catness

Subject:	QotD LJ
Time:	10:11 am
Current Mood:	sleepy

If you had one night left to live, what would you do? Would you prefer to spend your final night with a loved one or alone? What would you choose for your last meal?

I'll request foie gras, because I've heard it's something extraordinary but had never an opportunity to try it; failing that, a steak and red wine would do nicely. As for the loved ones, I thought they don't allow them in jail? Anyway, I'd rather stay alone, in case I freak out or something - better for them to remember me as I was :) I'll ask for some inspiring book to read, such as the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ;)

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catness

Subject:	3rd day and the first writer's block
Time:	07:22 pm
Current Mood:	contemplative

It appears that simply getting the words out on the screen is not a problem when you know the direction and succeed to (temporarily) suppress the need of choosing the right words. The real problem is when you're not sure about the direction anymore.

Probably my outline sucked from the start because I hadn't invested enough efforts into it. Or maybe it's the opposite - I had over-planned it. I'm sticking to the basic idea but most of the details keep changing - and I'd rather not scribble whatever comes to my mind, because eventually it leads to dead ends and contradictions.

In fact, I can make a break, write out the updated outline, as detailed as necessary, and then continue to flesh it out. At least I was right that it's easier to work with several separate episodes. I'm approx. halfway through the first one. There's also a brief introduction, which had been written truly on the spur of the moment, I don't know if I should keep it at the end, due to the immanent "personal issues". It would look fine on TV though :( and maybe I should stop being paranoid.

Funny... the updated plot seems to get the "message" clearer, more consistent with my original vision. I didn't want it to appear like good people doing the bad things - rather, good people trying to do the good things (isn't it what all Star Trek is about ;) and the only difference is what they perceive as good. At least, I hope there's a difference :)

Oh well... stop rambling, back to work...

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catness

Time:	03:03 pm
Current Mood:	amused

Due to the circumstances beyond my control (well, actually, within my control, it's just that when I chuck the task to someone else, I don't give a crap what happens with it), a couple thousand of our users had received an email "Test, please ignore" instead of a warning about the upcoming expiration of their email accounts. I think they're lucky (or I am lucky :) that I wasn't in creative mood when debugging that script. Otherwise it could've very well been a message like "Initiating the self-destruct sequence, prepare to disembark the shuttle, thank you for your cooperation. The Central Command."

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catness

Subject:	Nov 1 - and we're off to space
Time:	06:16 pm
Current Mood:	hopeful

Not bad for the 1st day: 2141 words (and counting) which are not a complete disaster, although nothing like the stuff I would normally post. I'm so envious of people who write and post right away! I'd totally *die* of embarrassment, would go back and edit everything 4 times per hour (and I'm already editing a little - I think that the sense of self-satisfaction is more important than the inflated word count). But right now got to a place which I have a problem to imagine visually. So it's a good point to take a break.

Looks like I don't have any clue how to describe people's appearance. It all just seems so obtrusive and infodumpy. Also, superfluous - after all, I know how they look like ;) and the viewers would know, too, if it *were* a TV script... Oh well, I'll leave the boring stuff for the better days. Same goes for stealing the Trek technology. My world is not as highly developed (in particular, no holodecks and transporters), but there's a lot of things I'd rather not reinvent from scratch, especially lacking the appropriate scientific background.

Wonder what I can watch as an inspiration, when I'm done with Voyager and House. Both start to be quite repetitive... I was upset at the end of season 3 when House got rid of his team, but hiring new members a-la "Survivor" game turned out to be a lot more exciting - while it lasted. I had really cared about who'd drop out! Now the intrigue is over, and most of the personal relationships used for B-plots are dreadfully boring. Oh and I had really liked the Cutthroat Bitch (as a character), and the end of season 4 broke my heart :(

Oh well - I've got something to do, and I'm having fun!

Ending with a brief message from the captain. "In case anybody missed the briefing, we're not here on a territorial conquest, and neither on a spiritual trip. Our mission is of exploration and research, and it relies on the teamwork. You have sworn to serve this ship to the best of your abilities, and I will accept nothing less than the best. If you prefer to spend time bickering with each other, you can hand me your resignations now, without waiting to be thrown out in disgrace."

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[lawlipoplover]
randomquestions

Current Music:	"I Kissed a Girl" by Katy Perry ^^
Current Location:	Somewhere on Planet Earth....
Subject:	Ghosts....
Time:	12:20 am
Current Mood:	guilty

Do you believe that Ghost exist?

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catness

Subject:	indulging
Time:	09:10 pm
Current Mood:	content

Yesterday we had a very nice dinner to celebrate the end of my food challenge - pork steak, baked potatoes in cream sauce, and red wine. This time I didn't feel like going to a restaurant; didn't make sense, too - after the way I had been screwing with food for the whole month, would've been happy with anything - even sausages and beer ;)

Today dropped by the supermarket on my way home, to buy a few previously forbidden yummies - liver spread, pel'meni, grated cheese for toasts, vodka, pizza, Red Bull - found myself maniacally grinning while looking at the shelves - here, I can have this, and this, and this, and nothing can stop me. And then, felt a kind of cold laughter, and realized with complete certainty that it was not the last food challenge, and they will be only getting worse. Oh fun... ;)

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[lawlipoplover]
randomquestions

Current Music:	"Today" by Gary Allan
Current Location:	Santee, California, U.S.A. :P
Subject:	If your house was on Fire....
Time:	10:15 pm
Current Mood:	stressed

If your house was on fire and you only had time to grab one thing out of your house to save, what would you grab? Why?

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catness

Time:	07:41 pm
Current Mood:	bored

I should be preparing for Nano. But there's always something for procrastination ;) Tried out the Google API for Blogger (in PHP). Yeah, it works as advertised, so connecting it to my LJ client is only a matter of tedious technical work which should include organizing the program better, because the low-level interfaces for blogger and LJ are completely different. Also, LJ supports a ton of nifty things which are not supported by blogger and must be disabled in the user interface - icons, moods, privacy levels, communities, additional properties (music, location). What's the point of having a blog if you can't use a different icon with every post?? (LOL, I know it's superficial, but LJ was my introduction to blogging, so everything else looks too boring)

Also, I think I should switch to xmlrpc interface - I had used the flat interface in the C++ client because I wanted it to be compatible with all LJ-clones, and 2 of them (Blurty and CommieJournal) didn't support xmlrpc at the time of testing. But now CJ is gone, and Blurty sucks anyway (I don't remember why, I think it doesn't support something essential, like tags and challenge/response authentication). XML looks more chic, and is easier to parse with the appropriate tools.

Had some weird dreams, partly about trying to configure several virtual machines with the minimal disk damage (VMWare ESXi has a problem - when the amount of memory on one machine is increased, it requires additional disk space on the datastore, so at least one of the machines must have its disk nuked, or all of them can't start). And partly about explosions, hospitals and death, courtesy of the last 2 episodes of House season 4, which was unexpectedly disturbing.

And a random joke, loosely translated from bash.org.ru:

Once upon a time there was a research lab.
They decided to create an analog of human mind.
They created a bot, codename "Adam". Then, using the inherited method "Rib", created another bot "Eve".
They built a testing map ("Heaven").
They also started to prepare the knowledge base with the data about the world ("AppleTree").
One programmer didn't understand the specifications and loaded the incomplete database into the bots' AI.
The error was discovered too late, the project was already approaching the deadline.
The bots were relocated to another map ("Earth"), and the programmer was fired.

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