Photo:
M. Bednarcyk
www.jamesrstrickland.com
James R. Strickland is the author of two post-cyberpunk novels, Looking Glass and Irreconcilable Differences. As you might expect from the URL, this is his website.
Strickland has been telling stories since before he could read or write. After a ten year detour in system/network administration and technical support, he has returned to his English major roots, and begun a career as a novelist. He lives in Colorado with his wife, Marcia, and some number of cats.
02/02/2010 04:39pm Technorati hookup
VRE5FPFEWH86
All this just to use their tags. It's starting to be not worth it.
-JRS
01/26/2010 10:30am Wind Farming for Farmers is Profitable
Turns out I was right about farmers and wind farming. But good grief, if my calculations at the time showed how little a farmer makes per acre growing food and grain, I missed it.
-JRS
01/20/2010 06:17pm A Little Music Theory, Maestro...
There comes a time, when you're writing about a professional musician and how she thinks about music, that you'd better have some music theory under your belt. This has proven to be a problem. I play guitar (occasionally), but everything I know on it I learned by rote, with none of the underlying theory. I don't read music, either. It's all strictly by ear.
This makes for a frustrating day, when you're trying to put words in the mind of someone with advanced degrees in music.
So in desperation, I was combing the web for some theory, and decided to start with pentatonic scales, since they seem to come up a lot, and are said to be the foundation of blues and rock music. A little digging turned up videos from justinguitar.com, and damned if he doesn't walk you through your minor pentatonic scales, slowly and carefully, in each of five positions, in one video. Free (donations requested). You'd better believe I'm donating. His site is a wealth of guitar lessons, all the stuff I never learned because I learned guitar by ear (my ear is pretty good) and by rote, the same way my father played.
Having learned some pentatonics, it dawned on me that I've been /playing/ those in one lick I picked up a long time ago described at the time as "stolen from the fingers of Elvis." Elvis undoubtedly knew his pentatonics, either by rote or as a theory, and now I understand them as well. Twenty years I've been playing that lick and I never understood what it /was/.
Writing novels is like that. You use little tidbits of knowledge you gathered up over the years, and then wind up learning entirely new subjects just to apply them in the story. Writing Irreconcilable Differences, I learned more than I ever wanted to about tactical nuclear weapons, windmills, babbitt bearings, and how the auto industry was evolving at that point. Einstein's Blues is proving no different. These searches seem less likely to bring me to the attention of the FBI, though. :)
-JRS
Technorati Tags: Einstein's Blues
01/07/2010 03:02pm Induction Rigs, Kind of.
Well, here it is 2010, and if you crunched the math while reading /Looking Glass/, you'll realize that while there's all kinds of promising technology towards direct neural interfaces, unlike my predictions in /Looking Glass/, the first practical ones aren't out yet, and things aren't looking too promising for them by the end of the year. Oh well, the risks of writing near term science fiction, I suppose. :)
Exceptthis, which I stumbled across on Make: Online. The EPOC Headset claims to be able to translate thought patterns (and presumably surface muscle activity) from the head into keystrokes for your computer. It also has a gyroscope to monitor head position and whatnot. I suspect it's doing a lot with physical cues as well as neurological interfacing, and certainly it's not writing back to the wearer's brain. Yet. But. It's a step.
Just what I need. More expensive toy lust. :) At least the CupCake CNC machine is mac compatible.
-JRS
12/23/2009 07:22pm Google Analytics
Just a quick update. I've hooked Google Analytics up on jamesrstrickland.com on all the main pages. If you see any bugs, slowdowns, or weirdness, let me know.
Also, I have not and will not hook up Addsense, so if you see ads on my website for anything that doesn't seem like one of my novels, please yell.
-JRS
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Assembly Language Step-by-Step: Programming with Linux
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Where the Cool Kids Program
A long time ago, in a basement far far away, I was sitting in front of a long-suffering television set, banging away on a Commodore 64, trying to dive beyond BASIC programming to where the cool kids played, down below the user interface, down in the guts of the machine itself. Stripped of the training wheels, you could write programs on that ancient machine that would fly. The cool kids wrote programs in assembly language. I tried. But I never got there. By the time I hit college, they didn't teach it anymore, and gradually, I moved past it to other programming, and ultimately to more satisfying careers doing other things.
But I never forgot.
Given that background, I didn't have high hopes for Assembly Language Step by Step. I know Jeff. I've read and enjoyed his science fiction, and he's blurbed mine, and to disclaim a moment, I know him well enough that he wouldn't let me pay for my copy of this new, near total rewrite of his classic text on the matter. I knew if anyone could explain assembly to me, it would be him, but I still expected to hit the point where my eyes glazed over and I didn't care anymore.
Instead, by five chapters into the book, I had refreshed my knowledge of binary and hexadecimal math. I'd looked into computer architecture to a depth I never reached before, and begun to understand, really understand the true center of assembly programming, the addressing of memory. And it's not like it was in the days when I tried to learn assembly before. Modern operating systems treat memory differently, and it's this new, more complex memory mapping that I understand now. Even after 30 years in and around the computing industry, this book taught me things I didn't know about what computing is, when all the familiar abstractions are stripped away and the bare code is exposed.
I can't wait to go further.
Thirty years later, that geeky kid in the basement who didn't get it, finally gets it.
If you want to get it, if you want to program where the cool kids program, if you want to understand how that machine on your desk really works, you want, you need, you must have this book. Buy this book. You won't regret it.
Highly recommended.
Five stars
-JRS