Robots, Recompense and Redux

The word of the week is perambulatory.

April 21 - Day by Day

It's looking to be a busy spring around here.

But being busy can leave you lacking time for yourself, if you're not careful. It could also mean that you are less appreciative of your life in the present while looking forward to the future.

For a long while, I thought very little about the past and the future was to much of an unknown to bother with. Which grounded me very solidly in the present, to let me focus, but that's what was needed then and not now. Self-examination of one's situation has always been a strength of mine, far more so than divining the gray mists of things to come or the mining the misty memories of the past.

NOT the way you want to discover your talent!

Similar to the 100 Days of Happiness I mentioned recently, Improving Your Life in 10 Steps is something that people can do every single day of their lives. Putting your head down and pulling through troubles is one thing, but being blind to everything but your goals is not really living, at least not in my books. Stopping to smell the roses should be on everyone's list and I speak from experience; cycling around the city year has given me a new appreciation for the every day that lies within one's touch and that can turn into a blur if you insist on stepping on the gas every time you need to get somewhere.

April 22 - 'Bot Budz!

I, for one, welcome our robot overlords!

Those of you who watch Futurama( I hope there's a lot of you reading this who are ) will be familiar with that quote. Machines that think have often been used as a metaphorical example of humanities here technology( as well as change ) and there are myriad of examples of such - the Borg from Star Trek are probably the best-known of those. Put intelligence and machine that can move under its own power and many people will tell you that humanity's days are numbered.

Myself, I just think robots are cool. Especially ones that you can own!

Back in the day, I really wanted an Omnibot 2000:

Missing: drink-serving tray and raygun.

Unfortunately, they were extraordinarily expensive; at $600 in 1984, it would cost over twice as much in today's market to purchase one… if they were still available, that is. While the Omnibot was basically a remote-controlled toy with a few automated functions, robots have come a long, long way since then with the advance of the personal computer market and advances in miniaturization technologies.

Meaning that nowadays, any g33ky dad with a knack for electronics can make his son a personal robot:

And while they're not robots, they might as well be: Daleks are both dangerous and cool and I would never want to meet one. Especially not after seeing this helpful and funny Hitchiker's-Guide-styled entry:

April 23 - Thriller Redux?

Speaking of modern technology : it's amazing what people can do these days with it.

To be more specific, it's incredible how talented CGI artists can create amazing videos using only the power of their home computer systems, no longer needing massive mainframe power. When you combine these talents with g33ky fandom, you come up with recent mesmerizing creations like this:

By comparison, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within came out back in 2001 and had millions of hours of computing power poured into it in order to create the fantastic graphics. There were quite a few g33ks involved in its creation and some of them used some spare computing power to create this fantastic animation - coincidentally using the same song as the one for the Frozen video above:

April 24 - A Week To Go!

Just one week to go and I'll have finished the first major edit of the third draft!

Meaning that I'll be spending all my spare time in May going through and adding smaller things here and there but not doing another full revision; that's to be for a professional editor in the future.

I can talk faster than I can type - some days...

This week I also had some MAJOR ideas for improving the novel yet again. Note I said 'improve' there, not 'change completely' - I believe the work that I've done so far holds together very well and there's no need to 'fix' it in any major way. Barring any glaring flaws, the book in its final form should be ready within a month or two at the most. I can hardly wait to read the finished product myself from cover to cover!

In the meantime, as I've been doing for the last few years, I have been accumulating tips, tricks and writing advice - both from the perspective of an author and from the business side of the craft. There's literally tons of advice out there and you could spend the rest of your life reading about it instead of actually writing, as I am very well aware. I've gone from reading to writing and one of the common pieces of advice is that once you started writing, you should never stop.

Recently I came across this list of 50 Books That Will Make You Better Writer and I have read some of them and though I didn't find all of them helpful, I can recommend the list so that people can make their own choice. I do find it amusing that I have hundreds of bookmarks about writing advice and very little time to peruse them - I imagine anyone who's doing something they're passionate about for living feels the same way about reading on the same subject.

April 25 - The Phone Call!

Good news everyone: I have a job Interview next week!

As most of you know, I've been looking for quite some time to find a better job than my current one which, though the people are wonderful, doesn't pay a living wage - unless you live in a cardboard box. And this is the first interview I've been able to land in a year...

The new job would be a government position, working downtown within walking distance of my current domicile - no need for a bus or even a bicycle, which is fantastic. The pay is almost twice what I'm making now and would be better even than what I was making back at MMart, which boggles my mind considering how much smoke was blown in my direction about how well-paid I was then. Not nearly enough, in my opinion, for everything that I went through there.

That was the past however; I'm looking forward to the future now. I've gone from being employed at a terrible job to being unemployed and having a wonderful time writing my book to being employed with wonderful people, so it's all about your perspective. I'm certainly not any kind of corporate ladder climber and would rather make my living by being creative than kowtowing; I've shown I can hold my own with my writing. If I keep working at my word crafting harder than any job I've had before, I know that it will be something I can do for the rest of my life and hopefully get paid for it in the bargain.

And from the past:  how about Andy Warhol?

I just have to throw this little bit in here: I have spoken this week in the blog about how technology keeps advancing. I used to own an Amiga computer, which back in its day was one of the most advanced personal computers available on the market… which unfortunately ignored the Amiga and went with the Windows PC( or even the Mac ) instead.

However, creative artists at the time knew that the media was THE premier machine to allow their creativity to blossom and one of those artists was Andy Warhol.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder - in this case, the middle.

Just recently, some of Warhol's last works, created just before he died, were uncovered on digital media by a computer club in Pittsburgh,PA. It's fascinating to see how a famous artist was able to effortlessly create new works in a new medium, one that I knew at the time to be cutting-edge.

Perhaps I'll find the same thing out when creating my first e-book?

April 26 - Speedy Surfing

Since I'm on a bit of a g33ky bend this week, let's talk about browsers.

On my computers, I use a mix of browsers: all of the major ones, in fact. FireFox, Chrome, Opera and even Safari… All of them have their strengths and weaknesses. Considering that I usually have several hundred tabs open at a time, it's useful to be able just to start up a browser and pick up where I left off.

However, even with memory-management and tab-organization software plug-ins, it can get a little crowded and the browsers slow down. So I usually use each browser to surf different subjects separately - for example, Opera is mainly for writing, chrome for gaming and entertainment, etc.

Drowning in a sea of tabs...

This week I've started using a fifth browser, one that's faster than any of the others, called WaterFox. It's a variant on Firefox, as you may have guessed and owes its speed to being a pure 64-bit browser. Windows 7 and 8 are written in 64-bit code and since 2009 most computers have shipped with 64-bit CPU's, which is a perfect match-up. Using WaterFox this week has been lovely, as the browser speed paired with the 16gb of RAM in my older desktop PC has been a great combination - the less time I have to wait for things to load, the more time I have to sort through all of my interests!

Speaking of interest, there's a lot of interest in low interest these days and in the near future.

A recent report about the state of Canada's economy look specifically at the interest rates of our country and pronounced the situation has a good one - very good, in fact. Canadians are currently enjoying some of the lowest interest rates in their history and it looks like things are going to be that way for a while. Which is good news for anyone carrying any debt, though I should caution against anyone picking up more debt due to the tempting low rates; it's always better to just get which you need instead of eyeing that gold-plated Porsche that you saw on TV.

April 27 - Too Many Thoughts

Sometimes there's too much to talk about in one blog entry.

Week to week, there's a lot going on in my head, many things piquing my interest and setting my thoughts in 100 directions a day. Some of these things I write down for later and some of I don't; some things I feel like discussing and some things will never see the light of day… well, basically because they're stuck inside my head( where there's no actual light )and I don't think there of value to anyone but myself. Then again, who am I to judge what's of value to another person?

Yup - it's like that.

All the same, I think it's a wonderful thing that so much about the world fascinates me that I can make so many connections between things that pop up in my life on a daily basis. I like to think that at the end of each day I understand a few things a little better and that makes the next day a little better as well.

In other good news, the injury I did to my side a month ago seems to have healed and I can move without pain day-to-day - yay! I'm quite glad and relieved, as I'm still dealing with the yo-yo factor of my wrists, which can be decent one day and bedeviling me the next. I hope that in my new job, the lack of lifting heavy objects on a daily basis will mean that my wrists have a chance to recover; the jury still out on how much typing I'll have to do with data entry, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

As I've mentioned, it's going to be a BUSY week: finishing off the last 5 chapters of my novel AND going in for a job interview, not to mention working 3 days at my current job and taking time for all the other sundries that make up a day in the Life Of Me. Should be fun. :-)