Regular Spelling
Thoughts on language and more

Small World, Small Internet

A few months ago, I sold one of my domain names. I had an offer to sell it for a rather impressive sum, being that it was just for the domain name only and not a site purchase offer. I had bought the domain name to host my resume and portfolio a few years ago while I was looking for a job, and so it was just sitting dormant now since I am currently employed. So I decided to sell it, a tale I covered much more completely in the review for my XPS M1530. After it was transferred, I was curious as to what they were doing with it. The registrar on it was a shirt printing company, as far as I could tell, so I wasn't sure what it was going to be.

Finally, a site has been given to it. It is the home of a program I read about in the news a few weeks ago, a music and acting program for students in the East Coast. It's called the Fidelity FutureStage: http://www.futurestage.com

The most intriguing thing about this, though, is who is running it. Fidelity Investments, an investment firm, not someone you would immediately think of doing something like this. But not that in itself. The intriguing part is my father is an employee of Fidelity Investments, and has worked there for over 20 years now.

Not even six degrees, that's like two at most. The internet is a much smaller place then it seems.

On a side note from an observer's standpoint, the page developer was a little inconsistent on their coding. The title has it spelled "Futurestage", without the second word capitalized, but the meta information right after it and the rest of the page has the proper capitalization of the program.

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 11:00:00 -0500

Another Voice Redux

I didn't realize how often we have British actors playing American parts in movies before, really. I've talked about this before, with Hugh Laurie's role in House, I had never known he was British until I saw an interview with him on TV.

Most recently I've observed this in the new film 21, starring Jim Sturgess, about some college students in MIT card counting to make big money at Blackjack in Vegas. Jim Sturgess in this is playing an American, so speaking with a northeastern US accent. Watching it, not considering him himself and having seen him talk with his regular accent, it's hard to tell that's not how he normally speaks. If I hadn't seen Across the Universe beforehand, I would have no idea that Jim Sturgess was British.

Along the same lines is Joe Anderson, who also played in Across the Universe. I'm just now watching the extras for the movie for the first time (another topic for another time), and only now realized he was British. He plays in that movie with a Jersey accent, and until seeing him talk in the commentary, I would never have guessed that it was not his regular accent.

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 08:00:00 -0500

Return to Normalcy

Finally done with training, so now I am finally back to a normal work schedule, instead of working until midnight or later.

Just to update what I've been up to, I spent most of today updating the templates I'm using here to switch over to PivotX when a final version is finally released. There's a few things I need to tweak still that aren't working yet, but it will be ready. I also noticed, in this process that the individual entry pages have the links list twice, on the right where it is supposed to be, and also on the left instead of the About box. I'm not going to bother fixing it on the current Pivot template, but it will be fixed when I update to PivotX.

Other than that, not much for now. I finally posted an update to Skewed, and now I'm past the point where I was getting stuck because it was weak. It actually ended up a little better then I originally expected, rereading the card in StoryLines and the previous parts for Gregory and Yukito showed me it actually had more to do then I thought it would have and also something I actually needed to cover, so it didn't end up being a total throwaway section. Now I'm going to spend a little time arranging some cards I had sitting unfiled, because I know more of where the third act of this story is going so I can place some of them.

I'm also liking the fact that Writers Café has a Linux version, which I had forgotten about earlier until I was checking for updates to my Windows version while working on the templates earlier. I had set up a VMware virtual machine with Ubuntu on quickly to run Apache so I could host the PivotX beta and work on the templates, and I threw the Linux versions on there. Works perfectly, exactly the same as the Windows version. It's nice to have my tools available in both Linux and Windows.

Also, finally a version of WordPerfect is out that supports OpenDocument, so I can finally switch back to WordPerfect over OpenOffice, but still keep my documents in ODF format and portable to other people. It doesn't use the Text Services Framework for it's text area though, unfortunately, meaning I can't use the full Vista Speech Recognition functions with it either, instead being stuck with the lackluster "Dictate Anywhere" function.

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 18:00:00 -0500

Cross References

If you have read my story Skewed, then you probably have seen in it that I like to make references, because I'm having a lot of fun writing this story, and all the rules are thrown out the window. I have referenced Final Fantasy 4, Yu-Gi-Oh, Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni, the Key products Kanon, Air, and Clannad, among various things, and have plans to reference several more things. I also have references to my own works, characters I created for the AnacondaSoftware titles.

Amusing to me, however, are references that would mean anything only to me. I haven't used any of those in the actual story, because that would be no fun, but in my notes for the story the game's completely different. Most amusing, however, is one I just passed by while adding and reading over my notes for future stories, a very vague reference that I just entered in without even thinking of it when I originally created the card.

The reference is the name of a card in my StoryLines file for Skewed. The card is simply named "Island", and references a scene that takes place in a basement of a building, completely unrelated. The actual reference that
"Island" means, however, was related to a story idea I got in 2005 in a dream while I was in vacation in Colorado. I woke up from the dream, booted up my notebook, typed out how one particular scene played out that was most prominent, and then entered the rest of the details quickly to that file so I could remember them later when I got around to finishing it, then saved the file as simply "Island" because I couldn't think of a name, but the story took place on an island. The conclusion of the scene I typed up completely took place in a similar place to where I was having this card's section of story take place, in a basement of a building, and the situations between the two were almost the same, so I stuck "Island" on there when I made the card so I knew what I was describing for the place. Because I can simply look at that, and know exactly what I want to describe of that place in Skewed.

I never actually did write any more of that story at that time, and as yet I've only written the introduction to that story beyond that. Once PivotX hit's gold I'm going to upgrade to it, and it's new features should make it fairly easy to integrate my writings with this blog seamlessly, so you should see it and other stories in the future.

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 20:00:00 -0500

Subcon

It may just be my body protesting against my training schedule, but I doubt it, because this has been going on much longer than that.

This started after the change over to daylight savings time. From then on, I've had a problem waking up at the time I've wanted. My alarm clock sits on my dresser, at the head of my bed, easily reachable from my bed. The problem I've been having is I'd either hit the snooze button continually until another hour had passed, or, on some occasions, turned off my alarm, set it an hour ahead, and turned it back on. And, mind you, this is all done completely in my sleep, i never have any recollection of it happening.

A couple weeks ago, during my training, I had to unplug my clock. When I plugged it back in, I decided not to set it, to try and get out of that problem. Instead, I set my phone's alarm, and have been using that as my alarm clock. It sits on my desk in the charger, well out of reach so I have to get up from my bed and turn it off. And apparently, my sub-concious doesn't like this.

I had a dream this morning, that I was out somewhere. Near the end of this dream, before I woke up, a friend of mine needed to borrow my phone to make a call. I leant it to him, and he asked me about the indicator on my screen that the alarm was set. My response was, literally, "That's my alarm clock. It's going to go off soon and wake me up. You can turn it off if you want."

Clearly, my subconcious has another plan, and wants to keep me in the dream world.

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 11:00:00 -0500