Waiting, Wizards and Welcoming Change

The word of the week is convergence.

Oct 6 - It's In The Air

I get the feeling change is coming.

Exactly what I mean by that, I'm not certain. At least, not yet.

Things are stabilizing in my life, here and there, enough that I can appreciate each good thing that comes into it more than I might have a few years ago when my eyes were too busy to really take things in properly. I'm thankful to be were am right now, for my close family to be here with me and for my many friends who have remained in my life despite my somewhat inattentive ways over the years. Not that I'm a terrible friend, but it's hard to keep up with people when I'm so far away from the vast majority of them.

I could ramble on here about the vagaries of friendship, of the necessity of close relationships in one's life or the way that social media has changed the way that people look at both of those things now. But I don't think that I need to right now, nor do you, my readers, need to hear another diatribe on the subject. At least not one from someone who's not put enough thought into it before speaking on the subject.

Things are changing. I think that's good and for now, that's enough.

Oct 7 - Invited, Plus One!

I finally got an invite... to buy a phone, that is.

For six months now, I've been trying to get an invite for the OnePlus One, a highly-desirable but hard-to-get cell phone out of the USA. Because OnePlus is a small company that only started selling their phones earlier this year, they don't have the capacity to take thousands of orders a day - hence their 'Invite' system, where you are ONLY allowed to purchase a phone if you get an invitation.

Said invites have to come from current OnePlus One owners, via the Forums hosted by OnePlus and as you can imagine, there's a lot of competition for invites: they're usually gone in seconds, not minutes. So it's been a tad frustrating for me to swing and miss, so often.

The phrase 'Never Settle' is one I really like.

Why do I want a OnePlus One, anyway?

Because the phone is touted as a 'Flagship killer' - its specs are comparable to the best phones out on the market today, but for hundreds less than said flagships, which is music to my wallet. There's a solid article here comparing the specs of the OnePlus One, the Galaxy S5 and the HTC M8, all three of which I've considered getting these last few months as my S3 continued to frustrate me. You can also read some enthusiastic reviews which speak glowingly of the OnePlus One here; lots of people really, really love this 'budget' superphone.

At last, tonight, I managed to snag an invite! I had popped onto the OnePlus Forums as usual, for a few minutes a day, hoping to spot a little-read or brand-new thread with Invites being offered. As luck would have it, my eye was caught by a thread titled 'Canadians Only' and I hurried in, learning that the thread owner would give an invite to the first Canadian to msg him - so I did. As it turns out, I WAS the first!

After doing a jig around my apartment with a silly grin plastered on my face, I sat down and ordered the OnePlus One, luckily having already set the money aside for this fortunate occurrence - not a dollar more, either, as I refused to consider going back onto a contract in order to 'afford' an S5 or M8… nope. Never again.

My new phone should be here next week, in plenty of time for me to configure it to take along to NYC with me. Two wonderful invites rolled into one!

Oct 8 - On Writing

Research.

That's what I'm doing at the moment, sadly, instead of writing further chapters on Book Two. Ever since I was thrown for a Feedback Loop( since recovered from )last month, I've been reluctant to return to writing Book Two, which I think has to do with my perceiving my 'world' isn't ready for prime-time yet.

Which is a good thing.

Writing's a business, more so in these times of Amazon and ebooks than ever. Gone are days when writers emerged from their Writing Retreat either to get more food or, more rarely, mail a manuscript to their agent, who handled all the Complicated Stuff to do with licensing, publishers and trivial things like royalties or film rights.

The modern writer has taken on a lot of the tasks that formerly fell to agents or publishers, which in itself isn't a bad thing: the more aware a writer is of how the real world works, the better the effort they'll put into their work in order to make it rise above all the other stories out their vying for the ever-stretched attention of John or Josie Public.

It's even harder for self-published authors, who have to do all of the footwork themselves. All the same, there's a huge upheaval in the industry right now, ever since Amazon's ebook strategies fundamentally shifted how book-buyers parted with their hard-earned cash. It's simple nowadays for people to make a few $3.00 purchases, expecting their books to be of a decent quality comparable to what they'd find on any reputable bookstore's shelves. Which is why I'm in no hurry to release my own books until they're of that quality.

Or better.

Oct 9 - Bye Bye, Boob Tube!

Today, I cancelled our cable - again.

We're fully, totally cutting ties to Shaw this time though, as $150 +tax per month is just too much money for what we're using. I watch maybe an hour of TV a week, have TV shows clogging my PVR that I'll never find the time to watch and barely use the local phone 'included' in the bundle we have as my Vonage phone suffices for all my long-distance needs and the rates / minutes are actually superior to Shaw. Leaving just the internet, which I've had at Shaw's $90/month rate for a few months now and grown to like for the speed, both upload and download.

Back in the early 1990's, finding an ISP was easy, as there were many local outfits that provided internet services of all kinds: you just had to know what you wanted and compare prices. Then cable internet came in and the rest was history, including most of those smaller ISP's, who couldn't compete price-wise or feature-wise.

There's still some independents out there though and I've decided to go with one of them, after researching for many months now. Lightspeed.ca, based out of Vancouver, offers excellent rates on internet packages comparable to Shaw's speed-wise, for about half the cost: impressive. Reviews of Lightspeed have been good for the last year, so I decided to take the plunge today after a deep breath. Amusingly, the Shaw rep who took my call didn't say a word to try to keep me, as nice as he and I both were, which surprised me. Goodbye and thanks.

My budget should be $100/month fatter from this point forward and I'll put the time that I could have wasted channel-surfing to good use writing instead. Definitely a plus on both counts.

Oct 10 - Two weeks!

I'm still waiting for the good word.

As of today, Friday, there's been not even a hint about who's received one of the five permanent positions at work. I had hoped that the higher-ups would at least give us an 'announcement date' but it looks like they've opted instead for playing this one close to their vests. From what I've heard around the office, this is normal for government positions, so as to ensure people keep working efficiently in their last few weeks - the theory is, people who've been told they didn't make the cut will slack off or even 'forget' to show up for work, which I can understand but not sympathize with: my pride won't let me do that.

On to happier things though: in two weeks, I'll be in New York City!

My passport arrived this week, all crisp and fresh, which was the last piece of the trip missing. My flight and hotel are booked, I have the area map downloaded( and marked ), my ticket to the showing of The Dark Crystal is purchased and I've confirmed with The Henson Group that I'll be attending the reception. I love saying that!

Oh and for my phone, I'll be using one of these while I'm in the States:

I wish I'd known about these cards when I went to AZ last year, but since they only work on unlocked cell phones, it wouldn't have mattered much since I just had my locked-to-Telus Galaxy S3. Eking out a wireless signal in AZ in order to check out local features was a real pain and didn't work out all that well, so having a solid data package my whole time in NYC will be a welcome relief. Yelping local places to eat, spots to see and the like is infinitely easier when you have the information right there on your phone screen.

It would have also saved me from getting heatstoke, if I'd known where to walk.

Oct 11 - Working Soundly

Saturday night: costume time!

It's not what you think though: tonight I spent over four hours working on my Halloween costume for this year, which is actually a carryover from last year when I didn't end up wearing it for various reasons.

Admittedly, these are g33kier than my costume

That's a good thing though, as this year's version will be even better, thanks to the work I put into it tonight. The majority of my time was spent using audio editing software to sample and various voice clips that I will be using in conjunction with my costume. I had hoped that I'd be able to reproduce the character's voice on my own, but as it turns out the vocal range is just too extreme for me to reproduce satisfactorily. So I'm just going to take a page from my Book Of G33k and use a technological solution to provide the proper audio for my costume choice. I'm really pleased with how it's turned out and apart from a couple of minor details, I'll be ready to go in a week or so, plenty of time.

It also helps that I've already received an invitation to a party this year - huzzah!

I should also mention I wrote part of this blog entry today at Moka House, sitting out on the patio and enjoying the intermittent sunshine in the albeit cool breezes that started blowing in around 3pm. The whole time, I was wearing my Parrot Ziks and was the happier for it: a few seats over, there was a girl who was a definite contender for Most Annoying Laugh of the year. I can't fault her for enjoying her time with her friend, but oh my… her infectious giggles of joy could have cut glass with their frequency and volume. I have to say her friend must have been a true one, to put up with that all the time. Slipping on my Ziks however, I just dialed up the volume and wrote to blissful sounds of my own choosing: even such a piercing laugh became background noise, easily ignored as I concentrated on other things.

Did I mention I really love it when technology works properly?

Oct 12 - Thanksgiving Magic

We did 'dinner' in style today!

A few weeks ago, I saw that The Empress Hotel would be holding Thanksgiving Dinner… as well as a Thanksgiving Brunch! I wanted to do something special this year - other than cook dinner - and though the 3-course dinner wasn't our thing, brunch has been a family tradition since I was a kid. We used to go out to all sorts of places to 'test drive' their brunches and whittle down the list to a few spots we'd come back to every month or two, most( all, actually )of which have closed their doors long since.

The Empress though; we've never been, any of us, so brunch it was!

We arrived around 10:30am, a little early, but the staff seated us right away. We were in the front section of the Empress room, which is a colonial-style dining area with 30 foot carved-mahogany ceilings and a magnificent view of the Inner Harbor. The room wasn't crowded, with only a half-dozen tables altogether and two of the walls lined with magnificently-set buffet tables, thusly:

So. Darn. Elegant.

The staff were very attentive, instantly whisking away empty plates or being at hand for unneeded drink refill; I even had someone poor my tea for me today, for the very first time. I kind of enjoyed it.

The brunch itself was more elegant than I had expected, with wonderful foods laid out to enjoy yet not anything I would call to excess. Along one wall, there was a turkey station, naturally, a roast station, about a dozen chafing dishes accompanied by brands, fruits, and other breakfast delights. The other wall had various roast vegetables, a wide variety of salad makings and of course, a large selection of desserts. It was all wonderfully fresh and perfectly cooked and the smell of the room was indescribably delicious.

That's my dad: try a little bit of everything...

Needless to say, my family and I enjoyed ourselves immensely, spending almost 2 hours in one another's company in the magnificent elegance of The Empress Room. We all ate our fill of the delicious foods, with the delicately-cooked salmon and an incredibly light mango mousse being my personal favorites. It was unquestionably the most satisfying Thanksgiving that we have had in Victoria to date and even before leaving, my parents had already decided we would come here again at Christmas.

For brunch, of course.

In the evening, I watched Oz: The Great and Powerful, which actually grew on me the more I saw of it. I'd seen bits and pieces a few times before, but tonight I needed something to pop back to now and then while writing my blog or doing other things. Amazingly, I found myself sitting and watching for long stretches at a time, which doesn't usually happen with a movie I wasn't really into the first time around. I think some of the elements of the film must have clicked in my head since I saw it last in the spring and tonight, I enjoyed it.

Tomorrow's a holiday, which I have off: hooray! I'll be doing some writing and relaxing, both in copious amounts and both likely indoors, as it's going to rain all day. Just being able to do as I please of a day is a welcome change, I must say. I'll have to see about getting more days like that into my schedule...

Ideality, Introversion and The Interview

The word of the week is transcendence.

Sept 29 - Serious Studying!

My mind was elsewhere for most of today.

Truly, it was stuck in my study notes, as it has been for the last few weeks. Today was the last day before my interview at work tomorrow, so all day long I had memorized phrases running through my head.
 

Ah, Paris... soon enough!

My stomach was also running around too, due to stress. After work, I went to a store to get a few small things on my way home, but I had to leave after five minutes or so without getting anything: the bright lights, combined with my nerves, made me feel suddenly nauseous and I felt it fade only slowly as I walked home. That sort of thing doesn't happen to me.

All the same, the rest of my evening went all right, as I made an intense( ironic, using that word )effort to calm myself, as I could feel my focus fraying and my nerves winding up far too tight. 

Fortunately, my sister is thoroughly familiar with stress-reductive techniques and recommended this 8-minute-long video, called Weightless by Marconi Union and billed as 'The Most Relaxing Song Of All Time - have a listen, but not as you're driving, please:

A few 20-ish-minute sessions of Weightless before and after dinner allowed me to find my equilibrium again, thankfully! It's a rare thing for me to feel so out of sorts, but as this is perhaps the most important interview I've had in my life, that thought's been rattling around in the back of my head for months now.

By the time I hit the hay around midnight, I felt far more confident in my preparations, having memorized keywords and phrases to use tomorrow. I fell asleep into a dreamless state almost immediately.

Sept 30 - Interview!

Today was the Big Day.

My interview for a permanent position was at 9:30am, nearly the same time I start most days, so it was an almost-normal morning routine for me. I wore a tie for the first time in years and fussed a little over my appearance, but by the time I was walking to work, I was in a state of almost zen-like calm. I was also tickled that so MANY people in the office wished me well this morning( and yesterday! )after learning today was my Big Day and that support went a long way towards balancing my head as 9:30am approached.

It kinda felt like this, from the other side.

The hour-long interview went very well, I think and I started out on the right foot with a smile.

I focused, not nervous as I answered 6 questions, in detail, using the phrases I'd memorized as well as the notes I'd jotted down at the beginning, immediately as I was seated. Drawing on my experience of the past twenty years at my various jobs, I focused my responses to ensure I gave as detailed and concise answers as possible. It was important that I hit as many of the expected keywords as possible as I spoke and I believe I did, as the three interviewers( all of whom I knew, which apparently is rare according to other people in the office )took copious notes, pages and pages, which made me rather happy despite the slight strain I noticed in my voice as I spoke.

I was finished in 45 minutes and felt I'd put in my best performance. I'd answered all the questions with detailed examples from my past work( and personal )experience, according to the guidelines I'd memorized and adding in little details as I went along when I felt I needed to emphasize a point. By the end, I actually felt there was little more I could add and the atmosphere in the room was, if not relaxed, far more comfortable than at the beginning.

Going back to my desk, I was feeling drained, but satisfied, and the rest of my day went along smoothly enough, with no residual stress lingering in my body by the time I left work.

Heading home wasn't in the cards though, as I'd promised myself a reward if I nailed the interview. I went over to the Brickyard for a beer and a pizza, which I enjoyed quite a lot:

A movie after my reward-dinner was also on the agenda, but unfortunately I'd been nursing a headache from mid-afternoon onwards and I decided on heading home. Besides, the only movie I would have felt like seeing was Guardians of the Galaxy, but as it'd have been the fifth time I'd have seen it, I passed - I'll pick it up on Blu-Ray in a few months anyway, with lots of special features to boot. 

No sense in overdoing it.

An evening of Just Relaxing, with a decent time picked to collapse into sleep and I'd call it a good day. According to office scuttlebutt, we may know as early as next week as to who won the five available positions.

Wish me luck!

Oct 1 - Time For Other Things!

Whew!

It's a new month and a new set of priorities for me.

Now that my Big Day is past( except for the waiting, that is )there's time now for me to do other things that have stagnated a while. Obviously, the first thing on my agenda is to get writing again on my second book, which has languished now for almost 2 months. I believe that I've recovered, for the most part, from the body-blow of feedback that I received from my friend a few weeks ago and that I'm ready to continue writing where I left off. The fourth draft of Book One will wait until early in the new year, when I hope to have finished the first draft of Book Two, as I've mentioned before here.

There's lots of other things on the burner: I'd like to take some steps towards voice acting, getting my business set up for my books as well as getting the full-blown website for those same novels started, and even perhaps completing my IT training online before the course expires in mid-2015.

Those are just the professional side of things; there's a ton of personal projects that I'd like to find time for and to be honest, I'll have to fit them in here and there when I can. I'll talk more about them as I get to them, as there's some interesting stuff( at least to me ) that I'll be fiddling with when I can.

For the rest of this year, I'll be focusing mainly on Book Two, if only because the characters have started to shout at me and I really just want to get them to lower their voices…

It's hard to write when I have a headache.

Speaking of which, I had the most concrete proof yet this week that the weather and my headaches are directly connected. this past Tuesday, around noon and though I managed to avoid getting a migraine, it threatened all the rest of the evening to degrade into such.

What I found the next day, checking my phone's barometric tracker, was that the air pressure in Victoria had peaked, then dropped, almost exactly at 1pm that day: 

See the spike / drop on the right, around 1pm? Ouch!

Again, I'll gain, I'll keep an eye on the weather, but I'm thankful that this sort of thing is much less common than it was for me in Ontario. I have enough other things pressuring me these days, though thankfully far fewer than in years past.

I love knowing that.

Oct 2 - Munchkin!

Sometimes you get the bear, sometimes it gets you.

This week definitely turned into a bear-got-me time at work, with my productivity down due to a combo of interview-stress-then-decompress plus a special project to complete. All of which ate into my daily numbers, which I try to keep up as a personal goal to show myself I'm actually doing my job well.

Today was also complicated by an early doctor's appointment( just a regular checkup )as well as a hair appointment after work( my regular re-do of the do was due )so I was a little flagged by dinnertime and could have done with some relaxation, given how the week had begun.

So it's a good thing my evening was spent relaxing, playing a game of Munchkin!

A friend texted me in the afternoon that there'd be a game tonight, which hadn't happened for many a month( not since last spring, I believe ). A total of seven people showed up, one more than the usual maximum for the game, so we snuck a small statue of Bhudda into play, just because.

That's me in the lead, the green guy!

Three hours later, I'd gone from a promising early lead to fourth place, not helped in the least by not one, but two total defeats that had cost me all my cards. Wouldn't you know that my new cards were, one and all, totally useless, with my ending up with all THREE Cleric cards in the game:

The odds of this happening? The same as my losing tonight : pretty good. Dang!

Everyone had fun though, which was really the whole point. Win or lose, Munchkin is always a blast and I think the next time we play, I'll be much more into things than during a week with a Big Interview in it.

Oct 3 - I Have Fans!

Today I had a smile on my face all day long, due to art.

Fanart, to be exact, of MY novel! A friend of mine has just started reading the book and after only five chapters, she was interested enough to sketch three of the main characters and send the images to me. While I don't have permission( yet )to post them( and they're not totally done, either )I pored over them all day long day, alternately feeling serenely pleased and childishly giddy.

I mean, how often does an unpublished author get fanart made of their work?

Once I'm told the sketches are 'finished' I will upload them to my book's website, so you can take a look at them. I'm especially pleased with how the main character, Niishe, turned out: my friend really managed to capture her intriguing human-like qualities as well as her alienness in a way that really draws you in. I hope you'll like the picture as much as I do, as one reader's interpretation of my creation.

Also, in three weeks, I'll be in NYC! I just had to say that, as it's still somewhat surreal to me that I'm going. This will be only the second time that I've visited NYC, the first being a class trip in the late 1980's, which was a totally different world compared to now. The NYC I knew then was big, bustling and a lot cleaner than I'd expected, the parts of it I saw by myself - I did manage to get out on my own to visit, of all things, an Amiga convention that was coincidentally taking place at the same time as our school visit. 

All in all, I have good memories of NYC and I'm really looking forward to seeing it again through older eyes.

Oct 4 - Rooting Around!

My project for today: fix my cell phone.

Most of you will know that my now 2-year-old Samsung Galaxy S3 has become a thorn in my side. In customizing it's software to meet my needs, the hardware has become sluggish, bogged down by all I ask it to( try to )do on a daily basis.

Yet the one BIG step I haven't taken to date is to ROOT my phone, mainly due to the complexity and risk.

Over the last few years, rooting has become the method of choice for anyone who wants full control of their phone - FULL control meaning you can customize it to your heart's content, including uninstalling ANY of the manufacturer's 'bloatware' apps that otherwise take up precious space and battery life.

Finally, I have control over my phone...

I at last rooted my phone today, after researching the best method for my particular model. To my surprise, despite my trepidations, it only took about fifteen minutes and a lot of fretting( needless, as it turns out )on my part. Until this year, really, there was a GOOD chance you would 'brick' your phone if you screwed up the rooting process, meaning there was almost no hope of recovering it back to usability.

It's a small but meaningful change and I made good use of it, spending a few hours of the rest of my day getting rid of all the bloatware that Samsung insisted on stuffing into my phone as it came from the factory. The biggest offender was an app named KNOX, a security app deeply embedded into the phone's OS to prevent unauthorized tampering. Hello root, goodbye KNOX and your power-sucking ways! After backing up my phone first( duh! )I happily zapped another dozen useless apps into oblivion while installing other root-only apps to customize my phone even more.

Soon enough, my phone will run this...

The end result, so far, is a phone that's behaving a lot better already. The next step is to completely replace the operating system with something like CyanogenMod, an open-source platform designed to perform as optimally as possible on Android phones.

That's a learning curve for another day, though. For now, I'll just make the best of my bloat-free phone, meaning I can perhaps put off getting a new unit until well into next year.

Oct 5 - Fun Scheduling!

Today was productive, but in other ways than working.

Relaxation is on the schedule, in large amounts. After yesterday's frustrations and successes both, I decided I just needed a total day off and today was the day.

After morning spent inside, puttering around under gray clouds, the sun rolled out and so did I. A lovely few hours at Moka House yielded this picture, with the sun blazing behind a flickering cool green wall of leaves:

My afternoon DID revolve around tea, really. And a croissant.

I happily spent a few hours sitting in the sunshine, tapping away at my blog, among other things and just observing the world now and then as I sip my tea. Again, I'm thankful that I have this form of refuge so close at hand, this third place that I can easily reach, to spend in social solitude on a patio with music and semi-silence thanks to my Parrot headphones - on the cheap, too, as tea doesn't cost much at all.

A friend dropped by and early evening saw me shifting patios, taking up a perch at Sam's in the corner seat on Government Street as the sun set, again behind a cooling set of trees that cut its brilliant glare into a gentle golden glow. It really was the perfect spot to sit and people watch for a while, seeing each person pass and noting in each face the gentle unspoken acknowledgment and wonder that a summer's day had come to visit again here in early October.

Simply stunning: Sunshine, sandwich and suds.

Writing the blog tonight, I feel rather more relaxed than recharged, and having spent the entire weekend as I wanted without any particular deadline hanging over my head. Doing what I wanted, when I wanted and in my own time was rather refreshing; I hope to be able to do to get soon, even with two more books to write among a host of other projects waiting to be started, or finished, or both.

There seems to be a lot of beer in the blog this week, for some reason. I'm not a stress-drinker by any means, but beer's seemed to slip into the picture more often this week than in past months. It might mean that I'm developing an association between suds and relaxation, which I'll have to watch; next thing you know, I'll be a chocoholic. Or something. Good thing I have nothing big planned this week, which should relax me greatly.