Hello, I Must Be Going

Wednesday, March 07, 2007 • 05:20:52 PM EST

Behold, the miracle of AppleScript: iTunes has just started playing Cole Porter's "I Can't Be Bothered Now" (as sung/danced by Fred Astaire). This only happens when Mail notes that the number of emails from readers who wonder if I haven't been blogging in a while because I'm desperately ill or something has reached a certain critical pre-defined limit. It exists to remind me that perhaps an update is very much in order.

It also serves to remind me that you guys care about me deeply, which I appreciate, or perhaps that my photos make me look like I'm perpetually sliding along that thin line between life and death. Here I make a note: "try to go out and get some more sun."

Well. Nothing dramatic to report. This is merely one of those periods when I twist my neck around and think "Hey, it's all the way up to my shoulder blades; I coulda sworn that I was merely up to my ass in work just a few days ago." The name of my pain: my next book. It's about a certain Major Software Release that I probably shouoldn't discuss. But suffice to say that although it was once a little bit charming to find myself starring in this sick little production of "Waiting For Godot," I am now ready for Gogo to ****ing show up, already. And yet, though this is indeed the place, he continues to keep me waiting.

Alas, I've long-since resigned myself to the fact that the author of my personal story isn't the finest English playwright that the 20th century ever produced. He's meanspirited, cheap, and tacky, like the author of a licensed series of "Star Trek" novels. So rather than cheerfully continue this endless cycle of waiting and expectation indefinitely, I'm forced to push things along as best I can.

"Triage" is the center of my life. There are nearly thirty chapters in this next book. Every few days, I complete and submit a few more chapters that I think, I hope, (dear God) won't be thrown too far out of whack when Godot finally appears and I get my first clear look at him. But (largely due to some prodding from my editors) I must keep making progress. I have already burned through the Completely Safe chapters, and currently halfway through the stack of chapters that probably can't be completely invalidated by unannounced features. Soon, I shall be forced to start working on those chapters that may never see the light of day in whatever form I initially submit them in.

Oh! And Microsoft Word, after years of stability, decided that enough was enough last week. An hour before I was about to submit three or four chapters, it crashed, and trashed all of those chapters' style sheets…which forced me to spend an entire day carefully re-applying styles to 22,000 words of text, one paragraph at a time. On a Windows machine, because that was the only stable copy of Word I had in the office.

The phrase "Good grief" comes to mind, with "Mother of God" on-deck and "Mother-f***ing ****-****ing ***-g****ed ****-knocker!!!!" leaning on a fungo bat at the edge of the dugout and trying to steal signals from the mound.

Suffice to say that if you've been meaning to get a full-back tattoo representing some being of serene divinity, don't come knocking on my door to shoot some photographic reference. At the moment, I'm only qualified to pose for the image of the big vengeful dude riding a fire-snorting skeletonized horse through the skies to pursue Meat Loaf and his scantily-clad chick across the molten outskirts of Hell, on the cover of an upcoming double-LP.

If you're in the market for such a thing, you have my email address.

Well, anyway. Time spent not-blogging leaves me with more time to contemplate blogging. Specifically, the future of Yellowtext.

Lots of you have emailed me in response to last month's post, offering input on What You'd Like To See In This Blog, Feature-Wise; Yes, Of Course, You'd Like Me To Post More Frequently, As Would I; Thank You, Honestly, For Now All I Want To Know Is "Would You Like To Post Comments" And "Would You Prefer A Full RSS Feed", You Know, That Sort Of Thing; No, It's Not That I Don't Appreciate Your Input, It's Just That…

(et cetera.)

Damn me, but I find myself seriously pondering a move to MovableType.

Yellowtext serves one purpose only: I amuse myself with it. Writing stuff like this entertains me. I don't update every day because I've always tried to stick to the Mr. Ed rule (never speak unless you have something to say), plus doing this 365 a year feels like actual work.

Of course, many bloggers (like my fianceé, Ms. Emma Kennedy) (yes, sensation-seekers, in further correspondence, she has upgraded me to "pseudo-fianceé," from "non-committally contemplating my pseudo-proposal" status…score one for Captain Smooth) can pull off the trick of blogging on events both big and small,on a daily basis and making it consistently entertaining. Alas, that particular color of Kryptonite still eludes my grasp, and thus my plans for global conquest lie in shards at my feet.

But it's not that important, truly. My ego eats a bowl of Wheaties with a glass of raw egg yolks every morning, and is a hale and hearty specimen. Even so, it isn't such a monster that I'll ever make the mistake of thinking that the world is a frailer and shabbier thing without daily insights into my wit and wisdom and my ongoing Larry King-like descent into dementia.

And having my own AppleScript blogging app is part of that entertainment. Yup, I'm a freak: I enjoy building software. This whole cycle of coming up with ideas for features and then banging on the problem until I actually have a menu item or a button for it is an enduring thrill. Even when I'm confronted with the problem of switching to a full-feed RSS format (difficulty: 3/10), or incorporating a database to make it easier to go back and edit stuff (7/10) or figuring out a way to allow you folks to leave comments.

The difficulty of that last one can't be conveyed via a mere fraction. I'd need to haul out some MathCAD-like tools to depict the expression ((infinity minus infinity raised to the minus-one power)/10).

AppleScripting that functionality is, in itself, an 8/10.

You can see where I'm going with this.

See, the crunchy whole-wheat Programmer side of me is having fun writing complicated code. The sugar-frosted Creative Type enjoys being able to spot a poorly-constructed sentence in Paragraph Three and then easily abjure the word usements into something a little more fringlacent, even though the thing's already been posted.

Which side wins the fight? The Creative Type is probably in better physical condition, but the Programmer (like all of his species) benefits from both a greater cunning and a lesser capacity for compassion and mercy. It's kind of a push.

The tie-breaker question is (again) "Are you publishing this stuff with the idea that you'd like people to read it?" with the follow up "So anything that helps people to find and read the blog…that would be a good thing, right?"

So let's see what happens. I think I'm going to have to install MovableType on an old tower Mac I've got here and see if anything about it makes me want to tear out my retinas, tunneling in through the back of the skull instead of through the front of the eyeball. If not, then I might have to make a fundamental change to operations around here.

Stay tuned. But no matter what happens, I can probably turn it into a column and thus get paid for the experience. God, I love my job.

Meanwhile, I'm on this week's Mac Break Weekly, so go ahead and check that out if you've still got some room on your iPod.

As for me, I'll be applying my nose to the spinning grinding thing. Whaddyacall'em. "Eddie Van Halen," that's it.

Ewww…no, absolutely no. Well, I'll figure it out when I have some free time.

Folks, I am so busy these days that right now, I swear, I am wearing boxer shorts.

We all have our "last resort" underpants. Mine are a three-pack of Hanes Boxers that lives in the lowes-caste area of my underwear drawer. A few months ago, Kohl's had a five-for $20 sale on underwear and I giddily scooped up what I thought were five identical packs of boxer-briefs. Alas, I had been cruelly hoodwinked by an evil or perhaps merely inattentive stockboy/girl. Ever since then, the boxers have been the Shorts Of Last Resort, aka the rumble strip near the edge of the highway that warns you that if you continue on this reckless path, you'll soon be soaring over the embankment and onward to catastrophe.

In happier days, I manage to get a load of laundry going before I ever need to confront the boxers. And now, I'm on my second pair.

Those of you who are men, or who have a certain access and familiarity with men, can appreciate the seriousness of this situation. When you're used to one style of underpants but you find yourself installed in something else, it throws your bodily humours completely off-balance for the entire day.

Show me a waitress who acts as though it's your fault that she screwed up your order, and I'll show you a woman who fell so far behind on her laundry that she was forced to put on the improbable convergence of string, lace, and butterfly-shaped snaps from Victoria's Secret that her boyfriend gave her last Valentine's Day in lieu of an actual, thoughtful gift.

digg this! | post to del.icio.us | email me | permalink | related websearch

New Horizons in Modern Idiocy

Wednesday, March 14, 2007 • 03:32:29 PM EDT

I Am Stupid, Special Postal Serice Edition, Part I:

I am the proud eBay winner of a vintage camera. But it shan't be mine until I dip down deep into my financial coffers and purchase a postal order for seven dollars and sixty cents. Easily arranged: I swing by the swell, old-timey post office a town or two away, present myself at the counter, and set My Government into a course of action.

The clerk has my debit card. He gives it a swipe, and instantly bCHUNKwwwhhrrr…..*. All the power goes out in the building and every electronic terminal in the lobby starts protesting with beeps and flashing lights as all of the clerks start reciting dialogue that's uncannily like what the bridge crew patters when the Enterprise goes into sudden red alert.

For a fraction of a second — a mere fraction of a second, but still — I think "Oh, crap…how can I be overdrawn?"

(I am stupid.)

I Am Stupid, Special Postal Service Edition, Part II:

I exit the post office, task incomplete, and immediately my keen geeky instincts diagnose the problem: a semi truck has snagged a low-hanging power line, and torn down an entire transformer pole. That building is going to be dark for a long time.

For a full second I think "Oh, crap…what's going to happen to that Netflix envelope I dropped in the mail slot in the lobby? Should I resend it?"

I should point out that I soon reminded myself that this was, in fact, a physical envelope, and that unlike when you lose power to a mailserver, it was exceedingly likely that lack of electricity would have a negligible impact on delivery. A nice man wearing blue trousers would still be quite capable of removing the white plastic tub from behind the slot and then putting it on a truck. All the same,

(I am stupid.)

Well, damn this pleasant weather. My pocket camera was in my jacket, which was hanging on a hook back at the house. And for some reason, my Smartphone wasn't in the mood to take any pictures. If ever there was a time to have my D80 with me, this was it: the scene could not have been a more perfect stage of tragedy if it included some dude dressed in shower curtains having sex with with his mom and then gouging his own eyes out.

As it was, it featured a huge honkin' truck trailing the splintered top two-thirds of a pole behind it, with thirty yards of trigger-taut power cable ringing from the corner of the cab all the way to the intersection diagonally opposite. The corner had crimped down into the cable, holding it fast, and the white paint was charred black for about a foot or so. I scanned the crowd and picked out the driver on my first guess. He looked to be in his Sixties, and his hands were shaking just enough that he was having difficulty working the buttons on his 2001-era phone.

Which was probably the first stroke of luck he'd found that morning, because clearly, he looked as though he hadn't the foggiest idea of what to tell the trucking company. A cop approached and said all the right things, starting with concern for his own health ("Did you feel the electricity? Do you think you're all right?") and gently steering him to a retaining wall to sit down.

He truly looked like a man who'd had a hard life.

However badly the accident had impacted his day, he'd thrown some unanticipated joy into just about everyone who worked in that neighborhood. The power was out everywhere, and giddy wage-earners from all sectors of soeciety — bank tellers, dental assistants, comic-shop managers — gathered on the sidewalks to watch the show. When you're a grownup, this is as close as you get to having a snow day.

digg this! | post to del.icio.us | email me | permalink | related websearch

Working, Drooping, and Twitting

Monday, March 26, 2007 • 03:52:34 AM EDT

I thought I'd take a break to check in with y'all.

My work on the book slogs onward. The frustrating bit is that due to The Way The World Is, it's resisting all attempts to be written in a linear fashion. There's so much about this subject I'm writing about that's still up in the air. I feel forced to write blocks of chapters concurrently, so that I'm free to move certain topics from one to the other as the bigger picture comes clearer. The good news is that it's getting done. The less-good news is that I (and my publisher) are missing out on the satisfying thunk of new chapters arriving on the project server every day. Instead, they arrive in sporadic bales.

But even though I'm deep in my absinthe-sipping, lily-sniffing, Morrisey-playing, velvet-suit-wearing Sensitive Artiste mode, the business of business must still be attended to. I still have columns to write, dagnabbit. And while the quality of the product is still at its usual Michelin Star-rated level, employee efficiency around the office isn't exactly at its highest level. I have a giant electronic sign on the far wall of the plant that reads "PROUDLY CELEBRATING (number) DAYS WITHOUT A MAJOR ****-UP." Lately, I've sort of fallen into the habit of resetting it every afteroon before locking up.

Take last week's Sun-Times column, for example. I wrote a first draft of it on Monday and I was dashed pleased with it. I sat on it for a day so I could do my final edits with fresh eyes, and I was only an hour or two before deadline when I realized that (dear oh dear) I'd ****ed it up with a pretty obvious error.

See, I was writing about a set of Bluetooth wireless noise-canceling iPod headphones, praising their effectiveness at shutting out aircraft engine noise, their compact size, and the fact that I had no idea that wireless headphones would be so handy when traveling. I confess that initially I wondered just how big of a lump you had to be to be put out by a 24" cord, but then I traveled with it and gorblimey! The first time I took off my jacket or my backpack or my whatever and I wasn't forced to take my headphones off and laboriously de-thread them from the weave of straps and loops and other layers of interference first, I was sold on the concept.

So what was my error?

(You have ten seconds.)

Yes, ten points to the young woman in the Strongbad tee shirt: you can't use wireless devices onboard a plane, and flying is the whole reason why someone would want a set of noise-cancellig headphones in the first place. Where the hell were you on Monday? Or couldn't you be bothered to chirp in?

Thus, a cozy morning that I was supposed to spend idly tweaking thingswas instead filled with a desperate search for something that could spackle an unexpected 300-word hole. Fortunately, I was able to solve the problem without resorting to the same technique that our lunchlady used when she found herself short of ground beef an hour before noon. I would never do that to my beloved readers. Also, I have no idea what the journalistic equivalent of shredded carpet padding is. Whatever it is, I bet you won't find much of it in the hallways outside of Michael Medved's office.

On the plus side, I have a review of these headphones that I can slide into a column in a month or two. I like to space these things out, y'see. In the meantime, I've done that dull bit where you make lots of phone calls and send lots of emails to lots of people at lots of different levels. I had to navigate several layers of iteration before the music stopped and the last bureaucrat standing was forced to give me a definitive answer, but here it is:

You can probably get away with wearing Bluetooth headphones on a plane. Which doesn't sound very definitive at all, actually, but it comes from a nice man at the FAA and it's an answer that encourages me to use these way-cool headphones, so on that basis I'm willing to stand behind it. The FAA forbids wireless devices, but they also allow the individual airlines to determine for themselves that whatever-it-is won't interfere with navigation or communications. If USAir thinks it's kosher, the FAA has no problem with it.

Speaking of kosher: Andy Ihnatko, Boy Journalist is also hot on the trail of the secrets of Passover Coke. In the past week, I have spoken with the Coca-Cola company; the sugar council; trade groups for both the cane and beet sugar industries, and I'm waiting on replies from the folks who certify Passover Coke. It's amazing what you can learn if you assume that everything you know is wrong and you seek out people who know more than you do on a certain subject.

This is why I have a fairly low patience for the argument that the musings of Random Q. Blogger are ever going to supplant real, actual journalism, or that (God forbid!) "user-created content" will ever take the place of thoughtful, diligent and professional writing.

And you certainly don't need to work for a newspaper or a magazine or even have a journalism degree to be a journalist. (My journalism degree? Er…sorry officer, I seem to have left it in my other pants...) All you really need to have is enough of a commitment to the facts that you don't let "First Post!" excitement get the better of you. Just step back and think before you publish something. Random Q. Blogger has the same access to public sources as I do, particularly on topics as straightforward as these. But does he use them? Naw, because he's being conversational. Which is perfectly okay, until he tries to claim that his post has same standing and credibility as an article in the World Almanac.

In the end, journalism is a product that the public wants, whether they get it in print or online, from an established publication or just a lone gunman with a Blogger account and a good reputation for getting his or her facts straight. The medium doesn't matter: quality wins, every time.

(The only problem is getting you bastards to pay for it. Finks! Quislings!)

Many thoughtful and helpful emails continue to come in on the subject of The Future Of Yellowtext, and all of your thoughts were (and are) appreciated.

I'm now 99.929% certain that I'm going to be moving the blog over to a "real" blog app sometime by the end of Spring. The most compelling reasons for continuing to update CWOBber were that I like bashing out AppleScript and that CWOBber lets me wire up features that no other blog apps have. It was fairly easy to let go of CWOBber once I realized that (a) I would continue to have fun with AppleScript just about everywhere else in my daily Mac experience, and (b) most of the things I like to do involve tricks in creating and composing posts…and there sure wouldn't be anything stopping me from writing AppleScript tools that work with whatever new editor and blog app I select.

But which one? It's going to be either WordPress or Drupal. Thanks to the unbearable ginchiness of MAMP, I now have both of 'em running here on Lilith so I can figure 'em out and make a choice.

I like WordPress because it's simple and I readily understand how it looks at the world. I like Drupal because Good God, there's practically no limit to what I could build with it; it's truly a professional content-management system. But I'm not certain that I really "get" how it works. I'm an old man who still sees a website as a set of HTML files instead of as a MySQL database and a set of PHP scripts. How do I create a site with a title page, a blog, a page that lists my various podcasts, a page with my Sun-Times articles, and other stuff? HTML file, HTML file, HTML file, HTML file, HTML file. Simple. Done and dusted in an hour.

Cool. But…with Drupal, I find myself visualizing a tank filled with my writings, attached to a compressor and a hose, with PHP scripts that aim the hose at the right targets. Which is well and good — and now that the weather's getting warmer, who doesn't enjoy playing with a hose? — but just try putting it into practice.

For now, my test Drupal site has a blog, and I can also post articles. But I'm still fuzzy on how Drupal sees the difference between the two. I also can't seem to figure out how to have more than one distinct page on my site. The fact that I'm as-yet baffled on how to use Drupal to create a site with several sections seems to indicate that my sk1lz are somewhat sub-mad at the moment. 133t? Oh, please. Don't make me laugh.

As for creating my own Drupal styles and themes…it makes my puzzler hurt. I've no clue. I'm using one of Drupal's defaults for now but I don't wanna publish a site that doesn't look like how I want it to look.

But hey, it's all good. It's fun to learn new things. In a few months' time — after the book is finished and before I start the next big project — I'll have made my choice and learned what I need to know and I'll deploy a new YellowText. One that's more fun for me to update and for you guys to visit. I'm certain that I'm making the right decision because at this moment, I'm more excited about what I can do with WordPress or Drupal than I am about what I can do with CWOBber and AppleScript. User-comments are a given, of course…but do I have any good ideas for a message board? How about a gallery that readers could upload pictures into? Well, with Drupal, all I would need is the will.

(And the aforementioned Sk1lz Madness-ness.)

Oh, yes…CWOBber. I ought to open-source it and let other folks have fun with it. It's a neat little thing. It isn't brilliant coding by any stretch, but it's a blog solution that requires nothing more than an iDisk or a basic FTP account. I think it'll work well as an AppleScript tutorial, too.

What else…?

I've begrudgingly come to the conclusion that my utter contempt for Twitter would probably have more credibility if I actually used it. So if you're interested, you can go ahead and see what I'm up to over there. If I'm wrong about Twitter, then I will have learned something and become a smarter person. If I'm right, I can redouble my arrogance. Try to guess which outcome I'm rooting for.

My current take on Twitter is that it presents a homeopathic approach to blogging. Just like the homeopathic approach to medicine, its proponents seem to think that the fewer molecules of actual content you deliver, the more potent it is. And also like the homeopathic approach to medicine, someone standing behind a curtain is probably having a pretty big laugh at your expense.

Of course, my profound lack of Twitter Zen might be one of those generational things. It's also possible that Twitter is actually a very cool medium, and that people simply haven't figured out the right place for it yet. Maybe once everybody stops thinking of Twitter as a blog thing or an IM thing and they try to figure out a unique and perfect purpose for a medium that limits you to 140 characters at a shot, I'll wonder how I ever did without it.

Or maybe it'll be like that "live photostrip on your desktop" software that premiered about a year ago to great hype and then promptly disappeared. I thought that thing sucked, too.

digg this! | post to del.icio.us | email me | permalink | related websearch

AppleTV On The Horizontal

Wednesday, March 28, 2007 • 11:06:32 AM EDT

The most awesome thing about AppleTV is that if you (a) are a technology pundit and (b) have a terabyte or more of music, movies, and TV shows on your home network, you can spend all day lying on the sofa with a remote in your hand and still call it "Work."

I mean, #%@& being an astronaut, man.

digg this! | post to del.icio.us | email me | permalink | related websearch

Learning Curve

Friday, March 30, 2007 • 08:22:03 PM EDT

I did something today that I'm not very proud of. I'm happy I did it; it made me feel a lot better. But still, I can't help but feel a little guilty.

I looked up the address of a man I don't know. I drove more than an hour and ten minutes to go to his house. I left the car running in the driveway while I dashed onto his front porch and did what I felt I needed to do. I tore down all of his wind chimes. I knocked over his reindeer-shaped recycling caddy. And then during my run back across the front yard, I even gave his Fat Lady Bending Over lawn ornament an ungentlemanly slap on ths ass before I made a Dukes of Hazzard-style re-entry into my vehicle and bitched out of there in a streak of burned rubber and a spray of torn grass.

I reiterate that this man is a complete stranger and I fully acknowledge that it was a really, really mean thing to do.

But I've been trying to learn Drupal for the past week or two and this software continues to delight in degrading and belittling me. On Wednesday night, I set myself the ambitious but (I imagined) quite realistic goal of creating a blog post with some sort of picture inside it. Well, it turns out that this thought had never occurred to Drupal's creators because you need to download and install a special plugin for that. So I downloaded it. And I installed it, following the directions with meticulous perfection.

And yet Drupal doesn't see the plugin. Every tutorial and howto I've consulted goes straight from "Install the plugin" to "…Now that the plugin is installed, do this" without any consideration that perhaps Drupal is a rotten bastard that refuses to allow innocent, hardworking, right-thinking, blood-and-platelet-donating (pending completion of one-year suspension) Americans like me to do something that would be a two-step process in any other web-building tool…including a text editor. I posted a newbie question in the forum a day and a half ago and as of five minutes ago…nothing. Not a nibble.

So if a Mr. Anton W. Drupal of Bentley, New Hampshire is reading this…look, I apologize. Sincerely. This really wasn't like me, I promise. If in a couple of days I'm still feeling bad about trashing your front yard, I'll mail you a $50 gift card to Bugaboo Creek Steak House. No need to get in touch with me; I already have your address, obviously.

digg this! | post to del.icio.us | email me | permalink | related websearch