Category: NaNoWriMo 2006

This time of year, anything that keeps you from having to set foot in the post office is an unalloyed good thing. So when I had to mail a package today, I went to the USPS website to pay for a postage-paid label I could use.

Safari still just doesn’t cut it: it does everything except print the label, for whatever reason. <grumble> FireFox — which I switched to a couple of weeks ago — has no trouble at all. I wasn’t sitting here at the laptop when I started, otherwise Safari’s continued weakness wouldn’t have been noticed.

Has anyone gotten this to work?

Technorati Tags: apple, safari, sucks less, usps

• Movie Preview for Stardust
  I had no idea Peter O’Toole was in this?!
  (tags: movies)

The second windstorm hit us last night at about 1 AM and roared around the house til 4 or so, making sleep difficult. The power went out right around 1 and came on again at 11 or so.

Pictorial evidence here.

We abandoned the upper levels here at Thistle Dew and slept in the basement living area. It was quieter but still noisy and the shadows against the blinds were in constant motion.

<yawn> This is like a hangover without the drinking. I’m not down with unearned punishment.

Since Seattle City Light is publicly-owned, I wonder if burying these residential powerlines could be done as part of a bond issue or levy?

How evil are you?

Dear Novelist,

You did it.

Despite everything else going on in your busy life, you managed to pull off the creative coup of writing a 50,000-word novel in just one month.

When the going got tough, you got typing, and in four weeks, you built vast worlds and set them in motion. You created characters; quirky, interesting, passionate souls with lives and loves and ambitions as great as yours. You stuck it out through the notoriously difficult middle stretch, and pressed onward as 80% of your fellow writers dropped out around you.

And now look at you: A NaNoWriMo winner. And the owner of a brand-new, potential-filled manuscript. It’s an amazing accomplishment, and we’re proud to have had you writing with us this year.

Continue reading “close the book on it”

• BBP Messenger Laptop Bag
  Missed this in the earlier bag roundup. cheaper than most of the others too.
  (tags: markets)
• Unclaimed Territory – by Glenn Greenwald: The meaninglessness of tenure
  well, he doesn’t actually mention tenure, other than to point the fatuousness of people or more precisely, law professors, who enjoy its perks. But they respond predictably enough.
  (tags: values culture politics)
• STNG ::Avoid the loony Zune
  too much to excerpt here but there’s so much wrong with the Zune, it’s amazing it ever shipped. Just read the article for yourself, especially if you have been at all tempted.
  (tags: hardware microsoft music markets)
• Jonathan Chait: Bring back Saddam Hussein – Los Angeles Times
  Yup, this is what we’ve come to. A longer campaign that was needed to defeat the Axis powers in WWII on three continents and two oceans, for what? To inflame civil war/ethnic cleansing and now someone proposes this?
  (tags: iraq worstpresidentever war)
• First Snow
  yeah, that’s about how it looks from here.
  (tags: weather seattle)
• Open Source Gift Guide
  “Here is my suggestion for the friend who already has everything: make a donation in their name to one of the many great organizations that work tirelessly to support the ideals of open source and free culture, including, but not limited to:”
  (tags: technology democracy politics values)

There was a time when email was actually useful, when you could communicate with strangers and bridge gaps of all kinds. Now we have this.

I get a couple of hundred pieces of spam a day, almost all of which get zapped by Mail.app’s filtering. I see perhaps two per day that get through and fewer still false positives.

I liked the Internet better when it wasn’t a collection of walled gardens.

Now playing: Don’t Ask Me Questions by Graham Parker & The Rumour from the album “Passion Is No Ordinary Word—The Graham Parker Anthology (1976-1991)”

white:~/Documents/nanowrimo 2006 paul$ echo “50000 / 30 * `date +%d`” | bc -l
39999.99999999999999999984
white:~/Documents/nanowrimo 2006 paul$ echo “50000 / 30 * `date +%d`” | bc
39984

The -l flag would, I thought, give greater precision (not that I need it, but one of the examples I saw used it and the compared results seemed strange).

-l, –mathlib
Define the standard math library.

This is my poor man’s daily goal setter. Lucky me, I am a day ahead, according to this. I might just make 50K, after all.