I is for Ink

We'll add a short post today as I catch up after missing yesterday. This one is about process and how mine has evolved in ways which don't always please me. It's also a lament for something we've lost in today's digital age.
The blog title "Pixel and ink-stained wretch" might strike you as metaphorical. Pixels, after all, don't stain and even those who do write in ink usually have it in a form that doesn't stain; you have to really work at it to get any kind of ink-stains on your hands with a ball-point pen. I'll admit that I never have been stained by pixels, but the "ink" part is a touch more literal; my original process, which I have since abandoned, is to write first-drafts with a fountain-pen, only later typing them into a word processor.
Why? First, really fine tools have a sense of permanence. One of my favorite pens is a vintage Pelican from the 1960s. Sometimes I hold it and wonder who owned it before me, what was written with it. The electronic devices we use now will fall into obsolesence within five years, much less five decades. The link to the past is nice.
Second, there's a certain thoughtfulness which comes from writing in pen-and-ink. If your words are to be permanently and idelibly marked on the page it forces you to pause and consider them first. I find this a different mental process than the much quicker write-edit-write-edit cycle I employ writing on a computer. (For those wondering, this blog is written completely electronically. Most posts are drafted on my tablet - an Asus SL101 slider - and then briefly editted on a desktop PC).  Writer Mary Robinette Kowal talked about this when, during a brief time she'd not be on the internet, she invited people to write letters to her. Real, hand-written letters. Some did, and she repeated the process for a month of letter-writing in February. You can see some correspondance with her fictional characters here.
And, finally, there's a sensual pleasure in using a physical tool. Its weight in your hand. The slight resistance as you draw the nib across the paper. The variations in lineweight and penmanship based on the writer's state of mind. The way different writing implements feel a bit different, the barrel of this one is a bit heavier, the nib on that one a bit more flexible, etc.
I don't do this anymore. Mostly because I write in odd stolen moments on the subway or bus, after which even I won't be able to read my handwriting. It's also faster in that I get an editable, ready-to-work-on draft in one step rather than two. What's the lost thing I aluded to? Manuscripts. In my earlier (and not very good) work, I can read the first draft an see my very beginning thoughts on a piece. Today, we have none of that. Unless you compulsively save with different revisions, there's a window into a writer's process which is forever closed. That I find sad.
Thanks for joining me today; see you tomorrow for J.

H is for Haggadah

Happy holidays everyone!

Today I'm taking a break from writing and technology to wish everyone a joyous holiday season and talk about how storytelling fits into the spring holidays. It's Passover, and that means a Seder, the ritual meal during which Jews remember the Exodus from Egypt and give thanks for our freedom from bondage. We do that, of course, by telling a story.

The Haggadah is a book containing this story and all of the rituals which go with it; blessings over candles, special Passover foods, etc. Different families do things a bit differently, some pausing for more more discussion, some skipping over a few bits to get to the eating faster, and some hewing closer - or wandering farther - from tradition. For the uninitiated, the Seder plate always has the following:

Maror, or bitter herbs to remember the bitterness of slavery.

Charoset, a sweet mixture representing the mortar the Jewish slaves used to make bricks. This varies widely by culture, and the few times we've hosted the Seder we've experimented a bit with different peoples' takes on it. Chopped nuts and apples are one traditional form.

Karpas, or bitter herbs, dipped in salt water. Again bitterness, but also a green for spring.

Z'roa, or a lamb shank. Representing the sacrifice. This isn't eaten.

A hardboiled egg, representing mourning.

As guests, we didn't this year, but I always add an orange, a modern tradition representing either feminism and acceptance of an equal role for women, gays and a rejection of the bitter seeds (to be spit out) of homophobia, or both. I say both. You can read one take on the origin of this here.

Throughout we tell the story of the Exodus. I'm sure you know it; Moses, the ten plagues, the parting of the Red Sea, flight through the desert.

Our host this year was a cousin of my bride Karine. He concluded the same way he always does; reminding us that when we hear the story we are to feel that we ourselves were freed from bondage. It, of course, happened thousands of years ago, so it's hard to feel that. So he tells another story, reminding us that it is his story. It's my wife's story. Another cousin's. It's the story of a family living in Europe in the early part of the Twentieth Century - including the three sisters Alice, Sonia, and Miriam.  Alice had moved to Palestine when it was still safe for Jews to travel. Then war came. America's borders were closed.  Sonia's family somehow managed to find passage to Cuba, with her five-year-old boy who would grow up to be Karine's father. Miriam wasn't able to flee and stayed behind, in hiding. Her fate was unknown to her family in America until, in the final days of the war, the family here received a letter from the family there, beginning simply, "we are still alive". They wrote about living in hiding for the past years, of seeing German soldiers march into the city and only recently being chased away by allied soldiers. They wrote about how their joy was tempered by uncertainty regarding the fate of other family members who'd been deported.

David tells this story every year, and reads the letter every year, reminding us that it is our story. I looked around the table and saw my children; their grandfather, the young boy who remembered fleeing to Cuba at the age of five, died when out eldest was just two and our youngest had not yet been born. Miriam - the oldest of the three sisters - lived a long and full life, but she passed away a year ago. Young Nathaniel never knew her,, and Chloe knew her only as a very old woman nearly a century older than she. It is David's story and Karine's story, but it's not Chloe's story or Nathaniel's. They didn't live it, didn't know anyone who lived it. I felt a profound shift of these events from memory to history. Those who lived it will soon all be gone but, as story-tellers, we still have the stories. So, year after year, we'll tell them and imagine that they were our stories, that it was we who were delivered from Egypt, who fled to Havanna, who hid in Lyon.

G is for Glamour in Glass

Today I have another book review for you, of Glamour in Glass Mary Robinette Kowal's sequel to World Fantasy Award winner Shades of Milk and Honey.
For those who've forgotten, Shades of Milk and Honey is, in brief, a regency romance with a touch of magic. The fantastical element lies mainly in the creation of glamours - illusions and other effects formed by a kind of psychic manipulation of the aether (which, in this world, appears to be a real thing). There were multiple suitors, misunderstandings, love-triangles, secret pasts, and a beautifuly written relationship between the sharp, independent Jane and her more beautiful but less wordly younger sister, Melody. They were sometimes competitive, sometimes dismissive of eachother, sometimes jealous, sometimes supportive, and sometimes just don't quite understand eachother. Shades of Milk and Honey also introduced Vincent, a sometimes troubled, sometimes moody but brilliant glamourist with both an artistic eye and a drive towards technical innovation.  It is a romance, and by the novel's end Jane and Vincent are wed.
Glamour in Glass begins not far from where Shades of Milk and Honey ended - with the Vincents newly married, much in demand for their artistic talents (they aren't merely glamourists, but some of the world's best glamourists). There's a lovely moment when, after feeling slighted by her husband's not including her in some element of their work, Jane immediately confronts him and tells him her feelings. It's a sign that Kowal knows how to let her characters act like real, reasonable people and that any misunderstandings won't come from people not telling eachother things  just so the author can create tension. It also tells us that we're reading about smart, reasonable people.

Tensions do come (it wouldn't be much of a book without them, now would it?) during the trip Vincent and a newly-pregnant Jane take to the continent to visit Vincent's old mentor. Napolean has just escaped from Elba to begin his ill-fated attempt to reclaim his empire, leaving a populace divided between those loyal to the current regime and those who long for Napolean's return. Add a mysterious long-term assignment for Vincent, Jane's inability to travel because of her delicate condition, and we get a feeling of real trouble.

Another thread winding through this part of the novel are the couple's attempt to record a glamour using the glass prisms suggested by the title. The experimentation was a fascinating picture of bright, talented people struggling at the edges  of a new and poorly understood science. There were setbacks, but ultimately triumphs. 

And, of course, it wouldn't fit into the period without some intrigue. Without giving too much away, know that there are hidden agendas, conflicting loyalties, and an actual surprise or two.

All of the narrative threads - the secret goals, the experiments in glamour, and the looming war - come together for a dramatic climax in which a victory is won, but at a steep cost. I'll not spoil it here, but that cost - and the characters' different reactions to it - were beautifully written and felt quite real.
I'll close with a word about language in this book; Kowal took the effort to painstakingly cross-reference all of the words she used here with actual works written in the nineteenth century so, even more so than with Shades of Milk and Honey, this book is of its time. This effort gives the book a wonderful feel of authenticity.
Highly recommended. Four stars.

F is for Friends and Followers

Continuiung from A to Z, we've fortuitously found fair F's for Follower Friday. Now seems a good time to step away from ink and pixels, from tomes and technlogy, from allegories and alliteration. Here are a small sampling of blogs I follow; I'll not include dreadfully obvious ones like BoingBoing or The Atlantic (both on my list). If you're interested in those you've quite likely found them already. We'll start with friends and acquantances before moving on, because a personal connection to the writer makes things more interesting.

Steampunk Emma Goldman is the slightly less mild-mannered alter-ego of a friend from a writing group to which I once belonged. I remember sitting on author Talia Carner's couch with her while all of the other literary-types subtly rolled their eyes at the two of us and our love for "imaginary stories" (ie, fantasy and sf). Steampunk Emma is an activist, steampunk writer, tall-ship sailor, nanny, occupy wall-street field medic, and an all around righteous babe. She stated the Emma persona for a pro-labor rally at a Steampunk event (in response to events in Wisconsin) and has been returning to it since. She writes mainly about historical activists.

Brad Parks is the host of the Brooklyn Speculative Fiction meetup, which I sporadically attend (almost as sporadically as he blogs. He's a very talented writer, a sharp critiquer, and has a knack for making everyone feel welcome and special. A great guy overall.

Becca Patterson is a fellow writer I met on the Google+ social network. She's the opposite of Brad (and me!) in that she writes quickly. Her description of how a geologist does worldbuilding (from the rocks up) hooked me.

Rachel Desilets is another writer working on the A to Z blog thing, showing off some excerpts from her works in progress.

And, ourside of writers, some blogs that I follow online.

Amazin Avenue  - If you cut me, I bleed orange and blue, so it's little surprise that I read this smart, fan-friendly Mets blog.

The Outlet - Literary magazine Electric Literature's blog, to keep up with the literary scene.

Lambda Literary - To keep up with the gay literary scene. Some interesting stuff there in a direction I don't often look.

E is for Extron

Here we are, continuing along the alphabet. Thus far I've alternated AV technology with writing and literature, and today we'll continue that theme with a shout-out to one of the major commercial tech manufacturers. Last month I had the pleasure of leaving sunny and warm New York to visit their headquarters in chilly Anaheim, CA for Extron's two-day School of AV Technologies for System Designers. Extron has been around for three decades now and has cultivated a reputation for high-quality, reliable audiovideo switching, transport, and signal processing equipment. Yes, it was two-days round-trip travel for two days on-site, but it's an official requirement for my new  job title so I packed my bags, waved good-bye to the family, and headed westward.
A good training session for me is one in which I walk away with at least one thing I didn't know at the start, and Extron didn't disappoint. Because I started in the industry when HDMI was something a  consumer might want on his TV, I'd never learned about performance specifications for digital video, including how to read an eye pattern on an oscilloscope - or even what an eye-pattern is, for that matter. They gave us the whole powerpoint presentation on a USB Key (I seem to be starting a collection of  USB keys given away to me by manufacturers), but it's more fun and better reinforcement to sketch the slides on my tablet with a fingertip.


Day two lessons covered streaming video (although not in quite as much depth as I would have liked) and what, to me, was fairly familiar ground in analog video, single- and multi-mode fiber. Here you can see some of my notes on streaming. As is the case with many things, there's a triple-constraint of quality, time (latency in thiase) and cost (bit-rate, or the "cost" in bandwidth)









The best thing about vendor training is getting so see their facility and play with their new toys. They've recently finished construction on a new building, and proudly showed us the crown-jewel: a bar/live performance space simply but unimaginatively called The Saloon. We couldn't get up and personal with the stage (it was set up for a band later that evening), but got a very good sense about how much thoughtful design and high-quality equipment went into creating the experience, from the pair of Meyer line arrays flanking the stage to subwoofers in multiple locations (so they can use the dance floor for seating without vibrating everyone's fillings out of their teeth) to mundane details like coatrooms and storage between the saloon and adjacent restaurant to keep unwanted sound from spilling over. The system is controlled, of course, with Extron's own touchlink system.

Which brings us to the next part; getting to play with new toys. Demos included:


Streaming Video
Both the a H.264 / MPEG4 encoding SME100 and the Pure3 were on display. The latter, using a proprietary system, was acquired when Extron purchased Electrosonic. It was interesting to see how artifacts appear on both devices if one pushes for too low  bit rate to accomodate a low-bandwidth connection. The Pure3 was impressive in its almost total absence of latency (at an admittedly fairly high bit-rate) and compression could be adjusted to either minimize latency or maximize quality, depending on the application.


Audio
Nothing earthshakingly cutting edge here, but Extron was clearly working to have us see them more as an audio company in addition to transport, switching, and control. They had a nice demo of their various speaker offerings an highlighted the very wide coverage angle of the "flat-field" speaker line (those are the ones that look like ceiling tiles). Two interesting tidbits: First, their amps are now all energy-star rated meaning, among other things, that they'll drop into a standbye mode and consome less than one watt. Second, the class-D XPA amps are convection cooled, meaning that they have no vents or fans. Extron has a conduit adapter kit available for their power which would make them completely plenum-rated, so you can put your amp above the ceiling without violating any fire codes. They also showed off their DSPs, which are physically pretty small, have a reasonable number of processig blocks (these blocks are fixed, like a Polycom or ClearOne DSP, not open like Biamp or BSS),


Switching
This is where I was a touch disappointed; I really wanted to see the new XTA system as Crestron's alternative to digital media and AMX's Enova. The new trend, started by Crestron, is to have all audio, video, and control signals on a single shielded twisted pair cable (CAT5e or better). The bigger units are also modular, allowing users to choose which input and output cards work with a system. The nice thing about XTP is that the output cards are the same size and configuration as the input cards, which might appear a bit neater than DM. Unfortunately, the STP input cards aren't available yet, so their mock-up had standalong XTP transmitters and receivers back-to-back with HDMI input cards. It works, but requires more hardware and more connections than one really wants and doesn't allow transmission of control via the switch. We did get to see the software, which looked easy enough to use. The one quirk was that the XTP frame, which takes about 8 rack units, had a USB mini for the configuration port. I always have micros for my phone and full-size a-b USB cables for everythign else; the mini has become the oddball size that I can usually never find. Oh well.

Before we left Extron owner Andrew Edwards dropped in to thank us for making the trip, ask if we had any questions, and defend Extron's decision to pull out of the Infocom trade show. His take was that the Extron Bash was costing upwards of five million dollars, which is money better spent in other ways - including their planned new demonstration facilities in Dallas, Toronto, and my own home town of New York.
So, that's the story of my two days with Extron. Another training requirement crossed off the list (next month - Crestron Essentials and then DMC-E) and another letter off the alphabet.


I'll leave you with one more shot of the salloon, including their crazy telecaster-shaped mirror-ball.


See you all tomorrow, for 'F'.

D is for Drowned Hero

A fellow writer recently asked if anyone else ever starts to write something, finishes a draft, and then loses interest in it. This is the story of how I fell into and out of love with an idea.

A couple of years ago I started toying with the idea of a kind of simple set of morality tales in the form of a secondary-world fantasy. I started with two different cultures vaguely connected to the classical elements - a nomadic desert race representing fire and earth and a seafaring race represenging water and air. They had a fairly stable relationship until, in an act of war an imperial power called the Roi conquered one of the seafarer's cities and tried to impose their own culture. The tale would be told from three perspectives in a triptych of independent stories connected by theme and setting.
At least that was the plan. Further inspiration for the first - "The Torcher's Tale" came from a news story about a Saharan "sand cure" (in which people would let themselves be buried to the neck in hot desert sand) and a panhandler on the streets of New York with a sign proclaiming himself the victim of "government torcher". The misspelling, sand cure, and larger idea jelled in my mind to the story you can read here.

The water tale was also influenced by a story I heard on the radio, but it was troubled from the start. I kept tweaking my original vision to match the real-world hero on whom I'd based my character, but desperately wanted to keep the world I'd built in my head. I twisted, I prodded, I workshopped it with my talented and insightful friends at the Brooklyn Speculative Fiction Writers meetup group (more on them - and critique groups in general - in a later post), I added and deleted, but it never seemed to add up to more than the sum of its parts. Enough time has passed in my own life since my first fumblings with this one that I feel that revisiting it would be trying to step into the same river a second time. So, I'll put the Torcher triptych to rest here with the unfinished text of "Waiting for the Drowned Hero". There's a touch of wordplay in the names and titles of the hero. I'll leave it to you, my readers to figure out who he is.

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Waiting for the Drowned Hero

by Leonard C Suskin (2100 words)

I. Fleeing the Nameless City


I fled the nameless city that had been my home with nothing but memories, and even many of those I left behind. The city’s name, for one. The invaders gave it a new one when they drove us from our homes and out into the cobblestone streets without even a spare set of sandals. It was on a warm night that I left the city. Ileft it to the pale-skinned savages from across the sea and the desert nomads we’d been fool enough to think of as friends. I left the city’s name. With the invaders ruling, it was no longer Efaaplis, no longer our home. I’d never call it by a dirty foreign name, so it was just the nameless city. One more thing taken.  And, of course, I took the memory of my father, and the stories he’d told of Cobete Lortenmer, remembered to this day as the “Firth Id Leger” or Drowned Hero.  It was the light in his voice when he spoke of Cobete that I carried with me, and that light was the beacon that brought me to the Serpent’s Tooth.

II. Arriving at the Serpent’s Tooth

It’s a rough but surprisingly green hill within sight of some of Scimitar Straights – those rocky, turbulent waters through which sailing ships have to pass to get from the Nameless City  to the famed metalworkers of the treacherous Roi. I arrived tired and hungry, not having had time to pack enough food for the long overland journey. The sea sometimes vanished from sight as I followed a lightly wooded path along the base of the Tooth, but the constant grumble of waves on rocks kept me company, like the constant reminiscences of an angry old man.  I eventually came to a small clearing at the edge of a rocky cliff with a breathtaking view of powerful ocean waves breaking against the rocky shore. As I leaned against a tree to catch my breath I noticed a flash of color on the ground. Someone – perhaps many someones – had placed ribbons, toy ships, and small wooden clubs at this point, overlooking the sea where the Firth Id Leger’s ship had last been sighted. I fell to me knees on  the soft earth, remembering the last time I was here with my father, waiting for the drowned hero. I don’t know if it was a true memory or just a cloud-shape in my mind, formed by my father’s constant re-telling and re-imagining of the story.

I was ashamed to have no trinket to leave behind in memory of the drowned hero.

III. The Day our Hero Died

The summer when Cobete Lortenmner drowned, I was old enough to tie a proper knot and to be trusted to wander the shore searching out odd bits of driftwood, but still too young for work or responsibility. Still young enough to run around town with a stick in my hand, rolling my head to flex neck muscles that wouldn’t feel stiffness for decades to come and pretend that I was the great hero, prepared to board a foreign ship to steal treasure for the young and orphaned back home.  I can’t remember if I cried when I heard the news his ship had sunk, but recall clearly my anger at the unfairness. He was too brave and noble and strong and swift for a little thing like a shipwreck to end his life.

Throngs packed the cliffs of the Serpent’s Tooth, and more crowded the small, rocky beach. Young men waved wooden clubs overhead and chanting his name while older men in sailors’ crimson (most sun-bleached to a coral pink) stared thoughtfully out at the sea. The women mainly nibbled on chunks of fire-roast fish and gossiped amongst themselves as women do, but some stared out to sea with a hunger and intensity to match any of the men.  Scents of roasting meat and unwashed human bodies mixed with the overwhelming smell of sea-salt to create a carnival atmosphere. I looked up at my father, who was staring off into the distant sea. “Is he really coming back?”

“Cobete was a hero, son. Did I ever tell you about the first time I saw him? He’s the strongest, smartest, most agile man I’d ever seen and”

“and the first of our people to captain his own ship in the Roi’s foreign navy” I finished.  I knew this. Everyone knew this. It’s why we’d run along the docks waving around scraps of driftwood or discarded belaying pins and pretend we were Corbete, armed with his wooden club.

His turned to the sea. “Look at all these people waiting and watching. They’re calling him the Firth id Leger – drowned hero in  the old speech. We wouldn’t all be waiting if he couldn’t swim back to shore, would we? Don’t you have at least that much faith in our people?”

I had no anwer.

IV.  A priest of the Firth Id Leger

I picked up a little toy ship from the makeshift shrine and flung it off the cliff, into the sea. “Come back, damn you. Come back,”  I yelled. It was time for him to come back. The time was long overdue.

An unexpected voice from behind me stunned me out of my reminisces and reverie. “Lots of people waiting for him these days.” He was an old man, wearing tattered sailors’ reds, long sun-bleached from bright crimson to a wan pink. His skin was sun-scarred as well and his hair faded to white, but he strode confidently and powerfully down the mountain path. “Some begging for his return, some cursing him.” As the man sat on a rock and stared out to sea he asked which I was.

“The Firth Id Leger is one of us. I don’t care that he sailed for the Roi, he was one of us. When he comes back, he’ll save us. Are you waiting for him too?”

The man smiled. “Isn’t that what people come here for? There used to be a crowd, then a handful, and now just me. Still the people who do come all believe that he’ll be back soon.  Either to save us or betray us from the Roi.” He offered his hand and introduced himself as Temn. “I was a sailor too, but haven’t been on a ship in years. Not since before he drowned,” he finished, with another glance at Cobete’s watery grave.

I was impressed. Cobete’s last voyage was only a few tens of years ago, but it already felt like something from another time, from a lost age of heroes. “Really? Did you know him?”

“Know him? I sailed with him. Now I keep the faith. I tell the stories. Not the ones about the women or the battles, but the good stories. His best moments.” He gave a funny, half-winking kind of smile, “kind of like priests do for the gods. For instance, did you ever hear about the raid on Lud’s Island? Now that was one of his prouder moments.

V. Temn’s Tale

This here’s a story Cobete tried to keep quiet-like, cause back then he still thought the Roi had their use. Even back then, they owned the seas. The <Shipname> was spotted a slow, fat merchant ship.  She didn’t have much in the way of guns, this merchant we were stalkin, and couldn’t sail too fast neither. I’d asked him why we were following a ship with Roi colors when we flew them ourselves, he just said that something looked wrongish. Wrongish, he said. I’ll always remember that kinda thing about him. I think it was because the Roi used to make fun of how he talked, with our accent and all that. He mighta thought it made them underestimate him, and he mighta been right.

Anyway, so we were following this ship because Cobete had a feeling. It was heading out into deep water where there was no port we’d heard of. We should have been harassing Espan merchant convoys, but once Cobete got an idea in his head it stayed in his head. Heck, with that stubborn streak it’s no wonder he wouldn’t stay drowned.

So we follow it to this island out in the middle of noplace that none of us had never seen on no map, and Cobete pulls out his spyglass and what does he see there? Kids. Not Roi kids either. Sandwalker kids digging up bird crap from the island and loading it in casks. They had one of those buildings where the Roi teach kids to think like Roi, but mainly it’s just these kids mining bird crap. Why? Who knows why. They were too lazy to do it themselves. They just like screwing with Sandwalker kids. Maybe it’s some kinda crazy Roi religious crap. And they call everyone else barbarians.

Well, Cobete was about as mad as you’d guess he’d been and then some.  Raked that merchant ship with  canons something fierce, then ordered fire arrows, burning pitch, the works. Took no prisoners neither. Cobete always took prisoners, usually talked to the smarter ones. Tried to make them see him civilized, even if he wasn’t a Roi. That was important to him. The way the Roi treat kids doesn’t make him civilized though… makes him mad as can be.

So now he’s  sank whatever of the merchant ship he hasn’t burned, killed all the crew, and he’s got these kids. There’s no room for ‘em in the <shipname> and whatever supplies there shoulda been for ‘em just sank to the ocean floor. Just us and these kids and they damn Roi teacher Cobete orders hanged from the yardarm almost as soon as we get ashore.

So now we’ve got some dead Roi, a whole mess of sandwalker kids, and all the bird crap we could ever want. Not one of our prouder moments.

What’d he do? He set us a course straight for the Devil’s Kneecap.  Yeah, it’s a Roi island, but we already sank one of theirs, even if we didn’t get caught. What’s another? The Kneecap is a right worthless rock, so we knew the ships in had to have food. It’s also the gaol for whatever bad muckmymucks are too bad to hold without an ocean around them, so we knew it’d be armed. Better armed than a bird-crap boat anyhow. We took a heavy pounding, but we gave as good as we got. Boarded ‘em, took prisoners, loaded up on food, were on our way back to birdcrap Island.

The <shipname> never made port again. It musta been damaged worse in the battle than we thought, ‘cause even Cobete couldn’t keep get her through these here straights.  That was when she went down.

VI.  Waiting for the Drowned Hero

I didn’t know what to make of Temn’s tale, and wasn’t sure I wanted to tell him. Sure, it sounded grand and was a great example of why we were better than the Roi are, even if they did take the now-nameless city.  Something about it wasn’t quite right, but the old man was growing more and more animated as he spoke. He had seen more winters than my father, but was very spry and growing increasingly animated as he talked. I was afraid if I showed doubt he’d hit me with that club he’d been waving around and try to throw me into the ocean. I thought it a good time to change the subject.

“You said there’d been more people here waiting for the Firth Id Leger over the past weeks? Since the fall of the Nameless City?”

This lead to a digression in which I had to explain to him why my home city no longer had a name, and Temn seemed to approve.

“Yes, over a score, one or two at a time. I told all of them the same story I told you, and all moved on. They didn’t get the point of the story.”

The point seemed clear to me. The Roi were bad, and we needed to fight them if we were again to be free. The sandwalkers were fellow victims, but also a dangerous distraction from the fight for our own lives. I confessed to Temn that I found it quite inconceivable that not anyone would get it.

Temn glared at me. “That’s not it at all. The fight was never about the Roi or for us or even for the sandwalkers. The real fight was against that part in himself that let the rage take over, that sank the merchant ship he could have captured and used to take those kids away, or at least fed them. May that part of the Firth Id Leger remain drowned forever.  

For the rest, we wait.”


VII. The Gathering

I never found out how the first ones heard about me, if they heard of me. Perhaps something in our blood just pulls us here. It was after I saw smoke rising at the distant horizon, smoke rising from the nameless city.

I didn’t cry, but the distant smoke might have stung my eyes, just a bit.

The first to arrive were old men, leaning heavily on walking sticks. Their bodies little more than a bundle of sticks, wrapped in old leather.

Then came the women in patched dresses carrying bundles of rags and rotting food and babies. They’d been sent by the husbands and brothers and fathers who would stay and fight for the city. To restore its name.

Finally the men came. Angry and defiant, bearing knives and swords and makeshift clubs. Had the young men come first there’d have been no chance. This would have become a place for caching weapons and making war.

But the young men did not come first. The came later to find the old men and the women staring into the sea, talking about Tem’s tale and the Firth id Leger as a saviour. Not just as a warrior.

The old man disappeared. One day I saw him walk down the mountain, to the sea, and never saw him again. But that’s OK.

We’re gathering here. And sharing the stories.

C is for Contrast Ratio. Also Caculation

It's a system installer's nightmare-scenario, and one that happened to me. The installation is just finished, the last wire connected, the control system merilly and efficiently controlling everything with a convenient and efficient push of a button. You see what you're supposed to see, hear what you're supposed to hear, bring the client in and... his face falls. "That's what it looks like? I expected it to be ... brighter". And, yes, when you look at the shiny new projection screen you just installed the image looks washed out. Very washed out. How did you get here? And how could you fix it? The answer in this case is math.

In designing an AV system there are a dizzying array of options as to how these goals will be accomplished. Video, for example, can be delivered via an LCD of flat-panel display, front- or rear-projection system, or a video-wall made of several smaller displays. Audio could be delivered via speakers mounted on a ceiling or wall, in a multi-channel (stereo or surround-sound format), single zone, mix-minus, or some combination. Sometimes follows function (a large paging system would likely use relatively low-cost cnstant-voltage speakers, while a large performance venue might use line-arrays to reduce the attenuation due to distance), some choices will be dictated by cost, and some by architectural and aesthetic constraints. Whatever the choices made, however, it should be possible to justify them mathematicaly; AV design can be an art, but at its core it is also a science. This example involved a simple front-projection presentation system and a real-world demonstration of the importance of contrast ratio.

One of the questions one has to ask is how bright a projector is needed. We can start answering that question by looking at contrast ratioA year ago Infocom (the AV trade organization for those of you who found me more through ink than pixels) released a new standard for what is considered an acceptable contrast ratio in a video projection system. That standard calls for ratios of:

8:1   for general viewing
10:1 for reading
12:1 for detail viewing
80:1 for cinema quality video.

So, for an average meeting room in which you're projecting text, full white shoult be just ten times the brightness of full black. If you know the ambient light incident on the screen it's easy to see how big a projector you'd need:

Ansi Lumens (Projector) = (Area of Screen) * (Contrast Ratio)  * (ambient light) * .75

A glance at the formula will tell you how you can get such a high ratio for cinema; movie theaters are very dark. Other kinds of rooms can't be as dark because people like to see what they are doing (another constraint is that "task lighting" - shoudn't be more than  three times ambient light, to allow your eyes to adjust. Contrast can also, of course, be measured easilly enough with a light meter and a "checkerboard" test pattern of alternating white and black squares. In this particular case the room had already been built, te projector installed - and now we saw that it looked washed out. A quick scan with the light meter confirmed what was apparent at a glance; the room had floor-to-ceiling south-facing windows and was, therefore, as bright as daylight. This left the simple solution of getting some darker shades with a definite and very reachable target for illumination incident to the screen.

Was that obvious from the first? Of course. But the math let's you quantify - to answer how much darker must the room be, or how much brighter the projector.

There is an art to AV system design, to understanding the users' needs and finding the neatest, most elegant way to meet them. There is also a science, and numbers to tell you exactly what you need and what you should expect.

So, that was 'C'. A bit of a change of pace, no?

I'll be back tomorrow with the letter D for.. digital publishing? Displayport? DRM? Tune in tomorrow to find out!