Posts

Musing about Veldan’s mentor/patron and the patron’s daughter

Yesterday, M pulled a muscle in her back while we were getting ready to go to aelfsciene’s party. Not a happy thing. We were able to call the doctor and get a quick prescription called in to Walgreen’s, which I ran and picked up, also getting a picture frame to go with aelfsciene’s housewarming gift. I got a burger for M and got her situated on the couch, then went off to the party anyway. ...

Here’s some info for writers who are not quite sure where the “beginning, middle and end” of their story should be. How To Write Science Fiction And Fantasy is a great book by Orson Scott Card. We had the fortunate opportunity to see Orson Scott Card speak at a convention last year. He is a great guy, and cares a lot about helping amateur writers with advice. He led a workshop session where audience members collaborated to create a new science-fiction world, by asking “Why,” and “To what result/effect”. This was a great way to establish a cause-and-effect chain, and if the cause-and-effect chain is worked out in some detail, it can be an excellent story setting and a springboard for a number of stories. This was quite interesting as well… I will elaborate more on this if there is interest. ...

I am seriously thinking about using Veldan as the subject for my writing. Veldan is a character from Merlin’s game, Altaia, which I play in every other week. Veldan’s History (Written as character narrative) I am a half-orc. My mother was a half-orc. She bore four children by her first husband (not my father). He was a jeweler, and he died 5 years before I was born, during a robbery of his shop. After his death, my mother continue to work as a jeweler, but was not as good at it and her two oldest children also started working to support the family. ...

Ideas for generating characters… I wish I had something that would come up with random character backgrounds, like Central Casting. (Friends- If you have borrowed my copy of Central Casting, please let me know. I think I loaned it to someone in my Altaia game group, but I’m not sure.) Central Casting has a lot of detail, and creates a pretty complete background, but it has drawbacks. 1. it takes a lot of time to generate one character, 2. it is appropriate for medieval/fantasy only, and 3. I have currently mislaid my copy so I can’t use it anyway. ...

OK, I just got a copy of Dragon NaturallySpeaking and I am playing around with it to see how well it recognizes my voice. It seems to be doing a credible job so far. It looks like I can talk into just about any application where I could type, but I have to be in DragonPad in order to correct or select previous text. I think I can type faster than I talk anyway, so it remains to be seen how valuable this program really is. ...

Some bits of the dream from this morning. In school, talking to some other school mates, everyone had school uniforms on. In a dorm room, still in bed, but listening to other kids on their way to class just outside the door. Getting in trouble for parking in the bus zone, then having to appear before a judge-type person to explain my behavior. Explaining that I was with my girlfriend (pretty sure it was Michelle) and that she had to go to the bathroom which is why I had to stop there Being told by the judge-type person “Oh well, that’s OK then” and then having to clear out of the auditorium before the next event started ...

New server is up. Done: Install RedHat 7.2 Download errata and install (Download time 12h 30m at 21.3 Kbytes/sec) Configure sudoers Configure ntpd chkconfig gpm off Start httpd and edit config so I can read docs To do: Configure iptables Unconfigure ipchains Test masq routing It will probably be at least a week or two until I can start moving services from the old server to the new.

I’m collecting story ideas for nanowrimo again. I think it would be cool to do a mystery, but you have to kind of have a story/solution in mind going in. Hmm. Vague bits of dream from last night… Living in a post-apocalytic society (a la Jerimiah) Having to crawl down into a deep pit/tunnel to get something working again In other news, I am installing a new server to replace Charon - I got a refurbished pc from Dell, 1.7Ghz 512M/30G DVD,etc for $550 +tax. Not bad. It included XP professional - I’m erasing it now but maybe I can reuse the XP on my other pc. I wonder what the difference is between home and professional xp?

I’m not sure why I was at the airport. Miche was with me, and someone else I knew but now I can’t remember. We were part of a tour group or something, and we had gotten off a plane and crossed a street, then gone up some concrete steps to where we were supposed to catch a bus for our group. We went into a building to sit down and wait for the bus… ...