Telegram Sam

Three geeky things I’m excited about:

  1. Using apt-rpm, I sucessfully upgraded KDE to 3.1 without breaking anything.
  2. My pal Russ built a nifty website called blinktag.
  3. I had a submission accepted at Slashdot on Friday!

Now, if I could just get my lan browsing working, and convince all three of my machines to see (and use) my printer, I’d really geek out.
Huge thank yous to everyone who e-mailed suggestions on printers for my books. I have narrowed the search down to two places, both of them highly-recommended. It’s just a matter of figuring out who will cost less, and who will print on recycled paper.
Regarding the previous entry, I failed to point out my long-held belief that we are the sum of all our experiences, including the ones we regret. If I’d listened to my advice to my 12 year-old self, I would most certainly not be the person I am today. To paraphrase a certain bald captain: “I don’t want my pain taken away. I need my pain.”
Time for bed. I’m taking my family to climb a mountain tomorrow.

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73 thoughts on “Telegram Sam”

  3. Wil:
    Also, don’t forget to take a cell phone, just in case!
    Have fun
    and watch out for that tree!

  5. Which bald captain was it? I didnt think it was a piccard thingy??? I thought Kirk said that in Star Trek V. Oh geeez does this make me a trekkie??? shoot me now! 🙂
    (first time poster, long time reader) (quote nicked from Grosse Point Blank))

  6. 1. I have no
    2. idea
    3. what you’re talking about
    Have a fun climb! Are you Geocaching or is this a relaxing walk? Don’t fall off the mountain! (thinking of SpongBob SquarePant’s “Mount Climb Up and Fall Off”)
    Don’t worry about your 12 year old. You turned out just fine. Besides, he wouldn’t have listened anyway; knowing how 12 year olds are.
    ~Maggie

  7. Cool, your friend Russ has a link to Bruce Campbell’s site. Gotta love that. I still have a crush on Ash…the one without the uni-brow. 🙂
    Have fun hiking with the family tomorrow.

  9. Climb ev’ry mountain
    Search high and low
    Follow ev’ry by-way
    Every path you know
    Climb ev’ry mountain
    Ford ev’ry stream
    Follow ev’ry rainbow
    ‘Till you find your dream
    grrr. where’s my pencil.

  13. Uh Dude,
    I thought it was a rather portly Captain whosaid “I need my pain”. Wasn’t it WFS in Star Trek V when he told Sybock?
    Just wondering…
    And BTW, with that advise you give your 12 year old self, you may end up NOT marrying at all!! You’re not thinking 4th dimensionally!!
    : )
    No regrets…. but damn do I have a lot of them.
    Commander of the Red October

  14. wil, aren’t you happy with who you are now? Because to all of us, you’e turned out to be a wonderful man (the part that we know, anyway). If you would’ve changed anything, you would’ve changed everything. You might not have met your wife, you might not have written your book, hell, you might not have made this website! *gasp* But as it is, sure, u may have done some shitty things, and acted a certain way to others, had some shitty things done TO you, but look at you now. You may not be rich in wealth, but you have a wonderful family, you’re a great writer whos appericiated by many and you’ve done things in life that most of us can only dream of. Chill Wil, You’re great okay…

  15. Everyday when we wake up, we climb mountains for ourselves, by ourselves.
    Tomorrow, you climb as a family.
    Sounds cool, have no idea what it means, and I hope that blinktag.org provides many hours of enjoyment in a much asshat-less environment.
    Thanks for the plug; I’ll bookmark that site now, Mr. Hamil. 😉

  16. hmm. If I had listened to my 12 yr old self, I would have bonked my then girlfriend Dianne when I had the chance. As it was I had to wait another year before that happened.

  18. Why the hell did everyone hate you? (By the way you were talking about Star Trek weren’t you?)
    Wes was always my fave even before i saw stand by me and some of your other work.

  19. I liked Wesley too, but I’m commenting because your last two paras remind me of this song lyric:
    “If I could keep three things forever,
    I’d keep a day you cried;
    I’d keep a day you climbed a mountain;
    I’d keep a place to hide, to hide,
    I’d keep a place to hide.”
    It’s from Trish Nugent, a name that will mean nothing to anyone who reads this, in all probability.

  20. Maybe by “bald captain” he was referring to William Shatner who has been said to wear a hairpiece 🙂

  21. Hi Wil — you bring up a good point about we are the sum of all our experiences — but trust me, that summation might not be what we want. Your entry about your letter to you as a 12 year old inspired me to write my own (http://www.livejournal.com/talkpost.bml?journal=chgowiz&itemid=48926). It was damned painful but will probably end up helping in therapy.
    What I did remember or rediscover is that gut wrenching pain that one can feel at that age. And while those experiences make us who we are today, there’s a good chance that there is much we *don’t* want to be – by 12, we’ve programmed or are finishing programming most of what we’ll take into our adult lives. Reversing that programming is what keeps the therapy business alive and well.
    We may “need [the] pain”, but I would be very willing to explore a future without that pain.
    Enjoy the weekend!

  22. Heh, I do agree about us being the sum of our experiences, even those we regret… I think maybe the things I really do wish I could tell my 12-year-old self are things that might have made me a better person now… which I suppose is what I really need to address. What can I do now to make myself happier? After all, regret is pretty pointless. Though perhaps this little exercise will help us all figure out where to go from here.
    It is way to early for me to be writing anything.

  25. Yay mountains!
    We need more of them.
    And they need to be bigger. Bigger I say!!!
    To the mountain-o-matic! Away!!!
    PS WFS is bald and wears a fungal mat to hide the fact, thus qualifying him as the “certain bald captain”.

  26. Damn Edgar, ya beat me to it buddy! lol
    As soon as I read about “Climbing a mountain with the family”, that song entered my head! and I KNOW I’ll be singing that damned song all week now!
    I’ll have a picture of Wil in Lederhosen in my head all day now! hee hee
    Enjoy your QT hiking with the family Wil.
    Peace and love

  28. 1. ….umm…. ::stares at her monitor with that glassy look in her eyes::
    2. Cool!
    3. Yay!
    And I also agree with you about us being the sum of our experiences. I’ve been through some pretty painful things in my short span of 24 years, but I wouldn’t trade it for the world because it has helped to shape who I am today and at the risk of sounding stuck on myself, I’m happy with the person I have turned into. I may not be perfect, but I can live with myself and my beliefs.
    Have fun mountain climbing! =-)

  29. Congrats on all those “Geeky” achievments, but even bigger congrats on your final statement.
    When I read yesterdays blog and the thread in EE I decided I wouldn’t give myself any advice because it could change the path of my life and I like where I am today. 🙂 Nice quote 😉
    Neph

  30. Or is Telegram Sam a reference to the Bauhaus song?
    Enjoy the mountain climbing.
    –timberwolf

  33. Wil, Have fun climbing that mountain. See ya at the top ;}
    As far as needing your pain, if you were to go back in time and give advice to your 12 year old self, and your 12 year old self took that advice, then when your 12 year old self became your 30 year old self, you would no longer have a need to go back. Since you didn’t go back this time, then you never gave your 12 year old self that advice, which in turn lands you right in the same spot you are in now. Of course that is assuming time is completely linear and there are not alternate dimensions in which every single outcome to a decision does actually take place…
    But that’s enough Temporal Mechanics for one day. I’m going to give myself a headache…
    To those that think Shatner was the captain that maid the comment about the pain, you are right, he *did* make that comment in STV. But I heard somewhere that he too is bald, he just wears a rug on his head. I don’t know for sure…
    I think Picard did make a similar comment in the Episode “Tapestry” though, where Q sends Picard back in time to his academy days, so he can avoid being stabbed through the heart by a Nausicaan. I don’t remember the exact dialogue but I think Picard said something similar, I could be wrong…

  34. Hey Wil,
    You’ve sparked an interest for me to write to my 12-year-old self, but the mid-20s self is still thinking about what to say to her…
    I am the person I am today because of all the pain I went through, but how could I wish that upon any 12-year old?
    Whoa.
    -Jocelyn

  35. I always loved the lines toward the end of Tapestry on TNG. Picard says he always regreted having certain loose threads in his past and that when he messed with them: “when I began to pull on those threads, it unravelled the tapestry of my life.” Always loved that line….
    Patrick

  37. Wow…you’re another step closer to the book being completely done! Congrats again!
    Hope you have/had fun climbing the mountain.
    You know 12 is a rough time & I doubt I would have actually listened to everything anyone/maybe even myself who was 30 had to say about life.

  39. Damn You.
    I upgraded to KDE 3.1, and the _only_ thing which broke was kmail. Do you have any idea how much of a pain it is to not have kmail? Heh, I bet you do.
    /rant
    Anywho, enjoy the trip.

  40. “I upgraded to KDE 3.1, and the _only_ thing which broke was kmail. Do you have any idea how much of a pain it is to not have kmail? Heh, I bet you do.”
    Dude, I am dealing with the same EXACT thing now. You can apt-get install kmail, and it will get some packages, but I haven’t been able to make it work with any real consistency.

  41. So true Wil.
    I hate the things that I regret in my life, but I wouldn’t remove them if I could. I know I would not be the person I am today if I hadn’t had to live those regrets.
    And LIKE who I am today.
    Recycled paper… You know it will probably cost you MORE to print on recycled paper. It’s cheaper to make new paper than recycle old.

  45. Yes, everybody, Shatner is the bald (but rug-wearing) captain. I took a 3-day screenwriting class at UCLA Extension with the woman who wrote the TOS episode “The Tholian Web”, and she told the following story–
    Her involvement with Star Trek led to a career in writing and producing, and at one point she was on staff at the show featuring Shatner in his other most famous roll, T. J. Hooker. She told of coming up with a scene for one episode: either Heather Locklear’s character or the guest “damsel in distress” would (somehow) be tossed off the Santa Monica pier, and Shatner-as-T.J Hooker would leap into the water to save her.
    The producers said no. She said, “But I know Bill, this is just the kind of heroic stuff he loves! It’s perfect for him!” They still said no. Because, they told her, they weren’t sure Mr. Shatner’s toupee would remain in place. The scene ended up going to either James Darren or Adrian Zmed.
    After the laughter in class died down, the instructor noted that the problem was solved by the time of ST-IV, since Mr. Shatner’s hairpiece didn’t float away during his swim with the whales…
    Sorry to be long-winded, Wil, but I like that story and it finally seemed to be post-related enough to pass along.
    Hope the climb was fun! (and that everyone managed to avoid poison ivy, sunburn and bug bites!)
    Best to all,
    Syd

  46. Wil: If you’re looking for a good book publisher at a fair price, try http://www.iuniverse.com. Your book can then be available through Barnes and Noble.com, Amazon.com, and a few other big chain bookseller sites. Just in case nobody else mentioned it first. I dunno if iuniverse.com will publish on recycled paper, and that’s a good question I’ll have to ask them sometime, when one of my manuscripts are ready for publication.
    And uh… good luck on the mountain climbing. Take pictures. LOTS of pictures. And post ’em!

  47. Wow, a T. Rex reference! Now I have to whip out my box set and spend some time with the boppin’ elf.
    Rattlesnake out with your tail feathers high,
    Jitterbug left and smile to the sky.

  50. haha, I totally just saw you on Nickelodeon doing an interview dealie at a con. That was odd.
    Anyway, you are an awesome writer..keep it up!

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