The Squirrel Technologist

we see we like we wait

Anonymous

It has a nice ring to it, kind of like "veni, vedi, vici".

Alexis Gilliland

What am I doing now? Writing this livejournal entry. But when I stop doing that I'm going back to reconciling different versions of the NoteboxPad. One is better than the other but I can't remember why, so I have to go line by line. I should probably run 'diff'...
The curtain is lowered for 15 µseconds to denote the process of running 'diff'.
...hm, yes, this looks useful. But it's still no substitute for not being disorganized. But then if I was organized you wouldn't be reading this, would you? Is almost paradox. Anyhoo, now back to what I should be doing.

Hah. Well. So it took longer than I expected to merge some code.
I blame everything other than myself, as what else is it for?
But I did manage to get a bit of inspiration toward my next novel from the experience:

My friend Kitman once observed that anyone can get any amount of work done provided it is not what said person is supposed to be doing. (I was quoting President Benchley's inaugural address. --Kitman.) This raises an existential question: is it possible to get anything done if there is in fact nothing you are supposed to be doing? Conversely, if nothing is what you're supposed to be doing, shouldn't you be able to do infinite work? It sort of boils down to whether the nothing in question is dynamic or passive, or perhaps the dichotomy is simple absence versus the Buddhistic no-thing. (So this is what you do all day! --K.)
Clearly it was going to be a metaphysical research summer...

And of course today I accomplished absolutely nothing. Douglas Adams invented the word Farnham under similar circs.

Regardez!

This, courtesy of imageshack.us, is a screenshot of what's up and running in the Notebox Disorganizer 6 department, viz:

• Qt Creator, which is what I'm coding in, Quite nice, if a bit memory-intensive.
• HPLWriter, shown here with an HTML file loaded. Stupidly I did not scroll to a spot where I employed formatting, but you can see the automatic paragraph indentation.
• NoteboxPad, which consists of the Ikon at the top (floating over the Qt Creator title and menu bars) (the Ikon is the Notebox Mismanager substitute for the Notebox Disorganizer tray icon; getting tray icons to work in a Linux context is now fairly simple, but wasn't when I started coding) and the window titled Brillant. (That is not a typo. Nor is it a reference to the 15th Istanbul Home Textile Exhibition, although certainly something should be. Nor is it a symptom of insufficient coffee, but that's close.)
• TextFiler, shown here with a notebox loaded. You'll note that it says "4,605 files" rather than "4,605 notes". This is because I initially wrote it to glom up all the files in a particular folder. Probably it should say "entries". You'll also note that the menu and button fonts don't look right, whereas in HPLWriter and NoteboxPad they do look right. Such is the result of a bitsy-piecey, scattershot, slapdash and ditsy coding approach that has caused Bjarne Stroustrup a total of 0.37 seconds of otherwise unexplained mental anguish.

Tomorrow I expect/hope to add the Ikon and proper menu fonts to TextFiler.

This blog entry is dull and uninteresting. To make up for it, I refer you to a much better blog.

I decided I wanted to put all my major bits and pieces of ND6 on the same (borrowed) computer, but since all my writable media are in boxes at the moment I decided it would be faster to start up my closet server.

As it turns out, servers work better when they are connected to the network. It took a certain amount of time to determine this. Then I had to sort out my IP addresses and an esoteric firewall issue, and now it is after nine o'clock.

But I do have my major bits and pieces assembled. In the process I discovered that my hard drive would give the Collyer brothers a sense of deja vu.

Excelsior, I suppose...

"Sloth is simply an inadequate synonym for 'insufficient coffee'."

Jon Kitman

"For someone who never does anything I accomplish a great deal."

also Jon Kitman

This is all by way of saying that

1) I am still alive, and
2) so is Notebox Disorganizer (or whatever it's called on my hard drive these days), although
3) you wouldn't know it if I didn't tell you, so
4) I just told you.

National Novel Writing Month is November.

I intended to have something called HPLWriter finished and released by last year's November.

That obviously did not happen.

Why?

You may have seen recent footage of a NASCAR driver rolling his car seven and a half times and walking away without a scratch. Well, it was exactly like that, except that involving a car it involved, strictly speaking, nothing at all -- but still managed to be exactly like that anyway. ("People say to me, Steve, where do you find time to juggle? Well, I juggle in my mind. --Whoops!" --Steve Martin)

Anyhoo, HPLWriter sort of mooshed around into something called TextFiler, which in turn started looking like Notebox Disorganizer 6 (I've decided to skip versions 3, 4 and 5, just to trump Netscape and Pat Volkerding), and I think I'm going to use it to write my November NaNovel, so it should get released in December. I expect to plink away at it every day this month, and I expect to blog about my plinking progress every day this month.

Watch me roll, one way or another.

...since this is my soapbox...

This Wall Street bailout is not, despite what the talking empty heads keep saying, socialist. They just call it that to draw attention away from the fact that there's nothing remotely conservative about it.

• Conservatives would let the meltdown happen. Let the speculators go bust. They made their bet, now let them lie under it.

• Socialists would nationalize the companies involved, confiscating all their assets rather than buying up the worthless ones.

---

Getting back to more traditional topics: for those following the Notebox Disorganizer III saga...progress is being made, although I underestimated the size of the endeavor. I have a transitional project called HPLWriter which I think will see the light of day somewhere around the start of NaNoWriMo.

One of the lesser known aspects of Jon Ashkanter's creative life was the time he spent as script editor for Steven Spielberg's cartoon series, WHINY GLOOM ADVENTURES. The series, which lasted three episodes and did not do well on DVD — it is the only known video release ever to be shipped directly to a recycling plant — is perhaps best remembered for its Ashkanter-written theme song, which begins:

We're whiny, we're gloomy, we're also kind of doomy
and just like Billy Mumy we're all lost in outer space
Our art is pretentious, the critics want to bench us
a nihilistic stench is what we spray around like Mace

and goes downhill from there.

The never-aired fourth episode is typical, featuring a musical number with lyrics by Ashkanter set to music by Arnold Schoenberg. The skit is performed, if that is the word, by the show's mascots, a pair of sixteen-ton weights named Angst and Weltschmerz.

ANGST
Living dead ballast goes down to a terminal sea,
exterminated Venus waiting for God; emotion abates in ice.

WELTSCHMERZ
The astronomer's calculation lost in uranium's end,
aligned with blood, lightning fast the unbred to break.

CHORUS
Opposites subtract and add up to mud, in the black mark lies the end of man
unfathomed; only the meek survive him. Doom cast fore and wide,
going, going, gone in circles of shell, the undead disclaimed and the anchor defined away.

ANGST
Sea blooms devoured in spiral dependency,
uncertain survivors, undecided variety, unfiled, unseen, lost and unfound.

WELTSCHMERZ
Black mark's is the victory, a maze of disease, only scattered flowers escape the flensing,
and the grass returns alone, for we could not cry enough to salt the ocean.

(REPEAT CHORUS)

Omitted from the above are copious directions by Ashkanter for appropriate visual accompaniment, rendered superflous when the South Korean legislature, responding to a desperate request from the animation company, unanimously passed a bill forbidding the importation of the script. As the negatives of this episode were destroyed by Steven Spielberg, and the positives never meaningfully existed, the actual visual background used is unknown. Trey Parker and Matt Stone have uncharacteristically denied involvement, while reports of copyright suits brought by Alain Resnais (Night And Fog; Last Year At Marienbad) and Ingmar Bergman (The Seventh Seal; Scary Movie 6) remain unsubstantiated. Ashkanter, speaking on condition of anonymity to PELLICLE: The International Journal of Film and Other Membraneous Coatings, stated that he neither knew nor cared. "Whatever I came up with," he said, "I'm sure you can think of something worse. Oh crap, the milk just boiled over."

One of the most challenging works in the Ashkanter oeuvre was found written in chalk on the inside of a toilet tank in the Ashkanter House in South Rhode Island. As it is unsigned its provenance has long been controversial; however, a recent IRS ruling has placed it de facto in the property of the Ashkanter Estate if nothing else. The case for its canonicity was recently buoyed by the discovery only last year (2009), on the back of the packaging of a wax seal in Ashkanter's hallway closet, of the following note, conclusively in Ashkanter's handwriting:

SPECULATIVE ZOOLOGY: the taxonomy of species possible yet undiscovered, or indeed undiscoverable.

The poem itself is untitled, and has been assigned an Ashkanter Opus Code of 1391401-A. The text:

In a watery cage I know a prisoner dumb but honest,
wading an eon with pyramidly patience, an unlit millennium of memory
unretrieved. Outside the gates of shell the jailers debate,
their trap satisfied in detachment.

Science is a dark blade, and time
collapsed, crushed and empty; God!
Scylla, seaflowers and grass ungardened,
an uncrimely demise unobserved; et tu, Charybdis?

Blood is too salty for this ocean, thus sea an enemy;
behold the bird-turtle at last. Poised on feathery fins
and awaiting a niche, all rivers at last run to the sea,
let us overturn Lethe anew.

Of this work, Wilhelm Dienst, Associate Professor of Poesy at Contamiski County College, writes as follows: "What more can one add?" Wrimo Bean of the University of the Cayman Islands (Florida) concurs, appending only an additional, parenthetical interrogation mark. Mr. Tommy Vig could not be reached for comment. Le mot juste is perhaps Ashkanter's own, for chalked at the very bottom of the tank was the single line "So what did you expect?"