Quick Post: Nyms and Newlines

I'm hip-deep in a project that involves structuring information stored in one system for transmission to another using a very specific format and protocol, and part of the process involves generating a list of fabricated names, a benefits number, and date of birth. The latter two are easy, since they just require a random number generator, but I wanted to solve the name issue with cleverness, and come up with some reasonable-looking pseudonyms. After all, the programmer's credo is: if it's worth engineering, it's worth over-engineering.

I've mined the baby names lists from the U.S. Social Security Administration before, and opted to pull a subset of names from the 1880 and 1890 data files. For last names, I turned to Wikipedia's entry on common bird names, and after a little scripting and hackery, have it generating me a random list of patients with a very Wodehousian flavor. Since I usually struggle for names in my own writing, I decided to keep the script for my own use, just in case I need something moderately ridiculous.

And taking a page from the book of the Typosphere's own Duffy Moon, I decided to over-over engineer and also come up with a set of professions for my silly characters. Duffy's technique, if I recall, was to open the telephone directory listings and combine the alphabetical section headings at the top of the page, treating the two index words as the parts of an interesting-but-rarely-normal job title. Category lists are easy to come by online, so I added these to my script's data sources, and hey presto, the nymomatic was born. Now I can contemplate the fictional life stories of "Florence Waxwing, Photography Plasterer" and "Grace Jay, Motorcycle Moistener" and perhaps wonder how "Christopher Albatross, Thermostatic Toilets" got into the business. And if you're very good, I shall whisper you the tale of "Franklin Dove, Turkey Upholsterer"

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Part two of this ramble has to do with those submission-and-response files, stuffed full of the exploits of "Etta Magpie" and "Glenn Ibis" and "Cornelius Kingbird" (who is in the Wildlife Wax line, I might add.) They are sent as a single stream of text, and received as the same, with no line breaks. Anyone who has to program text files needs to worry about how different systems say "this is the end of the line, start a new paragraph."

On Unix-ish machines, it's denoted by a "newline" character, which is usually written \n 

Before Apple got smart, they used to end text files with a "carriage return" character, thus: \r

Operating systems claiming a DOS ancestry use both, in combination: \r\n

These were originally teletype commands, meaning to literally return the carriage \r and advance the line one stop \n.  Of course typists will recognize this system, since it's exactly what you do when you manually throw the carriage as you type: return it, and then push on the lever a little more to line-advance.

Line endings are one of those things you take for granted until you get bitten by them, since most of our software handles the translations from one system to another automagically behind the scenes. But when you're hip-deep in test data, trying to reformat the exploits of Lou Cuckoo (Lead Lamps) and Nicholas Sandpiper (Singles Shredder) one gets reminded of the legacy of typing and the persistence of old standards. You may now look lovingly upon your QWERTY/QWERTZ/AZERTY keyboard.

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Concerning my previous post's cry for editing guidance, I have decided to follow your collective sage advice and just soldier through what I was doing, which was to edit in full, not to reduce-and-expand. I did give myself a little bone, though, by dropping in "finish lines" throughout the body of the text every 25 lines. When I'm able to edit, I tell myself that I only need to make it to the next finish line I have marked -- but once started, I'm not allowed to quit until I hit that mark.

There's no scripting my way out of this one. I have to work the text one \n at a time.

High, Concept

For as long as it lasts, here's the exhibit in question, but a quick interwebs search can find you information about numerous concept cars, including ones that should have been in my toy car collection, if oil embargoes hadn't spoiled everyone's fun.

Typed on a 1952 Smith-Corona Skyriter

The Rhino's Curse

The humble Nano Rhino all but stampeded the Typewriter Brigade last year, helped in no small part by Ledeaux at Dante's Wardrobe and her near-bottomless supply of themed clip art. All I can bring to the table is my cheap plastic toy Rhino that I found at a local clearance outlet: the kind of place where "ambiance" means "open boxes on top of shipping pallets." The little guy turned out to be pretty photogenic, though, and has become my writing mascot, and by extension, I've subjected the Brigade to all manner of Ceratomorphic shenanigans.

I'd like to pretend that 2012 will be different, but let's face it: there's no joke like a recurring joke, and the memeification of this little toy provides hours of entertainment when I should be doing something else. Anything else...



Never let it be said that I don't share, though. If you'd like to roll your own, I've uploaded a pair of blanks for your own use. I just recently discovered that the "standard" font for memes is Microsoft's "Impact" which satisfied my typographic OCD. Feel free to have at it, and maybe join up with the Brigade while you're at it? We could use procrastinators like you.

An Author is Me

"Kyras-Camera-High-Dive 061" by flickr user JoshSchulz


I spent the holiday weekend making a mess on our dining room table, and after much tweaking and pixel-pushing and fishing around for compliments, I pulled the trigger: One Last Quest is purchasable, at least electronically. That's one small step for (a) man, one more leap for the Typosphere. (Just following in Mr. Speegle's footsteps, here.) Now I sit back and recoil in horror at all the typos that slid by undetected.


Click me for a more humorous tomorrow

Can't sit for long, though. I'm already reading through the formatting guide to upload directly to Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Formatting for Smashwords is very particular, and I hope that I can use the same file -- or a slightly tweaked version -- to handle the other two sites. And then I need to figure out if I'm going to resurrect the print version that I proofed oh-so-long ago.

The only scary part is the jump...

Rescue Me

Chalk up another point for having a typewriter around. When I was gathering up the Valentine's Day gifts for my wife yesterday, I came to the sudden realization that the card that I'd picked up weeks earlier was a birthday card, and not for this particular holiday (the curse of having the two dates fairly close together: I tend to handle all the cards and gifts in one trip.) Solution: pull out the Silent Super from the foot of the bed, raid my kids' rooms for scissors and a glue stick, and concoct a last-minute art card, complete with a jagged typewritten heart on the front. It took two tries, as attempt #1 looked more like an actual anatomical heart than the traditional Valentine shape. Add a couple of rubber stamps and a cheesy typewritten ditty, and now her box of candy has a seasonally-appropriate mash note to go with it.

Roses are red
This typewriter is green
This is the most last-minute Valentine
That you've ever seen!

OK, we're not talking poet laureate here, but it sure beats "Happy Birthday."

The day was saved by a Smith-Corona Silent-Super.

Gary is...

Gary may be a lot of things, but I'll always remember him as the guy that forgot how to put the carbon paper in the typewriter. I found this message peeking out at me this morning from the platen of my Remington Premier, which is currently in rotation on my desk. I was transcribing from one of my notebooks onto a stack of index cards, had the desk lamp to battle the darkness of our Biblical rains, and there on the platen was Gary's self-affirmation, immortalized in ink and rubber. Well done, Gary.

Gary Douglas is a
highly skilled professional

And speaking of affirmations (smooth, that transition), I'm fishing for feedback as I try once again to make some readable sense of my 2009 NaNoWriMo entry. This latest round of motivation came over a weekend dinner with friends, when one of them had the nerve -- the unmitigated nerve! -- to ask if I'd done any writing lately. After I finished mumbling "no" into my napkin and then trying to change the subject, I figured that, once again, I've been neglectful, and unprofessional, and I think a disappointment to even good ol' Gary there. I'm taking this a chapter at a time now, and am slowly posting what I have so far on the Longer Pursuits page. As of this writing, I have all of three pages up, but believe me, it was a rough three. Good Openings, as all advice says, are Really Rather Difficult. Maybe not to Gary, but they are to me, especially when the original and revised openings read like a backstory-dump, which, essentially, they are.

I've made a clean break, and if you have a few minutes, I'd appreciate all feedback. Three pages. That's all. I'm no Gary.

The Tangled Weave of Plot

Feeling the typewriter love this morning: momentum is a powerful force, and the combined weight of all those typewriters thunking away... it's awe-inspiring.

Wanna see something else inspiring, in an I-can't-believe-how-nerdy this is way? Take a look at today's xkcd, and be sure to click through for the big image. (xkcd is... difficult to explain. Some are moderately NSFW if your boss frowns on stick-figure coitus. This strip is fine, but you have been warned.)

It certainly helps if you've seen the movies in question, but as a card-carrying mouth-breathing fanboy of The Lord of the Rings (both books and movies), I am completely awed and in love with the narrative chart. I know that Randall's ultimately going for a joke here, but I love the idea of seeing the lives intertwining on the page.

I was toying with something like this on Saturday before I started writing, trying to list out the various subplots and resolutions I'm aiming for in this year's book. But the chart form...

...I need some butcher-block paper and a pack of markers, stat.

Time to pick up

It's Tuesday, and my octopus only has seven legs.

This non-sequitur is brought to you by my latest knitting project. In knitting, the first row of stitches made is called the "cast on" row. That language puts me in the mind of fishing, and it's not a bad comparison, hopefully throwing your line into the water to see what you catch. I've only really managed one of the many methods of casting on, but it serves me well. My problem now with the octopus is that I need to go back and revisit that first row to attach legs, so the end product will look like a something, and not like a blob.

My knitting -- like my writing -- tends to shape up after a few rows (lines), so my cast-on row is numerically correct with the proper number of stitches, but may have serious style problems. Typically the tension in the yarn is wrong, and picking over it uncovers all the weak spots and funny gaps that even out over the course of the project. Now with this pattern, I have to go back and "pick up" stitches, which means just what it sounds like. Stitches that are done and in the past, stuff I laid down at the start of the project now suddenly fund themselves back on the needle and under scrutiny, being asked to support something else. And somehow, despite my ability to count to numbers higher than ten, I seem to be running out of room to attach the legs on the octopus. I just started leg number six last night, and without some creative rejiggering, it looks like I might be making a septopus after all. I'll figure this out, though. Knitting can be surprisingly tolerant of failure, especially when you're just doing it for fun. I'll work around it and it'll come out OK.

Now, it's Tuesday night -- the night of my wife's knitting class, coincidentally -- which leaves me and the offspring alone tonight. Once they're abed this evening, I will have about ninety minutes of quiet-in-the-house time. Unlike last week when I squandered this by actively ignoring the NaNo draft sitting right there on the side table, I think I'll dig out the pen and the note cards and start dealing with all those early lines, those cast-on pages that laid the foundation for the final story. Lines and pages that need reworking and revisiting, to ease out the tension and straighten things up. (Or maybe just ripping them out altogether.)

It's time to pick up and get to work.