Wits Intact

Odometer rolling over to 22222 miles. Taken on 2/22 while driving RR2222

No, I don’t believe this is a Message from God. Just an entertaining coincidence.

Still, maybe I should buy a lottery ticket…

There are a great many imponderable questions in this life. One of them is “Why does Kristen Stewart always look like she just took a bunch of Benadryl?” Only slightly less perplexing is “Why do so many filmmakers take beloved classics–especially childrens’ classics–and make cinematic train wrecks of them?” I’m looking at you, pretty-much-anything-based-on-a-Dr.-Seuss-Book-in-the-last-decade.

So it was with great trepidation that I allowed my daughter Devin to drag me to the Robert Zemeckis-helmed A Christmas Carol this past Sunday. The marketing for the film leads one to believe it is a wacky slapstick comedy. Jim Carrey being Jim Carrey! Scrooge ramming his nuts into an icicle as he slides down a roof! Fun!

“What the heck,” I thought. “The popcorn will be good.” That’s how desperate I am for any kind of moviegoing experience.

Much to my surprise, the film is absolutely nothing like what is portrayed in the ads. (I know! The scandal!) In fact, with the exception of one interminable, meaningless scene injected by the creators (presumably to punch up the action a bit, as it comes during a slow point… sadly, robbing that slow point of much of its very important emotional impact), this is the most authentic rendition of Charles Dickens’ original I’ve seen. Much of the dialog is preserved verbatim. And it is far and away anything but a comedy. At its heart, it has always been a creepy ghost story with a strong moral, and that is exactly what this film is. And here the marketing team has done the film a further disservice. If I had brought small children to this film thinking it was a bit of animated puffery, I would have had to walk out. There were parts where, frankly, it was bordering on too intense for Devin, who is on the sensitive side of 11. But if you’ve got kids in that age range (maybe even a little younger if they’re into that sort of thing), it’s excellent.

The mocapped animation still creeps me out, though it gets better with every film. Gary Oldman’s Bob Cratchitt is simply off; he’s not just visiting the Uncanny Valley, he’s building a summer house there. But the film is actually good enough to overlook that. Strongly recommended.

(N.B. — I didn’t see the 3D version of the film, so I can’t comment on that either way. 3D just isn’t my bag.)

I have seen a number of articles recently on health care rationing (like this one at Investor’s Business Daily, which originally included the hilarious bit of misinformation that Stephen Hawking, lifelong U.K. resident, could not receive adequate treatment on the N.H.S.), and I am compelled to point out what a giant steaming pile of BS they are. Folks, we already have health care rationing. The only difference between the public option and what we have now is that a government bureaucrat would decide whether or not it makes sense to fund a treatment that might save your life, as opposed to a corporate one. And, in case you’re not keeping score, here’s the salient difference between those two guys: the government guy only cares about the cost of treatment; the corporate guy cares about cost plus profit margin.

Don’t believe me? I encourage you to google “health insurance rescission,” which should get you to a bunch of really nifty articles, like this one at NPR.

When your wife actually accuses you of being willing to edit Wikipedia just to win an argument.

Yes, this actually happened. (Last night, in fact.)

No, I don’t think my marriage is in trouble

This will not be one of your shinier, happier blog posts, so you might want to skip this one, six people who actually subscribe to this thing. Still, it’s a weird and unique state I’m in, and insofar as this is the only form of journal I keep anymore, I believe it’s important to record how I’m feeling right now.

At this very moment I should be packing. My family and I are leaving at 4 AM to catch a flight to upstate New York, where my dad is soon to die of cancer. It’s weird to say that, stating it baldly as a fact like that. As though it was merely something you read in an encyclopedia, sanitized, no emotional freight attached whatsoever.

It’s weird to be packing. Feels like I ought to be doing something more… spiritual. Metaphysical. But I’m putting stuff into a bag. Things I must remember, that I’m likely to forget: toothbrush, toothpaste, shaving gear, power cords for electronic widgets. (I’ll be up there for some time, and will be working from there. Must bring all the parts of the laptop.) Clothes, of course, but only a week’s worth. We’ll do laundry and wear the same stuff each week.

I was thinking, as I laid all these items out, of my earliest memory of my father. I was perhaps five years old. We were living in our house on Spa Drive in Saratoga Springs. My dad had a bike, a big old blue Schwinn that must have weighed fifty or sixty pounds. I remember it had a horn button on the frame. We would go out riding, he and I, with me balancing on the frame, or maybe the handlebars. This one time, he took us down a slight grade — I want to say a side road, or a logging road; my Texas brain says frontage road, but that’s not possible. It had rained, and we took a spill. I bawled my head off, both of us were covered in mud. And I remember how he took his handkerchief and wiped the mud off my face.

When we found out in January that he had cancer, I knew that it was the end for him. His overall health has not been great these last few years, and I didn’t think he had the fight in him to lick it. I made my peace with it then, with some difficulty. I haven’t felt affected much by his recent downturn, because I believed I had come to terms with it.

I have always thought the place we crashed was over by Yaddo gardens, but I can’t think of a spot that matches my (admittedly fragmented) mental image of it. It occurred to me that soon — probably already; by all accounts my dad is not lucid — I will no longer be able to ask him. All of a sudden, I was overcome with a profound sadness. Stupid grief. It won’t fight you like a man, gotta be sneaking up when you’re not looking.

Then I wrote this down, and I felt a little better about it.

I’m not the first person to say this, but if there’s any good to come from a person leaving this life, it is to remind us to cherish the people we hold dear, and make sure they know how we feel about them every day. In all too short a while, one of you will be gone.

So I’m lying on the couch just now, watching a show. My son Aidan comes over and climbs under the blanket I’m using.

Me: No, go away. If I wanted a small boy I would have come and got one.
Aidan: Well, you had to help Mommy make me, so you’re stuck with me.
Me: You don’t even know what you’re talking about.
Aidan: I really don’t. I don’t have a clue.

Whose blog usually supplies me with the best Flash games, here I am returning the favor:

Effing Hail.

Also appropriate to the weather today, which has been rattling my windows and chasing the dog under my desk all morning. From Warren Ellis, of all people. (Warning: if you don’t know who Warren Ellis is, beware that his blog is often not so much Not Safe For Work as it is Not Safe For Any Humans, Anywhere.)

It’s late, and I’m quite tired, but I decided (in the car on the way home from gaming, if you must know) that I must blog. And then I had a thought, very clearly: “have to feed the beast.”

I found that supremely interesting. I know a lot of writers have this mental image of a small voice inside them that tells them stories. Laura Mixon even talks to hers; she had a name for it at VP, but darned if I can remember what she called it.¹

Suddenly I realized, nothing small about my inner voice. My inner voice is a snarling, slavering thing that wants nothing more than to slip its chain and tear some shit up.

So I write to feed the beast. Which made me think, hmm, if writing is feeding the beast, what does it eat?

Whitespace.

¹ Just remembered: she called it “her beast.” Dumbass.

If you’re into that sort of thing. Likewise, if you’re so inclined, happy belated Darwin Day and 1234567890 Day.

In writing news, got a really nice bit of feedback on “Road” from one of my fellow VPers who won’t be participating in the Skype discussion (tomorrow! yikes!). She liked it a lot, and gave me some very specific things that tripped her up, which will go into the “fit and finish” pass I do after the Skype call. Unless my other fellow VPers find something critically amiss which necessitates taking the piece apart and then gluing it back together.

1700 words last night, late, on a new short tentatively called “Chain-driven.” (Which, if you happen to live in Austin and are aware of a certain slice of society, you might recognize as a sly wink to a local landmark.) This one seems like it might end up being crazy but fun.

Oh, and “Lost Luggage?” I pulled it up after the second draft of “Road” was done and discovered I had already rewritten it. The ending isn’t what I want it to be; I’ll probably get it critiqued and rework it. It’s not my best piece ever, but it has what I think is a truly original central conceit, and I should be able to make it sales-worthy. And hey, at something like 2500 words, it’s in a rare phylum: a complete story by me under 50 pages!

Finally, I have decided to go ahead and hold onto “Nayda” until Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Wretch Day (April 23), when I may be able to get some linkage via my VP instructors who participate.

Over at Jay Lake’s blog, he has written an entry on how to do backups like a pro. I cannot whitewash this; this is sheer poppycock. What Jay describes is absolutely the safest way to back up your files… circa 1990. The IT industry solved this problem years ago. It’s over, done. And the software you need to do so is in the “cheap,” “free,” or “already paying for it” category.

That’s an audacious claim, so let me start by debunking the notion that this baroque sequence of events is actually safe. There’s one fundamental problem with it, and that is it relies on humans to not make errors. There are a lot of steps in there. And I don’t know about other people, but after I’ve just spent a couple hours pounding out a few thousand words, I’m not at my most mentally keen. Should you really be willing to bank your security on habitually executing all those steps correctly under those circumstances?

In a word, no. Going through these motions is tantamount to thinking that the TSA guys who make us take off our shoes, and restrict liquids to no more than 2 oz (so we can’t make a very BIG bomb?) are actually protecting us from terrorists. They counter what Bruce Schneier calls “movie terrorist plots”–threats that seem large, but in fact are not very likely–while against the real issues, they protects us little, or not at all.

An example, you say? Well, have any of you ever done any of these?

• Saved a backup file with the wrong filename, so you can’t find it later, or you accidentally overwrote a version you wanted to keep?
• Had your email account hacked? For example, by a spammer, who gets your gmail account permanently shut down within a matter of hours?
• Sent your backup dvds to the wrong relative, or had the right relative not correctly file them, making them impossible to find should you need them?

Et cetera, et cetera. “Impossible!” you say, “because I really CARE about my data.” Consider this article from 2007, which cites a researcher who discovered that human error is the most common cause of security breaches.

“So, Mr. Smarty,” you say, “You are not really being part of the solution here.” Fair enough. Safely backing up your stuff requires two systems to cooperate:

• Revision control (also called version control or source control), and
• Off-site backups.

Revision control is software that is designed for tracking changes to program source code. No reasonable development shop works without it these days. It works thus: when you make changes to a file, you push those changes over to a revision control server (this is called “committing” the file), which remembers ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING YOU HAVE EVER DONE TO THAT FILE. In the blink of an eye, you can revert to an older version, without destroying the data you’ve subsequently stored in your revision control system (hence, RCS).

Couple this with off-site backups. The best way to achieve this is to run your RCS on your internet hosting. When you save your changes, you tell the RCS to push the changes to your repository of files on your ISP. (Yes, there are some risks in doing this. There is no such thing as “no risk,” only “manageable risk,” and it’s wise under these circumstances to get someone who knows about such things to advise you when first setting up your RCS, to mitigate this risk.) At any point in the future, you can restore every single file you’ve ever stored there, to any version you’ve ever committed.

Meanwhile there are guys who work for your ISP who get paid to do nothing but think about how to keep data from being lost. They use RAIDs, which protect systems from drive loss. They do regular tape backups. Some of THEM do multisite backups, automatically mirroring your data to another node in their network to protect against catastrophic failure.

If you can’t see how that’s better than gmailing yourself all your files, I have failed at this argument.

Other benefits
Not only is this a solid backup strategy that requires minimal manual intervention, there are several side benefits it gives you for free.

• If you are working on a project collaboratively, how does your collaborator know they have the most current revision of the file? With revision control, you push changes up to your revision server, give your partner access and let them pull the most current changes using the same software. Unlike email, this works in real-time. You can even lock your files to show that you are working on them, so neither of you stomps on the other’s changes.
• Every checkin to revision control allows you to add a comment. So when you are looking for a particular past revision of a file, you can read “Road Trip: Changed protag from a man to a woman” instead of digging through a bunch of files called “RoadTrip_v132.doc,” “RoadTrip_v133.doc” and so on. Additionally, the system automatically tracks commit times and revision numbers, so even if you don’t add comments, it’s no harder than looking through a pile of hand-versioned files.
• If you work on multiple machines, like I do, it’s a snap to keep them in sync: on your desktop, push changes up to the server, on your laptop, pull them down.
• If you must have multiple backup sites, revision control makes it painless to keep them in sync, as well. You can even configure one revision control server to automatically push changes over to another (though this takes a little black magic; however, there are plenty of people who will gladly help you set this up for not very much money or free–including me).

All right, enough of my ranting. If I have even cracked your resolve on this, I encourage you, not to take my word on it, but do more research. Talk to your programmer friends. Google for some of the terms I’ve thrown around in this post. Go look at the web sites of some of the systems I’m talking about; the one I personally recommend for people getting started with RCS is Subversion. It is free, it’s widely-adopted throughout the open-source community (lots of people to answer your questions), there are a number of easy-to-use clients for it (such as Tortoise SVN), and it’s pretty easy to set up. (In fact, some ISPs that cater to developers, such as Joyent, the one I use, actually have a control panel that will greatly simplify the process.) I used to use Subversion, but if you’re feeling ambitious, you might have a look at Bazaar, which is the RCS I use nowadays. (Word of caution: it’s a more complex piece of software, so don’t let that sour you on the whole RCS strategy.)

Lastly, if you’re interested in hearing more about this, please comment. I will be happy to reply privately or answer peoples’ questions here.

TimK
Saving the world from arcane backup strategies, one writer at a time.