But I’ve been thinking about Lent today. I grew up in an Anglican tradition, and part of that was the notion of choosing something to give up for Lent – a minor vice or indulgence, that you thought you could do without for forty days, (not counting Sundays,) and improve your moral fiber for it.

It’s been a long time since went to church services for anything in the Easter season, or gave something up for rent. Several years back I put several specific categories of treats on the ‘not for Lent’ list as part of an effort to lose weight and eat healthier – pringles, ice cream, and something else I think. (Not chocolate – you’ll get my Cadbury cream  eggs when you pull them in warm chocolatey pieces from my hands, or something like that.)

I’m proud of how much weight I managed to lose a few years back, but I’ve been thinking that I want to get a bit slimmer, and stop the backsliding into eating more junk food. I’ve been mostly maintaining my weight lately, and maybe putting on the odd pound every other month or something.

So, rather than anything specific, I’m going to give up extra Calories for Lent. Back when I was still committed to eating right and losing weight, I was budgeting myself 2500 Calories a day, with perhaps a bit extra for days when I went above and beyond on exercising. Lately, I don’t beat myself up if I stay under three thousand, as long as I’m walking at least thirty minutes.

But as you are all my witnesses, I’m going to try and change that. For the forty days of Lent, I’ll do my best to stick to 2500 Calories or under, no matter how much I exercise – AND keep up the daily exercise as much as I can. On Sundays, I’ll splurge a little and indulge those extra few hundred.

Don’t let me give up, blog followers. I’ll do better if I know I have to come back on here and report how I do.

And let me know if you’re giving up anything for Lent – or doing something special to commemorate the season.

I found this today while helping my mother tidy up her computer room, (our Family Day activity,) and thought I’d bring it to blog readers via the wonders of document scanning technology!

There was no copyright date, but we estimate I made this sometime in 1983, so I would have been 8 or 9.

I also drew the pictures myself.

I hope you enjoyed reading one of the first books I ever published.

This time I’ll take more care with the scheduling feature. I’m also going to move on from ‘Project Fast Track’ and start sharing a snip from my newest story, “The Storm Mirror.”

Father was talking with his second mate near the stern when Melvin found him. “Wouldn’t you know it, for the weather to settle down just as we make it to shore.”

“You’re okay, Father?” Melvin asked, and Father nodded curtly. “What about Alec?” He looked around the deck and the pier for his tall older brother, but it was hard to sort out anything in the dim light. “Is he down below decks?”

I have been able to retrieve three other David Parlett titles from my bedroom bookshelf, at least – to refresh my memory when a Storywonk podcast quoted the name of the two-player tricks and combinations game ‘Bezique’ as a top-scoring Scrabble word. These books are organized by the number of players required – there’s one book of ‘Card Games for Two’, and ‘…for Three’ and ‘…for Four’, so that you can flip through them when you want to settle down for a night of parlour games, depending on the number of players available.

I don’t think I’ve ever played Bezique – most of my fondest memories are of the games in the ‘Card Games for Three’ book, used on occasions when it was just my parents and I interested in playing. There’s Bismarck – which is really four different card games in one, because the rules change from deal to deal – first no trumps, then random trumps, then the dealer calls trumps, and finally no trumps again, but all players trying to lose tricks. One player deals for all four variants in a row, and then the deal passes around the table, so the full match ends after twelve hands – which makes for a full evening of cards.

I’ve mentioned Tyzicha in passing, and it’s possibly one of my favorite games from ‘…For Three.’ You play with a short deck, ace through nine, and three of the cards are dealt into a blind pile in the middle of the table, while the rest are dealt out to the players.

Each player then bids a contract of points that he thinks he or she can make, (with the player left of dealer stuck for a contract of 100 points if nobody bids higher.) The highest bidder gets to take the blind, sort through his hand, pass any two cards to his opponents, and lead to the first trick.

Each card is worth a different amount if captured in a trick, 11 for an ace ranging down to zero for a nine. You can also score points by leading out the king or queen from a ‘marriage’ – IE, if you have the matching king or queen still in your hand. Whatever suit is married becomes trumps until superseded by a later marriage. So a considerable amount of trick play can revolve around keeping marriages in your hand until able to lead one of them, and marriages are a huge factor in the bidding – either marriages that you already have, or how many marriageable monarchs you hold whose soulmates might be sitting in the blind.

And each suit scores a different amount if married – 100 points for hearts, but only forty for spades.

It’s an interesting game that tells you a lot about personalities – who’s optimistic or pessimistic, choosing between focusing on marriages or on trick points, and whether the opponents can effectively ally to defeat a contract or only play for their own score. One little tidbit I remember is that if the contract winner realizes that things are hopeless, and guesses that his opponents might score high if the hand is played out, can concede the hand, taking the full penalty for losing his contract. Usually, whenever I was playing this, conceding was done by tossing your cards, including the ones that you’d just picked up in the blind, into the center of the table face down, and announcing – ‘forty each,’ because in the event of a concession, the opponents both count a fixed score of forty points.

During the last several years that Dad was on active faculty in the Computer Science department of McMaster University, he taught a course of ‘introduction to programming for physical science majors’ or something like that. The term project that he liked to assign was a team affair, with each team picking a card game, and developing a program that would play the game both in ‘one human user versus the computer’ mode, or a mode in which all players were controlled by the computer. He converted many of his favorite programs into versions that would run on our PC-XT clone home computer, and I loved to play on them. I don’t think that there was ever a Tyzicha program, but I remember Bismarck and Five Hundred, Euchre and Ombre.

Okay, that’s enough rambling from me. Do you know any unusual card games? Or have you ‘inherited’ obscure expertise from a parent?

I’ve been working really hard on the driving practice stuff ever since the last test, in the first week of January – I figured that I knew what mistakes I was making, so I made an effort to drill on those things when I was out driving with my brother – left turns, stop signs, roadside stops, three-point turns, and parallel parking. I took an extra hour of paid instruction with my driving teacher from A-1 academy, and he said that he thought I was doing well and shouldn’t be nervous about taking the test again.

So, the test appointment was booked for 10:10 am this morning – I picked the day because this is the week before reading week at McMaster university, so I thought the streets would be a bit busier in the morning next week. Tried to get to bed early last night, had a bit of trouble nodding off, but I woke up at quarter to seven feeling pretty good. Hopped into the shower first thing, grabbed oatmeal and logged into the work network to finish some tweaks on the ratesheet interface while I waited for 9.

At nine, my brother came by to pick me up – we went by McDonalds to get him a coffee and a muffin. I drove around a bit, just trying to loosen up – I did a roadside stop along Kentley drive, where the examiner had me do it last time, and my brother said that I was closer to the curb than I needed to be, but I didn’t touch it, so I felt good about that.

Then to the testing center to sign in, and back out to the car to wait for the examiner. I’d brought a CD to play while I waited – it was a somewhat odd mix, and I ended up singing along to Little Big Town and Roger Whittaker. Noticed all the instructors that I’d had before go to other cars while I waited. (The guy that I had in November and January was really nice, the lady that tested me in December seemed grumpy and made me more nervous.)

When my tester came out, he seemed pretty cool too, and I felt myself driving in the zone as I started going through the test. It was the same route as I’d driven in January – but he didn’t tell me to do the roadside stop along Kentley, or anywhere else. I remember thinking as I turned off Kentley that “Okay, now I don’t know when it’s going to come”, and then figured out when he told me to turn up Kenora towards the test center that he might not have me do it at all. I was also thinking, then, that I wasn’t sure if I was passing, but I was driving well and giving it my best shot.

I didn’t have to do a proper roadside stop. I did the three-point turn and the parallel park in the test center parking lot, and he asked me, as I finished the parallel park, which way I should turn my wheels if I was parking uphill. That was it.

I have a few checkmarks for ‘Needs some improvement’ on my official evaluation paper – incorrect vehicle position in the 3-point turn, observation while backing up, and turning too wide. But I’ll have plenty of time to work on those before I take the next road test, for the full permanent G license.

Next step – car shopping! I’ll let you know how that goes soon.

It’s great – a really smart, really funny show, that isn’t afraid to go – pretty much anywhere. From the grand tour de force homages like ‘Modern Warfare’, ‘Basic Rocket Science’, and ‘Epidemiology’ (the Halloween zombie episode,) to smartly thought out plots like ‘The Art of Discourse’ and ‘Co-operative Calligraphy’, I’ve been loving every chance I get to take in an episode.

“Calligraphy” is one of those little bottle shows that is shot like it was written as a play – one room, seven characters with a cameo by the Dean, and a plot that you wouldn’t think could stretch out the whole episode – Annie is missing her pen and doesn’t want the session to break up without finding out what happened to it. But the action unfolds like a locked room mystery, with suspicion falling on every character – including Annie herself, more than once. Every possible explanation of how the pen could have innocently gone astray is investigated, and ruled out. And this tiny, little thing stresses our unconventional family of college students to the breaking point, bringing out awkward, uncomfortable secrets, and testing the faith and trust that they have in one another.

Finally, at the darkest hour, Jeff proposes a completely outrageous and nonsensical straw man, a villain whose existence could never be obviously proven (or disproven,) just to give everybody in the group an out with which they can save face. And for the sake of the bond that they’ve formed, they each accept the utter nonsense.

Only we as the audience learn the truth, a solution to the puzzle that’s about as outrageous as anything else mentioned in the entire episode, but also has just enough logic in terms of the Greendale universe to make you go “Hey, why didn’t I think of that?”

I’ll try to remember to let you know what I think when I’ve finished watching season 2.

But I love how it’s been coming the past few days! I’ve gotten up to the big dramatic climax, and it just kinda flowed naturally and I was able to get a little foreshadowing in there. I do love it when a story comes together.

All I really need to write now is one short scene to establish the conclusion. And then I’ll need to figure out another short to start writing. I’m toying with a plot bunny about President Eisenhower and a scriptwriter, just as Ike’s taking office – he found out that he inherited a Roswell alien conspiracy from Truman and he’s determined to go public with it. What do you think, does that sound like an interesting premise?

The first story idea I ever remember coming up with, I was probably six years or so, and it involved – I kid you not, the adventures of a native Canadian boy, living near the site of Sydney, Nova Scotia, before Europeans came to Canada, and an iron mine and blacksmithy. My mother did try to tell me that she didn’t think the Native Canadians mined for iron or worked with it in that time, but I just didn’t care.

There isn’t much more to the story for several years. Coming through my ‘middle grade’ years, I remember being very convinced that I could write science fiction and fantasy if I worked at it, and managed to finish a few short stories on our family computer, a PC-XT clone. One of them involved a murder mystery at a school for wizards, (Pre-Harry-Potter, but I was probably influenced by the Roke School in Tales from Earthsea,) where all the main characters had miniature dragons as pets in brilliant gemstone colors. (So there’s a bit of influence from ‘Dragonsinger’ as well.) And I actually submitted a science fiction tale to a magazine, that was more than a little bit like ‘Wesley Crusher gets a peer group’ – a handful of bright, precocious teenagers all working as unofficial pre-cadets on a starship, and signing up for a space warfare tactics competition as a team.

Okay, that’s enough origin story I think, moving on to Blogfest 2. The Hook Line and Sinker blogfest calls for a 500-1000 word hook, and I’ve got to go with the opening to my new novel idea, ‘The Scroll:’

Will heard something, and looked out beyond the loading dock before realizing that the sound hadn’t been what he was expecting – not a van entering the parking area, but running shoes against the asphalt. For a second he panicked, wondering if the entire plan had gone wrong, if this was somebody from the University sent to intercept the package before he could secure it. But then he spotted the person running around the corner of the building, recognized her, and a smile broke out on his face. He left the museum, went down the stairs and stretched out his arms for a hug. Mandy took a moment to catch her breath before nestling in against one of his shoulders, her auburn ponytail brushing the side of his face.

“To what do I owe the pleasure?” Will asked. “I thought that you were just going to call me from the campus library.”

“Yeah, but I couldn’t concentrate, so I headed for the subway,” she said. “Don’t worry – I’m not going to hang around all night, while you study your new masterpiece.”

“Well, it’s great to see you.” Will smiled. “Especially tonight.”

“I was hoping to slip in the usual way, but you must have already locked it.” Mandy said as they walked towards the loading steps with arms around each other.

“Yeah, there’s only one open way in or out of the museum.” Will pointed up to the door above them. “And it looks like the delivery is more or less on time.”

The driver of the unmarked olive van didn’t bother backing up to the loading dock – he just parked six feet away from Will and Mandy and jumped down out of the cab. “Mister Peterman!” He held out a protective tube, two feet long and three inches in diameter, and Will took the package before any mischance might strike.

“Thank you, Keith,” he said. “For not coming tonight.”

“You’re welcome for nothing.” Keith nodded and got back into his vehicle to drive away.

“And so simply, in the dead of night, the course of history changed,” Mandy said. “As Will Peterman was handed the oldest surviving human writings yet discovered…”

“We don’t know that they’re that old, yet.” But Will couldn’t help the grin on his face. “Okay, do you want to come inside with me?”

Mandy smiled, shook her head, and took a look at the screen of her cell phone. “Any idea how long you’re going to be?”

Will leaned over to consult the clock reading on the phone. “After the subway stops running.”

“I’ll wake up and ask you how it went when you crawl into bed.”

Will chuckled, bent down to kiss her one more time, and watched as she ran off in the direction of Bloor Street. Mandy turned when she was nearly out of sight, saw him still standing in the parking lot, and called just loudly enough that he could make out the words, “Get that thing locked up! Angry palaeographers from U of T could be here any minute!”

He waved an agreement and headed back up across the loading dock and into the museum, locking the door behind him. He’d been the one to find out about this Iranian Scroll, and gone to Doctor Lyon in the U of T history department for her help in putting together a bid to get to study it together. A week later he found that U of T was proceeding alone and locking the museum out. That left Will with a choice – to put his ambitions on hold, or skirt the rules.

 Once inside, Will filled out the paperwork that would process this scroll into the Ancient Writings research collection at the museum, which would stop the University from transferring it back to themselves with a routine inquiry. Once those formalities were complete, he spread the delicate material and started to examine the writing.

The alphabet looked like Phoenician, so that Will could start to sound out the words. But there was something weird. There were two different kinds of passages in the length of scroll that Will had spread out – each passage a sentence or a few sentences long. The longer passages didn’t have any vowel indicators at all, just like classical Phoenician tended to avoid them. The words weren’t in Phoenician, maybe Old Persian, but he didn’t really know that much about Old Persian. He could start researching it tonight – or ask McCauley in the morning; McCauley was an expert on Old Persian manuscripts using the Persian alphabet.

But the shorter passages, a sentence here, two there – they were using a lot of letters that he’d never seen used with the Phoenician alphabet before, and from their placement in the words Will thought that they were indicating vowel sounds – there were at least twelve different vowel letters, and the words that they spelled out didn’t look like Old Persian.

Will grinned. This was the kind of challenge that he’d been looking forward to, and it was all his. He fetched a shiny ballpoint pen and a large pad of note-paper, and started to break down the pattern, checking his computer for details on the known Phoenician markings for vowels to use as a starting point.

 After half an hour, Will had nearly finished a pronunciation guide for the mystery language. He was sounding out possible pronunciations of one long sentence, and reached out to make a note on which marking meant a long ‘ee’ sound, but the pen wasn’t where he’d left it on the table. Frustrated, he checked on the floor first, to see if it had somehow fallen off.

The floor turned up pen-less, so he looked around the rest of his cubicle, and was astonished when he finally spotted the little silvery cylinder, because it was hovering in mid-air, a foot and a half above the pad of note-paper.

So, are you hooked?

As I vowed a little while ago, I’ve been making progress on some programming to-do items, including fixing up some programs for the Alphasmart Dana that I want to post for free download. I’ve got the manual for one program done and the other nearly ready, and I wanted to include a very brief legal licence that laid out the requirements I had for people who downloaded the package, mostly:

• If you distribute the program anywhere, keep my name attached to it as the author
• If you distribute the program anywhere, keep the manual and this licence with it.
• Don’t sell it or charge anybody anything for the download.

I looked for examples of this kind of thing, but didn’t have that much luck. I found some licence examples that were evidently designed to represent a deal between two established parties, as opposed to a somewhat open-ended contract between me and whoever ends up downloading it. And I found an awful lot of template licences for ‘free software’ or ‘open source’.

Now, those are not the same thing as freeware. Freeware means that the program is free to use, but implies nothing about being able to see how the mechanics of it work, or being able to improve it yourself. I like a lot of things about the free software/open source concept, but I’m not a huge fan of it; I guess I’d want to make the decision on whether to release something as open source or not on a case by case basis, unless I was building off something else that was open source, in which case the deal is usually ‘if you improve this, then what you make with it is open source too’, and that seems fair.

For these Alphasmart programs, I just don’t want to deal with open source right now, especially because I used a software development environment that isn’t free, so if I did release it as open source I could just picture some open source fanatic telling me off for the fact that he can’t use my free source code without paying somebody for the development environment. I don’t really have a problem with sharing my source code, but I’d rather talk to the people who are interested in seeing it, and if there’s some really good reason that it HAS to be open source to merge with an existing open source project, then I can always re-release it on that basis later.

So, I eventually found out about Creative Commons, which sounded like what I wanted – they have a tool where you can enter what kind of content licence you want, and they provide a licence to match it. So I set up an ‘Attribution No-Derivs Non-Commercial’ licence, and that seemed good.

Until I found out that Creative Commons doesn’t recommend using their licence for software, on the grounds that they’re not compatible with most open source licence standards, and instead suggests a couple of prominent open source/free software licences.

There seems to be this kind of preconception there that ‘Of course you want to be open source – that’s the point, isn’t it?’ and it really pisses me off. I even found it stated outright in this blog post from last year:

“f you use a Creative Commons License your software probably won’t be free software/ open source software, and therefore won’t be re-usable by others including developers (which is what you want right?)“

No, that’s not what I want!

I don’t want other developers to necessarily be free to study it or evolve other programs for it. I just want people to be free to use the program as it currently stands.

There are certain elements of the Open Source community who seem to be single-minded to the point of bullying when it comes to this point, and that annoys me. So the plan, at this point, is to go ahead with Creative Commons.

It’s a bit funny – most authors would never stand for it, if there were people telling them that they should release their work for free, and allow anybody who wanted to the chance to edit their words, cut one storyline, change which lover a character ended up with, and then republish it. Why is the situation so different with software?

Setup: Darlene is sales and customer service for TimeBubble, Inc, and was doing a demonstration for two customers – Jasmine and Michael, until Michael revealed that he wasn’t interested in an ordinary package.

“Could you tell me what you have in mind?”

“Can you invert the bubble effect with this demonstration unit?” Michael waved at the still slowly moving pendulum, and Darlene turned off the bubble to return it to normal time. “Speed it up so that time passes more quickly in there?”

 Hoping that this option had actually been field tested, she punched it in, and the pendulum started waving back and forth like crazy. “Michael – do you want to live inside a time bubble where time passes more quickly?”