I LOVE Japanese ginger dressing. It’s always been my favorite part of visiting a Hibachi restaurant, and it’s healthy and light. But over the years, attempts to find a bottled substitute have universally failed. Most are like ginger-scented vinegar. They are without exception really, really awful.
So now that I’m the family chef, I decided to make my own, and it turns out it’s really simple:
Like a lot of families, the Hardwick household spent a good part of the 2020 pandemic lock-down re-evaluating and adjusting our lifestyle. For us, a big part of that involved food. Kristina hates to cook and I never learned how, so for most of our adult lives, we’ve eaten far too much frozen or take-out meals. That ended in 2020. I started cooking, at first to take stress off of others and make the most of the foods on hand or readily available, later for health and economy and the too-often neglected in modern life, simple sociability of the evening meal.
I bought a high-quality ceramic coated wok and a Japanese knife of Damascus steel for making stir-fry. I mastered Korean Gyeran-mari (or rolled omelette), and found a new love for ready-made Indian sauces, tofu, and a host of other light and tasty alternatives to the high-fat, high-carb working man’s diet our parents learned on the farm and bequeathed us.
We will never go back. I’ve lost 50 pounds and have developed a striking intolerance for most American convenience food. But of all our improvisations and experiments, none has been as big a hit and made as enduring an impressions as my new go-to lunch, the pandemic taco.
New writers these days are instantly awash in all kinds of advice (some even useful) but none is better, I humbly suggest, than that you don’t have to master everything all at once. This is true of writing craft, but it’s especially true of the business side of the game, from website development to marketing.
When I started writing professionally, I didn’t know much about the business, but I knew I needed to build a newsletter so that I’d have a list of people I could get news out to later when I had novels and such to sell.
At the Writers of the Future workshop, Mike Resnick gave me hell about not belonging to my local writer’s guild, and it was good advice. The Houston Writers Guild was at something of a zenith of activity at the time and I got invited to participate in a number of appearances from which I collected a tiny buy growing list of reader email addresses.
From time to time, I get kind notes from readers favorably comparing my work to the classics of old. I also occasionally get messages asking how you can help promote my work and bring me one step closer to quitting the day job and doing this full time.
Well here’s something…
I’m no Matt Damen, but I did okay with the ladies back in the day–I guess. I was and am a nerd. I grew up in a world of books and ideas. I was that kid in the back of the class with his nose in a book to keep from having to make small talk before class, the kid in the comedy flick who never seems comfortable in his own skin, because at just over 6’1″ and adorned in whatever my mom found on the Blue-Light special, I wasn’t. I towered over the other kids, yet let myself be bullied. I avoided sports…and stayed scrawny. When I reached college with my touring bike and access to a natatorium, that all changed, but it never occurred to me I might be physically imposing until one night in a convenience store when the checkout clerk, unaware that her friend (who had come up to shout through the door and give me shit about my t-shirt) was sleeping with me, shouted her name and flashed the international standard facial semaphore for “are you fucking kidding? He’s gonna kick your ass!”
This week began our return to the daily commute, 3 days a week after 14 months fully at home. My day job is in IT, and the first thing we all noticed about working from home, everyone all the time, was the increase in productivity and reduction in stress. It took a while to sink in just how much additional time it bought us, and today, at the conclusion of my first full(ish) week back in the office, I felt the full weight of that additional time being taken away. Writing time–gone. Family time–gone. My wife comes home exhausted every day.
So today I put down the sums and added it up, for real.
The saddest thing I’ve seen in a while is a sign, hand-written with a beleaguered blue marker on a folded sheet of copy paper taped inside a glass door: “Closed until 7/13/20.” It had later been scratched through and updated to “until further notice.”
Double-masked, fully vaccinated, yet with no small trepidation, I ventured this morning out of the rain and into the labyrinth of tunnels underlying much of Houston’s downtown, just before 10 am, before any office workers are headed to lunch, when most stores are closed and restaurants are just starting preparations for lunch. Houston’s subterranean business district lives off this market, the lunchtime office worker rush. Aside from the many restaurants, convenience and gift shops, optometrists and printers all serve the needs of the itinerate workforce. 170,000 or so people who come and go every day of the workweek—a force that for the last 14 months has been largely absent.
In a browser, Modern computer applications contain thousands of text strings used within the user interface to populate help text, buttons, dialogs, and other controls. Localization is used to swap these text strings out for those appropriate to other languages so the application can readily adapt to users around the globe. This post isn’t about how that’s done but about a method for addressing the single greatest weakness of localization–getting all those strings translated into every language supported by the application. Generally, they’re stored in properties files of one form or another and sent out to language experts (or volunteers) for translation.
This quickly becomes a logistical nightmare nightmare, and unless each translator is very adept, and every translations is made in the context of the application, results can be mixed. It’s a lot of work and can be a great expense that many smaller developers simply can’t afford, meaning that many applications simply don’t support as many languages as they might, or support them as well as they should.
I will NOT be attending Comicpalooza this year due to the pandemic, or any other appearances for the first half of the year. AmadilloCon and Fencon…we shall see.
New stories coming!
Galaxy’s Edge Magazine: The Snows of Maxwell Montes – A cynic finds purpose in sacrifice on the harshest of planets.
Analog Science Fiction & Fact: Sample Return – A woman bets everything on a fishing expedition — into the clouds of Jupiter!
