Monthly Archives: January 2004

A painful lesson

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Ouch.  I set out on the bike this morning at about 6:30 all bundled up in my cold weather gear.  The temperature was 30 degrees with a light wind from the southeast.  My first stop was the Monument Cafe in Georgetown where I had breakfast with some of the guys from the ham radio club.  I have re-installed the antenna on the bike (using a different mounting method), and was able to make a few contacts on my way up.  After breakfast, it was 10 miles back down to Round Rock to ride with some folks from the Austin Cycling Association.  It didn’t warm up like I had expected and everybody doing the 53 mile ride were going too fast for me.  I ended up cold and all alone about 20 miles into it.  I made the mistake of not taking any snacks along, and bonked rather badly after I’d ridden 50 miles.  At that point I was 30 miles from home.  I crawled into the little town of Weir and found a convenience store where I rested and got some food, and then limped the remaining 20 miles home.

I know better than to set out on an 80 mile ride without taking a few energy bars.  I guess that’s what these practice rides are for:  to make the mistakes and learn from them so I don’t do it during the big ride.  Whatever the case, it was a painful lesson.

Writing for publication

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I’ve been giving some thought recently to writing and publishing outside of the computer field.  In the 15 years that I’ve been writing, everything I’ve published has been related to computer software.  The only non-computer writing I’ve done is posted on this Web site, which hardly qualifies as “publishing” in my mind.

Publishing outside of the computer industry presents some interesting challenges for me.  Mind you, I have no dearth of material.  I can write about almost anything, and given a bit of time to research I can even write intelligently about most things.  Even finding a place to submit my writing doesn’t pose much of a problem.  A trip to any reasonably well-stocked book store magazine rack proves that it’s possible to publish just about anything.  The problem is getting the acquisition editor’s attention. That’s something I’ve never had to do.

I had several advantages when I started writing about computer programming.  First, I was in daily contact with the editors of major programming journals (Dr. Dobb’s Journal and Computer Language Magazine) on their CompuServe forums.  When I decided on a whim one day in 1988 to put together an article for publication, all I had to do was email a query to Kent Porter, then the technical editor for Dr. Dobb’s Journal. Easy as that, my writing career (such as it is) was started.  At the time, the supply and demand equation was highly in my favor: there were lots of people looking for programming articles and very few programmers who had the desire or ability to write them.  A year or two later I had the good fortune to meet and form a friendship with Jeff Duntemann, who was forming PC Techniques magazine.  The computer publishing business at the time was small and everybody knew everybody else, so if I sent a query to anybody in the business chances were that they knew who I was.  I still had to write good stuff, but with a few writing credits to my name, it was reasonably easy to get a new article published.

By following the simple rule of “always query before writing,” I can honestly say that I’ve never had an article rejected.  I’ve had a few proposals turned down, but every article that I’ve submitted has been published.  Does that mean I’m some great writer?  Not at all.  It just means that I was incredibly fortunate.  I know that there are plenty of very good articles out there by authors who just can’t get an editor’s attention.

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, back to where I started.  How do I get an editor’s attention?  I figured I’d pick up a copy of Writer’s Market (it’s a reference book that lists magazines by topic, how much they pay, who to contact and how, etc.) and find just the right outlet for my article.  And there’s where I got my first rude shock.  How long has email been an essential tool of business?  I’ll be charitable and say five years, although it’s probably closer to ten.  Did you know that much of the publishing industry is still dependent on paper for day-to-day communications?  Many entries in Writer’s Market say something like:

Mail queries to (address).  Allow four weeks for response to queries. Eight weeks for response to unsolicited manuscripts.

The first time I saw that I just shook my head.  After seeing it dozens of times for many major magazines, I hardly could believe it.  They want me to print a letter, put it in an envelope along with a few clips from my portfolio, and mail it?  Four weeks for them to respond to a query?  All they have to do is look at the article proposal, check their editorial calendar and my clips, and decide whether they want me to write the article.  Total time: 7.3 minutes if they go get coffee while they’re thinking about it.  Are they out of their minds?  Why don’t they let me email a query along with links to my clip portfolio?  That would save them (and me!) an incredible amount of time.

It’s a good thing I’m not trying to make a living as a freelance writer of magazine articles.  Just the hassle of printing query letters, attaching clips, and tripping down to the post office would dissuade me from the idea.  It’s bad enough sending an email query and waiting a day or two while the editor digs out from under whatever he’s doing and gets to the email.  Waiting four weeks or more just to find out if the letter got to the editor would drive me insane.  For the time being at least, I’ll limit my queries to magazines that understand how to use electronic mail.  To the others: hire a business consultant and have him drag you kicking and screaming into the 90s.

More Visual Basic wonkiness

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Item #467 in my ever-growing list of What’s Wrong with Visual Basic:

Using line breaks as statement terminators is a terrible idea, especially when the language doesn’t define an “inline comment” lexical element.  Why?  Consider this bit of code:

strHtmlStuff = “<tr>” & _
    “<td>Last Name</td>” & _
    “<td>First Name</td>” & _
    ‘ Age and weight removed pending approval & _
    ‘”<td>Age</td>” & _
    ‘”<td>Weight</td>”  & _
    “<td colspan=2>&nbsp;</td>” & _
    “<td>Notified</td>” & _
“</tr>”

The idea here is simple:  I wanted to comment out a few lines of code temporarily.  But you can’t do that because the comment character (the apostrophe) means “comment to the end of the line,” which makes a complete hash of what I’m trying to do here.  Since the statement ends at the end of the line, everything after the first comment line is considered the start of a new statement.  Big bad compilation error.  Ugly.

This isn’t much of a problem when you’re developing new code, but when you’re maintaining existing code it’s often necessary to comment out sections of old code and add remarks that tell why and when the code was removed.  Visual Basic makes this impossible.  It’s bad enough that the problem exists in VB 6 and VB Script  It’s almost criminal that the problem persists in a “modern” language like Visual Basic .NET.

Google’s calculator

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I’m continually impressed by the things I can do with Google.  Today I learned about their calculator, which can do all kinds of magic stuff.  For example, if you enter “2.3 billion acres to square meters” on the Google search line, pressing the Search button will return the answer (9.30776977 x 1012 square meters) as well as a bunch of links to unit conversion calculators, dictionaries of weights and measures, etc.  Dang, that’s cool.

Absurd musings on weight loss

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Debra and I had some friends over for dinner this evening.  We got to talking about my bicycle training and I mentioned that I’d lost over 10 pounds since October.  It seems like whenever somebody mentions losing weight, somebody else will say something to the effect of “You didn’t lose it.  You gave it to me!”  As always, my brain analyzed that comment from several viewpoints and came up with an odd idea:  the aggregate weight of the Earth’s human population is constant.  I know it’s absurd.  But it was fun to toss around for a bit.

Sleep on it

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I suspect everybody has, at one time or another, used the “sleep on it” method of solving a problem.  That is, faced with a difficult problem or decision, you give it some thought before going to sleep and wake up with the answer.  It’s one of those things that “everybody knows,” but nobody had ever researched.

Researchers at the University of Lubeck in Germany decided to put it to the test.  They devised an experiment in which groups of students were trained to perform a calculation using seven steps.  They weren’t taught, though, a little secret that would allow them to perform the calculation almost instantly.  The students were trained, tested, and then retested after eight hours.  Half of the students were allowed to sleep during that eight hour period, and the others were awake.  During retesting, sixty percent of the students who slept discovered the secret rule.  Only 22 percent of the awake crowd discovered the rule.

You might be tempted to give these researchers the “Duh” award for discovering something that “everybody knows.”  But it’s good to put this kind of anecdotal knowledge to the test of science.  Perhaps researchers can discover the mechanism that makes it work.  From there, it’s then possible to begin trying to activate that mechanism without having to crawl into bed and put the lights out.

Juggling makes you smarter?

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Researchers at the University of Regensburg in Germany have discovered that learning to juggle can cause changes in the adult brain.  Apparently, mastering juggling increases the amount of “gray matter” in areas of the brain that store and process visual information.  The study apparently proves that new stimuli can alter the brain’s structure.  This was previously thought to be impossible.  In addition, brain scans taken three months after the subjects had stopped juggling showed a decrease in the new gray matter.

I’m not sure what all this means.  Does learning to juggle make you smarter?  Can we extend this to mean that learning anything new, not necessarily a complex task requiring hand/eye coordination, create changes in the brain’s structure?  It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that it does.  The more I read about aging, the more I’m convinced that a large factor in deteriorating mental condition is the lack of new stimuli.  I sum it up as “Keep learning or start losing your mind.”

Flying cross country in a private plane

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In the summer of 1993, I took a trip from Scottsdale to North Dakota and Chicago with Debra, my step-mother, and my brother.  All told, we were gone eight days, four of them spent flying a total of 20 hours in the cabin of a Cessna 210 Turbo.  This was the year of The Big Flood in the Midwest, and we got an excellent view of the flooding in southern Minnesota and much of Iowa.  In fact, we came to speak of Iowa as “Lake Iowa,” because so much of it was under water.

One of the highlights of flying cross-country in a private aircraft is stopping at little county or city airports for bathroom, fuel, and food (usually in that order).  The people at these airports are very happy to see an aircraft come in requiring 80 gallons of fuel, and they’re more than willing to let the pilot borrow the airport car to go into town for some food.  There’s little risk that the pilot will leave a high performance aircraft and run off in a beat up 1964 Chevy Impala.  The airport managers are also very happy to sit down and talk about flying, the weather, local goings-on, and just about anything else with a pilot who flies in.  They’ll also help out with directions, finding a place to stay, minor repairs, and anything else they can.

Small airports are like a blast from the past, taking you back to the “kinder, gentler” world of the 1950s that you see on TV.  You don’t see a lot of this easy-going and relaxed helpfulness in daily life.  It’s usually a cliquish attitude among individuals who share a common hobby or interest:  pilots, serious RVers, touring cyclists, campers at out-of-the-way places, ham radio enthusiasts, etc.  What I find most interesting is that the people who generally exhibit this behavior are not overly social beings, but rather individualists and sometimes downright anti-social to most people.  This quiet conservative kindness and helpfulness is the epitome of “neighborliness,” something that city-bred liberals neither understand nor appreciate.

The Long Walk

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One of my favorite stories of all time is The Long Walk, which Stephen King published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman.  The story is about an annual competition in which 100 teenage boys line up at the Maine/Canada border and begin walking south.  The one who walks the furthest wins The Prize:  everything he wants for the rest of his life.  The catch is that if a contestant falls below 4 MPH for more than about a minute and a half, he’s out of the Walk.  The novel reminds me somewhat of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery.

What fascinates me about The Long Walk is that King does a very good job of capturing many thoughts and feelings of endurance athletes:  optimism, acceptance of pain, forming loose and sometimes lasting friendships, despair, catching the “second wind,” wishing the other competitors would fold, giving up, and finally just buckling down, turning off the brain, and going.  The book is a bit gruesome in a few places, but I don’t want to go into details and spoil the horrible surprise that you discover in the first two dozen pages.  I wouldn’t call it an uplifting book by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s a wonderful read:  well-paced and full of things that remind me of my toughest endurance events.

Spaghetti westerns

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I’ve spent the last four days suffering from either a terrible cedar allergy attack, or some sort of flu.  There’s not much to do when I’m feeling that way.  Read a mindless novel, surf the Web, or watch old movies is about the extent of my mental capabilities when my head’s pounding and I’m hacking and wheezing.  And if that’s not bad enough, it plays hell with my bicycle training schedule.

Today I finally sat down and watched The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, the last of the Clint Eastwood/Sergio Leone “spaghetti Westerns.”  I picked up all three of them (A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More are the other two) in a set at Target a couple of months back.  I’d seen all three of them before, of course, but it’d been years.  Having now watched all three of them again, I’ve gained a new appreciation for what Leone did with these three movies:  he redefined the Western.  Prior to the release of A Fistful of Dollars, most Westerns featured a protagonist who was just too good to be true.  The movies were full of moral lessons and sugar coating that made the West look like a civilized place that was just a little bit dirty.  Leone’s interpretation is, I think, much closer to reality.

Of the three movies, I liked the second one (For a Few Dollars More) the best.  The addition of Lee Van Cleef works, and many of the rough spots from the first film were worked out.  The last film, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, was too long, a little too silly in places, and overdid it with the “spooky” sound effects and music.  I realize that the characters in all three movies were somewhat over the top, but they were too far over the top in the last movie.  All in all, they’re still wonderful movies, and well worth having in your collection.