Jun 17, 2009
3:35 pm »
Marching sideways
It’s been almost a month since I’ve updated my LiveJournal. I see I wrote then, “I feel like I should be taking an entirely computer-free day, but that’s hard for me to manage.” Both parts of that statement are even more true right now, but especially the first one.
It’s a kind of perverse state to be in: I’ve been working with computers almost daily since I was in elementary school, and while I’d decided I wanted to be a writer by the time I graduated high school the truth is that I’ve always made a living working with computers. I’d decided earlier this year that if I ever went back to school (God help me) it would be to backfill the foundation in computer science that I never actually had. The contract I’m on now that’s not quite keeping my head above water1 is for web development. The jobs I’m trying to get? Web development again. Hell, the main move I’d like to make is from doing PHP-based development to Python-based development…which is something I’m hoping Claw & Quill will help with, since right now I’m facing a chicken-and-egg problem (nobody will give me a job using Python/Django because I haven’t had a job using Python/Django).
And right now I am really sick of staring at computer code.
I’m dragging on the contract work because I’m having so much trouble focusing.2 I have contacts from recruiters that I’m procrasting returning. Granted, in part it’s because the contract work is, as it turns out, likely to run another month, and my assumption that I’d be able to start another job while finishing up the contract work is likely to prove false. But honestly, it’s in part because I just don’t want to deal with code.
I have a friend who’s been a freelancer for years now, doing desktop publishing work rather than coding. I’ve occasionally thought about following in his footsteps for web development/design—and in a way I’m experiencing it now. I can take two (or three or four) hour lunches. I can work at my desk or in the living room or on the balcony or at the Chili’s in San Bruno or pretty much anywhere I can set up the laptop and get email. (When I started writing this I was, in fact, at said Chili’s.)
But really, I’m always on the clock. If I decide I’m just not up to working right this moment, nobody’s going to fire me—but the work still needs to get done. I may be working on a weekend or past midnight. Stuff I need for my job may come on somebody else’s schedule, and it’s somebody who’s paying me, so I can’t just lean across the cubicle wall and say, “Hey, get off your butt.”
People will tell you that the plus of this lifestyle is that you’re doing what you love, and have freedom that you can’t match with an office job. We like to think that working on our own terms is worth nearly any reduction in salary. Well, we’d better think that. I have another friend who’s a tech consultant in Florida. Between him and the friend out here? Most years both of them could be making more money at Starbucks.3
Okay, two isn’t a huge sample size, and I know of freelance designers/developers who’ve raked in the money. But the guys who talk about making more money than they ever did at their office jobs are really good. This isn’t to say the guys I know aren’t good or that I’m not good, but we are not “being actively sought to teach at conferences” good. Being on the 10% side of the Sturgeon Line gets you enough not to be starving and homeless, but you need to be in the top half of that top 10% to keep up with the guys who stayed in the cubicles—and in the top half of that half to be doing it every year. It’s not a pleasant truth, but it’s a truth.
And the really perverse thing is? Right now I’m still in love with the idea of working on my own terms.
1. Technically, the job will have a bigger payout at its end, but the whole thing is flat rate plus potential royalties, and the checks I’m getting now are advances against the flat rate.
2. To be fair to myself, I’ve actually been averaging 40 lines of code a day the past few, which isn’t completely slouching.
3. No, I’m not kidding. According to Fortune, a “Coordinator II” at a Starbucks—an hourly, not salaried, position—averages $35K annually.
May 28, 2009
3:22 pm »
Train ride musings
I’m currently riding on Caltrain into San Francisco. I was lucky enough to catch one of the newer split-level cars, quiet and with little work tables for laptops—complete with power outlets.
It’s been a hectic last few weeks; I haven’t even been updating Twitter that often, let alone this journal. I’m expecting to catch a breather on the contract I’ve been working on the next few days, solely because my client’s out of town. He’s demoing the web site as it exists so far and I’m expecting a high potential for panic calls, but we’ll see.
I feel like I should be taking an entirely computer-free day, but that’s hard for me to manage. On the trip to Costa Rica I realized just how accustomed I’d become to continuous connection: I was constantly thinking I should look that up on Google or Wikipedia or I should look at Google Maps to see where I am or even just it’d be nice to share this picture or quick thought right now. I started being conditioned for this back when I first got a Sidekick in 2002, and the iPhone has taken it to a whole new level, one where it’s just about second nature.
I’m dubious about the more starry-eyed and histrionic interpretations of Ray Kurzweil’s “Singularity,” but there’s truth at its core: as as keeping ourselves always on the network becomes easier, as networked computers find their way into more and more things—as it becomes second nature to many people, not just some—society’s going to change in ways that, as we go through them, are going to seem incremental and subtle but in aggregate will likely be very radical indeed. We’re already seeing a lot of that if we know where to look. I have friends who think of themselves as “old-fashioned” because they prefer to do most communication by email, and avoid chat networks. But of course, two decades ago there were very few people who had access to email, let alone the first chat networks.
These thoughts have been feeding into a new story I’m trying to write, but they’re not the focus of the story—they’re aspects of the setting. Just what the story is remains to be seen, although it’s starting to get clearer as I puzzle through things.
I also have my own web site to be trying to work on, but that may wait for another day or so, too. I may not be able to take a computer-free day, but maybe a web-development-free day is doable.
(Finished and posted at the Panera in San Francisco across from the Caltrain station.)
May 12, 2009
5:10 pm »
Costa Rica Photographs
...and the first time I've bothered to use Flickr. Hopefully this all will actually work!http://www.flickr.com/photos/21977017@N
May 11, 2009
8:34 am »
Back from Costa Rica
I’m back from ten days in Costa Rica and a couple more in Florida recovering (long enough to at least take mom out to a day-before-Mother’s-Day dinner).
Was it a good trip? Of course—although it wasn’t entirely what I expected. See, I knew this was a group tour thing, and I knew that it was organized by a friend that my mom had met through the Florida Native Plant Society who was also a member of Audobon. So it would have a lot of Audobon people, but it wasn’t an Audobon trip. What I didn’t really fully understand was that this was a birding trip. What these people wanted to do was traipse around through the rainforest trying to snap photographs of elusive birds through telephoto lenses bigger than my first car.
So there was a lot of rainforest traipsing. This was a lot of fun, and not a lot of hard exercise—a bird-walk is not at all the same as a hike. The downside for me was that I’d shown up with a Canon G9 compact camera rather than an SLR, perfectly suited for taking touristy pictures in and around towns but not so good for zooming in bird-sized objects a football field length away. We didn’t get to see much of the towns except when the bus was driving through them unless we broke away from the group, and that only when we were in areas of Costa Rica that, well, actually had towns nearby.
And one other minor downside for me: a preplanned tour that includes all meals pretty much just includes all meals at the hotels. This is great if you don’t want to think about food, but anyone who knows me knows that I want to think about food. I’d have been wandering into little dives trying to find good meals and impressing locals with the three words I know in Spanish (“cerveza,” “tequila,” and “baños”).
The first night of the trip was spent in San José, Costa Rica’s biggest city and only real metropolis. From there we went to Villa Lapas, a hotel near the Carara wildlife refuge, close (but not on) the Pacific Coast, that’s apparently famous for its (surprise) birdwatching. Two nights there, then onto Monteverde and the “cloudforests” there (i.e., high altitude rainforests) for three days, then finally another three days at the Selva Verde Lodge in the Sarapiqui Rainforest in northeast Costa Rica.
So. Did I take pictures? Funny story (ahem): technically, I took just over six hundred of them. When I started trying to organize and edit them, though, my laptop fritzed out its GPU. This is apparently a Known Issue™ with the NVidia 8600M that the MacBook Pro I have uses; Aperture, my photo editing/cataloging software, is very GPU-intensive, and mom doesn’t use air conditioning until absolutely forced. My suspicion is that being pushed up to sustained hard use in a pretty warm environment tipped it over. It’s working now, but I’m a little paranoid about restarting Aperture. When I do manage to get a selection of pictures up somewhere, though, I’ll put up a link.
And, naturally, we did break away from the group and explore Monteverde a little. We found a chocolate shop and café run by American expatriates, several little art shops, and—yes—a gourmet restaurant we had dinner at, a marvelous tiny place called Chimera that has a tiny kitchen with two women in it turning out dishes that look like they’re being plated for Food Network specials. My mom became slightly obsessed with the chicken tortilla soup they made (their version has chipotle, bacon and roasted tomato in it); I think I liked the heart of palm and spiced cashew salad at least as much, and was pleasantly shocked by the “firecracker apple cake,” a rich cake served with a side of chile-infused caramel and locally made vanilla ice cream.
Out of all the places we stayed, Monteverde had the nicest town, but Selva Verde was the nicest hotel. No, call it a lodge: the rooms were in bungalows, most of them off the forest floor and connected by wooden walkways. You weren’t near the rainforest, you were in it there. It was hot and humid but was surprisingly mosquito-free (although we did discover a bullet ant in the room, which was a bit adventurous). Even though we were essentially trapped there for food, the food was good and the bar was well-stocked (the other places mostly just had a cursory selection of bottom-shelf liquor, treating you like the captive audience they assumed you to be). I learned a new drink there (a “Tropical Tico,” with cachaça and mango), had my first real Pisco Sour, and taught the bartenders how to make an El Floridita.
Now, it’s time to get back to work, and have some more coffee. Yes, I did pick up a bit from a coffee roaster in Monteverde, too. I wasn’t sure what to expect—was it stale stuff packed for tourists who can’t tell the difference?—but it turns out to be fine quality.
Apr 22, 2009
7:20 pm »
Oh yes. Did I mention I'm leaving on a trip?
It’s occurred to me that I haven’t written about this at all yet, in large part because I’ve had most of my brain cycles devoted to client work recently. Part of the scramble is that I’m leaving on vacation on Friday, to Costa Rica. I’ll be gone for about two weeks.
This is a rather programmed “tour group” thing that I’ll be going on with my mother, so I don’t really know that I’ll have time to see anything other than what’s scheduled. I’m still debating whether to bring my DSLR or just the pocket camera. (The DSLR, a Nikon D70, obviously has better optics and would let me get some better shots, but the pocket camera is a Canon G9 and is no photographic slouch—and would be a lot less headache going through airports and less of a theft risk at hotels.)
At the moment, I’m doing laundry and looking back at the checklist of oh-yeah-I-should-do-that-a-week-ago things for the trip that I made, uh, a week ago. (“Get camera memory cards,” although the type changes depending on which camera I bring; get photocopy of passport; etc.)
I’d like to say that I’ve been making great progress on Claw & Quill without telling you all, but—as I said, most of the brain cycles have been elsewhere. I have been working on it to the degree I can—mostly exploring Pinax, which looks marvelous in some respects but is woefully underdocumented—but I doubt I’ll get a chance to make much progress in May unless I get myself sufficiently ahead in the client work (which is supposed to be online by June).
Apr 20, 2009
5:11 pm »
What Oracle's purchase of Sun likely means for MySQL
Nothin’ much.
Small companies and open source projects weren’t going to buy Oracle anyway. Killing it doesn’t get you any extra business from them.
Companies that really want Oracle really want Oracle. The number of places that could afford Oracle but chose MySQL instead are frankly pretty minimal.
MySQL is a big player—far and away the biggest—in the web database market. Oracle rarely shows up there except at companies already using Oracle. Again: not much overlap.
MySQL’s biggest “competition” in the open source space is PostgreSQL. PostgreSQL, though, does treat Oracle and other “enterprise databases” as competition, and has a lot of “enterprise-level solutions” that have far more direct analogues to The Oracle Way. In other words, MySQL isn’t directly going after Oracle’s customer base—but PostgreSQL is. Even if Oracle doesn’t particularly care about MySQL, pushing users to PostgreSQL is not in their best interest.
Last but not least, if you use MySQL, there’s a pretty good chance you use the InnoDB storage engine because it’s the one that sucks the least. Oracle has owned InnoDB since October 2005. Back when they bought it, people said, “Oh, they’re just gonna kill it because they hate MySQL.” I don’t think that’s become any more true in the last three and a half years, though.
This isn’t to say that this isn’t something to keep an eye on—MySQL could find itself in a zombie state like the old FoxPro database after its acquisition by Microsoft, where updates and even major releases kept coming for years but there was always a vague sense of it being treated like a bastard stepchild. But that doesn’t seem likely to me; MySQL is far more visible and is a market leader within certain segments. Oracle stands to gain far more by continuing the model that MySQL AB already had developed and that Sun continued: an open source “community” build and a commercial build.
Apr 12, 2009
11:50 pm »
Failfail
Dear internet::%s/\S\{-1,}fail\>//gThank you.
Sincerely,
WM
3:39 pm »
Easter Sunday driving
For no real reason, I've found myself driving farther east than I have in a year or two. I've come to a place just east of Livermore called "Mountain House."
This is like a town, but not. In reality it's a planned community, basically a huge subdivision--in this case, one more or less in the middle of nowhere. It was built during the housing boom over the last decade as "commuting range" to the San Francisco are got farther and farther out, and people looking for bigger yet vaguely affordable homes were willing to put up with 90+ minute commuted each way. The home prices were still ridiculous by rational standards, but cheaper than San Jose for newer, nicer places. Just even more nowhere than the South Bay. (Places that were, well, somewhere cost a lot more.)
Then, of course, there was a double whammy of high gas prices zeroing out the savings in home prices, followed by the housing collapse. Now prices around here are, I gather, relatively affordable--but the expected suburbia never happened. If you live out here you'll have the drawbacks of living in a rural isolated place, and those of living in a character-free giant tract development.
Places like this hold a peculiar fascination for me, although I couldn't tell you why. Emblems of 21st Century American hubris? Nothing that cynical, really; the families here all had expectations of great things. And maybe they have very nice homes and are generally happy with what they have here. Maybe most of them work in Tracy or Livermore or Stockton. Driving around I don't see the plethora of "for sale" signs I half-expected, either.
I've been spending the last few days trying to get shelving units set up, to finally unpack like I actually live where I do. I've joked this makes me feel less secure; God knows my work situation is now awfully unstable. Maybe I like these odd house farms because of the combination of stability and absurdity in them. I don't think I would ever want to live in one--which somehow makes me suspect I will, someday.
Now on to... somewhere.
Apr 2, 2009
7:54 pm »
Hmm.
I shall hope that my last update on Claw & Quill wasn't too baffling/boring to get any comments. :)As a reminder, those are filtered -- I just added two folks I think should have been on the filter to it (my bad). So far there's only been two posts to the group.
Mar 23, 2009
6:50 pm »
A slightly disgruntled BSG followup
I’ve gotten a few comments, on the journal and off, that are along the lines of, “Oh, that sucky ending for ‘Battlestar Galactica’ makes me feel glad I never watched it. It must have really sucked. The Sci-Fi Channel sucks. Suck suck suckity suck.” You know, in direct response to me writing that despite its problems I think it was the best science fiction show that’s been on television.
Setting aside the question of what problems the show had in its second half and to what PSI the finale did or did not blow, to me this is kind of like saying that because so many people threw tomatoes at the series finale of “The Sopranos” it must not be worth watching, or that “M∗A∗S∗H” devolving into self-indulgent moralistic drek for its last few seasons negates the mostly brilliant writing of its first few seasons.
Anyone who actually cares about science fiction on television should watch at least the first season of “Battlestar,” because not having done so is like claiming you care about science fiction in the cinema but having no interest in seeing Blade Runner and Alien. You might see them and think they’re overrated and flawed, but just not bothering to see them is, for that field, like being a literature student who’s never read Hemingway and Faulkner. Sure, you can hate Ernie and Bill after you’ve read them—but you’d better damn well read them.
Did I just compare the first season of BSG to Blade Runner? Yes. And I’d do it again. Bite me. Maybe you’ll think the show lost its way (a very defensible position), and maybe you really won’t like it much from the start. (Although if you really come away thinking that none of the writing and none of the acting and none of the story was worth engaging with, you’ll probably have to remind me just what it is we have in common.)
If you haven’t watched it, though, don’t tell me that the presence of religion or providence or Bob Dylan demonstrates that you don’t really “need” to see it in order to know how terrible it was. Because you know what? If I ever got a TV show on the air and it only “failed” as badly BSG did, I would be unimaginably ecstatic.
Now back to your regular programming, whatever the hell it is you kids are watching these days.