Caught in the Tuna Net

If there weren’t a magnificent August sunbeam from the skylights making my bed feel like a frying pan, I would be asleep and trying to breathe while lying down with this miserable flu.

Instead, I’m trying to make some progress with re-skinning this blog. Must re-skin something. After spending a couple of years with Plone, PHP and WprdPress seem a little crude, though they certainly do the job. Figuring out why the path to the theme’s images directory works in one place but not another…Oy. Same old problems, different CMS.  But it’s getting there. I use two fixed “faux columns” in my site’s layout, this is just a different arrangement of the same thing. I should be able to do this. Mind you, I’d do it faster if I weren’t semi-delirious.

My boss reminded me to annoy Kaiser P. into seeing me today. Alas, yesterday, someone over at Kaiser called someone, not me, and left a message for me. How inconsiderate of those (unknown) people not to pass it along! Maybe Kaiser will actually call me back today and I can spend several hours of waiting with other sick people to get something to cope with this sinus infection from a vastly over-worked physician. For this I pay a lot of money.

Code doesn’t care if I can’t breathe through my nose. Code in da nose? Hah.

My boss, a gracious lady I admire and respect (no, I’m not just sucking up) speaks of techies as not speaking English.  I completely understand that sentiment. Some geeks are not as good at it as others.  That business about “faux columns” for instance: there really are two columns of text on the web page…on the other hand, there are no columns, no text, and no web page, just a lot of little bits of light glowing out at me from this flat panel monitor. It’s consciousness and pattern-matching ability that makes sense of any of it. “This is not a pipe,” as Rene Magritte, would say.  “There is no spoon,” as a fictional character once opined.

Mmph. Back to consciousness, of which I am in short supply.  Now, where did I put that pixel???

First post. Hello, world!

I have spoken to others in my small circle–people who have a lot more to say about the world than I do, generally–about starting their own blogs. Curiously, they tend to dig their heels in and refuse. My father, who generally has the most fascinating things to say of almost anyone I’ve ever met, mostly because he’s had a ringside seat at a lot of 20th century history, is mum.  Another beloved, Horgan (H.L. Schurr) who has the best rants, ever, is also word-shy. Dad has written nine fiction books full of cool stuff, mixing science fiction with memoirs. Morgan…has at least nine books worth of fantasy and steam-punk ideas stored away. I’ve seen six pages so far, and they’re quite fine. I wish they’d find a way to write publicly. I’m a freaking web master. I built and customized Dad’s (empty) blog, also a Wordpress thing. Yo, Morgan! I’ll host your blog, too!

“Hello world” is one of those things you always do when you first learn to program in a new language. I’ve lost count of the number of languages I’ve programmed in. Hmm…uh…Basic, Assembly, VAX VMS (is that a language? maybe not), Fortran IV, C, maybe a smidgen of Visual Basic, LISP, oh, what is that thing that’s a lot like C that they used to use for undergraduate CS people? And then there is web tech scripting: PHP, XHTML, CSS, a little Python… my memory fails me. If you don’t use them daily, you lose the details.

When I was in undergraduate engineering at the University of Virginia, they had their own humanities department in the engineering school, and they made us read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, of which I remember little except that every chapter was Chapter One. Always Hello World, always Chapter One.  Whew. And then I look around one day and ta-da! I’ve written a 500-page draft of a novel! Whoa.

And yes, I’m actually on the fourth book of a series. No, I haven’t really edited them properly. This one’s meandering around, keeping me company, basically, but it hasn’t bothered to tell me HOW I’m going to get there (plot points) from here. It will in time, I’m sure. Always the first step. Always with the patience.

And, eventually, I’ll be updating this silly blue theme to match the rest of the site. Of course, by saying this, I’ve doomed myself…