An Obsession with Everything Else

Writing Pause

2008-04-10T15:10:00.001-07:00

Once I start at Maxis, I'm going to cut back on my freelance writing. One reason is that the team will be moving toward crunch mode. But the main reason would have been true in any new job: I want to build my team's trust in me before I do writer things such as going to wine tastings in the middle of the day or visiting wineries or whatever. My current employer has given me a lot of freedom in this regard, but it didn't at first.

My clients have been pretty understanding. One asked me to do a piece because it wouldn't require any fieldwork (plus, they said, my copy is pretty clean, and they were a bit desperate for it). (I turned them down.) I bowed out of a Chronicle lede because I won't have time to give it the research it deserves, but then my editor asked if I'd be willing to write a 400-word review/commentary of a new book.

Overall, my life as a published writer is taking a breath. But I'm not letting it sit idle. Instead, I have writing skills that I want to develop. I'll be working on essays — a genre that I adore above all other non-fiction but which I find difficult to write, despite the real argument you could make that each OWF post is an essay exercise. I'm also planning to work on my narrative nonfiction abilities; I want to be the type of writer who casts features in the form of conflicts, crises, and resolutions. I want my pieces to have a story flow that brings the reader into the prose. And I want to continue to grow my newfound library research knowledge. If I may use a metaphor from my newest development project, those skills are currently in the Tidepool phase and I want them to be at the Civilization phase. My existing research skills have earned compliments from Ed Behr, which counts for a lot, but I want to go further.

But aside from my writing skills, I intend to devote some time to my programming projects. My recent job quest and my parallel investigation of the latest, greatest technologies have reminded me how much I like programming. I go through little phases where I believe I no longer do, but it doesn't usually take much to remind me of the sheer joy of coding. I'm working on a "wine notebook/cellar management" system, which I may or may not make more available. The application allows me to have a project where I have to explore technologies in depth but not spend months and months and months working with them. I can do a Spring/Hibernate/YUI version, as I am now, or a Mac OS X/iPhone version, or a Ruby on Rails version, all using the same database. Doing any one of those gives me enough of a grounding in the technologies to work on more complicated projects (at least in theory — I already know a fair amount about Spring, something about Hibernate, but nothing at all about YUI).

Dashcode/Spore Countdown Widget

2008-04-07T09:59:00.000-07:00

For obvious reasons, I’ve been reading all the press about Spore. At one point, I decided to do the cheesy, geeky thing and find a Dashboard widget that counts down to Spore’s release. Only I couldn’t find one that I liked. So I did the even geekier thing and wrote my own.

Melissa made noises about Kool-Aid and cults, but if you’ve ever played with DashCode, you’ll realize that my widget is a barely-modified version of the default countdown template. I fiddled with some colors, set some attributes, and added a graphic from the fansite kit. Other than downloading the fansite kit, which took eons on our slow connection, the whole widget probably took 30 minutes of my time.

I’ve played with DashCode before, but always with ambitious projects in mind that demanded more than the Dashboard infrastructure would allow. I was impressed with the application at the time, but ultimately my widget ideas didn’t go anywhere. Having a project go from start to finish in a short time made me appreciate just how easy DashCode is. I didn’t need to do any coding for the widget; any moderately technical person could have set it up.

AppleScript: Open A Bunch Of Links In Safari

2008-03-21T10:28:00.000-07:00

I recently judged the American Wine Blog Awards. My list of nominees came as a spreadsheet with the URLs of the blogs and their names, grouped by category. Because there were 30 or more nominations in some categories, I didn’t want to open each link individually in Safari. I turned to my old friend and nemesis: AppleScript.

It took a bit of online sleuthing to figure out the quirks in Safari’s dictionary, but I eventually got a script that opens a set of URLs, each in its own tab, in a new window. I’ve included it below for anyone who might find it useful. It works well enough, given that I only needed to run it 8 times. It’s pretty brain dead as it is: There is no error checking and you have to have the URLs in a return-delimited list, which is what you get when you copy URLs out of a column in Excel. If you run it, you’ll also notice that it opens an extra tab at the “beginning” of the new window. If it bothered me, I would figure out how to remove the tab, but for 8 runs I could just click the close box. I only tested it on Mac OS X 10.5 and Safari 3.0.



set clipText to the clipboard

set AppleScript's text item delimiters to {"
"}
set urlList to text items of clipText
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to {""}
tell application "Safari"
 set newDoc to make new document
 set currWindow to front window
 repeat with currentURL in urlList
  make new tab at the end of tabs in currWindow with properties {URL:currentURL}
 end repeat
end tell

Writing I Like: Nicholson Baker Writes About Wikipedia

2008-03-03T13:02:00.000-08:00

I think I’ve liked every piece of Nicholson Baker nonfiction that I’ve ever read, but I thought I would call out his piece about Wikipedia for my new-and-exciting Writing I Like category. Ostensibly, the essay is a review of Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, but in true NYT Review of Books fashion, that’s a lightweight skeleton supporting the piece’s muscle.

Baker has whole battlefronts of conflict at his disposal to spice up his piece: He paints the modern-day Wikipedia as an mostly-unseen war between the keepers of the encyclopedic truth and its would-be spammers and trolls. Even within the legitimate ranks, he finds tension: There are aggressive purgers debating against article inclusionists. (And, really, is it any surprise that the author of Double Fold sides with the “let’s include everything” camp?) There is even his conflict between his life as a newly enthusiastic Wikipedia editor and his life as a father and husband with household obligations.

But this piece really shines with its use of specifics. Baker has a finely tuned eye for detail backed by an obsessive knowledge-seeking mind. Consider his accounts of Wikipedia vandalism:

Some articles are vandalized a lot. On January 11, 2008, the entire fascinating entry on the aardvark was replaced with "one ugly animal"; in February the aardvark was briefly described as a "medium-sized inflatable banana."

He doesn’t bother cracking jokes. Who needs to with source material such as this?

As with the Wired piece about the Netflix Prize, Baker’s piece shines because of his presence in the piece (a more overt presence than that of the writer of the Netflix piece). He talks about how he got drawn in to Wikipedia editing, the battles he won (and lost) to keep articles in the system, the addictive pull of debates with other editors and conflicts with vandals.

I finished the piece feeling a little lighter, a little happier, and a little more inclined to edit Wikipedia articles.

Writing I LIke: Wired's Psychologist And The Netflix Prize

2008-03-02T20:55:00.000-08:00

I spend a lot of time here griping about laughable published writing that shouldn’t have slipped past an editor’s red pen. Let’s look a piece that makes me smile in a good way: Wired’s piece about an English psychologist/operations engineer who has rocketed up the leaderboard for the Netflix prize, a $1 million reward for anyone who can improve the company’s recommendation system by 10 percent.

First of all, hats off to the author, Jordan Ellenberg, for distilling complex math into a usable form for the smart, but not expert, reader. Ellenberg is a mathematician in his own right, and he summarizes the high-math concepts used by the competitors into common English, using analogies to illustrate his points. As someone who increasingly finds himself writing technical, “wine geek” wine pieces for a mainstream, layperson audience, I am impressed by his skill.

But the biggest draw of this piece is the compelling narrative: A classic “little guy beats the big guy” scenario. Good fiction, which is the model for narrative non-fiction, revolves around conflict, and the author has rightfully used the inherent battle — a single psychologist and his high-school daughter, the math consultant, trouncing teams of math and computer science professionals working with sophisticated programs — as the axis of his piece. From conflict comes crisis, the boiling point, and Ellenberg provides it with the current status: all the contestants close to the final prize from a numerical point of view, but very far from a realistic point of view. Ideally, one wants a resolution as well, but that remains in the future, an acceptable ending for a newsy narrative nonfiction piece.

The author doesn’t lock himself into this story, though. “Digress often, but never for long,” reads one of the few axioms laid out in the classic The Art and Craft of Feature Writing. Ellenberg spins a quick history of Netflix, a brief description of the prize, a look into the minds of the Netflix statisticians, the surprising collaboration of the competing groups, and more, all through short digressions that linger just long enough: As soon as you start to think, “Get back to the psychologist!” he does.

My final point — though there are other things to like in this piece — is that Ellenberg allows himself to be in the piece. Feature wells don’t often permit first-person narrative for obvious reasons: Too much first-person, and the reader begins to wonder why s/he should care about the writer so much. Among my clients, only The Art of Eating finds it natural, though others allow it when it makes a difference. But Ellenberg sometimes steps away from his story to give his own view: “He refers to the psychological model underlying their mathematical approach as ‘crude.’ His tone suggests that if I weren’t taping, he might use a stronger word.” Ellenberg exposes himself to the reader, but in doing so draws a more detailed picture of the person you actually care about. And he doesn’t forget to show and not tell, though he has a harder time in his straightforward reporting sections: Small details like the notebook and the elderly Dell allow the reader to paint a more vivid picture.

I might try to incorporate a bit more color and rhythm into the prose, were I writing this, but the story is good enough that only someone looking for nits will drill down on that.

Google Chart

2008-02-20T21:50:00.000-08:00

I recently discovered Google’s Chart service, which allows you to query Google with a bunch of parameters and get back a dynamically generated chart. The idea intrigued me, but I couldn’t think of an immediate use for it until I remembered that I had yet to publish the results of a survey I ran on OWF in September. Now was the time, I thought.

After a day of playing with the system, I have to say I’m pretty impressed. You get a wide range of styles, you can set the data in a variety of ways, and you can fiddle with labels and legends. It has some quirks: I couldn’t get the horizontal axis to quite line up with my data points on my bottom graph, and you have to give the data for the bar chart as a percentage instead of a straight value. But once I got the hang of it, the graphs came together quickly and looked nice.

Now I just need an excuse to put a Venn diagram on OWF.

Amusing Grammar Slip

2008-02-02T06:39:00.000-08:00

Mediabistro, a paywalled website for writers, recently posted the transcript of a seminar on grammar. I read through it — it’s all stuff I know, unfortunately — and noticed this sentence in the section on pronoun agreement: “The next example is probably my favorite because I didn't make it up. I get silly text messages from Virgin Mobile for their promotional crap, and it had a lot of errors in it. ”

I know it’s just a transcript. It may even be what the teacher said. But that particular sentence in that particular section tickled me.

Link Blogs

2008-01-31T14:15:00.000-08:00

One of the many blog genres is the link blog, a site that just provides links to other sites. It sounds boring, but some of the blogosphere’s most popular sites are link blogs: Jason Kottke adds little content at kottke.org; nor do the boing boingers.

Without realizing what I was doing, I started a link blog in July of 2007. I put up a “snacks” feature on OWF, a light feature that would just point people to interesting items on the Web. I made it easy to maintain, and I started populating it.

I’ve come to realize just how addictive such a feature is. Its main purpose is still to provide links that my readers may or may not find interesting, links that may fuel a coffee break at work. But I often find myself “snacking” a link that I want to be able to retrieve at some later point. Blogger makes this even more compelling: I host the main snack blog on blogspot, and the default Blogger header has a search box for the entire site. And once Jack prompted me to add descriptions to my links (which show up in the RSS feed but not yet on OWF), I realized I could add keywords that would speed up the retrieval.

So have I read The Mathematics Of Change Ringing [pdf] yet? Well, not completely. But I can revisit it at some later point without trying to remember where I saw the link. To find the link just now, I went to the main snack page, typed the word “bell” into the navbar at the top of the screen, and went right to the entry.

It’s been liberating in an odd way. I can tuck links into this little corner of the Internet and recover them at will. It’s become a Pensieve of sorts. I can snack a link, close the window, and revisit it when I have time.

The Atlantic's Variety Cryptic

2008-01-26T22:36:00.000-08:00

The blogosphere has been abuzz with The Atlantic’s recent decision to tear down its long-standing paywall.

While most have mentioned trawling the archives for this or that article, few have made the obvious observation: The variety cryptic, by Cox and Rathvon, is part of the package. Perhaps that’s because the boing boingers and Jason Kottke don’t actually do variety cryptics, but I feel like it hasn’t even shown up on my puzzle lists. Maybe it’s always been online, and I’ve never looked?

Cryptic crosswords are crossword puzzles in which the clues have the word definition, but they also have a hefty amount of wordplay to get you to the answer. Thus each clue in a cryptic is really two clues. It’s up to you to determine where one ends and the other begins, and deciphering the clue can be tricky: I often figure out what word should go in the space provided and then try to reverse-engineer the wordplay.

A variety cryptic adds yet another dimension. In a variety cryptic, the answer to the cryptic clues don’t necessarily fit into the grid the way you’d expect. You might have to add a letter, drop a letter, change one fragment to another, or make words “warp” from one part of the grid to another. I remember one variety cryptic, published in The Enigma, of course, where words that contained the names of European currencies had to be transformed so that those letters became EURO. Remarkable became reeuroable, for instance.

Technology Rules

2008-01-16T10:11:00.000-08:00

Some high school students discovered an asteroid. Neat.

But the best part is the summary of connections mentioned on Slashdot. The Wisconsin students, “used a telescope in New Mexico, belonging to a college in Michigan, that they controlled over the Net.” Gotta love the Internets.

Quote Of The Day: Starting Fires With Fish

2008-01-15T13:46:00.000-08:00

From Joystiq, describing the latest news of Uwe Boll, the German director most famous for his big-screen videogame adaptations:

…the infamous German director and pouting pugilist will see his future endeavors financially constrained after his latest $70 million video game adaptation, "In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale," set the box-office alight with all the effectiveness of two moist fish furiously rubbed together.

Quote Of The Day: This Is Why People Don't Like Goblins

2008-01-14T10:59:00.000-08:00

Jerry, from Penny Arcade, writes of his re-entrance into World of Warcraft.

After seven blissful levels of wondering why I ever quit WoW, I ended up on some featureless beach in Feathermoon waiting for some stupid, almost nonsensical drop. After that, I talked to a Goblin whose most pressing concern (in a world whose very crust was cracked by perpetual War) was his tremendous thirst. Would I go and get something for him to drink? I've got water, but he doesn't want it. He only wants to drink the glands of some twelve-foot tall plant man. It's like, listen. This is why people don't like Goblins.

Randomness

2008-01-11T00:04:00.000-08:00

When Pim and I looked at the prizes for Menu For Hope, we were surprised to see that a number of people had won more than one prize. I know, theoretically, that an even distribution among prize winners is one possible outcome while lists with duplicates are much more likely. But it's one thing to know it, and another thing to accept it. An iPod's shuffle feature is truly random, but it often seems as if the shuffle is favoring one artist or album. (That's why iTunes now offers a "smart" shuffle that diminishes randomness in favor of distributing artists/albums.) And in the TV show Numb3rs, an evenly distributed set of points is a clue that someone has tried to make something look random. True random numbers aren't spread out equally.

Just to convince myself, I wrote some code to demonstrate this unintuitive aspect of randomness.

First, draw 1 number from a set of 10. The probability for each number is 1/10th. Do this 10,000 times to get a bunch of results to chart, and you end up with an almost even distribution across those 10 numbers, demonstrating the fairness of the random draw:
1 1024
2 1042
3 992
4 952
5 974
6 1034
7 995
8 993
9 1001
10 993

In that run, each "turn" was a single draw. Now make each turn 10 draws. In Menu For Hope, many contributors entered multiple raffles, and drawing more than once from the same pool simulates this. We expect each number to come up once, because that's what probability tells us. But it doesn't work that way, at least not necessarily. On one run, I got this set of results:
2
5
6
7
2
10
2
6
8
3

Even though the probability of each number is 1/10, you end up with single numbers repeated. There are three 2s and 2 6s.

When I ran the 10-draw turn 10,000 times, I got these results:

1 unique numbers 0
2 unique numbers 0
3 unique numbers 6
4 unique numbers 187
5 unique numbers 1274
6 unique numbers 3457
7 unique numbers 3528
8 unique numbers 1373
9 unique numbers 169
10 unique numbers 6

Here I counted the unique numbers in each set. 10 unique numbers means a perfect distribution. 1 unique number means that every random draw hit the same number. I didn't implement the logic to separate duplicates (the 6 in the previous example) from the triples (the 2 in the prior example). Or quadruples, for that matter. This was a simple simulation.

The odds of randomly getting an even distribution are pretty low. You are roughly 600 times more likely to have 6 or 7 unique numbers, meaning that some of those numbers are duplicated (or tripled or whatever). You’re 200 times more likely to have a scenario where half the numbers are missing. You’re 30 times more likely to have just 4 unique numbers: a whole host of repeats. The numbers looked similar on multiple runs.

This makes sense if you think about it. In the second draw of the 10-draw turn, you have a 10 percent chance of drawing a duplicate. If you don’t, you have two unique numbers, and on the third draw you have a 20 percent chance of duplicating one of the existing values. By the time you get to the tenth draw, there’s a 90 percent chance that you’ll draw a number that’s already been drawn, assuming all the others were unique.

Menu For Hope, of course, is much more complicated. Raffle ticket purchasers can stack the odds in their favor by buying more tickets for a given raffle. Prizes with fewer bidders have different odds than those with more bidders. And it was about 100 draws across 9,000 raffle tickets. But even the simple version in this post, where each of just 10 numbers has an equal probability, shows that duplicates and triplicates should be commonplace. So it's not surprising that some people won multiple prizes: It would have been more surprising if none had.

Which Paragraph Looks Better?

2008-01-10T19:48:00.000-08:00

In my article about Franconian beer, I have these paragraphs:

But even the best Franconian brewers aim for the everyday drinker, not the thrill-seeking beer snob. Waltman contrasts Belgium's prestigious brews with Franconia's farmhouse ales.

Belgian beers kind of hit you over the head," he says. "They have unusual flavors; they're big. In Belgium, if you ask for recommendations for 10 breweries, they would all be cafes: People sitting around sipping these strong beers. In Germany, and especially in Franconia, beer is what you drink all day long. The beers are designed to be drunk." Simple flavors, well-balanced hops and low alcohol create a drink that can go with your weeknight dinner or your afternoon break.

This is the text as I submitted it and as the Chronicle ran it. But when I had a chance to review the piece before publication, I looked at it again and posed a question to my editor. Should it read, "Waltman contrasts Franconia's farmhouse ales with Belgium's prestigious brews"?

One of my writing mantras — one of the ones in my screen saver — is “Keep related concepts together.” Following that rule, the paragraph should read the way I asked. The first “Belgium” segues into a digression about that country’s beers. But then your internal reader sees “Franconia Franconia Belgium Belgium.“ Because those are proper nouns, it feels, for lack of a better word, loud.

What do you think?

Paging An Editor: An Article About Champagne Vinegar?

2007-12-26T09:35:00.000-08:00

I think the point of this New York Times article is that Champagne vinegar is good. But that point only shows up in the last two paragraphs: The rest is a stretched analogy about the flip side of Champagne's connotations of luxury. So what is the point of this article, anyway?

No. Really. No Ads.

2007-12-17T21:28:00.000-08:00

I got an email today asking something about placing content on OWF. I gave my standard response — I don't take ads on OWF. The author wrote back. Clearly I misread her intent: I thought she wanted to take out ads.

The text links I referred to in my previous email will not consume any advertisement space (header/footer/side bar) on your web pages and are to be placed within the existing content of your web pages.

Each of these paragraphs will be custom-written to go nicely with the rest of your webpage and will add unique content to your webpage. These paragraphs will contain natural text links only and will not affect your page ranking with Google.

I will write keeping the content, quality and audience of your website in view. After reviewing your website thoroughly, I'll write the paragraphs' content accordingly.

Would an ad by any other name still smell … ? If I say no ads, I mean it. It doesn't matter how they look.

Heroes Fans Fan Service?

2007-12-17T18:39:00.000-08:00

On my way home, I listened to the most recent episode of The 10th Wonder, a podcast about Heroes. The hosts announced that they'd be taking a break for the next few weeks, in contrast to last season's hiatus, where they kept the podcast going as "a service to the fans."

My inner schoolboy ("inner?" you're thinking) emerged, and I giggled. Three guys giving fan service? I'll pass, no matter what my friends might think of me. Call me when French Maid TV does it.

Oh, right. I guess FMTV is almost all fan service.

Gmail Ads

2007-12-17T10:37:00.000-08:00

I was amused by the current juxtaposition of context-sensitive ads appearing alongside my gmail pane:

Retaining Walls
Genesis Stoneworks Freeee! in home estimates Call 800-287-5400

Random Number Generation
Stanford finance risk mgmt courses. Learn new ideas & proven techniques

Official Gaiam Yoga Store
Official source for Gaiam yoga mats yoga kits, props & accessories.

SOHAKSC

2007-12-06T12:54:00.000-08:00

Today's Slylock Fox, shown near the bottom of this Comics Curmudgeon post, asks readers — children, in theory — to rearrange the letters in six words to spell the names of items in the picture.

Go ahead, try to figure out what SOHAKSC spells. You can probably guess the word based on how English structures these things, but do you know what it means? Can you find it in the picture? How many kids do you know who could nail this one?

Quote Of The Day: Mass Effect's Story

2007-12-04T13:52:00.001-08:00

From Wired’s review of Mass Effect, a game that has garnered a lot of praise for its sweeping story: “Mass Effect doesn't have the Star Wars license, so they've created their own universe of aliens and mysteries, and as far as I'm concerned George Lucas can take his midichlorians and shove them up his Gungan.”

Posts Are Not Blogs

2007-12-04T12:43:00.000-08:00

I realize that easy-to-use blogging software has given lots of folks access to this technology, and that there will be an inevitable sloppiness about terminology, but I share with Grant Barrett a pet peeve about the use of the word “blog” when the person really means “post.”

I just received a press release about the fact that Traci Des Jardins is now a guest blogger at the Epicurious blog. I noticed that Des Jardins made the post/blog mistake when I saw her post on the site — prior to receiving the press release — but thought little of it: I assume she’s not a techie. But the PR person repeated the mistake in an email sent to, I assume, lots of bloggers.

She wrote: “You can read her first blog which posted yesterday about easing the holiday pain (see link and blog pasted below).”

With a touch of that “big dose of personality” that Amanda once mentioned, I wrote back.

If I may, let me point out that Traci Des Jardins did not write her first blog yesterday: She wrote her first post on a blog. As a non-techie, she can be forgiven the mistake, but if you, the PR person, are sending this note out to bloggers, it sounds odd to make "blog" and "post" synonymous. A blog contains posts; they are not the same.

I also noted that I don’t link to celebrity bloggers until they’ve proven that they’ll keep writing and not peter out. She wrote back to assure me that Des Jardins would be posting in the future.

She closed that second note with, “Hope you will be enjoying her blogs.”

A Subject Line Guaranteed To Send Your Press Release Into The Trash

2007-11-28T16:05:00.000-08:00

HEY! LOOK! OH MY! GOOD NEWS! HOLIDAY GIFT CERTIFICATES & FOUR DAYS LEFT in the NEDA charity auction!!!

ThinkGeek Adds Cast Puzzles

2007-11-15T05:54:00.000-08:00

I noticed that ThinkGeek now carries a few Hanayama Cast puzzles. These are, to my mind, among the very best commercially produced puzzles. The folks at Hanayama, spurred on years ago by the late Nob Yoshigahara, seek out quality designs from the best designers in the world. In the ThinkGeek set, I particularly recommend Enigma, Baroq, O'Gear, and Chain. Star and Laby are entertaining, but not particularly interesting. And as I've mentioned before, Puzzle Master has an even better selection.

Grammar In The Times

2007-11-06T15:01:00.000-08:00

For once, I'm not writing about a publication's grammar in a scornful way. Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl, "tweeted" a link to this great Q&A with Philip Corbett, the man who tries to keep grammar in line in the New York Times. Readers got a chance to ask questions in advance, and Corbett does a great job of parrying the thrusts of grammar sticklers while shedding light behind the scenes at the Times.

Paging An Editor: Life Begins With Pancreatic Cancer

2007-11-06T06:50:00.000-08:00

My friend Dietsch gets credit for spotting this editing oddity in this NY Times obituary of biochemist Leslie Orgel:

Dr. Orgel had also advanced a novel idea about life’s possible arrival from outer space.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, said a spokesman for the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, where Dr. Orgel had been on the faculty since 1964.

Maybe our extraterrestrial forebears were dying of pancreatic cancer and left their home world to seek a cure?