2024-April Musings
Blood, sweat, and excuses.
G’day Friends:
A bunch of stuff happened this month. Some of it may even be of interest.
Update!
As I mentioned in the previous newsletter, I was hoping to write about The Three Body Problem (among other things). Well, I finally published my review. We’re talking about the book here, not the Netflix TV series nor the Tencent version. I was asked what I thought about the book, and let’s just say the review doesn’t leave any doubts about how I feel. Have you read it? Do you agree with my comments? Or do you feel I’m way off base? Leave a comment on the blog post.
I’m still working on the screenplay. I’ve made progress, but not as much as I would have liked. It’s lacking energy in places and I need to rework those scenes to pump it up some more, but that means I just have to consider my options.
As a result, I have more time to work on the next draft of my latest novel. I’m twenty-thousand words in, and making good progress there. No idea when it will be done, but I’d ideally prefer to publish it before the end of the year. I’ve also started a couple of sci-fi short stories, one of which I might submit to the new quarterly based in Singapore.
In my free time (when not writing, maintaining/setting-up servers, cooking, cleaning, cycling, shopping, sleeping, etc), I’ve been working on Django and have a proof of concept for the first of my projects (mention in last month’s newsletter). It worked pretty much straight out of the box (which is unusual for my code), but I had some annoying bugs that took some time to sort out. Of course, the hardest feature to implement is making it look nice. I’m not much of a front-end developer.
Over a decade ago, I published some short stories. At some point, the publishers changed their specifications and there were issues with my books. When I tried to fix the problems, their code wouldn’t allow me to publish just under the name skribe (they required two names). I queried them about it, but nothing changed… until now. I’ve finally been able to resubmit my books and they are once again published. Yay! Hopefully more to come soon.
News
Just under a month ago, the open-source community got a massive wake-up call. Someone inserted a backdoor into a vital piece of software. Fortunately, it was caught before it could be widely disseminated, but it does make me wonder: are there other backdoors that haven’t been caught yet? I think the most likely answer is: probably.
In the last week or so, there have been a lot of near-misses (or near-hits, if you prefer) on runways.
Of course the biggest news of the month is Voyager 1 has stopped speaking in tongues.
Other stuff
So, as you know I moved my server to a new host. Saturday, was when my contract with my former host expired. Normally, when I’m late paying (I refuse to allow autopay, if I can avoid it) they contact me within an hour or so. This time there was nothing. Nor on Sunday. Or Monday. Only late Tuesday did they send a reminder. My site could have been offline almost four days before they told me. I’m quite glad I left.
That’s it!
skribe