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Wow, reading that title for this post makes me think I’m going to say something about the programming on Cable TV. Like, somehow something on Cable TV was morally objectionable. Except than I remember who I am, and realize that there isn’t much that offends me in the world (see earlier post about art teacher telling me my motivations are incorrect for an example).

Anyway, I was sitting here waiting for my cable box to reboot, reset, and let the servers know it had reset, and I thought I’d post, since my cable modem is on a split, filtered boosted, re-filtered, unboosted line and I have internet access whether or not I have cable TV now. What I wanted to post about was this thing I just figured out:

The Bartending Academy’s commercial is a corrupted digital file, and it likely contains a virus.

I noticed some time ago that The Bartending Academy’s ads don’t have sound anymore, and are often accompanied by digital visual corruption. It wasn’t until just a few moments ago that I noticed that it was the third or fourth time I’d seen my cable box become unstable during a Bartending Academy commercial and then crash as soon as I hit a button that affected the cable box. And by crash, I mean total crash. The little LED screen that normally shows the time or the channel actually manages to say “ER:oR” before it goes to static. And I don’t mean the TV screen goes to static; the LED briefly displays static, then shuts off. The TV goes black, after a moment the logo of the company that made the software that is hard-wired into the box, as it resets itself to factory presets, comes up and disappears.

Note: it is then up to fifteen minutes before the box has fully restored itself to factory presets, identified itself to the network, and is allowed to decode the signals of channels above 22.

I wonder who I should call at Cox to complain about a corrupt ad.

I want to apply for this job, if only because the HR person thought that “& stuff” belonged in their ad. Except they don’t have an email address for me to send my resume to, and I don’t have a fax machine… drat.

MarketingTOYS! TOYS! TOYS!The nation’s largest test market co. set for 2 year expansion looking for people to have fun with other company’s toys & stuff. $400 per wk. Call Lisa Williams 602-273-7228, Fax 602-273-7468.

Source – Arizona Republic – Phoenix

What do you think?

Okay, I did it. I put my “completed” NaNoWriMo novel, Forlorn online.

First, I need to tell you that in order to fully appreciate it, you will need to have the Androcles or Ghoti fonts installed on your computer. They is available for download at http://demeyere.com/Shavian/. When you get to Chapter 16, if you do not have either font installed, you will not have the full experience. Of course, in a final printed or PDF version this will not be an issue, but for now just grab the font.

Second, this is just the first, roughest draft. Things are sure to change as I re-write and re-re-write it. Like, I’m sure the Dinotopia reference will be replaced by something not owned by someone alive. I am going to carefully re-read the first edition of Peter Pan to be sure that any references I make are derived from that public domain work, not other derivative works or versions that may be copyrighted by companies such as Disney. I’d also like to expand certain sections, add an end, and further clarify a lot of the technologies in the second half. Oh, and do a set of illustrations and cleaned-up maps to go with it.

Oh, and … maybe add a plot.

But if you have problems with it, or suggestions, or feedback of any kind, it’s still welcome. Just keep in mind it’s a first draft. Thank you, and enjoy.

Well, I got to 50,000 words around 9:30PM on November 30th, well before the midnight deadline. I even wrote a couple hundred more words, just to be sure the official wordcount would validate me properly, then I uploaded my “novel” to the site for the wordcount (after which it was promptly deleted, I am told), got my certificate (a pdf file I will print out just as soon as I buy a new black ink cartridge for my printer) and my NaNoWriMo winner logo (now featured on the front page of ME) and … uhhh… oh yeah. Then I went through and put together a few excerpts from the novel for my NaNoWriMo profile which got frozen at midnight. So that’s it, it’s over, right?

Except that the point in the story I was at at 50,000 words wasn’t a stopping place. It’s not over. I think I left off in the middle of a conversation. Wait, I just went and looked, and the last words in the document are “and he was glad that it was over for now.” How about that? Oh, and I guess it’s 50,112 words. I wrote somewhere in the neighborhood of 77,777 words in November, and that only counts what I wrote for the novels I was trying to get done. It looks like I wrote something a little over 9,000 words here on FYTH. I have no way of tracking how many words I wrote in letters I sent out this month. If I learned anything from writing over 50,000 words in one week, it was that I should never have stopped writing all those years ago. I have a lot of really good, really interesting ideas in me, and they want to get out. I’m going to finish this novel, polish it up, and start sending it to publishers. Then I’m going to get to work doing the research to get the other books I started finished and polished and send them out to publishers, too. Then in May I’m going to do MeNoWriMo again.

So, what do you think? Should I post my novel, as is, on the website for all to read? I determined somewhere around 45,000 words that there might be a problem with the novel I was writing; there is no conflict in it. The characters didn’t overcome insurmountable odds or learn some valuable lesson or even manage to stay in the same genre throughout the course of the novel. It isn’t about two people meeting for the first time and falling in love, and it isn’t set in some famous historical period, and it isn’t funny or scary or dramatic. You won’t learn some valuable moral lesson reading it, or have anything to figure out about who killed who, or how everything is going to turn out. Right now, there’s not even really an ending, let alone a twist ending.

Still, you might like reading it. I’ll see about putting it together to post, if you’d like. Just say the word.

“Hey, Teel! I noticed your rate of novel-writing has slowed down in the last few hours. Is it because it’s so late?”

“No, I’m high in caffeine. It seems to be keeping my hands typing as fast as they know how, and my creativity is way up, too!”

“So what’s slowing you down? You haven’t even written 10,000 words tonight. You’ve barely written over 7,000 words, and you’ve been working for the last eight hours straight! You keep saying you can type 1,000-2,000 words an hour, you should have at least 8,000 words done, and up to 16,000, right?”

“Well, my characters came to a city I invented that I had to research for a while on the internet, and -“

“Wait, that doesn’t make sense. If you were just making the city up, there was no need to look online for information you’d imagined anyway!”

“I know that. Anyway, that and posting about that took about a half an hour. Then when I got back to the story, I find out that the characters are in a city where a different alphabet is used, and the city is layed out in a way that I had to draw a color-coded map for myself to understand it. Then the mayor of the city was trying to explain it all to my main characters, only one of which knows this other alphabet. Which meant that the other character, Tink, couldn’t read any of the signs or really make much sense of the explanation of the layout of the city.”

“So, there’s a cultural block slowing misunderstanding for the character. What does that have to do with you writing slower?”

“I know both alphabets, but I type much slower in the one they use in this new city. So I was having to switch back and forth between fonts and alphabets to express things the Mayor was saying and the labels on the map, and it was slowing me down. Take a look at what part of a sample paragraph from this section looks like:”

“You know you’re crazy, right? You could have just said the stuff was in another alphabet and simpy described Tink’s confusion. You didn’t need to actually invent another alphabet and start typing in it.”

“I didn’t invent the alphabet. It was invented something like a hundred years ago to honor George Bernard Shaw. I don’t know how the residents of Skythia got ahold of it as their standard alphabet, but I’m sure the Mayor will explain it soon.”

“Crazy. You realize you’re typing out a conversation with yourself, right. There’s no one else here.”

“I also realize that I’m about to go try to sleep for a couple of hours, pumped full of caffeine.”

“Crazy.”