While I’m not sure it’s his best work, the musical selection is really very good. Since Justin never puts artist or anime credits on his videos I had to actually visit his website (yes, I’m a lazy ass) to find out that the song is “Satellite” by BT.
BT. That rings a bell. Oh yes, one of those CDs I got from Jaime at KNRK a couple of years ago. Do I still have it? Of course I do, I never throw out CDs. Does it have the song? Hell yes! Thank you, Jaime!
So now I don’t have to watch the AMV to hear the song. Sorry, Justin. Don’t worry, I still love your videos.
Speaking of videos, once December hits I’m going to apply the same “an hour per day” mentality from NaNo to my next anime music video. I’ll set the same goal: One month to completion. Do you think I can do it?
That makes one of us. *snicker*
How was Thanksgiving, you ask? Not too shabby. The turkey came out better than I’ve tasted in years, the mashed potatoes, gravy and corn on the cob were all excellent, and I managed not to go overboard on the Martinelli’s. No, really.
I didn’t get in any updates the last couple of days because I’ve been writing like crazy when I’m not sleeping, eating, or putting out small fires at work. (Okay, okay, so the umpteen hours I spent losing that Heroes IV scenario are in there somewhere as well. Oops.) I apologize for my lack of output, a little, though it’s never been my intention to write here Every Day Without Fail Or Else. I do love sharing my life with you fine folks, though. Don’t worry, I’m nowhere near hitting some kind of burnout phase.
Hopefully you and yours enjoyed the holiday as much as I did. May you be blessed with warmth and love all through the coming winter, my friends.
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We’re the clean-up crew for parties we were too young to attend
So here’s how it went down. The email server, that is.
I discovered a few weeks ago that one of the mirrored drives in the email server had died, probably quite some time ago. Nothing major, it was just one of the pair of drives that stored every email message for Entercom Portland. With the volume nearly at capacity, I figured that instead of replacing the one dead drive we could double the capacity while getting back that mirroring we’re so fond of.
The drives arrived last week. I didn’t want to try my luck with the remaining drive any longer than necessary, so yesterday became “replace hard drives in email server” day.
But it’s never just that easy, is it? First I had to find a place to put all of that data. Ah, the old 34-gigabyte partition on the main fileserver. Next, how to transfer it. Just drag and drop on the admin workstation, piece of cake! Wrong. Windows 2000 and Netware sometimes play poorly together. The first few megabytes of data transfered quickly, then it dropped to an absolute crawl. We’re talking a few dozen kilobytes every few seconds.
To hell with that. Plan B was to use Mihoshi, one of my handy-dandy Linux boxes. For all that she’s running a tired old copy of RedHat 6.2, she’s still got some life in her. Long story shorter, Mihoshi ran the file copy just fine.
Of course, it was still 17 gigabytes of data over the wire, so it took a few hours. About seven of them. I wrote, I moved a salesperson from one cubicle to another (don’t ask), I chatted with supercool people.
So it came up on 6pm and I could finally start swapping drives. It was over the next two hours that I learned something. I learned that Compaq is evil. Did you know that you cannot simply replace a hard drive in a Compaq server? Oh no, you can’t. You have to run the array configuration utility with the bad drive still in place so you can tell the array that you’re not going to use that drive anymore.
Idiots.
I finally got the new drives in, again, and the server was happy. Mihoshi leaped into action to put back all the files she’d taken off of the server just hours before. This of course took another few hours, though oddly not as many as on the outbound transfer.
The restoration transfer completed at 1:37am. I didn’t bother running ‘rsync’ to double-check the transfer, I just fired up the Groupwise server modules. Luckily for me it worked perfectly.
After that I just hung out and cranked out NaNo word-count until a bit before 5:00 when the first busses were heading out of downtown. By the way, it was colder than a penguin’s backside out there at 4:45am. Oh yeah.
And now I’m at home. I got a few hours of sleep in, but Hannah is due to arrive any minute now and there’s just no way I’m going to have any peace while she’s here. Cute kid, but loud. Did I mention that her favorite word is “mine”? Ah well, she’ll grow out of that. I hope.
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With thoughts so rich yet words so poor
I’m going to break the rules for a minute. I have to share this song with you. If you want to know how I feel about trying to be a writer, you should listen to this:
Toy Matinee – Blank Page (Ogg Vorbis format, 2.8 MB)
Don’t worry, the most recent versions of WinAmp will play the Ogg file just fine.
By the way, you can do a lot worse than to dig around in your favorite music store and find a copy of the Toy Matinee album. The regular version will do pretty well, but the recent “special edition” release includes the gem I’m linking here. This is absolutely one of the finest albums ever. No, really. And then you should try to find the late Kevin Gilbert’s solo album, “Thud.”
Ah. I finally found a good write-up on Kevin’s career and his death. I didn’t know he was going to audition for the lead-singer vacancy in Genesis! Not that Ray Wilson did a bad job, mind you, but Kevin fronting for and cowriting with Genesis? Holy flirking shnit. That would have been indescribably cool. Damn.
You have until December 1st to grab this song, the same length of time I have left to finish my 50,000 word novel.
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Those are thermometers, right Karel?
So at the end of a long, frustrating day at work (cubicle reassignments, short tempers, big-shot new salespersons, managerial short-sightedness) how fun is this:
I round the corner, computer chassis in hand, and look at the new decorations on the window of the Traffic department’s office. Big sheets of white paper with drawings and numbers all in red. Ah, they’re goal thermometers for three of the sales teams. You’ve seen them before, nothing special about them… Wait a minute. They’re kind of… wide. And the mercury bulbs are shaped… oddly.
And as these thoughts cross my brain, the KKSN/KRSK Sales Manager calls out, “Those are thermometers, right Karel?”
“Um… no they aren’t, Steve!”
That’s right, folks. The goal charts for Kisn, Rosey and Sunny are big red penises.
The poor unfortunate lady in the Traffic department who sits in that corner of the office has already stuck things to her side of the window to obscure the, ah, view. Later on the much-put-upon Traffic folks and I had a good laugh about how this proves that the Sales department is just a bunch of dicks.
There are worse ways to end a long week of work than to share a laugh with your coworkers, especially if other coworkers provided the joke.
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Utterly reprehensible. Therefore, funny.
This one came to me via an AIM chat with a fellow Entercom slav– er, employee. Be warned, it’s mean and violent though not truly graphic. The ideas are disturbing… and funny.
Oh yeah, and don’t try this at home, as it were.
a dyseducational road movie