I think I just scared the mechanic.

I got a recommendation for a mechanic to build my SR20 for me. I had sent the initial email saying I wanted 500-600hp at the crank, and that it would be living in my 82 280ZX. Here was his response:

Alex,

It would take some effort to get an SR to live long at that output.
The weak points are rods, oiling system, head flow. The bottom end
prep would be critical and the head would need work to get good flow
even with lots of boost. Tuning would have to be spot on, they don't
like detonation or overheating at all. What is your budget? An "all
stock" ITA engine is around $4500 with a good core.

Get that car to hook, and you're looking at 9 sec 1/4 mi times. Super sleeper.

"all stock" ITA engines have the following parameters:

Yep, it's a non-turbo. We are allowed the following
mods (and we've done them all):

- Built within service limits
- balanced and blueprinted
- .040" overbore
- +1/2 point compression
- exhaust is free (we run a HotShot Gen 6 with
ultraFlo muffler)
- intake is free outside the throttle body (we run a
CAI)
- stock flywheel
- stock cams
- stock valves
- no porting and polishing
- ECU is free, but we're running stock.


We put out 147hp to the wheels on a DynaPack, which
would be about 155 on a DynoJet; that's *about* 180 hp
at the crank at 6800 RPM. The key is careful prep and
optimizing specs...

So, the ITA motor is not really "stock" as such, but it complies to the ITA rules. And, that's a really healthy output for an SR without a turbo. Hell, 180hp was the original horsepower rating for the 82 280ZX Turbo! With a 2.8L six! Anyways, around this point, I fill the mechanic in. He's thinking, you know, get SR20 block, turbocharge it, and mostly pray that it holds together under abuse.

This is when I explain that I think the JUN 2.2L stroker (billet) crank, rods, and Cosworth pistons will be fine for the bottom end, and as for the top end, JUN also makes a complete SR20 cylinder head with proper massaging for the quench zones, their favorite cams, and a ceiling of like 10,000rpm. Those parts are about $10,000. Thank god Sandy isn't reading this, she'd have kittens.

I explained to the mechanic that it may seem insane to spend $15,000 on an engine that's going into a 25-year old car, just to relive my youth, but that the alternative is an M5 or SL65. Both great cars, don't get me wrong, but Thirty is right around the corner, and I am going to have an early mid-life crisis. With the amount of work that needs to be done to the chassis, that's probably a six to eight month job, depending on how many friends help me out. We gotta do all the suspension, the interior, fab up a dash, defi-ize it, and do aero on it. I'm going to be the guy driving an Imola Red (this is a Ferrari color, for the car-impaired) 280ZX with a 3' double-plane wing with gurney flaps, canards, skirts, and diffusers in a 5-point harness to work in the morning. I'm looking for 600 horse, hopefully to the wheel, but I'll settle for 600 at the crank. Maybe even 550. And by the time I'm done with the chassis, we should have the weight down to 2200lbs. And, the rate I'm losing weight, maybe the car will be finished for my thirtieth birthday, which is coming around in, what... eighteen months now? And I'll be a svelte 10% of my car's mass, positioned correctly in the center so as not to upset the all-important F/R weight distribution.

Yes, my friends. This will be a 9 second car. And it's gonna be street legal. It's going to be my thirtieth birthday present, to myself, and I hope to god I don't get arrested for setting the cruise control at 180mph on I-66. Low-flying aircraft, baby. Maybe I'll get rich when I publish Limits. Charlie says not likely, but maybe Sharks will do it. That one's certainly got movie potential.

Sad

I have made tremendous progress in the last couple days (about 3800 words on Limits -- that's good progress) in writing. I've also put a nice, mean veneer on Sharks. But now I'm stuck. I have a scene to write, and it's a very important scene, but the research I need to do for it, I need assistance from a friend. That friend is not as prompt with e-mail as I am, so I eagerly await her response. Trust me, she is the right person for this research. After all, I am a man, writing a book about a woman. I don't want to be one of those pricks who writes women the way men want them to be. I want to write a woman the way a woman is. The business end of things, Physics, and the arc of the book are pretty easy to take care of. And deep down we're all humans, and humans have similar thoughts. But, in this case, these are particularly woman thoughts, and I need woman inputs. And not just woman inputs, but inputs from a particular kind of woman -- one whom I don't normally associate with. Alas. So while I have such fervor for writing the last half of Limits, it's going to have to wait till this scene gets written, and then the havoc begins.

As Sharks goes, I am really frankly flattered at the response I got from people. I expected people to look at it and say, "well, there's a novel way to say 'dick' a hundred times..." and mostly brush it off. But people are interested! For me, it's a very hard process. I won't go into details publicly on some of the reasons this book stings a little. But the process I go through when getting back into it (I've been switching back and forth between Limits and Sharks), it's almost like I'm putting a mask of insanity, profanity, paranoia, hatred, and psychosis. I get to be that person. I'm writing it first person. I guess this is what "method acting" is. So I'm finding it difficult to put that mask on and get that book written. But it most definitely needs to be written. As soon as I can get that face off of me, I want to go and beat my ass on the treadmill. I think this is a good thing for me, health-wise, but may not be the right approach.

Lastly, Google suggests on one of the various Blogger pimping pages (Use Blogger to boost your business! and so on), the publishing of a book by blog. This I do not intend to do. However, I do have a short story, I guess you'd call it a novella, which I may get around to finishing. I don't see any market out there for it. It's just a neat story with so much earthy weirdness in it that I think people will enjoy reading it. So perhaps be prepared for that to come around these parts in the nearish future. Unfortunately, I'm not sure where I left the file. Go figure.

A snippet from the other book I'm working on

I mentioned that I am working on two books. The one I've done the most work on, Limits, is really more of a commentary on war and science than science fiction or some Clancy-style suspense. It's not a happy book. I'm killing lots of people. Entire cities, gone.

But I've also got another book I've been working on (tentative title, Sharks) which is much, much darker. The reason for this is complex. When we see Rachel from Limits trained to destroy people with munitions and people die by the millions, we can't grapple with that concept. Grief is a weird emotion. We can grieve for a family member, or for 200-300 people who die in a plane crash. But what about a million people? Would the grief actually be 3,000 times deeper? No, it wouldn't be. This other book is darker. It frightens me a little, because there are bits and pieces of me in it, and bits and pieces of things and places that happened. Sharks doesn't have any happy ending, and follows in the footsteps of Iain Banks' The Wasp Factory. Sometimes you can't be sure what your narrator is telling you. Is this happening? Is this world really that way? Did they really do that? It's a story I had to write about psychosis, delusions, paranoia, drugs, guns, information technology, and strangling people.

But, be warned, it is a lot easier to deal with a "city buster" warhead killing a million people than it is to witness somebody strangled at their desk.

And so, I give you a small quote from Sharks, (title may change) halfway in honor of NaNoWriMo, and half because most of my friends have no idea what I'm writing.

There wasn’t much you could do about the cameras in the urinals. Worse, if you just assumed the look at the ceiling effected by so many men, all you could see was another camera in the ceiling vent. Privacy was a joke, even in the bathroom. But what, really, made a bathroom sacred? What were these organizations doing with dick after dick after dick? A database of dick pictures didn’t seem to be of use to anyone, and yet it was plain as day that somebody was imaging the penis of every man to stand and use the urinal. They’ve seen mine before, certainly, and nobody’s come to me and told me that I had a deficient dick or was some kind of penile problem needing to be resolved by upper management. So clearly my member wasn’t interesting enough. Did that mean that it’s boring? Was that good?

Who knew what the women were up against.

I zipped up and headed to the sink. If anyone needed proof that the sensors in the urinals were cameras, all they had to do was put their hand under an automatic sink. You might get soap, you might get water. You might even get hot water. But you’d never get hot water, followed by soap, followed by hot water. With the same opaque sensor supposedly fitted to the faucet that flushed the urinal, it was clear that whatever was in the sink was inferior to the one in the urinal. Who needs pictures of soapy hands? Who needs dick pictures? The answer was simple. Dick pictures were much more embarrassing. Nobody’s going to give up money or classified information based upon the picture of their soapy hands.

I emerge calmly from the men’s room, carefully washing my hands, enough so others notice my hygiene, but not enough so as to appear compulsive.

I promise, it's not all about dicks.

Oh my god, I need this software.

Oh the things I could do if I had an install of Fluent running. That's an exhaust manifold for those of you who are not car geeks. With the SR20 under the hood of the Z, I'll have a lot of room for any kind of exhaust manifold I like. I am going to have some fuuuuuun with this car. I need to get me a dual or quad Opteron with a pair of 512 video cards on one of those NEC 42"s. Want. Want. Want.

Check em out.

Nike+iPod not so accurate.

As my coworker Hong-Ming told me when I explained how the Nike device works (it's an accelerometer tied to your foot, and tallies up the deltas in the iPod), "that's not very accurate." Now, bear in mind, Hong-Ming writes software for satellite control and we have to be very precise in our measurements and alignments and stuff. But, for walking around, it'll do.

But one thing has really pissed me off. I normally walk a very consistent 3mph. When I'm going somewhere, I usually get up to 4mph, but not much faster. After that, say 4.4mph, you're pretty close to running (at least at my stride), so I wouldn't call that walking. Anyways, so I had been walking these consistent 2.6-2.8 mile walks around the Suitland facility at work. The iPod told me I was ticking off a 20 minute mile, which I agreed with. That seemed reasonable. But this went on every day, even when I thought I had picked up the pace. So one day, I really kicked my own ass, went just as far, but went (as I perceived) a lot faster. Unfortunately I didn't time myself and it wasn't a known distance. The iPod told me I had ticked off a 21 minute mile. This infuriated me. I thought, okay, maybe it was the terrain (there are little grassy hills and stuff), or maybe I wasn't pushing myself as hard as I thought I was. Well, the next day my legs told me otherwise. I was sore as hell. So, if you ask me, I got my consistent 4mph, but the Nike device just wasn't accurate enough to tell the difference between the two (1mph sounds insignificant, but in this case, it's 33%!).

Fast forward to today (I hadn't done any Nike-enabled walks or runs because I lost my pebble, but found it today). I went for a 45 minute run-walk (the new LCD Soundsystem mix --w which is awful by the way). I'd walk at 3.5-4mph, and then run at 5mph for a few minutes, and then go back down to 3.5 or so, or down to 3 when I started to get a "gatorade cramp." Note this is on a treadmill. I don't know how accurate treadmills are, but they're not very complicated devices. The iPod told me this was 2.98 miles, while the treadmill told me I had gone 3.2 miles. I fear I may have miscalculated the iPod initially, as I didn't bother to read the instructions. This time I did.

I walked a consistent 3mph half mile, and told the Nike pebble to calibrate itself. When I had reached .50 miles on the treadmill, the pebble told me I had gone .43 miles, and had a slightly higher than 20 minute mile. So clearly, the thing is not very accurate at my level. If you're one of those marathon running freaks, it probably doesn't matter to you that it mis-paces you by .2mph, or that it thinks you've only run 26.1 miles. But at my level, it almost hurts my feelings to get that .2 miles taken away from me, when I went for a 3 mile walk.

I'm a sysadmin, dammit. I'm not even supposed to be outside, let alone running!

Been working on the book again

As I sit here downloading ISOs for RHEL 4 AS and RHEL 5 beta, I find myself with two hours (even at 800k/s) of dead time in front of my mac. And so I did something I haven't done in a while. I brought up my book, and started looking it over.

To be frank, reading Accelerando changed the way my book had to be written. Stross had some ideas in that book that I had written into my book (before reading his, mind you). So those have to be changed. The tone of the book has changed. I'm just kicking it around. And, I figured since some of you are participating in NaNoWriMo, I'd share a little bit of what I've been writing. I do not intend to publish my entire book online when it is finished. I will attempt to have it published normally, and depending on the success of that, I may lulu it or simply give it away. I certainly blather on a lot without you having to read a hundred thousand words of mine.

And so I present to you, the Prologue to Limits.

Prologue

War is good business. There's always a need for a better weapon, or more of the weapons they’ve been using. These "weaponeers" invent terms like “increased lethality” and “kill box” to describe just how effective at killing people their devices are.

Rachel Fischer had cut her teeth on lethality. On weaponry. Weapons lost the childhood stigma of causing death and pain, and became ever-more efficient devices. Her engineering prowess and innate understanding of how to make weaponry more lethal cast a coercive, seductive malice that permeated her creations. No mistake could be made about her designs. There were no civilian uses for the engines she developed, for the geometry of the aircraft. Rachel nurtured the death contained in her devices. She trained the software to pick bodies out better from grainy imagery. She altered aircraft so the concussion following its path would shatter bodies.

After leaving Cal Poly, Rachel started collecting other engineers to work with her on black projects for the highest bidder. Public, private, government, foreign governments, it didn't matter. Rachel and her team were doing what they did best. When searching for something to put on a business card that didn't say "Gigadeath Manufacturing," she settled for the more ambiguous Physics Without Limits.

And so it came to be that Rachel had enough contacts within many militaries, and friends in similar, warfighting companies.

This was the birth of the non-governmental, borderline paramilitary organization that was well-armed, for hire, and capable of immense destruction. Killing was their business: an incidental, sometimes accidental, kind of killing. Nobody ever had the hand on the knife that slit somebody’s throat, but their equipment had lead that knife to that throat, just as surely as the marine had used it to end the life of a counterinsurgent.

Rachel had often been in the mission control room when special operations forces carried out their usual clandestine missions. After a while, this got old. There was only ever one thing to see: people being killed. Green for night vision, white for infrared. Not people. Dots.

Despite being one of the pioneers of the new so-called "fourth generation warfare", Physics was looking to expand. To create new devices and weapons. But when Rachel looked at war, she saw that the business of war hadn’t changed much since August 6, 1945. Bombs just got bigger, and the machines that deliver them just got faster, quieter, or could carry more bombs. But whether chemical or nuclear, they were still bombs. And bombs were old news.

Physics, with Rachel at the helm, was going to change things. Change war, she said, and you change the world.

Note, this is rough, and I can already see some slight semantic/grammatical errors that I'll correct in my draft. But I thought I'd set the mood for anyone who was curious. Like I said, it's not a happy book. And after Accelerando, it's going to actually be a lot less happy.

Thanks, Charlie. :)

In sickness and in health...

I have spent most of this year deathly sick. Now, I have a strong sense of well being due to the aforementioned coffee plantation's worth of caffeine. But something else pleases me. I am wearing clothes I haven't worn in five years. Yes, folks, I am wearing pants I last wore in 2001 at ACS. I'm even wearing a long sleeved collared shirt and combed my hair. So I guess all that snot I was coughing up and the phlegm and yeast in my lungs were an excellent diet. I should spend more years sick.

Or maybe not.

Breakfast

It has to be seen and tasted to be believed folks. The already mentioned Redline (which, mind you, claims to have two doses per can), mixed with (the wikipedia has obviously not been graced with this one, and I am certainly going to correct THAT!) Encyto. Because, afterall, life has no speed limit. Quothe:

Life has no speed limit. Our exclusive energy mix features L-Citrulline to enhance blood flow, helping accelerate the transport of Taurine, Glucuronolactone, caffeine and other energizers to brain and body. If you don’t feel out of control, you aren’t going fast enough! Xcyto – Life Has No Speed Limit.

But, no, that's not good enough. I was dumb enough to take a double dose of Theraflu last night (pre-mentioned cold symptoms still not abated, although now seem to be allergy-related) with a double dose of Myer's Dark Rum. Think of hot buttered rum, only with acetaminophen, guaifenesin, and phenylephrine instead of the butter. Alex's patented "Hot Druggy Rum." Now, the goal was accomplished. I attempted to watch a movie last night, and instead found myself drooling on the couch at 7am. So I got some sleep. The quality of the sleep? Not so good.

So the final ingredient, served in my 32-ounce AMD Microsystems schwag mug, is four alka-seltzer. Yes, folks, it's bubbly, has particulate, has two foul tasting drinks in it, the equivalent of four plantations of coffee beans' worth of caffeine, and it will make me "out of control."

Let the games begin.

(glug, glug, hork hork hork)

If I had more money...

This is what I'd do for fun. I've seen all the videos, I now have the car (no Crown Vic is going to get up to 160, and the 'ru can do that for at least a few miles). I just need to save up money for the tickets, entrance, and week off work.

More work stuff

Like the weather... mercurial, mutable, forgettable. So often, we forget what last winter was like, even though we shared a drink together in a bar in a city we were both visitors in. We shared much. We got drunk together. We became friends. But, as the weather, these things blow away. All I have to say is that I am incredibly happy for Mr. and Mrs. Vicho.

Something's gotta change.

I need a new track. I need new tires. I need new brake pads.

but you just BOUGHT your car, alex!

yes, I know. And I didn't even buy some Tercel piece of shit. I bought one of Japan's finest. But I'm finding on roads like Akina pass that we're sliding uncomfortably in the direction of the outside tire. Example: hard right hand turn on a two-lane-wide road, appx 110mph. pushing hard in 4th (it might be 5th at that point, I don't recall exactly), but the car's at full boost and screaming like it should. We start floating a little from the inside to the outside. And we all know what's on the other side of the guardrail on Akina pass. Deth. So I wind up having to back off (in this case, compression braking is enough), and as the turn flattens out, I give it more gas, get to 120, and I'm into 6th. At this point, I have to brake. The brakes have gotten some use getting up Akina, and they're not sufficiently cool by the time I get to the top. So it's maximum-effort braking and downshifting (3 and 2 for compression-braking-assist), and then usually pop it out of gear and roll for a few hundred feet (down to 25mph or so) then get back into 3rd and pull into traffic.

So my tires are slipping. This ain't great. It tells me the swaybars are stiff enough, the springs are perhaps too stiff (Whiteline may have it right, with stiffer sways and softer springs), and the tires, even when hot, can't hold a 120mph turn. We're not talking a chicane here, this is a casual right hander (although nothing's really casual at 120, is it?).

Beyond the tire problem, on Usui pass, we have serious brake issues. Usui is a 3-lane wide (plus shoulders) 2800' downhill run with some nice turns, including hairpins. So you have time to get up to 90 or 100mph before you gotta get back down to 20 (until I find a way to drift this car, it's slow turns -- I can't just go tail-wide like I did in the Z), and then scream back up to 90 for the next straight. The brakes are almost useless when you get to the bottom. Akina, for contrast, is right about 1000' up.

I think I need to track prep the car. A second set of wheels with some BFG slicks, get some Porterfields on the rotors, get the JUN diffuser for the front (dear god, we need more downforce), and maybe some of the BFG g-Force tires for the stocker rims.

Winter tires? Who the hell ever heard of winter tires?

THE END IS NIGH! THE END IS NIGH!!!!!

We no longer have cable television. In fact, we haven't for a long time. I am an absolute mediaphobe. It started with movies like The Last Action Hero and conspicuous (or inconspicuous, even worse) product placement. You can't even look at a Metrobus without seeing an ad these days.

We switched to netflix when comcast fucked us on several bills. We also realized we were paying $90 a month for cable we watched maybe a few times a week. $3 bucks a day for TV we don't even get to choose? How about $30 a month for all the videos we want, of the titles we want?

Well, then netflix had to go and fuck us, too. Even with the "six at a time, unlimited movies", they were throttling us. They'd get a movie in the mail at 0700 on a Monday and ship it at 1700 on Tuesday. Which means we get a movie on Thursday for one we shipped Saturday. This means that while we're paying $35 or whatever, we're not getting what they advertise. They lied to us. And that makes the baby jesus cry.

At this point, I started ripping the dvd's we own, so we could watch them on our powerbooks. But I had no real way of integrating this with the television, save a 25' HDMI cable (oh, about $200 worth of cable!) and dedicating a laptop. Well, fruit, my 1.33ghz G4 powerbook, disliked the use it was being put to. I had something like fifteen USB devices on it, a firewire 800 device, and six or so firewire 400 devices on it. Wonky things started happening, and I decided it was time to sell the powerbook and get a computer that could handle it (an Alienware).

But let me get back to the story at hand. Both Sandy's and my laptops are now out of Applecare. This means if they break, it's our dime. Mine is in the shop getting a new battery, case, and keyboard (under applecare), so it will be in pristine condition on ebay. Sandy's is in pristine condition because she's super anal about it. But the point is, we can sell both laptops, both 60gb iPods (we've switched to a Nano), and net enough to buy Sandy a new MacBook and a mac mini.

So check this out. This is why television is over. OVER, I tell you. I have my own dvd's ripped to iTunes. I have all my music ripped to iTunes (well in excess of a hundred thousand tracks). I also have all my photos from trips on the mini (these will be managed in Adobe Bridge because iPhoto uses a proprietary database I cannot munge from Unix). BUT! (see earlier rant(s) about Apple delivering movies and tv shows) I can now also watch TV on my television, without ads, in hi-def where available (the mini can do 720i hi-def, but pales in comparison to the MacBook Pro video card -- otoh, it's $1200 cheaper). So I slap 500gb on the mini, plan for another 500gb, and I can watch all the TV I want. I have every episode of Lost (I'm still not caught up to current), and I just bought the ENTIRE SEASON of 24 (5th) at once. Before, with netflix, we'd reach the end of the disk and be screaming, "fuck!!!!!!!!!!" at the obvious cliffhanger, knowing that netflix would take a week to get us our disk. So Apple is now providing our television. Through a $525 Mac Mini. We have an HDTV, so we have a 33 or 37 inch display, something like that, in high-def. The mini's audio out sucks, so we used my spare amp to clean that up, used a DVI to HDMI cable to connect up the HD, and we're good to go.

May broadcast television die the painful death it deserves. And god help me, if somebody starts putting ads in my $1.99 episodes of television, I'm gonna go rip eyeballs out of sockets in Cupertino.

Friends are like the weather

Coming and going. Thunderstorms and balmy beautiful days at the beach. Sometimes a low pressure zone gets pushed out by a high pressure zone and you're left wondering what happened to everyone. Sometimes they get married, or have kids, or move, or just have more important stuff in their lives.

Sandy and I have been in kind of a drought (NOT to be confused with a draught!) of late. All of our friends are cow-orkers. And if you thought "friend weather" was temperamental, "work weather" is positively the definition of chaos. At least for me, because I suck at keeping my job happy.

Recently, we've fallen in with a new crowd. The DC All-Wheel Drive "club". We don't get tattoos and leather jackets and stuff. Nor, actually, do we do much racing. Mostly we just get together for dinner once or twice a month. But today I feel really special because we're going to the DCAWD halloween party! I had just been lamenting that this year, unlike previous years (where we'd been invited to laaaaame parties on Halloween), we hadn't been invited to any. And now I get to go hang out with some lovely Subaru folks.

What's more, is some of these Subaru folks understand my Hacker shirt (naturally, worn untucked with a dirty undershirt and baseball cap for effect). The first meet I went to, the president of the club was wearing a "127.0.0.1" shirt (I didn't have the heart to tell him he had typed extra characters on his shirt -- 127.1 points to the same place!!). And, get this, he works at Raytheon Missile Systems. Missile guidance stuff. Hey, that's right up my alley! Doing death for a living! Love it. So this is all good stuff. And they even have a semi-tolerant attitude towards my street endeavors into the triple digit zone.

Now all I gotta do is find one of Feòrag's adorable Cthulu dolls (you'll have to view to the end of the video for Cthulu's appearance with the adorable Athena -- John Scalzi's daughter) for the party gift exchange. Gee, I hope nobody from dcawd reads this or they'll all be fighting over the little plush braineater.

will the job thing ever feel "normal"?

As I am so fond of doing, I will display a piece of an email I received today:

Concerning parking permits, [REDACTED] has requested parking
permits at NSOF for all of the CIP personnel. Security is withholding
yours pending an investigation of the interactions between you and the
guards. I would appreciate it if you could provide me with a summary
of your view of the interactions that you have had with the guards
during the last two weeks. I recommend that you be cordial and polite
when dealing with the guards. They are "messengers", who are merely
doing what they have been requested. Apparently the rules for parking
and in particular for the granting visitor parking permits have changed
significantly during the last couple of weeks.

This all stems from some government guy coming out to the guard station and telling me I couldn't have a parking permit. He had many demands, and his porcine face turned a deep iron red as he berated me. He asked me all kinds of questions for which I had perfectly reasonable answers (such as "who my boss was"). When I did not become withered and inconsolable under his witty verbal onslaught, he became even more angry, to the point it appeared he would literally become "hopping" mad. Eventually, I just said to him, "well, then I'm going home. I can do most of what I need to do at home, and you can tell [NAME OF BOSS] why you didn't let me in the building today. (I have a badge, being a sysadmin, that lets me into all the private nooks and crannies, so to not let me into the building on account of where I park my car is ludicrous)

So now there's an investigation into how I treated the guards. Note that I always treat the guards with respect. It's like the mailroom people. They are at the bottom of the stick, salary wise, and everyone treats them like shit. That's why they're always so unfriendly. But, if you are nice to them, and do exactly as they want, use their honorific ("Officer Jones" instead of "Hey you"), and so on, you can even become friends with them. So what if I make ten times what they do? They're people too.

But this asshat, the guy who is apparently MASTER OF THE PARKING PASS, and not a guard, is so offended that I didn't cry in my soup in front of him, that he's asked for an investigation into my "behavior."

Apparently he's never met an Avriette. We don't quail easily. In fact, when people try really hard to do us harm, we react initially with stoicism. If stoicism doesn't do the trick, a little verbal abuse will do. If the verbal abuse doesn't work, usually a little demonstration of the intelligence differential does the trick. As a last resort, I walk away. One of two things happens then. If I walk, I never speak to that person again. They are a waste of their component elements. That is, they'd be better off recycled into something useful. Like a lump of coal. However, if I can't walk from the situation (this is usually because somebody is foolish enough to lock me in a room to "resolve a conflict"), I just get in real close to them, look down at their vacuous little heads and say "you really don't want this. I am a hell of a lot bigger than you."

And that, friends, is that. So we didn't even get past the "walk" park. I just left and worked at home, pursuing my parking permit through the proper channels. Yoda of the garage will probably be pissed when he finds a permit issued for me. If one isn't issued for me, I will quit. Plain and simple.

And while this isn't a perfect segue into the next little bit of job weirdness, here's a big image of a city I guarantee nobody will recognize:



I have been in ongoing negotiations with, well, I'll just leave the company name out of this post for now. The job will entail doing a C4ISRT installation for our friendly neighbor Taiwan. Now, given I speak some Mandarin, and my wife is Taiwanese, we're both interested in this. It's a big move, but I think we can manage. The curious part is that the company that would be sending me over there isn't sure whether they want me to live in San Diego (where Sandy would be miserable) and commute to Taipei, or to move to Taipei, and commute to San Diego (which would sort of be bearable). Personally, I like the whole idea. Either way, it suits me. I have lots of family in both places, and the food in Taiwan is fantastic. If we lived in Taiwan, it would also be a lot cheaper for me to hit places like Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, Goa, and many other places that are just so "out of reach" of the eastern United States. I'll probably go broke getting shit shipped from amazon, though.

But this is weird. Not the C4ISRT -- I've done that in spades. Not even moving to Taiwan or San Diego. I have no particular allegiance to a locale, as long as there are plants in the ground (this means no Arctic Circle deployments). What bothers me is that while I always seem to have a job, or be close to having a job, there's always another one around the corner, ready to shake things up for me. I like working 1-2 year stints at places. I don't get bored. But I'm ready to just do something for a long time, and then retire as a professor or something. I don't know how much more of this I've got in me.

I am special

I have now corresponded with Charlie Stross (albeit over a broken link to his website) and previously with CJ Cherryh. This makes me special. Maybe I should finish writing my book, or I should go cry myself to sleep because I'm a stupid fanboy. Decisions, decisions. Next, I'll be going to conventions and be the one crazed Fan (big "eff" mind you) who absolutely knows the meaning of Accelerando and The Faded Sun Trilogy.

Charlie made a comment that made me feel all special inside once, that he goes to cons to see fans. I mean, not too long ago, he was a fan and an aspiring writer. Maybe he won't think I'm crazy if/when I meet him and thank him for his work and tell him how surprised I was at how much we had in common.

As we get older, the world gets smaller. People we thought were continents and oceans apart are suddenly in our inboxes, saying they'd like to get a pint at our local Auld Hoose. I don't know what to make of it. It's frankly unsettling.