In an effort to make the word machine in my skull fire up, I’m trying to blog more. Some of those blog posts will be short and/or daft. Besides, why give my silly thoughts to the big companies and not put them here?
Last night, ZZ Claybourne and I got Chinese and finished watching Alienoid. (Alienoid is a Korean two-part sci-fi kung fu what-the-heck film, reminiscent on Buckaroo Banzai on acid. Both parts are out, so I can recommend it.) Anyway, Chinese food.
We all know fortune cookies. Just like most of our Chinese food, they were invented in the US and play to Western ideas of China.
ZZ and I both picked a cookie from the bag. His was, as is traditional, trite and inoffensive. Mine?
This is my new favorite fortune. The world needs more fortunes like this.
Also, M is my lucky lottery number? I do believe I’ve been told that if I want to win the lottery, I must resort to methods other than the traditional “buy a ticket and hope.” Fair enough.
I’m not back at work full-time, but I am starting back and paging the OpenZFS Mastery manuscript back into my skull’s RAM. Here’s a tidbit.
Compression is a key feature of OpenZFS. A computer has four classic bottlenecks: CPU, memory, disk I/O, and network. CPU cycles are the most plentiful in modern computers, while disk I/O and memory are much more constrained. Footnote This paragraph is being written on a machine with a 96-core CPU, and all but two of them are bored stupid. By compressing data before breaking it up into blocks, OpenZFS can store more data on each block. Similarly, compressing data before it goes into the kernel’s cache reduces memory usage. We’ll discuss tuning compression methods for particular situations, but the defaults work for almost everyone.
Now that you know the bare basics of ZFS, the rest of this book merely fills in several thousand minor details.
One Montague Portal, one Rats’ Man’s Lackey. Both exclusive to my store until I have enough of each to do a collection.
Yes, the cover art is correct. For Reasons. Having this story be exclusive to my store lets me do silly things like this.
Both Montague Portal and Rats’ Man’s Lackey were meant to be single stories, but the Muse got involved and she’s an absolute jerk. (Don’t go clicking around that site, Oglaf is decided NOT safe for work. Or children. The artist has never declared safety to be a design goal, so I can’t complain.) Anyway, these first person tales limit my ability to give an outsider’s impression of the hero.1 Luggage is viciously competent and quite dangerous, but he’s so matter-of-fact about it that the reader doesn’t see that. With The 1846 I got to show that. I also got to show what would make Luggage immediately say “I’m not doing this” and nope out at full speed, so that was fun.
Anyway. New Montague Portal, new Rats’ Man’s Lackey. Enjoy.
Yes, there’s been a gap. I would have announced it, but I didn’t know and then every week I thought I might start again. But I didn’t. My apologies.
Here’s a chunk of a thing called Without Hinges, With Consent.
Nobody mentioned that I’d stink of cardamom seasoned with damp poodle.
Whenever you transit to an alien universe, the Portal rearranges your anatomy and biochemistry so you can survive under its different natural laws. A grade D universe like Sieve stretches the definitions of “human” and “survive.” These universes had to be especially valuable for Montague to exploit them. Transit to this universe turned our flesh into something like stone and our hair into this slimy seaweed stuff so I’d depilated before going on duty, but I couldn’t keep myself from running my fingertips across my warm scalp. When a universe lacks a concept you can’t even think of it, but my gut knew I was missing something big. And you never miss your heartbeat until it’s gone.
Even the most bizarre Montague operations need security people. That left me, Aidan Redding, security third and trouble magnet, standing in a narrow gap in the wall surrounding the Extraction Plant. LuPan was back guarding the entrance to the Portal building. I was technically senior.
Just because things connect doesn’t mean they work.
The small standing desk supports the two monitors and the CPU. Unplug four cables, and I can move it anywhere in the apartment.
But if I actually start writing on the attached keyboard, the whole thing shakes horribly. The little standing desk isn’t robust enough to support all that equipment.
Folks have asked how they can help me, and I always say “buy my books.” Given my situation, I’ve (ugh) reactivated my Amazon wishlist. There’s not a huge amount on it, but if you feel like giving me a hand I sure won’t say no.
If you need some fun reading, I have a book in the Escape From 2026 bundle. Fourteen ebooks, DRM-free, all about time travel, alternate worlds, and generally mucking with history. My book, Tiny Time Wars? It’s exclusive to this bundle. As in, when this bundle goes away, so does this book. It will never be reissued.
Plus, part of the proceeds go to supporting World Central Kitchen. We shouldn’t need to live in a world where folks go hungry. The UN knows how to end hunger. Nobody will pay for it. WCK helps deal with the problem until someone with money develops a conscience. (Because seriously? If I was a trillionaire and the UN told me they could fix hunger for six billion dollars, I’d give them twelve and tell them to write me a nice thank-you note. I’d be the most popular person on Earth.)
WordPress paused several Patronizer accounts in April. People haven’t been billed, or notified of their benefits. I don’t know why. I only realized when I went to ship Patronizer copies of the Defenestrated Networking for System Administrators.
The annoying thing is, I can’t just reactivate all these backers. People can pause their own memberships. I’ve mailed everyone with a paused membership who patronizes me via TWP, asking them to let me know if they didn’t pause their membership. A few have already responded, confirming that it’s a WordPress strangeness. Strangely, a couple of folks who subscribe on Patreon also had their memberships paused around the same time. Why? No clue.
If you Patronize me, either in my store or on Patreon, please check that your membership is still active.
I’m adding “check and verify paused memberships” to my monthly checklist. And talk about bad timing!
If you chose to pause your sponsorship, that’s completely fine. I appreciate your past support and hope that me being more productive in the future will lure you back.
I’m moving to an apartment this week. If you’re waiting for a reply from me, I’ll be back in business next week. But moving is a chance to revisit old setups. A while back, ZZ Claybourne saw my desk and declared it to be “some real Geordi La Forge shit.”
That’s pretty nice, but it got me thinking: what does Geordi have that I don’t?
Forget the advanced tech: that’s just window dressing.
Being far cooler than me? That’s inherent. I can’t help being a total dweeb.
What does he have that I can possibly achieve? The Enterprise-D’s command section is detachable. I’m pretty sure that the TNG premiere only did that because Roddenberry wanted it in the original series and he needed to say “See! We have the budget now!” Also the models, but I digress. Half the saucer separation screen time appeared in the premier, but I digress again. Anyway.
My desk clearly needs the ability to separate the primary and secondary hull. I had all the pieces, including a smaller standing desk that I used for recording and accounting.
probably evidence at my inevitable sanity hearing
It’s not wired up yet, and pieces are missing, but it’s a solid proof of concept.
The smaller desk? That’s where I’ll do writing, on the portrait-mode monitors. I’ll do page layout, spreadsheets, and other landscape-mode tasks at the larger desk.
On nice days when I’d really rather work outside, I can detach one USB cable and two video cables, separate the smaller from the larger, and roll the writing desk out onto the apartment balcony.
After 34 years together, Liz and I are getting divorced. This is an amicable split, everyone behaved completely honorably, and we remain friends. We are working together to make sure we both have a solid start in the next phase of our lives.
All new projects are delayed. While I appreciate invitations, I will not be attending events until the process is complete.
The next few months will be very stressful for us both. I ask for your patience and understanding.
Filling someone’s office with styrofoam peanuts? Nope. Requires extra work. Putting an anti-cop bumper sticker on someone’s car? That’ll ruin lives. The more targeted your gag, the funnier you can be. A good prank has some thought, some cleverness, some attention to detail.
For my own reference and perhaps your minor amusement, here are the Internet-relevant pranks I’ve pulled in the past.
2026: Networking for System Administrators: The Defenestrated Edition. Some folks hate Windows. My book Networking for System Administrators covers Windows. I created a special edition that had all the Windows material blacked out and made it available for ten days as a Kickstarter exclusive.
Smart books have footnotes. Smarter books are only footnotes.
2020: The Networknomicon.
Abdul Alhazred’s infamously rumored Networknomicon, or SNMP Mastery, has long been blamed for the Spanish Inquisition, the Second World War, and Cleveland. While nuclear “testing” was thought to have eradicated all copies of the manuscript, an astute student with a baggy shirt and considerable mob debts recently liberated one tattered survivor from the Miskatonic University Library of Computer Science.
2018: I took sponsorships on a book, but refused to say what the book was. 1 April, I released Ed Mastery. The Standard Text Editor. “ed Mastery.” It has a blurb from Ken Thompson himself.
Let me be perfectly clear: ed(1) is the standard Unix text editor. If you don’t know ed, you’re not a sysadmin. You’re a mere dabbler. A dilettante. Deficient.
Ed Mastery also comes in the Manly McManface edition, because some men can’t handle feminine pronouns in their tech books. Part of each sale goes to the Soroptimists, because screw you, that’s why.
Any third-person singular pronouns that appear in the standard edition, for normal people, are female. Those who believe that women don’t belong in tech books may purchase this special “Manly McManface” edition, where all third-party singular pronouns are masculine.
To compensate for this edition’s much smaller market, though, the Manly edition is unfortunately pricier than the standard edition. That’s basic economics.
2011: The Great Committer was to honor John Baldwin in the most embarrassing way possible.Apparently some of his cow-orkers started calling him the Great Committer and genuflecting when he approached, so that’s a plus. I still think that the BSD community adopting the pinky-and-forefinger-horns salute would rock.
Theo de Raadt could not be reached for comment. While Theo’s home has been surrounded, UN peacekeeper troops have yet to storm the building and heavy casualties have been reported in the surrounding countryside. UN spokesmen insist that the siege is going according to plan, however, and Theo is expected to be available for integration in the new combined BSD at some date in late 2023. Of the two hundred eighty-nine casualties suffered by the UN troops at this time, the commanding officer insists that they were caused by a rampaging Canadian moose. Daniel Hartmeier, previously of the OpenBSD Project, insists that OpenBSD has no weapons of moose destruction.
Also: we caught a news reporter. That was fun. Sadly, my more substantial pranks of later years failed to catch… anyone. Apparently I have everyone’s expectations. If I want my next prank book to attract attention, I’ll need to bind it in penguin hide.
