Gathering Darkness

[This entry brought to you via my involvement in 750words.com. I really enjoy the service - if you aspire to be a writer, you should check it out.]

This past weekend, I watched a beautiful documentary called "Stone Reader". Directed by Mark Moskowitz, it's the story of a book called "The Stones of Summer", by a man named Dow Morrison. The book itself is described as a "coming of age novel" set in Iowa, telling a story which "succeeds in conveying the rebellious energies of youth, the essential madness of adolescent reality."

In 1972, the 18 year old Mark Moskowitz read a book review in the New York Times written by John Seelye, reviewing Mossman's novel. Continue reading "Review: Stone Reader"

Looking around the Intertron Tuesday night for ways to improve my writing skills, I stumbled across a website called 750words.

Much different from a blog, the core idea of 750words is that everything you write is private, and that WHAT you write is less important than THAT you write. For me, this was a liberating idea - many of the emails, stories, and blog posts that are rolling around in my mind never go anywhere because I can't get them up to a level of quality that I am comfortable sharing with other people. With 750words, the content itself is invisible to others, but it does give you a way to track how well I'm doing by publishing a very interesting page of statistics - in fact, you should go look at my stats page for 2010-MAY-20 right now.

They also have many "game theory" kind of things going on - there's a point system, and they have a monthly challenge that you can opt-in to where you commit to writing the full 750 words every single day for an entire calendar month - if you make the commitment and you miss even one day, your name goes on the "Wall of Shame", but if you make it every single day your name goes on the "Wall of Amazingness" - and, if you had previously been on the Wall of Shame, getting your name on the "Wall of Amazingness" would wipe out the shameful entry entirely. The site's creator also strongly encourages you to design your own rewards and consequences - it seems a lot of people promise to treat themselves if they accomplish it - imagine my surprise to discover that one of his suggested "consequences" is "If I miss a day or more, I will donate $_ to help support 750 Words." He's a very clever man, this Buster Benson fellow.

You can read more about the project on the About page, or you can just open your own account and start writing!

My wife says I need to be more open with people, so here goes:

On Friday of last week, I was diagnosed with thrombophilia, due to a genetic condition called Factor V Leiden. This caused a series of bloodclots in my left leg (deep vein thrombosis, or "DVT") as well as one in my lung (called a pulmonary embolism, or PE). Continue reading "Thrombophilia - like Hemophilia, but the other way 'round"

Got this one today. Unforunately, I can't even tell by listening what the guy is trying to say:

Hey Joey, this is carl from fast now. This call about getting screwed. I couldn't find one that that's exactly but I think. You, hey, there's a way to make a Marge and if you any questions, give us call back.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090815152830AAEQaml

You probably don't read the Bad Astronomy blog, so you probably haven't noticed that he's put up his annual review of what he considers the top 10 astronomy pictures of 2009. Personally, I think this photo of the Earth from the Rosetta spacecraft (click image for article and link to larger version):. There are some other excellent images, I recommend you check it out.

Turns out, there's an extension for that. Even if you're a Google Chrome user.

Thought some of you might find this funny:



You can read more awesome satire like this at Business Guys on Business Trips.

I cannot, for the life of me, understand why we STILL have "developers" who don't know that a + sign is a valid component of the "username" portion of an email address.

Those of you who listen to the TrekWest5 podcast know that we are starting to make more use of my Google Voice account. In testing the viability of this as something to help our listeners give comments, Peter called and recorded a rambling message. When we logged into the account, we were greeted with the following automated transcription to go along with this recording. Continue reading "Google Voice Transcripts Are Hilarious"

Brought to you from Wil Wheaton's (@wilw) twitter, I give you 101 Muppets of Sesame Street...there was more than one entry that made me think "WTF?!", and you'll find a couple of them behind the jump. Continue reading "So Many Things Lost"

I'm currently reading "The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives" by Leonard Mlodinow, and came across the following passage that I thought would catch the attention of some of the aspiring authors here.
I'm quite enjoying the book, and need to thank my good friend BigE for buying it for me. Here's the quote:

Suppose four publishers have rejected the manuscript for your thriller about love, war, and global warming. Your intuition and the bad feeling in the pit of your stomach might say that the rejections by all those publishing experts mean your manuscript is no good. But is your intuition correct? Is your novel unsellable? We all know from experience that if several tosses of a coin come up heads, it doesn't mean we are tossing a two-headed coin...

Continue reading "Randomness and Getting Published"

Tuesday should see the release of Firefox 3.5, which has a lot of exciting features I hope to be able to take advantage of from this blog - including using localStorage to implement the "Auto-save" feature, which should cut down on a lot of the un-published drafts that accumulate every few months. I encourage you to download the new release and give it a try!