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April 24, 2005

more technology, alas

As quite a few of you had good suggestions on how to handle my email problems (solutions being addressed now, and soon to be put into practice) I thought you might be willing to listen to my real tale of technological woe. If not, please, move on.

Here's the thing. We live outside of a small city or large town, depending on your perspective. Far enough out that we don't get cable here, and it doesn't look as though we will be getting it anytime soon. I make frequent calls to QWest to ask them about this, and they will never really tell me much beyond the fact that expansion into this area is not on the books. Yet, they always add.

All this means is that we have satellite for television reception, and no access to a fast internet connection. We do have ISDN, which is (as I understand it) simply a bundle of dedicated telephone lines. A lot faster than a dial-up connection, but tons slower than DSL.

I do a lot of research on line, a good deal of which requires looking at graphic images of journal pages. I have an extensive genealogical database on line. I also do quite a lot of website maintenance, both my own and for the Garden Sense Online site, which involves moving a lot of big graphic images around. I download audiobooks. My daughter is addicted to itunes, and spends all her allowance downloading music. My husband, who also works at home, is constantly online and sometimes has to up or download huge data sets. (An aside: just recently I ran into a paragraph written by Bill's co-investigator on some grant, and for the first time in the fifteen years that he has been working on this project, I actually understood what he does. In the technobabble spirit of this post, I include it here:)

W.D.K. Green is the sole designer and programmer of Edgewarp, a 25,000-line sophisticated workstation package for manipulation of 2D and 3D biomedical images and related data structures by a combination of landmark location, thin-plate spline, and image unwarping and averaging. It is built of C and C++ code and makes extensive use of SGI's OpenGL graphics interface. Communication with the user is by textual and graphical interfaces managed using TCL/TK, a general purpose scripting language. Since 1995 a series of steadily more powerful releases of Edgewarp have been released for free downloading from the internet, along with source codes for the versions prior to 1996. Currently the linux versions are by far the most popular. Edgewarp has been exploited in a huge variety of scientific contexts, from systematics and evolutionary biology to radiology, teratology, and kinesiology. It has also stimulated diverse reverse-engineered implementations of its pieces for other computing environments, such as the Rohlf series of thin-plate spline programs for Windows and the Pittsburgh "Visible Browser" for navigation of Eve. A decade after its initial release, Edgewarp remains the sole general purpose image comparison package, commercial or noncommercial, and continues to spin off new visualization tools and analytic strategies.

cha cha cha.

So back to the issue at hand: you can see that we suffer under the restrictions of an ISDN line. I have looked into satellite internet, which would be worth the considerable cost (installation alone is five hundred bucks) if the technology were just reliable, and there weren't all kinds of restrictions on how much you can use it. And a delay, I'm told, of up to two seconds. And all other kinds of problems (uploading, apparently, is slower than what we have now; downloading is four times faster -- I asked if we could order ala carte, two times faster up and two times faster down, a side of eggroll, but the person on the phone didn't even crack a smile).

Sometimes I get desperate, and I think about calling up QWest and demanding that they come out here and lay the cable, damn the cost, full speed ahead! But then sanity kicks back in and I remember we have a daughter who will be going off to college in two years and that four years at her college of choice, along with travel, room, board and books, will most certain hit the $150,000 mark.

Thus my tale of woe.

If you happen to be the head of QWest, or you babysit his/her kids, or you play canasta with his/her father, or you were in the armed forces with his/her mother, sister, cousin, best friend, would you put in a good word for us out here in the boondocks? I promise you the moon, or at least something good to eat, pretty to look at, or fun to read.

10:27 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

relative temperatures: more on writing sex scenes

Whenever I think I'm finished with this topic, something new pops up. Which is quite obvious if you go over to the category archives on the right and click on 'sex scenes' (here's the link, to save you some trouble). You may need to do just that if you want to follow this discussion, because there's too much backstory to summarize.

Earlier this month, Mistress Matisse mentioned the sex scenes series on her weblog. Mistress Matisse is a professional dominatrix, and she has a lot of readers. In the comments to her April 12 post (which is where she provides the link leading here), one of her readers raised an interesting point, from which followed a short discussion. Here are some of Lor's thoughts on what struck her/him as missing in my study of how to write a sex scene:

I was just amazed at the omission of what is, for me, an obvious point of writing about sex. I think that just like a good horror scene is good because it scares the reader, a good sex scene is good because it arouses the reader (or shocks, or whatever the character/narrator is feeling). I think the reader's sexual response would be something an aspiring author needs to consider.

Granted, saying "good sex writing is usually hot" isn't very specific, but could lead to some productive discussion about what makes something hot or not. Perhaps it's not your style to be as forthcoming about the color of your orgasms as Susie Bright, that's fine, but certainly there's some way to throw into the mix that a lot of readers like a sex scene to get them off, or give them ideas, or just to learn more about sex, no?

So I've been thinking about this, because it is an interesting issue. A few distinct questions come to mind. (Please note: I am specifically excluding erotica from this discussion, as that seems to me to require a different approach.)

is a good sex scene (which I have defined, for my purposes, as a scene that furthers characterization and plot) necessarily erotic? Does a sex scene work the same way as other emotion-driven scenes? A parallel: is a good fright scene necessarily frightening?

is it possible or necessary for an author to use his or her own sexual response as one way to judge the effectiveness of a sex scene in progress?

do we need to define 'erotic'?

I'm curious what will happen, and if the people who comment regularly and most often will feel comfortable answering one or all of these questions -- or if other people who don't usually speak up might have something to say. This weblog had close to four thousand distinct visits last month (not counting bots and search engines) [correction: to be exact, 3929 unique visitors and 8629 distinct visits and 63249 hits, not counting bots and search engines, for the month of March] so I know you're out there. Anything to contribute before I go ahead and voice my own thoughts on this?

11:02 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack