Ian says that this is good advice for screenwriters; I’d say it’s good advice for software developers as well, and probably for anybody involved in doing creative work for a customer. In short, when asked to do something you think is a mistake, say “Yes.” Then find out what they are hoping to get from it; they have a reason for asking. Then think about it, and see if you can figure a way to get them what they want. Then take your answer back to them.

Sometimes their request will be fatally flawed, but you’ll be in a position to explain, patiently and without anger, just why it’s a bad idea. Sometimes you’ll find that your initial reaction was mistaken. And sometimes you’ll be able to propose a better way to get them what they want. And no matter what the result is they know you’ve taken them seriously, and tempers will be much cooler without that big “No” hanging in the air.

As a side note, my favorite way of saying “You’re mistaken” on such occasions is, “Actually, that turns out not to be the case.”

Actually, things are going fairly well with my new diet, though I’m still undeniably grumpy about the whole thing. Jane’s being wonderful about it, and is actively looking for ways to make my meals both tasty and varied, for which I am extremely (and vocally) grateful. (Jane’s the cook in the family; I can scramble eggs OK, but I’m not allowed to eat any, so that doesn’t help.)

However, it’s clear to both of us that a number of her experiments are going to flame and burn (metaphorically speaking). Yesterday, for example, she fixed me four soy-based breakfast sausages from Trader Joe’s. I’m fond of Trader Joe’s, but sometimes they let ideology trump edibility, and this was such a case. I felt like Arthur Dent, being served something almost but not quite entirely unlike sausage.

I hasten to add, the problem wasn’t simply that they were soy-based. Jane regularly buys some kind of microwavable vegetarian sausage patty that she makes for the kids. I’ve tried them, and while I don’t like them much they do a pretty good job of mimicking real breakfast sausage. Not a really good job, but pretty good.

The four cylinders of doom I found on my plate, on the other hand, were like breakfast sausage in shape only. In taste and texture (and color!) they were like nothing on earth. We agreed not to try them again.

We salvaged breakfast, however, and lunch and dinner yesterday were really quite good, as were breakfast and lunch today. Dinner was another experiment, and something of a failure in that neither of us particularly liked it or would want to have it again; on the other hand, and we both cleaned our plates.

There will be many more experiments in the days to come, and some of them are bound to bomb; it can’t be helped. But at least few even of the failures are likely to descend to the level of the cylinders of doom.

Meanwhile, Jane’s being a trooper about the whole thing; and diet or no diet I’m an extremely lucky man to have her.

I have just been informed by my doctor that a number of important indicators are “too high” and must be reduced. I will not go into the sordid details, but part of it is that for the next two months I am to embark on a rather radical diet, something like the Atkins diet with the nice parts left out. As I said to Jane when I got home from the doctor’s office, “I’m giving up food for Lent.” This is combined with the usual suspects, i.e., regular exercise, diet supplements, and a check-up in one month’s time.

I am put in mind of a short story by P.G. Wodehouse, entitled “The Juice of an Orange”, in which the protagonist, one of the lower forms of life at a major Hollywood studio, is placed by his doctor on a rather special diet. For breakfast: the juice of an orange. For lunch: the juice of an orange. For dinner: the juice of an orange. Period. The effect is dramatic. Once a spineless yes-man, he becomes within mere weeks so thoroughly fed up with orange juice in specific and the world in general that through sheer bad temper he becomes the number two man at the studio.

Me, I don’t even get orange juice.

I am, however, to walk for at least 30 minutes every day. After informing Jane of the catastrophe, I set out (iPod in pocket) to set a baseline. I went down the street, along past the elementary school, up another street to the local park, through the park and out the other side, and along a couple of other streets back to my house. Round trip time–18 minutes.

Did you know, it’s very difficult to extend a brisk walk at the end of the loop? You have to do it in the middle, when you’re less tired–and then, of course, you have no choice but to walk the additional distance home.

Sigh.

In most ways this is a typical Wodehouse farce, but it has a unique
twist. Imposters are a dime a dozen in Wodehouse, but I’ve not
previously run into a case where a gentleman goes to a country house
pretending to be himself, and is terribly afraid lest anyone discover
that he really is himself.

No Bertie, no Jeeves, no Blandings; this is yet another fine standalone
novel, and it’s Wodehouse, which really says all that’s necessary.

Ramble’s been taking up my blogging time for the last couple of days; and we’ve got house guests for the next week. Blogging might be slight for a few days…..

In Maze
Generation 1 I discussed how to generate a rectangular “perfect”
maze using the recursive backtracker algorithm, and gave a
detailed implementation in Tcl. Here’s a maze I generated in this
way:

Perfect mazes can be fun to solve, but they really don’t make very
good dungeon levels. A perfect maze can be described as a tree:
there’s exactly one path from any given cell to any other cell, and
there are no cycles–that is, you can’t walk in a circle anywhere in
the maze, and there are usually lots of dead ends, some of which are
so short they’re just annoying. On top of that, two cells
on opposite sides of a wall might end up being quite a long walk from
each other. This is frustrating if a detection spell has shown you a
treasure hiding on the other side of the wall–which can be a good
thing, actually, but not all the time. The dungeon’s going to be
frustrating enough, what with fierce beasts and horrible monsters and
all, and so the dungeon itself should usually be just a bit
friendlier, with fewer dead ends, especially short ones,
and a fair number of cycles. So in this essay I’m going to describe
several operations that can be performed on a perfect maze to make it
more suitable for use as a dungeon level.

Continue reading →

It’s a family joke that my mother-in-law grew up in prison. And the funniest part is, it’s completely true–when she was a young girl her father, Barnett Huse, was the assistant prison warden at Folsom and later San Quentin prisons in California. As the Number Two man at the prison he was entitled to live with his family in a nice house that was actually inside the prison walls. They also had a houseboy, a Chinese man who was devoted to little Barbara. He was a convict, of course; according to Jane’s family lore, he’d been a ring-leader in the Chinatown tong wars in San Francisco.

But I was speaking of little Barbara’s father.

During WWII Barnett Huse was given command of Camp Roberts, a prisoner-of-war camp in the California desert. The POWs were Italian and German soldiers. The phrase “POW camp” has an ominous, alarming ring to it, but Camp Roberts was no Stalag 17; it wasn’t even a Gitmo. There was no fence; the nearest water was 50 miles away, as Barnett informed new prisoners, and he was giving no hints as to the direction. If any prisoner wanted to run off to go looking for it, well, maybe somebody would find him before he perished of thirst. Meanwhile, here’s a sack of fresh onions, and garlic, and other food stuffs; you get to cook for yourselves. Let us know when you’ve used up the onions, we’ll get you some more.

Onions! Garlic! The prisoners hadn’t had fresh vegetables in months. And they got three square meals a day, and they hadn’t had that in months either. Truth to tell, I gather that few were all that eager to run off.

They were all released after the war, of course, and some of them stayed here; others returned home to Europe and later came back to the States to live.

Lest you should think I am painting an overly rosy picture, my mother-in-law has a letter to Barnett from a German officer, a doctor, who was an inmate of Camp Roberts. It’s a remarkably warm, cordial letter; evidently the commandant and the doctor had become good friends.

But all of this is by way of introduction. Barnett and his family had a cocker spaniel named Judge; during the war, Judge stayed home with Barbara and her mother. Once at Camp Roberts, Barnett acquired a springer spaniel named Lady who accompanied him all over the camp, growling at prisoners who got too close. And on April 16th, 1945 Lady wrote a letter home. It’s neatly typed, and I imagine she must have had some help. It reads as follows:

Dear Judge:

I trust that you will pardon my writing you this letter, for altho we haven’t been introduced I’m sure that you must have heard about me. So that you will get some idea of what I really look like, I’m having some pictures inclosed which were taken with the man we both manage – the fellow who likes to think that he is our master. Now these pictures don’t particularly do me justice – they were taken at a time when the Mess Hall was open for business and I just couldn’t get my mind on the silly business of a picture when I could have been over at that open door waiting for some chow. So, most of the pictures will show me sitting down, this being the only position where they could keep me semi-still and looking at the man with the camera. I’ve been told that you like to eat – well, it’s my favorite pastime too – and I don’t believe in letting anything interfere with it. however, when we do meet I can only hope that you remember that I’m a Lady and get out of my way when there is FOOD in the offing – otherwise I’m pretty handy with my teeth for other purposes than eating. Mostly my disposition is very good, and I hope you’re the same. But, then I guess I just can’t expect too much, considering the family we belong to; they are enuf to spoil the manners of any dog.

I’ve had a pretty busy day keeping track of this master of ours; made some inspections with him, only places I miss going with him are into the mess halls – damn it! Right now it is time for us to take a short walk and then I’ll crawl under his bed. By the way, do you snore much? They tell me that I snore like a freight train, but my master reaches down under the bed and swats me and I turn over and keep quiet till he goes back to sleep.

Sure hope I get to see you before very long – I’d like to look over the collection of bones in your back yard. Good night now, give my love to your two Mistresses and tell ’em our master loves them very much also.

Love and best wishes, from

Lady

The February Issue of Ex Libris Reviews is now on-line.

Actually, it’s been on-line for a couple of days, but I forgot to post a notice.

Ian still thinks it’s remarkable that I’d not previously read Dashiell Hammett, but takes exception to my claim never to have seen any of the film adaptations of his books. In particular, he’s sure I must have seen A Fistful of Dollars, which is based on Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, which is based on Hammett’s The Glass Key.

Well, yes. Yes, I have. Just a year or so ago. And since I saw it with a buddy who’s a Kurosawa fan, I knew about that link as well (though I’ve not seen Yojimbo yet). But you know, the credits for A Fistful of Dollars don’t say “A competent Italian ripoff of a Japanese Masterpiece inspired by an OK Hollywood picture based on a book by Dashiell Hammett.”

Really, they don’t.