The Walled City of York

I've just started my first overseas trip in 22 years, and the first big vacation my wife and I have taken alone together since our honeymoon over 32 years ago. Wednesday/Thursday was something like 28 hours of travel with gaps waiting for the next mode of transportation, which I plan to forget about. Today was a wonderful walk around the old walled city of York.

Extraordinary skills for D&D 3.x

For quite a few years the only tabletop / play-by-post role playing game I've used is D&D 3.x (or the Pathfinder variant). As far as I can tell it's still fairly popular, despite the fact that D&D is up to a 5th edition, and various OSR (Old School Rules) have emerged. But it has always suffered from the problem that magical power is roughly quadratic with level, whereas everything else is linear or worse. My online gaming colleague Keith Davies has designed a whole new system, Echelon, in reaction to this, but Echelon is in flux and I'd rather not take quite so big a step away from the familiar just yet. So I've looked into some (as yet unplaytested) house rules that would beef up mundane classes, at least for a few levels more than at present.

This post is about some ideas for improving skills. If you think they ought to be totally mundane ("skillmonkeys can't have nice things"), this is not for you.

Recovering slowly…

It has been pretty much exactly 3 months since I broke my left elbow, and I've recovered a lot, though not quite enough to return to work yet.  Here is the saga of what happened since my last post.

My temporarily one-handed life

As I posted a few days ago, I recently seriously damaged my left elbow in a fall. The surgeon who replaced part of my elbow had to put me in a humongous cast in part to prevent the elbow from moving at all, and in part to immobilize the wrist I also broke. This leaves me temporarily trying to operate with one hand, since I was told not to attempt to lift more than the weight of three sheets of paper with my left fingers. Fortunately for me, I know this situation is temporary, which makes it much easier to cope with emotionally. I'm sure people who have permanently lost the use of a hand have much more significant issues. I'm not looking for sympathy; I thought some people might be interested in a few details:

My recent accident

On Tuesday, February 22, I slipped and fell while walking from my office at Queen's University to the bus stop. In the process I seriously damaged my elbow, and will be in a cast for at least the next 10 weeks. Here is the story in more detail – not quite "gory detail" but close. By the way, I am dictating this via Dragon Naturally Speaking; typing with a few fingers of one hand is no fun at all.

Ada Lovelace' 200th anniversary

I have the impression that computer people have little awareness of, or interest in, their own history. So, time for a very short lesson.

Today, December 10, 2015, is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace, credited as the first computer programmer. Her claim to that title comes from an article she translated an article on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine from French to English, to which she added copious notes three times longer than the article itself. In it she described how the Engine could handle letters and symbols, not just numbers, and described a method for getting it to repeat instructions; the concept of looping is one of the things a lot of beginning programmers struggle to understand.

In note G, she analyzed several methods by which people could compute Bernoulli numbers, observed that one was particularly suited to calculation on the Analytical Engine, and proceeded to describe how to get it to do so. At this point Babbage thought the Engine was impossible to build with the technology of the time (he was wrong), so she would have had no hope of an actual implementation.  I am told that when people got around to actually building one in 1991 (using technology available to Babbage), they finally implemented Ada's description, and it worked perfectly, the first time. I doubt I've written more than a handful of programs in 45 years that worked perfectly, the first time.

I started programming in the fall of 1970 in Grade 13, and never heard of her until 1979, when the US Department of Defense named a complex and not-especially-successful programming language after her. I'd already been through an Honours Bachelor of Mathematics in Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, and had been in a graduate Computer Science at Carnegie-Mellon (one of the best in the world for the subject) for five years.  I wish someone had told me about Ada; she is an inspiring figure.

Reflections on NaNoWriMo

I took part in National Novel Writing Month again this past November, and realized a couple of things that were new to me.

First, my writing process has always proceeded from a few scenes that came vividly to mind over several months, which I then had to try to stitch together into a story (I am not the only person who writes this way; I talked with a published novelist who does approximately the same thing).  This year I tried outlining, based on Dan Wells' 7-point structure, and it helped make the writing a easier. So now instead of being mostly a pantser, I've moved a little further in the direction of being an outliner. I expect I'll always have some mix of the two, but I think the eventual balance point is going to be further towards outlining than it is right now.

Second, it helps tremendously to have a community to help out in brainstorming.  I'm still in touch with some of the alumni of the Writing Excuses Retreat of 2015, and in three separate sessions they helped me flesh out my ideas and add some new ones. I was happy to be able to return the favour a few times.

Third, I've come to terms with my guilty feeling about writing a lot of junk weak prose during November, in between the good bits.  A lot of people from WXR15, including some of the instructors, emphasized that the first draft is for getting the story out of your head and recorded in an editable form. Making it good is what separate revision passes are for.

Fourth, winning NaNo six times (barely over 50,000 words each year), I still haven't finished a novel; I basically just stopped, exhausted, each time I got over the limit. This time I can see more clearly what the eventual shape of the story should be, and I've resolved to finish this one, even if I wind up trunking it when I'm done. I can't sustain 1667 words per day over the long term at this stage of my life, but I can probably manage to write a few hundred on many days, or edit a few pages.

I'll post again in January or February about whatever progress I've made.