Gmail Manager and Gmail Notifier are bot …

Gmail Manager and Gmail Notifier are both not worky on Firefox 3. The former isn’t available for FF3 yet, and the latter is just broken. I have switched to -horrors- to buttons on my bookmarks toolbar. Wake up, extension developers!

Hotwire is a fancy new shell, a sort of combination of a regular shell and a file manager.

I think I want a modafinil prescription. I feel the need for chemical augmentation.

Rice Cream

If you happen to be a user of Cream/Vim, and you were used to having multiple sessions and opening new files by just typing cream filename, then you may have noticed as I did recently that this no longer works. Apparently multiple sessions are gone, even though the option is still there in the Settings menu. Fortunately, as the previous link points out, if you enable tabbed documents on top of single session mode, things start to behave semi-normally; you can use cream filename from anywhere and Firefox extensions like It’s All Text start working again. And then you get used to having one big Cream/Vim session sitting in a designated workspace all day while the tabs come and go, instead of opening and closing dozens of separate sessions.

Recently discovered the strange and compelling Rice Boy. It’s a webcomic, yes, but quite unlike most other webcomics. I would say it was surreal or fantastic, but that could be said of practically any webcomic for a given flavour of “fantastic”. For some reason Rice Boy reminds me of Hayao Miyazaki films -not in the sense that it’s manga-like in any way, but in the sense that there is a very similar sense of the fantastic. Something that almost hints at the numinous.

Jotting Things Down

Blogs are so, like, yesterday.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m just not the bloggy type, if there is a type -it’s been a very on-again-off-again affair for five years now, and while the persistence must mean something, the regular long silences must, as well. I am a private creature in many ways and do not want to talk about some things. At least, not like this.

Still, I feel guilty about taking up space on the Interblags just to sit quietly. Everyone is so busy and prolific, what’s a habitual lurker to do?

These days I’m playing with Jottit, which is Infogami 2.0, as far as I can tell. (Yes, I had an Infogami page, too.) It’s strange to have a plain old ‘website’, as opposed to a blog or tumblelog or Facebook account or whatever. Just a website, with pages -even if it is sort of wiki-ish. Retro, simple. No rich text editing or Youtube embedding or RSS feeds, yet. It’s the unharvested Internet that our savage ancestors knew.

I’m just going out there again. I may be some time.

Warm Reboot

The attempt to catch up on my reading continues. It’s what I’ve been doing of late, mostly, instead of blogging. Or writing, if it comes to that. But let’s not even go there.

During the un-blogged gap: first, finished Accelerando and another Charles Stross, Glasshouse, which I liked better. I found the former book a little too “yay, Singularity”. No, I’m not even sure what I mean -it’s not that he didn’t manage to surprise me, because he did. But the rapidly telescoping timeline of the story gave me a weird sense of vertigo. That said, Stross is very good, and I’ve long since added him to that list of writers whose books I will buy on sight. And I need to re-read both those books while sober.

Later, rooting around a book sale with very little to say for itself (and also, inexplicably, buried in abridged editions of David Copperfield), found a Stephen King going a-begging, a nice, fat Hearts in Atlantis- which, King-like, is overwrought in spots but sweet and sad, also King-like. Or at least, like King at his best. Also found Peter Straub’s Lost Boy, Lost Girl at the same book sale. Now, I’d been eyeing this in various bookstores for quite a while now, but as it turns out, I didn’t like it much. Seemed too formulaic, not like Straub at all. Not that I’m in any position to judge, having only read one other book by him -and that may well be the problem, that I was expecting something like the magnificent Shadowland and got, instead, a retread of a generic Stephen King story.

A week or two after the book sale I went a little mad and spent a fat wad of cash buying books. Read Ursula Le Guin’s Changing Planes, a little book but a tasty morsel. I almost wish it had gone on in that vein for a little longer, but that might have become unpalatable. Something almost Borgesque there. Moved on to a Dan Simmons-fest, with Ilium, Olympos and Hyperion. No, I really had not read Hyperion before… I’ll not comment, since as far as I know pretty much everyone justifiably loved that book. Ilium was actually a re-read, but I had forgotten almost everything about it except that it was some sort of remake of the Iliad, and was pleasantly surprised. Actually, because I read Ilium and Olympos back-to-back, I can’t remember where one leaves off and the other begins. I remember being just a tad melancholy when Olympos started explaining away all the sheer weirdness -I wouldn’t have minded not having some of the exposition in exchange for the sheer sense of wonder, you know?

The last book in the pile, which I’m just starting on and trying to make it last until I get my hands on the Hyperion sequels (so that I always have something to read next, of course), is Justina Robson’s Living Next Door to the God of Love. Justina Robson is another writer whose books I have resolved to buy on sight. This particular book, I’m not clear yet on what the hell is going on, but this is in no way a bad thing.

I’d post at more length on some of these stories, but I’m not much of a reviewer. For one thing, these days I’m instantly awed by anybody who ever actually finishes writing a book.

Forgot one book from my buying spree: Alastair Reynolds and Absolution Gap. This is actually the last book in a series, which I didn’t know until I was halfway through it. I just picked it up at random, just to test the waters. Amazingly, despite being at the end of a series, Absolution Gap is great, no sense of missing context. Solid, hard sf, with a sort of slightly campy gothic-horror feel surfacing every now and then.

Really, all I have to say is: I like all these books. Read them if you find them around.

Meanwhile, in other news: while not quite as dramatic as some previous online “housecleaning” sessions, I’ve just been cleaning out my online presence, mostly by deleting half a dozen old accounts on various unused or little-used services; one notable casualty being my five-year-old Blogger blog. Amusingly, it was only today that I realized that this WordPress blog is now a year old, give or take some days. I suppose I should stop thinking of it as the “new” blog, eh?

Tumblr and Twitter, the short-attention-span twins, both survive the cull, as does Last.fm. I’d add Last.fm and Twitter widgets to the sidebar here, but -to my mild shock- apparently WordPress.com doesn’t support them yet. What is this, the Middle Ages?

Meanwhile, over at Achewood, hilarity ensues as Ray lolcats Roast Beef. I find this extra amusing because of the use of “lolcat” as a verb. THE HELL WHY DID YOU LOLCAT ME YOU SON OF A BITCH!? Heh.

Gathering Moss

I just discovered Tumblr -yet another blogging service- and signed up to it on a whim. See the “Linkage” block on the sidebar. Of course, this might be one of those extremely short-lived geek things. Still, anything short of actually writing is something I can spend time on. I actually finished a whole campaign of Battle for Wesnoth. I haven’t spent this much time on a game since… uh, the nineties. Not that I was a huge gamer back then or anything.

I’m a little bummed out about my own procrastination. Always some goddamn thing -and if not some goddamn thing, it’s the goddamn migraines. I am now on a whole new slew of ze drugs. And ze drugs do work. Sort of.

Now Everybody Be Book

Today’s short story is Wikiworld, by Paul Di Filippo. Note ubik – a homage to Philip K. Dick coupled neatly with the play on “ubiquitous”.

“That digital text is just information, Son. This is a book! And best of all, it’s mongo.”

I tried to look up mongo in the ubik, like I had been taught, but couldn’t find it in my dictionary. “What’s mongo, Dad?”

“A moment of grace. A small victory over entropy.”

On a parallel but completely tangential note, book is the new cool. (via)

And finally, Neil Gaiman’s laptop is a Panasonic ToughBook CF-W4 – we have it from the man himself.

you know your computer is an extension of your self when

…the reinstall after a hard drive crash feels like a spiritual cleansing.

All the detritus of failed experiments, swept away; all the tangled memories of inconsequential things erased; the choking mass of data flushed and made empty and pure. Restoring the important bits from backup is a reaffirmation of who we are, what we love, and what it is, precisely, that we do.

I/O Error

So my hard disk crashed and I lost all my stuff. Ho hum.

As Drac noted, I am comparatively calm about this -mostly because I didn’t lose all my stuff. Both work and personal email is in Gmail these days, so that’s fine. A gigabyte or so of work-related data is rsynced daily to a server at work, so that’s fine. Novel and associated notes are tarballed and emailed to myself on a daily basis, so that’s fine. Most everything else important is on a weekly backup, which means I’m losing precisely a week’s worth of data, given that my weekly backups go on Fridays and the crash happened Thursday evening -but nothing life-threatening. Apparently backing up really is a Good Thing.

There was a hairy moment with some freelance writing work I’m doing these days -I’d forgotten to back that up. I’d only been on it for two or three days -it just didn’t occur to me. I should have put it in one of the directories which are automatically backed up, but I set the backing-up cron jobs a long time and had mostly forgotten about it. Still, working at a tech company has its advantages. They dug out the external USB cables for me and I managed to recover those precious twenty-eight kilobytes. (OpenOffice makes very small documents… the plain-text version is only a little smaller)

The deadline for the freelance job was Friday, so I had to temporarily put my hard drive troubles on hold, borrow the flatmate’s laptop and stay up till 3am on Friday morning, accidentally pressing F1 far too often on that stupid Thinkpad keyboard. Still, no harm done.

They had a replacement hard drive by the time I got to work Friday morning, and I’d gotten around to reinstalling Ubuntu (from a Dapper CD that was lying around) by noon. Since then, I’ve been

• re-upgrading Dapper to Edgy.
• Firefox 2 and setting up my handful of extensions again -I always forget how to get Gmail Manager to show up in a toolbar of my choice as opposed to the bottom corner of the status bar. Every time.
• doing things like this, every ten minutes: Hmm, let’s watch a movie. Wha- where the hell is- oh, right. New install. Sigh. apt-get install vlc. Hmm.

That’s all the good news. The bad news is, I can’t seem to wedge the old hard drive open long enough to fish out all the shit I had in it -the stuff that’s was never backed up because A) it was always going to be moved to DVD, in a few days or weeks and B) because it was just too goddamn big to back up in the meantime. This means maybe five gigs of music (Goddammit! I just got that Thunderbirds are Now! album), maybe twelve gigs of comics (Goddammit! I was really and extremely looking forward to reading Wood’s Local over the weekend) and of course, the next two episodes of Prison Break- so there goes my stash of weekend entertainment.

Of course, a digital packrat’s hard disk is usually littered with obscure goodies. There may have been gigabytes of interesting stuff in there I’d just forgotten about (I know I save a lot of stuff off the Internets to read offline… I just never see it again once it goes into the “Crap off the Internets to read” subdirectory.) Non-critical stuff, of course. Anything you can’t remember is there probably wasn’t important in the first place. No, I’m sure they weren’t important. But they might have been interesting.

This Is Not Flex Mentallo

But it’s always fun to see someone redo this little parable: Dresden Codak.

While people who didn’t grow up poring over tattered old comic books with ads by Charles Atlas (and other things -Sea Monkeys, for starters) might not get it at all, Flex Mentallo was sheer pop perfection. Originally showed up in the “Danny the Street” story arc on Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol, later got his own very brief mini-series. I think the Charles Atlas people eventually sued. Ah, well. Now I have an urge to dig up my copy of Flex Mentallo – Man of Muscle Myth. My shell scripts tell me this one is on cd #106. Really, I’m beginning to worry that the older cds are about to start disintegrating.

A treat for any passing fans, as unlikely as this may seem: the annotated notes.

Schrödinger’s Schnake

Schrödinger’s Schnake: is it on a motherfuckin’ plane, or not?

Sometimes the strangest questions go through your head.

I just discovered -and installed- the sinhala-gnu-linux package from the brand-new Sinhala package repository. It must be because the damn book is on my brain, but fiddling around with SCIM and typing laboriously in Sinhala (I still haven’t figured out how to type my name -it has a rakaransaya in it. How the heck do you type a zero-width joiner? It’s too late in the evening for this… or rather, I’m getting old.) reminded me of the time my father wanted me to fix up an old PC for him to write on.

My father is a writer, if you didn’t know. He’s nearly seventy now. His last book was a year or two ago, and he’s writing another one. Said once that it was going to be the last one -he’s a little morbid sometimes. He’s never used a computer in his life. Or a typewriter, for that matter. Couldn’t type to save his life. I think he just saw somebody, sometime back in the late 90s, using one of those keyboards with the little stickers pasted on, so that you could get the Sinhala letters.

He once kept the sole electronic copy -which someone else typed up for him, of course… it was the Middle Ages- of one of his novels on a floppy disk for a year. Imagine that.

Silence of the Muse, or How to Geek Out Instead of Writing

Being (still) more geek than would-be writer, I obsess around the edges of the writing. I track my wordcount in a spreadsheet. I’ve got graphs and everything. I find it soothes me, especially on days when the actual writing seems to dry up.

Hey, it’s something to do. Better than staring at a blank page all night, eh? (Which is what I was doing yesterday night, before I gave in and called it a day at four in the morning.) The green line and the red line belong to the left-hand Y axis, and represent the daily wordcount I’m optimistically trying to stick to (green) and the actual daily wordcount I’ve managed over the last month (red). The blue line belongs to the right-hand Y axis, and represents the total wordcount, in the particular file I’m working on ,over the same period. The green line is hope and the red line is manic-depression. The blue line, on the other hand, is probably some sort of important lesson in perseverance: all you have to do is keep pointing out to yourself that the blue line only goes up.

I don’t believe in writer’s block. I’ve made a religion of not believing in writer’s block. At least, I don’t believe in it as a genuine condition. I think there’s no shortage of things to say, or ways to say them. I think there’s just tiredness and shortness of breath.

More on the subject of obsessing around the edges: I’ve been fiddling around trying to set up the Simplest Possible Backup. So far, what I’ve got is this:

All the stuff I write goes into text files in a single parent directory; there’s a cronjob which tarballs it once every day and emails it (using a one-line script for mutt and msmtp, which in any case is configured to work with my work email account -which, as of this week, is a hosted gmail account) to my personal gmail account, where it is filtered, labeled and archived automatically. Text files tarball very small -the entire thing comes to around three hundred k once compressed. That’s cool, but also a little deflating for some reason.

You know what’s weird? My father, that’s what. My father is a writer -unlike me, he’s a published writer with half a dozen books out of print. He’s writing a new one. Every time I go see the old man, he’s gone and hand-written pages and pages of manuscript. He cuts them up and staples them in the appropriate places. He’s been doing this for thirty years. He wakes up at three a.m. to write (I clearly did not inherit his metabolism.) The irony just about kills me.

Beat your computers into typewriters

Bruce Sterling, in a recent and inspired rant about spimes, blogjects and the Internet of Things, went on for a bit about how inaccurate the word “computer” is. He posited an alternative universe where we called them “ordinators”, like the French do, ordinateurs.

I was just reading this off the Guardian:

Most writing happens under the duress of constant distractions: phones, emails, colleagues, and a vast and unending internet full of tantalising ways of wasting time, to name just a few. When we write, we have to devise strategies to thwart these and to ensure concentration [...] By and large, these strategies fail to address the very source of most distractions that fill a modern working day: computers. Even disconnected from the internet, a computer is a Pandora’s box of time-killing baubles: music libraries, bundled games, archives from other projects, photographs, movies, popup reminders from your other software programs nagging you to do this or that, and more settings, preferences and opportunities for tweaking than you can shake a stick at. You can spend a whole day at the keyboard on vaguely productive tasks and still emerge with nothing to show for it.

I like “time-killing baubles”. It’s true, of course. Sometimes I envy Wendell Berry, who actually does use a typewriter. (Or carves everything by hand onto clay tablets, whatever. Doesn’t use a computer, is what I mean.) In the article quoted and linked above, Vinh goes on to talk about using software to beat the problem. If a typewriter is the “ultimate single-tasking productivity application”, and yet typewriters are too flat-out tedious to actually use, he says, perhaps we should have software that emulates typewriters. Something that takes over your interface, hides away all the time-killing baubles. Ideally, according to Vinh, it wouldn’t allow you to backspace or ^H^H^H^H your way into the morass of “editing”; the whole point of this entire exercise is forward momentum. Having spent plenty of time in one morass or the other, I can see his point. Kind of. The article ends with a plug for a MacOS X app called WriteRoom, which does pretty much what he says except for the backspace-not-allowed thing.

So hang on -without that most typewriter-like quality, isn’t this just a fullscreen text editor? How’s that different from running vi on a console? Or, like I do nowadays, vi on a full-screen terminal with a nice transparent background? Fullscreen on xfterm4 (press F11) is quite nice. (And you know, even Microsoft Word comes with a fullscreen mode, which frankly would work just as well as this WriteRoom thing -if it ain’t vi, it ain’t vi. Unless it’s Emacs, and the less said about that the better.)

On a related if slightly tangential note: there is a vi that may be better than vi, and that’s Cream. Which works fine in graphical mode, has a few nice colour schemes and is perfectly functional cross-platform. Doesn’t have a fullscreen mode, though. I can’t say I’ve suffered because of that lack.

Which brings me in a roundabout way to my professionally reasoned out response to the “oh no, our computers are so distracting that I need a whole new application to give me a fullscreen text editor”. Obviously it’s not just the computers which are distracting: that’s pretty much what life is like for a lot of us now. What’s apparently not so obvious, though it should be, is that if you need a new software tool to save you from the world so that you can write in peace, then you’re probably not cut out for this work anyway. Distraction, tedium, boredom, ennui, apathy -whatever variation or flavour is your preferred poison, these are not things that can be fixed in software. To make your own way out of the slough of despond (or the slightly muddy scrubland of perpetual distraction, whatever) is one of the things that makes people smart and insightful. People who can’t focus on what they want to do in the middle of chaos, they probably can’t write anything worth reading, either. In fact, that might be how you get to the point where you can write something worth reading.

Also, it annoys me that the arty-farty MacOS types are all gaga-googoo over a fancy new text editor just because it has (booya!) fullscreen mode. I think that’s actually the real reason behind my slight overreaction to this whole thing. I’m simultaneously envious and contemptuous, neither of which are nice to look at. Or perhaps, to be kinder to myself, I’m just slightly brain-stretched from simultaneously feeling like an insider and an outsider.

I wrote a few hundred words today. They were all right. Words in some order. I used Cream. It’s a novel. Or it will be, at some point -maybe. If I’m lucky, persistent and sufficiently cunning. My take is that persistence matters most out of the three, though some would definitely give first place to sheer good fortune. Text editors though, even in fullscreen mode? Nah.

Well, Flock is still a pain in the arse.

I got the clever little email a little while ago.

we imagine you might have one of the following
reactions below:

A) Ohmigod! This is great news! Where can I get it???

B) Flock, they’re still around? Lemmie see what
they are up to.

C) Stop bothering me

I figured I fit squarely into B, and I was tickled by the self-conscious humour, so I downloaded it and messed around a bit. The fucking Shelf seemed to be gone, which is good because I grew to hate it so much the last time it pretty much drove me away. Or maybe the Shelf is still here, but I’m not going to be hanging around long enough to find out.

See, I rediscovered Flock’s built-in blogging tool and began to write an indulgent and cautiously pro-Flock blogpost. It grew into a little paragraph about people who habitually use multiple browsers, and the reasons and moods aligned with each. And then Flock crashed unexpectedly and lost the post. (I hadn’t saved. I think I’ve been trained to not habitually save on the web by Gmail’s autosave-drafts feature. I still compulsively :wq on vi, though.)

Of course, I harbour no personal malice against Flock. Shit happens, you know. And I’m sure the bugs will be ironed out, et cetera. But what the hell, man -you send me the clever email, pique my curiosity, my roommate’s been marketing you at random intervals for days. I did sort of expect a distinct lack of segfaults.

Now to post this before it crashes again, and then its rm -rf ~/bin/flock for another few months…

Blogged with Flock