New SF reading

The end of 2015 there was this new show on SYFY called The Expanse. Based on some books I had not heard of or read.

So recently I've bought the books and read the first three, started the fourth.

Well...you know how this general sort of thing goes, it applies to music as well...every so often you make a discovery of a new artist whose work knocks your socks off. Ozric Tentacles was like that, Lana Lane was like that, Klaus Schulze was like that, ELP was like that...

Peter Hamilton was like that 15 years ago. Ron Goulart and PG Wodehouse were like that 35 years ago.

and The Expanse series is like that too. There's nothing in there that you haven't encountered before if you've been reading SF for a while. I've been reading SF since the late 1960s, so I've read it all. But The Expanse is like all those individual things rolled into one.

It's politics, except on the interplanetary scale, but not interstellar scale. It's got your kinda-typical hero, serious bad guys on a scale and detail not usually covered in SF, it's got classic space opera goings-on, unseen and incomprehensible aliens, artifacts left behind by those aliens that are either mega-nifty or mega-dangerous or both, spaceship battles...

I was impressed. So I'm reading the 4th one, bought the 5th, and awaiting the 6th.

I liked the tv show, but it was well-nigh incomprehensible without the books, and I think missed some episodes, making it REALLY hard to understand. And it was incomplete; the first tv season maybe covered the first half of book one--and THAT wouldn't have made sense without the rest of the book.

[Update: halfway through book six, not sure I can go on. SPOILER: Naomi's son decides it's cool to effectively destroy mankind on mother earth. Not yet clear how many people he murders by dropping asteroids on us. Hundreds of millions. Needs some necromancy, so he can be executed, then resurrected and executed again, at least once a day until the sun goes cold. All because he had some abandonment issues, and a manipulative daddy.]

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So this all brings to mind something else. SYFY seems to have changed their game plan ~2 years ago and has stopped making those complete trash low-budget things they were doing for so long. And now we have some far-better-production-values-and-budget shows getting created. OK, and silly stuff like Sharknado.

I like this too. SYFY had devolved into too much fairly bad stuff. Well, it still has some fairly bad stuff, but Killjoys, Expanse, Childhood's End...now if they'd just drop WWE and Ghost Hunters and that kind of dreck. There's lots of stuff better than that they could re-run, and heck they could run those old cheesy 50s monster movies too, and all the star treks, etc. The least of which is better than the low-budget crud they put on.

Job Hunting

egad. it's job hunting time again. I am tired of this...it's not quite retirement time, altho it's close...

Earlier this year was my 40th (yes, 40) anniversary of when I started writing computer programs. Jan 1976. So I've been at it a while. And I'm very good at it.

My employer is not so good at getting new business, these days. Result: a year ago I had a project I was running. That collapsed in Feb due to a mgmt error re funding, and some customer error that we got blamed for also re funding; I had no idea anything was wrong until mgmt said "everybody stop charging this project today." In the spring I wrote a proposal for something new, that dawdled along until late Aug while the customer kept trying to get us to cut our price (while the scope and certainty of failure got larger), and we finally had to say no we aren't going to do this. Then I helped write another proposal that would start Oct 1, and we lost that on price to another group that is going to fail to perform by virtue of having to put really cheap (i.e., inexperienced) staff in 90% of the positions.

And now there's nothing else coming up for me. That's THREE fails this year. So my employer is going to have to lay me off in the next few days. I've been asked to give numbers for doing some contract work. I've never done that before...

So now I'm trying to figure out how to become an actual contractor.

Had an interview today at lunch with another employer just 3-4 miles from my old house...that'd be convenient for a while...we didn't talk about my planning to move and sell my old house in a few more months. I didn't think that was a good topic for this first meeting :)

I'd rather just retire, but I can't afford to do that until after the old house gets sold.

Yesterday I was at the new house. Because I was in the basement, I counted just how many model railroad structure kits I have to build...it's about 500, which means that if I build one a month I'll die before I get too far...one a week takes a decade to complete, and there's not way the bigger ones are only going to take a week--nor would I want them too, lest I be making mistakes all over.

Which means I need to get busy building these things...i.e., I gotta retire.

Which i can't quite afford to do. I gotta figure out how to work remote some of the time, how much to bill for that, etc.

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Next day: agreed with my employer to take a 30-day LOA. Now I can build my outbuilding!