cleversimon:

But if “the ONLY thing that matters… is output,” when the focus is “quantity, not quality,” you’re not writing a novel. You’re masturbating. It’s fun, it doesn’t hurt anyone, and a lot of people could stand to do more of it—but it’s not exactly something to brag about, and in the end the only thing you’ve made is a mess.

“Write 50,000 words this month, and it’s okay if they suck” is a great idea. Calling the result a novel is asinine.

Well, if “National Harness Your Creativity By Committing to Writing The First 50,000 Words Of The First Draft of That Novel You Always Promised Yourself You’d Write” was catchier, they’d use that name.

But NaNoWriMo is catchier.

Talk to novelists. Writing a first draft is a lot about getting through it, about hacking through and discovering your story and your characters. Brilliant novels don’t happen on first draft. They happen after a whole lot of rewriting and editing, after the fact. But you can’t get to a rewrite until you’ve written the first draft!

I’m a big supporter of NaNoWriMo. I think it encourages people to think creatively and to make a big step - a bit like committing to running a marathon or climbing a mountain- that they might never do without making a public commitment. Is every NaNoWriMo novel good? No. Is every NaNoWriMo participant in it with the best of intentions or ideals? No. But the only reason to define any event (or, really, anything in human endeavor) by the very worst offenders is if you want to bash it. It’s called a strawman argument, and it’s what cleversimon is making.

I have been writing all my life. I write nonfiction for a living. I wrote fiction throughout elementary school, high school, and college. I edited a fiction magazine for a decade. And yet, though I promised myself I would one day write a novel, I NEVER PUT DOWN THE FIRST WORD UNTIL I COMMITTED TO NANOWRIMO IN 2006.

The result? I wrote a 160,000-word novel (now edited and rewritten once, really needing another editing pass and more time for me to attempt to find an agent to sell it) and am 52,000 words into a second. And yes, I plan on finishing it (or at least tacking on 50,000 words to it) in NaNoWriMo this year.

If you want to quibble with details of NaNoWriMo, go nuts. But it’s a beautiful concept that really does unlock creative power for a whole bunch of people. Why piss on that because you don’t like the name?

Concurring opinions from neven and avery.

I have an AppleScript that fires occasionally and automatically updates my iChat status to indicate if I’m at home, at work, or wherever. You know, so I don’t have to waste my time on it.

It works by detecting the Wi-Fi base station I’m connected to. But of course, every time Apple updates its OS, it breaks the methods I use.

Under Leopard I use this approach:

system_profiler SPAirPortDataType|grep -e “Current Wireless Network:”|awk ‘{print $4}’

That Terminal command gets wrapped in a “do shell script” command for AppleScript purposes.

But here’s the thing. In a future OS update, Apple has changed the output of the system_profiler SPAirPortDataType command. Now what it spits out is:

AirPort:

      Software Versions:
          Menu Extra: 6.0 (600.22)
          configd plug-in: 6.0 (600.27)
          System Profiler: 6.0 (600.9)
          Network Preference: 6.0 (600.22)
          AirPort Utility: 5.4.2 (542.23)
          IO80211 Family: 3.0 (300.20)
      Interfaces:
        en0:
          Card Type: AirPort Extreme  (0x14E4, 0x8B)
          Firmware Version: Broadcom BCM43xx 1.0 (5.10.91.19)
          Locale: FCC
          Country Code: US
          Supported PHY Modes: 802.11 a/b/g/n
          Supported Channels: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 36, 40, 44, 48, 52, 56, 60, 64, 100, 104, 108, 112, 116, 120, 124, 128, 132, 136, 140, 149, 153, 157, 161, 165
          Wake On Wireless: Supported
          Status: Connected
          Current Network Information:
            Extreme Meadow:
              PHY Mode: 802.11n
              BSSID: 0:1c:b3:ae:42:c3
              Channel: 11
              Network Type: Infrastructure
              Security: WPA2 Personal
              Signal / Noise: -58 dBm / -92 dBm
              Transmit Rate: 130
              MCS Index: 15

So, grep/sed/awk terminal wizards, any suggestions on how to update my command-line command to parse that I’m connected to “Extreme Meadow”? And fail gracefully if I’m not connected to any SSID, at which point the entire “Current Network Information” block disappears.

Update

Lots of smart people helped. This seems to work.

do shell script "/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks
/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/
Resources/airport -I|
egrep '^[ ]+SSID:'|cut -f2 -d:"

Here’s a short AppleScript that looks at the frontmost window in Safari, grabs the URL, runs it through the Metamark shortening service, and sticks the result on the clipboard.

I run it via LaunchBar and paste the results into Twitter, generally.

tell application "Safari"

set longURL to URL of front document

end tell

set shellScript to ("curl --url
\"http://metamark.net/api/rest/simple?long_url=" 
& longURL & "\" ")

set shortURL to (do shell script shellScript)

set the clipboard to shortURL

Please note that the line beginning with “set shellScript” should be all on one line; I’ve broken it here in the interests of readability.

Update: Graham Ballantyne offers his version of this script, which is very nice.

And here’s another one from Brad MacDonald.

(Originally posted at TV Barn.)

I'm a baseball fan. So when I learned that Major League Baseball was finally going to join the NFL, NBA, and NHL in creating its own dedicated channel, I was pretty excited. I mean, an entire channel with nothing but baseball -- how great an idea is that?

The MLB Network has been on the air since early January, and as most people over the age of 10 understand, the reality is a whole lot more complicated than the dream was. But it's fair to say that spending a day with MLB Network will give you a good overview of most of the constituencies of modern baseball.

Many baseball fans, most of them aging, are obsessed with the rosy glow of the 20th Century (is it too soon to refer to the 20th as old news?), when baseball was truly the national sport. This is the constituency of Ken Burns' epic documentary, "Baseball," which is airing weekly on MLB Network -- the series' first appearance off of PBS.

It's also the provenance of Bob Costas, who has always professed to be an enormous baseball fan and has now proven it by switching his cable home from HBO to MLB Network. It's hard to think of Costas, who is eternally youthful in a Dick Clark kind of way, as a representative of Baseball's Olden Days. But when MLB Network plays back an NBC Game of the Week broadcast from 25 years ago -- and the network's time slots are currently filled with replays of classic baseball games of yore -- there's Costas, his voice sounding no different than it did when he anchored the Beijing Olympics last summer, calling a Cubs-Cardinals game with Tony Kubek by his side.

I've always liked Costas, but as my colleague Philip Michaels points out, he is someone who tends to speak in a tone best summed up as "the voice of the common fan and guardian of the game." It's a tone that's loved by the national-pastime crowd, but even someone who has sat through the umpteen hours of Ken Burns' documentary can probably admit that Bobby C can get a bit ponderous.

Still, baseball has always been a game that has romanticized its history, so why not spend the off-season -- there's plenty of time to kill! -- by dwelling on the past? But as we roll through spring training and the regular season nears, there's a question about how MLB Network will choose to cover the present.

Know this about me: I'm not a big fan of "SportsCenter," or "Baseball Tonight," or ESPN in general. I know this puts me in the minority when it comes to sports fans, but I've long since grown tired of the catch-phrase-spewing anchor schtick and the ex-jocks whose "analysis" of games is often laughably unsupported by reality, just so they can be provocative and get in faux argumentes with other ex-jock analysts.

If you like that sort of thing, I suspect you will like MLB Network's coverage of the news, which seems to essentially be following the premise, "What if ESPN could only cover baseball?" The off-season version of MLB Network's news show, "Hot Stove," is nothing more than ESPN's "Baseball Tonight," only with more time to fill. It's even got the same neon-and-plasma-screen set design, the kind that screams "Live! From an alien spaceship!"

Owing to the network being owned by Major League Baseball, during the season MLB Network will have amazing access to games, including live cameras in every stadium. I have no doubt that MLB Network will be the best place to get game information and watch highlights. (And to its credit, the network's wall-to-wall coverage of the A-Rod steroid revelations suggest that it will show some degree of editorial independence, even though it's owned and operated by the sport itself.) But I have to admit being depressed that the network has apparently stuck with ESPN's ex-jock-and-print-journalist analyst philosophy.

Look, I'll lay my cards on the table. I'm a paid subscriber to the excellent web site Baseball Prospectus. One of the biggest revolutions in baseball in the past two decades has been an increased use of statistical analysis to reveal new ways of judging the good and the bad in baseball, from managerial decisions to free-agent signings to player performance. Though Michael Lewis' book "Moneyball" is the most popular (to the point of being overused) description of this phenomenon, usually called Sabermetrics, it's just the tip of the iceberg. Statistical analysis is everywhere in baseball now. Even the most stodgy teams employ analysts, because what the analytics guys have revealed is not an opinion, it's truth. Truth that was previously unexposed.

So where are the guys who represent statistical analysis on MLB Network? I can't find them. The ex-jocks aren't there to analyze how the game works. They're there to bring anecdotes from their playing days and apply them to the present. They should only be one part of a rich analytical stew. Instead, they're the beef, the broth and the cornstarch. (I might also point out that most ex-jocks seem to have a very hard time saying anything critical about any current players, being that they're members of the same fraternity.)

Enough of the players. What about the journalists? MLB Network has a close relationship with Sports Illustrated, and employs SI writers Jon Heyman and Tom Verducci. They may be talented writers, but I have deep misgivings about both. I've never been a fan of Verducci, and the incessant lecturing tone of his articles actually was the thing that drove me to cancel my twenty-year-long subscription to SI. Heyman, meanwhile, is the man who -- as delightfully chronicled by the now-defunct Fire Joe Morgan web site -- went out of his way to disparage VORP, one of the most useful new methods of determining player value, and insulted the people who understand what it means.

I'm not saying MLB Network shouldn't have hired Heyman and Verducci. Well, maybe I am saying that. But even if those guys are going to hold down the desk at MLB Network, is it too much to ask for some serious participation from the modern statistical analysis guys? (Would it be catty of me to point that even SI's print magazine has imported analysis from Baseball Prospectus, perhaps in acknowledgement of the lack of understanding of modern ways of viewing baseball by its own writers?)

I'll admit it -- stats guys can be boring. As much as I loved following the election polls on FiveThirtyEight.com, operated by Nate Silver of Baseball Prospectus, watching Silver on TV always made me uneasy. And I'm not saying that the network should suddenly become a giant walking, talking database with all analysis happening by spreadsheet. But surely there are stats guys out there who can clean up nicely, string a few sentences together, and hold their own in arguments with Harold Reynolds and Jon Heyman. You'd think Major League Baseball would know where to find them. So, MLB Network, where are they?

MLB Network seems to have done a good job servicing the fans of baseball's rich history, the fantasy nuts who want a fast-paced highlight show, and the ESPN viewers who (apparently) enjoy the punditry of ex-jocks who like to talk about how gritty Jason Varitek is and how much heart he's shown in playing for two World Series winners in Boston. But who's going to look at the stats with a steel eye and dare to suggest that there's a giant fork sticking out of Varitek's back?

[Jason Snell is the editorial director of Macworld.]

Having seen “Watchmen” 24 hours ago, I am still thinking about it and still not quite sure what I thought of it. I think the fact that this intersection of two forms of media and two different works of art has provoked this much deep thought says something in its favor; if it’s a failure, it’s the good kind of failure.

I think the critics who are bashing the source material are guilty of the most pathetic form of revisionism; the work is a masterpiece despite its (admitted) flaws. Yes, it’s a B-movie plot with some ridiculous dialogue. So? Doesn’t diminish it one bit.

The movie is perhaps more interesting in terms of its relationship to its source material than as a movie. I don’t know. I would need several blows to the head to watch the movie in a state that doesn’t involve 20-plus years of self-interpretation of Moore’s and Gibbons’s work. I do think that perhaps this is the best movie that could ever have been made of “Watchmen,” with the possible exception of casting different actors as Adrian and Laurie.

I will point you to Alan Sepinwall’s review of the movie, which is probably 90-95% in alignment with my feelings.

I don’t like the new “Bird’s Eye” logo that Pepsi has gone to. It looks weird to me. The old logo was fine.

However, the box design that’s rolled out with this new logo? Gorgeous.

Gone are all the background trappings. Gone is the ’80s style logo font. Instead there’s a very simple solid color, the new logo (ugh), and the word “pepsi.” It’s simple and very attractive.

Well done, box designer. Maybe you can have the logo guy’s job.

I’m a little less convinced about the new Mountain Dew boxes, which re-brand the drink as “MtnDew.” What, Mountain is too long a word? Come on.

I’ve been making my own pizza since 1994. I know the date because I’ve been married since 1994, and for our wedding we received a Zojirushi Breadmaster bread machine and a pizza stone and pizza peel.

Since it came up on Twitter, I thought I’d detail my method below. This is something I’ve fallen into over the years, but feel free to vary it any way you like. That’s the beauty of cooking — you can do whatever you feel is right, whatever you like.

HONEY WHEAT BEER PIZZA DOUGH

(makes two crusts worth)

• 5 cups flour (at least 2 of which should probably be whole-wheat)
• 2 cups beer (a bottle is generally not a full 16 ounces; use water for the balance, or heck, just use water)
• 4 tablespoons olive oil (yeah, you can substitute butter or margarine)
• 4 tablespoons honey (or sugar)
• 2 teaspoons salt (optional)
• 1 package yeast (I use rapid rise)

I make it in the bread machine, and when it’s done I generally separate the dough into two identically-sized balls. (Put some olive oil on your hands to prevent a sticky mess.) I put a little olive oil in a large zip-top bag and then toss in one of the balls, which lives in the bottom drawer of my fridge for a week or so.) The other one, I leave in the bread machine container until I make it later the same day. The same-day ball is puffy and soft; the next-week ball is thin and crispy. They’re both great.

At some point early in the process, after the dough ball is out of the bread machine, I place my pizza stone on an accessible shelf in our oven and heat it to 500 degrees. The more heat the stone can drink in, the better. Be generous with your pre-heating time. When the oven is pre-heated, the stone is still getting hotter. (Pro tip: when not cooking pizza, leave your stone on the bottom level of your oven. The mass of the stone will help balance out the temperature variation in the oven. Also you can get an unglazed paving tile if you don’t want to get a “real” pizza stone.)

I coat my peel with a thin layer of corn meal, then pull out the ball until it’s a circle and lay it down on the peel. I coat the top of the dough with some olive oil and walk away for a little while, letting the dough rebound from my pulling and prodding. Later I return with pizza sauce (I gave up making it myself and use it from a can, or just use barbecue sauce if it’s BBQ chicken pizza.) Then on goes the cheese, generally a mixture of mozzarella and cheddar, though last night we threw in some jack as well and it was really good. What you top it with is up to you. (We generally use Turkey Pepperoni, and for BBQ Chicken I just grill a chicken breast and cut it into cubes and toss it on, then use a spoon and drizzle some more barbecue sauce on.)

I pop the pizza in the oven (sliding it off the peel onto the stone is tricky, which is why the corn meal on the peel really helps keep it slidy) and if I’m feeling careful I’ll drop the heat to 450. It takes about 12 minutes to cook the pizza in my oven. Once it’s done, I use the peel to pull it back out and let it cool. You don’t want to cut the pizza when the cheese is still molten.

A nice thing to do while it’s cooling is to spray or brush on olive oil on the crust at the edges. The crust absorbs the oil and ends up softer and more edible.

Once the cheese cools and thickens, you know what to do. (I love the Zyliss Pizza Wheel.)

That’s it. I like drinking my pizza with Sierra Nevada Porter. You pick your own favorite.

I curse Marck Bailey and all he stands for.

The rules:

1. Link to the person who tagged me. (Above.)
2. Post the rules on your blog. (Yup.)
3. Write six random things about yourself. (Sigh.)
4. Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them. (Sigh again.)
5. Let each person know they’ve been tagged and leave a comment on their blog. (Zzz.)
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

So, six random things.

1. My high school had an actual, legitimate broadcast radio station. These days I suppose you’d just stream it on the Internet. I think we broadcast at fifty watts. It was like a light bulb. But my Junior year in high school I did radio, and had my own radio show for two hours every Wednesday, 3-5. I have a sound-check tape of my last show somewhere. I played a lot of Peter Gabriel. (One of the girls in my radio class was, in fact, the person who suggested that I might like a song called “Don’t Dream It’s Over” by a group called Crowded House. Uh, yeah.)

2. I was on my elementary school basketball team. Seventh and eighth grade. We didn’t have any place to practice or play at our school (I believe they’ve since converted the cafeteria into a combination cafeteria/basketball court). So we had to walk a mile down the Frank Dondero Nature Trail to the National Guard Armory at the Columbia Airport. (The Columbia College basketball team also practiced there, though they played at the high school — these days they practice and play at their own gym.) We were really terrible, especially after half the team quit or was ruled academically ineligible. We lost one game, to Twain Harte, 82-2. I kid you not. I wore a bag over my head to school the next day. Also true.

3. My favorite TV show of all time used to be “Max Headroom.” Great show. Waaaay ahead of its time. What it says about our culture and media and technology today, twenty years later, is still relevant. However, a couple years back I realized that it wasn’t true anymore. “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” has eclipsed it. Depending on how it ends, “Lost” might beat that too.

4. I met my first girlfriend online. Which in 1987 meant on a computer bulletin-board. We had just had a scandal at the BBS I ran, where a user had posed as a girl, going to far as to having a girl he know call people and pose as this fictitious female user as “proof.” So when my new user from Michigan claimed to be a girl, I expressed skepticism. She immediately told me to pick up the phone. When the modems died out, we were left on the phone together. She was a girl, I can verify, and within a few months we were pretty much obsessed with one another. At seventeen years old I bought an airplane ticket and went to Michigan to spend a week with her. You’d think we would have been worried that we wouldn’t hit it off in person. We did. She’s one of my Facebook friends these days and I hear from her every now and then. She’s got three kids and is married to her college boyfriend. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know about how serious it was between her and me, which is probably all for the best.

5. My daughter Jamie is named after my cousin, who we called Jamie growing up. (He was the last in a series of James Hysongs dating back to my great-great grandfather.) Jamie Hysong qualified as a pilot very young and was hoping to be a flight instructor when the plane he was flying disappeared over Lake Michigan in the spring of 1993. Eight years later I asked my aunt and uncle’s permission to name my first child after their son.

6. The first computer I used was not, in fact, an Apple computer. It was a Commodore PET, which my family bought in 1980. In the summer of 1984 I dipped into my college money a bit early to buy an Apple IIe, and experienced my first period of “buyer’s remorse.” That feeling didn’t last long — I wore that Apple IIe out. I joined the Mac world when I bought a Mac SE on clearance at the UCSD Bookstore in the spring of 1990. And I’ve never looked back.

I’m going to tag Lauren, Lisa, Matt because he’ll give me hell for it, CRAIG BECAUSE HE WOULD DO IT WITH THE CHOCK LOCK ON OK, and Andy. Though I’m not sure any of them will really do it. Nor should they.

1. A starship leaves earth at a constant acceleration rate of 1G.

2. After the ship has flown five light-years, the people on board the ship have experienced 4.85 years of time passing. Earth has experienced almost six years of time. (I think.)

3. Every day a message is sent from the earth to the spaceship via radio.

So here’s the question. From the perspective of the spaceship, how often are those daily messages received? Although time on the spaceship is passing slower relative to time on the Earth, it also takes the radio message a year to travel one light-year.

Or to put it another way, the ship is now five light-years away from Earth. If I sent them a message five years ago, Earth time (i.e., one year after they departed), when did they get it, from the perspective of their ship’s clocks? And if I sent them another message the day after that, when did they receive that message? 24 hours later? 23 hours later? 25 hours later?

My head hurts.

In a rare no-requests concert tonight in Jamie and Julian’s room (usually the rule is that each of us picks one song), Daddy sang the following chart-toppers.

1. “No One Is To Blame,” Howard Jones
2. “Barbara H.,” Fountains of Wayne
3. “No Sunlight,” Death Cab for Cutie* (first time ever performed in this venue)
4. “James K. Polk,” They Might Be Giants

Last night at the same venue was a standard request show.

1. Julian: “Shock the Monkey,” Peter Gabriel
2. Jason: “No One Is To Blame,” Howard Jones
3. Jamie: “Every Little Kiss,” Bruce Hornsby & The Range