Finished up my 2,000 words for day one of the book.
This fiction stuff is really hard work. It's the making shit up bit that's more difficult than you think it's going to be until you actually do it. I mean, you want 2,000 words on Chinese history or opera or classical music or networking, sure, I can bang that out in an hour (or two). But actually having to make this stuff up is hard work.
And now I gotta do another 2,000 words tonight or sometime this afternoon. Am I a glutton for punishment or what?
say now that's 100 words you coulda used elsewhere.
And i think the phenom you describe is a part of the well-known "write what you know" rule.
Maybre your book can borrow the plot of a chinese historical opera (the East is Red, leaps, natch, to mind, or perhaps Nixon, with Goldstein, in China) and feature a young man who knows a thing or two about the networking.
I'm this close to reviving bellerophon.
But it's possible - even likely - the lockups are hardware based. grrr.
Interesting idea, but I've already committed myself to the waters of shit I know nothing about.
You know, that actually sounds a bit like this blog...
(good luck with bellerophon -- what were you doing that made it blow up so good?)
it started freezing around the 28th of October - no reason I could see - nothing in the logs, no oddball disk activity - but I wasn't ever looking right at it when it froze.
Then I noticed I'd forgotten to set up firewalling on the second NIC (an 80211b card), and I just threw up my hands, thinking:
"geez, maybe i have let someone in the back door.
If I'm gwine hafta do a stint at hard sysadminry, i might as well start with the Jaguar upgrade, since I know that busts stuff too and will provide a guided path as i fix what ain't right."
So, then I erred. I was multitasking (bad sysadmin, bad sysadmin) and wanted to cheat a bit, so instead of clean installing, I just told the installer to upgrade.
So. Install, wait, write, wait... what's this? It's frozen mid-install!
reboot.
won't reboot.
repeat cycle with increasing degrees of rigor on my part, until i note the freezes are quite independent of the software.
So, who knows? But If I'd made a proper backup of the system volume as i well knew i should have, I wouldn't have quite as many kittens to herd.
If you follow me there.
Viv and I went to see Spirited Away this afternoon. It was excellent, and made us seek cheap Japanese food.
Ouch. Hardware failures suck. I once had a 7500 at the office that would just lock up hard randomly. Turned out that it was a bad L2 cache card. One of those things that's impossible to really diagnose without opening the box and pulling random bits out.
Woooo. Mike, now that's a scary halloween story. shiver