Without further ado, here is the first chapter.

Forced Significance
Chapter 1
The pen rolled down the table, and landed in the Executive’s lap.

His blank eyes stared straight ahead, and only recognized the presence of the foreign object after several minutes. He looked down, and with one large hand, crudely shaped as if from mud instead of clay, scooped the pen, and placed it upon the table where it once came.

The pen wobbled for a few seconds, then plunged back into its cycle of rotation, until that very cycle deposited the pen back into the lap of the Executive, continuing a larger cycle.

The hand scooped, and placed the pen back onto the table seventeen more times, until three whole hours had passed. Then, as if some inkling of intelligence had suddenly moved into the large head, the hand paused as it was about to drop the pen, and instead placed it into a jar, an inch away.

A few beats passed, and suddenly the behemoth stirred, tipping great clouds of dust into the air as it rose to its formidable height, pushing the aged chair behind it against the wall, and then slowly, almost defiantly, walked towards the open ancient oak door, only pausing to clumsily bang its hand against the wall, until the light switch gave into the violence, and the light dimmed into nothingness.

Outside the study lay a long metal corridor, with flickering fluorescent strips mounted against the walls. As the Executive walked, every light flickered with every step, some even plunging into permanent darkness, and by the time the dinner jacket and tie wearing man had made it to the end of the corridor, practically all the lights were either permanently flickering, or off.

The metal door creaked open, stayed open, and then shut.

The dust slowly settled back onto the floor, the remaining functional lights slowly flickered back to their normal glow, and the pen in the jar sat very still. There was a rumble, a muffled shout, and a hail of gunshots, and then the only sound was the hum of the tubing, casting light onto an unseen corridor.

The metal door then slammed open, and stayed open.

A young woman, maybe in her mid thirties, judging by the lines on her face, half crawled, half ran down the corridor, clutching her sleeved arm, which was wet with a dark vicious substance.

She screamed with frustration when she saw the shut oak door, and started hurling herself against it with great ferocity, until she let go of her arm, and used the handle. The door opened onto a dark study, the harsh light from the tubing casting strange shadows on the plaster walls. Midnight, for that was her name thanks to her parents experimenting with not being conventional, blindly hit the wall, until the light switch, tiring of the constant impacts, gave power to the slightly swinging tungsten bulb on a string, casting a warm, if feeble, glow on the study.

“Sign up for the military, mother said, it’ll do you good, mother said,” she muttered to herself, gritting her teeth in pain. Her arm dripped blood onto the floor covered in dust, forming a pattern of dark blots upon the otherwise light grey floor.

She cast her grey eyes over the single wooden desk, with the slightly archaic high backed desk chair pushed roughly against the wall, leaving the wooden floor visible through tracks in the dust. Her eyes settled on the jam jar, containing two used paintbrushes, and a blue pen, as well as two fluid ounces of water.

Briefly taking in the definite scratch marks, probably the sign of many upon many impacts of the pen on the desk, she picked the pen out of the jar, shaking it slightly to rid it of the clinging droplets of water, and quickly turned and ran out of the room, panting and grunting.

The still slightly swinging tungsten bulb shone upon the drop lets of water on the ground, as they formed a disturbing pattern with the blood mixed with the dust.

The patter of footsteps and missteps continued down the corridor, until the metal door slammed shut, casting an echo down an empty corridor, and causing the dust to break from its shifting dance to scatter in many directions, as the waves of compression and expansion that was the noise of the door, rippled through the air.

Eventually though, all that was left in terms of sound was the trickle of dust falling off the desk, causing more dust to fall off the desk in a cycle that would lead to a bigger cycle. But not for now.

I stayed up all of last night, (and well into the morning), watching the US Election trickle through. I feel that the right man won, but as without a vote, my voice matters not. What’s important is what happens now, to the USA and the world.

While we wait, I’ve prepared a few interesting things.

An image showing the frequency of words used in McCain's concession speech.

A representation of the words most used by President-elect Obama, in his victory speech.

Some time ago, I posted some images displaying the word frequencies in speeches made by Senator Obama and Senator McCain. Here are some similar images from their victory and concession speeches respectively. I apologise for the difference in size, but one is taken off the BBC News website, while the other I had to create myself.

I have to say, on a personal note, this election has been a very interesting, considering it’s the first US Election of my adult life, and despite not being able to vote, I have taken a strong interest in the whole affair. Now we sit back and wait for some time, to see how it all pans out. Hopefully President-elect Obama will prove the critics wrong, although he doesn’t have particularly big boots to fill.

However, this happy election was marred by the passage of Proposition 8 in California, causing me much charigrin. There is not much to say about this, other than how I disagree, but we will wait and see, because eventually the basic human dignity will win out.

I was working in my local St Peter’s Hospice charity shop (link) when my mobile rang. So, when I picked it up, I was shocked to get a call from BBC Factual, asking if I wanted to go over and work on Watchdog. Obviously, this was a little shocking, and I had to initally pant a bit in order to ward off the fictional heart attacks that beset me. I had just accepted that they weren’t going to call, and then suddenly this happens. There’s a first time for everthing, even the BBC calling you when you’re working, to offer you a position.

The strange thing was that initally it wasn’t as good as I had been expecting. When I planned this gap year, back in the day, I didn’t really understand what was important when looking for work, such as time, effort, and the ability to apply to lots of seperate places. So, when I had finally decided to spend a significant amount of time in England, I have to admit, the prospect of moving up to London was a tad daunting.

First of all, I needed a place to stay. London isn’t cheap, I hear. Then there was the revenue loss of not working for a month (even though I’m not working now, I would definitely not be working if I was doing unpaid work for the BBC). So, initally, despite the dream, I was hesitant.

However, I changed my mind after I talked to my Dad. You see, I had forgotten that one of the most powerful resources a person can have is not money, but networks of people, people who are willing to lend an ear, or tell you where to get things, or in this case, give you a place to sleep. There was also the fact I had planned a stint in November with one of my aunts, so this wasn’t a big change of our plans. They’ve let me stay for the month, in exchange for me being a good guest (read: do the dishwasher, help us fix our computers, and cook once in a while).

But of course, life has some irony, because I’m hesitant to accept anything before I know where it is (since I need to know how to commute), and what the hours are (although I’m betting they’re longer on Monday, considering that’s Show Day). So, I’ve left a message on the answering machine, which is the number they gave me, as well as email BBC Jobs.

I’m worried I should have accepted on the spot, and by not being prepared, I’ve missed the chance. But of course, this is that whole “life experience” thing that I went on this gap year for, isn’t it?

Money consists of two main elements.
The first is cash (notes and coins). The total amount of cash in the UK is just over £50bn, with about £43bn circulating outside the banks and £7bn in banks’ safes, tills and cash machines.
But cash is a relatively small proportion of the total amount of money. So what is the rest? (link)

CTRL-Z

CTRL-Z means to suspend a program. For example, you are working with a command and you want to stop it temporary as it is taking too long. To do that, you can use CTRL-Z. You can later restore back the command using the fg command. (link)

These are godsends for us who are just learning the basics of the terminal and all it’s intricasies. Now when I cause my Nethack game to vanish, I won’t fret at all!

So, when you work in Linux terminal you might have noticed some essential things that you would like to have in it. Linux terminal is the most powerful application running in Linux. It can do anything that you can ever think of.

But when you start an application like firefox and after that you would like to use another application while still using firefox and would like to start it from Terminal you can do it.

And it is extremely easy too.

Just type the name of the application you would like to start and end it with a space and the ampersand (&): (link)

This is useful when running graphical programs in an X server, while using ssh. It means I can use Firefox, while making sure that privoxy and tor are running. Hurray!

This is probably what it is like living on your own. I didn’t actually mind it. Since I’m here by myself, for a couple of days, I can do what I like. More enterprising teenagers might organise some sort of “rave” or “party”, or even get some people over for “drinks”. Of course, I seemed to spend my time reading, listening to my music through the stero hifi (which is one of those awesome speaker systems that you can hear the quality difference of mpeg-3 compression, making me smug with my lossless formats), and cooking. Oh yeah, and I may have danced, a bit. But I’m sure most people do that.

Warning, what follows is a very descriptive series of sentences, which may be dull.

So, I found a recipe in Sam Stern’s get cooking (link), for a sausage ragoo, which seems to me a fancy way of saying tomato sauce with sausages. Most of the stuff was in the house, I only had to go to Sainsbury’s for mushrooms, fennel seeds, and small chillis (which they didn’t have, so I got chilli powder instead).

Within the first ten minutes, I knew three things. The first was that chopping onions seriously stings, which I had forgotten, just like how I forgot that stinging nettles seriously sting. The second was that peeling garlic is fiddly, and crushing it without a garlic crusher is incredibly difficult, which is why my fingers now ward away vampires.

The third was that Dad called to tell me he’s in hospital under observation, due to heavy chest pains suggesting an oncoming heart attack. Wow. That’s really difficult to deal with when cooking, you know?

However, in my typical style, I quickly forgot about this when I realised that cooking to music was fun, and that I needed a bigger saucepan, because when the recipie calls for a large saucepan, it means it.

Also, eating raw mushrooms is surprisingly dull. You need to eat a large amount before you get any flavour, and then it’s kind of gross.

Did you know that vegetable stock, or at least the powdered stuff, tastes exactly the same as Cup a Soup? I mean, it’s almost if Cup a Soup is vegetable stock! (My dreams have been crushed.)

However, the dish turned out surprisingly nice, even if the sudden appearance of a duty I had been neglecting did make me compose a long email, which then caused me to forget the pasta, which is why I may have left it simmer a bit long. Although, I don’t think you can really simmer things for too long, I mean, there was still liquid left.

At this point of the evening, it ceased to be evening, and then I was cooking into the wee hours of the morning, because I only started at ten o’clock, because I had forgotten I needed to eat. Eventually, the tiredness, and my Dad’s hospitalisation got to me, and all I could do was stare at the dish for ten minutes, before eating.

Despite my increasing distaste for the world at large at that point, and the sense that I was a miserable failure (no, I didn’t think I was George W. Bush), it was actually a nice meal, and will probably feed at least three of the family when they come back from Cornwall.

Even if I forgot the lemon juice.

When you enable Mail Goggles, it will check that you’re really sure you want to send that late night Friday email. And what better way to check than by making you solve a few simple math problems after you click send to verify you’re in the right state of mind? (link)

Then again, all things can be broken. (link)

Hurray. For. Connecticut.