So, the fun part about putting a new operating system on the computer is finding out just how many things you forgot to back up. However, I am ecstatic that Microsoft has finally got the driver dilemma taken care of. They almost had it for XP, but now it’s more or less automatic (for a few months at least, until they fall behind again) and I don’t have to go hunting for things to make my computer work. Also, it looks like most XP programs run smoothly in Vista, though a few of my smaller, older programs have been giving me trouble…lag in a shell that only uses a few mbs to run.

Regardless, Vista is a slick little interface with a lot of cool little features. Stuff that Apple and Google have been doing for years now, finally available on a PC desktop without the nasty hog of an external application (google’s tools are great, but on older computers they just suck you dry). My computer in question is almost 3 years old and it runs smoothly, though occasionally I do get the slow down effect of too much trying to process at once. Of course, XP was never 100% for me either, so what can you do?

Vista’s nice though, and I like the new color scheme a lot better than the green and blue of the past. Very sleek. If I ever finish getting my system back to normal I’ll throw some more in depth reactions your way. For now, I’m having too much fun playing with Aero.

Oh man, it’s time to start the writing now? That’s awesome. So step 5 is writing it right?

Kind of? What do you mean kind of?

Slow down and chill, alright. You’re ready to start writing, but not the whole thing. It’s like getting into a hot tub. First your toe, then your leg, then slowly submerge until you just dunk the rest of your body. You’ll see. But, for now it’s just the tip of your toe. Throw a frog in a boiling pot and he’ll jump out right?

And here’s the deal. I skipped the outlining phase for now. You don’t outline quite yet and here’s why. You need to establish a tone, a voice and a basic train of thought before you start outlining any of the rest of your story. I find that if you outline the whole thing right off the bat, you end up spending the entire time trying to make all of your ideas and characters match that outline. No, that’s never a good thing, so the best place to start in my opinion is to write up a little bit and see what comes of it, then start visualizing the process into an outline.

And so….(drum roll here)….write the first sentence. That’s all. It’s not so simple as it sounds though. Don’t over think it or anything. The odds are that it will be deleted and replaced a dozen or more times before you ever actually have a “first sentence”, but I guarantee you that the amount of thought that goes into the words you first write in your story will be ample to get you rolling on an outline. A few simple rules though.

1. Don’t start with a cliche - no mentions of alarm clocks waking anyone from deep sleeps, bright and sunny days,no onces, upons, or times, and definitely no mention of ‘when i was a kid’. It’s all corny and cliche and even if you end up using it in the long run, don’t start with it. It’s like shoving a big smell sponge in between your ears and trying to fire the same neurons and synapses into green cleaning materials instead of your brain. It just stinks.

2. It doesn’t count it if it’s just a quote - Quotes are fine for starters, but simple useless speech like, “I don’t think so, Johnny” doesn’t do anything for you. So, ignore that and start with more. Who is Johnny and what did he just presumptuously ask for. Move past the crap on the surface, because that crap on the surface has probably been floating there since you first came up with your idea. It stinks and needs a flush. Get to the meaning and motivation behind it all.

3. You should mention at least one of your characters and something even you didn’t know about them in this space. It opens up the dialogue between you and what you’re going to write without forgetting the actual purpose of the story. It makes so much more sense to flesh out the characters in the story than on a sheet of paper somewhere. Just doesn’t always work out that way.

4. Don’t necessarily stop at 1 sentence. Give it a go and keep writing if you can. But don’t get too carried away if you’re not sure where you’re going with it. There should be a clear objective in every paragraph you write. Don’t just scribble for the sake of scribbling words. Freewriting is for outlining and brainstorming. This is the actual story and you’re only going to clog it up with a bunch of junk if you start experimenting here.

You should have a general idea of where you’re going now. Some kind of seed in the back of that sponge in your head that tells you what kind of character you’ve got and what you want them to do, for at least the next chapter or so. I recommend sitting down and going through this process every chapter or so, that way you don’t craft too long and unforgiving an outline later on. You’ll never stick to it and it doesn’t help your story…ever.

I got a $3 payment from Daytipper today for the tip I submitted and they published. I know there was a lot of bashing and complaining, and you know what, it’s really just a matter of poor communication and untimely technical errors, but they did come through on that promise at least. It’s not the promise I originally saw in the site, but then again I don’t suppose they can keep approving everything that comes their way for immediate payment. We’ll see how long it takes to get the rest of the money.

I hate it when something new and cool comes out. I’ll generally stay neutral for a good long while, until I realize that I do in fact want to see what all the fuss is about. So, I start looking around for a good reason to get involved in the hoopla. This month, the hoopla in question is over Microsoft’s new operating system, Vista.

It’s been almost 6 years since the last upgrade in XP and I’m spoiling to test the new Windows Vista. Of course, as you may guess from the banner on my site, I’m unemployed and a writer. So, affording said software becomes something of a conundrum all by itself. So, what to do? I suppose I’ll just go to Best Buy and start clicking on their test machines to see what it’s like, and when I begin to salivate even more, I’ll know that I’d better head home. The odds are that I’d get it and it’d immediately cause my 2+ year old laptop to start smoking. And, we’d all have a good laugh at how crappy my computer is.

For now, I’ll just wait until I finally get that computer upgrade I’ve been eyeballing for so long. Vista….or not to Vista.

In yet another crushing blow to the thousands of poor saps who sit in traffic, sit on the bus, or sit at home dreading the traffic they have to sit in so that they can hurry up and sit on the bus, Portland opened their AirTram this weekend, a high speed gondola-like apparatus floating above the city to transport folks up the hill to Oregon Health Services. Half as many people and twice as many transit options. We can’t even figure out how to rebuild a single road here.

I found this on a google developers page, Chiu-Ki Chan, a Google Engineer working on Google Books, one of the many cool beta features that I like to check back on as often as possible. Basically, you can see where all the places mentioned in a book are with a single click. Man I love Google

I am an avid traveler — like many, I like to explore the world and experience different cultures. But when I can’t physically travel, I’m content to be an armchair explorer and read books to learn about the world.

One of my recent finds is Extreme Cuisine: The Weird & Wonderful Foods that People Eat. The book is organized into chapters like “Dogs & Cats,” “Rats & Mice,” “Alligator & Crocodile,” and so on. While that’s a perfectly sensible way to organize a book about food, what I really want to know is where in the world they dine on rats, and which country’s cuisine includes cats.

As of yesterday, this sort of information became a lot easier to find as well as visualize: there’s now a Book Search feature on the “About this book” page which shows readers the places mentioned in a particular book and pinpoints them on a map. Clicking around on the map for Extreme Cuisine, I quickly found out that dogs are on the menu in Seoul, Roman emperors enjoyed dormice, Melbourne residents serve up emu and crocodile, and Mopani worms are available in Johannesburg!

There are plenty of books that you can explore this way. Here are some more of my favorites:

• We Are Off - The Journal
• Just Keep Pedaling: A Corner-to-corner Bike Ride Across America
• Patricia Unterman’s San Francisco Food Lover’s Guide
• A Short Guide-book for Tourists in Japan
• A Journey Around the World

If you’re hungry for more (no pun intended), there are even more examples on the Inside Book Search blog, where my teammate David first talked about this feature. And you can try your own searches too, at http://books.google.com.

I have a lot of words on good and bad writing and who is worth your time to read and who is not, but I thought I’d go ahead and offer up some lists for all you Googlers out there. First up, authors you must read.

Haruki Murakami - Contemporary world literature master of magical realism. Read: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Jonathan Lethem - Genre bender, sci-fi guru, and area expert on Brooklyn fictions. Read: Motherless Brooklyn
Paul Auster - Oddball, tightrope walking realism challenged auteur. Read: The New York Trilogy
Salmon Rushdie - Hyper literate genius with the pen to back it up. Read: Midnight’s Children
Chuck Palahniuk - Cult-pop literature extraordinair, master of the grotesque. Read: Survivor
Jorge Louis Borges - Father of Magical Realism, and master of the short form. Read: Collected Fictions
Christopher Moore - Modern day Swift. Satire and comedic mastermind. Read: Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff
Michael Chabon - A story teller through and through via genre literature. Read: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Mikhail Bulgakov - Repressed soviet playwright. Greatest Russian writer of the last century. Read: The Master and Margarita
Franz Kafka - The one and only Kafka. Read: Everything he wrote
Sherman Alexie - A local writer and a really nice guy. Short form with magical touches. Read: The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
David Sedaris - The contemporary master of memoir and essay formats. Funniest writer around. Read: Me Talk Pretty One Day
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Nobel prize winning magical realism novelist (of which there are few). Read: 100 Years of Solitude
Cory Doctorow - The next generation of Science Fiction, and he gives them away online. Read: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
Neil Gaiman - Fantasy’s modern revolutionary. Resurrected Comic books and reinventing fantastic fiction

Every book on that list is worth your time and money, and every writer is worth even more of that time and money.

I don’t doubt that Google has a million and one projects in prelim, waiting to go to beta, at which time the internet will fall to its knees in collective fellatio of the geniuses at the big G, but this is definitely a fake. Sorry for those of you who woke up to a bum email or saw Google TV in the top search terms index. It’s all a big joke. Funny if you think about it though. And the best part. The project is not entirely unlikely for Google.

[youtube]J9SK_M_nVWA[/youtube]

I posted a few days ago about Daytipper, a site that purportedly pays $3 for a simple tip if it’s chosen for publication. I submitted 12 and 10 were approved and I was happy about it, so I shared the site with you all on here. However, as I surfed the boards over AssociatedContent, I noticed a rising ire among its users about the legitimacy of business practices. Basically, they don’t pay anyone.

They hold your tips, say you’ll get paid at a later date, 7-10 days after publication (and publication is random at best), but it could take up to 4-6 weeks. Now, four to six weeks is ridiculous because it’s done by paypal, and the last time I checked Paypal is a fairly quick and easy service. Associated Content sends out thousands of payments a week via the same service with no delay, so that’s kind of bull right off the bat.

Then, I found a post that supposedly showed the links to unpublished tips that were sitting there, published on the internet with adsense, absorbing ad revenue while the author isn’t getting paid. How did I find this? One of the tips I submitted just so happened to be tip #10,000, and thus posted all over the boards a few blogs showing that it could be viewed before publication. That particular tip by the way was rejected by Daytipper.

Since then, they’ve made it so you can’t view the tips that haven’t been published, but who knows how much revenue they generated in the time they were available and with the kind of buzz being generated by poor saps like myself. Now, who knows if they pay or not, but I’m surely done until they do (if they do) and am very unhappy that money was made from my words, especially before they even bothered to reject my words.

Thank you to Susan Corbett at Associated Content for commenting on my earlier post so that I get the chance to rescind my support for this waste of time website. You can read her article, detailing a little further my rant from above here

Librocrat (among many others) posted this on his page, and I always thought it was pretty damn funny, so I’m going to post it here. How does it relate? Doesn’t matter. Maureen Dowd tearing Cheney apart like no one else can. Daffy Does Doom indeed.

Dick Durbin went to the floor of the Senate on Thursday night to denounce the vice president as “delusional.”
It was shocking, and Senator Durbin should be ashamed of himself.
Delusional is far too mild a word to describe Dick Cheney. Delusional doesn’t begin to capture the profound, transcendental one-flew-over daftness of the man.
Has anyone in the history of the United States ever been so singularly wrong and misguided about such phenomenally important events and continued to insist he’s right in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary?
It requires an exquisite kind of lunacy to spend hundreds of billions destroying America’s reputation in the world, exhausting the U.S. military, failing to catch Osama, enhancing Iran’s power in the Middle East and sending American kids to train and arm Iraqi forces so they can work against American interests.
Only someone with an inspired alienation from reality could, under the guise of exorcising the trauma of Vietnam, replicate the trauma of Vietnam.
You must have a real talent for derangement to stay wrong every step of the way, to remain in complete denial about Iraq’s civil war, to have a total misunderstanding of Arab culture, to be completely oblivious to the American mood and to be absolutely blind to how democracy works.
In a democracy, when you run a campaign that panders to homophobia by attacking gay marriage and then your lesbian daughter writes a book about politics and decides to have a baby with her partner, you cannot tell Wolf Blitzer he’s “out of line” when he gingerly raises the hypocrisy of your position.
Mr. Cheney acts more like a member of the James gang than the Jefferson gang. Asked by Wolf what would happen if the Senate passed a resolution critical of The Surge, Scary Cheney rumbled, “It won’t stop us.”
Such an exercise in democracy, he noted, would be “detrimental from the standpoint of the troops.”
Americans learned an important lesson from Vietnam about supporting the troops even when they did not support the war. From media organizations to Hollywood celebrities and lawmakers on both sides, everyone backs our troops.
It is W. and Vice who learned no lessons from Vietnam, probably because they worked so hard to avoid going. They rush into a war halfway around the world for no reason and with no foresight about the culture or the inevitable insurgency, and then assert that any criticism of their fumbling management of Iraq and Afghanistan is tantamount to criticizing the troops. Quel demagoguery.
“Bottom line,” Vice told Wolf, “is that we’ve had enormous successes, and we will continue to have enormous successes.” The biggest threat, he said, is that Americans may not “have the stomach for the fight.”
He should stop casting aspersions on the American stomach. We’ve had the stomach for more than 3,000 American deaths in a war sold as a cakewalk.
If W. were not so obsessed with being seen as tough, Mr. Cheney could not influence him with such tripe.
They are perpetually guided by the wrong part of the body. They are consumed by the fear of looking as if they don’t have guts, when they should be compelled by the desire to look as if they have brains.
After offering Congress an olive branch in the State of the Union, the president resumed mindless swaggering. Asked yesterday why he was ratcheting up despite the resolutions, W. replied, “In that I’m the decision maker, I had to come up with a way forward that precluded disaster.” (Or preordained it.)
The reality of Iraq, as The Times’s brilliant John Burns described it to Charlie Rose this week, is that a messy endgame could be far worse than Vietnam, leading to “a civil war on a scale with bloodshed that will absolutely dwarf what we’re seeing now,” and a “wider conflagration, with all kinds of implications for the world’s flow of oil, for the state of Israel. What happens to King Abdullah in Jordan if there’s complete chaos in the region?”
Mr. Cheney has turned his perversity into foreign policy.
He assumes that the more people think he’s crazy, the saner he must be. In Dr. No’s nutty world-view, anti-Americanism is a compliment. The proof that America is right is that everyone thinks it isn’t.
He sees himself as a prophet in the wilderness because he thinks anyone in the wilderness must be a prophet.
To borrow one of his many dismissive words, it’s hogwash.