Bricks Without Straw

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.

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.

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...

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.