Posted by Jim at January 31st, 2006
You’ll pardon me if I engage in a bit of navel gazing for the moment. Here are a few actual search strings that led to my blog yesterday…
i have a scream speech (Still… and despite the fact that Howard Dean gave that speech a while ago)
grand rapids prostitutes (No clue how they got me through that)
men pudding wrestling (Eek.)
Posted by Jim at January 30th, 2006
I’ve got a few thoughts that don’t really fit together, but aren’t developed enough to warrant their own entry. Rather than develop them, I thought I’d get them out of my head in one fell swoop.
This Blog
I’ve been thinking about getting a little more organized about this blog. Rather than just spitting out what happens to be in my head, it might be interesting to deliberately try to cover certain topics. For example, one day a week I might do commentary on a webcomic, novel or movie. Another day I might regularly write on programming topics, cooking or something else. Nothing is set in stone, but I’ve been thinking that more focus might help.
Webcomic?
I’ve been wanting to start one and have even done some preliminary character sketches, but haven’t. It’s a lower priority than my novel, so don’t expect to see it soon.
Novel
I’ve been having a good time working on it, but I’ve mostly been doing the background work that I should have done long ago. I’ve been working on character motives, plot arcs, thinking through thematic elements, and generally trying to set things up so that I can make the current draft go as quickly as possible.
Programming Projects
Let’s see… I’m trying to learn Ruby so that I can use it with Rails, and investigate AJAX. I’d also like to expand the PHP based content management system I wrote for work. I’ve been thinking that there’s a way we could use it to manage email lists and write/send our email newsletters.
And then there’s the master’s project…
Role Playing Games
Back in July when I first started messing with adapting Dogs in the Vineyard to my campaign idea, I thought up something I wanted to try. Unfortunately, it seemed to violate a person’s control over their own character. I’m thinking that I’d like to revisit that one in light of current discussions on Vincent’s blog. Apparently, he’s deliberately entering into that area.
General Blog Maintenance
I noticed recently that my blogroll doesn’t include half the blogs I actaully read. I should change that. I’d add the webcomics too except that the list is embarrassingly long.
Posted by Jim at January 26th, 2006
I like food from India. It’s one of the things that got me interested in cooking ethnic foods. I’ve got a very basic understanding of the different cooking styles connected with different regions of the country.
This doesn’t stop me from screwing up every so often.
Yesterday I decided I would cook two dishes. One was basically fish in yogurt sauce. The other was cauliflower and scallions with black mustard seeds.
I’d managed to find black mustard seeds at a local store that specializes in middle eastern foods and I’d been wanting to find a way to use them. They turn out to be a little harder to use than I’d assumed. Basically what you’re supposed to do with mustard seeds is to heat oil to high, put the mustard seeds in, and wait for them to heat up and probably pop.
They never popped for me.
They just sat there, released their smell, and did nothing else. Mind you, I waited for them to pop. I waited while the edges of the oil blackened, began to smoke, and the smell became unbearably nasty. The air in the kitchen became hazy and everyone in the family began to cough.
According to the cookbook, I was supposed to wait for the seeds to turn grey before I put in the rest of the spices.
The seeds stayed black.
After several agonizing minutes, I gave up and dumped in the rest of the spices and turned on the ceiling fan. In the meantime, the pan that I’d been cooking the fish in had developed a dark, black crust that covered the pan. This isn’t as bad as it sounds because the fish was okay. It’s just that it had been dipped in flour, allowing the flour to combine with oil, making the crust nearly impenetrable.
Now, more than 24 hours later, the pans still soak in our sink and the house reeks of a smell like burned popcorn combined with mustard.
I shouldn’t complain. The food actually turned out okay.
Posted by Jim at January 18th, 2006
Ed’s most recent cartoon included a reference to how he looked in college. Just for your entertainment, I include an actual picture taken by me of Ed (and Joe). Ed, obviously, is the guy with the beard.
Posted by Jim at January 18th, 2006
I’ve been going over prior drafts of my novel lately, reflecting on my mistakes and considering what I have to do to fix them and improve this thing.
One of the biggest mistakes I made in my first and second drafts is faling to establish character motivation adequately. Basically, the main character moves from one scene to another as dictated by the coolness of the plot idea and not so much because it flows naturally from the character’s wants and needs.
Obviously this is a problem and must be changed.
What’s harder, of course, is to figure out exactly how I’m going to change it.
A key part of the story is that there are multiple time lines. In some of them he starts working for a particular man and as a result he becomes part of terrible things, eventually losing much of what makes his life worth living. The character and ideally the readers know that this is a possibility for the main character as well. A major tension in the story, therefore is whether he will do this himself.
To my mind, this means that I will have to make doing terrible things in some way attractive to the character and perhaps also to the reader.
And that sounds hard. So, I’m still thinking about how it will work.
Posted by Jim at January 13th, 2006
Just thought I’d make note of a couple changes in local restaurants.
Taste of India
First, the relatively good news. As someone who likes Indian food, I’ve occasionally gone to Taste of India. In my opinion, one of the best things about Taste of India was the buffet–$6.99 for adults and half that for children under 10. Though I tended to like the the food at Bombay Cuisine a bit better, Bombay has a more expensive buffet.
And I’m kind of cheap. So, we tend to go to Taste of India’s buffet when there’s no food in the house on Sunday after church.
Taste of India has new owners now.
As we drove up to the restaurant, we noticed that a sign hung over the empty storefront next door proclaiming that Taste of India was expanding into that space. I also remember seeing something about dancing. Also, they changed the buffet. Some of the stuff is still there like the tandoori chicken, but they added more entrees, more types of chutney, and from what I can tell, some of the vegetable dishes seem more fresh than I remember. Also, with regards to the tandoori chicken? They now make more than one kind.
As for the price? Just the same except that they no longer have hard and fast rules about what they charge for kids. For example, half the cost of one person covered both of our kids, making it overall cheaper.
Thus, while I’ll miss the old owners, it looks like the restaurant will improve.
There Can Be Only One
Looks like there’s only one ethiopian restaurant left in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Ibex Ethiopian’s phone number has been disconnected. On the bright side, Little Africa still exists (and was pretty busy tonight), but, if you want Ethiopian meat dishes you’ll have to drive to Ann Arbor or Chicago.
Posted by Jim at January 11th, 2006
As of tonight, we just washed the dishes for the first time since last week Saturday (the day of the flooding…). Here’s a couple pictures of the new normal for our kitchen. Incidentally, the backsplash is now subway tile. The tile on the counter is granite.
Kristen’s pretty happy with it.
Alas, now that the granite is in, it’s very obvious that the green paint must go. Fortunately, we’re not going to deal with that just yet.
Posted by Jim at January 7th, 2006
I dread home improvement projects because they almost always turn out to expand exponentially from what I originally anticipated I would have to do. This turned out to be no exception to the rule.
We don’t have an official arrangement about who does what in home improvement projects, but here’s what it appears to be:
1. Kristen plans out the project, gets the necessary materials, and does the research. She then does all the stuff directly related to the project. Thus, in a tile project, she cuts, puts down morter, lays tile and grouts.
2. I, in turn, end up being responsible for the parts of the project that require more muscle than she can provide or don’t have anything to do with the main part of the project.
Thus, in the last project, I was responsible for removing the tub surround and putting up concrete backerboard (something that turned out to be far beyond my abilities…). In this project, I’ve been responsible for troubleshooting wet saw problems (I know nothing about wet saws) and taking out the kitchen sink (ditto).
And that’s how I nearly destroyed our furnace today.
Here’s what happened: Our kitchen includes cutoff valves for the sink and dishwasher, allowing me to take out the sink without turning off all the water in the house. Unfortunately, I only noticed two of the three valves. The third was hidden by the water filter.
When I began detaching the connection between the cold water line and the faucet, I noticed a little water coming out at the point I was turning. Knowing that water sometimes ends up in the line, I got a bucket.
Moments later, I made the final turn of the wrench.
Buckets turn out to do very little good when the water starts shooting out of the pipe, hitting the bottom of the sink, covering the floor of the kitchen, and pouring through the floor into the basement.
While I frantically tried to re-attach the cable to the cold water line, Kristen ran downstairs to close the main. She couldn’t find it. I ran downstairs. I could find it, but I couldn’t get a good grip on it because my hand was wet.
I tried using pliers to grip it. No dice. I pulled off my sweatshirt and wrapped it around the little wheel used to control the valve.
It worked.
Unfortunately, while all this was happening, the water also poured down the heat register on the floor of our kitchen. The furnace turned on and suddenly we smelled an odd smell, one somewhat like a wood burning stove.
I turned off the furnace and started calling furnace repair businesses. Interestingly, none of them came out. They all told me the same thing. Turning off the furnace was a good idea because furnaces contain electronic components these days and having water touch them would be very bad. Fortunately for me, the electronic parts seemed to be untouched by water (I opened the service panel to check). Unfortunately for me, the bottom of the furnace contained a quarter inch of water.
This meant that I had to get the water out and run a fan directly into the furnace until things were dry. Turning it on too soon risked the possibility that the blower might fry, meaning that we would probably have to buy a new furnace.
This would make the business owner $2200 richer, but we would be very unhappy campers.
We kept the furnace off from 3 PM to 9 PM. When we finally did turn it on, everything worked. I got the sink out of the counter around 10:30 PM.
Kristen’s not doing any tiling tonight.
Posted by Jim at January 6th, 2006
I’ve been curious about the current indie rock scene for a couple reasons. First, I’m trying to get back into writing my novel. Many of the characters are college students who are trying to get a band going. I’d like to throw in references to recent bands that they might like as opposed to having the characters’ tastes in music be out of date.
Second, I’ve been reading Questionable Content (a webcomic) lately and get about half of the music references.
It’s kind of funny. Though I wouldn’t call myself particularly knowlegeable about independent rock, I did deejay at Hope College’s radio station and hung around with at least some people who knew a lot about it. Thus, there were about 10 minutes (more than 10 years ago) when I had a good idea of the lay of the indie rock land.
Amusingly, certain attitudes in the indie rock scene haven’t changed.
1. The more obscure a band is, the better it is.
Once a band becomes well known to the general population (and signs on with a major label), it instantly begins to stink and it’s time to find a new favorite band. Questionable Content has a good illustration of that one…
Oddly enough, that’s what happened to at least a few of the bands I liked back when I followed indie/alternative rock. Personally, I’ve never believed this one, and don’t find that my enjoyment of someone’s music is sullied by the fact that more than five people now know of their existence.
2. If the music came out before a certain date, it’s by definition less interesting than new music.
As someone with a strong interest in jazz, I’ve never been able to buy into this assumption. There is great new stuff coming out in jazz, but it’s got a history that you can’t ignore. Mind you, people in the jazz community used to have this attitude as well.
Anyway, the sidebar of this comic has a good example of this assumption in action.
Music changes, but human beings don’t change much at all.
Posted by Jim at January 3rd, 2006
I’ve been rereading my novel lately. It’s not a published novel. It’s the novel I started near the end of college, but never quite brought to a publishable state. I stopped near the beginning of draft three due to a combination of work, children and multiple graduate programs.
You might wonder why I would be looking it over now instead of working on my master’s project. Honestly, I need a break. For the last year, I’ve been either working on my master’s project or avoiding working on my master’s project. I need more variety in what I think about. Also, I think I’m just happier when I’m involved in telling some kind of story.
I’m not going to go into details about the plot. Part of that’s because there are a lot of unsettled details. Part of it’s because I feel uncomfortable describing a work in progress.
I am comfortable mentioning that it’s a contemporary fantasy that makes use of local, West Michigan history. Among other things, I mess around with time travel and the alternate histories that come about when people make choices. That’s really just the tip of the iceberg, though.
If I had to describe it in a sentence, I’d describe it as a cross between the Godfather and Back to the Future.
Of course, I’d only describe it that way to someone more familiar with movies than science fiction. If the person were familiar with science fiction, I’d describe it as a cross between Kim Stanley Robinson’s Orange County trilogy and Roger Zelazny’s novel Roadmarks.
Anyway, I’ve been reading over my second draft and meditating on all the things that have to be fixed in the third draft. I’d probably be going over my first draft too but unfortunately that’s lost to time. I wrote the first draft on an Amiga using Word Perfect 4.2. Needless to say, I can’t open those files anymore (but I’ve still got the disks!).
Whatever the case, the laundry list of stuff that must be changed is very long indeed. Much of the writing in the second draft really stinks–clunky dialogue, scenes that go nowhere, scenes that must be shortened, word choices that make me wince. The only really good thing about the draft is that around two-thirds in, it tightens up.
Suddenly the overlong descriptions disappear, scenes get directly to the point, and the dialogue is okay. I don’t remember when I suddenly figured out where I was going with that draft, but apparently it happened.
Now I’ve just got to rework the preceding two-thirds of the story.
In some ways this fits with my normal way of writing. During the first draft, I tend to have very low standards. Whatever comes out, comes out. I build on that, deleting and rearranging as necessary. With a poem or an essay it’s a lot easier to keep in my head what I’m trying to say. A novel includes so many things that it takes a while for me to understand what I’m doing and figure out which details are important, which aren’t, and how they fit with the overall structure of the story.
I’m thinking that this time around, I’m actually going to outline the various key story arcs. I may also go back and fix things that I think are screwed up before moving on to the next section. I’ve been avoiding that in the past because getting a particular scene right didn’t seem worth it when I didn’t understand the overall shape of the story.
Now I think that I do.