Project 14 - Sketch Fiction - Sector of Interest : Wrap Up

Well, I've managed to write all six of my planned sketch stories. I'm disappointed it took me so long to do what was supposed to be a few days worth of work basically, but it's done. Hopefully I'll revisit a project like this soon and maybe do it a little more like I was originally envisioning. In the mean time, however, I'm really happy to say that I've finished Project 14.

Sector of Interest

“Sector Control, this is Bulk Hauler TMS-M884MXHQ. I am exiting jump-space from gate 5417-a into your zone of control."

"Good morning, Hedge Queen, we have your on our boards. Good to see you again.”

"Thank you Control. My Nav-model has synced, can I get a course to the Loading Station Six?”

"Confirmed, HQ. Sector-Nav will transmit."

“Thanks, control. Anything interesting going on out here?”

“Nope, HQ, you’re not that interesting and neither was the hauler eight hours ago. I’m guessing the hauler in eight hours won’t be that interesting either. Mail courier might be interesting at least.”

“Oh that’s right, I almost forgot. The courier had some engine problems and the Station Master at Hai Shen gave us the mail packets to pass on to you guys here.”

“Huh, good to hear then HQ. Data or physical as well?”

“Both, Control. I can transmit the data once we’re in one-hop range and I’ll get Johny to run over in the tender and pass the physical packet over to you guys. Looks to be about 6 cubic meters.”

“Rodger, Hedge Queen. Sector-Nav will transmit a solution for the tender too. Stand by.”

“Thank you, Control. I’m glad we get to be interesting after all.”

“Don’t hold your breath, HQ. We have a pretty high standard of interesting out here.”

Project 3: 25 books in 52 weeks : Wrap up

The 25 books in 52 weeks project ended on September 3, 2012. I'm writing this wrap up a week later.

I started this project with the intention of kicking myself back into reading. For a bunch of reasons I'd stopped reading almost totally and really felt like I was missing it, but it was hard to start again. The original goal was basically to read a book every two weeks, which is not too ambitious a goal. I still found it to be harder than I'd have liked but managed at the end of the day to get through 12 books in 52 weeks (which I guess leaves me at 48% completion rate).

I re-discovered through this project how much I enjoy listening to audio books and actually listened to most of the books I finished rather than reading them off paper (or e-ink).

I feel much better about reading now, although I still need to balance my approach (since I tend to read a book all at once over a day or two, rather than a little bit at a time for a longer while. I also want to reduce the gaps between books (which I tend to cause by becoming obsessed with some other media thing) and be generally more even in my media consumption.

The Books I Read

• The Atrocity Archives - Charles Stross
• I love John Le Carré's George Smiley books especially the focus on the infrastructure built by the espionage organizations. The Laundry books do an amazing job of invoking that feeling and mixing it with some Lovecraftian world mangling and a healthy dose of Dilbert.
• The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross
• As with the George Smiley element in The Atrocity Archives, the James Bond elements in the Jennifer Morgue work very well as well. 
• The Fuller Memorandum - Charles Stross
• Unlike the other two Laundry books, I felt like the Fuller Memorandum was more "in it's own style" although that may be because I haven't read the books wikipedia mentions as influence. All of the Laundry books are a lot of fun to read and I'm very excited that the next major novel is coming out in the next few days.
• Mort - Terry Pratchett
• I'm working my way through the Terry Pratchett books in publication order and I have to say that I found Mort much harder going than the first three (Colour of Magic, The Light Fantastic and Equal Rights). With the first three it was fairly easy to slip into the world as odd as it was, but Mort feels like such a festival of anachronism that the world is hard to accept. 
• The Alloy of Law - Brandon Sanderson
• I loved all of the first Mistborn trilogy, but especially the first volume. I enjoyed the action and adventure and heistyness and especially how alive and active Vin felt. The other two were good as well but I found that they didn't move as quickly as the first (which I think is something of a standard problem for Brandon Sanderson). The Alloy of Law felt like a return to that first books energy and I finished reading it and wanted to pick up the next one immediately. (Which is sad because I think the wait might be a while).
• The Sword of Shannara - Terry Brooks
• I read this book at least partly due to having never finished the project I undertook in junior high school where I promised that I would read it. I found this, especially for the first two thirds to be an incredible drag with uninteresting characters. As I eventually began to accept it as a Tolkien based D&D campaign rather than "people run back and forth in a small park" (seriously the longest march they undertakes is about 4 days, how close are all the major cities). The end had enough charm and momentum and I don't regret reading it, but I'm glad to have relieved myself from that particular guilt of my youth and don't think I'll pick up any of the other books from the series without some serious motivation.
• I should also point out that I seriously expected Menion Leah to have no idea what a woman was when he first meets Shirl. The entire first three quarters of the novel is devoid of the mention of women, so it seems to me that Menion should have been totally baffled. Serious missed opportunity for an Ethan of Athos kind of world. 
• Great by Choice - Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen
• I liked the ideas put forth in Built to Last and Good to Great. I think that Great by Choice is better than either in that the findings of the book are much more applicable to the daily life of a graduate student. It's certainly worth a read and is an especially good jumping of point for trying to be more productive.
• Cryoburn - Lois McMaster Bujold
• Any adventure with Miles is fun. The more mature version of Miles we get today has a different feeling than his earlier, more energetic self, but a good Xanatos Gambit is always great.
• Sourcery - Terry Pratchett
• Of the Wizard books, I think this one had too many wizards in it. It also feels like it treads the path of the coward Rincewind a little too heavily. We already did that in the earlier books.
• Leviathan Wakes - James S. A. Corey
• Leviathan wakes, the first book of The Expanse is a good, fairly hard, sci-fi story. I haven't ready sci-fi like this for a while and generally I thought it was okay. It dragged a bit and was grittier than I really enjoy in the middle but I found the ending really engaging. I also found the swapping between characters a little frustrating, which is maybe inevitable with Corey actually being two authors. I also felt like the chapters were coming in the wrong order (that Miller's chapters and Holden's chapters should have been flipped).
• The Apocalypse Codex - Charles Stross
• As with the Fuller Memorandum, this book felt very much it's own genre (as opposed to the earlier Laundry books). It had a lot of features that reminded me of the earlier books in general, but was a really great read. It left me wanting Stross to write more of these and faster.
• Caliban's War - James S. A. Corey
• This is the direct sequel to Leviathan Wakes. Overall I found I enjoyed it more than the first, but was strongly put off by the child abduction in the opening scene of the book. I also felt that it didn't really drive the story as far forward as it might have, didn't provide more in depth examination of the situation or the characters and left off at almost the same point as the first book. As with the first the ending was definitely the strength and left me wanting to get onto the third book. 

Project 1 : A Blog - Wrap Up / Update

A year ago I started the "Blog as a Project" project (not to be confused with the "Blog as a Blog") and today is the day I'm supposed to wrap it up.

Let me say first that I'm planning to start a "second season" of the blog, but that I'm still not sure exactly what form it will take.

When I first started out to blog more I had a list of things I thought would be interesting to blog about. I even have a nicely organized file that lists them all. I'll include that below so you can see what I had been thinking about before I started.

Idea	Date Added	Date Published
Intro	06/08/10	01/08/11
Windows Shutdown	06/08/10	-
Thesis	06/08/10	-
We are all going to live in public	06/08/10	-
Thesis Wordle	06/08/10	-
Ad incentives (omgpop vs tetrisfriends)	06/08/10	-
Why everyone should be a polymath	12/08/10	-
Not all collections are created equal	12/08/10	-
Clean Desktop	13/08/10	-
Nerd Fighting / Proactive Nerds	14/08/10	-
My Pockets	14/08/10	-
Black book ToDo List	14/08/10	-
Enjoying Wear	14/08/10	-
Pomplamoose Videos expertise in sound crafting	15/08/10	-
Closet	28/08/10	-
Water Bottle Spigot	28/08/10	-
Garfield / Adding more to the given story	18/11/10	-
I don't really like Harry Potter	18/11/10	-
I don't really like Robots	17/12/10	-
Fan Chants at Hitmen	31/01/11	-
Peanut butter pizza tutorial (Video)	03/06/11	-
"Future" - (Corning Glass) (via Terry O'Riley)	03/06/11	-
Derek K. Miller	31/07/11	13/09/11

So what can we see? Mostly that I only managed to get two posts done from the original list, the Introduction (which I split into two parts, the intro to the "The Blog the Blog" and the intro to "The Blog the Project") and my memorial post to Derek K. Miller. The others haven't been done for a variety of reasons.

By far the biggest reason is that the me of 2010 just doesn't have the same concerns that me of today does. So, while I could write most of these posts still, I'm not sure I'd feel the same push I would have had I not been procrastinating back in 2010. A few of these I have no idea what I was supposed to talk about (Closet? - mine should be be cleaner but what was my point, Garfield? - I don't even know) and some I don't really have anything to say on the topic (Harry Potter, Robots and Hitmen Chants). A few actually require me to learn new skills (how hard should it be to mock up Windows Shutdown Screens? damn hard if you aren't trained in it, it turns out).

Some of them may still be interesting, but I don't know that they match as well with the things I'm thinking about now, nor the things I'd like to focus on. Over all, at the moment, I feel that this blog should support all the other projects that I'm working on (and yes I know I'm not doing much right now, that'll be followed up on in another post). That's why I've been writing (a bit) about video games since at the moment I would like to focus more on learning to be a good developer of video games.

July is really the first month in which I've gotten any traction at all blogging, and that mostly through my Favorite YouTube Videos series. While the YouTube series is not exactly an amazingly deep set of posts, they are fun to write (and hopefully fun to read) and they give me some practice in getting things written and sent out. Given that my career requires (for the next 3 years at least) that I get better at writing and and presenting my work, any practice I can get doing this seems like a good thing.

With a "year" of blogging in hand, I feel excited to keep going (and actually more excited having written this post). As I mentioned, I would like to focus more on blogging about things that support the other projects I'm doing. This means in the short term I'm going to keep posting thoughts about different video games as a primary topic, but I'll keep posting about anything that I think is interesting and slowly flooding everyone with the videos I've favorited on YouTube (incidentally that should take about a year to get caught up on).

As I've said before I think that there should be a pre-determined end date for any project. I'm calling this the second season of the blog and it will run from now until August 1, 2013.