On the Election

I wanted to believe that we wouldn’t elect someone who advocates and empowers active hatred for women, blacks, latinos, and the poor.

I wanted to believe that we wouldn’t elect someone who declared that if he became President he’d have to do “unthinkable things” to “make America great again.”

I wanted to believe we wouldn’t vote for a candidate that proposed rounding up folks based on their ethnicity and putting them in internment camps.

Well, crap. I guess this is what America is.

I won’t defriend people over differences in economic policy. I think Ayn Rand was a sociopath, but I’m friends with folks who believe in her work. (The fact that she died broke, dependent on government handouts, kind of makes my case.) I’m OK if your stance on issues is different than mine–I’ll argue, but it doesn’t make you an enemy.

But blatant racism? Bragging of sexual assault? Not ok. I have too many black friends, too many female friends, to accept that.

So many of those friends are heartbroken today.

And there’s not a damn thing I can do.

I have no idea how to talk about this with my friends and family. The only thing that comes to mind is “move to Canada.” I’d post a link, but the Canadian Immigration web site has crashed due to all the folks hitting it.

I can’t use my “White Male Magical Inherent Worth” to protect the vulnerable people I care about everywhere they go. Are we supposed to all move together into one armed commune and only travel en masse? “It’s noon, everybody to the bus for grocery shopping! We’ve reserved sixteen carts for today. Remember, stay with the group. The Expedition Leader will blow her whistle twice to signal an advance to the next aisle. We’re starting in produce and working our way through canned goods, then the convoy will hit dairy and end up in frozen foods. If you’re somehow separated, hit your panic button and we’ll send a white man for you.”

We survived the incompetence of the Bush administration. (And yes, he was incompetent. I’ll fight the whole bar on that, but only in person, not online.) If that’s all we faced, I’d say “crap, we best save money for the coming economic crash” and move on. Heck, I’d plan to make a profit off the inevitable crash.

But a President who brags about sexual assault? Who says that folks from our most populous neighbor are rapists? Who declares that “certain people” need to be kept from voting?

The President is a role model. Trump’s election empowers every entitled dude who abuses random women in the hardware store or the park. It empowers the freaking KKK. It empowers people who think they’re better than others because of the luck of the genetic draw, who want to make life worse for other human beings.

I want to make things better for those folks.

And I have no idea how to do it.

All I can say is: I’m sorry. You deserve better.

(PS: The First Amendment only applies to governments. This blog is private property. Comments are open, but if you’re a jerk I’ll moderate you right off. There’s lots of soapboxes out there for people who good with racism or who think Bush’s handling of Katrina was great.)

Ohio LinuxFest 2016 wrap-up

I spent last weekend at Ohio LinuxFest, present on ZFS and meeting readers. First, the obvious question: how did things go between a BSD Unix guy and a whole bunch of Linux fans?

It was kind of like visiting a parallel universe–the GNUniverse, if you will. And unlike Star Trek, that universe’s inhabitants are perfectly friendly.

The program heavily featured system administration and community presentations, where a BSD conference would have had more code. (That’s not a complaint, just an observation.) Friday had a single track of talks, while Saturday had six. This meant I skipped a couple of talks on Friday–I’ve been a sysadmin since 1995, and if I must sit through another talk on GNU screen someone’s getting a serious wedgie. Saturday’s program had an embarrassment of riches, however.

The keynotes were excellent. I particularly enjoyed Catherine Devlin’s talk on open source in the US government. 18F is a great example of how a government agencies can be perfectly competent.

On a BSD-specific note, Ken Moore from iX Systems talked about the new system management tools in PC-BSD TrueOS.

For a small conference OLF treats their speakers quite well, with lunch every day and a pre-con party on Thursday night. They also did an excellent job of communicating with speakers. I knew exactly what was going on, my timetable, and the presentation requirements. Knowing simple things like “our presentation gear is VGA, please bring an adapter” helped everyone a lot.

OLF did have a couple of extra surreal notes to it.

If you watch an SF show with parallel universes, somehow all of the major characters appear in slightly different form. This is absurd–changing the universe around you would change your interests, your personality, and possibly even your very name.

I’m pleased to report, though, that in the GNUniverse of a Linux conference, Andrew Fresh and Peter Hessler are still hackers. Their names have changed, to “Justin Smith” and “Andrew Pullins.” They even wear hacker T-shirts. Their allegiances have changed, however…

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My 3-day challenge for Oct 2016

The meds are starting to work. I’m feeling better. Not great. Not good. But better. Better enough that I should be making some words. And I’m having a terrible time making words. My writing discipline has collapsed this year, because I’ve been ill.

This happens to every writer–really, any self-employed person who works fully independently. Us indies need to get our discipline back every time something goes wrong.

For me, the trick to getting things back together is to set goals that succeed or fail quickly. These goals give me a quick shot of victory, or confirms that I suck.

For these goals to work, though: someone has to know about them. Someone must know if I succeed or fail. Otherwise, I don’t push myself.

Thursday, I leave for Ohio LinuxFest, to talk about ZFS.

That gives me three days. I could slog into the next tech book, or grind out some words on my current novel, but on Thursday I’d feel like I’d just poked along. No real failure, but no real success either.

I’m giving myself three days to write a short story. There’s a hard word cap of 10,000 words. At 1,000 words an hour, that’s a maximum of ten hours labor in three days.

Some people do challenges where they write a story a day, but they’re up to speed, not coming back. They also write much shorter than I do–I call 10K words “flash fiction” and 80K “a brief novel”

I’ll post my progress on Twitter. Wednesday or Thursday, I’ll follow up with a blog post reporting success or failure.

This year’s anemic output

(This is a “blog it so I can refer folks to it later” post.)

Last year, I wrote 403,000 words. Not great, but not terrible.

So far this year, I’ve written 130,900 words. That is terrible.

I also seem to have passed an awareness threshold. In the last few months, I’ve been offered speaking and teaching opportunities at half a dozen events, including big events like LISA and MeetBSD.

I’ve had to turn them all down. Which sucks. I want to expand my readership, and conferences are a great way to do that. Especially conferences that pay my expenses.

Ditto for the fiction opportunities I’ve been offered. (Which really tonks me off.)

It turns out there’s a reason why I’m tired all the time. Why I can’t concentrate. Why my productivity is in the toilet. Why flying somewhere and returning leaves me wiped out for a week.

Why I’m not doing my usual September writing retreat in Oregon.

Why I’ve had to take bloody naps.

I’m anemic. My blood marrow has shut down, and isn’t making more red blood cells. The ones I have are old and tired, and not doing such a good job of hauling oxygen around my innards.

There’s no reason for alarm at this point. My physician said “hmmm… that should have worked” and sent me to a blood specialist. I’m on more meds. They haven’t used words like “aplastic” or “pernicious.”

If I worked for someone else, they’d just have to put up with me falling asleep at my desk. But I’m self-employed, so my boss isn’t nearly so understanding.

Why am I posting this?

  • If you’ve offered me a wonderful speaking or teaching opportunity and I turn you down, this is why. Yes, I want to expand my readership–but if I fly to Georgia and back in the space of a week, I’ll be flat on my back for a week afterwards. Add in a time zone change, and it’d be ten days.
  • If you’ve asked me to contribute to a book bundle and I say no: this is why.
  • If you’ve offered me exciting work that I’ve inexplicably turned down: ditto.

I am maintaining my existing commitments. I made those commitments already understanding my health. You’ll note that there’s only two of them. The furthest requires a three hour drive, and that’ll require rest breaks. (I’ll be fine at Ohio LinuxFest; I arrive early the day before, and I’m scheduling nine hours of sleep a night.)

My morale wobbles unpredictably between “not good” and “f— anemia.”

The bad news is: it took too damn long to find out this was going on. The anemia’s slow, stealthy progress hid the depth of the problem. It’ll take a while to recover.

The good news is: I’m expected to make a full recovery. There’s no reason at this time to think I’ll need vocabulary words like “aplastic” or “pernicious.”

More bad news is: you can’t do much to help me. The only thing I can do is wait for the meds to work, which will take a whole bunch of time. All I ask is that my readers understand why I’m slow in producing new books this year.

The great news is: I’m under medical advice to eat more cow.

Wherein the past haunts me, but in a good way

Back around 1992 (or so), I published a role-playing game called Gatecrasher. This was back in the day when RPGs were on paper, and used all sorts of weird dice.

In retrospect, Gatecrasher was a triumph of vision over skill. The main design goal was “use all the dice.” But if you wanted to do something like “Spaceships and Sorcery,” playing an angel in enchanted chain mail wielding a propane-powered flaming sword and struggling to scrounge up spaceship fuel in time to make the Mars-Jupiter Hohmann transfer window, you could.

We did the main book and a single supplement, Believe It Or Else!, before the company folded, in the first of my many educational failures.

There’s not much on Gatecrasher on today’s Internet, but I did find one of the reviews of Believe It Or Else!

Around 1998-ish, I had moved on. My career in RPGs was dead, and I had focused on writing fiction, with occasional forays into writing tech articles for Sys Admin magazine. There wasn’t any future in writing tech stuff, but it was nice getting my name in print now and then.

One day I came home from work to find a Gatecrasher fan letter. On paper. Handwritten by a 12-year-old boy. He absolutely gushed about how he loved the game, but couldn’t find a copy of the supplement. He hoped I could tell him where to buy it.

I had no idea where to buy it.

Well, what can you say to that? I wrote him a polite letter back, thanking him, and sent him a signed copy of the second book. By “signed,” I mean “I scribbled a whole bunch of lunatic stuff on the inside cover including, if I recall correctly, the lyrics to ‘Mr. Reaper’ sung to the tune of ‘Mr. Sandman.'”

And that was it.

Occasionally I wondered if I’d scribbled too much daftness in that book and scared the poor kid’s parents so badly that they confiscated the book, but mostly it was just a bright spot in my ever-growing past.

Until today.

I got an email from that same kid. Okay, not kid. Ex-kid. Adult. Whatever they call thirty-year-olds these days.

At the time he wrote that letter, his home life sucked. Playing Gatecrasher with his friends helped him survive adolescence and grow up into a successful adult, with a career in IT and a spouse.

This is the most amazing, wonderful, heart-wrenching fan letter I have ever received.

If you’re a fan of something, tell the creator. Even if it was something from decades ago. They’ll love to hear from you. Especially if it’s something obscure, that the rest of the world has forgotten.

I still have a terrible time saying “thank you” when someone says nice things about my work. But it’s important that us creative sorts do that. Those fans might just come back two decades later…

Scottsdale AZ redux

I’ll be in Scottsdale, Arizona, for a few days on family business.

Readers, fans, and detractors are welcome to join me Friday 15 July 2016, 6PM, at Frank & Lupe’s Old Mexico.

And yes, there’s a gelato shop within walking distance. Several, actually.

I’m very hopeful that, while this might not be my last trip to Scottsdale, it will be the last trip to Scottsdale in the summer.

Getting Ahead of Blackmail

Here’s the interesting things about blackmail: it only works if the victim permits himself to be embarrassed. A victim who is willing to release everything renders himself invulnerable to such threats.

People have wondered how I make a living as a writer. It all depends on how you sell your product.

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dealing 3

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dealing 6

dealing 7

dealing 8

dealing 9

Sorry, David. You’ll have to buy your books like everyone else. Meet me in the alley if you’re still interested.

Penguicon 2016 Lucas Track Schedule

While the folks at Penguicon reserve the right to change the schedule at any time, we’re close enough to the con that I’m comfortable releasing my talks and panel schedule. This is extracted from the official Penguicon descriptions. and schedule.

Friday, 30 29 April:

6 PM – Social Media for Writers (panelist) – Hamlin
What social media trends does a writer building their web footprint need to understand? What are some Dos and Don’ts?

8 PM – PAM: You’re Doing It Wrong (speaker) – Windover
PAM, or Pluggable Authentication Modules, is one of the most occult parts of managing Unixish systems. The unique configuration syntax and idiosyncratic rule processing drives many sysadmins to copy working configurations from other people and random blog posts. This talk takes you through the essentials of PAM configuration, You’ll learn the components of PAM, how PAM processes rules, how to use multi-factor authentication, and get an overview of some useful PAM modules you probably haven’t used, based on my forthcoming book “PAM Mastery.”

10 PM – the ZFS File System (speaker) – Windover
ZFS, the Zettabyte File System, is one of the most full-featured filesystems available today and gives almost unlimited storage flexibility. Originally created by Sun Microsystems, the independent entity OpenZFS now develops ZFS as deployed in illumos, Linux, and FreeBSD. This talk takes you through ZFS’ features, including: data self-healing, deduplication and compression, clones and snapshots, copy-on-write, boot environments, replication, and more. Once you use ZFS, you’ll never understand how you lived without it.

Saturday, 1 May 31 April:

11 AM – Networking for Systems Administrators (speaker) – Windover
Too many organizations have a tense relationship between the network folks and the sysadmins. Sometimes it degenerates just short of war. But basic networking isn’t hard–if it was, network engineers couldn’t do it. This talk teaches the essentials, in a way that lets sysadmins troubleshoot network problems on their own. Sysadmins have amazing visibility into the network, once they know how to use it. We’ll cover cross-platform tools for viewing and troubleshooting the network, on both Windows and Unix.

4 PM – Encrypted Backups with Tarsnap (speaker) – Windover
Online backup is incredibly useful, but has many privacy and integrity risks. Tarsnap is an online backup service that only handles your data in encrypted form. It’s inexpensive and reliable. Plus you don’t need to trust the Tarsnap service–they can’t access your backups even if they want to. And Tarsnap’s built-in deduplication saves space, letting you store terabytes of backups in mere gigabytes of disk. This talk takes you through using Tarsnap, from backing up a system to customizing and rotating backups, to fully restoring them.

5 PM – Acts of Shameless Self-Promotion (panelist) – Portage Auditorium
What’s the best way to get your name forward?

7 PM – reading (speaker) – Writer’s Block (313 & 315)
My first ever fiction reading: my datacenter crime story “Wifi and Romex” I’m sharing this hour with Ken MacGregor. Don’t know which half I’ll get.

Sunday, 2 1 May:

10 AM: Self-Publishing 2016 (panelist) – EMC 1
This panel discusses today’s self-publishing options and business models. Our panelists include authors who are both self- and traditionally published, in fiction and nonfiction, including people who are making an income entirely by self-publishing. We’ll discuss why we made the choice to self-publish, the pitfalls and lessons learned, and which business choices we’ve made on our respective self-publishing efforts.

12 PM: BSD Operating Systems in 2016 (speaker) – Windover Charlevoix B
The BSD family of Unix has a been kicking around for almost 40 years now, and have taken different paths than Linux. Come see the last year’s developments in BSD land! One of them just might solve your intractable problem. We’ll talk about new things from FreeBSD, OpenBSD, plus updates from NetBSD, Dragonfly, and assorted derivatives.

2 PM: Senior Sysadmins Panel – Windover
Some say systems administration is a young man’s game, and that eventually sysadmins rise into management. They’re wrong. A sysadmin who measures their experience in decades has made mistakes younger sysadmins can’t even imagine. This panel lets you learn from their suffering, take advantage of their experience, and laugh at their pain.

I’ll have print books at all of my tech talks, including the brand-new FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS. You’ll be able to find my novels up in the Writer’s Block, rooms 313 & 315.

I’ll be kicking around the con the rest of the weekend, except for probably a lunch break Saturday. (Anyone interested in pho?) I’m not making a firm schedule for the rest of the time, but you’ll have a pretty decent chance at finding me at any of these events.

Friday 4 PM: LN2 Welcome Back Ice Cream
Friday 11 PM: LN2 After Hours Ice Cream
Saturday 3 PM: LN2 Guest Flavors Ice Cream
Saturday 11 PM: LN2 After Hours Ice Cream
Sunday 11 AM: LN2 Sunday Brunch Ice Cream

Winter Arrivals

Two exciting things happened. First, we have a water heater, kindly provided by the fine folks who sponsored FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS.
water heater
A few hours after getting it, my missus declared that she believes the old water heater never worked. At all. She is also highly in favor of water pressure in a shower. Apparently my standards for heat and pressure are lacking.

Secondly, my author copies of FreeBSD Mastery: Specialty Filesystems arrived from Tilted Windmill Press.

author copies

I’ll pack some of them up for shipping this weekend.

50% TWP titles (and more) at Kobo.com

If you’re a Kobo user, I’ve got a heck of a deal for you. All of my Tilted Windmill Press titles, fiction and nonfiction, are available for half off with a coupon code. This includes books like FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS, SSH Mastery, and Immortal Clay, but excludes my No Starch titles like Absolute FreeBSD and Absolute OpenBSD.

It’s not just my books either. All self-published titles are eligible.

Here’s the coupon codes and eligible dates, by country.

Canada:
October 28th – October 31st
Promo Code: CA50SALE

United States/Australia/New Zealand
October 27th – October 30th
Promo Code: GET50SALE

United Kingdom
October 30th – November 2nd
Promo Code: UK50SALE