Jack Of Too Many Trades is live

Posted on by
Reply

Since the early days of the Pandemic, I’ve pondered a review-focused site. It’s a way to share some of the gadgets and useful items I’ve acquired, recommend interesting products to my readers, and maybe make a little bit of money when people buy through my affiliate links.

I invited a friend to take a lightly-paid role contributing reviews. He never got around to taking me up on it, because of various reasons, and I never got around to starting it.

Until now.

Welcome to Jack Of Too Many Trades, or jotmt for short.

JOTMT already has four pre-loaded reviews, and I’ll be adding more over the coming months. Readers of this blog will not be surprised to find I acquire and talk about a lot of tech gadgets, and one of the first four posts is about a tech gadget (or three, to be more accurate). But I’ll be covering other things. There’s already a $60 deodorant, a flashlight with a Splunk connection of sorts, and a DC-powered pellet smoker.

My goal is to write about interesting things, and give perspectives on things that might entice you to try something you didn’t know you needed. I have a box of Thunderbolt 4 cables in my home office that largely aren’t worth a blog post, for example. But the one with a built in power meter, or the one that coils up like a well-trained snake for desktop storage? Those might be worth reading about. A silicone ice tray probably isn’t as interesting as an icemaker.

Start out with the welcome post, “It’s a website with reviews, comparisons, and projects,” over at jotmt.com. And stay tuned for more reviews, and some larger goals that may incorporate a few things, like a solar battery project or a mini-PC cluster.

Writing the entire Harry Potter series in a year: A return to regular story building in 2024

Posted on by
Reply

[Updated 2024-03-31 for March metrics]

There’s a bit of clickbait to that title, but according to a quick web search, the first Harry Potter book (Sorcerer’s Stone) has just short of 77,000 words. And in my writing journey for 2024, as of January 25, I had written that many words.

Don’t get too excited.

I don’t expect it to be as coherent or commercially successful as J.K. Rowling’s works, and there probably won’t be a movie made of any of the first things I’ve composed this year.

But it’s an enormous start to the year, and if I stay on pace, there’s a reasonable chance of passing one million words in 2024. (The entire Harry Potter series, seven books, is 1,084,170 words, or 90347 words a month).

Last year I wrote about writing a thousand Amazon reviews in one year. In the last 18 months I’ve made it to 1145, but I didn’t get a thousand-review year. I’m okay with that, and if I only get half a million words this year, it’s more than I’ve written in any decade, including college probably, so I’ll be satisfied.

A novel in a month

Some of you may have met me through National Novel Writing Month[1], or NaNoWriMo. I got involved in 2002, completing a 50,000 word novel the same month I got laid off from 3PAR and lost my mother in the same week. The writing, and the community, probably came the closest to keeping me sane through a very stressful month.

I continued doing it every year through 2009, including being the San Francisco Municipal Liaison a couple of years and helping my friend Linda start the peninsula region along the way. I stayed as active as I could with the South Bay group, but in 2009, life and a bad relationship soured me on the effort. When you need an escape from your escape, it’s not a good thing. I’ve occasionally considered going back, but I haven’t.

Getting back on the writing horse

I’ve written partial drafts of at least half a dozen short stories since then, and from November 2022 to March 2023 I kept a handwritten journal every day. Double espresso and sparkling water, a warm white monitor lamp, and a notebook and pen started every day in that time. Some days I literally wrote “I don’t feel like writing anything today” and others I wrote a full page.

But 10 to a hundred or so words is pretty manageable, undirected other than the obligation to write *something* every day, and didn’t run the risk of turning into anything interesting.

To be honest, the NaNoWriMo days weren’t as smooth as they might have seemed. Just needing 1667 words a day on average isn’t so scary in theory. But thinking back, that felt harder than this January effort where I averaged 3290 words a day.

One counter-intuitive reason is that I didn’t have, want, or really need anyone to support me in Home Office Writing Alone Month (HoOfWrAlMo? Maybe not). I didn’t go to write-ins, or share my word count with anyone consistently. There was no party at Rickshaw Stop when I got to the end of the month, just dinner at Opa with my honey. And that was just celebrating Wednesday, and her not wanting to cook.

The stronger reason, I think, is that I wasn’t focused on trying to get a single coherent work to the finish line. In fact, with 11 new projects and one I picked up after two years of sitting in the drafts folder, I didn’t have to stick with one character, one story line, even one location. So if I ran out of steam on one thing, I could warm up something else.

As with my 2000s era novels, my characters sometimes take off in different directions. The runaway one MC picks up at a rest area who I thought would go camping with him? Her dad’s a real estate magnate who invites him to join the family business, not just the family. The girl another MC meets at a coffee shop on the coast? She’s taller than last time he saw her. And there’s more, but I’m going to be intentionally vague for now.

Sometimes the draw for a character or a story ebbs and flows. Sometimes I don’t care enough to come up with a full length story/novella, much less a novel, and sometimes a one-off suddenly pops into existence as a five-book series that I’m writing out of order and then going back to try to squeeze some continuity into it. Witches, spells, and brooms? I lived through that in the early 90s so maybe some of that will end up in a story called Allan Kahzam and the Bikini of Extreme Peril before the snow falls at Squaw Valley next winter.

Darn, it’s bad enough that a KLF video gave me an idea for a story. Now I have to figure out a magical bikini?

But you see where this is going.

The wrap for January 2024

I wrote on December 31, and seem to have two days in January where I either didn’t update my spreadsheet, or didn’t write. I don’t remember that happening, but we’ll just go with 32 days to report for January.

Total words: 103,414 (3232/day average)
Pace for the year: 1,179,565 words
Total works opened in Word: 12 (one started December 31, one started January 31)

And since I left this in my drafts folder for a month, let’s do…

The wrap for February 2024

Total words in February: 40,321 (1390/day average)
Total words in 2024: 143,735 (2396/day average for 60 days)
Pace for the year: 860,053 words
Total works opened in Word: 22 (including five archival works and one that will get rolled into another)

Another month has passed, so here is the obvious…

Wrap for March 2024

Total words in March: 35,760 (1153/day average)
Total words in 2024: 179,495 (1951/day average)
Pace for the year: 712,126 words
Total works opened in Word: 17 (11 cuurent, 5 archival, and one still waiting to roll into another)

Where do we go from here?

Well, if you spend a month working on a single story line, you may make it to the end of the month with nothing salvageable but the patterns and habits you developed. That, and being the legend of the guy who finished and submitted his first novel with seven (7) seconds to spare, are what I still carry from NaNoWrimo between 2002-2009.

But if you track multiple projects, you may find it easier to write, and out of those 12 projects I added anywhere from 854 to 23125 words to last month, maybe two or three will see the light of day before the Summer Solstice. One of them is looking to be that five-book series, two of them have a third part still to be started, there are half a dozen I haven’t resurrected from the last 20 years, plus digging out and looking at those 8 novel-attempts to see if any of them hold up to a decade or more in cold storage on a VM in San Diego.

And it feels like every time I walk to a cafeteria on campus at work, I get another picture in my head that could become a thing. Like that five-book series that began with the thought of a couple of young women sitting around a large living room asking themselves why guys like boobs. Don’t feel too bad for the guy in the room. He has a pretty good answer. Maybe you’ll get to read it later this year.

I would offer to write a future post about my writing tools and workflow, but “Word + OneDrive” isn’t so exciting. So there you have that.

For my fellow NaNoWrimo survivors, and any other writers out there, how is your productivity going? What do you think is worth thinking about as someone gets back into writing, or into it in full force for the first time?

[1] I’ve been reading a lot of the fresh drama around NaNoWriMo in the last month or two thanks to Reddit algorithms, and I’m glad I’ve been out of that scene for something like 15 years. I feel bad for the people affected, both in the bad actor situations and the apparent incompetence among the so-called leadership that’s killing the program now.

The Lonely Silver Rain and the Long, Dark Tea-Time of the Soul: Two things that hurt about obsessively reading fiction

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve been pondering this topic for a few days now, and have thought about it occasionally over the last 30 years. I go through phases of fiction reading, often going through a writer’s entire catalog, or at least a series or two when they write in that manner.

Recently I’ve been reading a writer named Marilyn Foxworthy, who is inspired by Burroughs and the pulp era, writing with a mix of allegory, sexuality and sensuality, internal monologues and soliloquys, and pop culture references. Her work isn’t for everyone, and she warns you of that in the introduction to each book. But I’ve enjoyed it.

She has almost a dozen “series” that are in various states of being written. One of the series, with two books so far, was based on Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter/Barsoom series. When I got to the second book of her series, I took a break from modern fiction and read the first three John Carter books. I have the rest on my Kindle now, so they’ll be covered in between other works.

Between going back to a classic writer, and running out of a modern writer’s works (at least in several series), I got to think about my two pains of fiction reading.

Waiting for new works

The late Douglas Adams was influential in my high school and college days. There was a gap in his Hitchhiker’s series, and I remember rushing to a bookstore in Muncie to get Mostly Harmless when it came out in 1992. His last Dirk Gently novel had been in 1988, and So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish was 1984, so I’d been waiting a while for that book to come out.

We weren’t as connected then as now, so my research mostly involved checking the library and Usenet occasionally for a few years here and there, and I was excited to get the book.

I probably felt something similar whenever a new Jimmy Buffett album would come out, but by the time I became a Parrothead and a tapwater Conch, it was a lot easier to keep track of these things, and listen to something on release day online, if not get it shipped from a bookseller or music store, or pick it up in person somewhere nearby.

With Adams, I read most of what he wrote. The first computer CD-ROM title I bought was “Last Chance To See,” even though I didn’t have a computer with a CD-ROM drive yet. But I felt he had done his work, and it was okay to read it all.

Running out of works

You’d think I would go on to mourn Adams’s demise in 2001 and the lack of future works by him. That was and is sad, and I remember exactly where I was sitting when I got the news of his death (a particular hotel room in Canada with my American girlfriend who lived in Canada at the time), but it didn’t feel quite the same.

My reference for running out of books from an author was more connected with Jimmy Buffett (RIP) who I seem to remember had among his three desert island books one Purple Place for Dying by John D MacDonald. I can’t find where I read that list, but he leads off Incommunicado with a mention of the author and his best known character. He also says it brought him back to Florida from French Polynesia and led to him finding his wife. The other two were Bruce Chatwin’s “The Songlines,” and one I can’t find,

I mentioned it in my Goodreads review of Seven by JDM. As I mention in the review (that I forgot about writing until about a minute before this line), I read 20 of the 21 Travis McGee novels.

I always wanted to know there was more Travis McGee to read, even if there would never be more, so The Lonely Silver Rain sits in a box somewhere in Silicon Valley, waiting for me to run out of anything else to read.

My honey says I should read it, so I can go back and start over from the beginning… and seeing that I got the last seven Travis McGee novels and The Executioners (which became the movie Cape Fear) about 17 years ago, maybe it’s time to abandon my restraint and read it.

First world pains, I’m sure

I’m usually not that superstitious, so my reaction to Travis McGee is a bit odd, but after I finished #20 in that series I did have all of Randy Wayne White, Carl Hiaasen, and Tim Dorsey to read. RWW of course was closer to JDM’s style and manner, while the others went more into the modern absurd, Dorsey even more than Hiaasen.

I’ve enjoyed some “aftermarket” Douglas Adams, including several forms of his incomplete story Shada from Doctor Who. Gareth Roberts wrote the Shada novelization based on the BBC script that was interrupted by a strike. There were two remakes/flesh-outs of it, including one narrated in the gaps by Tom Baker and another fully animated one. And of course, Chronotis and his TARDIS stuck in Cambridge became Reg Chronotis at St Cedd’s in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.

On the upside, going back to Marilyn Foxworthy, she has dozens of books out, and is still working on more. I’m eager to continue the adventures of the various Jensens, and I’m hoping for another Barsoom book in particular before I finish with Burroughs.

Where do we go from here?

My Kindle is getting a workout. I’ve had an Oasis for a couple of years, and while I’m tempted the larger screen of the Kindle Scribe, I’m probably not going to make it worthwhile even with a trade-in. It is on my Amazon wishlist, in case anyone has Amazon gift cards they can’t find a use for. But if I need a larger screen before Foxworthy gets the next Barsoon volume out, I have an iPad Pro that runs the Kindle app as well.

I also just re-realized that the used bookstore in Mountain View, California, has been closed for many years. Ananda BookBuyers moved to Gilroy in 2016, and closed that store a year and a half ago. I went looking for Lonely Silver Rain at two used bookshops left in the area, but neither had it. So I’ll be getting a copy tomorrow via Amazon Prime.

Who have you read obsessively, and have you run into either of the concerns I’ve discussed here? Share in the comments.

[2023-12-10: Title updated since the books involved fit well.]

I went in seeking a heatsink, and came out with a Raspberry Pi 5

Posted on by
5

[Updated 2023-11-12 for farming experience and PoE splitter]
[Updated 2023-11-22 for Pi 5 4GB plot time and case experience]

I was on the waitlist for Raspberry Pi 5 8GB at my local computer shop, Central Computer. I had to go in to get a cooler for a new machine I am going to be building this month, and at the checkout I asked if they had any Pi 5 boards left, thinking I’d play with a 4GB board if they had any left.

“We’ve got 4GB and 8GB, which would you like?”

Well, of course, 8GB.

I already had a couple of cases coming from Amazon in preparation, and a 5V4A PSU (the 5V5A one for full power with the new Pi is already hard to come by), and a fresh MicroSD card from my last visit to Central, so I was ready to go. 

I was planning to wait a while at first, but someone on one of the Chia Discords asked about Pi5 for Chia, I took the challenge on. 

Continue reading →

Flexpool has closed, as has my dalliance with end user customer support

Posted on by
Reply

As my regular readers know, I was laid off in 2020 and refreshed my cryptocurrency investments (time and money) in early 2021. Soon after that, I took a part time gig supporting miners (and later farmers) on Flexpool, a small cryptocurrency mining pool that grew to being a leading pool in Ethereum and Chia among others.

Thirty Days On The Front Lines: A return to tech support

I always told the owner that I was looking for a “real” job, namely one that would enable me to sustain and survive in Silicon Valley, and when the time came I would leave Flexpool support. After the end of Ethereum mining, support demand dropped off a cliff, like the crypto market, so I was able to keep up with support with a small amount of time before and after work and on weekends. For context, it was less time than I spend preparing coffee in a given day.

Well, with the crypto winter being as it is, and the pool owner probably wanting to live away from his laptop for more than an hour at a time, Flexpool is closing down. And with that, on November 1, I have retired from my second round of end user customer support.

I’m still in the crypto world, farming Chia and mining Neoxa at the moment. I’ll still answer questions on Discord for my new pool and some other venues. But I’m no longer loading up the time clock app, and I will be refocusing on some of my other side gigs (ebay sales, affiliate marketing, and so forth) to keep the mind and the toy budget rolling.

I would say that means more geekery and less crypto on the blog and the YouTube channel, but I don’t think I can commit to that. I’ll work on it though, as I have footage in the can for a couple of coffee devices, and I’m building a new server this weekend if all goes well.