I just looked at when my last post was. 23 October?! Yikes!

So what have I been up to? Well, it was November, so my long time readers know exactly what that means for me: National Novel Writing Month. It managed to successfully eat my life pretty much all month, and now I am 70,060 words towards a first draft of a gothic horror/thriller novel. And I think that I might have found what I should be writing. Of course there is still a ton to do before this story ever sees the light of day, especially since the first draft isn’t even finished yet.

Still, I had some massive writing days (in excess of 6,000 words) and I sat down and pounded out a few thousand nearly every day. I hit 50,000 words (the NaNoWriMo “finish line”) at the end of the 14th. There were only a few days where I didn’t sit down and write something.

As always, this year was a bit of an experiment. In addition to writing in a different genre (yet again), I also used a different writing tool. It was still my trusty MacBook, but rather than using a word processor, I used Journler. Each day I started a new entry and tagged it as part of NaNoWriMo 2008. I had a smart folder that collected all of those entries so that I could spit the whole thing out as a single file. But each day I sat down to a blank page. At the bottom it gave me the word count for that entry, which meant that I knew immediately whether I had met my daily goal or not. And because I could not easily go back and reread work from previous days, it kept me from continually checking what I had previously written. While it might not work for some projects, for NaNoWriMo it was perfection (or close to it).

In addition to being Novel Writing Month, November is also National Solo Album Month. The goal is to write and record roughly a half hour of music during November with no outside help. I had heard about it a few years ago and have been wanting to give it a try. I thought that it might be a good excuse to finally write that goth album I have wanted to write for the past twenty or more years. In the end, though, I ended up with about 20-25 minutes of sketches and demos which will mostly wind up on the second Maniac Art Pond album, once I have reworked them. I know that I have still to wrap up Winter Colors, but these fit the theme that I had been planning on for the second album. I am hoping to make significant progress on both over the next two months. It would be fantastic to be able to release them both next autumn.

I think that this might be the last year for both NaNoWriMo and NaSoAlMo for me, at least for a few years. I have so much raw material to go through and polish that I think I could use with a break. There are a few other challenges that I would like to do, though. Feburary Album Writing Month, with the goal of writing fourteen songs in twenty-eight days is, not so surprisingly, in February. April is now Script Frenzy, and I think that it might work out well for me now that they have significantly reworked the rules. Of course, I may simply sit down and work on the scripts that have been on the back burner for the past few years without the help of the challenge.

First comes the holidays, though, and all of the work leading up to those. My stomach knots just thinking everything that I want to have done before I see my family again.

Tschuess.

Halloween is nearly here, and I have not finished any super-spooky music. I have been putting together a seasonal music mix, though. Originally this was a two disc monstrosity, but after listening to it for a few days it dawned on me that it needed to pruned and a few new tracks needed inclusion. I have included links to places you can listen to or legally acquire tracks, as best I can. So here, without further adieu is my Halloween 2008 mix.

1. Herrmann by Arling & Cameron
2. Creepy Doll by Jonathan Coulton
3. Death Ship by Hoodoo Gurus
4. Transylvanian Concubine [The Manson Mix] by Rasputina
5. Basement by Skinny Puppy
6. Afterlifestyles by Graveyard Cafe
7. Barrowlands by The Bolshoi
8. Bela Lugosi’s Dead by Bauhaus
9. The Jazz Butcher Meets Count Dracula by The Jazz Butcher Conspiracy
10. Voodoo by Chris Isaak
11. Twisted Nerve by The Damned
12. Scarecrow by Siouxsie & The Banshees
13. Spiderdust by Bel Canto
14. Halloween at Hogwarts by Ginny And The Heartbreakers
15. Tubular Bells by Book Of Love
16. Gingerbread Coffin by Rasputina
17. In The Tower by DeVotchKa
18. Dead Or Alive by Oingo Boingo
19. The Horizon Bleeds And Sucks Its Thumb by This Mortal Coil
20. Wormwood Theme by Todd Hodges

Enjoy.

My day job is programming computers. More specifically, I write device drivers. Mostly on Unix-type operating systems. This last year we have been a bit short-handed and I got gang pressed into working on our Windows drivers. So have some other engineers who normally work on other things.

One of these engineers was commenting—okay, complaining—about Microsoft inventing their own words for things. The complaint that day was that they call a kernel crash a bug check. Okay, so a bug check is really stopping the kernel and making a report and not exactly a crash. Still, it shows a general direction that has been made over the years of Microsoft (and others) making up words for things that already have name. And for trying to put less offensive names on bad things.

For years the errors were the not-so-helpful “general protection fault” and “illegal instruction.” Those might be helpful to an engineer, but not so much so for the lay-people who make up the majority of the victims. I had more than a few highly educated people (doctors, lawyers, etc) who told me that they thought “illegal instruction” meant that they (the user) had tried to do something that they should not rather than that a programmer was asleep on the job.

Windows Vista appears to have done away with those two error messages. Since I primarily use Mac OS X at home and Unix at work, I have not had much exposure. I do distinctly recall seeing a new and different error report in my limited exposure to Microsoft’s latest operating system. While it demonstrated that user applications still experience defects on Vista, at least the new error message is less likely to make the user think that they pressed the wrong button.

All of this got me to thinking about the logical conclusion of defect error messages. How about calling a fault a “quality moment.” Sure, it is really a “lapse of quality moment,” but when has that put a stop to deceptive naming. And think of how much more accepting of the defect you will be if you see that you are “experiencing a quality moment.” It almost has a Zen feel to it, nu?

It is a good think that I do not work for Microsoft, or you would probably see the introduction of “quality moment” into their lexicon. Of course I do know of one of my occasional readers who does work for the Redmond company, so it still could happen.

Off to work on my evil laugh. I really need to get the name of Dr. Horrible’s voice coach.

Tschuess.