Gerald Brandt

I’ve come to realize there are not enough hours in the day to do all the things I need to do. I typically wake up at 7:00 AM (a luxury, I know), and start taking care of the kids right away. I get to bed around 10:00 PM. I go to bed exhausted and wake up tired. Ugh!

So, I’m going to try an experiment. I’m going to wake up earlier. My goal is to eventually wake up at 5:00 AM so I get about 2 hours of writing time in before the kids wake up. My plan is to move my wake-up time back about 15 minutes every few days. I’m thinking if I move things 1/2 hour a week, I should be okay. I still want to get to bed at the regular time.

Starting Monday, I’ll be out of bed at 6:45, on Thursday I’m going for 6:30. After about a month, I’ll be hitting my 5:00 AM goal.

I tried this once before, but I used a ‘cold turkey’ approach, which didn’t work so well for me. I’ve also done the opposite, where I’ve added two hours to my day by staying up later. It worked exceptionally well, but logistically it was a failure. Let’s see what happens with this new attempt.

Well, it’s official I guess. The writing group I started has had its second meeting. We’ve critiqued two pieces of work, and the format seems to be working well. Originally, we had five prospective members, but by the time everything settled, we ended up with two. Yup… just two. Still, it’s a start, and we are pushing each other to generate more work.

One of the rules of the group is that you must have something to critique every meeting. We’ve already broken that one, and we’re currently at every other meeting. With the feedback from the other member (d’oh), it should be easy enough to accomplish every meeting. I’ve left every meeting with a huge urge to sit down and write, which is great.

Currently, we’re looking for more members. I think five or so in total should be a great size. If everyone submits something for critique, and each critique is allotted 15 or 20 minutes, that’s a good length for a meeting. We’d still get time for socializing and discussing concepts and plots, etc. Originally, we’d planned on a group that didn’t cater to any particular genre, but now there may be a slight lean toward Science Fiction and Fantasy. I’m not sure yet. Keeping things genre specific allows us to skip some preamble on the critiques, since everyone would be familiar with the basic concepts. On the other hand, being non-genre specific give us more points of view and a fresh pair of eyes.

Something to think about.

At any rate, if there’s anybody in Winnipeg, Manitoba interested, leave a comment here and we’ll figure things out from there. I’m trying to create a nice tight knit group, so we’ll need to get together and talk first, maybe have a meeting with you, and then we can both decide if the group is a good fit.

Oh, and I plan on getting back to weekly updates on the blog. I’m aiming for every Tuesday and keeping my fingers crossed (which makes it hard to type).

Really, it can’t be…

Yes, I have been lazy… with the blog at any rate. I’m working on an article and should have some new content up in the next few days. Of course, we are going to be warm, warm, warm tomorrow, so I may just spend the entire day outside.

Oh, and by the way, I did 3,344 words on The Anshi Legacy today!

When I first met my future father-in-law, well before I decided to marry the wonderful woman I was dating, I was well and truly scared of him. Standing before me was a gruff man, very forthright and rough.

As usual, I immediately formed an opinion of who and what he was. It’s a defect in my personal make-up that this man helped me recognize… and to some degree, change.

That first evening in his house, I became his ‘go boy’. If he needed a fresh beer, I was instructed to go get it, no matter how close he was to the fridge. Later that evening when some aunts and uncles visited, I was instructed to get their drinks as well. At some point, one of Marnie’s aunts quite clearly told me that I didn’t have to do as I was told, and to sit down and enjoy the company. By this time though, I had become accustomed to my new role, and fulfilled it with relish. Hey, I was impressing my girlfriends old man, so it couldn’t be that bad.

Over the rest of the weekend, I was introduced to a unique and varied family, which I have been proud to become a part of. Over the next few years, I learned more of my father-in-law. Some of it through discussions with him, but most of it from the people he called friends, and more importantly, the people that called him a friend. I came to learn that this gruff guy had a heart of pure gold. He wouldn’t, or couldn’t, always put his thoughts into words that we could understand, but if someone needed him, he was always there willing to lend a hand.

When his first grandchild arrived, he seemed to blossom right in front of my eyes. He was a caring and doting grandfather that would do anything for his grandchild. Even if it was against our wishes. The arrival of his second grandchild doubled his apparent capacity for love. If I had to discipline one of the kids while we were in his house, he never failed to show his displeasure with me, and his empathy for whomever was being disciplined. I had to harden my heart a little when he sat on the couch with tears in his eyes while one of his grandkids sat on a timeout.

I was always uncomfortable addressing him. Before my wife and I were married, I didn’t feel comfortable calling him by his first name. The discomfort never left. When the kids arrived, it became easier. I just called him Grandpa, and all was well. I think I called him Dad once. Just once. I regret that I didn’t do it more.

Dad passed away on Thursday, March 21st at midnight. He will be missed more than I can say.

And the lesson I learned? I guess I can sum it up by “Never judge a book by it’s cover”. Instead of letting first impressions form your opinion about people, look at the people that call him a friend. Find out why they call him a friend. And look beneath the cover. Look at the heart of the person, and judge that. For that is where the true person can be found. Look, learn, and then form your opinion of the man. My first impression was wrong, and I am so glad to say that it didn’t take me long to figure that one out.

Love you Dad.

So, Marnie calls me this morning from her car. She wanted to remind that Jared had Computer Club after school today. After checking my calendar and verifying for her that, yes, he did indeed have computer club today, we started to chat.

I happened to mention that I was pouring a cup of coffee, which she hadn’t been able to do yet this morning.

“So, whatcha doing?”, Marnie asked.

“Pouring myself a coffee.”

“Oh, mock me.”, she whispered back.

“Mmmmm, this is really good. Yum…”

“Amadeus”, she said.

“Excellent coffee really… did you just say Amadeus?”

“Yup!”

“Mock me, Amadeus?”

“Yup”

“You’re a geek”, I said.

We laughed, said our goodbyes, and hung up the phone. Good times.

I’ve been using Linux for a long long long time. My first kernel was 0.9 something in 1992. During that time I’ve switched distributions based on eye candy, support, stability, etc. For the last few years I’ve settled on Gentoo. I like the control, I like (for the most part) the upgrade path. I like the ease of use in getting things running. True, it took about a week to finally get all the tools necessary to get my laptop running nicely, but when it ran, it was sweet.

When I finally screwed up my laptop install (trying to get Windows Mobile 5.0 to sync), I figured I’d look for something else. I ended up installing Sabayon, a Gentoo based install. I had a perfectly working laptop (very stable) with great eye candy in about 1/2 hour. Very Schweet.

In all, I have 4 boxes that run Gentoo or a Gentoo based distro. On that I have a Gentoo based VMWare session for my email/web/etc server. I also have a CarPC that I just converted to Windows XP, just because it was easier.

So, where is all this going? I guess right back to the distro of choice. There are so many people out there that bash an OS based on who makes it. They bash a distro because it’s not what they want. But really, who cares? My opinion is that the distro should be picked based on what you need it to do. For my car I needed a distro that had great GPS software and a good music program. For a long while, I used Gentoo with software I wrote myself, and a separate Garmin GPS. Now I use a new ‘distro’, Windows XP. The GPS is integrated with the music software, and it just works.

I’ve wanted a really good web based email/calendaring program for a long time. For the last year I’ve been using eGroupware, which worked very well. For a while I used Outlook and egwosync to sync my calendars/contacts/todo’s with the web based system. When I moved the laptop to Linux, I lost that. Interestingly enough, eGroupware syncs better with Outlook than with any Linux based app I’ve seen. Now for the main reason for this little rant. I’ve been looking at Zimbra and Scalix for my web based solution to replace eGroupware. Mainly because the eGroupware email reader does not handle filters on email. Filters move email from one folder to another based on who its from, or part of the title, or… whatever. eGroupware relied on some separate perl scripts to do it’s filter/moving. Ugh. And then there was spamassassin, which I used for spam catching. After training it on thousands (yes, that many, I still have emails from 2000), it still let spam through. It never took good email and marked it as spam, but I still had about 20-30 spam I had to handle manually every day. It caught about 80% of my spam. I just wasn’t happy with the overall solution.

After doing some research, I decided to try Zimbra. The problem was that it wouldn’t run under Gentoo. Damn. Oh well, it did run under RedHat, Debian, Ubuntu, and one other if I recall. I started a new VMWare session and installed Ubuntu Server. It installed clean and ran great. I gave it a 25 GB HDD and 320 MB of RAM. Once Ubuntu was installed, I downloaded the Zimbra Community Edition and installed that. Another clean install. Now, after two days of running Ubuntu and Zimbra, I’ve completely moved over to it for all my email and calendaring needs. I use to use Thunderbird to access my email, but honestly I haven’t fired it up in days. Zimbras WEB/AJAX based interface is so sweet, that I don’t miss it. It accepts all the standard keystrokes, does drag and drop, has great filtering. I just can’t say enough about it. It catches 95% of my spam with no false positives yet. It also does virus scanning. And Ubuntu Server is great. Will I switch to Ubuntu for my other systems? I don’t think so. I still like my Gentoo. Still, Ubuntu did the job it was supposed to, and did it well.

The summary of this is: Why the wars on distro’s or OS’s? Just use the one that does the job for you. It should do the job cleanly and efficiently with the least amount of hassle. I can honestly say that all my choices do exactly that.

Now if only I could get Windows Mobile 5 to sync.

Here’s a list of my current systems:
1. AMD 64 3400+ (1GB RAM, 1 TB HDD, Gentoo)
– main MythTV Back End
– VMware Server System
   - Blog and Web Server (256 MB RAM, 17 GB HDD, Gentoo)
   - Email (320 MB RAM, 25 GB HDD, Ubuntu)

2. Celeron 2GHz (512 MB RAM, 200 GB HDD, Gentoo)
– MythTV Slave Backend
– MythTV Frontend (living room)

3. Pentium 4 3GHz (2 GB RAM, 250 GB HDD, Gentoo)
– Temporary MythTV Frontend (bedroom)

4. Athlon XP 1800+ (256 MB RAM, 40 GB HDD, Gentoo)
– MythTV Frontend (basement)

5. Via 533 MHz miniITX (256 MB RAM, 250 GB HDD, Windows XP)
– RoadRunner CarPC Frontend

6. Pentium M 1.7 GHz (2 GB RAM, 100 GB HDD, Sabayon)
– my main machine/laptop

7. Athlon XP 1800+ (512 MB RAM, 250 HDD, NO OS)
– unassigned unused box. Used to be my CarPC.

This guy is cool!

Announcing the James Patrick Baen Memorial Writing Contest

Since its early days, science fiction has played a unique role in human civilization. It removes the limits of what “is” and shows us a boundless vista of what “might be.” Its fearless heroes, spectacular technologies and wondrous futures have inspired many people to make science, technology and space flight a real part of their lives and in doing so, have often transformed these fictions into reality. The National Space Society and Jim Baen’s Universe magazine applaud the role that science fiction plays in advancing real science and have teamed up to sponsor this short fiction contest in memory of James Patrick Baen.

CONTEST RULES:
-Write a short story of no more than 8,000 words, that shows the near future (no more than about 50-60 years out) of manned space exploration in a positive, exciting and hopeful way.

-No entry fee. But please only submit one story…your best one!

-All entries must be original works in English. Plagiarism, poetry, song lyrics, or characters from another person’s works will not be considered.

-E-mail submissions only. Send entries as .rtf attachments to: isdc.jbu.contest@gmail.com

-Please put the word SUBMISSION in the subject line when sending a contest entry and QUESTION in the subject line for questions to the contest administrator.

-Each entry must have a cover page with the title of the work, the author’s name, address and telephone number, and an approximate word-count in the body of the email. The manuscript should be in standard manuscript format and should be titled and numbered on every page, but the author’s name MUST BE DELETED to facilitate fair judging.

-Deadline is April 9, 2007.

WHAT WE DO WANT TO SEE:
Moon bases, Mars colonies, orbital habitats, space elevators, asteroid mining, artificial intelligence, nano-technology, realistic spacecraft, heroics, sacrifice, adventure.

WHAT WE DON’T WANT TO SEE:
Stories where everyone dies, stories that show technology or space travel as evil or bad, dystopias, Star Wars type galactic empires, UFO abductions.

JUDGES:
Semi-final judging will be by Jim Baen’s Universe editorial staff, final judging will be by the Publisher at Baen Books, Toni Weisskopf and Jim Baen’s Universe editors Eric Flint and Mike Resnick.

PRIZES:
-The GRAND PRIZE winner will be published in a future issue of Jim Baen’s Universe* and paid at the normal paying rates for professional story submittals. The author will also receive free entry into the 2007 International Space Development Conference, an autographed copy of The Best of Jim Baen’s Universe, a totebag and coffee mug.

-SECOND and THIRD place winners will receive a year’s membership in the National Space Society ($45 level), an autographed copy of The Best of Jim Baen’s Universe, a totebag and coffee mug.

*Publication details will be worked out between winner and JBU. In the unlikely event that none of the stories qualify for professional publication, a cash prize, of an amount determined by contest organizers, may be substituted in lieu of publication.

-Winners will be announced and notified no later than May 9, 2007. (only the winners will be notified) The winners will be honored at the 2007 International Space Development Conference Gala Awards Dinner, in Dallas TX, on May 22, 2007. (though we would prefer the winner attend this Gala, it is not required.)

Spam has become an issue with the blog. This morning alone, I’ve gotten 20 spam, and that’s 20 too many.

I’ve made some changes to limit what can be added into comments. I hope it works. If you know how to get hold of me personally, please try to leave a comment and if it fails, send me an email.

Thanks.