Torrents, Trojans and Twenty Chapters

The word of the week is obsequious.

April 7 - Approved!

All things considered, today was a pretty good day.

I was busy as all heck though! Running around during the day to get things done before heading out to Cordova Bay to get some editing done on the novel took up a goodly amount of time. Plus, I was at my writer's group Meet N'Greet around dinnertime, which went VERY well: it's hard to tell some nights if people will be more into general conversation than games but MAN, they were talkative tonight! It was hard to tear myself away from the conversation at the end, since we all had to go home, but it boded very well for the rest of the year that we have such a fun, intelligent and genial group who gather every few weeks. 

Ah, but the main thing today was: I was approved for my( second-time-around )new laptop! 

It was actually rather surprising how smoothly the process went; I was in and out of work in about half an hour or so. Papers filed, deposit paid and silly grin plastered on my face, yup. Sunny and bright, perfect weather to run around skipping for joy with a new toy... er, laptop for doing my writing with, tucked safely in my pack.

Look, it's smart enough to find my lost marbles!

Having spent hours late in the evening properly setting up my new PC, I'm really happy with the unit, with none of the knuckle-dragging the Acer S3 vex-hibited. Admittedly, the SSD storage space is pretty limited and I'll have to be careful with what I install, even with using Dropbox for my files - I can supplement my storage with flash drives, if needed.

The main thing is now having a portable computer that doesn't struggle to do what I need it to do. That's really what it's all about and in that regard this new Samsung Ultrabook is wonderful.

April 8 - Siberian Mysteries

Everyone loves a little mystery, right?

Stories about mysterious places have always peaked my interest, especially ones that involve ancient places and things that can't be readily explained even buy modern science. And where better to find a mystery then somewhere remote, like Siberia? We're not talking about ordinary mysteries here either; no, we're looking at things that defy the normal and make silly faces at reality, possibly diving right into the down right unexplainable.

Mysteries that involve inaccessible places are always the best mysteries and the deep northern parts of Russia are just that: inaccessible. Very few people live or travel there willingly and if you DO want to visit, you really have to  be prepared for a journey of epic proportions. You also have to be prepared to see perhaps a whole lot of nothing, as mysteries don't tend to draw attention to themselves, you know.

In this particular inaccessible mystery, what one would hope to see you would be strange underground domes, made of metal, that are warm as the spring breeze, even in the middle of winter:

Yes, he's riding a reindeer - no, that's not a Frozen joke.

Stories like that of ancient Atlantis, lost civilizations and even the aliens are all rolled into one with this tale and it's fascinating to read. The adventure was made by one Ivan Mackerle and his team and you can read about it here as well as see pictures from his expedition. Not that I believe every word, mind you, but it's fascinating nonetheless. With stories like these, the writer in me joins hands with my inner child and dance around the possibilities that places like this suggest about what our universe may contain.

And the truth? It's still buried somewhere deep in the permafrost in Siberia.

 

 

April 9 - Halfway Point

Novel update: Today marks the halfway point of editing my novel.

Twenty chapters have been thoroughly edited and although I don't consider the first half of the book complete, it's incredibly far along the way towards being finished. The second half of the novel still needs to be edited, of course, but that's on track with my current pace for being done by the end of May 2014. That likely includes a few weeks of tweaking and putting in little touches that make the whole better than the parts, which is all just part of the editing process. If you're curious about that, this article has a neat little summary of what an author should look for when editing their first draft; useful advice!

And then there's people who make BIG mistakes when editing...

 

In all the headlines this week was Heartbleed, a HUGE bug in the security code used by millions of websites the world over.

If you haven't read what all the fuss is about, this article is a succinct and useful summary of what Heartbleed's all about and what you need to do about it to protect yourself. Don't be complacent; go and read the article, then change your passwords - this article has a short list of the major sites affected.

If you don't, you're taking your chances that someone else will change your passwords for you.

April 10 - Diamonds for Batsy!

Batman turned 75  today.

To celebrate the singular distinction, a special animated short was created by none other than Bruce Timm, who was a cornerstone of the original Batman animated series on television in the 1990s. It's a fantastic short, done in the old 1940's serial style and you can see it in all its glory below:

To be honest, Batman's a little moody for my tastes. I much prefer Spiderman, for all of his introspective uncertainty and bigger zest-for-life then ol' Batsy has - or at least shows, anyway. Yet the enduring brilliance of Batman can be perhaps be best summed up by saying that he's an ordinary man who dedicates his life to a cause so completely that he transcends his circumstances and became something greater.

I think we can all learn a lesson from that, which may last for at least another 75 years.

 

 

April 11 - Being Punctual

Are you a Grammar Nazi or a member of the Punctuation Police?

I'm not either, but had to laugh when I stumbled across a series of photographs of terribly-punctuated signs. While I'm excellent at spelling and have a solid vocabulary, sometimes punctuation is a bit of a grey area. I can see how some people might be confused, especially if they have a not-so-great-grasp of the English language to begin with, in all it's strange and twisted convolutions of rules and exceptions. I present to you an example below:

On a related note, I've enjoyed this year of not sweating as much about being early or even perfectly on-time for work. In my previous job, I had a very narrow window of arrival and departure, no more than 5 minutes, due to the restrictions placed on us by the monitoring company. Having your DM get a phone call because you were late to work was rather stressful and while that never happened to me personally, I still stressed about punctuality. My current job has started to get that way again and that's not a good sign, I think - casual lateness is something to be discouraged, I agree, but when a workplace starts seeing the clock as some sort of holy institution, that rings warning bells in my brain.

I hope it's just a phase they're going through and will grow out of, in time.

April 12 - Driving Cloud Storage

Don't you love it when things get less expensive overtime? It's so rare...

In the tech world, that usually means things get faster and smaller, the less expensive is a relative term and tends to take a long time overall. Price points do fall: high-end laptops were $4,000 twenty years ago when I was in university and now they're $1,000-ish. Still pricey but not out of the reach of ordinary people.

Cloud storage has been somewhat pricey for a couple of years, but the whole industry got a kick in the pants this week when Google nose-dived the pricing for all of its cloud-storage plans across the board. While my own 50gb of Dropbox space runs out in September, I'll be picking up 100gb of GoogleDrive space for a mere $2.00 a month. That's right: for a Toonie a month, I'll be set for space on my mobile devices - how great is that kind of a deal? 

This week's blog was again composed on my phone by voice, which amazingly took even less time than last week. I did manage to install Dragon Naturally Speaking 11 on my new laptop, but I couldn't get the microphone working; frustration. I ended up having to download the Dragon 11 install as a torrent as I couldn't find my install disks( I own a copy )which was an adventure in itself, as I discovered that - as I suspected - torrents are rife with sneaky malware and trojans. Case in point: the torrent I downloaded was infected with a trojan botnet virus, which probably makes the torrent host a fair bit of cash from stealing valuable personal info as he 'generously' lets people the world over download and install his little backdoor bug. So you have to know how to keep yourself safe when torrenting.

Scumbags and criminals: they're only a click of a button away. Be warned!

April 13 - Rollin' LARGE

Usually I sing the praises of tiny homes, but this week I found something different: a big trailer.

A really, really BIG trailer. Take a gander:

That's a man in a white shirt by the wheel.

Now, that looks like something that can only exist where there are no bridges to go under, or cross, for that matter. I searched the 'net for anything that could relate to giant RV's, trailers or other similar massive rigs but came up empty. My closest guess as to what the thing is used for is as mobile accommodations at a massive mining facility, perhaps in Australia? I'm not sure; if anyone out there has any idea what this mobile motel / apartment is used for, please let me know.

If not, it's no... big deal.

Everyone needs a day off to catch up.

Since I'm only working two days this coming week, that leaves me five days to devote to my novel. Well, four, as today( Sunday )was again devoted to catching up on other things and getting in some relax time after a busy three days working; spring weather really seems to bring people out in droves. There was only one twit in the whole lot too, which was nice; I've seen very few idiots on a daily basis this last year, which has been wonderful... I don't think I've smiled as much in the ten years at my last job as I have in this single year at Staples, which tells you a lot. 

 

 All for now - lots of work to do this week to get at least another 5 chapters edited, at least!

Roleplaying, Recycling and Returns

The word of the week is happenstance.

March 31 - Cool News

Humanity took another big step towards reaching the stars today.

Surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital have begun human trials for suspended animation. They will be testing new techniques that allow victims of accidents and violence to be put into an artificial state of low-temperature suspension in order to help the surgeons slow the loss of blood while they repair the patient's body.

If this sounds like science fiction to you, you're not far off. Up until now, there's been no method developed that would allow humans to be placed into a state of chilled metabolism that would be ideally suited to long-term interstellar travel. Up until less than a decade ago, if you froze someone, there was a vanishingly small chance you could ever revive them and even if you could, they’d likely have suffered severe brain or organ damage.

Be sure to get frozen with a good expression on your face

With the new procedures being tested, the next step of sending humans into space on journeys of hundreds or thousands of years is a little closer. Admittedly, the starships that the people would be traveling on would need to be reliable on a scale at an order of magnitude greater than any level of technology available today, but that's another story.

For now, it's thrilling to see science make a major advance like this, where people can dream of the stars and perhaps even a chance for immortality at the same time.

April 1 - Library Launch

Tonight I attended a book launch!

It was the first book launch I've ever attended, being held at the local library in Colwood. A friend of mine from my writing group wrote several stories for an anthology and had invited me to come on out to the launch. I thought it was a great idea, arriving there just a little bit after dinner time.

It was a smaller affair than I anticipated, with around a dozen people including the authors and the publishers, but it was definitely an excited group. The authors each stood up to read a piece from their work in the various books being launched this evening, excerpts of no more than 10 minutes in length. It was thrilling to see the excitement in their eyes and hear it in her voice as they read their work for the rapt audience.

If you have THIS many people at your book launch, congrats!

Afterwards, the conversations were animated and although I didn't get a chance to speak to some of the authors, one and all they were floating above the ground with having their work finally in print. Much like my own feeling of euphoria when I had the second draft copies of my book printed last summer; it was wonderful to see that same feeling reflected in the eyes of many of the people tonight.

As for my own book launch, I'm hoping that will take place within a year or two and perhaps be held somewhere more grandiose than a library, no fooling.

I'm thinking... a shuttle launch pad.

Speaking of which: for some reason my blog has received hundreds of hits this week:

Normal activity is 15-25 hits a day, so wow...

I've no idea why, but it's kind of thrilling. Who are all these people and where are they coming from? As far as I can tell, it's not some kind of bot-rush or other stat-skewing slew of pageviews, so we'll have to wait and see what the stats show in the next few weeks. I don't believe they're hackers or bots, as the stats would show known referral sites or the same address trying dozens of times, but who knows these days.

Heck, I might be getting popular... this week's post is my 333rd, after all!

April 2 - New Laptop Blues

I returned my new Acer laptop today.

I had no other choice, really. I spent too much time over the course of two days this week trying to overcome the issues I was having with the unit, with no success. The final straw was where I was forced to chat with an Acer technician via their website in order to get an answer and THAT only happened after a needlessly convoluted and protracted warranty registration nightmare that took most of a day. It was a terrible experience and extremely frustrating only to find in the end the answers I got were the ones I hadn't wanted to hear anyway.

In the end, there were two major reasons I had to return the laptop. The first was that the 'green' 5400rpm hard drive was far too slow to allow me to multitask, and so use the laptop's speedy i5 processor efficiently. I had to wait for anything to happen when browsing the web or editing documents at the same time, which is unacceptable for a modern computer. The 20gb 'SSD' drive that was advertised on the S3 turned out to be a 'cache' and not an SSD at all, useful only for quick bootups and putting the laptop to sleep - Windows runs from the slow hard drive and that is a Very Bad Thing when it comes to speed.

Seriously. It felt like this.

The second reason was that if I had wanted to open the computer's case to upgrade the hard drive, Acer would consider that to be voiding my warranty; again, unacceptable. I was especially annoyed by the second item, as some manufacturers will allow you to upgrade a laptop hard drive and not consider it as voiding one's warranty. Given the hoops I had to go through to even eke out that little bit of information from Acer, I knew that the laptop was going to be returned.

Fortunately, while I was at work today I stumbled across a serendipitous solution. Another ultrabook had come in as an online return and amazingly it was everything I wanted... And it was only $30 more costly than the Acer unit I was returning! I looked over the stats: it's  the highly-rated NP540-U3C by Samsung, with an i5 CPU and best of all, has a solid state drive inside that is 10x's speedier then the silly Acer S3 laptop. It's small and portable and powerful and I feel very, very lucky that my timing was so perfect to find it this week after making my decision to return the Acer. 

I've set the Samsung aside with my name on it until next Wednesday, when I should be able to effect the transfer of my employee computer purchase plan over to it. I'm very pleased and looking forward to using the notebook as I intended, to write what I need to when I need to and not being hamstrung by unadvertised quirks in the technology.

April 3 - Chapters Three

After a full day's work, three whole chapters were done being edited.

Overall, I'm pleased with that result this week, given the issues I had trying to get my Acer laptop 'fixed' this week. I'm also happy with the writing that resulted, as several of the chapters I edited were crucial ones, with a lot of tweaks and additional information that have now made them a much better fit into the overall story.

NEWS FLASH: one of my favorite video games of all time is coming back!

Homeworld, one of the classics of space warfare, is being remastered for release sometime later this year. This is fantastic news, as the space RTS genre has been rather lackluster in the last decade or so. Homeworld was a fantastic game, with incredible 3d visuals and a compelling storyline that, combined with fluid game mechanics, made for a game that has yet to be surpassed even today.

Put into a modern gaming system with updated graphics, I can hardly imagine how wonderful an experience it will be. I have to confess, I may end up trying it out with the 3d feature of my television, just because I want to see if that adds anything to the game. I've tried the 3dTV with a few other games of a similar nature and so far found it to be fairly gimmicky instead of useful. Here's hoping Homeworld will be different in that regard.

April 4 - You, Not Me?

I was told today I was flawed.

A very good friend of my sisters saw me at a party last week and confided to her that although he found me a fascinating conversationalist, he noted that I rarely asked questions about the people I am speaking with. He said it was something that he'd noticed about me the last several times when we were all out together socially and he felt the need to let me know, albeit in a roundabout way.

As a writer, someone who is supposed to be observing most everything going on around them, it is a major failing not to dig into the character of other people in order to discover the gems of the stories that they carry with them. Not to mention just finding out more about them, which will better inform the creation of your own characters as an author.

Plus, it's just polite.

Honest observations like this don't come along every day and I'm very grateful for my sisters friend for feeling the need to tell me about this, however obliquely. I'm hoping that I don't have too many other major shortcomings that have gone unnoticed, but don't consider this a request for all of you to write me to let me know everything that's wrong with me. Considering that most people are quite blind to their own flaws unless they have them bluntly pointed out to them, I'm pretty certain that I don't have too many other character flaws hiding inside.

Also, the thought that I may be subtly narcissistic yet not have noticed did cross my mind. I'm by no means a selfish person, but still I can't help but wonder if subconsciously I love to talk about many subjects and one of those subjects is me. However it comes up, I'll happily chat and perhaps in that mirror-like focus, I lose sight of the fact that I may be talking to someone who may be as interesting as me... or likely even more so.


April 5 - Roll 'em!

After work today: adventure!

For the first time in almost a decade, I played a game of Dungeons and Dragons using pen and paper and those wonderful random dice that tend to cause a lot of screaming for joy or in horror. I have to say I'm forever grateful to my parents for allowing me to play DnD when I was young and not listening a whit to the fearmongers who tried to ban the game - it's made my imagination what it is today.

The group was a good size: eight people, including the DM, only some of whom I've met before. We gamed at a lovely location just outside the city with plenty of room for us all to gather round a single large trestle table. Although we didn't game for more than a few hours at this initial session, I found the people to be simply wonderful folks who, if you believe it, all have an appreciation for puns!

It was pretty much like this. Guess who I am?

Needless to say, I had a great evening and I admit that I spent more time thinking about one -liners then I did about how my character's personality was being portrayed. I also am happy to say that I spent a lot less time with my nose in a manual buying equipment and far more time paying attention to the game, something I've known that I'm guilty of doing from past DnD sessions.

There's a certain thrill to gaming with people in person that can't be had online, though there are advantages to both. I do enjoy using my imagination and interacting with people personally quite a lot, so tonight was wonderful in both regards. I'm really looking forward to the next session in a few weeks when we might actually get something done other than swat a few cyclops mere steps from a bar...

In the meantime, my rogue will be counting his loot.



April 6 - Idle Recycle

This coming week has me working a mere two days. Erk.

Part-time doesn't cut it for making headway in my financial life as you might imagine. Ironically, I cashed in a whole pile of cans and bottles for recycling from work today, simply to get them out of the way as nobody else there has bothered in months. My motive was to use the money to pay for a farewell party for one of the staff who's leaving in a few week's time, which was fine by store management. As I was heading out to Cordova Bay today for the first of four days of writing, I had the van anyway and was able to pack it to the gunwales with the entire load of recyclables - they barely all fit, if you 'can' believe it.

A canner in NY from the Oscar-nominated film 'Redemption' 

Now, there are people here in Victoria( and elsewhere, too )called 'canners' who go around the entire city tirelessly, searching every available bin for recyclable items to take for a deposit refund. I see them wheeling bicycles or shopping carts festooned with bulging backs of cans and bottles and have sometimes wondered what all that effort has netted them. I wonder if it's worth the effort compared to holding down a regular job that doesn't pay much, like mine.

As it turns out: it doesn't pay very well at all.

After sorting and bagging five massive sacks of recyclables, the total payout was $53.00 even for over 1,000 items turned in. Good for party funds, lousy for living on.

See if you can name them all; I couldn't ... 

Tonight is also the premiere of the 4th season of Game of Thrones, which I'm sure has millions of people jumping up and down for joy. While I'm one of those people, I'm not going to be watching the 4th season premiere tonight as I still haven't manage to see any of the third season episodes yet, for various reasons.

Soon enough, though. In the meantime, if you need to catch yourself up on what's happened in the previous three seasons, you can find a great refresher over at io9.com who have done a wonderful job in the article of catching readers up on each season. They also have an episode by episode guide that you can read too; again, I'll be getting there soon...

That's all I've got for you this week. Since I'm starting my writing sabbatical early on Sunday night in Cordova Bay, I don't have my home PC's voice recognition software to help me write this week's blog. Meaning that I had to use Google Voice on my phone to capture the bulk of the words, errors and all, then slap that into my browser to edit by hand. As error-prone as the raw text was, it still took me about three hours to edit it all down to the final version, which isn't bad. Have a great week!

Martians, Machinations and Miscommunication

The word of the week is propitious.

March 24 - Personal Progress

Timing is everything this spring.

My schedule has thankfully fallen into a perfectly practical regular rhythm, where weekly I work three days on and have four days off to write my novel as well as catch up with my life.

In terms of having a life, I've been working steady weekends and that's not been so great for getting out to meet people. All the same, my hourly wage isn't exactly ranking in the 'disposable' category currently, so perhaps it's for the best that I've not been going out much of evenings.

Yes, it's an e-card. No, I couldn't find anything that wasn't less lame.

Right now I'm not feeling the lack. I have a job, I have my novel and I have my family here in BC, all of whom are doing well. I've set aside almost everything else that I could be doing to focus on what I need to be doing and that's enough. Material things are not even on my radar anymore and I haven't watched any of the many TV series or read most of the books I own practically since this time last year. Heck, I still haven't seen a single second of the third season of Game Of Thrones( which I love! )and the fourth season is starting anytime now. Perhaps I gives you an idea of how I've disassociated myself from most everything except what I've already mentioned I'm up to this spring.

Finding a better job is next on my priority list, as soon as I've finished editing my novel's third draft. Once I've established a better pay scale, I can spend my non-day-job time working on the next book in my trilogy. It would be wonderful to be able to take three months off as I did back in 2012 - I am confident that I can put in the time day-to-day and still manage to get similar results within a similar time frame later this year. 

 I haven't set a goal yet but I'd very much like to make a good start to the second book by year's end while I shop my first book around some agents to see who might be interested.

March 25 - Shock

Today found out my granddad had a stroke, several weeks ago. Two strokes, actually.

He's still with us thankfully and has suffered no major effects, but I was shocked by the news! Nobody on that side of the family had told MY side of the family, not even a hint.

That's not the way things  need to work in a close family and I'm horrified that weeks have gone by with my family here in BC having no idea of what happened.

Needless to say, while I talked to my grandfather today I had a decent chat with him about less-weighty topics, to be sure and he sounded much cheerier by the end of the call. As he's my only living grandparent left, it's weighing on my mind that in all the years that have passed, I've seen very little of him or my late grandmother, for that matter. You can't get back the time that you didn't spend with someone and while I'm not one for regrets, I wish that family matters had worked out differently and that I could have a little time back to spend more of it with that side of my family.

Don't wait until it's too late. I'm hearing that loud and clear.

March 26 - More Of The Same

My workplace is chaotic.

That's a rather charitable description and in no way reflects anything about the character of the people who work there. It's just a simple fact that the store could be run much more efficiently and given the current way that it's going day to day, I find myself with little desire to dive into the chaos in order to 'fix' things - that's not my responsibility.

What it does bring to mind is leadership.

There are thousands of books about leadership out there, many of them very well-written and all of them espousing various Rules and Insights into the seemingly magical or mystical methods of inspiring people to work harder for the same pay. I've read more than my fair share of them and no two books are the same.

Essentially, it boils down to this: you're either a good leader or deficient one and oftentimes it's difficult for you to tell the difference. Good leaders might not be efficient whereas deficient ones might very well be efficient in some ways but don't realize they're sorely lacking in others.

When I think about leadership, I think about the people I've worked for that I respected and inspired me to want to do my very best. Others make me want to watch the clock and become very good at my job so that they don't breathe down my neck every 5 minutes to make sure I haven't made yet another tiny mistake.

Good leaders make better companies and better people. Who doesn't realize that?

March 27 - 1/4 done!

At the end of today, I finished editing the first 10 chapters of my novel's third draft.

This was the most difficult part of what I had to do for the book, in a way, because of the almost total restructuring that every scene and every chapter had to go through.

Now that that task is done, I am FAR happier with the way the book reads from the very start. I've also been able to insert and tweak many more layers and aspects of the story overall, meaning that little seeds are planted earlier in the book that will grow throughout much more naturally.

I won't bore you with the details, but suffice to say I'm energized to finish the rest of the book over the course of the next few months. I'll be plugging away every week, solidly turning the words over line by line and scene by scene in order to make them the best they can possibly be. I'm taking pains not to obsess over any particular part but to look at it as needing to progress steadily on the project as a whole.

That's all for now. Back to writing...

March 28 - New Writing Tool!

I bought a laptop today. Well, I started interest-free payments for one, that is. 

My workplace sells laptops by the job-lot and there's been a little ultrabook sitting at the end of an aisle for longer than I've been working at the store, unsold. Yesterday its price dropped yet again and as it was the last one, on clearance, I bit the bullet and put in to buy it on our company Computer Purchase Plan. I was approved for the CPP( heh )today, meaning that I'll be paying a mere $40/month, sans interest, to own this sleek bundle of techno-joy.

Why do I need a newer laptop, you ask?

The key word there is 'need' - it's for my writing and for the last half a year, the hand-me-down laptop from my parents has been a struggle to use. It's slow, quite heavy to carry around and prone to overheating; all those factors don't help my creative workflow. The same goes for my 3-year old ASUS Transformer, which I originally hoped I could tote around to write wherever and whenever I wanted, but again the tool wasn't right: it's even slower than the old laptop and multi-tasking? Forget it.

The Acer S3 is a tool suited perfectly to my writing needs: it has an 'instant-on' feature I've not seen in most any other laptop I've sold at my work. Meaning I can flip it open and start writing within seconds, which I could kind of do with my slower ASUS; something I still love about that machine. Here's a picture of all three units, with the Toshiba on the left, the new Acer S3 in the middle and the ASUS Transformer on the right:

Left: Big and bulky - Middle: Best! - Right: Better but backward

Needless to say, I'm over the moon at being able to get such a stellar laptop( ultrabook! )for such a tiny monthly outlay. It will make editing the remainder of my novel this spring a MUCH smoother process and getting started on my second book all the simpler.

A final note: turning the Acer S3 over, I noticed to my delight that the unit was manufactured on August 29, 2012, only 24 hours before the day I finished my novel's first draft! It's as if the universe anticipated my needs and gave the order to create this particular Acer S3 when it did, harmoniously for me to find it this spring and put it to good use for my writing.

I think that's an extraordinarily cool coincidence!

March 29 - Blossoms

Victoria's beautiful in the spring, more so than any place I've ever seen in my life.

The blossoms here are what makes it so lovely. The city had the foresight to plant thousands of cherry trees decades ago and every year they bloom, as I've mentioned here in the blog before. The expectation of such sights each year still doesn't take away from its majesty. Just have a look at this picture that a local photographer posted of a random city street here:

Stunning.

On my way to work today, the wind had picked up ever so slightly. Small swirling vortices of blossoms accompanied me as I cycled along streets, dancing around in ahead of me in pink choreographed chaos. It reminded me very much of the scene from American Beauty, where a plastic bag was filmed as it played with the wind: enchanting and unique and inspiring.

That's Victoria. I love it here.

March 30 - Mars

Four years.

In less than half a decade, the next step outwards from our planet will take place.

Mars One will launch the initial stage of what will be the first manned mission to Mars. Unmanned ships will preceed the habitable trans-solar vessels that will carry the first permanent colonists to the red planet.

It's mind-boggling to think that in a decade's time, humans will be walking on the red planet. Permanently too, I might add: everyone who's going to Mars is taking a one-way trip, leaving everything and everyone they know behind in order to take the next giant step for humanity. Naturally, there's nothing saying that if those first brave colonists are still alive in another 30 years then there might be more regular travel between Earth and Mars to allow a return trip, but that's just speculation right now. Besides, if they're willing to leave the earth behind, why reason would they have to come back at all at any point in the future?

Lots of 'ifs' go through my head when I think of the Mars One project. If my situation here on Earth had been different, if I had no permanent ties here and if I had a skill set next that would let me be considered for the mission, I think I would have volunteered. One of the few regrets I have in my life is that I likely will never travel in space, between the planets or the stars, so setting foot on another planet would literally be a dream come true for me. Perhaps in another 40 years, I'll be able to afford a ticket to Mars to go and look for John Carter's footprints among the red dunes of that distant, alien world.

Not so alien, though, if humans are walking its surface soon.

It's a weary me who's wrapping up the blog a little after midnight this week. My left side is still aching now and then, depending on what I've been doing. I have an appointment next week to get an ultrasound, which I hope will have nothing to say save needing more time to heal. All I want to do now is write; work's been less real to me than the words in my head fighting to be realized and the clock's ticking to get my stories out into the world.