Nov 9, 2011
5:38 pm »
Furry Story Sites, 2011 Edition
Way back in May 2006, I wrote a little piece called “The State of the Furry Zine.” I’m informally revisiting it now.
( Warning: ~4800 words. )Sep 6, 2011
12:19 pm »
Huh.
So my last entry was June 11th and it begins, "I've been lax in updating this. Maybe I'll try to make this a weekly thing, but no promises."Boy, good thing about the "no promise" part there, huh? Wow.
I'm trying to figure out when LiveJournal became--well--mostly irrelevant in my writing. In 2011 I've made only four posts, counting this one. In all of 2010, I made only 13; in 2009, 35; in 2008, 51; in 2007, 66; in 2006, 83. (Those numbers count "locked" updates, so not all of them will necessarily show up if you're bored enough to browse the archives.) In previous years I'm pretty sure I broke 100. I never used Facebook, but I think I started using Twitter as my main platform for small life updates around 2009, and in 2010 revived my "linkblog," Coyote Tracks, as a technology blog where most of my writing attention is going. While it's tiny potatoes by Big Name Blog standards, it has over 1,000 followers on Tumblr and 650 or so RSS subscribers.
I suspect at this point I should face the truth that I'm not likely to use this venue very much anymore. I don't even check my LJ "friends page" daily anymore, and I've never successfully integrated Dreamwidth, LJ's erstwhile replacement, into my browsing habits. While I appreciate the philosophy of DW's founders, in practice... well, in practice DW is where you start a blog as a quasi-political statement about how much you hated Six Apart or now hate SUP, and then cross-post to LiveJournal because you know the majority of your friends are still there. (I have exactly one friend who used to post on LJ, moved to DW and stopped cross-posting.) At this point I simply don't see DW achieving any kind of critical mass. I think that may be just fine for them; they've pretty much gone out of their way to target themselves to the
If not Dreamwidth, what does replace LJ? Personally, of course, I like Tumblr; I've seen it derided as "the dumber, naked LiveJournal," but I think that seriously underestimates how stupid a lot of LJs have historically been. Choosing a hosted blogging service by the apparent median IQ of the blogs hosted on them is going to leave you with Field Notes. Tumblr has the equivalent of a friends page, and you can choose to allow comments.
But the answer, more than likely, is "nothing." It's possible that the notion of a public journal that LiveJournal implicitly promotes is a notion that people are moving away from. Most people really don't want to share all of their life: they want to share general bits with everyone and specific bits with specific people. Some people want to just write rants; some people want to write daily or weekly columns, or to just share interesting things they've found around the net (or photos of things they've found in real life). Even though LJ was in many ways first with all that functionality, it's not really best at any of that functionality anymore. The people who can't handle having more than one site to do everything are mostly stuck in Facebook; for the rest of us, diffusing our attention across a few different places on the net turns out to be fairly easy.
Jun 11, 2011
10:24 am »
As usual, I’ve been very lax in updating this. I may make an effort to start making this a weekly thing again, finally, but no promises. Here’s an overview of what’s been going on recently, at the least…
Most immediately, about two and a half weeks ago I woke up with a stiff neck. No big deal, right? Well, as the days went on, it didn’t go away, and it seemed more like a pinched nerve. Or a shoulder… thing. Then a shoulder thing that involved limited movement and excruciating pain. On Memorial Day I went to a nearby hospital for an evaluation—the walk-in clinic nearby was closed for the holiday (!)—and got the helpful diagnosis of “muscle spasms,” caused by a pulled trapezius. Okay, maybe so. But the pain didn’t really go away completely and the range of motion didn’t really come back, either. A week ago I went to a chiropractor, after doing a little bit of due diligence to find one with a fairly good reputation who focuses on what massage and skeletal manipulation could conceivably help with (i.e., back and shoulder pain) rather than sounding unduly homeopathic.
Is he helping? I’m not sure. He’s not hurting, but from all appearances I have a “frozen shoulder,” which could take months to heal.
Welcome to middle age.
Anyway, on other fronts… my contract with the startup that I went to work for in February ended at the end of April, and I still have not been paid. I knew this possibility going in—that’s what “deferred compensation” means, after all—so I’m not upset. (Which is not to say that I don’t want the money.) However, I’m firing up the engines for looking for work again, getting my resume back in order and starting a long-delayed revamp of my personal web site. I’m not really sure what I’m looking for at this point; I don’t know how much of a picky bastard I can afford to be, either. But part of me wants to be doing consulting work more than doing full-time work. I could definitely be comfortable on a lower annual income than what I made last year—again, which is not to say that I wouldn’t like to make that much or more on a regular basis, but I really do like the freedom to set my own hours and working conditions. I want to work my own way, to other people’s deadlines. (Deadlines are, I have learned, pretty necessary to me.)
A couple months ago I started trying to force myself to write at least a half-hour every day. It doesn’t matter what the writing is, but notes and research for writing doesn’t count. This has actually helped—I’ve written several vignettes and stories and gotten more regular at updating my other blog. The shoulder injury has broken my concentration on non-blog writing but I’m trying to get back on that horse, too, so to speak.
Claw & Quill is still only moving forward in fits and starts. I admit my motivation to work on it has been relatively low the last few months; I’d like to find something to relight that fire, but at this point I’m not sure there’s anyone out there actually clamoring for it. What the fandom has for showing off stories is probably in the “good enough” category, and I’ve been at a loss to define just what it is that’s going to make people want to migrate to C&Q if it were actually finished. (If you think this is a blatant call for encouragement and reassurance, you are by and large right.)
There’s a few of you who I really only keep track of through LiveJournal these days (or Dreamwidth, which I still haven’t really made the mental shift to, even though I suspect there are many of you I should actually be reading there instead of on LJ). Many of you have become almost as bad about updating as I have. Some of you have moved to Twitter—as I’ve mentioned, it’s great for small stuff—and some of you, well, I’m not sure about at all at this point, as you don’t write much here, don’t tweet much and don’t seem to ever be available on IM, which about exhausts my ability to spy on you. I hope you’re all doing well!
Dec 14, 2010
9:18 am »
I tell myself I will look back at this and laugh
As some of you heard, I was laid off from my job yesterday.
Technically, I was “given notice” yesterday: I’m considered to be an employee through the end of the month and on the payroll through January 28th; while I’ve heard of better severance packages, for somebody who’s only been a company employee (as opposed to a full time contractor) for 9 months, this isn’t too bad.
On one hand, I’m not surprised. Back in October of last year, I was brought on to support a product which is going away in January—and specifically to do web development for the promotional, ordering and management web sites connected with that product. The technology from it will live on, but the web sites won’t. The last few months I’ve been working on UI implementation (not design) for a product which, I’m given to understand, my now former group won’t be responsible for permanently—I’ve been saying to people for a few months that I really couldn’t tell what I was going to be doing come January. Sometimes you feel like Chicken Little when you’re reading the writing on the wall everyone else seems to be missing, but unfortunately my track record in predicting imminent doom is fairly good. (On this job this makes me right about three things that other people apparently weren’t.)
On the other hand, I am surprised by the timing: not because it’s the holidays (companies do not tend to be sentimental), but because yesterday was literally the first day in the new office. They had spent the money to move me—and three other people in the group who were also laid off—down to this building, made us name plates and such. Whoever made the decision on which of us would go very likely wasn’t in Silicon Valley at all. My manager wasn’t informed until about 45 minutes before I was, apparently. (And yes, I believe he was pretty shocked: he’s not a good enough actor to have just been pretending to look like somebody had run over his puppy.)
The Dilbert-ness of the whole affair is the most painful aspect, in some ways. I have worked at the company’s brand new showcase Silicon Valley office—a move which in part precipitated my move down to Santa Clara a little over a month ago—for a grand total of four hours.
(I may use my badge to get into the building while it still works just to drink their free coffee, in the new coffee mug they gave me as a moving gift. If we’re all going to play Dilbert, I have a few weeks to play Wally.)
So: what happens now?
I’m not going to get back into the active job hunt until February—not that I won’t be open to something falling into my lap in January if the stars are right, of course, but I want to spend some time on personal projects. Not that I expect any of them will be income-generating, but some are long-overdue for attention and I don’t have much excuse not to attend to them now.
Part of me would like to not get back into the job hunt, at least not directly. I enjoyed my time as a freelancer in 2009, with the not-so-minor flaw that I simply wasn’t getting paid enough to match my expenses. I’m not sure I know any friends who freelance consistently who aren’t also consistently worried about scraping enough money together for ramen. I’ve worked out what I need as a reasonable minimum, and it’s a lot less than I’ve been making the last year—which is good, since that means I have enough cushion to coast without help for at least a few months.
For now, though, I’m overdue on going on a really long drive to nowhere in particular.
Dec 9, 2010
7:00 pm »
Fall Weather
Since I’ve lived out here, people have said that the San Francisco Bay area has little seasonal variation. To someone who’s come from the northeast United States, perhaps this is true; to someone from Florida, it certainly isn’t. The seasons here seem to come late—fall never gets underway until November. This year it came abruptly. The summer had been unseasonably cool, leading to an unusually warm October followed by a cold snap. In a single day, trees around where I live jumped from green and a little yellow to red, orange and shedding, thick drifts of brown leaves blowing across roads and gathering soggily in gutters after the rain.
At least, this happened where I live now, in Santa Clara, back in the heart of Silicon Valley. In Foster City, just 30 miles north up the peninsula, I don’t remember this happening. This may be the fault of my memory more than of Foster City—as I write this passage, I’m on a train bound for San Francisco, the same train I used to take into work at times. Right now it’s in Menlo Park and there are—well, some fall colors, although certainly not as pronounced as I saw in Santa Clara.
When I got to the peninsula it seemed much nicer than the South Bay: more urbane, with walkable downtowns and fewer chain restaurants and more history. It would be closer to hills and closer to parks. There was one right down the street!
All true. But Foster City itself had no downtown at all, and only a few restaurants (chain or otherwise). It wasn’t easy to get into the hills except for residential neighborhoods. The nicer downtowns were some distance away. Nearly all of my friends live in the South Bay, and I found myself making new ones there that I could rarely visit.
And there are no first class coffee shops anywhere between Mountain View and San Francisco. Trust me.
Don’t get me wrong; Foster City is a pleasant place. Sure, it’s aggressively nondescript in a way that only the exurbs that sprung up in the last fifteen years top (and which were the clearest sign of the recession-to-be: when people are spending $300K to live in house farms 60 miles from the metro area they work in, something’s going to give). But it had a great location and made taking a job in San Francisco a lot more bearable than it would have been if I’d stayed in San Jose.
When I first moved to California a friend complained I kept saying everything was better in Florida. I don’t think that was a fair complaint, though. I was guilty of comparing things here to what I knew in Tampa, yes—but looking back is hardly the same as wanting to go back. There are things I miss (as anyone who’s moved from a place they grew up would have) and I love my friends in Florida, but it’s never been a place I’ve pined for.
I didn’t realize until this very move, looking back on my other moves, that this is hardly new for me. I rarely think the grass is greener on the other side—the grass is greener wherever I happen to be. The SF Peninsula was clearly better than the South Bay until a month ago. Now the South Bay is clearly better than the Peninsula and I was an idiot to think otherwise. So it goes.
Today, though, is the last day that my office is in San Francisco, and while I won’t miss the commute I’ve had for the last several weeks—I’m very much looking forward to the shortest commute I’ve had in five years!—I’ll miss being in The City. After spending a year riding in four or five days a week, it’s a different place for me: less intimidatingly labyrinthine, but no less magical. There are dozens of spots from little cafes to funky neighborhoods to world-class bars that you’re unlikely to visit, or even find, unless you live or work there.
There’s a curious mental barrier between SF and the South Bay. It’s only 45 miles away from where I’m living now, which is—yes, this is a comparison to Florida—is a shorter distance than that between my college in Sarasota and the neighborhoods in Tampa I visited frequently. But SF is much harder to get into and get around in until you’re familiar with public transit. I doubt I’d been into San Francisco more than a dozen times in the seven years before I started work up by Market and Embarcadero.
So this colors this move in a strangely unexpected way. I am going to miss working downtown despite the costs involved. (Between no longer paying for monthly transit and parking passes and not having the “Financial District tax” on lunches, I’ll probably be saving upwards of $200 a month.) Yet I have a curious feeling that the South Bay is more my home than the Peninsula ever was. This has made me think—not for the first time—on just what “home” means to me. Maybe I’ll have an answer before I retire.
Oct 17, 2010
5:02 pm »
Another autumn, another change
It’s a rainy day here in the Bay Area. A rainy autumn day wouldn’t be worth mentioning here in the Land of Fog in previous years, but it’s taken us until mid-October to actually have a fall day. The weather’s been unusual most of this year, with a brief burst of heat to both open and close the summer. The temperature in San Francisco itself broke 90 several days, which is nearly unheard of: a hot summer day in the City is one that breaks 70.
For me personally, autumn has frequently been a time of change. It was autumn in 2002 that I moved out to California. The last few years I’ve had a change every autumn: in 2007 I moved from the South Bay up to Foster City, in 2008 I was laid off and survived (barely) on freelance income, in 2009 I got the contract—now a permanent position—with Nokia. Now in 2010, I’m moving—along with Nokia—back to the South Bay.
The new apartment is in Santa Clara, equidistant between Nokia’s new office building and the building my flatmate’s new job will be in. It’s another “luxury” complex and, yes, it’s expensive—although it’ll be $400 less than the complex we’re in now and more, well, luxurious. This is a mild letdown in some respects, in that I’d decided a while ago that Miramar would be the last apartment I lived in: I wanted the relative freedom of at least home rental, if not ownership. (My slightly facetious measure is that I want a place where I could add a subwoofer to my stereo system without fear of reprisal.) We looked at a few condos and homes, and I’m sure if we kept hunting we’d be able to find one that would be Nearly Perfect and probably for somewhat less rent money to boot—but the location of this place is honestly pretty hard to beat. Even if one or the other of us ends up with a job elsewhere in a year, a distinct possibility in our industry even in good economic times, there’s a good chance that job will be in the South Bay; this complex is not only very convenient to freeways, it’s about 2 miles from the closest Caltrain station, which makes it about as “connected” with public transit as where I live now. And while its location looks fairly isolated—two friends of mine lived in the apartment complex across the street and I didn’t think there was anything nearby but a terrible Mexican restaurant—it’s actually within short walking distance of El Camino Real and a lot of restaurants and businesses.
And it’ll be close to good coffee shops. There are things I really like about the Peninsula compared to the South Bay, but coffee is not one of them.
So. I’m not looking forward to the process of moving over the next month—it’s going to suck no matter how I slice it—but I’m looking forward to actually living there. With the exception of Duncan’s household (near where I live now!) and Kitana and roommate in Alameda, nearly everyone I know is in the South Bay, spread out from Mountain View toward the eastern foothills of San Jose. At the very least I’ll be more available for those weird spur-of-the-moment things I see people occasionally tweet about. And, once both Nokia and I are moved, trading my homeward commute of 60-90 minutes for one of 10-15 should open up the evening nicely. (Whether I take advantage of it wisely remains to be seen.)
For now, though, I’m actually down around Gilroy and it’s 5 pm, and I have work to do at home that must be done this weekend. So back in the car.
Sep 22, 2010
7:25 pm »
Comment screening
Because of morons who have been registering LiveJournal accounts and inexplicably bombing my older entries with Russian spam, I have had to ratchet down the comment permissiveness -- now everyone who isn't a LiveJournal "friend" will be screened. I will change it back when I can, but I've had three rounds of this now in two days.I can't figure out the rationale, because they're not links and translations don't suggest that they're keywords. Is there some benefit to posting pointless crap in Russian on old LJ posts?
At any rate, I'm hoping that if the rationale -- assuming there is one -- involves actually being, y'know, web searchable, screening comments will do it. Otherwise I may have to make commenting friend-only.
Granted, I'm mostly writing on Coyote Tracks these days (and even that's been a bit neglected), but this still irks me on general principle.
Aug 28, 2010
11:19 am »
EF16 approaching
So, I’m heading off to Eurofurence next week with ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=88.8){kind=small}
jadedfox, leaving on Tuesday afternoon here and arriving Wednesday at Later Than I’d Like. (We get into Hanover at 6:30 pm.)
This is not a particularly well-planned trip; I ended up with two plane changes on the way out and a six-hour layover in Frankfurt, which irks me because I didn’t notice how long it was until after I’d bought the tickets. Otherwise, I would have just gotten train tickets to go between Frankfurt and Magdeburg, rather than waiting six hours for a brief flight to Magdeburg and then taking the train from there. The travel company tells me that if I just blow off that last segment and take the train anyway, they’ll cancel my return tickets. Lovely of them.
Also, despite talking to cheetah_spotty at Anthrocon about helping out with panels I forgot to actually, you know, write to panel coordinators to offer to help out, so the best I can do is show up at panels and be one of those annoying guys in the audience who talks too much. Yay!
Even so, I’m looking forward to the trip and seeing people I haven’t seen since, well, the last Eurofurence. I’m not sure which of my European friends and acquaintances are going to be there, honestly, but I’m sure some of you shall be.
I’ll be easy to spot, because I’m the guy who looks more or less like me.
…okay, I’ll also probably be wearing a badge or two. Look for “Chipotle.”
May 4, 2010
9:17 pm »
Oh look, a new car.
After eight and a half years and 192,000 miles—yes, that’s over 20K miles a year—I’d started looking about for a new car to replace my Acura RSX. As much as I liked it (and the engine still seemed to be in pretty good shape), it needed work: squeaky brakes were a must-fix and tires were due to be replaced within the year, and it had annoying and expensive non-critical problems: a blown air conditioner compressor and an ugly dent in the passenger side door. A median estimate for all that would be around $2500, notably more than the car’s actual value at this point.
I’d made a short list of cars to look at—the Ford Focus or Fusion, the Mazda 3, the Hyundai Genesis Coupe. Nothing by Honda, Toyota or Nissan particularly grabbed me this time, which surprised me. (Which isn’t to say that I’d turn down a 370Z, but it’s out of my price range.) The Hyundai appealed to me as something similar to the RSX but more powerful, with rear-wheel drive, and just an all-around great driving machine. And even less practical than the RSX. The Mazda 3 surprised me by being as interesting as it was—for what’s basically Mazda’s answer to the Accord, it’s aggressively styled, has some interesting standard electronics and even with an automatic transmission is as responsive as the stick-shift RSX. (And it’s a five-speed auto with a “manual shift” mode, to boot.)
The Ford salesman was pretty cool, managing the neat trick of seeming laid back and attentive simultaneously. He didn’t fail to close the sale—the car did. It may be that nearly nine years with a quasi-sports coupe has changed my perceptions, but the Fusion seemed to take the steering wheel and accelerator as suggestions rather than commands. It’s a distinctive ride style I imagine some people would like, to be sure, but those people are not me.
I hadn’t actually expected to buy a new car now, either way, but Mazda was offering a 0% APR deal expiring on Monday. Gnaw gnaw gnaw. So I took a deep breath, went back, signed all the papers, drove away from the dealer five minutes before they closed, and the car immediately died.
No, seriously. A mile away from the dealer the “check engine” light came on, which isn’t necessarily serious, but so did the “automatic transmission malfunction” light, which is drive to the shop now do not pass go do not collect $200 serious.
As you may guess, this caused a great deal of stress for me, and more than a little consternation at the dealership. Their service department wouldn’t re-open until Monday (yesterday). I got a loaner then—apparently a very ad hoc “don’t strand the customer” choice of cars, as they’d actually just closed when I rolled the ailing car back up—and then swapped it for a somewhat more official “drive this while we figure out what’s going on, please” loaner on Sunday.
To wrap the story up somewhat more quickly, yesterday I checked in with the service manager in the morning, who optimistically said, “It’s probably just a loose connector.” I wasn’t so sanguine, and had been preparing myself to politely but firmly suggest that perhaps they should look into getting me a different car. As it turned out, the return visit in late afternoon made that unnecessary. When I walked in, they greeted me with, “We’re getting you another car and it should be here in a couple hours.” They couldn’t determine what was wrong with the original car (“something’s wrong with the transmission”) and didn’t want the deal to be permeated with lemon scent. I’ll give them points for handling it proactively.
So, bottom line: new car. Payments for five years, but slightly less than the payments on the RSX were, and with no interest. A lot of the gadgetry that’s become standard in the last decade, too—the advancements are remarkable. I may be a nerd and post pictures later.
I’ll take it out for a long drive—well, maybe not for three weeks: this upcoming weekend is booked for Mother’s Day stuff, and the weekend after that I’m keeping open for potential visitors.
After that, though, I drive somewhere stupidly far away.
(Also: props to Menlo Mazda and Jessica, the saleswoman there who helped me out and handled what’s surely on the list of Things You Do Not Want To Go Wrong With Your Sale with grace. And, if you’re in the market for a Ford, Zach at Sunnyvale Ford gets cool points. Hopefully he won’t lose them when I say I’ve bought a Mazda elsewhere.)
Mar 21, 2010
6:53 pm »
Random updates
(Presented for your perusal in no particular order.)
- I transitioned from being a contract employee to a direct employee of the company I’ve been working for since October. In practice this doesn’t make a huge difference in terms of my role and responsibilities (or salary), but it’s nice that they’re hoping to keep me around for a while.
- I’m experimentally moving my journal back end from LiveJournal to Dreamwidth. So:
- If you’re reading my journal on LJ or at ranea.org, you shouldn’t have to do anything; if you also have a DW account and want to read me there, my username is (surprise)
![[personal profile]](http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
chipotle. - If you want to comment on my journal, you still shouldn’t have to do anything, at least for the indefinite future. I expect to check both sites.
- Eventually, if DW works out, I may first request and then eventually require comments to be only on DW. But I’m not sure. I’d rather things be a little more of a pain in the butt for me than for you.
- Why bother doing this at all? In very short form, I don’t really trust LiveJournal’s commitment to their “old” userbase (i.e., people like me).
- If you’re reading my journal on LJ or at ranea.org, you shouldn’t have to do anything; if you also have a DW account and want to read me there, my username is (surprise)
- While this journal is probably going to remain moderately quiet, just for the occasional life update, I have a tech blog now, although it’s also something of an experiment: Coyote Tracks.
- My goal is to update it with something at least once a day and with something substantial at least once a week. It may be a little something like Daring Fireball in content mix, focusing on web stuff, Apple stuff, and publishing stuff, musings about the future of computing which will undoubtedly look ridiculous in as little as a year’s time, occasional commentary on commentary, and—the secret ingredient—cocktail recipes.
- For a “brand new blog” it got a fair amount of attention from being linked to by Marco Arment (the creator of Tumblr and the amazing Instapaper). We’ll see if that lasts.
- The URL is http://chipotle.tumblr.com/, and it should have an RSS feed and other such niceties out of the box. LJ users may add it to their friends page as “chipotle_tumble”; Dreamwidth users may add “coyotetracks_feed”. (Please note that while DW and LJ will allow you to comment on feeds, there’s no guarantee that I will see such a comment.)