The Boy, by the numbers

[This list is now obsolete. Please refer to the current list.]

To make this blog easier to write (and read), I’m considering using a series of codes to describe The Boy’s latest misadventure… something like this:

• TB01: Left home (again)


• TB02: Came home (again)


• TB03: Said he’d be home, stayed out, hasn’t returned


• TB04: Had a tantrum, broke something


• TB05: Caught in a lie, insisting on his version of things


• TB06: Talks about getting a job, no follow-through


• TB07: Talks about getting a GED, no follow-through


• TB08: His band has been signed (again)


• TB09: Blames everyone else for his problems
  

You get the idea. I could just use a subject of, say, “TB04” and I wouldn’t have to type anything unless he threw multiple errors like Friday (TB04, TB05, TB06, TB07, TB09). He hasn’t been doing a very good job of managing his diabetes as of late (his A1C is 10, in the Very Bad range), and that doesn’t help — he goes completely off the rails when his glucose gets really high. And so we have one less phone than we did Thursday.

He now has less than two weeks left to clean up his act, before his court appearance. He now acknowledges drinking heavily and smoking various substances, shows no regret but says he quit drinking after a two-week binge (“I decided that was stupid”). His lip ring is gone, but the earrings are still installed and his hair won’t exactly impress a judge. He still has his head in an alternate universe, where looks don’t count for anything when going to court or job interviews. The hard part is that I agree with him partly — appearances shouldn’t make a difference — but as I’ve been telling him repeatedly, he has to deal with how things are instead of how they should be. The other minor detail is, as a high-school dropout, the facts beyond the appearance makes the job hunt difficult.

“I don’t want to work in a restaurant, or a gas station, or Kroger, or anything like that.” Unfortunately, without a diploma, that’s about all that’s open to him at this point. I think I got through to him on one point: he’s gone backwards in a big way this summer. He started out with a job, a working car, and a cell phone; now he has a non-working car, no job, and no phone. I didn’t even mention his A1C going up three points, but that’s as much a part of it as anything else.

Cool, man

I don’t think it broke 75 here today — it has been overcast all day, except when it was pouring down rain. It was kind of nice to get a day here like what we had last weekend in the NC mountains, even if I did get rained on some.

I just finished adjusting the valves on my motorcycle (two were seriously loose and a third was somewhat loose) and putting it back together, so it’s ready for when the rain clears out (which it seems to have done already). Looks like it will be in the 80s all week, with only small chances for rain, so I’m looking forward to enjoying my commute.

Professionalism, Rants, and Support

Techcommdood related a flare-up over Flare on techwr-l, a mailing list strictly dedicated to work-related communication by and for technical writers. He went on to say,

All facts removed, this was an inappropriate post. Why? Well, it offered little information and, well, it was a classic rant. You have to ask yourself, "What value did this add to the community?"

One word: none.

I don’t know about that. It pointed out some potentially serious problems with Flare, a fairly new help authoring tool (HAT) that’s trying to dethrone RoboHelp. MadCap (the company that produces Flare) stepped up and offered to work with the ranter to fix the problems, so maybe there’s a happy ending to come. Whatever: being a Mac user, neither MadCap nor Adobe (RoboHelp’s current owner) gives much of a rip about what I want or need.

Dood’s point was to decry the unprofessionalism of ranting on a public forum, whether directly or through an intermediary (as in this case) — of course, there’s Techcomm, a forum for tech writers that’s meant to be 95% rants and silly jokes, but that doesn’t really count. But there’s several kinds of unprofessionalism on display here, and they can all be seen in the ranter’s rhetorical question (caps lock removed): “Why should I pay $700 for a product and then spend my time doing workarounds to get it to do what it should do automatically?”

First, the ranter didn’t mention whether MadCap had tried to fix the problems before the rant, or if they were even aware of the problem. If you’re going to spend $700 for a piece of software, you should ask for help and expect to get it… and if you’re charging $700 for that software, you should a) make something that doesn’t break; and b) make sure your customers don’t get to the point of ranting about you in public. (The latter is often something that small companies like MadCap actually do better than larger ones like Adobe.)

The larger unprofessionalism is depending on some pretty $700 piece of software chrome to do your work for you. Face it, fellow tech writers, HTML (or even XML) is not rocket science. We complain about those icky tags, then we wonder why we get replaced by “technical writers” with a certificate education, at half the salary. Then there’s the whole issue of trusting your work to a monolithic database, which destroys everything when it gets corrupted (e.g. the late, unlamented ForeHelp), or any other software that doesn’t allow you to easily extract your work out of it (Word).

I’m not saying that we should be building help systems by hand — but we should certainly be willing to get involved at a much lower level. HTML-based help, after all, is simply a wrapper around a series of HTML (and graphic) files that provides (usually JavaScript-based) niceties like search and context. You provide table of contents and index files — and the content, of course — and that’s it. You don’t have to work directly with HTML — but you should be able to use what your authoring tool gives you to produce HTML, then be able to clean it up and prepare it for use with the help system. Yes, it takes a little time, but so does importing stuff into a dedicated HAT and fiddling with your content there.

Probably the most trouble-free help-building system I’ve seen to date is Mif2Go with FrameMaker to produce OmniHelp, an open-source help viewer. I’ve also used groff to produce HTML that works well with OmniHelp — everything can be modified to work the way you want it to, with no $700 “license fee” involved. Why are we not taking more advantage of set-ups like this?

It’s time to take control of our operating environments and to start living up to the title, technical writer. We’ve let the word become little more than a way to distinguish what we do from journalists and fiction writers for too long now, to our detriment.

FARfetched Faith Healing

I got a new power brick for my iBook the other day, and the new battery should be shipped as soon as I resolve a credit card issue with the vendor. All the fun I’ve been having with my computers lately makes this an appropriate time to tell this story.

My first encounter with a Mac was 1985, when we replaced our VT100-clone terminals (connected to a VAX) with “Fat Macs.” Those were the ones with a whopping 512K of RAM, a seemingly-extravagent amount of memory for those times. The trend of the time was decentralization — throwing off the tyranny of IT (which was “MIS” in those days) and taking care of our own needs. I’ll write more about our motivations, and the trade-offs we accepted, some other time.

As I’ve said in the past, my relationship with the Mac was not exactly love at first sight — while I loved having “my own computer,” I chafed at its limitations and propensity to crash. But it was new territory, and I forged ahead to see what it could do. Sometimes, being a day ahead can make all the difference between the “Mac Guru” and the befuddled co-worker.

I’m not sure when the spooky stuff started. First, I would figure out a pattern of non-intuitive clicks and keystrokes that would untangle a snarled program — normal enough for a button-pusher. But then, problems would go away as soon as I touched the keyboard. Then it started happening when I talked to the “owner” on the phone. But the craziest thing was when people told me they could get things working right by threatening to call me!

I’m a fairly rational guy, for being a Christian. I believe that there is an order to things, even to the supernatural — but I also believe we haven’t quite nailed down the natural order, and don’t have a clue about the supernatural. So I’ll admit that it made me a little uncomfortable when touching a computer, or someone invoking my name over it, would make it start working right. But time went on and I found other work, at a place where IT didn’t need a faith-healer, and it became a joke of sorts.

So a few years back, the people that eventually became our renters asked me to check out their daughter’s computer. It was an early Pentium-based Aptiva, with “soft” power (like many computers nowadays, it can be turned on or off by software). So I came by, and the daughter showed me the computer. Sure enough, it wouldn’t power on. I disconnected everything and pulled the cover off, thinking I might find a blown fuse. Not finding one, I told the kid, “Sometimes you can just lay hands on the motherboard” — doing so — “and say, ‘BE HEALED!’” She laughed. Then I plugged everything in, hit the power button, and it started right up.

“You weren’t kidding!” she gasped. She was almost as surprised as I was. (Most likely, unplugging the power allowed the startup circuitry to reset, and I told her that.)

What allows me to laugh it all off — even when I recently learned that people still use my name to make their computers straighten up — is that it doesn’t seem to work on my own gear. Then again, when I have a problem, it tends to be a big one — often requiring a new power supply, or rebuilding the hard drive. Maybe it’s a case of the shoemaker’s children going barefoot. Or maybe God is just reminding me that I’m really not all that.

The Rise of the Creator-Consumer, Part III

Continued from Part II
(start at Part I)

“If he tries to bring it in the bathroom while I’m taking a shower,” his wife growls, “I’ll kill him and break that camera.”

“I don’t think you have to worry about that,” he reassures her. “They’re making some sci-fi flick, I think.”

She sighs. “At least it gets him out of the house. Mary’s up in her room, just like every night. Who knows what she’s doing on that laptop…”

III. The Author

“So will we live happily ever after, Merlynn?” Katera laughed.

The sorceress shrugged, something Katera had never seen Merlynn do before. “That’s a question no wizard can answer,” she laughed in turn, “but you can. You can choose to be happy or not. There are those who have little more than their lives, who praise the gods for each day of life; and some who have conquered entire kingdoms and are yet miserable…”

Mary pauses partly to think, partly to savor the moment. It has taken her a year to get to this point: with two more sentences, she will have finished her novel. A few clicks will send this final part to her blog. But with satisfaction comes reluctance. She is happy and even relieved to be done, and it’s definitely time for a break. But it also seems so — final — to end it. Many readers assured her they felt the same way; they didn’t want it to end, or they hoped she would start a sequel soon.

Putting the laptop aside, she unfolds her legs and stretches across the bed. She has never been one of the popular girls at school — and after listening and watching them, she is glad. Their world was clothes, makeup, and their figures… and what kind of life was that? The boys don’t buzz around her like bees around a rose, but she had created a world in the last year, and if boys didn’t flock to her, all sorts of people had flocked to her story. All the posts telling her they would buy the book if she found a publisher were flattering, but what were the odds? Probably worse than her getting a date for the prom, and she isn’t exactly counting on that either.

She winces for a moment, thinking about how the early parts of her novel really stink compared to the latest — her writing has improved, and she vows to go back and fix up those beginning parts. Some of the readers had caught the odd inconsistency, and she had saved those messages too. “Done” is a relative term, I guess, she thinks, and sits back up to finish her opus.

Continued in Part IV

Good signs?

M.A.E. is still in the hospital; tomorrow is her earliest chance of getting out and it could be until Friday. She still hasn’t gotten to the point where she can eat solid food yet. I figure her Medicaid application, or some other benefit, must have gone through; they would be pushing her out the door otherwise.

The Boy was home when we got in last night. Much to my surprise, the lip ring was gone (and has stayed gone, so far). Call me a skeptic, but I think something got to him. It might have been Cousin Splat getting busted with a huge amount of pot — The Boy was driving with a car full of kids when they got pulled over, and only Splat got busted. Or it might have been his girlfriend’s mom cutting a deal with him; he ditches the girlfriend and she doesn’t try to get him whacked on statutory (he claims she told him she was 16, not 14, yeah right). Or, he might just be running out of people to sponge off of. He doesn’t really want to get his hair cut, but he’ll do it if he has to... and he probably does to get a job that pays enough to get his car fixed, pay the phone bill, get an apartment, etc. He also says he’s going to get his GED. I’ll believe it when I see it.

But the lack of lip ring is highly encouraging.

Miss Diagnosis

With M.A.E. (as we thought) on the mend from her “infection,” I grabbed Mrs. Fetched and Daughter Dearest, jumped into Barge Vader, and headed to North Carolina to visit my mom for a scheduled three-day weekend (mom and her hubby evacuate Florida for the summer, visit relatives in the Midwest, and then rent a place in the mountains for August). Amazing what a 2000-foot change in elevation makes — Planet Georgia is like a sauna, with temperature and humidity in the 90s, but we luxuriated in low-70s almost all weekend (and with temperatures that pleasant, who cares about humidity?).

Meanwhile, back at FAR Manor, M.A.E. had a relapse early Saturday morning. She called Mrs. Fetched’s mom, who took her back to the hospital — but got a doctor who she knew. This guy had a little bit more on the ball than the ER doc; he (correctly) figured out it was gallstones and admitted her to the hospital. Thanks to the magic of cellphones, we found out fairly quickly what was up and Mrs. Fetched called M.A.E.’s aunt and grandmother in Florida. They grabbed a flight and were there in short order. With everything under control, we came home Sunday afternoon as scheduled; the hospital wasn’t exactly out of the way, so we went there first. M.A.E. was kind of in and out of it, between the pain and the pain meds, but we had a nice chat with the aunt (she and I have this in common: we both hate Lotus Notes). Mrs. Fetched sent Daughter Dearest and me on our way to pick up a prescription and then go home and unpack.

Word this morning: the surgeon removed what he called “the worst-looking gall bladder I ever saw” and told M.A.E. she has to stay in the hospital one or two more days. I think the hospital is going to help M.A.E. apply for Medicaid, because that’s probably the only way they’ll ever get paid. By the time she gets out, M.A.E. won’t have had a cig in five days. Here’s hoping she extends that particular record.

The No Juice Blues

Current music: Lift It - World-Wide Message Tribe

Sing it with me…

Well, my laptop battery’s dead,
It’s power supply’s gone flaky,
Another hour before I go to bed,
And my hands are getting shaky —

My laptop, …
It’s got the No Juice Blues.

I’ve known the battery has been going bad for some time now. The power supply issue kind of snuck up on me in the last day or so.

Fortunately, I have a couple of fallbacks: I can use Daughter Dearest’s power supply, as long as I don’t keep it. My other fallback is the old beige G3 in M.A.E.’s room. It's about eight years old now, and still gets nearly daily use. Then people wonder why I insist on buying Macs.

This isn’t good

M.A.E. was complaining of back pain early this morning — it got her up and into the shower at 7:30 a.m., before anyone else was moving. That’s unusual to the point of being unique. Mrs. Fetched told her she would call the chiro-cracker to see if they could set up an emergency appointment.

After getting home just a few minutes ago, Daughter Dearest filled me in on the rest of it. She went to the chiro-cracker, then came home and started feeling sick. When she started throwing up blood around 4 p.m. (which is not what I would call a good sign), Mrs. Fetched took her to the hospital. And there they are as of now.

So if you’re the praying type, pray for M.A.E. Good thoughts, well-wishes, etc., are also appreciated.

UPDATE (9:06 p.m.): Thanks Katie, and everyone else who is reading. I heard from Mrs. Fetched about a half-hour ago; the docs haven’t figured out what’s going on. M.A.E.’s white blood cell count is elevated, which indicates an infection of some sort but they don’t know why it would be causing back & chest pain.

LAST UPDATE (9:47 p.m.): She’s home. The problem is a lower respiratory infection, for which she has been prescribed antibiotics. And I guess we’ll crank up the “quit smoking” nags a few more notches.

The Rise of the Creator-Consumer, Part II

Continued from Part I

II. The Producer

The phone rings. Husband and wife look at each other for a moment, and he says, “I’ve got it, I’m closer.” There’s nothing on anyway, he thinks — perhaps as close as it gets to “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” for him.

“Hi Dad!” came the voice of his son over the line, more cheerful than usual as of late. “I’m over at Jim’s, just wanted to let you guys know.”

“OK,” he says. “Doing anything interesting?”

His son laughs. “Just making a movie. Jim got a camcorder for his birthday. Do you think I could get one for my birthday too?”

“Um…” A memory stops him. Through the eyes of a younger self, waiting for his mom to pick up her pictures at the local camera shop, he stares wistfully at the Super-8 movie camera on the shelf behind the counter. He remembers a dream, boldly walking into the old abandoned house down the street, camera rolling, ready to interview a ghost. He would have been famous — but that camera was as out of reach financially as it was physically. That movie maker was gone, but…

“I’ll talk to your mother about it,” he says at last. “But your birthday’s in February — we’ll see how your grades look once school starts up.”

“I’ll get straight As if that’s what it takes!”

“I’ll hold you to that. Say hi to Paul for me, and be home by ten.”

“Ten… yeah. That’s enough time. Thanks, Dad! Bye!”

***

“You can stay ’til ten, Kyle?” asked Jim, as Kyle hung up the phone.

“Yeah, and I might get a camcorder for my birthday, if my grades are good.”

“That’s… seven months from now,” Tony said, counting on his fingers. “Maybe you could get it for Christmas, that would be better.”

“We’ll talk about it later,” Kyle said. “Let’s get these last two scenes done — we’ve only got two hours to wrap this up.”

“It’s not like we’re on a schedule or anything,” Tony laughed. “We can finish up tomorrow if we have to. It’s more important that we do it right.”

“You haven’t seen the comments page, have you?” Jim retorted. “There’s at least fifty of ’em, everyone’s all, ‘Hey, when’s Episode III coming out?’ We can’t leave ’em hanging.”

“OK,” Kyle picked up Tony’s script. “We still haven’t figured out how to wake up the crew — or why we’re awake to begin with. We’re all getting up from the table when the red light starts flashing — Tony, is the foot switch where you can hit it? Good, turn it off. We’re going to dub in the buzzer, right? Then we have do the bridge scene, where we see the asteroids.”

“And that’s the end of Episode III,” Tony grinned. “It’ll give us a month to figure out how we’re going to get out of it in Episode IV.”

“Let’s do it,” said Jim, turning on his dad’s halogen work lights and starting the camera. “Places, everyone,” as he grabbed a chair in front of the solid blue wall.

Continued in Part III

Three fools in a pool

The Boy, me, and Daughter Dearest at the resort last weekend. I have since had major bush-hogging done to my hair.

The Rise of the Creator-Consumer, Part I

This is a true story. That’s not to say I saw it happen, but I have seen its light shining from sites like Blogger, MySpace, and YouTube; its shadows cast across the living rooms of American households. It’s my story, and yours too... if you let it be.

I. The Passives

Another near-silent family supper is over. “Family” supper, although the four of them sat together for maybe two minutes with all the late arrivals and early leavings. Being (as he thinks) an enlightened kind of guy, he carries his dishes to the sink before entering the sanctuary of his living room. He bows to the altar of his lounge chair, picking up the remote before dropping himself onto the altar, presenting himself a living sacrifice of another evening to his one-eyed god. His god asks little of him but attention, and usually fills his empty evenings with empty entertainment in return.

But there’s no ball game on tonight, and nothing else strikes him as particularly interesting as his slack-jawed, belly-scratching worship carries him from channel to channel. He looks up as his wife comes in from the kitchen, having loaded the dishwasher and left the pots to soak in the sink. She looks past him as she settles into her own chair, picking up the romance novel from the lampstand.

He watches her for a while, pretending to watch the TV. She turns a page, then another; her expressionless face could be mistaken for a mask of anger.

That’s not the best she’s ever looked, he thinks; an echo suggests he has little to talk about. Sighing, he points to his god once again and communes. Persistence may be rewarded.

Continued in Part II

Go Back To Shopping, America

D-Day lays out our whole economic dilemma in one fine rant. In a nutshell, if we don’t spend ourselves into bankruptcy we’ll bring down the economy.

Anyone who has been out of debt for 33 years is worth listening to.

The Boy: America in Microcosm?

Current music: BassDrive

The Boy has done yet another one of his in&out maneuvers. He came home Friday evening, and flaked off back to the New Party House Wednesday night after going to see a movie with M.A.E. Amazingly(?), this came after he started looking for a job and Big V offered him one when their regular guy quit. Of course, there were strings attached to the job, like getting a haircut and putting the hardware in his pocket (he has chunky pointy earrings and a lip ring that even his friends think looks stupid). There’s also the minor detail of cigarette addiction (we’ve been after M.A.E. to quit too). He supposedly has also embraced Rastafari, but I’ll bet you a beer that he can’t tell you who Haile Selassie is or what he signifies to Rastafari — his supposed conversion is probably exactly what you would guess it is. (I’m still trying to figure out whether white people are even allowed to be Rastas… if anyone who knows happens to be reading, please feel free to comment.)

So I was huffing and puffing on the evil exerbike last night, when I started thinking about how The Boy’s self-destructive behavior is a small-scale version of what our nation is doing to itself:

• The Boy is using Rastafari to justify his ganja use; America picks and chooses parts of the Bible to justify a selfish, judgmental lifestyle that has little to do with either Judaism or Christianity.


• As The Boy is addicted to nicotine, so is America addicted to oil. Both use their addiction as an excuse to continue doing what they want — and both will continue until it’s too late, most likely.


• The Boy and America both want what they want, and want it right now.


• Neither The Boy nor America is looking ahead 20 years (or even two years) to see where their respective paths are leading.


• Neither seem to respect nor care for anyone else, no matter how much those others love them.

It’s difficult to stand by and watch both The Boy and the nation going to hell in a handbasket. But I have very little influence over either one. I do what I can about them both, but I fear it’s not enough.

Too much happening!

Work is driving me nutz. Home is driving me nutz. Got a long weekend coming a week from now though, and I’ll probably take Solar up on his invite & go roast myself in Florida next month. Then we have a week of vacation scheduled in September. Just gotta hang on a little longer.

The Boy has been partly the reason I haven’t been writing, and partly the inspiration for an upcoming essay. I’m also trying to wrap up a rather long essay on the rise of the creator-consumer, which fortunately lends itself to serialization.

Just got off the evil exerbike (puff, puff) and have some bread in the oven. This is the first night in a long time that I haven’t had to run out and pick up somebody. Yesterday would have been it, except that a friend of The Boy and his mom were out of gas & I got drafted to help them. At least they paid for their (and my) gas.

Back to it....

Musical humor

Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) is perhaps the first US Senator to be immortalized with a techno remix of his infamous “series of tubes” speech. Absolutely hilarious!

The $3/gal threshold

This hit home yesterday... gas prices have stayed just under $3/gal here for a while now. At that price, if you use two gallons per day on your commute to work & back, working at home two days per week saves enough on gas to pay a $40 DSL bill each month.

So if you're trying to convince your spouse that you need broadband (or need to keep it), here’s your ammo.

Sign, sign, everywhere a sign

Sometimes, it’s best to bring the camera along instead of wishing you had.

A bus stop bench near where my uncle Sonny used to live. Look carefully at the model (click on the pic to get a bigger image).


If I could choose my clients, it might not be a bad deal!

I had a look inside. It was full of spelling books.


I’ll bet he’s against gay marriage. Only a Republican would miss the irony....

DSL fixed, no longer neutered

Whew.

The No DSL Blues

Awhell came out and fixed our noisy phone lines yesterday, but the line technician must have goobered the DSL at the same time. A call to customer support got a promise for someone to come out... tomorrow.

Daughter Dearest is having net.withdrawal symptoms, and I’m glomming an open wireless network after dropping M.A.E. off at her work.