I’ve started doing some image processing on my meeting notes in order to make them look nicer.
Here’s the original from a group of notes I took during a meeting on 11-29-2021. As I recall, we were having a meeting of the IT people that support the region facilities out and away from the main IT group.
And here’s the end result after processing.
It’s been a few years, and a lot has changed.
We’ve moved away from the farm, which was a really good thing… also a very sad thing, but on the whole it’s been positive. (We’ve still got chickens, so we didn’t leave it completely.)
Life has been busy. Life has been very different than I ever expected. I still work in IT, but I spend my summers working in the field at wildfire camps, sleeping in a tent and working sixteen hour days.
Through all of that time I’ve continued making meeting notes, and playing around with them. I figured I’d post a few of them here.
Been a while, but here’s one to make up for it.
It’s not exactly a meeting note, but something similar.
This is a post to get the, “I haven’t posted in a long time” stuff out of the way so that the next time I post I don’t have to write it and I can just write what I’m thinking about.
Also… I sold a story to Podcastle! Woot Woot! Yeah it was a couple months ago but I haven’t written anything here in almost a year.
Also… I got a different job! Yay! In Washington… er… yes that’s a yay! too. But it means moving and selling the farm… that’s not so much yay. More like Holy Crap! How the heck are we going to do that. Answer: not right away. I move to Washington, rent a crappy little cave of an apartment and leave the family to brave the winter and lambing season alone. Yeah… not so much yay at all. But still yay in the long run.
Also… mostly almost done with a long short story – heading towards 9000 words, but after a good edit it’ll probably be down around 8000 which is my ultimate goal. It’s a bit dark, science fantasy, and everyone dies in the end. I’ve got my eye on trying it out on Clarkesworld first and they can likely do one of their famous same day rejections… or maybe not. Lots of editing needed first… well first I need to finish it and then comes the editing.
Also… I’m annoying myself with all of these ellipses so I’m just going to stop now.
Writing contests. I’ve wanted to write since I learned how to read, and while I’ve always known that I’m pretty good at it – having your mom or your wife say you’re good is nice – they aren’t objective readers.
I’ve been listening to Mur Lafferty a lot over the past year since I decided that I wanted to give being a writer a try, so when I received my first couple of rejections, it didn’t bum me out much. Actually my reaction was, “Cool! Now those stories are finally free again to submit somewhere else.”
I hate how long some submissions take. That’s one of the benefits of web sites like the Submissions Grinder and Duotrope – they’ll tell you what the average submission length is, and some of them aren’t really that bad – a couple days for Clarkesworld.
99% of the stories submitted there are rejected though, and usually with a form letter, so you have no idea why the story didn’t make it. Either it was bad, didn’t work for the slush reader, or just wasn’t what they happened to be looking for that day. A form letter really isn’t that much to go on to help improve your craft.
One place to go is critique groups – I don’t have a good one that I’m part of so I can’t really write much about that. The one thing that I’ve heard though, is that you need to be very careful with critique groups because you can get some pretty terrible advice. You should look for a group where most of the members are better / have more experience than you.
My current favorite is contests. The mother of all scifi/horror contests is the Writers of the Future contest. I haven’t worked myself up to entering it yet, but I’ve got a story in mind that needs some rewriting before I send it off anywhere.
Last summer I entered the Escape Pod flash fiction contest – 750 word stories, and I did pretty well. The story was rough and needed to be rewritten, but it still did alright. So when Escape Pod’s sister podcast Pseudopod announced their flash fiction contest, I got to work and came up with two 500 word stories that I think are going to do really well.
One of my stories has already won its group and is headed to the semi finals and the other story’s group hasn’t shown up yet. The cool thing is that I think the second story is better than the story that’s already in the semi finals.
It’s exciting to see the voting, to read the comments that people are making, and it’s also consuming. A new group shows up every two days, so every two days at midnight it’s possible that my next story has shown up, and new comments are being posted all the time. Whew. Fun stuff.
The nice thing is that even if neither of my stories wins, I can see the feedback directly and I can see how much my writing was liked. I’m not getting a bland form letter, I’m getting real, helpful, constructive feedback that can help my writing get better.
So when the contest is over and I’m less consumed by it, I think I’m going to polish up my story about Mars, add a couple thousand words, and send it off to Writers of the Future. Most likely it will be the beginning of a process that may or may not result in winning a prize, but I think I’ve found what works for me, and that’s a pretty good prize to win all on its own.
Gates are interesting things. Where there is a gate, it’s implied that there is also a fence or a wall that the gate allows passage through.
On a farm, gates let trucks, tractors, and animals pass from outside the farm to the inside, or sometimes the other direction, but either way they’re going it’s always a very controlled thing involving three parts:
Part 1: open the gate.
Part 2: pass through the gate.
Part 3: close the gate.
On a farm, if you do part 1 and part 2, but are too stupid or lazy to do part 3, then you will quickly learn the fastest way to meet your neighbors while you spend the next five hours chasing down your animals.
If you tresspass on someone else’s property and are too stupid or lazy to do part 3, then you have given some poor farmer the gift of meeting his neighbors while he spends the next five hours chasing down his animals, and if one of those animals happens to walk out into the road and a car comes by and hits it, totals the car and gives the driver a broken collar bone, then the poor farmer gets to pay for the car, the hospital bills, and he’s down a cow which might be worth $800.
So if you open someone’s gate, you better freaking close it once you’ve passed through.
Here’s the vacuum pump my wife picked up at an Amish auction. I attached it to the board and the motor. it only came with the pump and the glass jar thing. The old Amish guy had been using it to milk his cows for years, so we know the pump is good enough to do the job. The big question is – aside from the surge milker which isn’t pictured here – what else are we missing?
The four main parts of the pump are the pump itself on the top left, the on/off switch on the bottom left, the motor on the bottom right and a glass jar thingie on the top right.
I have no idea what the glass jar thing is for. I’m sure it’s important for something though – and the Amish guy didn’t say anything about it.
Here’s a picture of the pump manufacturer tag and model number.
Daisy had a baby. The kids named her Violet.
A lot of speculation has been written over the years about where the word woot comes from… that’s woot! as in, “WOOT! I’m so happy!”
Some say it’s a Scottish word, some say it comes from dungeons and dragons, some say it originated with L33t speak, and some say it came from the original MMORPGs like Ultima online.
Here’s the real story.
Back before fast internet and before there was anything like a graphical internet let alone graphical playable online computer games, kids with UNIX accounts at their local college spent WAY too much time playing the original online multi-player games – MUDS (Multi User Dungeons.)
There were a lot of them. Hundreds, maybe more than a thousand or two, and amazingly there are still a lot of them out there. One of the largest then (and it’s still one of the largest and most popular) was a MUD called The Discworld Mud, modeled after Terry Pratchett’s Discworld book series.
At the height of the Discworld’s popularity there were still only a few popular MUDS available to play on and people tended to play on multiple muds at the same time, so the population of users was very well integrated between the different large muds. The reason for this was LAG. In the Discworld LAG was even a monster you could attack and kill.
The servers that the MUDs were hosted on were generally run by collages and were supposed to be used for research, so the MUDs were designed to limit the number of people who could play at a time, so it was typical to sit in a queue and wait for your turn to play on a popular MUD, and while you waited you’d play on a less popular MUD.
All of this explanation is to set up the environment where a popular new word could spread rapidly across a wide group of people.
Woot started this way:
On the Discworld, there was a popular way of communicating with other players on the MUD – you’d shout, and everyone near you would hear what you said. Usually the shouts would be silly things. For example if you shouted the number 8, you’d go flying through the air and get kicked out of the game.
It was also common to quote bits of Monty Python movies – especially the Knights who say Ni!.
In the Monty Python skit, the knights use the word Ni to attack the knights of King Arthur, and one knight invariable says it wrong… Noo!
And to this we add one more final piece – the Unseen University Librarian.
The Librarian used to be a human wizard but due to a magical accident he was changed into an orangutan – after which he refused to be turned back into a human because he found that he was more effective as a librarian in Simian form. His only problem was that he could only communicate by saying, “Wook.”
Add them all together – the shouting system of communication, the word, “Woot” and the Monty Python skit – and you get someone shouting, “WOOK WOOK!” when they were excited, then someone else turning it into, “Woot Woot! in reference to the knights who say ni… er nooo… or something.
This was eventually shortened to simply, “Woot!”
There we have it… the origin of the word, “Woot” is actually a magical orangutan.
The reign of the MUDs was strong all the way up until Ultima Online came out, and then almost all at the same time, the players dropped the MUDs and moved over to the new graphical MUD experience, and they brought their way of speaking with them.
AFK – away from keyboard.
LOL – laugh our loud.
: ) – the smiley face. It originated in early MUDs.
And Woot.
doWhilenot 