Thaddeus Nowak's Blog: Thoughts and Observations, page 3

Audiobooks

Audiobooks

Admittedly, I am a little late to the audiobook scene. Unfortunately, none of my 6 novels currently have an audiobook version. In fact, until recently, I had not listened to any “books on tape” (to use the name they had long ago).  Why? I have just had other things occupying my time and never took the effort to look at them closely (other than to get a basic understanding of rights, process to create them, and costs).

Recently, I decided to change that. I started a trial of Audible and got two free books to listen to. I finished the first book fairly quickly—the reading took only five hours. The second book is over thirteen hours and I am only halfway through it.

This post is not about those books, or even a review of Audible. It is just my early observation around audiobooks.  Namely, I cannot multitask when listening to an audiobook.

I know some people talk about doing other things while listening to an audiobook, but for me, if I am listening to the reading, I cannot focus on something else. If I do focus on something else, I miss out on what was said in the audiobook. 

I’ve been experimenting with when I can effectively listen to an audiobook, such as when I am out walking to get in my 10k+ steps a day. However, I also like to use that time to mentally work on my novels. As a result, I am not planning to continue listening while I walk. I might be able to if I am exercising hard, as then I rarely write in my head.

I could potentially listen to the books when I drive. I used to listen to podcasts on the way into the office and on the drive home. They could be a little distracting, but not hugely distracting. However, in the current environment, I am staying home and not driving very far when I do drive somewhere. Which means, not a lot of time in the car anymore to listen to audiobooks (and I still have those podcasts I want to listen to).

So far, the best time I have found to listen to a book is when I am in bed and getting ready to go to sleep. However, I could also spend that time just reading a book on my Kindle or in the good old fashion paper form.

Are audiobooks a growing trend? Most definitely. Will I eventually have audiobooks for my novels? I am planning on it (part of why I am doing this research). Are audiobooks for me? The jury is still out on it. I need to listen to a few more books and find the time that best suits my activities before I decide.

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Diet, I should have started sooner

Why didn’t I start sooner?

Like many people, when it came to resuming my diet, I always found myself saying  “I’ll start on Monday” and then “I’ll start on the first on the month” and so on. Turned out, I always planned to start tomorrow and tomorrow never comes.

Well, now that I am a couple months into this effort (I started logging my food and watching my diet on 6 Apr 2020)  I am feeling better, sleeping better, and overall, have more energy.  Some days it sucks to not cram a bowl of ice cream into my face or to eat a salad instead of a huge bowl of pasta, but I am managing. It really is all about moderation. I still eat some ice cream, just a smaller amount. I love and eat pasta, but I measure out and weigh the noodles before I cook them.

Now that I am used to smaller portion sizes, I feel full sooner, which means the diet modifications are working. It keeps me on track, even if I have a week of bumps and jumps.

Exercise

I’m not as with it as I would like on the exercise front. I get busy during the day and just forget to move from the chair.

As you can see from the step counts, I am stepping it up (pun intended). This last week I made sure to get in over 10k steps a day. But prior to that, I had some days where I barely managed 2k steps. The sedentary nature of my working in front of a computer can make it hard.

So, to help with the losing weight and staying on the diet, I am using the determination I built around what I am eating and I am getting out each evening. Achieving 5+ miles a day of walking eats an hour or two of time, but I end up feeling better afterwards, and so that helps me stay motivated. I am also seeing the definition in my calf muscles again. Yeah me!

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Cables, so many cables

Cables and their management

I would love to show you some pictures of beautifully managed cables. Precise lines bundled together with ninety degree turns and no loops or sags. Color coded, plastic wrapped wire, secured with coordinated Velcro and zip tied to tracks. Cable routing planned and executed with no second thoughts or change requests. I would love to do that, but I don’t have any pictures with that kind of elegance and refinement.

I’ve had a few chances recently to cleanup and reroute cables in my office, as well as in my wife’s office. It has resulted in lots of Command Strips to affix power bricks to the underside of the desks and the little hooks to hold up cables. Velcro has become a decoration, but not in the style of Picasso. More of The Dogs Playing Poker by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge style that just turns things a bit sideways and is surreal.

The trouble is, cables are not neat. Just like life, they get out of control and make things a mess. Like the bundle of leads for the charging area on the shelf for all the various electronics (USB A, B, and C, with the full size, mini, and micro variants, plus Lightning, because everything wants to be different and unique). Then you have extension leads on the top of the desks for easy access, because the shelf is too far away for convenience. Of course, one of each isn’t usually enough and then you have to have the loose ends long enough to reach … the ends which get wrapped around each other and pull something over when you tug on it to get enough room to plug in the tablet or camera.

And then you run out of ports on the computer, so you add hubs, but then you have to wonder have I put too many things on the same USB chip inside the computer … so you think about adding extra PCIe cards to avoid bottlenecks …

But, you forget all about that because some cables are only good for USB 1.1 or 2.0, if you want to get the full power and speed out of USB 3.x, you need a different cable with the extra pins. Sometimes the cables are marked, others, not so much.  Wikipedia has some good charts for you to memorize. I’ll email you a test later (putting a USB A plug into the socket on the first try gets you extra credit).

Is my work area in perfect order and alignment? No. But it is a work in progress, much like the rest of my life. I will continue to improve it and bundle things together in orderly runs whenever I can, be they cables or anything else.

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Psychology and writing

Psychology

It is the study of the mind. The examining of behavior. The parts that make people who they are in a given situation. It is also an entire line of study in school, and for many, it is a soft science. In pop culture, the main protagonist in the TV series Bones, Dr. Temperance Brennan (played by ) often insulted psychology as not being a real science. (I was a big fan of the first 4 seasons of the series.)

As a person with a science background, I agree that psychology can be a bit squishy in the middle. People are rarely rational and will do things external observers would not expect. Heck, people do things most of the time without consciously thinking about the underlying reasons for their behaviors. But, that inability to predict exactly what someone will do doesn’t make psychology wrong. It just makes it like weather forecasting: a tool that does not have all the variables. However, when enough of the most significant variables are known, psychology allows for accurate predications and can help someone see the butterfly within the caterpillar.

Psychology for writers

Writers need a good grasp of psychology. It helps in the identification of motives for characters and making the protagonist and antagonist act in a more consistent and realistic manner. Understanding the mental condition of our abused pawns gives us the means to manipulating them through our narrative without triggering the dreaded breaking of the suspension of disbelief.

As a natural introvert—who has learned to function as an extrovert when needed—I spend a fair amount of time watching other people. Coupled with a lot of self-reflection, mental time alone with my characters, and some basic psychology courses in college, I attempt to get into the minds of my characters and understand them at a deeper level. Sometimes I don’t dig down deep enough, and then I struggle to tell a particular story. When I take a step back to figure out my own mental state, I realize that I have not put my character on the couch long enough to learn their little quirks. After a bit of psychoanalysis, I can get back in front of the keyboard and make their lives miserable instead of mine.

When did I start doing this?

I think I have always been on the curious side of looking at motivations. A big factor comes from my formative years, where Isaac Asimov injected the notion of treating psychology as a hard science for me in his Foundation series with his concept of Psychohistory. Which is the idea that one can predict the future if there is a large enough body of people to use as a model and you have a powerful enough computer to process the math behind it.

This broader concept of psychology at a societal, or even species, level comes to play in my novels when I have to predict how the people of a given country might act when certain things happen. Or, conversely, what trigger might my characters might need to invoke to cause society to act in a certain way. It becomes an enormous game of what-if scenarios.

Of course, that leads into psyops and manipulating large groups of people to achieve militaristic outcomes. I would like to say my time as an author has helped me recognize some of these operations in practice in the real world and that I don’t fall for them more often than not. However, the internal psychologist in me wants to say that might reflect a bit of hubris. 

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Losing weight, bumpy, but expected

Quick weight update

As you can see from the featured image, my overall trend is going down, though that is not without several bumps in the road. The images are from yesterday morning, so a day off. This morning I came in at 175.2, which is down a pound from yesterday, and actually 9.6 pounds over the last month (there was a little bump up 30 days ago if you are paying close attention to the 0.2 difference).

Some mornings I get a little down when I have periods of several days with no change, or worse, the days where it shows I’ve gained a pound and then I stay the same for several days. Many times where I have a gain, it is especially disappointing because often the day before I had a hard workout (like hiking 8 miles).

However, I flip over to the body fat percentage and can add a little rational thought behind the fluctuations. When I see a bump up in weight, an accompanying drop in body fat also occurs. So, I am gaining muscle, and muscle is denser than fat, which makes the scale go up and not down.

I’m just using a magic scale to calculate my percent body fat, so I expect there is a bit of inaccuracy in the number. (I don’t like the fat calipers, too much effort and still quite variable.) However, I am checking my weight each day with the same routine, so I expect the error is at least fairly consistent.

The best news is that both numbers are trending down and even though I have the Lose-it! app set for a goal of 1.5 pounds per week, and I am staying to the calorie values, I am actually dropping closer to 2 pounds a week.

I know when I started this, I said I wasn’t sure if I could keep disciplined enough, or if I would hit that period of total annoyance. The honest truth is, I have found it relatively easy. I have had some cravings for things that I just know I can’t have, but I often find something sweet and eat a small amount of it and then move on to doing something else. I think the being at home is really helping me, because if I had easy access to a lot of nice restaurants, I probably would succumb to cravings.

Actually, I better stop now. I am thinking about strawberry lemonade and that is definitely not low in calories.

 

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Fjelldal City Map

Maps

I love maps. Old maps, new maps, maps of actual places, maps of places that only exist in the mind. It could be an obsession. It is a requirement for me to write. Maps keep my mind straight about where the people of my worlds are going, but even beyond that, maps inform me about world politics and how society functions. Land or water barriers change migration patterns and establish borders for countries, counties, and citizens. Those are the things that make the world come alive in my mind.

Today’s map

The featured image above is a work in progress and far from complete. In fact, I need to change the density of the buildings and streets (I made the city too large by making the blocks too small).

I suffer from the chronic writer’s problem of trying to get very accurate information, and in this case, I spent more than an insignificant amount of time researching historical numbers for medieval population densities. In that research, I came across a very detailed paper on plos.org call Population-Area Relationship for Medieval European Cities. The research article goes into a lot of detail and provided me with enough information to come up with some quickly scribbled notebook calculations for how big I needed to make the city above (about 0.75 miles by about 4.71 miles).

Therefore, I am sharing this as a discussion of my process for making the map and not as an example of anything finished.

Fjelldal

The city of Fjelldal exists in the northeastern part of my world. About as far north and east as a human dares to go (there are elves on the other side of the Bad Lands in the Rim Mountains and elves and humans do not get along). Unfortunately for the Varikians, southern invaders currently occupy their county.

My current WIP takes part in this northern capital. The main characters, Kadia and Tylor use the city as an initial base for their activities. As such, I really want to understand the layout and traffic flows. Future books in the series will also have pivotal moments in Fjelldal.

Crafting the map

The workflow I am using for the city is one of blocking in the basic structure before doing the actual drawing. The featured image above reflects that effort.

Inside Photoshop, I started out with a grey scale layer to depict the terrain in more of a topographical sense. The darker areas reflected the stepper cliffs of the fjord (again, understanding the land allows me to see where the people would create roads and paths).

It is hard to see, but I have a patterned grey mass running down the right third of the image, which depicts the Kalar River flowing into the fjord. Fjelldal benefits from river traffic as well as people sailing to other holds along the northern coast. Hence I have left an area along the fjord for a harbor.

For the city proper, I blocked out a couple of areas where I knew the castle needed to go and then I added a solid black layer above that that to fill in everything inside the walls. I am then erasing lines to make roads, streets, and alleys. This automatically creates the city blocks, market squares, and other details.

Having been to both London and Paris, I must say the explorer in me preferred the winding maze of streets that is London and the surrounding boroughs. As a result, I am glad that Christopher Wren’s plans to rebuild London after the Great Fire never got used. Paris is beautiful, but more of their avenues are straight and orderly. For me, I wanted this ancient city of Varik to have a less ordered and planned feel and my trips to London have helped to fix that in my mind. 

Once I redo the blocking, I will create layers to draw in the buildings, fountains, and other details that reflect the past of the city. As I make progress on this effort, I will share some of the intermediate results.

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Camera Mount

I scoured the Internet, but came up empty. I wanted a camera mount that I had a desk camp at one end, a pole to elevate the camera, and a standard tripod head screw at the top. I looked, and looked, and what I wanted just didn’t exist. The certainty of my mission crumbled around me.

Not finding what I needed, I gave up on the pre-built solution and started an equally challenging search for separate parts that I could put together. Unfortunately, I could not get very accurate specs on the items I planned to purchase. Images rarely showed the bottoms and the descriptions left a lot to be desired when it came to my needs of Frankensteining everything together.

My attempted camera mount solution

So, I took a gamble and bought a heavy duty desk clamp for a monitor stand: the VIVO PT-SD-CP01A. I then bought the Manfrotto Table Centerpost 385. Finding a source for the Manfrotto presented a challenge, with almost everyone out of stock…but I did find one. The big question: does it have a center hole in the column with threads that I can bolt the clamp to?

Yeah, Murphy, I hear yeah. As you can see from the photo below, that heavy duty pole has nothing in it, and more fun, nothing lines up, the bolts are of different sizes, and I can’t send any of it back, unless I want to give up.

The Manfrotto stand is a table mount, but one that requires damaging the table with bolt holes. A bottom plate helps to old everything secure through the mounting surface. If I wanted to drill holes in the desk, the stand is ideal. But, I want a movable mount, not a permanent one.

Next, the bolt holes don’t line up with the clamp. Not only are they further from the center, but the bolts for the Manfrotto are too big for the desk clamp. Worse, even if I found a bolt to go through the center of the clamp, it would not be stable enough to keep the post vertical.

So far, this had checked none of my requirements:

Moveable table mountNon-damaging to the deskStableNever give up, never surrender

Tenacity fills my blood from time to time, and in this, I refused to throw in the towel (I might need it if I were to find myself hitchhiking). I got pen and paper, my trusty calipers, and started taking some measurements and sketching solutions. With the center points of each hole mapped, I pondered how I could make a union of the two parts without drilling holes in the plates (I no longer have a drill press, a vice, or a workbench). This meant I needed a way to attach at least one part from the outside when I sandwiched the union between the pieces.

Dusting off the trig from highschool, I converted the polar coordinate system of 120 degree spacing of the holes to Cartesian coordinates and then started building in FreeCad. I then rotated the inner circle 60 degrees, and reconverted, so I could set the holes on oppoite sides for additional strength.

I exposed at the bottom of the outer holes so that I could get a 10mm wrench into the opening for the nut (I should have made it large enough for the 11mm wrench, which just barely fit).  For the inner openings, I made the top part of the channel wide enough to get a 10mm socket into (those nuts were 10mm).

The desk clamp gets bolted on first, then the Manfrotto post second.

For the printer, I set the slicer to 4mm walls (double the default thickness) and set it do do 8 layers on the top and bottom.  I also set the infill to 40%.  All that might have been overkill, but I don’t want the PLA to crack and send my camera crashing to the floor when I tighten everything up.

So after about 9 hours of printing (that is what overkill does to print times) I had my new part. A quick run to get some bolts and nuts (the desk clamp did not come with any) and voilà, finished mount.

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Keeping Focused on the Diet

Still on the Diet

I am still on the diet. This is coming to the end of week 3 of calorie tracking and I am down 5.8 pounds. Surprisingly, these three weeks have been easier than I expected. I have had 5 days where I went over the calorie budget by over 100 calories, but on the weekly level, I have remained under the amount that would have me lose 1.5 pounds per week.

Diet challenges

One challenge I have had over these three weeks is the amount of hours I have been working for the day job (not the writing job). I’ve averaged over 12 hours per day (over 60 hours per week) since the start of April. And unfortunately, those are hours I have spent in the chair and not moving around. In fact, my Fitbit step counts for some days had been well under 5k and many hovered around 2.5k.  Only 4 days had me over 10k steps. (I love having the tech toys to track these things. If you can’t measure it, you can’t change it.)

Another challenge is that I am the only one in the house doing the diet. The positive side to that is outside two times that we grabbed some take-away, I have manged to refrain from eating in excess.

Things to compensate

To try to stay on the diet and compensate for the lack of movement, I put a couple of weights in the office. I’ve moved up to 15 pound weights and need to figure out where I put the 20 pounders. I’ve also been doing sit-ups, pushups, and other exercises and stretches. Though, I will be honest, I didn’t even do those on some days.

I have also been trying to eat at home more. I am eating more salads (which if I eat 4 cups of salad, it fills me up with few calories). The other benefit to eating at home is that my budget for food in April is running at around 40% of what I originally expected to spend.

The primary way I have stayed on track is by eating smaller portions. I still get to eat some goodies, but instead of eating 3 servings of ice cream, I weigh out 1 serving and just eat that … slowly. It might not work for everyone, but it is working for me.

Sanity

How is my sanity while we are all at home? Pretty good actually. Since I am still working, I don’t have those concerns and I feel fortunate for that. The huge number of hours has been good and bad. On the plus side, I don’t have time to think about other things, but it keeps me from being able to have the time to exercise as I would like and it keeps me from writing or doing creating things. The lack of writing and creativity is probably the biggest detractor from my mental health. I get quite grumpy if I don’t do creative things.

The fortunate thing is that I hope the time will normalize back toward the 40 hours a week mark soon.

The other very fortunate fact, both for the diet, and my mind, is that I live close to several trail systems. They aren’t the mountains, but many of them have some tree cover. So this morning, we got up and put in 6 miles on one of the trails we had not explored much before. There were quite a few people on the trails getting in some exercise, but not so many that we could not social distance.

The featured photo at the top of the post is from a tree on the trail, as is the small pond at the bottom of the post. There are lots of birds and other wildlife enjoying the weather, which is what we did.

Diet goal

So, I am at 184.6 pounds, about 20 away from my diet goal of 165. According to Lose-It!, I should be hit the goal 26 Jul 2020.

Stay safe out there.

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Diet At Home

Starting a diet when stuck at home

Like many people, I have been at home for several weeks now. I’m fortunate enough that my day job allows me to work at home. However, that has allowed for some bad habits to proliferate. Namely, snacking. And I had really started snacking and that is not a good diet to have.

I eat when stressed, and over the last couple of years, I have added more weight than I really cared to admit. The weight went on slowly and it would usually level off, but my home office has reduced my step count and the long hours in front of the computer (and TV to unwind) had allowed for additional weight gain the first couple weeks of staying at home.  I never went over 200 pounds, but I have a fairly small frame and if I follow the BMI, I should be high school skinny at 155 (not a realistic value in my mind).

What I’m changing

So, just over a week ago at the grocery store, I decided I would put myself back onto a calorie counted diet. I did it almost two decades ago and got myself down to that high school skinny weight. Then I just kind of let off and stopped paying attention to my activity and what I was eating.  It took a few years to add ten pounds back and then the ten became twenty and that turned into thirty.

Today I weighed in at 188.2, which is about 23 over my what I have considered as my target number of: 165.  The 155 is just too skinny … though I always wanted to do a 10th Doctor cosplay … was one of my favorite Doctors …

I digress.  Anyway, I’m not doing anything fancy. I am using the Lose It! app on my phone to track my calories with a goal of losing 1.5 pounds per week.  I’ve owned the app (lifetime subscription) for years. Where does my willpower to stick with it come from? I don’t know. I’ve only been back on the diet for a week, so time will tell if I have the needed strength to get to my goal.

However, 2 years and 317 days ago, I gave up drinking Coke. (I also have a countdown app on my phone.) Just before I gave it up, I would drink two or three 20 once bottles a day. Something in my head flipped and I stopped. In fact, I gave up all soda at that time. (I fell off the all soda wagon about 16 months ago for a few weeks, but have not had any now for 448 days.) This no soda decision has stuck, even when my wife has a case of Coke in the house.

I’m hoping that the willpower that allowed me to give up soda will allow me to stay on the diet. Part of it is I have a backpacking trip planned for August, so I need to get back into shape for that. I think that might be the big motivator, but I also just want to feel better, and I do feel better when I weigh less and when I am more active.

I want to turn my time at home into a positive. Therefore, between meetings, I pick up some weights and do a few reps. I mix in pushups and situps when I can. I need to add in walking around the house when on conference calls, but that is harder since I often need to be on the computer at the same time.

Either way, my goal right is to take full advantage of the time I am at home. When I eventually go back to the office, I won’t have these luxuries and don’t want to regret not starting to improve myself when I had the opportunity to do so.

Stay safe out there.

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Bound Is Available!

Bound is now available!

Raised in an isolated Colorado mountain valley and socialized with D&D, after her mother dies, Kyrie must learn to use her powers to stop those hunting her.

It has been an absolute pleasure writing this novel and am thrilled with how it has turned out. The best part is I can now I can share it with everyone else.  The first book in this new series is now available on Amazon Paperback, Kindle, and at Barns & Noble.

If you want to get one in person, I am excited to say I will have copies available at Planet Comic, which starts in just a few weeks on 20 Mar 2020.

Note, if you follow the Amazon links from my site, the purchases will be tied to my affiliate account.

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