Musings and wanderings in the Daemon Wastes...

Month: September 2008 (Page 4 of 4)

365 Ficlets – #119 ~ “The Flame”

There it was, suddenly, in the darkness. The flame appeared with its attendant rushing sound, not unlike fast moving water, as it flared into existence and then was gone.

Victor strained one more time against the ropes that were tied tightly around his wrists and ankles. He could not make anything out in the blackness, even though he had returned to consciousness and opened his eyes several minutes before. He had never been in complete darkness before, and he was starting to wonder where he could be that not even the tiniest amount of light could find its way to his eyes, apart from that flame. He decided that as he could not work out where he could be or how he could have got there that he had nothing to lose by trying to make contact with whoever was in control of the flame.

“Hello? Who’s there?”

Again the flame burst into life, for nearly a second and then was gone.

“Come on, tell me what you want if not who you are. Okay?”

A low laugh came out of the void.

“What makes you think I want anything?”

You can see the original post on Ficlets.com by clicking here.

This Ficlet was inspired by the following image:


Photo by Samuelraj (on Flickr) you can see the photo’s page here.

Help me lazy-web, you are my only hope…

So I’ve been thinking about my career, and my future; dangerous waters for sure… The thing is that I love programming, but more and more I am finding myself to be restricted by the kind of work I can get, in short I tend to find that there is too much ‘fix it, fix it now!’ and not enough thoughtful, well designed and planned and innovative development going on to really hold my interest and allow me to get the creative / intellectual buzz out of my work. Frankly, in the long term, if I am going to stay in programming, I think that I am going to have to evolve my skillset away from purely web-based technologies, if only to give me the opportunity to pick the most interesting work I can get instead of the most interesting web-based work I can get.

I am really enjoying the freedom and flexibility of contracting – don’t believe the hype about the money; it was great in the 90’s, but unless you are prepared to fly a lot closer to the grey areas of the tax rules than I am comfortable with it is not all that much better than appropriately compensated permanent work these days. Still the freedom and flexibility is well worth the extra hassle and uncertainty, so I’d like to carry on being a freelancer / contractor whatever I end up doing.

It has also occured to me that I like and am interested in server / systems admin, particularly on the UNIX / Linux side of things, and that I already have __some__ skills in that area.

So here’s the rub… I have some periods on my CV that I can legitimately claim as times in which my job has genuinely required me to act for a portion of my working time as a UNIX sysadmin. I have some skills in that area and would certainly not be over-selling myself to describe myself as a “power user” in UNIX-like environments, i.e. I LIKE the command line, I use grep, sed, vi, perl, regular expressions and many other tools that characterise the sysadmin, box-pilot, code-monkey trope. I also love servers – I know this is a little weird, but if I had the money I would have a small rack of server appliances in my home, just to play with; I love the kit, I love what they can do for me if used correctly and the soft hum of server fans and the blinking of (preferably blue) LEDs is very attractive to me. I am a geek; there I said it, I feel better. Bearing all of this in mind, I think that I might like to move into doing contract-based sysadmin work, specifically providing short-term relief for key server support staff on long-term sick, or maternity leave or who simply leave a company ‘in the lurch’ by changin jobs unexpectedly and leaving a resource gap. The problem is that I am not sure of three factors:

1. How to shore-up (or is that sure-up?) my skills… Should I look into certification? Should I look for lower paying ‘doing my time’ work? Are there steps that I absolutely should take?

2. Where to look for short-term / freelance / contract sysadmin work.

3. Is all of the work in this field going to come with an on-call burden, or is there the potential to escape that?

Your thoughts, friends, would as ever be very helpful to me…

TTFN

.
EOT

365 Ficlets – #118 ~ “Homicide”

Andrea was completely silhouetted in the lights from the squad car, stood over the corpse whose coming to rest on that corner, on that night had dragged them from their beds at three in the morning.

In that moment it was easy for Dan to forget the dead person lying in the street, and marvel at how impressive she was. Only out of bed only ten minutes and she was already ten times more focused than he would be until the rest of the coffee in his hand had been taken on board, like fuel for his brain. How did she do that? Maybe she did not sleep.

He knocked back another slug of the bad, convenience store drip and placed the box on the deck. He started getting the camera ready to shoot the scene, looking up from time to time to watch her taking notes and moving in a slow spiral towards the body, noting the placement of shell casings and other detritus before she even reached the body. He clipped the adapter from the ring flash onto the hot shoe and checked that there was a card loaded.

“Ready for the pictures?”

You can see the original post on Ficlets.com by clicking here.

365 Ficlets – #117 ~ “If Only He Knew”

We were walking down Chandos Place heading for the Maple Leaf, which is one of my favourite places in Covent Garden, hell even the West End, when Jake turned to me and dropped the bombshell.

“I mean, how fucking cold is this; she told me while we were fighting that the thing that finally made her want to divorce me was mi haircut!”

I nodded, and desperately sought within myself a way to agree with him while resisting the temptation to agree with her as well. No one has ever looked quite so ridiculous with a mohican as Jake. He was my best friend, but the man had ears that would not have looked out of place on Prince Charles. His tiny, pin head denuded of all but a floppy crest of his thin hair that had then been dyed a dodgy shade of red, he did look a mite ridiculous.

I was pretty sure that Katie really wanted to divorce him because he quit his lucrative sales job and become a bicycle courier, at twenty-nine, without talking to his wife about the decision. Well and then there was that she was shagging me.

You can see the original post on Ficlets.com by clicking here.

This Ficlet was inspired by Hepstar’s suggestions of a bad haircut, Covent Garden and His Best Friend’s Divorce as item, place and activity from the Wednesday poll on my Livejournal.

365 Ficlets – #116 ~ “Kiss Me Quick”

“YOU can kiss me if you like.”

I nearly choked on my coke. Sure I wanted to kiss her, pretty badly in fact, but that was pretty forward even for Pip. There we were, sitting on the barrier at the top of the cliff above Orange Peel Corner, stealing thirty minutes before we were both expected in different holiday homes for tea. This was our only time, until maybe next year when we might be allowed to go out after tea, though not to the Tuds. We would have gone then if we thought we could get away with it; we each knew other fourteen year olds who would be there later on that evening.

I smiled at her and without saying anything I moved my mouth towards her, extending my whole body behind my face, to reach and kiss her without our bodies touching at all. Her lips were soft, warm and wet and just a little apprehensive, like mine. I was about to pull away when I felt her fingers in my hair pulling me closer; our bodies touched. In the back of my mind I started to hope fervently that I was going to be late for tea.

You can see the original post on Ficlets.com by clicking here.

Official Announcement – 365 Portraits, LIVE!

OK, there has not been a lot of communication from me on this subject for a while and I realise that we are now getting into the realms of short-notice, but I can now announce with final and complete certainty (well almost, more on that later) that the exhibition of my project “365 Portraits” will run from 12/09/2008 to 18/09/2008 in The Turbine House Exhibition Gallery at The Blake’s Lock Museum in Reading.

If you can see this, then you are warmly invited to attend the ‘Private View’ on Friday 12th of September, starting at 1900h.

There have been some roadblocks along the way, including the prohibitive cost of having the collection printed, but this is by no means designed to be a sob-story, and the important fact is that the mountain has been almost completely conquered and the show will go on.

There are two remaining details to deal with between now and the 10th (when I get the keys):

1. I am still in need of a volunteer or two who are prepared to be anything from bored out of their minds to engaged in deep discussions with interested members of the public, for either / both of Tuesday and Thursday the 16th and 18th. Basically to get the space, it must be ‘open’ from at least 1030h to 1830h during the entirety of the exhibition and I have to go to work… I will be keeping the exhibition open under my own steam on the evenings, and the weekend, but I need some people who need to ring-fence some quality reading time, but who are comfortable dealing with the public if necessary. Any offers greatly received, please email me at – maleghast at gmail dot com.

2. I need to provide my own Pulic Liability Insurance for the duration of the exhibition or Reading Borough Council will not let me have the space. It may be that I just have a butchers on the internet and buy what I can get / afford and be done with it, but if anyone out there has experience with arranging / sourcing / buying short-term event insurance of this type, or even of any type and particularly if they can recommend a good, cheap broker, then I would be in your debt.

I hope that some / many / all of the people who can see this, plus their significant others (if for some reason I can’t reach them) will come and see the show – a lot of the people who will see this blog-post are in the show. I hope some of you will be able to make it on the Friday evening, where there will indeed be ‘pie and punch’, or perhaps something a little more sophisticated. Anyone who can hook me up with cheap wine that is actually drinkable, and / or good nibbles may well get a copy of their picture presented to them (though not the show copy, as I hope to re-exhibit later this year / early next).

Those of you who can see this who blog in other scenes / environments / areas or just have different audiences to me who are prepared to do their bit passing on the details, you are forever in my debt and you are also shiny, special people. So that you can spread the word, here are some details:

Blakes Lock Museum

Dates: 12/09 -> 18/09 2008 | 1030h to 2130h

The Project on Flickr

There will also be a ‘Page’ on my WordPress Blog with these details, but it’s not ready yet – I will send another Ping around when that’s live.

Thanks in advance to any and all that talk / blog about this for me 🙂

Finally… I am going to say this up-front so that it’s not a shock to anyone, and also to make it as clear as I can to the people most important to me that I have no expectations on this front;

This endeavour is costing me (conservatively) about £1k. Now, that is my choice and I’m not asking anyone to either praise my commitment, or mock my lunacy, I wanted to do this, this is the best way to make sure that it’s my show, my vision, my achievement. Nonetheless there will be a donations box at the show, and rather like the money you may (or may not) spend on a piece of good shareware software, or the tip you leave after a good meal, if you enjoy the show, then please think about leaving a donation. I do not expect to even get close to recouping costs, but if I do, the balance of any further donations will go to charity, I have honestly not decided which one yet. Please feel free to give me some ideas…

There will also be the chance to buy either an ‘official’ / licenced digital copy of the picture or pictures that you like, or to order paper or canvas prints. Again, I do not expect this of people, but I want it to be possible, and I want to be transparent about the fact that there will be a mark-up on printing, so if you want to get the best deal, then I would think about the digital route and doing your own printing – there is simply no way for me to get it any cheaper than you can. For Reading locals I will be recommending a local tradesman, who appears as one of the portraits in the show. He is an excellent printer and framer and his prices are very good considering the qualilty of what he turns out. There will be more details on his services in the show literature (must get to Kinko’s this weekend)…

Okay, that’s it for now – I look forward to seeing as many of you as I am lucky enough to get on the 12th; thanks fo reading…

365 Ficlets – #115 ~ “No beer for you, Newsman.”

“Hey Jimmy! Phone!”

He put the beer back on the bar – was he ever going to get to drink it? He had just got rid of Newton, who talked so much and so fast that Jimmy had felt like he was caught on the interstate without a windshield. He levered himself down off the stool and ambled to the end of the bar where the phone’s receiver had been thoughtlessly placed in a pool of beer. He rolled his eyes at no one in particular, wiped it off with a spare napkin from the pile on the bar and put the receiver to his ear;

“Jimmy Lancaster here. Who is this?”

“Jimmy, get your ass back to the White House right now! Something unbelievable just came over the wires and when I tried to call Gergen for confirmation the switch was jammed! It’s for real, man, so get back there before you miss the briefing that is no doubt about to occur.”

Jimmy’s mind was swimming, first off Nate almost never screamed at him down the phone, plus Brady’s deputy had already called a full lid. It had been a quiet Labour Day. What had happened?

You can see the original post on Ficlets.com by clicking here.

This Ficlet was inspired by the front page of Wikipedia for the 1st of September 2008, in English. Amongst other articles was the mention that today was the 25th anniversary of the downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 by the Soviet Air Force / Air Commnad. You can read about the incident here.

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