Paul William Tenny, born 21 January 1980, in Elmira, New York. Currently living as a freelance screenwriter in Stokes County, North Carolina. Autobiography On Writing Programming Links

Autobiography

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I was born in Elmira, New York, and lived there until I was about eight years old. I've never really bothered to find out why, but my family decided to move to North Carolina somewhere near the end of the 80s. We lived in Kernersville and near High Point for a few years before settling in Stokes County, where I've resided for the past 12 years. From shortly after moving to Stokes County until 1998, I became enthralled with computers, and later information technology. I found that there was pretty much nothing I couldn't do when it came to computers, and working with them became more of a boring chore than exploring a passion. I gave up the field in January or February of '98, and set about finding something that could hold my interest for the rest of my life. Science has always consumed me, and I gave a lot of thought to extended schooling with an eye towards the Astronauts Corps. It's an extensive process that requires vast amounts of knowledge and intelligence just to get started, much less succeed within. Based on how late I would be coming to the game, I projected out that even under the very best of circumstances, I probably wouldn't be eligible for selection until I was in my early to mid forties at best, and the chances that the missions of science and exploration that I would be dedicating the next 20 years of my life to wouldn't even exist by the time I was ready. At some point, my frustration with some of the absolute crap on television and in the theaters pushed me far enough to begin a study of writing. If there is anything I'm good at, it's learning. I can recognize important concepts independent of theme very quickly, and roll them around in my brain until I've come to so thoroughly understand them, that I feel as if I had discovered these things myself. I can do this with virtually anything, and I put every bit of effort into this, and I really didn't even understand why at the time. During the early part of the learning curve, some ideas began sprouting in my mine. Most of them were promising, and I sat down to apply everything I had been learning to see if I could do any better than the people I had been mocking for so long. That screenplay never saw page fifteen, and sits in my desk even now, but it served an incredibly important purpose: it shows me how far I've come in skill and understanding since I started all this two years ago. Back then, a page in a day was worth celebrating, and a good one was worth taking the following day off. Today, fifteen really good pages in a day is the bare minimum, and the sky's the limit.

On Writing

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"Remnants" - Stargate Atlantis: editing. "Reflections" - Stargate SG-1: planning. "Exile" - Stargate Atlantis: super secret. "Deep Down" - Stagate Atlantis: planning. Scripts are technical manuals with flair. They tell the actors what to say and what to do, they tell the set designer what to build and where to build it. You hope that when you're finished, there's a story buried somewhere within their pages. Performed entirely in the readers imagination, they really aren't a lot to go on when you want to know what the final product is going to look like. Shorter than a book, far more compressed than most people would like, they are at the same time both simple in construction and complex in expression. Sometimes the pages come free and easy, sometimes not so much. You just hope the days that produce outnumber the ones that don't, otherwise you're in trouble. It's really easy to lose your feel, you get numb to the excitement of having it all fall into place in that one rare moment of clarity. If you don't get it out of your head and onto paper fast enough, it'll blur, and you'll move on mentally to that next great moment, a scene twenty pages from now that keeps you up for a few nights and makes you want to sing with words. As time goes on, I have many more of these moments where everything freezes in your minds eye and you see it like it's on the big screen, filling up everything, even when it's supposed to be on TV. They come faster than I want them to, always before I've finished dealing with the last one. I'm constantly behind, I can't get into gear fast enough to capture this stuff while it's fresh and alive. I have three or four good scenes for the current script, but they are too far away from where I am now to work with. I have a solid feel for three good episodes, but I can't mess with them until I finish the one I'm working on now. I feel them slipping away, even though I've just begun. So much potential, so much work. Welcome to the life of a writer.

Programming

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SFR - Shoutcast File Recorder (Java) - Done Written in 2004 to save Shoutcast streams to disk. When meta-data is present, each song or video is saved to an individual file, properly named. Works with MP3's and NSV.	free_space - PVR util (C/GPL) - Under Development A win32 console app and accompanying DLL that will report the amount of free disk space and how much time left that disk space represents based on a given bit-rate.
ISO/Core - An Isometric projection engine (Java/proprietary) - Under Development See here for more.	GVVPatch - wrote the native port (C/GPL) - Done Original C#: http://www.nanocrew.net/wp-content/GVVPatch.cs
comskip2vls - PVR util (C/GPL) - Done Converts the frame-range list that comskip.exe creates into both .vls and .wme files that Womble MPEG-VCR can understand (clip list and project file).	smart ftpd - SFTP rewrite (C/GPL) - Under Development A total rewrite of StupidFTPd. Half done.
Frontier Communique - Enterprise mail suite (C/?) - Development Includes a dedicated SMTP server for receiving messages, a dedicated SMTP server for delivering messages, and a file server for managing the message store. Contains three sub-systems for message storage: The master file server, remote/local maildir/mbox, and local via an embedded SQL server (SQLite). Cluster and stand-alone configurations, win32/Linux compatible. Contains a custom memory-caching subsystem for maximum performance under high loads.

External Links

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PGP Key: [0xE6732141] Native C port: [GVVPatch.c]