Meet Enlark, LLC
One more small step along the road of my business venture, the documents have been signed to establish the corporate entity: Enlark, LLC. No mission statement and I'm still not ready to disclose the first product planned for Enlark. There is an alpha (trademark) logo for the company that I've been using on internal presentations. So maybe I'll give a little background on the source of the company's name and that'll give something of a very general view of the company. I'll talk about other aspects of this baby business venture as other pieces start to fall together. What follows in this post will be personal opinion and shall not constitute official policy of the company. [1]
From whence the name? I have a weird techno-linquistic background, so bear with my jargon. My goals in choosing the name were 1) originality, 2) brevity, 3) available in the .com TLD, which today is just about the source for globally checking the openness of a name. I wanted something pronounceable without "training" (for example, "flickr" is cute but highly confusing on first introduction) and also easy to spell should someone only hear the name in the "real world" and wish to find the website. The easy way to satisfy the three goals are to use a neologism, or "made up word", particularly because the .com domains for almost every word in the average sized English dictionary has already been purchased (as well as most common misspellings and two word combos and baby/pet/nicknames...).
Enlark is an unlikely, but valid, construction following English morphology, coming from the still productive en- prefix (found in words like entrust, endear, enthusiasm, energy, and embiggens), of latin/greek origin via french, and the English verb lark as in to play ...
Film of the Moment: Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
I had a much longer post written, but I lost it because I'm an idiot. Probably a good thing because it did contain some almost nasty insults to critics and ninja lovers. In a nutshell, I think the third film cements this trilogy as a modern classic. I loved it.
I still think it needed allusion to Wagner's Flying Dutchman Overture, but not much else to complain about.
Rock On, VPS
My current VPS host (Tektonic) just announced that they will be doing as several have started doing and will start allowing unlimited transfers between VPS accounts, which is great and my future plans may just use it...
(This sort of thing is great for several forms of load balancing, particularly because a server doing one and only one thing is always more efficient than a server doing more than one, but then your servers need to communicate...)
Keyboarding it new school...
I've taken the plunge and on Thursday switched cold turkey to Colemak, a Dvorak-influenced layout that puts some emphasis on being easier to switch to and saving a few of the ingrained Qwerty shortcuts and punctuation. I'm rather happy with the choice and am slowly regaining speed. I expect to best my previous speeds easily.
As someone that does a lot of typing I've long considered using a smarter layout. I've been aware of Dvorak since middle school, but never felt like tackling its significant learning curve. I'm hoping the switch will be something of a proactive strike against carpal tunnel/RSI, which I worry about sometimes. I'm also using this as a opportunity to finally rid myself of my touch-typing "left-handed limp". (My left hand in Qwerty was skewed a key to the left and my right hand "wandered" to make up for it.)
I swear I might have paid more attention to touch-typing in school if the first lessons had used words (Tennessee can be spelled in the two inner fingers of Colemak) instead of gibberish (fkjjkddkk, anyone?).
Book of the Moment: Variable Star
Awesome. Proof that more writers should collaborate. Set in a parallel version of Heinlein's Future History (Detailed timeline of the Future History) with some of Heinlein's "juvenile" elements and recent events (9/11, war in the middle east) folded in. (Then further skewed by a major event in the book.) It's a fun, classic space opera (with some "romance") that begs the question of why Robinson has not written one before... Having read quite a bit of both writers, I think it does read more like Spider, but I like the feel of Robinson's writing (bad puns and all) around Heinlein's world building.
Requiem for a Hard Drive, plus a dash of morning road rage
- The horn was not installed to be your impatience meter.
- For an average inner-city stop light, say the intersection of 3rd and Hill, it does not make a hill of beans difference in when you get to your destination if it takes you 30 seconds longer to get to a damn red light.
Impatient bastard. Oh, am I holding you up from your important job and life or death meeting? Don't want to be late for sitting at that red light in front of you another minute and a half...
Anyway, my desktop hard drive crashed, again, (that damned click of death) and I'm saddened. Important day to day stuff is on my laptop hard drive at this point, but there were plenty of non-essentials like a veritable ton of piecemeal documents of works in progress, interesting titles, random sequences of events. Sure I might not have finished a lot of that anyway, but much of it means a great deal to me... I'm just not sure if I could afford the $300+ to recover that data. I think it is worth it to me, but I'm not sure if it's worth it to my pocket book, you know.
This time freaked me out, too, because most of the previous times it has happened (and I've seen the click of death way too many times in this life) I've had a little bit of warning and a bit of a chance to pull off a lot of those same files. (Some of them have seen more than one click of death attempt at their digital life and it seems even sadder to give up on them this far down the line...) This time I didn't notice any of the customary warning signs ...
Downcasting C# Generics...
This is one of the things that becomes stickier and more annoying due to my near constant jumping back and forth between Python (web apps and one-off data wrangling scripts) and C# (the current big project). But, it's bugged me for a while... It would be nice to have an easier way to handle the many situations of having on hand a List<DerivedClass> and needing to make use of that as a IList<BaseClass>. I realize that it's the sort of magic meta-programming often frowned upon in strongly-typed languages but I would be so happy if Generic Collections could provide even just IEnumerable<BaseType> for the base-chain and interfaces...
The End of Pirates of the EST, For Now
I've finished serializing what I've written for Pirates of the Eastern Standard Tribe. I apologize for being "late" posting this week's finale, but to make up for it I've made my RSS feed a bit nicer to read in most readers... Anyway, I'd love feedback on Pirates if anyone has some. I think it turned out well enough. I'm worried that it ends a bit anti-climatically considering I used the "real" climax as the opening and the "twist" climax (which I don't think is much of a twist), and then butchered it down into a surprising two lines. On the other hand, I think I told the full story I set out to, which can sometimes be rare for me. It does have a clear beginning, middle and end; even if I'm not certain about the placement of the elements, and perhaps it needs a bit more in the way of "middle parts". But I am happy with it. It's been several years in the writing, and I'm glad to have finished it. Again, I'd love comments, criticism, questions, what have you...
Because I'm feeling rather magnanimous, here's a teaser of my most recently begun work (this is about half-way through the current sequence):
A simple movement of your sword brings it across his shins, involuntarily dropping him to his knees. He has enough time and movement to swing a gun out his working armâs pocket. He fires swiftly for a conventional. His bullets are nothing. It is just about effortless, that magnetic mantra, your will over the very substance of the bullets. The bullets ricochet uselessly into the ceiling. He needs to reload. His hand is trembling. You save him the trouble by removing his ...
Requiem for a Pirate
The official memorial service had a few, somewhat estranged, relatives around that only eyed us with a mixture of misunderstanding and malevolence. They feared our usual piratical trappings amidst the abysmally formal surroundings. They couldnât understand why we refused to call their odd uncle or weird brother, one John Taylor, by his name and instead insisted on variations of âThe Captainâ, or âTaddie, me buckoâ, or âMcRavenâ. We didnât even try to eulogize him in their presence. We couldnât help but chuckle at their insistence on an open casket presentation. It had taken the help of the Captainâs attorney to get the funeral home to agree to release his body to us without the knowledge of his rather strict family.
We held a true buccaneerâs service at the edge of the Waterfrontâs Great Lawn. The weather was appropriately gray with storms on the horizon and so we had the copious green space to ourselves. A fine, strongly tempered wench of a grog was passed amongst us. We told tales of the Captain and his mistress that deep dark sea of data that haunted his sleeping moments.
We all knew that everything was going to be different. Already we heard the tremulous pattering of people seeking our heads on a platter for our actions, from a number of Tribes including âour ownâ. On the one hand, no one could prove that the anonymous data drop box, whose address was blasted unto the sky, was one of ours. On the other hand few other groups had the data skills that we had to get the booty in the first place, much less the fact that people were slowly tracing the money trail of the bombes, those brilliant and powerful hologrammatic projectors of ...
Everything is Miscellaneous and Some Local Fast Food Metadata
David Weinberger's speech on his book Everything is Miscellaneous is excellent. His discussion is basically on the theoretical aspects of the stuff being discovered and examined practically by people and companies in the digital space and digital era that has prompted vicious [1] new ideas like The Long Tail and Wikiality [2]. Neat stuff and useful to kind of expand your horizons on knowledge of er... knowledge.
Here's the kicker that really connected a couple of dots that I don't think I had yet: the tools we are building in this digital age (tags, folksonomies, et al) and the links we are building between sources of data and the tools we are much more slowly building to make use of that huge amount of wild, unmanageable data: we are slowly creating the amazing ability to externalize and enrich meaning outside of our own heads. This is an amazing conclusion and one that seems to beg for much more thought... [3]
On a bit of tangent, albeit perhaps ironically dumped into this generally miscellaneous post... Here a few notes from my mental local fast food database that someone may find useful: The central station Quiznos had a new management sign which makes that second I've seen since it has been there. The J. Gumbo's local chain has very quickly impressed me. I'd been meaning to try it since it was named Gumbo A Go Go and only in Crescent Hill, but the chain seems to have hit something of a stride. The central station location is really nice. I like it's particularly Fast/Casual balance, plus the fact that it is a Fast Casual non-Pizza place that delivers. Even more impressive, I checked out the 4th Street Live location... It is three doors down ...
