Joyce’s Musings

Growing up, my relatives were adamantly determined to erase any trace of homosexuality in our family. If any male child showed signs of being effeminate, my grandfather would advocate beating the gay out of him. Female children were expected to show proper female pursuits and interests. If you stepped out of line… well… I saw what happened many times to aunts and uncles and cousins that transgressed the family in much smaller ways. They were completely erased from the family, as though they didn’t exist.

You can imagine that, growing up in this environment, I was not keen on revealing to people that I was a queer woman.

That’s not something that many straight cisgender people can really understand. Growing up with the knowledge that you’re not being true to yourself, but without the ability to articulate just how. Without the ability to say, “I’m ______.” is quite a challenge. If you acknowledge it as true inside your own head, you risk other people finding out what’s going on inside your head. The only way to be safe is to deny it to yourself, to others, to everyone. You must deny the very essence of who you are and what you want out of life. Most folks can barely imagine what that’s like.

It took me until college to admit I was bisexual, but I didn’t come out to other people fully until years later. I gave lip service to being queer, but I spent most of my time pretending to be completely straight. I had even entered into a “straight” marriage. When I finally came out to family and friends and started to live a queer lifestyle, well… things went badly.

My marriage fell apart, obviously. But beyond that, I also experienced a lot of… abuse… from my blood relatives. They erased me, just like they had done to other family members over the years. Even my mother and my sister told me that they never wanted to talk to me ever again. Family members went so far as to threaten to try to get me fired from my job in retaliation for “what I had done to them.”

Despite everything that happened to me in my journey to self-acceptance, I still find myself continually surprised by the sheer intensity of violence that can be directed towards queer people. I can’t quite bring myself to understand that there really are people out there that literally want me dead for the simple nature of who I am and whom I love. I can’t understand that mentality and attitude. I can’t grok that it even exists.

When my mother died two weeks ago, I raced back home to Cleveland to be present at her funeral. I knew that I had been erased from my family for being queer, but I had no idea of the sheer extent of their hatred of me. They erased me from the obituary. They told me that I wasn’t allowed to come to my mother’s viewing, and would only be let in after everyone else had left. Some family members called me and badgered me into accepting their terms for grieving for my mother. My step-father went so far as to hire a cop to keep me out of the funeral home.

The idea that family could do this to flesh and blood was shocking to me. The idea that people could let their hatred and anger make them keep me out of my own mother’s funeral was unfathomable. How could people be like this?

I went to the funeral home anyways and held my own little service on the sidewalk out front Friendly family and friends came to me and expressed their grief. We cried together, shared stories about my mother, and talked about her life. At many points, it just felt like I was on some sort of outdoor patio for the funeral home, and there wasn’t anything unusual going on.

My hateful blood relatives are just a mild example of this. Recently, two members of a Sacramento radio “shock jock” show made horribly violent comments about transgender children on the air. I listened to the original broadcast and follow up show today, and was stunned by the ferocity of their attack. They apologized profusely for their comments in the follow up show, but I was still stunned.

I’ve also read some recent stories about children in grade school that were murdered by their parents or class mates for being too effeminate or acting gay. And still other stories where children who may or may not have been gay committed suicide because the other students were saying they were gay and calling them “fags” and things like that.

Somehow, to people like these, queer people like myself no longer become human. We’re monsters. Perverts. Sickos. Whatever phrase they want to use to describe us. In their minds, we deserve less than equal rights regarding marriage and discrimination. According to them, we deserve to be erased, murdered, raped, destroyed, beaten, etc.

It makes me all the more glad for the people in my life that are supportive of me being queer. It makes me appreciate the fact that I can go downtown at the end of this month and see millions of people cheering for San Francisco’s annual pride parade and festival. I’m lucky to live amongst friends, but there are so many queer people that aren’t so lucky. So many people that still are searching for acceptance in a world that hates them.

It’s really quite sad.

I interviewed a candidate for a position with the company I work for today. It was an absolutely beautiful interview, one of those interviews where you are just talking to the person and not worrying so much about asking your standard set of questions. During the conversation, he asked me what drew me to software engineering as a field. I wanted to share my answer with you.

Before college,my experience with computer programming was limited to writing simple programs in various flavors of BASIC. My first exposure to programming was back in 1992 when I attended National Computer Camp between 5th and 6th grade. There, I learned about apple BASIC on those old Apple IIes. I found it utterly fascinating and fun, and I began to stay after school in the computer lab to play with the computers there and try to learn more about how to write programs for them. My family got our first computer in 1995, and I discovered QBASIC. I also did GWBASIC when I took a programming course in high school. My earliest programs were really simple text adventure games, which evolved into database driven text adventure games, ASCII art arcade games, and stuff like that.

But it wasn’t until college that I really got hooked. It was fall of 2000, and I was attending John Carroll University studying to become a high school math teacher. As part of the curriculum, I was required to take an introduction to computer science course, which would teach basic programming skills in the C programming language. After taking that course, my life’s path forever changed.

I found programming to be simple and intuitive. Yet more than the simplicity, I found software to be simply beautiful. There is something absolutely incredible in the structure of a program. In memory management and object relationships and data structures and algorithm design…

Like an abstract Rube Goldberg machine, all of the parts fit together and do their job well. There is so much beauty there, and when you’re looking at a well designed program, a program where the data structures and simple, intuitive, well-documented, efficient, etc… You’re looking at a work of art on par with the paintings and sculptures you can find in museums. Good programmers are brilliant artists, painting with lines of code, rather than a brush or paint.

And that’s why I became enamored with programming, because once I started to experience that, I wanted more. I began to play with assignments to see how fast I could complete them. I joined the swarm research team to give me more ideas for programs I could write. I began writing all sorts of different games, tools, libraries, etc. whenever I could find time to spare to do it. And after college, I got jobs doing programming for home automation interfaces, autonomous agent coordination algorithms, and more. I love what I do and what I create. It’s more than a job or a skill. It’s an art form. An ability to create things that do things and work.

It’s functional beauty, manifested in the most subtle of ways.

And that’s why I’m a programmer.

“Joyce!

What happened to your website? It was completely gone for a week or two. And then when it came back, it looked screwed up. Half your entries were missing and your About Me page is gone, among other things. What’s going on?”

Well, dear friends, what has happened is a rather frustrating series of events. I originally had the idea that I would host this weblog on my own personal webserver. The idea of totally doing it myself really appealed to me, but I only had my Windows gaming machine available for the task, so it was my only choice. A week of playing around with WAMP and, and voila, we had http://joycemurton.com!

But time passed, and well… I started thinking about security. Sure, I can run WAMP, but Windows is so insecure eh? So I decided to change my tune and switch to running my webserver in Linux. Yet, being a bit of a gamer, I decided that I wanted my PC to be running Windows. Thus, the only way to run my webserver in Linux was to run Linux as a virtual machine on my Windows box.

It took a lot of beating on that thing to make it work. In addition to struggling to figure out which of the thousand VMWare products I needed to use to do what I needed to do, I also had all the usual concerns of setting up a whole new machine as a webserver and such. Since this was my first time doing so, it was quite a challenge. To make matters worse, once I had that working, I started running into another problem: Every few days, my Windows box would just BSOD for no apparent reason.

But finally… FINALLY… after 2 weeks of pouring over documentation, man pages, and web forums, I managed to get the machine up and running. Oh joy of joys! It was totally working! FINALLY! My webserver was live and running on a PROPER Linux distro. I went to bed that night happily clutching my teddy bear, joyful in my accomplishment and ready to move onto my next project.

I woke the next morning to find that my PC had died. Not just died, but had completely and utterly fried. There was even a smell of burnt electronics in the air. I did some investigation, and it turned out that the mother board, which has been having issues for nearly a year, was toasted.

*sigh*

With my next paycheck, I bought hosting on LaughingSquid and now enjoy the secure knowledge that my blog is securely hosted somewhere. Unfortunately, in the process, I managed to accidentally lose my original SQL database, so I had to restore from an older backup, which wound up costing me two entries on the blog, and my About Me page. I also lost a lot of my configurations and such.

Ah well. So that’s what happened here.

You’re wondering why I haven’t actually taken the time to fix all this up again? Well, to be honest, after spending 2-3 weeks doing nothing but getting my blog all set up, I’m not too keen to digging back in to work more on it just now. In addition to that, I’ve been focused on my actual job-job, because I’ve been working on a new and interesting project that’s been consuming all of my free time. I do plan on getting the blog fixed up at some point, but frankly, I need a few weeks break from it, ya know?

Anyways… stay tuned. This blog will be fixed up some time in the next few weeks, and then we can FINALLY get to the business of using it as a place to store my various creations. I’ve actually got a few things to share that I’d love to put up here!

A photograph of some set cards.

I absolutely adore board games. At one point in my life, I owned over a hundred board games and would play them every chance I get. I don’t really have time to play as many games as I used to these days, but I still very much enjoy them whenever I get the chance to play them.

One of my favorite games is Set, pictured to the right. Set is one of two games that I’ve ever found that truly challenge both the logical and creative parts of my brain. (The other game being the game of Go.)

While living in Cleveland, my best friend Stacy and I would often get together to play the game. She and I would fly through the game, calling set after set, leaving most onlookers baffled at how fast we were identifying those sets. She usually won, but that never stopped me from having a blast.

I was really sad when I moved to California and had to leave her behind. One of the things that I left behind with her was that amazing experience of battling someone so incredible at the game of Set. So I resolved to find a version of Set that could be played over the internet.

Unfortunately, I have been unable to find any online versions of the game that truly capture the full experience of playing Set in person. So I decided to embark on the journey of making my own version of Set. The end product is intended to fully replicate that “in-person” experience, with the experiencing of calling set, seeing the cards be dealt, etc.

Now, I haven’t done any application development outside of control system software for several years, so I decided to go with my old mainstay from back in college and use Java to do the project. Unfortunately, I’ve been much too busy for most of the time since I began the project, so I would only be able to handle one small feature a night. Then I decided to completely overhaul the graphical framework to properly use Java’s Swing architecture, which resulted in another delay. As a result, the current version is more about functionality than it is about good user experience or nice UI design.

Screenshot of the first implementation of gjSet

You can download the JAR file for the project here. It works on Windows and Mac machines only for the moment, due to a slight error on my part. You can download the native Mac app for the project here.

The next phase of the project will be to build a game server that players can log into and run games over. Since I’ve been itching to learn PHP and MySQL, I’m going to investigate how well those technologies could be used to create such a thing.

As always, stay tuned.

There’s this interesting tale that started 4 years ago, in December of 2004. For several weeks, I had been thinking that I needed to get my butt in gear and actually get myself motivated to do some coding. I’d had a problem with finding time to do this in my spare time since leaving college. It seemed that I always found myself distracted or unable to focus.

Anyways, I finally decided to get a little bit of headway made in the process of putting together a programming project. I wanted to create a little website where I could share photos, poetry, essays, software, and other things I’ve created with other people. I had only vaguely heard of “blogs” before, but had no direct knowledge of any of them. A friend of mine suggested checking out LiveJournal as a possible blog, so I did.

At the time, I thought that I might be able to take the LiveJournal source code and play around with it some to create something that would suit my needs. It never really satisfied my needs, but flash forward four years, and here I am installing WordPress, a blogging tool that looks to do exactly what I wanted to do with LJ so many years ago.

But I haven’t been sitting on my laurels all this time, oh no! That little venture into LiveJournal 4 years ago resulted in a whirlwind of adventure and self-growth that wound up changing my entire life. It resulted in my moving to California, living the live I’ve always dreamed of living, and becoming the person I’ve always wanted to be. It has been four years of struggle and dramatic change. In the process, I went through a costly divorce, but found the freedom to begin exploring my own concepts of love and relationships. I stopped my debt from growing and started to bring it under control. I finally learned how to socialize and make friends with other people.

I’m a whole new person, living an amazing new life. But it is finally time to return to what I originally intended that little LiveJournal for. It is time to return to growing and building my programming skills, if for no other reason than the fact I love to code. It’s been far too long since I created things on my own time, not for work.

This blog is intended to house all of my creative projects, whether they be essays on the wonder of using Mac OS X for the first time, poems about my life, philosophical ponderings about the nature of the universe, or little bits of software that I’ve created.

So watch this space! There’s a lot that’s going to be happening here.