Thursday, November 30, 2006

The Comics Curmudgeon: "He knows if you’ve been bad or good, ladies, and right now it looks like you’re pretty bad
November 30th, 2006



You know, suddenly this is the first Funky Winkerbean sequence I’ve unironically enjoyed since I rejoined the new gloomed up version of the strip. I love the musical notes floating in the air — is it stripper music? Is it Christmas music? Is it somehow, wonderfully, both? I love the way that Santa’s thick black belt, such an iconic part of his thoroughly asexual garb, has suddenly been transformed with a vague aura of S&M. But mostly, I love the way that everyone is leering at sexy Santa with naked lust — except for the mother-to-be, who looks on in unalloyed horror, as if only she can see how very, very wrong this is, and she’s thinking, “My God, has everyone else gone insane?”"

Some commentary from my favorite curmudgeon.

Whoa. Just Whoa. I don't read newspapers, not even their comics, but this is too awesome.

Monday, November 27, 2006

National Novel Writing Month - National Novel Writing Month

On my vacation I spent some of my downtime (mostly my airline flights and some time in the middle of the night and such) on my PDA, stitching together the various source documents I've put together over the past month. Rather to my suprise the end result is a lot above the finish line. My wordcount right now is 72364,
well above the 50k required.

My novel is 13 chapters right now, with three appendixes and almost ten pages of endnotes. It's the longest work I have of my writing (the previous record being a nonfiction work that was lost, and then last year's NaNoWriMo, a novel called Prisoner N at about 51k).

On the unfortunate side, the story has a lot of problems, and is probably at least a few months of work from being really readable.

Also, Google Docs turned out to be inadequate to the task. I ran into multiple problems, including formatting, footnote/endnote functionality, multi file problems, and some accessibility problems. I have made numerous suggestions to the Google Docs team, and may be haunting the newsgroup for a while, as it was almost a very useful tool.

I think it was a good exercise to participate, and I'm going to continue working on this novel (unlike Prisoner N, which I never wanted to see again), and it's given me some ideas on my work process as well.

As a side-effect, I've gotten better with the Frogpad, as using the PDA pen-entry was too painful, and it synched up with my wireless keyboard (barely).

The Frogpad is vastly superior to pen entry, and comfortable on the road, but it's still slower and more unreliable than qwerty or dvorak wired keyboards(perhaps I'll get a USB version this christmas).

On the home front, I'm back in the thick of things at work, where we had some interesting visitors, and will be making a hiring decision soon. Heady stuff!

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

The interview: Robert Pirsig | Review | The Observer

Pirsig is one of my favorite authors, and an important philosopher.

It's a sad interview, for several reasons. It's unlikely Pirsig will write another book, if he's not even going to grant another interview.

Looks like I fell off the horse, I haven't posted in weeks. I'm still in the running for NaNoWriMo, but my notes are scattered across PDA and Computer and paper, so I need to gather those and resubmit. Once it's back together, the final copy will be that link I gave earlier.

I'm going out of town for thanksgiving today, still interviewing and getting applications(craigslist is definitely my first stop for the next opening), and maybe even expanding our office space a lot. Exciting times, my friends.

I'll be back on Sunday. Be smart and safe. Black Friday is coming.

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

craigslist: los angeles classifieds for jobs, apartments, personals, for sale, services, community, and events

Wow. I listed one of our positions at the company here, and was immediately flooded with applicants, many of which look good on first inspection.

Looks like a much better response than when we listed with Monster.com, for those of you who do any hiring in the cities craigslist covers.

Monday, November 06, 2006

The Blog | Nora Ephron: My Weekend in Vegas | The Huffington Post

I must admit, I have no idea who Nora Ephron is, but she's my new favorite journalist, just for this piece, which is perfect.

Sunday, November 05, 2006

outlawpoet's Friends

livejournal was down for most of the day on saturday, which was annoying. I like to see what people are doing on the weekend, and their livejournals are often a convenient way to do so.

A good day at work, without the new guy here, I managed to get a new test mostly finished and into the system. Also, I managed to stir up a hornets nest of issues that will probably resolve into either irrelevancy or interesting new tasks by tomorrow.

I managed a respectable 2057 words today, although I started very late and am still behind. I finished the first chapter, and am finally getting into the plot.

The world is so weird that I'm afraid I'm still infodumping a lot(a term limyaell uses) but I try to do it from my character's perspective.

Also, my character, entirely against expectations, ran out and awkwardly started to seduce a confederate, Bond-style. I really did not have any such thing in the outline, but it really made too much sense to avoid. I'm trying to avoid descending into erotic fantasy, but the way things are going, I'm going to have to work out just what kind of mating rituals these magical freaks have.

Friday, November 03, 2006

AMAZINGPW on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Holy crap, that is an awesome pumpkin.

I suppose I'm doing okay on the novel, I got more time on it today, and made back some of the deficit, but I'm still not doing it, in terms of rate. Also, the way I'm going, more than half of my wordcount is going to be footnotes, which is not cool. Maybe I need to exclude those from this document and the wordcounts somehow.

A good day otherwise, the new guy is doing pretty well. The new office setup is getting comfortable.
YouTube - jugband

A slice of childhood for those of you within +-10 years of me.
Flickr: Photos from outlawpoet

Moved my desk into new digs, and added a monitor (inspired by Troy again), pictures on my flickr link above.

I oriented a new employee today, and so I didn't get done with work and clear until late. I've only had time for some editing and outlining on the novel, that leaves me about a thousand words behind plus tomorrow's quota, not good. I've got plenty of material, but I need some time to work it all out onto the page. We'll see how quick I can do the first two chapters now that they're largely solid.

Thursday, November 02, 2006

Cambridge Consultants - Four cent inhaler offers real alternative for pandemic vaccination

This is extremely promising, and probably for more 'mainstream' medicine, rather than pandemic vaccination, which promises to be an irregular and politicized affair.

Cheap, safe, and requires little doctor supervision for use. Excellent.
Dosage

This is my novel's URL, at least for the time being. Having enjoyed using writely in the past, I've decide to use it for NaNoWriMo.

In terms of scheduling, I've simply replaced my leisure time(video games, books, movies, amusing internet videos) with writing. In this way, I won't cut into my work(since I'm one of the few people in the world who actually enjoys and am interested in my job to the point where I'd be disappointed if I was getting less done in it).

In non novel news, I've installed Shadow Plan, at Troy's urging. We'll see if it's organization helps me at all in my work.

I also replaced my venerable Moleskine with a new one, slightly larger, sketchbook style. I quickly modded it with duct tape to hold a pen/pencil on the outside, and have started carrying it in my cargo pocket.

ok. To bed with me. Save, wordcount, sleep.

Wednesday, November 01, 2006

National Novel Writing Month - Outlawpoet's Profile

My profile above now contains my novel, and the first preface, which I've just written. I've put a widget on my blogspot main page to show current wordcount, but livejournal seems to want me to pay to do any such thing, so I guess I'll just put the widget in my daily posts. Good luck to other participants.

National Novel Writing Month - My Novel

Fortuitously, I am waiting for crystal to get home for the nightly phone call, and it's after 12, so it's November.

My novel this year is a high fantasy world introduction called "Dosage". It's introducing a fantasy world I've designed in part over the past few years(or at least one part of it).

The title refers to the profession of the primary character we follow, who is that world's equivalent of a pharmacologist(to be polite) or a poisoner.

I have two prefaces, 24 chapters and one appendix to write. My goal is to get at least a first draft of all of it by the end of the month, which will probably take me far above the 50k word finishline, but we'll see how I do. I'm spending my time until crystal gets home getting my word counter up, and my first preface written.