Bricks Without Straw

February 20, 1959

2012-02-20T12:52:00.004-08:00

It was a somewhat cloudy, cold Friday. By mid-afternoon, temperatures in Toronto were hovering around -12 C. I remember the quality of light that afternoon, but not the temperature. I remember the confused worry on my mother's face when my father drove up in the family car - a green 1958 Mercury Meteor with foul-smelling vinyl upholstery that gave me headaches on hot summer days - hours before he was normally expected. I remember his downcast expression as he came up the front steps, a load of reference books under his arm.

For some reason, my memory flips the scene around, has the driveway on the wrong side of the house, has him walking in from the wrong side. But it's still clear in my mind, and I think this mirror-image memory of this particular scene is the result of the traumatic jarring of what took place on February 20, 1959.

I remember clearly the smell of that Meteor in the summer. But this was winter, and this was a particular day in winter that changed not only the lives of my father, my mother, my sister, my brother and myself, but the lives of close to 30,000 other families who were all connected, one way or the other, with A. V. Roe Canada Limited: Avro Aircraft.

Aviation historians and Avro Arrow enthusiasts will tell you about the flight characteristics of this completely made-in-Canada 1950s supersonic high-altitude interceptor. They will tell you about the post-war Cold War politics and Soviet threat that lead to the proposal, in 1953 for a Canadian solution, about the RCAF's requirements for such a machine, about the Liberal government's funding for the program, and about the world's changing geopolitics when the Soviet Union tested its H-bomb.

They'll tell you about the creation of NORAD, and how a combined Canada-US defense strategy made for a fiscally responsible one.

But from the perspective of a five year old, none of that mattered. I was home from school that afternoon because I was in the morning kindergarten session, so I was there when my father came home. My brother and sister were still in school. I can't quite describe the look on his face - a combination of relief and disgust. My mother's expression was one I've seen many times: worry, pure and simple.

I can't pretend, either, to know what was really going through my father's mind. The stresses at work leading up to Black Friday must have been enormous. He has said, in the years since, that he was just glad to be done with it. That must be at least partially true. But only partially. We were an aircraft family. We watched with awe and wonderment and pride as the culmination of the work of my father and the thousands like him flew in test flights overhead. I remember once my brother, an enthusiastic ten or eleven year old, running in to summon me outside as the Arrow flew in a slow loop on a test flight, the sun glinting off its sleek body. You could hear the dull roar of the engines. There, he said, pointing up. There's the Arrow.

There it was: Canada's crowning technological achievement. There it was: a personalized accomplishment. There it was: a concrete representation of how all of us, heart and soul, were involved in a creative endeavor that was at once a national emblem and validation that we, Canada, were important.

The cancellation of the Arrow program and subsequent hacking to pieces of all the aircraft was nothing less that a cultural trauma. The impact was as great as if we had discovered a murderer living on our street. We felt violated, abused, and marginalized. Our identities were in question. As a nation, we suffered an existential crisis.

And as a nation, we lost thousands of brilliant minds to the US defense program. Most of my father's close friends and workers moved to California. We moved to Georgia, where my father found work for Lockheed, working on the Titan II missile program.

We were second-class citizens, strangers in an alien land. We lost all confidence. We struggled to find hope where hopelessness seemed the daily condition of our lives. We were exposed suddenly to a Twilight Zone cultural shift. We saw first-hand issues of race that as middle-class suburbanites we had never seen before.

Entering into Grade 1 at St. Joseph's School, I felt as if I might as well have been speaking a foreign language. I connected in no way with any of the kids in that class, let alone the nuns teaching us. I remember none of their names. We Canadians, pledged allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, forced to learn the words and posture - hand on heart, standing at attention. We practiced nuclear bomb drills, ducking under desks and covering heads with interlocked fingers. I became severely ill, and missed two full months of class.

We were, all of us, outcasts.

My father detested work at Lockheed probably more than he had at Avro. Separated from his own brothers, sisters and mother, he experienced a terrible sense of fracture when his mother was hospitalized, and died, back in Canada.

We returned to the Toronto area in 1960. Everything had changed for all of us affected by February 20, 1959. As the youngest in the family, I was probably affected least. As the youngest, you have little power to change things around you, so you are forced to accept them simply because you have no other choice. But you also watch, sometimes in a detached observer kind of way, how things affect the people around you. We knew the upshot of Diefenbaker's decisions. We knew that we had been betrayed by our own government - something that in the 1950s seemed unthinkable.

In a sense, Canada was also the youngest - certainly a very young nation. The cultural trauma suffered by the nation informs its self-concept even today. Yet we have come to accept, almost dispassionately, the failures and self-inflicted wounds of the narrow-minded governments we choose to lead us.

For more information on the Arrow, check out the following:
http://www.vancouversun.com/health/This+history+February+1959/6180553/story.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_arrow
http://archives.cbc.ca/science_technology/aeronautics/topics/275/

"Arrows to the Moon" discusses the contributions of Canada's engineers to the US space program.
"Requiem for a Giant" details the story of Avro's demise, and dispels the myth that the Arrow program was too expensive for Canada.
"Avro Arrow: The story of the Avro Arrow from its evolution to its extinction" is an excellent history of the aircraft.

Have Yourself a Horrific Little Christmas

2011-11-16T10:46:00.000-08:00

The free Morpheus Tales Christmas Horror Special is out now, with a fine selection of Christmas-themed horror, including my own Ye Merry Gentlemen.

Read at ISSUU or download the PDF!

Reusing Old Routers

2011-10-12T11:57:00.000-07:00

This past weekend, after having received an Internet-enabled Blu-Ray player for my birthday, I decided to explore the possibility of using an old Wireless G router (Linksys WRT-54G) as a wireless bridge to connect the player to our Internet connection without having to run 40 feet of cable from where the Blu-Ray player is to where the current router is.

It actually went surprisingly well.
I started by seeing if I could put the WRT-54G into Client or Client Bridge mode. The Linksys web administration pages on the router had no options for doing this. So my first thought was, well, maybe Linksys enabled these features in a later release of the firmware. Indeed there was a newer version of the firmware, but the release notes didn't make any mention of these new features.

I connected the router to my laptop, did a factory reset on the router, set my ethernet port to a static IP, and turned off wireless on the laptop after having first downloaded the new firmware image from the Cisco Linksys support site. That was the first time I'd ever flashed a router's ROM, and it went flawlessly.

So now I had an old WRT-54G with the most current firmware, but was no further ahead.

Doing a bit more research, I discovered DD-WRT, an open source alternate firmware site for routers. An amazing effort which covers a staggering range of routers, I was able to determine that my router was on the list of supported devices. The DD-WRT firmare does provide the WRT-54G with client functionality not provided by Linksys.

(To determine the available devices supported by the DD-WRT project, go to the DD-WRT site and click on the "Router Database" button. Enter the manufacturer of your router. In my case, it is Linksys. The list of available devices is then displayed.)

Each DD-WRT firmware image applies to a specific version of hardware, so it is essential that you correctly identify the version of hardware of your router to determine if DD-WRT will work on your equipment.

The router database table shows your router's model number and hardware version, as well as whether it is supported. My WRT-54G's hardware version (version 6) was listed as supported. Clicking on the entry for my router, I was redirected to a page which listed several different firmware images. Rather than simply downloading all of them, I decided more research was required, so spent the next couple of hours reading the "fine print" in the DD-WRT wiki. This wiki page was an excellent step-by-step walk-through of the process. I followed the instructions nearly verbatim, including reading the phoenix page.

The critical bit of information here was the 30/30/30 reset, which until this time I never knew existed.

The only exception to following the DD-WRT wiki was at step 20.3. I selected the dd-wrt.v24_micro_generic.bin image from the DD-WRT site instead of the image mentioned in the wiki.

In all other instances, I followed the instructions to the letter.

And, probably 5 hours after I started the exercise, I was able to put my WRT-54G into Client Bridge mode, connect my Blu-Ray player to it, and have it connect to the Internet wirelessly.

(A good and accurate summary of how to set the Client Bridge mode options for a router with DD-WRT firmware is here.)

It proved to be a worthwhile way to reuse older equipment, rather than spending money needlessly on a wireless adapter (such as Mad Catz's or Microsoft's) or on cables. And now, my spiffy new Blu-Ray with built-in YouTube and Netflix access, can be fully utilized.

Two Things That Bothered Me Today

2011-09-17T13:02:00.000-07:00

1) The weather: I know, I know, there is nothing I can really do about the weather, and I know that global warming's main effect is to cause radical changes to weather pattens regionally, but it doesn't mean I can't be bothered by it, so today, I find it bothering me.

Mostly, I think this is because I just don't expect to feel this cold at this time of year. Especially after having gone through a cold, damp, July. And I am largely an accepting kind of individual when it comes to things I can't change.

So, maybe it's just another aspect to aging. Or, maybe it's just one more thing to add to the ever-increasing list of things that I remember being better before. Or, even more likely, it's the first indicator that the fall (in the many senses of that word) is not so very far away.

2) Tablets and Android's browser: I am writing this on the company's newly-purchased Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. While over the past two or three days I have largely been busy downloading apps from the Android Market, and trying to determine whether there is in fact a legitimate business reason to use a tablet, I've also been trying some of our own browser-based applications on the Android browser. And this is where I'm bothered. By and large, the browser is fast, capable, and renders sites very well.

But for the past four years, Google has failed correct a significant failing. On sites requiring logging in using http basic authentication, it is not possible to download files. Period. The login authentication is handled separately on a download request, and is not supplied from the browser. Many, many developers have complained about this failing, but Google has done nothing about it. Firefox works fine, so why not the webkit browser? Other failings of the browser have to do with keyboard input.

And a complaint about the Galaxy Tab in general: Smart controls like this post editor, or a Flash application's text input field, do not necessarily respond like browser text fields, so on a touch-screen device, you cannot easily position the cursor, and for those of us who keyboard a lot, the lack of cursor movement controls on the touch-screen keyboard is a real shortcoming. In fact, on a Flash application text input field, the touch-screen keyboard sometimes simply will not come up, perhaps due to the control's display size or some other factor. So seriously, from a true usability perspective, there is much that needs improvement.

For now, I'm just bothered.

This Craft is Minecraft. This Craft is Your Craft.

2011-08-25T14:43:00.000-07:00

After listening to the first episode of the "A Pixel Canvas" podcast, I decided to seek out and boldly go where few near-seniors have ever gone - straight to the Minecraft website.

It took me a few minutes to figure out how to navigate the landscape, dig, create blocks and then destroy them, but not long enough to frustrate those with low attention spans.

The problem with Minecraft is simply this: It is so incredibly addictive that you can easily lose yourself playing a game that is at its essence nothing more than a virtual building-block set similar to the wood-block sets many of us used as infants and young children. Perhaps this is why it is so incredibly soothing. The music, too, is soothing, so the entire experience - blue, lightly-clouded sky, verdant fields - is engaging because it becomes a meditative exercise in a pointless activity. It's a good way to get into your "Zen thing".

It is not so much a game as a creative play set, like Meccano toys, Lincoln Logs, or Lego.

What's not to like about that?

But be warned: just try to stop playing it.

Sucked into the Vortex

2011-08-10T15:28:00.000-07:00

Robert Charles Wilson's new book, Vortex, wraps up his Spin trilogy. More connected to Axis than Spin, Vortex brings together multiple intertwining histories that lead ultimately to the discovery of the truth about the "Hypotheticals", and the eventual end of the known universe.

Or does it?
(Spoiler alert.)

Immediately after finishing Vortex, I was left feeling a little empty and perplexed. I wasn't even sure I liked the book.

But, like all good books, even after it's done, it's never really over. I spent not a few hours laying awake in bed mulling it over. The issues raised by Wilson continue to resonate long after you turn the last page. As usual with his recent books, his story-telling is compelling, his characters real, and the issues grand and subtle at the same time.

The idea of convergence of different lives leading through pathways to one of only many possible histories more than hints at the notion that there are multiple possibilities, multiple pathways, and multiple universes. So the end is not really the end after all. In the one pathway that leads Turk Findley into the Vox culture, and ultimately to the disclosure through Isaac Dvali of what the Hypotheticals are doing, we experience the eventual end of Earth and even the physical universe. In another pathway, an ex-cop intervenes in a young Turk Findley's life before he ever went through an archway, and prevents the death of an individual that must ultimately change both Findley's and his victim's lives forever.

Orrin's recording of Findley's experiences has been tainted by this intervention. And so the story he relates can't possibly be the same as it was in the time-line where Sandra and Bose did not intervene. Consequently, we can never really know the truth. Is there, in fact, a single truth at all? Wilson's answer seems to be "No".

Similarly, we learn that there is no hypothetical intelligence guiding the events through which humanity is drawn. All of this technology is simply a process - like photosynthesis. This would seem to become the atheist's example of how great and unknowable events can be misinterpreted as God-driven to those who don't understand the processes that are taking place. And the processes are galactic in scale. Hypotheticals are nothing more than a technological scavenging process bent on ensuring humanity's survival simply so that humanity can make more resources available to the process, which is part of a galactic ecosystem.

All the same, there was, at some point, an ancient, alien civilization that created the fundamental building blocks of a self-replicating technology that, once set in motion, evolved into that process. Eventually, as the universe moves inexorably toward entropy, organic life intervenes, and becomes, through this process, in some sense non-corporal, spiritual, and immortal.

Is this cautionary? Should we be always vigilant about what we create, and what the impact of those creations might be on our ecosystem? Or is it also acknowledgement of a First Mover or Intelligent Designer? Does organic (not human) life ultimately tend toward, in an evolutionary sense, a non-physical, perhaps spiritual existence? Does organic life evolve to become the non-existent gods to which it prays?

We don't really know. We are left with questions, not answers, and so Vortex leaves the Spin universe completely open-ended. There is no end, despite what Isaac Dvali experiences, because his universe, the Spin universe, is only one possible universe in a much grander multiverse.

If there is any failing at all, it is, for me, in Dvali's (through Orrin's) closing monologue ("The Sum of All Paths"). It would be nearly impossible to convey in any human language the experiences of Dvali as he transitions from mortal to machine, from finite to infinite. The result is sometimes stilted, made the more so by the info-dump necessary to give the reader some kind of understanding of what's going on. I wonder if it was even necessary to have this last chapter, in this form. As Wittgenstein said, "That of which we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence."

That weakness notwithstanding, Wilson is extraordinary at taking cosmic, metaphysical and spiritual questions and framing them in the experience of the ordinary individual. This is why Vortex is a masterful work of science fiction, and a masterful end to a stunning trilogy.

Creature Tech... Meh...

2011-08-06T20:49:00.000-07:00

Creature Tech
by Doug TenNapel

My rating: 3 out of 5

Recently I was handed a copy of Creature Tech to read, and after flipping through it, I did look forward to sitting down with it.

But while I have enjoyed Doug TenNapel's art ever since the Earthworm Jim video game, I was not overly impressed by either the story or the characters in Creature Tech. I did not believe Katy's desire to be saved and "made whole", for example, and I thought that the symbiont was far too similar to Alien's face-hugger.

The inciting incident (the arrival of the space eels) went virtually nowhere, so the wrap-up with the revivification of the mummified alien and departure by space eel seemed, well, boring and anticlimactic. I did not agree with the foreword's claim of how cinematic this graphic novel was, certainly no more so than others in the genre. It seemed to be just an average book, by a truly wonderful artist.

My Musical History

2011-08-02T11:56:00.000-07:00

My short story, History of Early Music is set to appear in the November issue of Hobo Pancakes. This is a nearly-entirely fictional account of my young love affair(s) and music, guaranteed to not contain more that 10% truth.

I wrote History early in 2009, and although it came close to acceptance a couple of times, it only found its current home more than two years after it was first submitted to a publication (which was, for the record, Taddle Creek).

The story (in its submitted form) contains several musical excerpts which I wrote specifically for the story, being somewhat inspired by the musical fragments that appeared in Margaret Laurence's The Diviners, as well as my own early musical compositions.

The other inspirational source for the story was Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, a brilliant novel of sexual self-gratification, frustration and guilt - not to mention neurotic family relationships - in other words, a book that has everything any reader would want in a novel.

Check back later for a link to the story!

Christmas is coming...

2011-07-10T09:24:00.000-07:00

Watch for my story, "Ye Merry Gentlemen", set to appear in the Morpheus Tales Christmas horror special issue this December.

Closet Archaeology

2011-07-06T22:04:00.000-07:00

I had an inkling that I'd go through some of my old stories tonight, so I dug deep into the inky blackness of the closet and pulled out a box-load of papers that have traveled with me since 1969 (oh God! that's 42 years!)

I found out things I had completely forgotten, which is why documenting your life in some fashion as you live it is a really good idea. I have not done that. There are vast stretches where I couldn't begin to tell you anything about what I did, who I met, or where I went. Such is the frailty of the human memory. But this period, this aspect of my past is allowed to live because I actually kept a record of it.

One of the interesting things I discovered was a chronology of my early writing. Apparently I wrote 45 pages of a book, long-hand, called "This is Andromeda", which I started before I wrote what I consider my first real attempt at writing fiction ("Joshua Hamilton"). It is noted in the chronology that it was destroyed. A deserving fate, I'm sure. It was also noted that the problems were a runaway, out-of-control plot, and the introduction of two new characters in each chapter, making it completely unwieldy only 45 pages into it.

I also discovered the original draft of the screenplay for "Planet of the Naked Apes", which shows a shared writing credit with Robert C. Wilson. (You can download it here.) This was a 3-minute 8mm film which, in the original conception, would have run over 5 due to lengthy humorous but irrelevant fake closing credits. Ah... for the want of an extra couple of dollars... I had no idea I'd hung onto that screenplay. So that was a particular joyous moment when my eyes landed on it, since that time is really one of only a handful of places and times where my memory is fully functioning.

I apparently also had a penchant for writing historically relevant commentaries on what was wrong with the things I'd written, and why I abandoned (or didn't) certain stories. After several hundred thousand words, I saw value in only two or three stories. But that's not the point, ultimately. The point is that even then I was critically capable - I could tell why what I was doing was horrid. Paul Nowak, a former editor of the Financial Post, who for a time taught a few writing courses at Ryerson that I enrolled in, called me a "natural editor" and here, looking back at these notes, I can see that he was right, even if I didn't think I had the evidence of it at the time.

Interestingly, in re-reading some of them (at least the first pages), they actually aren't all that bad. They do all go off the rails at some point, heading down that craggy slope toward a disastrous death among the ruins of failed story-telling and imagination, but surprisingly a few of them actually seem salvageable.

I don't know that I ever will salvage them. But it was a very interesting couple of hours to drag them out, dust them off, smell the acrid odor of the aging paper and recall for a while all the hellish agony they caused me.

It's been said many times before, but it's worth saying again: If you want to write, it's important to document your life. Keep a diary. Write a blog. Do something that you can look back on in twenty, thirty, or forty years to bring back to mind just who you were on that particular day. It's a fascinating reflection. But more than that, it establishes in a concrete way your journey through this short life, and, if you can be honest about yourself, what you've learned about who you are as you've gone through it.

Two Things that Drove Me Nuts Today

2011-06-20T11:35:00.000-07:00

There's always something that gets under my skin. Today it's "regime" and "my philosophy".

1) "Regime" and "Regimen". A day rarely goes by when some writer, somewhere in the newspaper (usually in sports, but also in entertainment, lifestyle, arts pages, and even on occasion in op ed pieces, columns and even news reports) misuses "regime". Regimen refers to a plan or regulated course. A course of antibiotics is a regimen, not a regime. Your Weight Watchers plan is a regimen, not a regime. Your exercise program is a regimen, not a regime. A regime is a set of rules that operate a government. More colloquially, it also refers to authoritarian or tyrannical control of a government by an individual or group. It has other uses as well, but none of them refer to something that can be construed as a regimen. Where did you people go to school? BC?

2) "My philosophy". All those who wax reflective on their blogs about their philosophy, their philosophy of life, their philosophy about parenting, lack any understanding of what philosophy actually is. Having an opinion is not a philosophy. Musing on your relationship with your children is not a philosophy. Choosing a green lifestyle is not a philosophy. I'm not saying that many times there actually might be philosophical underpinnings about some of these things that are guiding your choices - but simply saying "my philosophy is x" indicates people using that phrase have no idea whatsoever what they are talking about.

So here is a questionnaire for you, to determine what your philosophy actually might be. (Take your time; on average it takes about 4 years to complete.)

a) Metaphysics: What system of thought do you subscribe to regarding the nature of reality, including the physical universe, the relationship of mind to body, and causation?

b) Epistemology: What system of thought describes your views concerning the nature and scope of knowledge? Can we, in fact, be said to know anything? Why? How does perception relate to knowledge? What exactly is possible to be known (see "metaphysics", above)?

c) Mind: What is the basis for your view of the nature of the mind? Is there a dualistic aspect to humanity? Or a purely materialistic one? (See "metaphysics", above.)

d) Ethics: What system of beliefs describes your views concerning morality? What are your meta-ethical principles? Are there absolute truths? What is your normative-ethical view? How can we determine how we ought to act in a given situation? How does your system of ethics apply to complex questions of behavior in contemporary society?

e) Religion: Based on your metaphysical and ethical philosophies, do you hold that God exists? Why? What is the relationship between faith and reason?

f) Politics: What system of beliefs describes your views on the relationship of government to the individual, and the relationship of individuals to society? What system of beliefs do you subscribe to concerning the nature of justice and law? How do your systems of metaphysics, epistemology and ethics reconcile with your philosophy of law and politics?

g) Language: What is the basis for your view on the nature of language? How does language work? Can a meta-language determine the fundamental similarities that tie all languages together - human and non-human? Can there be non-human languages that are actually languages?

h) Logic: What determines the validity of an argument? What types of arguments can be symbolized? What is modal logic? What is predicate logic? Do you agree with Bertrand Russell concerning philosophical logic?

i) Aesthetics: What constitutes the nature of art and beauty? Why? What does it mean when we say we enjoy something? What mechanism is at play when we derive pleasure from art, literature and music?

If you can answer even two of those questions in a coherent, reasoned fashion, score yourself full marks - you might actually have a philosophy. If you can't, just say "I think", or "I believe" instead of asserting your "philosophy".

For a deeper understanding of why "my philosophy" talk irritates me, see the following sites:

Using the Kobo Sudoku App

2011-06-12T15:09:00.000-07:00

As I posted yesterday, I discovered a Sudoku app on the Kobo Touch. Today I'm going to show you how to use it.

First, decide where you would like to place a number, then tap that square.

Next, tap a number on the keypad to put that number in the selected square.

The number selected on the keypad remains selected, so the next square you tap on the Sudoku board automatically gets that number.

To stop a number from being applied to a square, tap the number on the keypad to deselect it.

Use the backspace (delete) key to clear the number from the selected box.

If you're like me, you sometimes like to make tiny notes of which numbers you think belong in a square, so that as you work through the puzzle, you can recall what the likely options are. The Kobo Touch Sudoku app lets you do this with the multi-pick button. Tap the multi-pick button.

Any number numbers you tap on the keypad will accumulate in the selected square.

To exit the game, click the Menu button.

If you beat the game, you get a congratulatory screen.

and when exiting the game, you get the option to choose a difficulty level, and start another game:

Sudokobo

2011-06-11T08:53:00.000-07:00

I discovered a nice little Easter-egg on the Kobo Touch: a Sudoku game.

Tap the "settings" icon, then tap the "About Kobo Touch" menu. Go to the last page (page 4) by tapping the navigation arrows. Under "Special Thanks To", tap "Richard Penner", which is in smaller type than the other names.

Sudoku!

Touchy Kobo Touch Doesn't Sync

2011-06-10T15:34:00.000-07:00

I've been using the Kobo Wireless since Christmas 2010 when my sister gave me one. I had some issues getting it to start up properly, so when my wife presented me with a Kobo Touch today, I expected I'd have a few issues as well.

Not surprisingly, I did.

My Kobo desktop software was installed already, so the first thing I did was start it up. I plugged in the Kobo Touch to the USB port, and then tried to Sync my library. I waited about four minutes without anything happening on either the Kobo or the desktop app, before deciding that it wasn't going to do anything. So, I ejected the Kobo, unplugged it, and tried again. Same result.

On the third attempt, after looking at the included pamphlet, I shut down the desktop app, plugged in the Kobo Touch, then started up the desktop app. Same result.

So, I perused the online help (which is so generic as to be unhelpful), and then tried again. However, this time, I did things slightly differently -- and it worked!

So here's the steps you need to follow if you're having syncing difficulty.

Close your Kobo desktop and disconnect your eReader.
Download and install the Kobo desktop app from the Kobo website. You don't need to first uninstall your existing desktop app.
The install prompts you to plug in the eReader, and syncs it as part of the install. You will be prompted to log into your existing Kobo account, too.

Voila!

Nowhere in help does it say that for existing Kobo users, you have to reinstall the desktop app.

Hard to the Core

2011-06-08T20:38:00.000-07:00

I was reading Electric Spec's interview with Robert Sawyer, and paused over his comment regarding his WWW trilogy's Webmind character as being the hardest writing task he'd ever set for himself.

That made me wonder about my own hard tasks. So, here's a quick rundown, unprioritized, of writing tasks of all sorts, set by myself or someone else, that were sometimes insurmountably difficult, and often resulted in failure.

1. DASH 7 lighting system troubleshooting trees. Bah! That was the last technical writing task I worked on at DeHavilland before leaving the company to write a novel, and go to university. That singular task was so mind-numbingly boring while at the same time so anxiety-raising that I just could not take it any longer. In fact, I never completed the task. And it was probably better for air travelers that I didn't.

2. An Essay on Decartes' 2nd Meditation. First-year philosophy. After leaving DeHavilland, and after working on a novel for a year, going to university was a real mind-fuck. It was one of the first essays I had to write, and I had no clue how to do it. Getting that paper back was a lot like the scene in A Christmas Story where Ralphie gets back his theme: "C plus!" You'll shoot your eye out!

3. My novel Trajectory (still unpublished). After 30-some-odd years, the novel at least now makes sense. This was the one project I kept walking away from, after spending months and months at a time working on it. In its various manifestations, it ran anywhere from 180,000 words, down to 100,000 and back up to 140,000.

4. A series of algorithms to parse blocks of text into individual sentences. This arose out of a project for Hughes Aircraft Systems Division (Richmond, BC) pertaining to the Canadian CAATS air traffic control system between 1993 and 1997. The requirement arose out of a need to populate a requirements tracking database with unstructured text taken from requirements specifications. Relying on the LISP programming language and regular expressions, the specifications were successfully parsed. You'd think that it wouldn't be too difficult, but when documents are filled with abbreviations, various uses of apostrophes, quotation marks, numbered lists, reference notes, etc., identifying the bounds of what constitutes a sentence becomes fairly complex. The work was successful, and resulted in a document-based interface to the requirements tracking system, including transaction processing for changes implemented in the documents.

5. Quantum Music. In 1975, I worked extensively with electronic music (using tape manipulation, and analog synthesizers). I was striving to develop a new musical language and notation (as many others had and have done). What arose from that was what I called Quantum Music. This was an internally consistent set of rules that permitted the composer to draw on the spectral frequencies of any matter as a reference "keyboard" from which compositions could be created. Notation consisted mostly in graph-paper plots of frequencies that could be manipulated through music-like means. Structured, yet also highly artificial, QM led ultimately to a musical dead end.

Zombies? What Zombies?

2011-05-14T14:52:00.000-07:00

I recently finished reading the wonderful novel, TRUE GRIT. Portis's voicing of Mattie Ross is exceptional, and, having seen the Coen Brothers' movie before reading the book, it was impossible to not see Hailee Steinfeld, Jeff Bridges, and Matt Damon behind the words.

Also extraordinarily impressive is the job the Coen Brothers did in bringing the book onto the screen. There is a southern lyricism and bare-faced honesty in the writing, which they preserved, which is truly inspirational.

So what does this have to do with zombies?

Sometimes while reading, I am overtaken by the voice of the writer. This is very easy to have happen with a narrator like Mattie Ross. I admit that Portis's clarity is extraordinary. Simple, bold, honest. That is exceptional writing and being exposed to exceptional writing has inescapable influence.

And, sometimes while reading, I will have a stray line pop out of nowhere, and have a character suddenly speak to me. In this case, the voice (male, but not Rooster's or La Boeuf's) said to me: "I did not take as easily to grave robbing as some."

I jotted it down in a Word document, and kept reading. By the time I finished TRUE GRIT I had an unrelated story taking shape in my head, set in my fictional Mill Town, somewhere in Ontario, in 1897 (a period I am somewhat interested in from other writing perspectives, and I have been engaged in reading other material from the late 19th century and early 20th century as I am slowly preparing work on another novel).

And that is how KILLING WALLACE CRAWTON, a late-19th Century zombie story came to be.

Honestly...

2011-04-21T13:05:00.000-07:00

The first story I wrote (or to be more specific, the first story I remember writing that was not required for school-related work) was called Joshua Hamilton, a science fiction piece about 3700 words long that consumed me for about a week during the summer I was 15.

My father was taken with it, and ran copies of it off one of the photocopiers at work and passed it around to several people, which was kind of embarrassing, because, really, it honestly sucked.

The story idea didn't suck -- it was about a man who, upon suffering some calamity (I don't remember what; might have been disease, or perhaps a terrible accident) was the recipient of a new body. His brain was transplanted into an electromechanical substitute, kind of like a Frankenstein or Six Million Dollar Man situation, but from the inside perspective.

The thrust of the story had to do with the philosophical issues of personal identity and the mind-body problem.

Unfortunately, as a 15 year old, I wasn't up to the "what if" of the scenario. I could really not speak to any aspect of the the story, and had none of the tools required to address a philosophical problem in this way.

After being rejected by Analog and F&SF, I shelved the story, and went on to the next one.

And then the next one.

And the next....

It was also, if I recall, around the same time that I began banging out my first novel (thankfully still unpublished), called Children of the Sun, a science fiction tale about a wealthy industrialist (Benjamin Cramer) who was pursuing the promises of anti-gravity drives for space exploration. Kind of like Star Trek meets Atlas Shrugged. The iconoclasting Benjamin Cramer had something up his sleeve, though, beyond any Randian capitalism: the discovery of new spiritual truths connected to the adulthood of humanity as it advanced into a phase of colonizing discovery.

After being rejected by Doubleday, Signet, and two or three other publishers, I shelved the book, and went onto the next one (Shiralam, about interspecies relations on a distant tropical world where very little clothing was worn by anyone).

And then the next one (The Ascension, a kind of other-world mystery where somewhat ape-like beings were being used as pack animals - a book I might just revisit, 40 or so years after that first draft was put down).

And the next....

Looking back, the problem with all of these things was only partly mechanical. The writing craft was something I got reasonably good at. What I really was bad at was actually telling a story. I loved reading stories, and plowed through hundreds of SF novels between the time I was 15 and 25. Those were ten very full years, in that regard, and I can honestly say I absorbed almost nothing from that reading, not because the books didn't contain plenty to absorb, but because I was too full of myself to realize what it was I lacked: Education, experience, and the ability to actually understand what the point was.

Even when I quit my job, at 26, to work on a new novel, I was still pretty convinced I had what it took. For two years, I worked on it full-time (an espionage tale; I figured by then that SF and I just weren't going to get along in the writing world...), took several writing courses at Ryerson (which at the time was still called Ryerson Polytechincal Institute), impressed instructors with my natural editing ability (all those years writing bad stuff weren't entirely wasted), even guest lectured, and did freelance editing.

I think it was somewhere around 120,000 words into the book that I realized that even though I'd heavily researched and plotted the book, it wasn't working. I was lacking something. A lot of things. What I really was talking about was shallow, facile stuff that might have gone somewhere in a different century, but which, in the age in which I lived, simply demonstrated what a self-centered, empty-headed dolt I was. So I headed off to university to get the degree I'd never known I needed, and then life took a variety of turns.

I went through four versions of that book, about 10 drafts. I ran into trouble with it in 1988, and so shelved it for just about exactly 20 years.

To write fiction, you see, you have to be honest in a way that you don't when you're writing exposition or exegesis. This is what makes writing so incredibly difficult, because each character you invent has to be honest, as well -- both to themselves and to the story.

Recently, I read Stephen King's Full Dark, No Stars, and found myself nodding when, in the Afterword, he writes: "...when it comes to fiction, the writer's only responsibility is to look for the truth in his own heart...[B]ad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do...."

One of the first pieces of advice novice writers receive is to write what you know. (In fact, that was the title of the first article about writing that was published in Cross-Canada Writers' Quarterly, in 1981 or 1982.) The problem is, what you need to know, first and foremost, is yourself. The rest can be researched. The most difficult question to ask and answer is: Who am I, really?

Which is really, if you think about it, precisely the question I was trying to address in Joshua Hamilton, when I was 15. And that's something I'm still not sure I can answer. But the point of writing at all is to go to those places, psychologically, that any other person would tend to shy away from. That's how you find the emotional core of the characters you create, the story you tell, and that's where you learn a bit about yourself along the way.

Honestly.

Two Things that Drove Me Nuts Today

2011-03-29T21:12:00.000-07:00

One: strtok().

See, the thing about strtok() (we're talking c here) is that you can't call this function when it's being used elsewhere. Say you have a function:

void DoSomething(void) {
      char MyString[] = "Hello all you people";
      char seps[] " ";
      char *token;
      // get the first token in a string:
      token = strtok(MyString,seps);
      printf("token: %s\n",token);
     while (token!=NULL) {
           token = strtok(NULL,seps);
           printf("token: %s\n",token);
      }
}

All well and good. But, say you're in another module of code and want to use strtok() again, called from a function within your DoSomething() function:

void DoSomething(void) {
      char MyString[] = "Hello all you people";
      char seps[] " ";
      char *token;
      // get the first token in a string:
      token = strtok(MyString,seps);
      printf("token: %s\n",token);

     while (token!=NULL) {
           token = strtok(NULL,seps);
GoGetMeMoreTokens(void);
           printf("token: %s\n",token);
      }
}

void GoGetMeMoreTokens(void) {

      char MyString[] = "Welcome to my wormhole!";
      char seps[] " ";
      char *token;
      // get the first token in a string:
      token = strtok(MyString,seps);
      printf("token: %s\n",token);

     while (token!=NULL) {
           token = strtok(NULL,seps);
           printf("token: %s\n",token);       }

}

The nested call to strtok() clobbers the pointer to the current token in the outer function, and eventually, boom - memory leak and probably (on Windows) an access violation error.

I've known this for years. And yet.... well, sometimes your brain just goes to sleep....

Two: spawn()

Windows is very misleading with regard to informing you of what is wrong with a spawn() call. You might, for example, use spawnlp() to run a process:

status = _spawnlp( _P_WAIT, cmd, arg1, arg2, NULL);

Simple enough, but if any of the arguments (cmd, arg1, or arg2) are not acceptable, status will be -1 and errno set to EINVAL, which documentation states is an invalid mode. No it ain't, either. Things that can cause EINVAL include quotes inside an argument (cmd, arg1, arg2, etc.) and multiple NULL arguments.

That was extremely annoying to discover....

Why Warp Drive Will Not Be Coming Any Time Soon

2011-03-12T13:11:00.001-08:00

Until the 19th century, explorers were the R&D leaders of the planet, finding new ways to exploit desired resources. The business developers of the day turned exploration into economic gain by funding better ships, with regular schedules. Ultimately, there was a consumer whose demand for goods supplied the reason for the huge expenses of energy and time by the few who were forging ahead.

It's easy to see that 20th century visionaries, extrapolating on the economic history of western civilization, would come to the conclusion that the next great exploratory realm was space, and that what was needed was a practical method of traveling the vast distances for such exploration in order for it to be viable.

Oh, there were some exceptions to those visions - the idea of generational ships, for example - but essentially, 17th and 18th century exploration mentality was driving the visions of the 1930s, 40s, 50s, and 60s. (Things started to wane a bit in the 70s with the rising concern of population growth and the realization that the environment and the star ship Earth were of more pressing concern. This also coincided with the decline of the Apollo program, but I digress.)

It is perhaps unfair to think that it could have been otherwise, and given the geopolitical climate of the 50s and 60s, it really is quite rational that superpower governments should think that a strategic foothold on Earth's closest off-shore island (the moon) would improve the security of everyone involved. So the contemporary kings of the day cannot be blamed for investing multi-billions of dollars into projects that could go nowhere.

Ah, they argued, but look at the spin-offs.

Yes - look at the spin-offs, the most significant of which, arguably, were solid-state microelectronics, and computers. You need both to get to the moon and back (you couldn't exactly have an on-board steam-punk version of Univac, now could you?).

Here's the thing. The 1960s space race triggered a new economy. If the old economy had chugged along at its steam-engine pace the way it had been going, then perhaps the focus on space exploration would not have diffused the way it did by the end of the war in Vietnam. But a new economy was spun, and everything - and I mean everything - changed.

The essential difference in the post-space program economy compared to the imperialistic, exploration-based economies of the 18th century and earlier are threefold: distributed research, competitive development, and commoditization of product.

"Distributed research" means the dissection of large-scale problems into specialized component research areas (for example, finding materials suitable for semiconductor electronics use, versus manufacturing techniques, or, say, fiber-optic communication). Taken further, distributed research also means information-sharing between research centers. Getting more people involved in research means more avenues of research exploration, with more potential practical outcomes.

"Competitive development" means several different developers all vying to produce profitable products.

"Commoditization of product" means producing sufficient quantities of a good to make penny-cheap, but widely dispersed.

Think of the plummeting price of disk drives with the concurrent rise in capacity during the 90s, and you can see the result of the DCC equation.

The funding for research into computing, the rise of university departments and degree programs in computing science as its own discipline, the capitalization of the business, and the competition, all lead to what is now a global consumer electronics market of somewhere around $680 billion, of which roughly $200 billion is personal computers. More than enough money to invest in other ventures, such as manned space exploration. So it's not like the money isn't there. It is; but not distributed where it can be utilized.

The investments in the kinds of research that would be required to make such exploration feasible and valuable just won't happen because there is no foreseeable benefit. Exploration, to be an economic driver, must provide economic, social, or cultural benefits somewhere down the line. Otherwise, there is no point in maintaining it. (I would wager the Vikings left Newfoundland simply because there was nothing to be gained by being there.)

Our ability to mimic the science-fiction visionaries like Gene Roddenberry and the writers of Star Trek (which has been credited for such things as voice-recognition/interaction computers, cell phones, and even fast-opening sliding doors) is limited by the economic outcome. We will stop at anything that likely does not feed, clothe, or entertain us.

It will be a long, long time before manned space exploration on the scale of Star Trek is something that will be realized, if it ever is, because the economics and the "DCC equation" will prevent it. Warp drive (or any FTL technology), even if the physics of the universe permit it, is not something that can be innovated into existence by one or two back-yard experimenters (although it is potentially something an extraterrestrial race could gift us). It is not something that could ever be made cheaply enough (comparatively -say, like liquid-fueled rockets) to become the jet-engine of manned space exploration. It requires real, exploration-based drivers to make it worthwhile.

In the absence of such drivers, there is no need for faster-than-light travel. Consequently, Earth will continue to be, for all intents, one tiny cell of life in a sterile, stellar soup.

Still, it's fun to imagine.

Posthumous Poetry

2011-03-07T18:04:00.000-08:00

This remarkable poem was written by my late brother, Robert Barker, sometime around 1969. At this point, he was using a variety of source material including newspapers and dream imagery, combining them in what might be described as word-collages.

A Headline

a headline in the news today
revealed
a saintly indian would be
honored
upon Mount Keswyck in new york.

with my eight dollar salary
I bought
two tickets for the tour which
promised
a place to eat and sleep.

the tourists would be
taken
on the Keswyck peak to view
aurora
borealis illuminate the night.

I planned to bring my father
on this trip
but was discontent to learn our
guide would
be Eastern born, but
american.

so I purchased from a cousin
in our
living room store another gift,
slippers
to cover my father's naked feet.

Zinc Fingers

2011-03-06T13:29:00.000-08:00

A story in the paper on March 2 in the Philadelphia Inquirer (and carried by The Vancouver Sun) talks about the use of zinc fingers in experiments that for the first time demonstrate the technique of actual gene editing. Unlike genetic engineering that uses viruses to transmit new genetic material into the nucleus of a cell, zinc fingers are protein folds able to attach to specific genes, and make it possible to cut a DNA strand, insert or remove a single gene, then splice it together again.

The report describes how nine HIV patients' T-cells were modified to eliminate a receptor that HIV requires to enter a cell, making those in the experiment invulnerable to the virus. The modified T-cells proliferate in the body.

Research on zinc fingers has been going on for decades. Now, actual applications are being developed that use them. It doesn't take much to understand the implications. This is a remarkable advancement in genetic engineering for fighting diseases. It may not be many years before zinc fingers can be applied to a massive range of genetically-based diseases.

Read more about zinc fingers here.

Check out the preview

2011-03-01T09:12:00.000-08:00

My short story, If Ever I Should Leave You, is in Morpheus Tales #12, coming out in April. Check out the preview, then buy a copy!

http://www.morpheustales.com/preview12.pdf

Whither Representation?

2011-02-15T14:52:00.000-08:00

Here in BC, we have a four-day session of parliament just underway this week, after 265 days without parliament in session.

That's right. 265 days. Two. Hundred. Sixty-five.

It's nearly a year since parliament was in session. And the only reason for this particular session to be taking place is to pass legislation to permit the government to spend money until the new Liberal leader and NDP opposition leader can be elected at their respective conventions.

Not only do we not have a working government, we have neither a leader of the house, nor of the opposition.
Of course, "the government" is largely the bureaucracy of public service employees, not the elected officials, who keep doing the day-to-day work of keeping the province running, providing services.

But it's very strange to live in a democracy where people elected to represent their constituents can effectively leave the ship uncaptained for so very long.

Do we need elected officials at all? Do we need parliament at all?

With no parliament in session, how are the voices of constituents heard? What business is actually transpiring? What legal reforms can be made? Why does no-one seem to care that a 265 absence is an affront to any democratic society?

Things are very, very broken.

Brilliant Australian Cinema - Animal Kingdom

2011-02-13T14:59:00.000-08:00

We recently downloaded Animal Kingdom on iTunes. Knowing nothing about the movie, except for critical accolades for performances by its cast, I approached this Australia masterwork with both detached curiosity and unease.

As unsettling as watching Season1 of The Sopranos, I wasn't sure immediately after viewing whether this was actually a good movie or not. All I knew was that I was set deeply on edge by the incredibly subtle script and performances. (I think there should be a sub-genre for this kind of film: Creepy Crime.)

It is not immediately obvious just how disturbed the Cody family is, nor to what extend Janine "Grandma Smurf" Cody (Jacki Weaver) is the lioness stopping at nothing to protect her pride. From the nearly-surreal outset of the film, where Josh (James Frecheville), seated beside his dead mother, calmly makes the call to police while watching a game show on television, we are set completely and utterly adrift, and are almost forced to somehow emotionally fend for ourselves in this masterfully-directed cinematic assault.

We never actually see just how bad the Cody family is. Oh, we have a few black-and-white stills during the opening credit to establish they are a close-knit family of armed bank robbers, but we never witness all the horror they have created. We don't need to. Andrew "Pope" Cody (Ben Mendelsohn) is quite capable of doing this within one minute of film time. A completely unassuming man to look at, Pope is clearly psychopathic.

But really, the show belongs to the no less chilling performance of Jackie Weaver. Quitely, lovingly caring for her boys, Janine Cody is the kind matron who just wants the best for her family.

This is a haunting, distrubing film. Did I like watching it? Not really. Would I recommend it? Of course I would. It's brilliant.

"Come give us a kiss."

Synaptic Computers

2011-02-12T13:07:00.000-08:00

In the recent weeks following my brother's death, I've had some pretty strange dreams, as one would expect, as well as some half-waking notions.

The day following his death, I dreamed he returned home, looking as he did back in the early '70s, from Australia, wearing Armani sunglasses. I don't even know if Armani makes sunglasses, but it didn't stop me from looking through every mall kiosk I came across subsequently, to see if I could spot a pair like the ones he was wearing. In fact, having once had the idea to look for them, it almost becomes habitual, because the right combination of stimulus and response has been established.

Not long after that dream, I had a notion, half in that dream-state just before you wake up, of a new technology involving electronic circuits capable of operating like biological synapses, from which synaptic computers could be built, which would, like Commander Data's positronic brain, be capable of learning and remembering new connections.

Those who know me will know that I have often said I'm slightly ahead of my time - by about two weeks. This means, I think, I might be sensitive to the zeitgeist, because those great insights that I have, have actually been floating around for some time in some fashion before they seep into my consciousness without having had any direct exposure to the idea; they are ideas of their time. The same is true in this case, too.

In an interesting article on the synapse chip in March, 2010, the memristor is described. The memristor is that missing electronics link between electronics and neural-like computing - a device which functions analogously to a biological synapse. The more times a signal traverses a given path, the better that path is "remembered", so is more likely to be traversed on the next event.

At least as important as quantum computing, I think, memristors promise to be the single-most important breakthrough in electronics since the solid-state transistor. It might be a decade before anything practical is developed out of the memristor, but it is likely going to be the foundation of the real-world realization of science fiction ideas at least as old as Asimov's "I Robot", or Star Trek's "duotronics", or "positronic brains".

Mubarak Resigns - Now What?

2011-02-12T11:04:00.000-08:00

The remarkable events in Egypt leading to the resignation of Mubarak demonstrate boldly what can be accomplished with organized civil disobedience.

But we still have to ask what the eventual outcome will be. Martial law and the state of emergency that has been in place in Egypt for decades continues, and will do so until the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces decides how, when, and if a transition to democracy will ultimately take place.

It is right to be joyful at the resignation of a dictator. But you can probably count on one hand the number of times in history a peaceful transition to civilian government from a military regime has actually occurred.

Never thought I'd be doing this...

2011-02-11T16:29:00.000-08:00

Well, this is a first for me. I've resisted blogging for so long, hoping, I guess, that the medium would be just another passing fad. Ah, wrong again, it would seem.

Why "Bricks Without Straw"?

First, because if there's a hard way to do something, I'll probably find it. You see, in old-time brick-making, you could not make strong bricks without adding organic material like straw. When Pharaoh tells the Israelites they must gather their own straw, and still produce the same output of bricks every day, Moses complains, but the complaint resolves nothing. The idiom "bricks without straw" implies having to do something without appropriate resources.

Second, when we were forming Metaformix Information Systems Inc. back in 1999, "Bricks From Straw Software" was one of the proposed names. So, while that wasn't really a saying in its own right, the idea behind it was that having "the right straw" we could help you "make bricks" more easily. Ah, great idea... but no, we hadn't the "right straw" to do that.

Third, Life is a bit of a "Bricks without Straw" experience. We are never really sure that we are given the right tools to get through it. Often, we don't have that particular skill we need in that particular situation, so it's all just so damn hard.

I'm not really sure what I'm going to be blogging about here - probably things that interest me on any particular day. That may range from art, music, writing, ethics, philosophy, religion, software, publishing, reading.... I might actually be one of those people who has trouble focusing.