Writing In the Mission (1: Origins)

Well, now that my novel, In the Mission, is out and available, I thought it might be a good moment to write about the writing process. You know, a little like a making of DVD bonus feature, only you have to read it instead of watching it.

How did I come up with it? Well, In the Mission has a long story. I started thinking about it in the mid-90es, when I was young and crazy. I lived in Cologne, Germany in a giant apartment with a bunch of friends. Germany was being unified, dance parties were all the rage, and most of my friends were much older than I.

Brother HL4150 Color Laser on Linux (Kubuntu Natty)

Summary: WOW! Five Stars!!!

I’ve had mixed luck with printers under Linux in the past ten years. Some of them would not work ever, others worked just fine, and a third kind worked some or most of the time, but you could never count on them.

It used to be the case that printing on Linux depended on the standards used. Printers that internally used PostScript would work the best, GDI printers not at all, and most of the HPGL language printers would have some functionality available. Once printers went from parallel to USB, things got worse until Linux caught up.

When is Taxation Fair?

I had a long conversation with my brother while in Europe, and it sparked a lot of thinking inside me. We were talking about the Obama Administration’s concessions during last year’s budget negotiations and the resulting extension of tax cuts for the rich. From that instance we moved on to a more general topic: what is fair taxation?

We noted at first that since the beginning of the idea, taxation was driven by ease of implementation more than by the idea of fairness. It’s not just about who can afford to pay taxes, it’s also how you assess taxes in a way that a government bureaucracy can successfully monitor and demand. Additionally, it’s pointless to demand money where there is none, so a lot of governments focus on taxes to be paid while money changes hands – in that case, you know there is money somewhere.

Europe

It’s been the best of times, it’s been the worst of times. My brothers and I decided to part with our old family house in Germany, since none of us was ever going to live there, and I had to go and retrieve as much of my distant past as possible. At the same time, I knew this was the last time I’d see the place and get to soak in the memories of my childhood.

Enthusiasm

I guess we all have them – those days when we just overdo it, and then at the end of them we are a bundle of exhaustion, curled up on the living room couch, watching Samantha Who? and wishing we had had a little less fun.

Well, today was such a day. I went in the morning and “surfed” for 2 hours – and then went again this evening. After an hour I was beat, and I had barely been able to catch a wave (three of them, to be precise). I surfed for another 30 minutes and then I took my favorite to date, the last wave, the one that carries you all the way to the beach.

Why, Nokia?

To all my friends with iPads (and there is a shocking number of them): I had a tablet years before you did. Yes, your tablet may be shiny and a joy to use, but mine is stored in a closet with the HP Omnibook I had in 1994 and the Sharp Zaurus I held in my hands in 2002. The tablet is a 7″ Nokia N770, a tiny little bundle of joy I bought in 2005. It was expensive, it was slow, it was buggy, but it was mine. And it ran Linux, probably 90% of the reason I bought it in the first place.

Chance, Ayn Rand, and the Triumph of Narcissism

[Long post, with a rambling story. It’s worth it, I promise.]

When I was a wee lad in Italy, I had a horrendous Latin teacher. You must know that all high school kids in Italy need to learn Latin (at least back then), and in the higer grades of high schools Latin was taken very seriously. That meant that one of the two essays in the graduation exam had a good chance of being about Latin (the other was always about Italian literature). Having a lousy teacher meant that the rest of us had to go to remediation classes – long, boring, expensive.

‘Sup, Dudes?

Well, it’s been a long while since the last update. I just checked, and it looks like the last entry on this blog was from just after my participation in the AIDS LifeCycle ride – that was LifeCycle 8, and we are at 10 now. I guess living in San Diego has been a lot of fun and a lot of work, and I hadn’t had much time to keep this site updated. Plus, I’ve been posting on a trillion other places – mainly on Blogger – and didn’t feel the need to keep this up-to-date.

Creating Panoramas with Hugin

I stood at the bottom of this thing and took a picture of where I had come down. Then I took a picture of La Jolla to the South. Then one of the nudie beach to the North. Then one of the waves and the low sun. Then I decided I was just going to cover the whole world around me, and figure out a way to stitch the pictures together.

Use OpenOffice.org to Create an Image Gallery

I went on this hike on Christmas Eve – a steep trail down a ravine, with the most unusual people and the most unusual features. At the end, a gorgeous beach with surfers and pretty ladies with parasols waiting for them. Huge mansions staring down from lofty cliffs, and an amazing sunset that colored the cliffs a golden hue of honey.

I looked at the pictures, and they were pretty. Unfortunately, due to the unusual nature of the features and the number of different things you were looking at, it wasn’t quite clear how (or even if) they belonged together, and what the story behind them was. The pictures needed an explanation. A story had to be told.