I’ve been going through OpenZFS Mastery but don’t feel like reading a chunk of it, so here’s a tidbit of a story I’m putting out this month.
The scarred, cratered rear end of the twenty-thousand-year-old wreck hung two meters below my feet like a giant platter dividing the cosmos, filling me with an astonishment even the best holograms couldn’t convey. From childhood I’d studied every accessible work on generation ships to feed my fascination. Reality exceeded them all. Overhead, the plush black sparseness of the Orion-Perseus Gap filled me with a whole different awe. Our ship, Recovery Interceptor Hoover, was invisible against that darkness. The glow from our support drone a few meters above only thickened the void. Stunned by the distance, by the generation ship, by the mere awareness of the engulfing universe, only the stink of my pressure suit kept me anchored to my duty.
When I took my adulthood allowance and purchased my ensign’s commission in the Gap Guard, Father had bought me the finest Gieves & Hawkes custom-tailored pressure suit, worthy of a gentleman and the sixty-seventh son of the Duke of Horsehead.
I freely admit that publishing short stories from my backlog is all about a quick dopamine hit. Sorry. Last month’s new stories, an Aidan Redding Montague Portal and a Rat’s Man’s Lackey, are in my store right now.
This post went to Patronizers in June and to the public in July. Not a Patronizer? You could be!
I am now settled in a safe and clean apartment. After ten days of work, everything is unpacked and in a place. I’m not happy with all the places, but those can be adjusted and if things have a place the apartment can be kept tidy. My office is functional, including printers and wireless. I’m actually fairly content with how it came out.
I loathe carpeting, but that’s what I could get.
Going from a sprawling house to an apartment is weird. The network demarc is close enough to my office that, instead of trying a dozen different makeshift ways to get Ethernet to my test gear, I might be able to do everything over wireless? The power strips all show these bizarre “grounded” lights, which I have never seen before but am reliably informed do not represent a failure mode.
My first priority is catching up on stuff that’s behind. I had planned to ship Patronizer copies of the Defenestrated N4SA2e, but a problem with my Patronizer system has made me delay a day. I suspect that none of the paused print-level Patronizers chose to pause, but I must verify before turning them on. I’d be inclined to just ship them all books, but someone might have gotten disgusted with me and wish to never hear my name again and I don’t want the postal inspectors to charge me with mail-order stalking.
My second priority is getting back to making words. I’m financially okay for a few months, but people support me when they see progress and there has been no real progress for a few months. I can’t just leap into writing eight hours a day, however. Writing is a muscle that must be warmed up or you crash and burn out. I’m starting by blogging more often. Some of that content will make it into Sausage posts as relevant, but most of it will be randomness to get the writing brain rolling. The impulse to write is once again present, but I know my brain. Brains are the worst. The worst. I can’t afford a self-imposed crash.
Plus: I might be living separately, but the divorce still must work its way through. An estate sale agent is disposing of the material trappings of our old life and then the house will go on the market. This is all intensely emotional, and I just have to roll with it.
I’m making the best of the split, though. My new apartment is less than two miles from my dojo, so I’ve been practicing more. The rats came with me, and they’re settled in okay. Everything is in open storage, which helps me remember what I own. Money is tight so I am living on a cash only basis until I achieve stability.
In other good news/bad news, a couple of publications that I had sold stories to folded. Again. Once again, as previously documented, I have been seen fleeing a burning publisher. The bad news is, the publisher sat on them for two years and I won’t get paid for them. In indifferent news, I am giving up on selling short pieces to publishers. It’s not worth my time. In good news, I can publish these stories myself and score an easy dopamine hit. The pile includes Montague Portal and Rats’ Man’s Lackey, so that’ll make some of you happy. Plus a ghost story, a magic Regency, and a sci-fi Regency. Because I could, because they amused me, and because nobody stopped me.
No, I didn’t warn anyone. They might have stopped me.
That’s kind of the key right now. Not warning people? No–well, okay, yes, also that. But amusing myself. The path to being okay lies through amusement. Besides, if the labor of writing doesn’t amuse me, the result will read like any other tech book. Tedious. Flat. I’m connecting with people and attempting to refill my well of amusement. I’ll be doing a writer’s event in Seattle at the beginning of August, and have tentatively scheduled a public meetup at Sirena Gelato in Kirkland on the evening of July 30th. No, I haven’t scheduled with the gelato shop. That would count as a warning.
Anyway, if you’re around Seattle on 30 July, there’s your chance to meet me.
And now, the Tilted Windmill Press store wants me to update to WordPress version 7.0, complete with generative AI features. Do not try me this month, you abhorrent monster. Do not.
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.
