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Posts tagged as “Webworks”

How Crazy is Comic-Con?

Published March 3, 2012 by centaur
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How crazy is Comic-Con registration? I logged on at 8:00am this morning to get in the waiting list and by the time I cleared the "waiting room" for the signup page (at 9:10ish) it was completely sold out. This is what I saw when it finally "let me in" to register: I hate to do it, but I have to lay the blame squarely on Gmail. Comic-Con sent me a registration form, I clicked on the link at 8:00am, just like they told me to ...
The wait is over! Comic-Con 2012 badges will go on sale at 8:00 a.m. PST on Saturday March 3rd, 2012. To access the EPIC online registration website, click the following link: (link deleted for security reasons)
. The link kept timing out, as one might expect from an overloaded system, but after 5 or so minutes of click ... timeout, click ... timeout, I started to get suspicious. But the problem wasn't in the site ... it was in something Gmail was doing to the URL. Clicking on it didn't work; copying the link location didn't work. Copying just the text and pasting it ... got me in at 9:10AM. Too late. Ah, Gmail, can't live without you, but every once in a while... BANG! ZOOM! To the moon. Oh well, here's hoping I get in as a professional like I did the last two years ... this year I have even more claim, I guess, as I have a second book out, appear in two more books, and am involved with Blitz Comics. Crossing my fingers! -the Centaur Pictured: Lots of stuff. Fair use and whatnot ... parody, informative commentary, transformative and educational uses, and so forth.

It’s Better to Be Done

Published January 26, 2012 by centaur
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better-to-be-done.png

I am very interested in promoting creation. I think the world would be a better place if more people wrote, drew, painted, sculpted, danced, programmed, philosophized, or just came up with ideas. Not all ideas are great, and it's important to throw away the bad and keep the good - but the more ideas we can generate, the more we can test.

One of the biggest problems I see in unprofessional, unpublished or just unhappy creators is not finishing. It's very easy to start work on an idea - a painting, a novel, a sculpture, a program, a philosophy of life. But no matter how much you love what you do, there's always a point in creating a work where the act of creating transforms from play to work.

Whether you stall out because the work gets hard or because you get distracted by a new idea, it's important to realize the value of finishing. An unfinished idea can be scooped, or become stale, or disconnected from your inspiration. If you don't finish something, the work you did on it is wasted. More half finished ideas pile up. Your studio or notebook becomes a mess.

If you don't finish, you never learn to finish. You're learning to fail repeatedly. The act of finishing teaches you how to finish. You learn valuable skills you can apply to new works - or even to a new drafts. I know an author who was perpetually stalled out on a problematic story - until one day she made herself hit the end. Now it's on it's fourth draft and is really becoming something.

The tricky thing is you have got to put the cart before the horse: you've got to finish before you know whether it was worth finishing. This does not apply to experienced authors in a given genre, but if you're new to a genre, you have to finish something before you worry about whether you can sell it or even if it is any good.

You don't need for something to be perfect to finish it. I know too many amateurs who don't want to put out the effort to finish things because they don't know whether they can sell it. No. You've got a hundred bad programs in you, a thousand bad paintings, a million bad words, before you get to the good stuff. Suck it up, finish it, and move on.

Procrastination is a danger. This is the point in the article that I got distracted and wrote a quick email to a few other creators about ideas this (unfinished) article had inspired. Then I got back to it. Then I got distracted again doing the bullet list below and went back and injected this paragraph. The point is, it's OK to get distracted - just use that time wisely, then get back to it.

Finally, sometimes you just need help to finish the first time. The biggest thing is to find a tool which can help you over that hump when it stops being fun and starts being work - some challenge or group or idea that helps you get that much closer to done. To help people finish, I'm involved with or follow a variety of challenges and resources to help people finish:

  • Write to the End: It's not a critique group; it's a writing group. We meet almost every Tuesday at a local coffee house and write for 20 minutes, read what we wrote, and repeat until they kick us out. We normally hit three sessions, so I usually get an hour of writing in every night - and hear a half dozen to a dozen other writers. Inspirational. Our web site contains articles on writing, including my new column The Centaur's Pen.
  • National Novel Writing Month: A challenge to write 50,000 words of a new novel in the month of November. This seems daunting, but Nanowrimo has a truly spectacular support group and social system which really helps people succeed at the challenge. Even if you don't "win" the first time, keep at it, you will succeed eventually!
  • Script Frenzy: Write 100 pages of a script (play, screenplay, or comic script) in the month of April - another event sponsored by the creators of Nanowrimo. This is an event I haven't yet tried, but am planning to tackle this year to get back into screenwriting (as part of my 20-year plan to get into directing movies).
  • 24 Hour Comics Day: It's a challenge to produce a 24 page comic in 24 hours, usually held the first weekend of October. I've tried this 3 times and succeeded once. It's taught me immense amounts about comic structure and general story structure and even improved my prose writing.
  • Blitz Comics: Because I failed at 24 Hour Comics Day, me and my buddy Nathan Vargas decided to "fake it until we make it" and to put on a boot camp about how to succeed at 24 Hour Comics Day. We produced a Boot Camp tutorial, a 24 Hour Comics Day Survival Kit - and along the way taught ourselves how to succeed at 24 Hour Comics Day.
  • Other Challenges: There are a couple of events out there to create graphic novels in a month - NaGraNoWriMo and NaCoWriMo - though both of these are 2010 and I don't know if either one is live. (If they're not active, maybe I'll start one). There's also a 30 Character Challenge for graphic artists to create 30 new characters in a month.


thedonemanifesto.png

Finally, I want to finish with what inspired this post: the Cult of Done. I won't go too deeply into the Done Manifesto, but from my perspective it can be summed up in two ideas: posting an idea on the Internet counts as a ghost of done, and done is the engine of more. Get your stuff done, finish it, and if it's still half baked, post it to force yourself to move on to newer and better things.

The plane is landing. Time to get it done.

-the Centaur

Credits: The BlitzComics guy is penciled, inked and colored by me and post-processed by Nathan Vargas. Joshua Rothass did the Cult of Done poster and distributed it under a Creative Commons license. This blog post was uploaded by Ecto, which is doing well (other than an upload problem) and is probably going to get my money.

Vibrancy in Social Media

Published January 25, 2012 by centaur
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Some social networks vibrate with life: tweets ripple through Twitter, three quarters of a billion people use Facebook, and Google+ grew faster than either of them in their early days. Others, like MySpace or Orkut or LinkedIn, may not exactly be suffering, but they don't have the same buzz and aren't growing at the same rate.

I don't have access to all the numbers when I'm interacting with a social network: I only have its interface to my local network. But there's a side effect to a network's rapid growth and activity: some of that activity will flow through MY part of the network. Now, that's true of even non-social media like newsgroups and RSS feeds, so activity by itself isn't enough.

What's interesting is how likely MY inputs are to garner a response or even start an ongoing conversation. Let's call that the network's vibrancy. Now, the measured vibrancy will be different for different users, different inputs and different times. But we can hold that constant if the user in question, like me, crossposts similar content to different networks.

I do this because I'm an author, and I don't require my fans to be members of Facebook or Google+ or Twitter or to have an RSS reader - so I need to post many announcements to every service that my fans might be on. So what follows is my brief, purely unscientific judgments about the vibrancy of several social networks.

General Social Networking: Facebook, followed by Google+, followed by Twitter. Within minutes of me posting to Facebook, I usually get a number of likes or responses. Google+ is also good, but not quite as fast, or quite as deep. Twitter, while being great for hearing announcements from people I'm interested in, isn't as responsive as the first two. Other services I've tried, like MySpace, Orkut and Buzz, were either less active to begin with or not vibrant at all.

Literary Networking: Goodreads. I've been on LibraryThing for a while, but I haven't yet seen much activity. Goodreads, however, after some unfortunate business with spamming some of my contact list, has nonetheless proved both very active and very reactive to what I have posted.

Business Networking: No winner. I've used Linkedin, but my primary activity on it has been receiving connection requests and there's been very little response to my updates on its interface.

Thinking about these services, what makes the vibrant ones vibrant is a combination of features: Enough users, enough activity, ease of posting, ease of sharing, and in particular with Goodreads, enough different activities to make the interface a game. With Goodreads, you can post reviews, book progress, shelving and so on and this activity is exposed. Goodreads is like a game played with your literary friends and the fans of the books you're a fan of. To a lesser degree, services like Facebook and Google+ which make image and link sharing and commenting fun do the same thing.

I haven't taken this analysis any deeper. Right now this is just a thought posted to the intarwubs - the ghost of done (from the Cult of Done manifesto) since done is the engine of more. More thoughts after I spend more time researching social media.

-the Centaur

The Centaur’s Pen at Write to the End

Published January 21, 2012 by centaur
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I'm part of a fantabulous writing group called Write to the End that meets at Mission City Coffee. This group, which started at Barnes and Noble at Steven's Creek before the economy and contracting book market convinced B&N to cut back on their community programs, has been the best thing for my writing productivity since ... well, ever. I'd even stopped doing National Novel Writing Month until I started attending the WTTE, but now I do Nano every year ... and go to the writing group almost every Tuesday. SO ... it's now time to give back. I'll be doing a monthly column on the WTTE blog titled "The Centaur's Pen." In it, I will write about writing: about why to write, what to write, how to write, how to edit, how to get published --- and how to behave AFTER you get published. Now, I am not a great writer, but I'm trying very hard, I think about writing almost all the time, and I've spent a lot of time talking to other aspiring writers and learning about the art, craft and business of writing. So I hope my insights will be of use to you! January's inaugural article is on "Learning from Publication:" how seeing your work in print can be an opportunity to improve your craft, even though you can no longer change it. An excerpt follows:
Recently I wrote a short story called “Steampunk Fairy Chick” for the UnCONventional anthology. Even though the story went through many revisions, lots of beta readers, two editors and a copyeditor, when I read through my author’s copy I found there were still things I wanted to change. Nothing major—just line edit stuff, a selection of different choices of sentence structure that I think would have made the story more readable. I can’t react to this the way I would with a draft; the story’s in print. And I don’t want to just throw these insights on the floor. Instead, I want to analyze the story and find general ideas I could have applied that would have improved the story before it hit the stands—ideas I could use in the future on new stories.
To read more, click through to Write to the End and "Learning from Publication." If you want to read the story the article is talking about, click through to Amazon and buy the UnCONventional anthology (in print or ebook). Enjoy! -the Centaur

The Photoshop Filters of Luxury

Published January 21, 2012 by centaur
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Following up my previous post on using offline blog clients, here's an example of something harder to do with an offline client: uploading images with the originals as clickthrough. I haven't quite figured out how to do that in Ecto but perhaps it's an easy thing. Regardless, what Ecto posted was an image resized to the size it would be displayed at, whereas sometimes what you want is a resized thumbnail where you can click through to the original, which is what the standard WordPress interface will do for you nicely: These images are a comparison of two different filters in Photoshop on the same original. Amazing what we can do with graphics filters today. -the Centaur -Anthony

Testing Ecto as an Offline Blogging Platform

Published January 21, 2012 by centaur
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lapofluxury-detail.jpg

My ideas for blogging fast outpace my patience for actually blogging them. One problem with systems like WordPress or Blogger is that the interfaces for creating posts are a bit complex and work only online. Simpler "microblogging" systems, like Facebook, Twitter and Google+, enable you to post easily, but limit what you can post (and are walled gardens, to one extent or another). So I'm always looking for good offline blogging clients.

Part of the problem is that I'm on the Mac. Nothing against Windows or Linux, but Macs are (for me) more reliable even though the interface isn't quite as easy to use. But working on the Mac limits your software choices. I've tried Qumana, which isn't bad but sometimes has bad interactions with my blogging settings. (I need to update it, so I'm not giving up on it yet). I've tried a variety of Android blogging clients, such as the WordPress app, but I haven't figured out how to make them obey my image sizing restrictions. So I'm trying other blogging clients, starting with Ecto.

Nice category / tagging interface, easy uploads. Doing something weird with carriage returns, which was a problem with Qumana, but it may be fixable. OK, this is enough of a post to try it out. Here goes nothing!

-the Centaur

Pictured: Gabby, my most computer literate cat, in the lap of luxury (as seen through a few Photoshop filters).

UPDATE: Ecto *gasp* did what I wanted. One point for Ecto!

It’s ALIIIIIVE….

Published November 17, 2011 by centaur
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I avoid talking about work on my blog as a matter of principle - even to the point of never directly referring to The Search Engine That Starts With A G by name, unless I'm talking about a product - but in this case I think I have to make an exception. The Galaxy Nexus phone from Samsung and Google has launched, and the marketing site contains a 3D model of the phone developed by my team (pictured above). Guys, great job. I'm proud to have worked on it with you. I have a lot more I want to say about it, but at this point (2am) after an 14 hour day ironing out all the wrinkles in this launch I look about how I feel. Time to GO HOME and tackle this again tomorrow, make sure no fires are going ... and then, celebrate! Oh, and please enjoy the phone and all its Androidy goodness! -the Centaur P.S. My opinions are my own and are not that of my employer, even if I do think my employer is awesome. And I don't speak for my employer, though I did run this by them first to make sure they were cool with it. Some restrictions may apply to your limitations. Do not taunt happy fun ball.

Backing off from Qumana

Published July 23, 2011 by centaur
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screen shot of qumana Qumana is a good blog editor, but it's got two unfortunate interrelated problems: it isn't quite compatible with how I put images into posts, and you can't publish posts as drafts. I just found that out - I think perhaps I confused Qumana's interface with a blog posting app I have on my Nexus S - which is why some you may have seen a brief flash of a post in your RSS feeds that will instead show up later. Saving posts as drafts on Qumana won't cut it - I need to upload the draft to WordPress as a draft and make manual modifications before publications, which I can't do in the current interface. So I'm going to back off from using Qumana a bit. It's still good for composing drafts offline, but I either need to dig through their manual, update it to a latest version (if applicable) or find another editor that works better with my process. -the Centaur

The Spammers Are Getting Snarky

Published July 8, 2011 by centaur
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They've tried flattery, they've tried clever links ... now they're trying humiliation:
The following time I read a blog, I hope that it doesnt disappoint me as much as this one. I mean, I do know it was my option to read, but I really thought youd have something fascinating to say. All I hear is a bunch of whining about one thing that you would fix in case you werent too busy in search of attention.
Too bad this comment was posted on an image ATTACHMENT. :-P So there was no whining to comment on. Even if I follow the comment back to the article, it was about the importance of not whining when things go bad and moving on with your life. Tracing back the link revealed that no, there was no real person behind this: there was an apparently fake blog that was actually an invitation to some kind of ad network. Apparently they keyword matched the text of my article with the comment in an attempt to get some attention. So: nice try, but bad spammer, no backlink. -the Centaur In more detail, my methodology: my moderation software asked me about this comment. The comment was not obviously related to an article and was badly written, so I drilled through to the referenced post and found it was an attachment. It's entirely possible that someone clicked on the parent article, which did reference whining, then clicked on an attachment in an attempt to post an irritated comment. But the person's email address was for an ad network, the linked-to-blog seemed to have unrelated articles, and on my second visit to the blog the ad network tried to take over my whole screen (yay Google Chrome for saving me!). People don't generally have email addresses that are the same as spam networks, so I classified the comment as spam. It was a new kind of spam, so I'm posting about it. UPDATE: Ooo, ooo, I forgot the best part of the methodology: do a search for a long phrase in the spam to see how often it appears on the internet. You can't do too long - the spammer may be using software that introduces slight word variations - but if it's long enough to be unique and it still shows up everywhere, you're virtually guaranteed the comment is spam. I don't care how repetitive a commenter is, nobody is going to write "The following time I read a blog, I hope that it doesnt disappoint me as much as this one" on "About 847,000" pages, according to Google.

Posts With Images Hanging Right Now

Published March 22, 2011 by centaur
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They seem to do fine on the main page, but they hang on detail view. Will debug this weekend, just letting people know if you drill down on a link and nothing shows up.

My Favorite Borders, Closing …

Published February 16, 2011 by centaur
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Two of my favorite bookstores are closing ... along with many other Borders in the Bay Area:
(ABC News) A list of store closings planned by Borders as it tries to reorganize in Chapter 11 bankruptcy, state by state. Closings are due over the next few weeks. Some clearance sales are expected to start this weekend: For the full list look here.
Or put another way, the closest 3 stores to my address are closing; check out these search results:
  • San Jose - Oakridge Mall: Closing
  • Los Gatos: Closing
  • San Jose - Santana Row: Closing
Which goes back to ... fffffffffuuuuuuuuuuu! Some of you may be thinking "ah, the e-reader and Amazon have killed the bookstore at last." Uh, no, though that may still happen. The fate of Borders can be laid at the feet of giant discount stores like Walmart, Costco and Target, who can sell books up to five bucks cheaper than a typical bookstore. Contributing to this is the recession, of course, and American corporate culture, which tends to think of businesses as interchangeable moneymaking commodities and not living organisms that need to be helmed by people who understand the business. Don't get me wrong - the management of Borders puts together superb bookstores. They've been my favorite chain for years. But a fair number of analysts of Borders have suggested that a lot of its recent management hasn't had the handson bookstore experience to make the right choices. It was owned by K-Mart for a while, for instance. Ugh. And I'm not critiquing K-Mart, but perhaps there wasn't quite enough skill transfer there. (Full disclosure: I'm a former Borders shareholder). I've seen many other bookstores go: the Science Fiction Mystery Bookshop and the legendary Oxford both of Atlanta. Many other bookstores have survived, and will no doubt continue to survive. But they're going to have to change, and consolidate - the industry is changing. I love my e-readers, particularly my Nook Color, and I love the selection and choice of Amazon and to a lesser extent Barnes and Noble online. (Full disclosure: I'm an Amazon shareholder). Some online publishers are particularly attractive, especially O'Reilly, which will typically sell you a DRM-free PDF of your book for an extra ten bucks. And I, personally, as an author sell ten times as many e-books as physical books. But there's something wonderful about going into a bookstore, browsing the shelves, and flipping through books. I could blame it on the idea that for the time being, at least, the technology does NOT exist to make flipping through books as fast on the web as it is in real life - to see why, check out the High Performance Web Sites site and look carefully at the latency that goes into rendering a single web page. You're looking at second-level latency at best. Then go pick up a five hundred page book and flip through it rapidly. You're looking at second-level latency at best. See the problem? But if that wasn't a problem, the physical layout of a bookstore, the related books sections, the browasbility has a real value - as do the omnipresent coffeehouses found in many bookstores. I could see bookstores evolving into showrooms, with much more varied content, single copies of most books, and people wandering through them with their Kindles and Nooks and Kobos and what have you, reading a book and then waving their e-reader at it to add it to their collection. The physical books will often be printed in the stores themselves with cheap on-demand presses. But even in this blissful world, there will be a need for fewer bookstores-as-showrooms than the bookstores we have now. Places like Recycle Books (a kind of micro-Oxford Used Books in the making out here in the San Jose area) Bookbuyers (a solid competitor to Oxford Used Books), Kepler's, Books Inc. will survive both as community centers and as online presences - they're quickly making the move to selling e-books through Google Books. And cultural institutions like City Lights will also survive - it's also a publisher. But how many of the big box bookstores that I love will survive? Not certain. And their closing will have side effects: on authors and publishers, on communities, on books and reading in general. It isn't the end of the world ... but it's the beginning of a tectonic shift. -the Centaur Pictured: the Borders at Oakridge Mall ... its cafe unusually deserted for a Wednesday night.

Back to Qumana

Published December 4, 2010 by centaur
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The Balcony of Borders at Santana Row

Now that we're on WordPress, let's give this a try again and see whether Qumana plays better with WordPress than it did with Blogger.

ANSWER: Worked just fine. Borders was closing up shop so I had to go back into WordPress later to add the post tags, but I assume that's somewhere in the Qumana interface I didn't have time to find. Image posting was relatively easy - actually slightly easier than the WordPress interface itself, though that's more a web app issue than a UX design issue.

-the Centaur

Pictured: my mobile office on the balcony of Borders at Santana Row. Software: Android, Camera Sync, Mac OS X, Chrome, Picasaweb, Qumana, WordPress. Hardware: Macbook Air 13 inch, Nexus One. Foodware: the staggeringly unhealthy and delicious Cookies and Cream JavaKula.

Powered by Qumana

We Heed Not Flatterers…

Published August 11, 2010 by centaur
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... especially the spammy kind. Let's do a little naturalistic analysis, a little data collecting, shall we?
  • Maintain up the beneficial work mate. This website publish shows how well you comprehend and know this subject.
    -Mr. "Traffic Generation Promotion"
  • I can see that you are an expert at your field! I am launching a website soon, and your information will be very useful for me.. Thanks for all your help and wishing you all the success.
    -Mrs. "How Men Date"
  • hi very good blog here, you can list it on our site for more views
    -Mr. "Ads Classifieds"
  • This is a really good read for me, Must admit that you are one of the best bloggers I ever saw.Thanks for posting this informative article.
    -Miss "Belly Fat Burner"
  • Unbelievable, that’s exactly what I was seeking for! You just saved me alot of work
    -Sir "Miles the Car Guy"
  • I can see that you are an expert at your field! I am launching a website soon, and your information will be very useful for me.. Thanks for all your help and wishing you all the success.
    -Ms. "Refinance Loan"
What are the keys? Lack of grammatical or logical sense, not apropos to the articles, text repeated over and over again from different posters, names that are obvious commercial scams, sites that are obvious commercial scams ... and some that are bizarre cries for help from deep within The Algorithm:
Why did you remove my post… My post was actually useful unlike most of these comments. Ill post it again. Hiya guys, I spottet a great way to make a lot of money online creating blogs. I expect this is primaraly for the website admin but there are probably alot more bloggers reading this. I have already made thousands using the techniques detailed in the product and it has only been 2 months.
Now, there are some that aren't bad ... almost close enough to get you ... again, if they didn't show up again and again, and weren't posted by "Mister Cheap Free Viagra Guy" at iscamu@suckers.com. Sigh. Fortunately a friend of mine out here for the Rush concert is a WordPress blogger and keyed me in that I hadn't enabled Akismet, WordPress's built in comment spam fighting plugin. Doing that now... -the Centaur P.S. What really gets me is that these spam comments are arriving at the blog of someone who actually studies spam. I know The Algorithm doesn't know that, but still...

Let’s Do The Qumana Thing Again…

Published July 24, 2010 by centaur
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... testing the suitability of this tool for WordPress.

Why did this come up? Well, I'm at San Diego Comic Con, where my AT&T wireless dongle has had an awful time connecting, and on top of that I'm working hard on LIQUID FIRE, which often prompts me to turn off the Internets so that I can focus on getting writing done.  SO it's useful to have an offline blogging tool again, and I had good luck with Qumana ... though it was not perfect, it got the job done.

OK, here we go ... reconfiguring blog ... aaand ... post.

404 error: not found.

OK, so obviously, that was was not the right endpoint ... Qumana needs to know where your control panel for your blog is, and if you don't tell it, it can't post for you.  Fixing ... OK.  Aaaand ... post.

302 error: a redirect.

Rassen frassen ... ID:10T error, stupid Centaur, read the documentation you include in your article and add the xmlrpc.php to the final end of the path to your endpoint. Fixing ... OK.  Aaaand ... post. 

404 error: not found.

No, still not quite correct ... don't need the /wp-admin/ in there to make it work, which I could easily have seen by inspecting the PHP files on the server, or in the local MAMP copy of my WordPress installation.  The actual final path seems to be http://SITE/BLOGPATH/xmlrpc.php, which makes sense, but since I've got a custom site organization I stuffed a  /wp-admin/ in there which didn't need to be. Fixing ... OK. Aaaaand ... post.

Geronimo!

-the Centaur

Before the dawn of the dawn of time…

Published July 19, 2010 by centaur
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Continuing my attempts at computational archaeology: before the dawn of the dawn of time ... or at least the dawn of the Internet ... computer people had .plan ("dot plan") files, chunks of text you could read from the command line using the finger protocol. This protocol is often deactivated nowadays, but it was Facebook at graduate school at Georgia Tech in the early nineties. The following was mine, from apparently late 1995. Like my attempt to find my first web page, this obviously isn't the earliest version of my .plan file, but at ~15 years it's the oldest bit of online presence I've found about myself yet. Obviously, some things have changed ... the "love of my life" died (the love itself part, not the person) shortly after writing this, as evident from the editor's note. I then went on to marry the lovely Sandi Billingsley, the real love of my life. Some of the other friends listed are no longer with us, or no longer with me and my friends. For the rest, well, read on - this is a completely unfiltered snapshot of me fifteen years ago:
The Centaur's Bio (his Old .plan File) Hi. This is the personal page of the Centaur, otherwise known as Anthony Francis. I'm ostensibly a graduate student in Artificial Intelligence at the College of Computing, but that's just a hobby. For the past eight years, I've been a science fiction writer, a vocation that became professional when I published my first short story, "Sibling Rivalry," in the February 1995 issue of _The Leading Edge_ magazine. The love of my life is a redheaded historian, Shannon Duffy. When I'm not with her I spend time with my best friends in the Edge Group, which consists of Michael Boyd, David Cater, Anthony Francis, Derek Reubish, David Stephens, and Fred Zust in the core Edge franchise as well as William Morse, and Stuart Myerburg in our recently opened Atlanta branch. [Editor's note: Sad to say, Shannon and I are no longer together; we simply had different ideas about where we wanted to take our lives. We're still friends, though, and hope to keep it that way.] I'm sorry, I can't tell you what we at the Edge Group do; we'd have to kill you (we do bad movies, good software, and great times, in no particular order). When I'm not hanging with the Edge Group I'm jamming with my other best friends Steve Arnold, Eric Christian and his fiancee Chalie, Joe Goldenburg, Kenny Moorman and his wife Carla, Ruth Oldaker, Mark Pharo and his wife Yvette, Patsy Voigt, and Fred's girlfriend Marina. The weekend tradition is to jam with William, Stuart, Mallory and sometimes Joe at Anis, Huey's, Oxford at Pharr, Phipps and wherever else we can get into trouble. (Occasionally, you can find me at the Cedar Tree or Yakitori Den-Chan with Mark & Yvette). If not, I'm either hanging with Fred & Marina, Eric & Chalie and Dave & Ruth up in ole Greenvile, South Carolina, watching (or filming) movies at my house, eating dinner with my loving parents Tony and Susan Francis, perforating the odd target with musket fire at Eric's or just noshing on late-night food at Stax' Omega or IHOP. If I'm not doing any of the above, I'm liable to be curled up with Shanny in O'Flaherty's Irish Channel Pub in the French Quarter in New Orleans, listening to Irish ballads and soaking up each other's company over an Irish Coffee (her) and a diet Coke (me). Since people have asked, my favorite authors are H.P. Lovecraft, Larry Niven, C.J. Cherryh and Douglas Hofstadter, in that order. My favorite TV show is Dr.Who, followed neck-and-neck by Babylon 5 and Star Trek (TOS TNG TMS DS9 VOY ANI, in that order) and nipped at the heels by the Tripods and the Six Million Dollar Man. My favorite comic book is Elfquest, followed closely by Albedo Anthropomorphics, Superman, Cerebus, and Usagi Yojimbo. My favorite band is Tangerine Dream, although I do listen to Rush, Yes, Vangelis, and Genesis. My favorite style of music is now called "New Age" (uuugh) but used to be called electronic music, minimalist, or just electronic rock. My second favorite style of music is soundtrack music (music for the visual image). I can stand rock. I hate disco. Rap held my interest for a while, but it officially lost me with "Whoomp(t) there it is." My favorite cuisine is Lebanese, a gift from my parents and my family, the best damn extended family in the whole wide world. I shock my parents and family by also appreciating Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Cajun, Mexican, Italian, Korean, Vietnamese, Spanish and Indian cuisine; I also have a great appreciation for the foods of the South, a culture which I find to be both vastly underrated and overdiscussed abroad. When I'm not dining out or curled up with a good book or laptop computer at Captain D's at Corporate Square in Atlanta drinking inordinate amounts of iced tea, I'm at home honing my patented personal tabbouleh (Lebanese salad) recipe, slowly learning to cook Chinese, and honing the art of grilling steaks and microwaving potatoes so that they both finish at the same time. My favorite form of literary expression is science fiction; my preferred style is flashbacks within a framing story, usually in third-person limited, although I've begun to experiment with a more liberal third-person style derived from the narrative structure of contemporary motion pictures. My primary means of plotting and expression are visual images. My favorite fictional creature is, of course, the centaur; however, the genetically engineered spaceborne professionals of *my* fiction bear little resemblance to the bearded primitves that stalk the wooded glades of your average fantasy novel (unfair though that may be to my inspirations, which include the very nice halfhorse folk of the Giesenthal valley dreamed up by Donna Barr, the ambiguous Titanides from _Titan, Wizard, Demon_ by John Varley, and Timoth the warrior sage of the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons comic. Just don't call my Porsche St.George a halfhorse too; she'll be liable to pummel a fictionalized version of you in a story sooner or later if you do). My favorite style of AI is symbolic AI with a situated/behaviorist twist. I play around with memory, agents, case-based reasoning, natural language understanding, and semiotics; I have nothing against genetic algorithms or connectionist systems other than the fact that I don't have time to pursue them as avidly. I also fiddle around with animal cognition, and can talk your ear off about chimpanzee culture and dolphin language if given the chance. My favorite style of science is Kuhnian with a cognitive flair. I have no respect for positivism or any of the horrible things it's done for science. My philosophy is somewhere between Kant, Plato and something no-one has a name for yet. To sum: the universe is real; deal, but don't assume you have the answers and *don't* assume that a single level of description can capture all of reality. My religion is theist; I believe in the tripartite single God at the heart of mainstream Christianity, and accept the messiah aspect as my savior. My theology is liberal Episcopalian with a strong theological background in my Catholic upbringing. My disagreements with the Catholic Church are primarily theological and only partially pragmatic; I gave up on waiting for them to catch up with Jesus, but they're still mostly good people. The religious right, on the other hand, is a bipartite oxymoron: neither religious nor right, and certainly not in keeping with the anti-Phariseean radical I follow. Genteel religious discussions are welcome; rude evangelizers will be biblically and theologically diced *before* I turn you over to Shannon, Joe, William, and Eric. Bring references to authorities, but don't expect me to respect them. Arguments against evolution will either be summarily flushed or buried underneath my copies of Eldredge's _Time Frames_, A.G. Cairns-Smith's _Genetic Takeover_, Dawkin's _The Selfish Gene_, _The Saint Paul Family Catechism_ and my copy of the New American Bible, flipped to the part of the preface discussing evolution. Read the gospel of Thomas; it's an eye opener, and you haven't even seen the Dead Sea Scrolls yet... Politically, I am a Goldwater liberal. I believe in war, gays in the military, religious freedom, no state-mandated prayer in schools, free ownership of automatic weapons, licensing of gun owners, aid to the Contras, prosecution of IranContra, investigation of Whitewater, and support and respect for the president regardless of party. I voted for George *and* Bill once each, don't regret it, and would do the same knowing what I know now. I believe in AIDS spending, military spending, research spending, and the space program; I also believe in welfare reform, cutting waste, a line item veto, and perhaps even some kind of budget amendment if I could be convinced it wouldn't get us into trouble in wartime. I don't believe in "school choice", "political correctness", "multiculturalism", "Rush as Equal Time", "the liberal media", "the conservative media", or "anti-special-rights amendments". I don't think we should take "In God We Trust" off of our coins and I don't think we should picket funerals of people who had AIDS. I don't believe acceptance of homosexuals as equal citizens has anything to do with the disintegration of the American family. I don't believe in hobbling industry with overregulation nor do I believe in letting them cut down trees holding endangered species just because they planned our logging programs poorly. My political heroes are Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Margaret Thatcher.
Interesting. Well, that is what it was. There are definitely opinions I would tweak, things I now think I got wrong, and snapshots of relationships that no longer hold. But the Edge is still here, I'm still here, I'm still writing, I'm still a Christian, and still a scientist. SO, all things considered, I think I'll have to stand by my dot plan file after all. -the Centaur

Before the dawn of time…

Published July 16, 2010 by centaur
centaur 1
...there was my ORIGINAL home page at the Georgia Institute of Technology: Amazing, yes, the frames, the under construction sign, the 'bouncer look' photo, etc. What amazes me even more? It's still up, as of 2010-07-16. Wow. But wait! This just in ... according to the Wayback Machine, this wasn't even the first version of the page; this is the first version of my home page: Actually I can tell this isn't the actual first version of my page - there are some links missing from it that were in the very earliest version of the page, and it has frames, which I don't think were in the very first page I put up - but this is the oldest recorded version, from almost 14 years ago. Aeons in Internet time ... especially considering the very first web page was only six years earlier, about 20 years ago: How things have changed in two short decades. -the Centaur

Trying Again and Again is not Sisyphean

Published July 12, 2010 by centaur
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Loosely transcribed from a letter to a friend. Names have been variablized to protect the innocent: Dude, it's been over a year since you applied at The Search Engine That Starts With a G and since then you've created, all by yourself, a brand new, polished web site with no doubt N users and X,Y and Z impressive features. Time to update the resume and apply again? I know you're frustrated that this venture didn't make it, but successful entrepreneurs are ones that try, try and try again. During my time at The Search Engine That Started With an E, we were exposed to a variety of advisors who had started successful businesses. Most of these had started several, only a few of which caught off. The ones that did made them millionaires. My uncle B is the same way: he's worked on many businesses; many failed, the others did quite well. Come to think of it, when the dot-com bubble burst, the lead founder of The Search Engine That Started With an E didn't let its stumble stop him - he's started several other ventures since then. One of them will catch fire and make him a millionaire too. I also had another thought. Stay with me here. In the essay The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus argues that just because the Greek hero Sisyphus is condemned for eternity to push a rock up a hill, only to watch it roll down again, that doesn't mean that his life is actually devoid of hope. Camus argues that even though Sisyphus's task is meaningless, and the moment the rock falls down is heartwrenching, he nonetheless can be happy because he's engaged in a constant struggle ... "and that struggle is enough to fill a man's heart." In the book How to Be an Existentialist, author Gary Cox expands on Camus' argument: to an existentialist, everyone's life can be considered to be meaningless, and it's the constant struggle to exercise our freedom itself that brings meaning to life. In other words, the struggle has intrinsic value, just to us, whether we succeed or not. But I am not an existentialist, and in the objective world we share, our tasks do not endlessly repeat. It does look like we live in a world where the rock will always roll back down - time and entropy conquer all - but sometimes the rocks stay at the top of the hill, a long, long time. Longer than the allotted time we have to push rocks up the hill, sometimes; sometimes the rock stays up, even when we're the ones that slip and fall away. It is, in short, possible to succeed. It's possible to build something that lasts ... but what if we don't? Well, even if we don't, I am still not an existentialist, and in the objective world we share, our burdens are not unique to ourselves. There are many other people pushing rocks, and it brings comfort to know others are struggling. There are many other hills - sometimes, they even look like the same hill - and it can ease other's paths to know which parts of the slope are better. That is, not only does the struggle have intrinsic value, above and beyond the possibility of leading to a reward, our reports about the struggle also has extrinsic value, value to others who are fighting the same struggle ourselves. Keeping our struggle to ourselves is noble; sharing it with others is valuable. Perhaps, even, something that could lead to a reward. What if ... I know it is too late for this for the work you did over the last year, but imagine ... what if you had a blog, and every week blogged about your experience finding and overcoming development / product / business challenges for Company X? Yes, I know there are millions of blogs, and yes, I know most of them are drek. But they're not what I'm talking about: I'm talking about your blog, your experiences, your wisdom. Imagine, if you'd been doing that from the ground up, talking about your experiences, passing on your wisdom, it might start to build a name that you could turn into a career. At the very least, it would be another point of reference for your resume. Seriously, I've learned from you about how to use technology X to design web sites and benefited from development platform Y that you pointed out to me. And I've been doing this for years. If I could learn from you, don't you think other people could to? Everything you're doing might be a building block in the next big thing. I know it's trite to say that many great companies have started in garages ... but how much copy has been written sharing those stories? How much have you benefited from learning how others have done things? How much can other people learn from you? How big can you think? -the Centaur

Reblogging

Published July 9, 2010 by centaur
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Way back in the dawn of time, the Library of Dresan looked very different. And I didn't just write all the articles ... I formatted all the HTML by hand. Now, thank goodness, publishing to my blog is easier than I ever imagined, back in the day (and no, I'm not going to snark about Blogger having as many problems then as now, it served me well for many years before it, well, finally stopped serving me well). SO ANYWAY, I'm reblogging all of the old articles of the Library, tagged now as, um, Reblogging. I will of course leave the original Articles up for historical interest and my eternal embarrassment. I mean, adding banner ads to my own site ... pointing to my own site! What was I thinking? Really, next I'll get so self-referential I'll be critiquing myself as I'm writing this! -the Centaur

The Wayback Machine

Published July 9, 2010 by centaur
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No, not the WABAC machine ... the Wayback Machine! As clever as Mr. Peabody's invention is, what we're talking about here is the Internet Archive's tool for looking at what the Web looked like long ago. It's located at www.archive.org and is a great tool for inspecting, for example, how your own web sites have evolved. Let's take a look at what the Library of Dresan looked like, long long ago. Set the Wayback Machine to December 3, 2001, Sherman! (If you're following along at home, you might want to play the theme music for Jeopardy while the page loads ... this may take a while, the Internet Archive is stored on stone tablets). Alright, so the page looked like this: *shudder* In case you don't "get" the many problems with this version of the site, let me point out (beyond the background which makes it nearly unreadable) that the site is "dedicated" to something (universal peace and harmony) different from what it was actually dedicated to (my random thoughts and musings) and then with that in mind I went and wrote a post called "Dedication" which appears right under that dedication? Need I go on? Well, we can't expect perfection right off the bat, can we? (Or ever. Shut up, voice of reason! I'm just sayin'. Shut up!) At least I haven't done something dumb like, I dunno, making my site logo with Papyrus. That would be just too embarrassing for words. -the Centaur