Where One Ends and Another Begins
Been busy the last several days with some things while the rest of my family has been on vacation. Days filled with work around my house or being away from my house. Usually I try to write my entries in the evenings, but Friday was a Law and Order marathon on USA (I'm a big Law and Order junkie), and Saturday and Sunday USA was playing National Treasure (which I hadn't seen before). So I've had neither the time during the day, nor the attention during the night to add entries, although I've had some things pointed out to me by MSN Messenger buddies that would make for good articles.
Right now, I'm trying to work on an update to Skewed during my lunch break at work, since I haven't done one in almost a month now. While doing this, I was reminded of some discussion, either on Notebook Forums or in English class in High School, on writing, particularly the space between sentences.
For a long time, I always written with two spaces between sentences, as that was how I was taught was proper for typed writing. This particular discussion was started because of that, with someone commenting (again, I'm not sure where this discussion was, so it was either a comment on my writing directly, or just a general comment). The comment came up that two was not necessary, only one was needed.
The answer is both, it depends on the actual writing. I learned how to type in my early elementary school, so it was between my Commodore 64 and my school's 286 machines. These both all used monospaced fonts, where the letter always used the same total space no matter the actual width of the letter. When typing with monospaced fonts, it's harder to discern the space between sentences, so you're supposed to write with two spaces. But with variable-width fonts, such as used by modern word processors and the main of the internet, it's easier to tell such things, so one space is sufficient and two spaces is not particularly necessary.
So in the end of the discussion, both sides were right. Nowadays, I only write with one space between sentences, as my writing habits have changed.
Tags: computer internet personal skewed typography
Buried Treasure
In High School, I kept a notebook for stuff related to the AnacondaSoftware title Spiral Island. This is a white notebook, with a sheet slid in the front with the Spiral Island logo printed on it. Judging by the fact that this paper has the words "AnacondaSoftware" printed in Kino MT font instead of Arial, which I changed it to long ago, I'm guessing this notebook was probably started somewhere in my Sophomore or early Junior year.
There's more than just that in there now. It's current contents are as follows: handwritten papers for the intro for another game, a printed copy of the original script for Spiral Island, up to the first town, printed copies of the first few entries of From the Computer of J. Millen and all the work so far done on it's sequel Dreams of Reality, a printed copy of a Pokemon fanfic I started, scrapped because it didn't work as a Pokemon fanfic, then merged into the Spiral Island storyline, some documents related to the mechanics and backstory of Spiral Island, a couple sheets of randomly generated names, a peice of triangle graph paper with Hexagons traced out on half the page, several handwritten pieces of the Ties to Infinity story, and the original handwritten work for Skewed.
But most interesting, and a most unexpected find, is a paper I found in the back of a divider sleeve. It is a fragment of my aforementioned English class, a writing test on the first two of the five sentence fragments, where I wrote a large peice of the Spiral Island storyline in the test and wrote a note on the side saying "I want a copy of this back, ok?"
These sentence fragments are called "brush strokes" by this material. The first two are Participles and Absolutes (for which I found no Wikipedia entry, sorry). On this test, we had to define these two, and this is the definition I have written on this paper:
"A participle is a phrase describing the closest noun. It starts with an active verbe with an 'ing' (or 'ed') ending. An absolute goes just a little bit further, by putting a noun that is part of the closest noun before the 'ing' word."
Using these two first "brush strokes", I have now found all five fragments, so I no longer need to look for that packet. The remaining three items are: Appositives, Adjectives Out of Order, and Active Verbs. I'll go into these in detail at a future time, but for now if you want some short examples you can look at this page on the Utah Educational Network.
This folder's got a lot of information that is valuable to me, as it contains much of my ideas that aren't written anywhere else. But finding an unexpected gem like that, made it even more valuable to me, as it now tells that things in this folder have lasted, whereas i have very little other things from my High School years. And there's some other interesting things here, like the word lugubrious written and defined randomly in the margin of one of my town maps, and this saying written in the back of it:
"I see a hitchhiking cloud. I want to pick it up, but I'm not sure how..."
Tags: anacondasoftware anecdote j_millen linguistic words writing
Proper Documentation
I don't like to forget things.
Anyone who's a regular around Notebook Forums should know that I'm a frequent poster, and the member with the highest post count. Anyone who reads the large threads in Off-Topic there, where I moderate, should be familiar with a particular post style of mine. I'll often post my thoughts or actions, surrounded by asterisk, in a similar form to stage directions. This 'conda-style posting' is rather well known on there, and in fact there's even a fairly recent thread on there dedicated to the style. From time to time the question has come up as to why I do that.
I remember a lot of things. I can remember things that are said months back, years back, even if they're said in passing. I remember a good number of the dreams I have, which I base story elements on. I remember things done over a great deal of time. But, at times, my memory fails me.
Nothing is more disconcerting to me than forgetting something. Yet, I remember little of my actual life. I remember some of high school, I remember a tiny bit of junior high. I have memories, fragments in my mind, going all the way back to when I was about two years old, yet I can't tell you what I did last month. I remember some of kindergarten, I remember practically nothing of first grade. I remember parts of the rest of my elementary school. I remember nearly nothing of my 7th grade year. I remember some of high school, but not as much as I would like. I don't remember very much of my graduation, and I remember very little of after that until the time I started working for my first tech support job, a good 5 month period, in which I turned 18.
The poem I posted a week ago is the so-far-first in a series of poems about this. I'll post more of it over time. It's a two-fold story, one a first person account of a Bard telling the story of his wanderings, and losing his old stories as he learned new ones to tell. The other a third person account reflecting myself, and fragments of memories coming to mind, forgotten strands of the past that should not have been forgotten. The stories eventually intertwine, the things in one affecting the other.
The first poem I wrote for this collection, which I originally wrote as part of a discussion after a funeral in the backstory I've written for Ties to Ifinity ~ Hehehee! The Story. The story of this poem collection, and the story told along with this first poem, originated from a dream I had one day when I decided I didn't go to work and called in sick while I was working at my first tech support job. The particular building I worked in is part of a strip mall, up the strip from a grocery store. As of now, the only things left in that strip mall is a tanning salon, an empty grocery store (the store moved out into a property down the block), and a small medical center, everything else has been taken by this call center. In this dream, I was explaining to a good friend and coworker of mine what used to be in the space, since I lived only a couple blocks from there.
When I was a kid, the strip mall used to be full. There was a video rental place, a florist, an odds-and-ends store which sold things usually $10 and under, this was before the All-A-Dollar style stores appeared. Across the parking lot used to lie a few different restaurants. I walked through the building in this dream, and pointed out the divisions that made the different stores, and showed him which stores were where. After I woke from that dream, I realized that this was something I had never thought about, and had practically forgotten. The restaurants laid empty for years at this point in time, and that one tanning salon was the only remaining shop in the building's original purpose. By now, as I understand, the owner of the property wants to tear down the complex and rebuild it from scratch, as its now more or less useless to him with one measly call center its only attendant.
I post that way on forums so I can remember. So I can look back at some time in the future, and say "oh yeah, this was happening at this time, this was a concern at this time." Nobody else remembers, because nobody else cares to remember. What has gone by is just as important as what is to come, but most people forget this. And then, at the end of the day, they look back and say "oh, what happened here, it used to be so different?"
I want to remember, I want to remember everything. But my mind is fallible. So I write things down, as the written language is not so fallible.
Tags: dream internet memory personal regularspelling ties_to_infinity
Cooldown Period
Between late training all week, and the fun of replacing a motherboard and then dealing with driver issues after that, this week has been pretty busy. Today in particular, I had a headache when I woke up, and that didn't go away until I finally finished fixing the driver problems the changing of the motherboard caused. That was from about 10 AM this morning to somewhere around 4:30 PM.
Humorously enough, as I was finishing the last of the drivers, and all I had to do was make the short phone call to Microsoft to reactivate Vista, "And Then There Was Silence" by Blind Guardian came up in my shuffled playlist. As the final driver finished installing, the line "The nightmare shall be over now, there's nothing more to fear" played. And indeed it was, a nightmare started Thursday morning after I finished installing the motherboard, a nightmare that even invaded my dreams, as it was the topic of a discussion in a dream last night that I was at work talking about the problem with other members of my team.
I had some other things I wanted to get done this week, that I was unable to get to. For starters, I wanted to start writing the new news script for use at AnacondaSoftware, so I can be rid of Coranto. There's just been too much drama surrounding Newspro/Coranto over the years, and I want to be done with it. Heck, the Wikipedia article that once existed for Coranto had a war start over it, and it was permanently deleted and not permitted to be recreated. If that's not a black spot on a product's record, I don't know what is.
But for now, for the next couple days, I'm just going to relax, and enjoy my now stutter-free machine, a problem that has plagued me since I installed the dual core processor in here back in early February. All things considered, looking at it now, I'm under the final opinion that, although the MSI website said the board was tested to work fine with the processor, the board, which was a first-gen board made and released before the Athlon X2 was released, simply wasn't compatible with the Toledo-core processor I purchased.
I'll talk more about that on the AnacondaSoftware Devblog sometime in the future. For now, after a full week of training and all the mess I've dealt with the last few days, I don't want to think about any more computer stuff for now. I want to take this chance to listen to music, watch some anime, and maybe do some writing. I have noticed, as I was using my notebook this morning to browse, that there is something wrong with the layout of this site under IE7, but I'll deal with that next week. So, I'll end this entry with a rather hilarious exchange from this week in my training class, between one of my classmates and the trainer, describing a customer he spoke to once who oddly called the remote control for their TV a "push-push.":
Trainer: Was she from the states?
Coworker: No, she was from Alabama or something...
Tags: anecdote computer music website_design
Too Late, Can't Think
I'm in training all this week, from 3PM to 11:30PM.
On normal days, I go to bed at the time I'm just getting home.
So I haven't had the chance to think of anything to write, nor have had much going around to comment on either. If you want to talk about something, I can comment on drlouis over on Notebook Forums making up the word "rotiserizing" today.
With its grand 1 result when searching Google, I'm sure its slated to be the next word added to the dictionary.
And now I've just doubled that count by including it on this page. It's gaining popularity fast!
Tags: internet linguistic personal words