found_drama

The copy/pasted/validated word count came in as 50,198…

…but that was a story without an ending.

So I plowed ahead and tacked on an ending that kinda/sorta worked well enough^[1] and used Scrivener’s word counter^[2] to get my new “completed” word count of 52,520.

So yeah…  Go me!

Thanks to everyone that was understanding and/or patient and/or encouraging and/or interested in this project.  I don’t know how I managed to get anywhere near the 50,000 mark (let alone break it), what with everything else going on this month—massive project at work, The Boy getting sick, our Thanksgiving holiday trip, and everything else that always seems to crop up.

For folks that expressed interest in the novel, let me know if you want to see this ugly first draft.  I like to share.  But I warn you, it’s a far cry from “any good”.

Also:  Scrivener review to follow.  (Short version:  it’s bad ass.)

1. Except that I just sort out outlined the post-climax denouement portion a la David Foster Wallace’s “Adult World (part II)” only with fewer abbreviations and much shorter and really just basically outlined what I really wanted to do to actually finish this novel but that will be later when I get the time to do edits etc. because really at this point I am so done and fried from the first draft of this story. [↩]
2. Which is a little more liberal, I might add. [↩]

• Apple document details Target Display mode for 27" iMac
  at tuaw — makes me think that I shouldn't bother getting an external monitor for "the home office" and just upgrade to this guy next year and use this instead…
  (tagged: iMac Apple hardware wishlist )
• Advanced Plugin Development with Ext JS
  Great piece on developing plugins for the Ext JavaScript framework.
  (tagged: Ext javascript work tutorial todo )
• A JPEG Encoder for JavaScript
  at bytestrøm (via Ajaxian) — wow, looks quite awesome
  (tagged: graphics javascript webdev work todo )
• Inheritance Patterns in JavaScript
  via Ajaxian
  (tagged: javascript dev todo )
• Full Frontal ‘09: Robert Nyman on the Javascript Language
  an interesting collection of notes at Ajaxian
  (tagged: javascript dev work todo )
• Full Frontal ‘09: PPK on Mobile Quirks and Practices
  at Ajaxian
  (tagged: webdev mobile javascript css work todo )
• Full Frontal ‘09: Jake Archibald on Performance Optimisation
  at Ajaxian — the part I'm most interested in:
  

  The question is, how much faster? In many cases, such as this example, your energy is better spent on optimising big things.

  (tagged: javascript webdev work todo )
• Concur.next — More Clojure I/O
  (tagged: Closure )
• Tom Gauld print: "Characters for an Epic Tale"
  at Boing Boing — what's funny is that, in looking over this only briefly, I was pretty quick to match up each archetype with the characters from my '09 NaNoWriMo.
  (tagged: writing literature archetypes illustration awesome )
• William Gibson’s Neuromancer Staged With Porn Star
  at Slashdot — More interesting than the staging is the Gibson quote re: dystopianism as another form of relativism. Time for another re-read?
  (tagged: Gibson scifi literature postmodernism dystopianism todo )
• All the Anne Franks
  by Erik Hoel (at Strange Horizons Fiction) — the title alone is makes this seem worth it.
  (tagged: scifi fiction todo )

• Beverage Company McKinlay And Co. Drills For Vintage Scotch Whiskey In Antarctica
  at cbs5.com (via B²) — I wish all news stories were like this. It has everything!
  (tagged: whiskey conservation Antarctica environment history news )
• Pasadena Yoga
  Some linky love for a friend's yoga program down in MD.
  (tagged: Maryland yoga friend )
• Hacked E-Mail Is New Fodder for Climate Dispute
  at NYTimes.com :
  

  In several e-mail exchanges, Kevin Trenberth, a climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and other scientists discuss gaps in understanding of recent variations in temperature. Skeptic Web sites pointed out one line in particular: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t,” Dr. Trenberth wrote.

  Hate to break it to everyone but it's not actually a "travesty", it's just science. For the folks that weren't paying attention in science class, it's called an "experiment" and while it can answer some of your questions, it usually results in more questions, more follow-up research, and more complexity. And if your feelings are hurt by being called "idiots"… well, the only difference between the climate change scientists and the smokestack apologists is that the climatologists tried to keep their name-calling private.

  (tagged: news science globalwarming )
• THE RINGS OF THE EARTH , 3DS Max Animation
  via B² — tremendously cool
  (tagged: astronomy research video visualization surreal )
• The 100 best quotes from The Wire
  Only 100?
  (tagged: The-Wire )

If you’ve been keeping track, we are (as of typing this) past week three and into week four of NaNoWriMo.  According to their little widget, there are eight days left in the writing sprint.  I’m currently claiming 45,058 words committed to the manuscript.  To put it into perspective, that’s about:

• 5 days aheads of schedule (with 4,942 before the goal marker); or
• 197 letter-sized pages of double-spaced 12 pt. Courier typing (currently without any embellishments to indicate chapter or scene breaks)

Daily output looks a little bit like this:

The columns represent each day’s total word count.  The descending line represents the average words-per-day rate necessary to reach the goal by the November 30 deadline.  (Note, that goal starts at 1,700 words per day.)

I feel pretty confident that I’ll make it.  And I’m looking forward to my discount on Scrivener^[1].

Also, curious what I’ve been writing about?  Click the little “Novel Info” tab on my NaNoWriMo profile for a sort-of-synopsis and an excerpt.

1. And I’ll admit that I’ve grown kind of attached to it. [↩]

• Odd Man Out. Why isn’t anyone else taking paternity leave?
  (tagged: parenting essay )
• 9 Most Common IE Bugs and How to Fix Them
  at Nettuts+ — just keep reminding yourself
  (tagged: webdev IE debugging work )
• A bug’s dance
  at The University of Chicago Magazine: Arts & Sciences — “Julia Oldham’s artwork is inspired by creatures that make most people squeal.”
  (tagged: friend art essay )
• James Cameron and “Avatar”
  The New Yorker (via DF) — this one is fucking inspirational:

  “If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success.”

  (tagged: inspiration writing quote )

Friday the 13th.  I am 13 days into NaNoWriMo and have hit that weird spot where the hours don’t all match up in a given day any more.  I apparently picked a hell of a year to give a crack at the contest again.  Whew…

A few observations at this point in the writing sprint:

• I could do this full time.  Perhaps some day.
• I’m only slightly behind 2006′s pace.  I’m over 28,000 words as of tonight; in ’06 I broke 28,000 on the 12th.  So not bad—more complicated situation this year, I’d say.
• The story is flowing a bit easier.  Though I must say that for something that’s supposed to be self-parodic, I’m not sure that it’s really all that funny.

And/but that’s the rub right there.  By the time you get to about 20,000 words or so you have introduced most of your core characters, your setting is established, and you’re just sort of trudging through… plot?  Or something like that.  You follow the characters for a bit.  Then they lead you somewhere else.  It’s a fun game of tag.  But there’s also this thought:  ”If you’re going to write yourself, please write yourself and let me go to bed.”  But damn is this ever a great exercise in discipline.

I’ll make it.  So help me, I’m going to make it:

This is the recipe for vegephobes, for the folks (like me?) that do not otherwise care for Brussels sprouts.

We are participating in the Food Basket CSA this winter and this was in our first basket.  I’m not a fan of Brussels sprouts but I’d also never had them fresh before.  So we decided to try this.

Get the following together:

• Brussels sprouts, approx. 1 quart (must be fresh)
• 2 strips of streaky bacon (hickory smoked if you got it, add more if you want it)
• 1 cooking apple, coarsely chopped
• 1 tablespoon of butter
• 2 teaspoons of lemon juice
• salt to taste
• pepper to taste
• nutmeg to taste

Cut the bacon up into bite-sized slices and throw it into a big pan and start the sizzling on moderate heat.  When the bacon has released its fat, toss in the butter and the sprouts (make sure to have de-stemmed the sprouts).  Cook the sprouts down for about 5-10 minutes; they should be a little bit browned.  Then add the lemon juice, salt, pepper, and nutmeg.  Give it a good stirring and reduce the heat down to low; simmer for another 5-10 minutes.  Add the apple bits and simmer for about another five minutes.  Serve hot.

So good your one-year-old will be signing for more.

Full disclosure:  this recipe is based on one from The Bacon Cookbook; I’ve changed mine up a bit to add the apples later (otherwise they’ll get a bit too mushy).

Image credit: Brussels Sprouts by Barbara L. Hanson (on Flickr); sadly, we ate our Brussels sprouts too quickly to photograph the meal.

• 15 Things Worth Knowing About Coffee
  at The Oatmeal — I love this design.
  (tagged: coffee design visualization )
• Fox News Fact-Checks Sarah Palin’s Coin Conspiracy Theory (VIDEO)
  short version: "Sarah Palin is too crazy even for the crazy network." Personally I'd like it if "In God We Trust" came off the money all together (it's part of the reason I don't carry cash?)
  (tagged: money politics atheism crazytalk news )
• Vermont City Almost Encased In a 1-Mile Dome
  a Slashdot News Story — I found out about this years ago and have been telling it to damn near everyone. And no one believes me. Even a few native Vermonters. Not that I'm relying on /. to up my credibility but still—thanks for backing me up, CmdrTaco.
  (tagged: Vermont Winooski geodesic dome absurd surreal )
• 5 Simple, But Useful CSS Properties
  (tagged: css webdev work todo )
• Daring Fireball Linked List: Lots of Excuses
  Perhaps a bit meta but to sum up: this is a good, paradigmatic microcosm of where I think the Android is currently "going wrong". And let's not get me wrong: I wish Android nothing but success—I want it to be as hugely popular/successful a platform as the iPhone. But this is a worrying trend, don't you think? I could link back to Gruber linking back to someone else again here: when we talk about mobile decides—especially mobile "touch" devices—we're talking about how badly there needs to be a common interface language that is not "owned" by any singular entity. Tapping, dragging, pinch-to-zoom, etc. That needs to be taken as the de facto way to interact (and that's just talking about ONE FACET of the the user-input aspect of this discussion). I think it's inevitable that these things will work themselves out (and quickly) over the next couple months and then developers on the non-dominant platforms will be playing a game of "refactor-or-perish".
  (tagged: mobile touch ux ui )
• Move Your Home Folder Off Your SSD Boot Drive in OS X
  at Ransom Note Typography (via DF)
  (tagged: osx ssd mac hack hardware todo )

• October 2009 browser stats: Firefox finally passes IE6
  at Ars Technica — possibly the worst, most mis-leading graph of all time but if those numbers are accurate, at least the conclusions are great news
  (tagged: IE Firefox stats )
• Emission Impossible?: Is Dark Matter Behind the Hazy Radiation at the Milky Way’s Center?
  at Scientific American (via /.):
  

  In 2003 Douglas Finkbeiner, an astronomer at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, noticed a diffuse haze toward the center of the galaxy in microwave data collected by NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). There are only a handful of processes that yield microwaves in the interstellar medium, Finkbeiner explains, and when he subtracted templates for those processes from the WMAP data, something curious remained. "If our model [for microwave production] were correct, we would have random noise left over," Finkbeiner says. "Instead, we see a pattern, an excess of microwaves in the inner galaxy."

  (tagged: science astronomy research )
• Check out this church made of guns and bullets. AMAZING. mess… on Twitpic
  via @johnjosephadams
  (tagged: religion art )
• Closure Tools – Google Code
  at Google Code:
  

  The Closure Library is a broad, well-tested, modular, and cross-browser JavaScript library.

  (tagged: ClosureTools webdev javascript research work todo )
• The Meaning of Information Technology
  at Magic Scaling Sprinkles (via DF) — discussing "the heap problem"
  (tagged: heaps essay todo )
• Adobe is Bad for Open Government
  at Sunlight Labs (via DF):
  

  Here's a hint– if the data format has an ® by its name, it probably isn't great for transparency or open data.

  (tagged: software adobe government transparency opendata politics )

Following up on the September post (“advise me: enhancing storage“)—we went ahead and put a shiny new 1 TB Western Digital hard drive ^[1] into Malkovich, effectively quadrupling the storage (re this particular problem) and paving the way for a lot more life out of this ol’ iMac.

The idea for this particular upgrade owes some thanks to Arden at dtgeeks.com and Wilson Rothman at Gizmodo.  For those of you looking to do this as well, budget about an hour and make sure you’ve got a small Phillips head screwdriver and also a TORX 10 bitdriver.  Oh, and your Leopard install disk and your Time Machine back-up drive.

Now… here’s where we started:

The plan:  remove the 250GB Maxtor drive (“seemed big at the time!”) that came with the thing^[2] and replace it with the 1TB Western Digital drive that boasted all the speed benefits of SATA with some additional optimization for reduced energy consumption.  Alright… go.

First order of business is to pull the back of the iMac off.  This is easy.  There are three “lossless” screws on the bottom grill.  Lay the iMac flat and unscrew; gently lift the chassis backing off.  Well done.

OK, now we’re inside.  Do yourself a favor and blow out the dust.  Good job.  Now you see the hard drive?  It’s the green PCB in the sea of blue PCB.  Upper right.  Yeah, that’s it.  We want to get that out.

Now that we have gone in for a closer look.  Observe how the hard drive is in that bracket?  What we need to do is: (1) unscrew the bracket; (2) remove the tiny cable on the “bottom” [see photo at this link]; (3) disconnect the power etc. cables; and then remove the bracket from the drive — because we’ll need it for the new drive.

Use the Phillips to unscrew the bracket from the chassis.  Should be one screw on the bottom (by the memory modules) and two up top.

Now gently lift the drive up just a bit and use your fingernails to gently pull that tiny cable from the bottom of the drive/bracket.  It’s delicate, so be careful.  Nice job.

Lastly, pull the data and power cables from the rear of the drive with your fingers.  Now lift the whole drive out of the slot.  This is where your TORX 10 bitdriver comes in handy.

The hard drive is held into the custom-designed extra specially awesome Apple chassis by this weird little bracket.  And that’s fine — but the bracket isn’t held to the drive with your usual flathead or Phillips screwdriver.  Oh no.  They went extra fancy and used TORX screws.  Fortunately, I happened to have a toolkit that just happened to have the right size TORX head — a size 10.  Use the TORX 10 to remove the 4 TORX screws (2 on the top, 2 on the bottom) and thus remove the bracket from the old drive.  You may now commence celebrating.  This is basically the halfway point.

As I mentioned above, we went with a 1 TB WD Caviar Green drive (pictured here, above) to effectively quadruple the storage capacity of our aging iMac.  The rest should feel easy:

Use the TORX 10 to put the bracket on the new drive.  Attach the data and power cables to the new drive.  Lower it down into the bay and attach the little “other/misc.” cable.  Screw the bracket into the chassis.  Replace chassis backing etc.  Awesome.  Hardware section complete.

Now comes the software section:  for this section, I will basically defer you to the above mentioned article by Wilson Rothman.

Start the computer with the Leopard install DVD in it and boot from the disc.

You’ll need to use Disk Utility to format/partition the drive.

Then you can restore from Time Machine.

Except it’s a little more complicated than that.  Rothman wrote it up as follows:

Once you open up the system and swap out the drives, you can set the old drive aside, hopefully never to use it again. Assuming all went well, you restart the system and insert an OS X Leopard installation DVD. You won’t need the OS installer on it, but you will need it to act as mediator between the Time Machine backup drive and the newly installed blank drive. Once it boots up (you may need to manually restart to get it to work right) follow these instructions CAREFULLY:

1. Choose your language.

2. At the main screen, choose Disk Utility from the Utilities pull-down menu.

3. Select the drive itself and click on Partition.

4. In the Partition menu, select 1 Partition and Options… where you choose GUID Partition Table. Click OK then Apply, then say “yes” to whatever warning comes up.

5. Once you have reformatted the drive, close the Disk Utility window.

6. Do Not Go Forward. Instead, when you see the main Welcome screen, click the Back button, which takes you to the language select page. It sounds silly but DO IT. This shakes the system into action.

7. Once you have reselected your language and are back on the Welcome screen, click Utilities and select Restore System From Backup…

8. The process should go smoothly from that point on. You simply select appropriate disks to copy your chosen backup data from your Time Machine drive to the new internal drive, as shown in the following sequence:

…and then a bunch of pictures.

Now note: he means it when he says to follow those instructions carefully.  Especially that “Do Not Go Forward” bit.  The installer system will lose track of the drive you just formatted/partitioned if you do that.  Do the instructions above EXACTLY as described.

Except where he says “GUID Partition Table”, I did “Apple Partition Table”.  Just pay attention to what the prompts say.  It says right in the app which partition type is for Intel vs. PowerPC systems.  Just “RTFM”^[3] and you’ll be fine.

That concludes the hour.  Then you just wait for your backup to finish restoring…:

Nine hours was a bit of a stretch though. It was really more like four or five.

FOLLOW-UP NOTES:

Spotlight is going to want to reindex itself; that will take a couple hours depending on how much data you have.  Mail is going to want to set itself up again; but if you’re fortunate enough to use IMAP, this won’t be a big deal.  iTunes is going to get confused about what computer you’re on again; you may need to re-authorize a few songs.

1. Sorry Zeb; the 1.5TB was a good deal but bit-for-byte this was going to work out plenty fine for us. [↩]
2. Only partially true: that Maxtor was already the second or third drive we’d gone through.  But let’s not digress too much. [↩]
3. Whereby “M” I mean “Screen”? [↩]