August 2014: Book Check In

Work on my book from last year's Nanowrimo is still moving along and in some respects I have finally found a sort of groove. I am not working on the book everyday, but I am trying to get some editing in at least once a week. Most of the characters and places in the book now have names and I think I have successfully put in a first edit for the first couple of chapters. The books is still incredibly rough around the edges, but I think it is at least comprehensible in those sections now. I am going to continue to chip away at the book. 

I won't be doing Nanowrimo this year, but I am again hoping to have some form of a draft of this book finished before the end of this year.  

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August 2014 Reading List

My volume of books so far this year hasn't been really high, but that is probably because the majority of the books that I am reading seem to be in the 800+ page range. I have continued to work through the Malazan series and I am now on book #7 with Reaper's Gale. 

This book so far has been the hardest to get through and it is really a slog. I personally just don't have much of an interest in the story line that is happening in Lether and the characters really are not that interesting. I am close to 50% of the way through the book and we have finally be reintroduced to some of our Malazan favorites and I did get one new character called Beek, who seems like he will certainly turn into a great character in the future. 

I think after this book I will need to take a break from the Malazan series and catch up again on some of my Sci-Fi reading. I am really looking forward to reading Unstable Prototypes, which is the follow up to Joesph Lallo's Bypass Gemini. I also have on my radar to get back into the Entire of the Rose series. I read the first book in that series several years ago around 2001, and while I wasn't a fan of the main character, I did find the world very interesting.  

I would also like to read the follow up books to N.K. Jemison's Inheritance Trilogy. A Hundred Thousand Kingdoms was one of the best books I have read in the past few years and I really would like to see where that world goes as well. 

What a terrible tennis season

The summer tennis season ended this past week. I broke strings on two of my rackets and I figure that sort of sums up my season this summer so far. All of my matches were pretty close, but I couldn't pull any of them out. I finished 2-5 for the summer session and frustrated is the mildest term I would use. 

I can't quite say exactly what it is that has me not playing well. In fact I feel I am mostly playing good tennis, but it seems like I am either hitting winners or hitting unforced errors into the net. Perhaps it is a patience thing. Let's just hope the fall season plays a bit better. 

So a guy almost died on the tennis court tonight

So I was playing a tennis match this evening and on the courts behind us a man with his son and his son's friends were also playing around, just hitting the ball. I saw that the guy fall at one point out of the corner of my eye. It appeared he broke his wrist, but it didn't seem like a big deal at the time. He was holding his wrist, but did show any major visible pain and he was walking around fine.

A couple of minutes later I hear one of the boys screaming and I turned around to see the man collapsed along the fence. I grabbed my water bottle and my towel and ran to him as fast as I could, as did most of the people on the courts. The first gate though was locked and I had to go the long way around, outside the courts. Another man playing basketball got to him right before I did and started CPR on him. He said that the man wasn't breathing, but I am unsure. The man was definitely not responsive.

His son, probably, 13-14 was sitting on the ground with his head on his knees just screaming. I went over to him and hugged him and tried to get him to walk with me away from the situation, but he wouldn't move. He was just frozen. A minute or two later the man was finally revived and I saw him sort of jerk back to consciousness.

He was very alert when he woke up and was trying to stand up almost immediately. He had no idea what had happened and was being argumentative with us. We kept trying to just keep him laying on the ground with his head propped up with my towel, sipping on some water. He eventually stood up and started walking around very wobbly, but talking about how he was fine and how he broke his wrist and needed to drive to the ER. I eventually had to stop him and look him dead in the eye and explain to him that he had just been unconscious for several minutes and that the man in the red shirt next to me had just performed CPR on him. It didn't seem like it was registering with him. His son was pleading with him to listen to us. He must have been in shock, because he kept playing with his broken wrist and showed no signs of pain.

The medics were there quick, probably within five minutes. They were talking him through various questions asking him his phone number, and address. I am guessing they were trying to determine his state of mind or find out if he had a stroke or something. His son was pleading with him to go in the ambulance. Eventually the police officer asked us all to step away and few minutes later they must have convinced the man to get on the stretcher and go in the ambulance.

Incredible.

Ridelog - July 28th: 2014 BMW MOA International Rally


View Great River Road in a larger map

Last week I took a long weekend road trip up to Minneapolis for the 2014 BMW MOA International Rally. On my way up we road the Great River Road up through Wisconsin, which is a very scenic road following the Mississippi River. Overall I would highly recommend it as a (long) day right out there for anyone interested. There is some really fantastic shots. I took my GoPro along with me, but unfortunately I only turned it on after La Crosse so I didn't get the best of the ride on film. I will have to do that at another point. 

Video gaming in 1994

I was listening to the Gamer's with Jobs Conference call on the way into work this morning and the episode this week was formatted as if they were broadcasting from 1994. I have been playing video games for a long time. My parents always bought us the cool console out a the time growing up and right around this 1994 period my family picked up our first PC, which was a Macintosh Performa 575. What a great computer. During that period I had some really fantastic memories from video games. While I have always considered myself a console gamer I do have some particularly vivid memories from video games during that period. 

The GWJ podcast talked about Myst and its release during 1994. That game is one of my favorite games of all time and still to this day has one of the best sound palates I have ever heard. I was so intrigued by the podcast today that I had to buy the game for my wife, who has never played it and repurchase it for myself on my iPad. Let's hope the experience holds up. 

During this same period I also played Sim City 2000, which I cannot even remember how many hours I put into. It is honestly one of the games that got me interested into government and urban planning type of work. 

But seriously though, if you haven't ever played Myst go out to the IOS App store, or GOG or something and buy it for the $7 dollars that it costs. There is an updated version called Real Myst that adds some nice modern touches to the game. It really is one of those amazing puzzle games that even non-gamers can enjoy.  

Ride Log - July 5th, 2014: Kankakee River State Park


This past weekend I had a chance to do a nice quick ride down Route 113 near Kankakee. There is a nice thirteen mile stretch along the south side of the Kankakee River through the state park down there. If anyone is in that area, it is worth hitting up this little stretch for a pleasant ride. Unfortunately it seems like the "New Google Maps" is terrible for trying to load GPS data into it. I'll put that in another post, but in the mean time enjoy this quick video of the ride. 

I bought a record and I don't even own a record player.

I have dabbled here and there in a few kickstarter projects. Some of them have been very successful and others sort of missed the mark. One of my most recent investments was in a project call Moments Lost by Analog Sweden and it was actually a music album. This is actually the first project I backed (on indiegogo) that was actually what those sites were originally created for, namely artistic endeavors. 

The album is a concept album to recreate music that feels like the Blade Runner soundtrack. For those who don't know, Blade Runner is my favorite movie of all time and the soundtrack is right up there as one of my favorite albums of all time. I had to buy the vinyl edition of it then. I think I had to get the vinyl edition to really appreciate all of the artwork that was made to go with each of the pieces. I do get that in the digital version, but the impact isn't nearly as profound.

The digital version of the soundtrack came out about a week ago for backers and it sounds wonderful. It really captures the spirit and feeling of the original soundtrack so I would definitely say that this project was a success. If anyone out there is a fan of Blade Runner, I would highly recommend you consider picking this up. You can get it over at the Analog Sweden website. 

The only trick now is that I need to eventually purchase a record player and some speakers to listen to all of it. 

B&N selling off the Nook business - I hope that is good news for Nook


News has been all over the web that Barnes & Noble has decided to split off its Nook division and sell it off. I hope this actually means good things for the Nook in the next couple of years. I am an Amazon Kindle user, but most of my family uses Nooks (sink versions). I personally think they are fantastic ereaders and they do have a really nice interface. It seems like B&N itself didn't know how to properly push the Nook devices out. Perhaps with some new management they can aggressively target the Nook like it needs to be targeted. 

It seems like the biggest problems that the Nook has had in its existence so far has been its marketing and its online services. When was the last time you saw a TV ad for a Nook? The answer is never, whereas Amazon has done a very good job of producing Kindle TV ads around the holidays. The Nook has also suffered quite a bit with its online delivery services. They have had some significant problems and they tried to implement a Whispersync type of service to sync your progress up to the cloud and other apps. For a long time it only partially worked. If a new team can get in there and fix two of these main problems I think it could help a lot. 

I would also say that they should ditch the tablet version and the whole multi-media approach. B&N has its history in books and literature. I think the Nook company could really own that space if they ditched the videos and music and went all in on the books (and may be magazines). I would love to see them really make a premium line of sink readers. Push that sink technology hard. The Kobo Aura HD has the highest resolution sink display right now and for hardcore readers that is a niche market I think could be profitable. Publishers seem eager at this point to fight back against Amazon just as they did with Apple and iTunes a few years ago. Nook could have an opportunity to strike some really good publishing deals. 

Also, if you have ever been on the Nook sites they actually have a pretty good social media team going. They have some excellent blogs and online communities that push out some great content for fans of reading. It features some good interview and other content. They also have continually offered their "Free Book Friday's" deals which I think are a boon for readers. The problem is, it is near impossible to find these on B&N's website. 

The Nook (and B&N in general) also really should highlight more that they are leveraging the epub format. Technically any book bought from the Kobo or Google Play stores can be side loaded onto a Nook without issue. KIndle's can't do that. It would be nice if Google Play or some other service could license a way to wirelessly send books purchased on these other stores right to the Nook wirelessly to alleviate the friction of side loading. The idea of having multiple stores accessible to your device is something that could be a great sell for the Nook hardware business. 

Summer is always so busy

Whew, summer is officially here. I just got back from a great vacation to Florida and now I see that my summer schedule is already filled up. There just is never enough time to handle all of the things I really want to handle during the summer months. The weather is so nice that I want to get outside to do things like golfing or my motorcycle or even just going to a museum or something. At the same time I always want to get in all of my other hobbies like doing music, getting some summer reading in or watching some good movies. Something always seems to slip however and I can never get it all in. Motorcycling, tennis, golf, music, video games, reading, family functions, music concerts. 

It is all going to go by quick and sure enough autumn is going to be here. Don't get me wrong, I love the seasons, but sometimes I feel like I never get to fully enjoy everything. The fall comes and you are instantly in the holiday rush and the, boom it is the dead of winter.