textiplication.com

The backlog is rising again.  I’m writing during lunch instead of reading, but my buying habits haven’t changing.  It would certainly help if I had an unbelievably long plane ride or two coming up.  Hear my prayer, O Ceiling Cat of Enterprise Software Sales!

1. The Best of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, edited by Kelly Link and Gavin Grant
2. Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel, Frances and Joseph Gies
3. The Secret History of Moscow, Ekaterina Sedia
4. The Echo Maker, Richard Powers
5. Ha’penny, Jo Walton
6. The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson
7. In the Forest of Forgetting, Theodora Goss
8. The Book Thief, Markus Zusak
9. My Mother the Cheerleader, Robert Sharenow (my wife went to school with him, his best friend is married to my wife’s best friend)
10. Johnny and the Dead, Terry Pratchett (probably on my son’s list more than mine)
11. Lies My Teacher Told Me, James Loewen (new edition, substantially updated, and, so far, the only Book Every American Should Read)
12. Ptolemy’s Gate, Jonathan Stroud
13. Bear Daughter, Judith Berman (one of my favorite con panelists)
14. Impostors, George V. Higgins
15. Stranger Things Happen, Kelly Link (actually, I’m about halfway through)
16. Skin Hunger, Kathleen Duey
17. The 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear, Walter Moers (halfway through, so far, it’s no Rumo)
18. Trial of Flowers, Jay Lake
19. The Guin Saga, Kaoru Kurimoto (I have no recollection of ordering this, strangely enough)
20. The City of Dreaming Books, Walter Moers
21. Lowlife, Luc Sante
22. By the Sword, Richard Cohen
23. The Curve of Binding Energy, John MacPhee
24. Ragamuffin, Tobias Buckell
25. Black Sheep, Ben Peek

There are a few more in the car, too, though I’m nowhere near my record.

The Pokemon shrine under my backlog shelf belongs to my nine-year-old, not me.  Those are his Spongebobs, too.

Picture by the fabulous Gavin Grant, Small Beer Press (publisher of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet and others), and husband of the fabulous Kelly Link.  Theo and I had some wonderful conversations with both of them. 

Funny thing about this picture - when we posed for it, I thought I was standing right next to Chris, but as you see in the picture, I was actually about ten feet further back.  We’re actually about the same height, or maybe I’m a little taller…

Odd how photography lends itself to these perspective illusions.  Heck, a little further back, and we could do the standing-on-Chris’s-hand thing.

Overheard from the playroom - my six-year-old playing chess.

The Gray Lady has discovered that you can’t quit Facebook:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/11/technology/11facebook.html

People used to make fun of Google’s "Don’t Be Evil" motto, but my sources tell me that it’s taken seriously inside Google and results in discussions about the morality of alternatives.  Probably, exactly what (and no more than) the founders intended.

What’s Facebook’s internal motto, if they have one?

The obvious? "Be Evil."

"Supposing that Truth is a woman — what then?" — the opening line of Nietzche’s Beyond Good and Evil, in my opinion the funniest line in the philosophical canon

"…Evil is usually …. good…"  — loose paraphrase from the same work

Or, my favorite - All your face are belong to us. 

Darn.

Not first to apply this to Facebook, this guy seems to be the first - or first-ranked.  But it does seem to capture their philosophy, doesn’t it?

The0 was asking.

Here’s what I do (crossposted from theophrast.us):

1. Add a new Chapter 5.
2. Rewrite Chapter 4 so new Chapter 5 makes sense.
3. Go back to Chapter 1, change one line to make new Chapter 4 make sense.
4. Update Chapters 2 and 3 to accommodate the effects of that one-line change, originally motivated by that new Chapter 5.
5. Fix Chapter 4 again, recovering from the rippling effects of that one-line change in Chapter 1.
6. At last, begin rewriting forward, making minor edits to Chapter 6 (formerly Chapter 5) and Chapter 7 (formerly Chapter 6)
7. The shit hits the fan. Chapter 8 now needs to be rewritten from scratch. Longingly contemplate working instead on novel #2 (unfinished) or novel #3 (unfinished). Play Kingdom of Loathing instead.
8. Rewrite Chapter 8 (formerly Chapter 7), doing beautiful job, loving every minute of it. Unfortunately, it’s in third-person objective instead of first person.
9. Rewrite Chapter 9 (formerly Chapter 8!) in third person.
10. Start the third-person rewrite of Chapter 10 (formerly Chapter 9). Realize that this is how I got into this problem in the first place.
11. Rewrite first 1000 words of Chapter 1.
12. Rewrite first 1000 words of Chapter 1 again.
13. Write new Chapter 1, occurring entirely before existing Chapter 1. I’ve been wanting to tell this part of the story for ages, wrote thousands of words at it, couldn’t do it. Now it works.
13. Rewrite Chapter 1, now Chapter 2. Was 6500 words, a long goddamn chapter. Now it’s 4500 words, every one of which I like better than the old version.
14. I’ll let you know…

The last time I had this much trouble implementing a bug fix, I was probably twelve.

Software’s for suckers.

Caitlin Kiernan is a wonderful writer with some health problems and no insurance.  Only in America!

You can help.

I am sorry, I can’t cancel your Facebook account. My post was a joke, elliptical and weak, hut in the proper light quite humorous, I swear - Scoble, who is one of the most famous bloggers evah, got his account canned by testing a tool that created an abuse of terms of service. 

I would never advise you to do such a thing. 

Therefore, there is no way to cancel your Facebook account. 

Facebook loves you too much to let you go.

Not me, him.

Let’s think about this for a moment.  The0 has just written his fourth novel - in the last two, two-and-a-half years.  (He’s not counting at least one prior work of at least a couple hundred thousand words.)  Each of those novels is over a hundred thousand words.  At least a couple of those novels he rewrote - as in, start over from the beginning and go all the way to the end again - at least once, in that span of time. 

So call it six hundred thousand words in the last two years, 

Plus a bunch of short stories, 

Plus several dozen beautiful watercolors and digital artworks,

A national award for a short story, and a contract for his first book,

–All of this, on evenings, weekends, and occasional plane rides–

While holding down a more-than-full-time job as an technology leader for a fast-growing company.

Let’s hear it for the man!

D’you suppose they’re going to be fashionable again? or, I guess, for the first time?

http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/01/googles-newspaper-ads-big-hopes-for-small-barcodes-goog.html

Google’s efforts to get into the newspaper ad business have yet to yield much. One tool it hopes will eventually change that: Small, square barcodes, like the one at the right, at the bottom of print ads. When a person scans the barcode with a compatible camera phone, it takes their phone’s browser to a mobile Web address encrypted in the graphic.