[science] fiction

To hear Ian Stewart tell it, the world just isn’t ready for transcendentalistic science fiction. I think the problem is that people these days expect more than just cool ideas from science fiction authors. In fact, the science bit is relatively unimportant, to wit: The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson. Fantastic science fiction set in the 1600’s that uses some scientists as characters, but dwells rather more on swashbuckling, romance, and intrigue than upon science per se. Science fiction seems to me to have become more of a literary attitude than a genre.

Compare with Asimov’s work. Rubbish. PKD? Sophomoric at best. Here are guys that were definitely thinkers, and definitely prescient, and ideas a plenty, but damn if they could write a story one tenth as engrossing as Stephenson.

In his book Transfer, Stewart tells the story of George Casey – or rather, George Casey’s consciousness – as it becomes the first human mind to exist in a non-biological medium. That other medium, we come to learn, consists of some few hundred terabytes of RAM scattered betwixt the battered nodes of a cluster of old Dell workstations running in the basement of George’s home. It sure seems like there’d be an interesting story in there somewhere.

But between the tired inside jokes for Slashdot readers (it is a beowulf cluster of those!) and the mindless synesthetic droning on (colors experienced as tastes, images as feelings, &c, &c, ad nauseum), one fails to find a soul.  How ironic. And a story’s soul is ultimately what makes it worth experiencing, regardless of its shelving category. So I think Mr. Stewart needs to worry less about impressing people with how long of a run on sentence he can write with a straight face and more about what makes people bond with a story.

Wanderlust goes Boink

In a stunning development that shocked the high tech world today, former software tool vendor and high tech consulting company Wanderlust Software, LLC today announced it is no longer in business. The president of the now defunct company, Myk Willis, explained that “well, uh, we’ve actually been closed down for a really long time. But there was this health insurance thing…” before his lawyer whacked him upside the head and stammerred something about “no improprieties implied or evidenced…prolonged wrapping up activities…”

I formed Wanderlust after leaving Citrix Systems, Inc., where I’d worked for about five years. September 20, 2002 is what the articles of formation say, but I haven’t had a chance to make sure I had actually quit Citrix by then, so don’t quote me on that. I had this idea of building a small but sustainable company that I could run by actually writing code, instead of planning for potentially doing things in the future, or working on things for 9 months before having them cancelled just as we were going to beta, or working 80 hour weeks for months at a time cleaning up someone else’s mess.

When I was in college, I worked for StratosWare Corporation, which was a small software tools company (I joined the company as the only programmer outside of founder Keith Bluestone) that made the once quite popular MemCheck products. We consistently ran runner-up to NuMega’s BoundsChecker, like the Washingon Generals to the Harlem Globetrotters, but it was a great experience for me. We wrote products used by other programmers, and had to learn the intricisies of the development and runtime environment. I got to design and implement entire products in x86, C, and C++ while most of the people I went to classes with were struggling with Pascal or Fortran.

I’m not sure that I wanted to emulate StratosWare with Wanderlust, but I definitely wanted to get back to a time in my professional career when I was doing what I think I do best: write code. Sure, I like strategy, product management, business development, even a touch of marketing now and again, and of course philosophising (some might argue that my, err, unstructured thoughts tend more tow.ard bullsh*t than philosophy, strictly speaking), but the only time I find myself truly in the zone is when I’m heads-down in a code editor.

But enough already. Wanderlust ended up being more of a contract development house than a developer of software tools. Too hard to turn down fun jobs and big $$$. File systems, low-level networking code, native NT applications, device drivers, hard to turn down that kind of work. When all was said and done, as it was and is now, I can look back and say it all wound up quite nicely. One large chunk of technology that had been developed in house was sold to a large company (which itself was then sold to Microsoft) for enough money to pay back the development costs plus some, and the rest of the assets were rolled into mVisible Technologies, my current company that’s behind MyxerTones.com.

Funny how there are so many books written about starting companies, but very few about shutting them down.

a lot to say

Sometimes, I have so much that I want to say that I don’t say anything at all.

beginning

“What are you doing now?” he asked.

“Do you keep a journal?”

So I make my first entry today.

So starts Henry David Thoreau’s journal, which (I hear) went on for approximately 20 volumes before that infamous quarrel with God (of which Thoreau was apparently hopelessly unaware) ended his writing career some years later. I hesitate to invoke the words of such an oft-quoted hero of writers here, being that (1) I am exactly 9 pages into my first reading of Civil Disobedience, and therefore have had insufficient time to elevate the author to heroic status, and (2) I am some 100 words into my first blog entry, and therefore have had insufficient time to establish myself as being, indeed, a writer.

When faced with such daunting tasks as this that lay before me now – the goal of writing my own 20 volumes, perhaps puncuated now and again with a particularly witty essay that might stand on its own and serve some purpose for a Good great or small, hopefully stretching my words across a great many more years that were afforded Thoreau – I often speak silently to myself the words of Confucius (another great thinker of which I am most completely ignorant):

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

So I take my first step today.