Most Recent Posts – Page 7 – Quietly Passing By

December 3, 2019

Yet Another NaNoWriMo Win (and another WIP)

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I did it again! Fifty thousand words in 30 days. Another work in progress to hopefully someday complete. I accomplished the same results this year for NaNoWriMo, but went about it a totally different way.

In previous years, I would get up an hour earlier in the morning to write and would generally accomplish a third to a half of my daily writing before going to work. This year, I did not get up earlier. I wrote at lunch and I wrote in the evenings and and I wrote on the weekends and I simply got it done. Not sure how, because in the past when I’ve gotten up early I’ve had difficulty winning. Not this year. Maybe that means I will finish this book.

To be honest, I don’t have a book, not even a pale facsimile of a book. I have a couple of scenes, probably opening and middle scenes, and a whole lot of character development. I wrote more “flashback” than current story and wrote one scene, a date scene, in far too much detail. Over half of it will be tossed in the final edit, most likely, but it’s there on the page now.

I have a decent grasp of two characters, a really good grasp on one character, a wildcard mystery character that is more “info ex machina” right now than useful character. I have zero character development for the antagonist. How did I get 50,000 words done and have zero antagonist development? I did as I described above.

I mean, I have plenty of second hand conjecture and “info ex machina” information on the antagonist, but he only shows up in one written scene, which is not complete. He actually does show up “off-screen” at another point in the story, but I’m not sure where that scene falls in the storyline.

My plan of attack at this point is as follows:

Finish a couple of the draft scenes I have
Work out a full story outline, from opening scene to climactic final confrontation
Work out a full time line, from earliest point in the lives of the characters to the final confrontation
Start outlining scenes – just a list of scenes
Start writing these scenes
Do lots of editing

I’ll be creating a Kanban board to track my progress for this novel, so that should be interesting. I might post screenshots of it as I move along. I hope against hope that I don’t get bored of this story. Wish me luck!

November 13, 2019

A NaNoWriMo Update and Other Thoughts

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We’re closing in on halfway through NanoWriMo and my word count is over the 22K mark. I’m a touch ahead of the minimum word count, so that’s OK for now, but I need to get far more ahead, because Thanksgiving is coming…

I found an interesting technology tidbit today. I’m fairly certain that I’ve never mentioned I am a Type I diabetic, at least not in anything published on this site-maybe on a previous site. I’ve been diabetic since I was thirteen years old, so that is creeping up on thirty-five years living with an incurable, but treatable disease.

As with most incurable diseases, especially ones that affect millions of people, there is a sizable support community on the Internet. There are multiple foundations working hard to find a cure, but they are all hampered by the need for any commercial solutions to be approved by the FDA or other regulatory bodies before they are available to the public.

Well, open source technology is trying to make an end-run on this bottleneck. It is succeeding to some degree. Before I dive into how, let me explain the mechanics behind diabetes, particularly Type I diabetes. To simplify this explanation, I will take some shortcuts that medical professionals might feel are inaccurate, but I’m not writing a dissertation, just trying to explain what is broken.

In Type I diabetes, the pancreas, which is responsible for producing insulin (among other things) stops working. This is the root cause of the problem. Without insulin, the body’s cells cannot process sugar, or more accurately, glucose. Levels of glucose build up in the blood, causing a condition called hyperglycemia, or elevated blood sugar. The short-term effects are intense thirst, excessive urination, lethargy, and a craving for sweets or food in general. The long-term effects are damaged organs and bodily systems from dealing with the excessive amount of glucose in the blood.

When a pancreas functions normally, it can react to higher levels of glucose in the blood and produce more insulin to allow the body’s cells to process the glucose. In diabetics, this doesn’t happen. Unless the body gets insulin, a person will eventually slip into a coma and die. There have been dozens of attempts to replace a damaged pancreas – transplants, insulet cell (the part of the pancreas that produces insulin) implantation, and other weirder methods have been tried, all in an attempt to bring the glucose cycle back to normal – a person takes in carbohydrates, the digestive system breaks them down and the pancreas produces insulin to process the resulting glucose.

Insulin therapy, whether shots or pumps, has always been complicated to balance because to properly dose insulin you must know your blood glucose (bg) level. This requires, for most diabetics, pricking their finger and using a test strip and an electronic meter to determine their blood glucose level. They then can use a formula to determine how much insulin to take. Unfortunately, taking insulin after eating, when bg levels are high, has been determined to be less effective at preventing long-term complications of diabetes, which are many, some of which are more dangerous than the disease itself.

It was discovered that the better way to treat with insulin is to determine how much insulin to take prior to eating, to keep bg levels from rising too high. This requires knowing how many carbohydrates are in your current meal, and also knowing how much insulin it takes for your body to process that amount of carbohydrates, which varies from person to person.

The ideal system would eliminate the finger sticking and insulin calculations and coordinate information from a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) and feed that directly into a insulin pump, so that the pump can automatically determine how much insulin to deliver. This would essentially create an artificial pancreas. That’s exactly what two open source projects are doing now. Check out the main website for these amazing projects. They do a much better job than I would in explaining what they are doing.

Here is the Looping website and here is the OpenAPS site, both of which are making strides toward creating an artificial pancreas system. Pretty exciting stuff.

I’ll check back in once I top 30,000 words.

November 2, 2019

The Obligatory (and Tardy) NaNoWriMo Announcement

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Here it is day 2 of NaNoWriMo 2019 and I am just now announcing my intentions to participate. Thankfully, I did not forget to start writing and I am now over 5000 words in.

I’m back in the thriller genre for a fourth or fifth time, depending upon how you count it. I have started four thrillers for NaNoWriMo, but one of them I had to split into two novels, so five is more accurate from a WIP perspective, but four is the correct number of NaNoWriMo attempts. Let’s just say it depends upon your “point of view” (an oblique Star Wars reference, in honor of Episode IX coming out soon).

Today was the third annual Northwest Georgia Writers Conference, held in Calhoun, Georgia. I did double duty at the conference, running the NaNoWriMo Write-In room and speed presenting on NaNoWriMo – what it is and how to prep for it. It was a great day, with some great authors and speakers. You can check out all the details at their website – nwgawriterscon.com.

I wanted to mention a bit about the featured image for today’s post. I usually find some (free) stock photography for my featured images, but this time I am posting this photo from a cruise excursion I took several years ago. It was a forest zipline and because of the lighting in the shot, you can’t really see the other end of the line very well. I see this as a symbol of the NaNoWriMo experience. You can’t see the end very clearly, or at all, but the journey should be great fun!

Until I post next…

October 17, 2019

Repost – My First NaNoWriMo Attempt Announcement

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This is a reposting of the announcement of my first NaNoWriMo attempt in 2011, the year I started on the 15th of November and did not manage to pump out 50,000 words. It’s the first post I’ve come across that didn’t involve substantial ranting about the state of politics leading up to the reelection of he-who-will-not-be-named, the 44th president of the United States. I’ll refrain from reposting those, as they display, for all to read, a coarser and very sarcastic side of me that I am not particularly proud of. There was not much else in those posts aside from updates on my NaNoWriMo progress and promises of things that never came to pass, so I will let them slide into the digital dustbin.

Here goes…

Writing, Writing, Writing – originally posted November 21, 2011

I am 10,000 words into my book now… oh, I didn’t mention my book before?

I know, I haven’t mentioned it, sorry, but I had to open this post with something interesting. I signed up for the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) event about halfway through November, which was kind of silly, since the goal of the event is for people to craft 50,000 words of a novel in 30 days. Yes, that is 1,667 words a day, a somewhat challenging goal for anyone who is not a professional writer or seasoned veteran of journaling (my spell-check tells me that is not a word, but I know some of you do it).

The idea is not so much to have a “finished” work by month’s end, but to have that pile of 50,000 words to mold and shape into something potentially publishable. The event is in its 13th year if I count correctly and has produced many published novels including Water for Elephants, a best-seller by Sara Gruen that was made into a movie. I am not so egotistical that I think that I will have a best seller (although that would be ultimately cool). I realize that probably 7,500 of those 10,000 words are either passively rendered, misspelled, repeated too often, or just bad prose, but I am plugging on in hopes that I can at least say I tried.

As I am a complete beginner at this and have no real idea what I am doing, the book I am writing is constantly morphing. I see where I am overly descriptive and bog down in details. So I edit and move and cut and modify so that the novel fits my new mental framework for it each day. If I don’t finish the manuscript it will be because I never quit editing or I get so tired of editing that I finally give up the goal of writing a book.

My attention span is not my strongest character attribute, so I hope that this project gives me a challenge and teaches me to stay with a task until it is complete. No sneak previews of my book right now. I will tell you the (working) title is “Opposition” and it is a suspense, thriller, action novel (not sure how much of each will survive the edits) set in present time. Maybe I will post a snippet of one of the chapters in December. That is pretty dangerous to do since it could all change before/if it gets published!

So wish me luck on my book if you don’t mind. I will need it.

October 16, 2019

Repost – My Inaugural Post on the WordPress Platform

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Here is another gem from the past – my first post after moving from Blogger to the WordPress platform. Like the previous repost, this one is a little raw, and after reading this post and my previous one, you may be done with my site, as my political leanings are spilled out all over everything. I urge you not to leave, but read some other posts, and have a dialogue with me through the comments. I won’t call you names as long as you reciprocate, and even if you do, I still won’t call you names, but I will post your comments in the Hall of Shame (that place where useless ad hominem attacks and silly name-calling go to be seen by everyone who checks out the site).

Inaugural Post Seems Random, But It Is An Allusion – originally posted April 4, 2013

Here I am!

I posted on my other blog over two weeks ago that I had a new blog site and that it would be more personal, close-to-my-heart topic oriented. I am covering a wide variety of topics in this post, but it really is not random, I promise.

First, I want to rant a little about the ongoing, immensely frustrating “ammo shortage”. I enjoy shooting, but now that I have come back around to focus on it, I can’t find ammo to shoot. It is ridiculous to go to my local Wal-Mart and not be able to find ammo of any kind except for my shotgun. I don’t have exotic firearms, just .22s, a .30-30 rifle, and a .45 1911 clone (and my shotgun). I should be able to get that ammo easily, and not pay through the nose for it. The last time I bought .22 ammo from a reputable reseller, I still spent $0.08 a round for it. The last box of .30-30 ammo I saw (at WalMart) worked out to a dollar a round.

I don’t think so.

I’ll just use my .22 rifle, which is a single-shot bolt-action, and shoot what I have very S-L-O-W-L-Y.

It is not that there is a shortage in actual supply, just that “entrepreneurs”are capitalizing on the fear that some gun owners have that they may not be able to buy ammo in the not so distant future. They snatch up large quantities of ammo and sell them on sites like GunBrokers.com for ridiculously inflated prices. As long as others continue to pay these prices, there will continue to be a “shortage”. Stop buying over-priced ammo!

Follow the advice offered in this YouTube video by “beelikestowatch” (Caution: In his passion he does use some coarse language)

Cool your heels and let the vultures eat their investments. Speaking of vultures…

While there are still highly flawed gun control bills floating around, both at the state level and the federal level, it looks as if we may scrape by this frenzy and return to some semblance of status quo – at least at the federal level. Some areas will be impacted by state legislation. Some states, namely Colorado,Connecticut, and New York along with others, have passed some nonsensical bills to limit magazine capacities, “strengthen” background checks (another illusion – more on that shortly), and introduce other mostly useless measures to improve gun control. Someone should tell them that “gun control” can only be improved at the range…

The next illusion I want to clear up is the so-called “generally supported” measure of improving background checks, now cloaked in the innocuous term “universal background checks”. These bill must be stopped. Think about it. The goal of these bills at the federal level is to make sure that criminal and “unfit” persons are not able to purchase guns, even in private transactions, much like it is in California now.

How is this accomplished?

In short, the government must first know about every gun currently owned. That means a database of guns, with all of the owner information included in those records. What happens after that? I can’t explain this any better than YouTube personality “nutnfancy”. Watch this video of his for an excellent description of the “universal background check” insanity.

Speaking of insane… would you believe that Our Dear Leader (POTUS), who has never had a budget to constrain him his entire presidency (good thing, too, as he would break it every time) and who has spent recklessly (to put it mildly) his entire tenure, has declared April “National Financial Capability Month”, with the stated goal of helping Americans learn how to live within a budget and make wise financial decisions.

You can’t make this stuff up!!!

Free political humor!!! You can read all about it here.

Enough said about that…

Finally, I want to end on a happy note (literally) by mentioning that if you are into smooth, well-mixed, ambient music, you should head over to Ambient Nights. While the site is in a bit of a transition, once you find the music (free forum registration is required) the journey through the site’s twists and turns is all worth it. Alex (the mixing genius behind Ambient Nights) works magic with the music there. I promise you won’t be disappointed.

(Sadly, it looks like the forum site is no longer accessible, but you can listen to this great music at MixCloud and as a bonus, it is easier to navigate than the forum site).

By the way, if you want more information from sources more “in the know” than me, check out “hickok45”, along with “nutnfancy” on YouTube and others that pop up in the recommendations after you watch one of their excellent videos. Get involved at the local level, contact your representatives and let them know what you believe, talk with other gun owners and keep pushing back against infringement on the Second Amendment.

Until I write again, stay safe, live life joyously, and always move forward (but not in that weird liberal “forward” way).

October 16, 2019

Repost – A Prescient Political Rant From Way Back When

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The following is a now seemingly VERY prescient political rant from way back in the second Obama administration (and when I was blogging on the Blogger platform). The biggest difference between what was happening then and what is happening now is that our current crop of 2020 presidential candidates are now at least being honest about their intentions. The post is a bit raw, as I was really still developing my “voice”, but I wanted to show it “as-is”, if for no other reason than to show how little things change. Have a read, then rejoin me for a brief comment on current events at the bottom.

I do not think it means what you think it means… (originally posted April 17, 2013)

The relentless dialog from the Obama administration about gun control (and yes, I am shamefully gleeful that the POTUS is upset about the background check amendment failing) has consistently used two words that I feel are improperly applied.

Their use reminds me of a line from the movie “The Princess Bride”, based on the book of the same name by William Goldman, where one of the characters keeps interjecting the word “inconceivable” and, after several instances of this misapplication of the word, another character takes him to task with “You keep using that word – I do not think it means what you think it means.”

The words the Obama administration keeps using is “common sense”. While to me, a member of this administration using those words is “inconceivable”, especially the president, whose lack of common sense has devastated morale in this country, not to mention the economy. The application of “common sense” as in “we need to pass these common sense laws to protect Americans from gun violence” is just another tactic used by this waste of an administration to marginalize those who actually do have common sense about gun control.

If they label their legislation as “common sense” then what happens to the person who opposes it? They are instantly labeled as not having common sense by the sheep of this country who believe everything Obama says. Because the president of the United States and his lackeys all parrot the same words “common sense, common sense” those of us who actually have it are left to fight the label instead of having a logical conversation about what really is “common sense”.

Is it common sense to think that the police will be at your house in time to protect you from home invaders? Is it common sense to think that police are available in an instant to keep someone from robbing and murdering you in the street?

I submit, it is not.

While I have the utmost respect for the police officers I know and for the police in general, I know they are only human and not superheroes. They cannot be everywhere at all times, leaving the average citizen to protect themselves from those that would do them harm. To only allow criminals and law enforcement officers to have guns is most definitely NOT common sense.

My idea of common sense is in tune with the sign I saw on the door of a sporting goods store the other day. It stated that anyone entering the store should realize that all staff were armed and, instead of threatening violence against those who might cause trouble, it simply said after that, “be smart”. Common sense dictates that the store I entered had an extremely low probability of being robbed, even though the merchandise within was extremely valuable. Common sense dictates that those entering the store be mindful that every staff member had the proper tool to stop any attempt to pilfer.

But what really bothers me is what this administration is hiding behind those two words they are misusing. The expanded background checks they want are the first step to gun registration and confiscation. As much as they argue that the law explicitly prohibits this, logic and “common sense” still lead to this conclusion. To enforce these expanded background checks, particularly the ones aimed at private sales, the enforcing agency must first know what affected property is in circulation.

How is that done? Registration.

The argument that the majority of sales at gun shows do not involve a background check is pure fiction. The vast majority of sales at gun shows are between private citizens and dealers – who run a background check on anyone buying a firearm. A small percentage of private sales occur at these shows, but this is not where criminals buy their guns. These transactions are overwhelmingly between law-abiding citizens who happen to meet at the venue.

So please ignore the shallow, misused words “common sense” when the latest diatribe by the POTUS or his mouthpieces is broadcast by the liberal media. The proposals being offered are so much the opposite.

What to think? We still hear about passing “common sense” gun laws from every 2020 Democrat candidate, but some double down with even more nonsense. Francis “Beto” O’Rourke has made it known that he is after your “assault rifles” because there’s no use for them away from the battlefield. But don’t worry, the government isn’t confiscating them, they are “buying them back”, not that they ever owned them to be able to “buy them back”.

The only silver lining on this particular cloud is that “buy-back Beto” is polling a few decimal places south of one percent.

Site Changes and Other Minutia

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In case you didn’t notice, I’ve been playing with the site theme. I’ve gone through over a dozen themes, with about a dozen left to investigate. They look so great on their demo sites, but once you actually put them on your site, getting them to look good is, shall we say, challenging. I’ve desperately been looking for a theme similar to the default WordPress theme “2017”, which is what I was running when I first set this up.

The current theme, Moesia, is OK, but not exactly what I want. My main gripe is that the header image, which starts full page, makes you think there isn’t anything there except an image. There’s no title visible until you scroll down, which is not what I want it to do. Most of the other elements are good and the theme is fairly customizable for a free one (I’m a cheapskate, remember?).

But I’m still not happy.

You probably wonder why I even care, as little as I post to this site, but I do, and I think (and believe) that if I can make it look good, I’ll be more apt to post. Who knows?

I’m still working on those posts I promised in my last entry…hopefully I will finish one tonight. If not, it may be a couple of days before I finish it. It’s coming.

Stay tuned…

September 30, 2019

About Life Getting In The Way…

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It’s funny how the life you want to live keeps getting interrupted by the life that is. Or maybe, it’s not that funny for you. I have to admit, it’s not that funny for me, but I’m set on moving forward.

It’s been months since I have posted, as usual. When last I posted, we were looking for a house, I was looking for some old blog posts, and everyone was looking for some sanity to come out of Washington D.C.. We did at least find a house, but as for those old blog posts and sanity from D.C., those have yet to be found.

Peter Mayhew and Rutger Hauer were still alive, but nobody knew Jan Michael Vincent was already dead (that was an odd one…).

I was determined to finish a book before NaNoWriMo kicked in again, but here it is, the cusp of October, and there is no way I will finish a book before November. Will I start a new one in November? Probably.

I am going to re-post some of my old entries. Actually, I have already done that. I dropped three re-posts right before writing this one. More to follow.

For the two of you who read this, I want you to know that I am re-dedicating to posting more consistently. I have a fairly full head right now, and in the absence of a pensieve, I’ll need to blog to remember it all.

A separate post is coming right up after this one, detailing some moderately deep thoughts about what I have been learning in my Christian walk over the past few months, from searching for a house to going through the life ordeal of seeing my daughter get married.

After that is another post, potentially quite controversial, about how I feel we as a church do a disservice to new believers before they even accept Christ. I will be opening up comments on this post as I really desire to know what others think.

What does the image above have to do with this post? Absolutely nothing…

Stay tuned.

February 25, 2019

Another Update on the Site Rebuild… and Some Thoughts

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Since I haven’t posted any old content to the blog yet, I’m making a new post. I have several articles almost ready to go, but I’m missing a whole set of articles, particularly many chess games and some articles about my writing, so I’ve been doing a deep dive on my hard drives and server to find those files. No luck as yet. Which is eerie. I don’t ever delete anything…

…which is both a good and a bad thing. Good, because you never know when something might be useful again, or you’re in the mood for some nostalgia. Bad, because sometimes you should just clean out the clutter. Cleaning out the clutter is a discipline, at least for me, as I am loath to get rid of anything, digital or physical.

Sometimes, it is the right thing to do. Bear with me as I get spiritual here. Sometimes we need to ditch bad habits, bad influences, laziness, a desire for comfort, and the slightest hint or shade of impropriety to turn around and be what God wants us to be. That’s hard, especially the part about comfort. We crave comfort, we long for it, whether it is a big house, a large salary, a nice car, a regular nap on Sunday afternoon, or just the right comfort food. Not to say that these things, in and of themselves, are necessarily bad, but to put them in front of our family, our health, our relationships, or God, turns them from innocuous nice-to-have things to idols. That’s when we need to get rid of them. That’s when our little comfort things turn into huge obstacles to our walk with Christ.

I’ll admit that a house is a big thing for me right now as my family looks for a new home. The pressure over the search looms larger and larger as the deadline to move approaches. God will show us the right house, at the right time.

I love my Sunday afternoon nap. Can I survive without it? Yep.

Comfort food, to me, is sometimes the only kind of food, and it is awesome, until I realize that I’ve consumed WAY too much of it. I’m working on it.

But I’ve digressed…where was I?

Yes. Here I am. Sometimes we need to clean out the junk and clutter, and anything else that gets in the way of us following Christ. Do you have anything you need to clean out? Start doing that today!

Writing, writing, writing

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This was originally posted November 21st, 2011, the first year I attempted to write 50,000 words during National Novel Writing Month. It is here mainly for historical purposes. I started late and didn’t get 50,000 words done that year, but have every year I’ve tried since then.

I am 10,000 words into my book now, oh… I didn’t mention my book before? I know, I haven’t mentioned it, sorry, but I had to open this post with something interesting. I signed up for the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) event about halfway through November, which was kind of silly, since the goal of the event is for people to craft 50,000 words of a novel in 30 days. Yes, that is 1,667 words a day, a somewhat challenging goal for anyone who is not a professional writer or seasoned veteran of journaling (my spell-check tells me that is not a word, but I know some of you do it). The idea is not so much to have a “finished” work by month’s end, but to have that pile of 50,000 words to mold and shape into something potentially publishable. The event is in its 13th year if I count correctly and has produced many published novels including Water for Elephants, a best-seller.

I am not so egotistical that I think that I will have a best seller (although that would be ultimately cool). I realize that probably 7,500 of those 10,000 words are either passively rendered, misspelled, repeated too often, or just bad prose, but I am plugging on in hopes that I can at least say I tried.

So, I am 10,000 words into my book/novel/whatever. I have pieces of several chapters, but no completed chapters. My goal for the end of the month, since there is no way I can achieve the 50,000 word goal of NaNoWriMo is to have at least once chapter completed with all scenes in place. As I am a complete beginner at this and have no real idea what I am doing, the book I am writing is constantly morphing. I see where I am overly descriptive and bog down in details. So I edit and move and cut and modify so that the novel fits my new mental framework for it each day. If I don’t finish the manuscript it will be because I never quit editing or I get so tired of editing that I finally give up the goal of writing a book. My attention span is not my strongest character attribute, so I hope that this project gives me a challenge and teaches me to stay with a task until it is complete.

No sneak previews of my book right now. I will tell you the (working) title is “Opposition” and it is a suspense, thriller, action novel (not sure how much of each will survive the edits) set in present time. Maybe I will post a snippet of one of the chapters in December. That is pretty dangerous to do since it could all change before/if it gets published!

So wish me luck on my book if you don’t mind. I will need it.