Diary of a Network Geek

I just got a reply from my favorite fantasy author, Lawrence Watt-Evans, today. I’ve read almost all of his work, except for the Lords of Dûs series which I just couldn’t get into for some reason. I especially like his Ethshar series of books and stories. I really like the flow of his style of writing, what people in the writing game call an author’s “voice”. It’s real familiar and comfortable to read. I find his work more relaxing than just about any other author I’ve read, including the incomparable Frank Herbert and Ernest Hemmingway. (I read those two authors for different reasons than I read Lawrence Watt-Evans.)

Anyway, I’ve been working at writing some fiction again (no, not my resume!) and I ran into a bit of a snag: naming. See, I’ve been hiding behind that for a relly long time, something in the neighborhood of ten years, to keep from writing. That bothered me enough this past week to get past it and just start writing. But, before I did, I turned to my favorite fantasy author to see how *he* made his character names.
Well, the lucky, *professional* author was off in Europe on vacation, so he didn’t get a chance to respond to me for a week, or so. Lucky me. If he had, I might not have actually started writing the damn story. See, he went through a process much like I had been trying to go through, but I had some significant difficulty with it and I used that as a reason to not write. So, if he’d responded sooner, I might have gotten bogged down again.

Anyway, I wanted to encourage everyone in the world to go buy Lawrence Watt-Evans’s books. I highly reccomend “The Misenchanted Sword” and “With A Single Spell”, which are both great places to start in the Ethshar books. Also, I highly reccomend “Dragon Weather” and its sequel “The Dragon Society”, which are not set in Ethshar, but are superior fantasy novels. Keep in mind, this isn’t Tolkein-esque work here, it’s much, much more accessable than all that. Nor is it a cheap copy of someone else’s style. Lawrence Watt-Evans is in a class all his own.
You can find out more about Lawrence Watt-Evans, and Ethshar, at Ethshar.com or Watt-Evans.com

Well, I think I’ve finally gotten this blog thing down. I figured out what was making the entries look all wonky in Netscape and corrected the HTML code in the templates. Then, too, I figured out how to control some of the custom settings for the look and feel of the blog via the style sheet. In fact, I like it so much, I’m going to imitate it for the rest of my website. It’s really just a matter of updating the style sheet for the main site so that it’s similar to the blog. Way back when I started this poor, sad, little site, I planned it so that eventually, when I wanted to make look and feel changes, all I’d have to do is update the style sheet. Pretty clever for a Network Engineer, eh? Now, why, if I’m so clever, has no one given me a job yet? *sigh* Like they say in the Baltimore Catechism, “It’s a mystery!”

I apologize to everyone that see’s this entry as basically raw text. I swear, it’s not my fault. I’m new to this flavor of blog and I haven’t quite worked out the style sheet for it yet. So, despite the fact that I normally make sure everything on my site works in both Netscape and InternetExplorer, the Diary of a Network Geek currently looks better in IE than Netscape. I’m so ashamed.
I have my personal webdesigner looking into the problem, but I haven’t given up on it either. Like so many other things, we’ll get to it soon.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled web browsing.

Well, I’ve finally gotten a real blog set up. No more manual updates for me! Well, okay, that’s not really true. I mean, it’s not like I can just *think* the entries into the blog. But, at least I have a MySQL database keeping track of everything for me now. So, I guess I’ll keep the old, lamer-than-lame Diary of a Network Geek entries around in some form. For historical purposes. For posterity? Eh, just because I can’t bear to let them go.

Stay tuned for more *real* entries to the Diary of a Network Geek!