Don't Fear The Creeper

Datajunkie runs a great series of scans on Steve Ditko’s “Beware the Creeper!” series that he created for DC. I actually remember having the first issue but never knew others followed.

What I like about this post is the casual examination of Ditko’s storytelling style over the series and how it changed when he returned to the character years later. Also, that it’s liberally illustrated with scans from the issues themselves.

I Can See Clearly Now...Except When I Can't

Quixotic is a blog journal I stumbled across recently and it’s morbidly fascinating (and by “morbid,” I mean fascinated by disease. From what I gather in my skim-reads, the blogger is a woman suffering from cancer for many years, who has relocated to Mexico to undergo more aggressive (and what would be non-legal in the US) treatments.

Her post on a tumor that is causing periods of blindness shows, I think, what I find wonderful about her blog: a sense of humor that comes through in her honest voice, pragmatism, and, on her good days, philosophy. I hope she keeps writing about it through it all.

Organizing my books

We’re studying classification in my Organization of Information class. One of my classmates shared a link to a posting about arranging and classifying your personal library by the color of the book’s spine. The link was from the Design Observer blog (though the site has been unavailable to me recently). This spurred a lot of discussion on the mail list about our own personal methods for arranging our book collections at home. Here’s my typical over-the-top response.




I remember reading a designo tract years ago suggesting you group your books by color, by size, or by the publisher’s insignia, the latter of which I found most intriguing for some reason. Imagine all the O’Reilly and Penguins and Modern Library books clumped together.

Another way to arrange your personal set of books would be by autobiographical timeline–when did you acquire them? What associations and nostalgia would they bubble up in you? (I think I got that idea from “High Fidelity.”)

I have 3 vertical bookshelves in my home office, 2 out in the room, 1 in a closet with the record collection. After a lifetime of grouping books by author or genre, I went a few years ago with a totally randomized approach. I just threw them on the shelves in no order, two-deep. Periodically, when I got too familiar with what was on the top 2 shelves, I’d switch them out with books from the lower shelves. I think I did this because I enjoyed being surprised by finding a book I’d forgotten or enjoying the juxtaposition of 19th-century diarists shelved next to “The Mole People.” It broke down the categories in my own head so that I had to keep seeing the books anew.

But it did become too much work to find the book I was looking for and I often found myself tearing the shelves apart when hunting for a specific title. I loved browsing my shelves but hated trying to find something on them.

Inspired by Marc Brodsky, I’m purging my books so that I can only keep what I have shelf space for. (Marc purged his entire collection down to what would fit on a 2-foot shelf, but I’m not that strong.) It’s an arbitrary limit, but aren’t they all? It’s a practical limit anyway.

Lord Peter Wimsey says in one of his stories that one’s library is like a carapace, a shell we carry with us that reveals signs of our travels, interests, and philosophies over the years. I’m finding lots of categories of books that I don’t need or have time for or have lost interest in, which seems kind of a shame, in a way. As a result, most of my collection is sitting in piles on the floor of my office.

As I re-shelve, the closet bookcase becomes the main Holder of The Books. I’m putting them back in rough genre/subject matter/author clumps: journals/diaries/letters, reference, essays, computer, etc. Art books tend to go on the bottom shelf, which has the most headroom, though all my Delacroix books (his journal and letters and various monographs) sit together in one place, as Hinar described. (Reminds me of how The Book Shop on Franklin Street does it; all of the biographical or other material on a writer is shelved with that writer’s novels and stories, so you don’t have to go all over the store to find the books dealing with an author.)

One bookshelf is devoted totally to my graphic novel collection, which are arranged by creator (all the Alan Moore stuff in one place, all the R. Crumb in one place). Anthologies are all grouped together. And then within those clumps, pretty much random. I’m not big on alphabetizing by author/title/date/etc. I know geographically about where a book should be, and if it’s in that region, I’m happy. The remaining onesie-twosie books are non-clumpable, and therefore randomized. The top two shelves hold unread or unprocessed books/comics/magazines.

The 3rd bookshelf has a shelf dedicated to current schoolwork/papers/registration junk, with other shelves holding most of the fiction and poetry. I tend to group authors together, but not alphabetically. For poetry, I tend to group them on a timeline from ancient sources (Greek translations, through to India, China, Japan) to modern (Wright, Rexroth, Sexton). I never noticed that till I wrote that sentence and I have no idea why I do it.

The top shelf holds the books I’m currently reading (or was reading before school threw itself bodily into my path). When I put a book I’m reading back on the shelf, I place it on the far left. Books I’ve not read recently migrate to the right, over time. So when I have time to read something, I’ll reach for the leftmost book first; I don’t have to stop and wonder where that book I was just reading went to. (When I stop reading a book, I either stop at the end of a chapter or stop so that I start reading again on the first full paragraph of the left page.)

It would be a good idea to leave about 10-20% room on a shelf for more books, but that ain’t gonna happen.

Aside: My personal book purge makes me wonder – wouldn’t it be interesting to junk a public library’s classification system every 75 years or so, and start over again with a new system based on the learnings and experience gained from using the old system(s)?

Other links of interest:

Good Questions: How To Arrange My Bookshelves?
http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/ny/good-questions/good-questions-how-to-arrange-my-bookshelves-012749

bookshelf on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/santos/27538777/

Superpatron - Friends of the Library, for the net: Books arranged by colour
http://vielmetti.typepad.com/superpatron/2006/07/books_arranged_.html

Books arranged by colour on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/popsie/156057963/

Huddersfield Public Library Reading Area on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/organised/98972109/

Huddersfield Colour Coded on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/organised/98972115/in/photostream/

The library labeled their color-shelved books as the serendipity shelves.

Evaluating Virtual Machines for Personal Use | Altiris Juice

I’ve been thinking for awhile about installing a virtual machine product. I want to read this article from the Altiris site to see what they say about the different products.

Based on my reading, Msft’s Virtual PC is the easiest to set up on a Windows machine, esp if I’ll be installing Windows XP. VMWare is the most capable, but the most complicated. Altiris’ own software virtualization product works amazingly well for virtualizing individual application installs, but I think it’s more for developers who can handle the abstractions than Joe Computeruser. (My comments about Altiris’ SVS program are on this thread at Donationcoders.com.)

Magic with a Glass Topped Table

This Google video shows some amazing illusions worked with a glass-topped coffee table. It reminds me of Slydini’s famous trick of snapping a coin through a table. But like the best tricks, it takes something familiar – a penetration illusion – and makes you see it fresh.

Jeanette Winterson - We Need Poetry

From one of Jeanette Winterson’s latest columns, this one on why we need poetry:

And in the way of things, the memory gets used to being fed something more useful than crossword puzzles, and will deliver you the lines you need, when you need them. Poetry, because it has rhythm and because it is made out of breath, is easy to remember. It fits under the tongue like a slowly dissolving pill, but there are no side-effects – well maybe there is one; the next time you open your mouth to speak, something of the poem stays with you, and laces your response. In that way, poetry makes poets out of all of us, enlivening our personal capacity to speak with feeling and with an honesty that comes of being able to find the right words.

Lotus Notes and GTD

When I was using Lotus Notes years ago and far away, I made these notes to myself of how I was implementing GTD (or at least task management) using Lotus Notes. We’d been forcibly removed from Outlook, which was familiar, to Notes, which was stark and unfriendly.

Anyway, here are the notes so I can find them again later:

1. Here’s a post I wrote years ago on the DavidCo board: http://www.davidco.com/forum/showpost.php?p=16631&postcount=8

2. Here are notes I wrote up a little while after the above post:

Herewith, some stray notes on how I’m working with GTD at my job using a variety of tools. I’m more fortunate than most, in that I have only 1 project to occupy me full-time, though many are the one-off tasks my manager assigns me. (My contract is ending in a few weeks, and the work winding down, so I have a little more free time on my hands to scribble these notes.) Apologies in advance for the length.

LOTUS NOTES – I hate it, but what can you do? Rather like David’s method of ‘dumbing down’ Outlook, I’ve done the same with Notes. I only use a fraction of its power because 1) I don’t want to be a Notes guru and 2) the IT honchos have locked down the templates so they can’t be updated.

I discovered I prefer living in the email view over any of the other views, so it’s my home base. I’ve found that I prefer a two-dimensional approach to managing my mails; this translates into a single level of folders. However, I use folder names to provide an index, which let me scan quickly for the items I need. A typical folder name will be “P: 8bit: comms plan approvals”. Translation: P=project, 8bit=the overall project name, and then the specific sub-project. When the sub-project is all done, I move those mails into the “P: 8bit” folder, which holds ALL the mails for the 8bit project. It’s much simpler for me to know that all the project mails are in one place; makes them easier to search, and so on. I have as many P: folders as I need and delete/archive as needed.

I write up meeting notes for the various sub-teams we meet with (yes, putting my college degree to work). I keep a separate folder called “P: 8bit: Meeting notes” to hold that data. Useful to troll through during the weekly review for undone next actions, who-said-what-when issues, a record of ongoing work, and so on.

I also have a series of Reference: folders for corporate spam, personal stuff, anything NOT a project. I try to avoid having lots of folders as I find that, in my cleverness to categorize precisely, I’ll put one item in this folder, forget that I created that folder, and then create a new worded-slightly-differently folder tomorrow. What a mess. So I follow the precept ‘do the simplest thing that could possibly work,’ hence a few large buckets for emails.

I find I use the Drafts folder a lot. If I’m interrupted in the middle of a mail, I save it to Draft. If I’m framing out an article or a big email to go out to lots of folks, I’ll work on it and save it to Draft. So it holds in-progress work that I can pick up again later.

To a limited degree, I do use the Copy to Calendar and Copy to To-do List functions, the former more than the latter. When I had to track the vacation schedules of the folks on our team, I’d copy their mails to a to-do list category I’d created called “Team Schedules”, with their vacation dates in the subject line. This let me quickly scan who was in or out. When they came back, I deleted the to-do. It was a handy list. But I tend to use paper for my GTD lists.

NaNoWriMo '06 - Lessons Learned

The blog went quiet in November because I decided to once again compete in the National Novel Writing Month competition. I blogged a bit about the comp last year when I dropped out then dropped back in. By then, though, it was too late and I only had about 30-some-thousand words by month’s end. I’ve since learned that this is called the “sophomore slump.”

This year, I stopped work on the short story that’s taken my attention off and on throughout this year and plunged into nanowrimo ‘06. I got my friend Sue in California to do it with me for our first comp, in 2004, and we’ve done the comp together ever since. I should add, she has won every year.

She had difficulty with her book this year, but finished just in time. I, by contrast, had it pretty easy, apart from dealing with effluvia of the moment like family obligations, job, and school work. I thought about what made my freshman effort a success, and what could I do this year to be successful again.

I decided to go back to the source: Chris Baty’s No Plot? No Problem! book. I read it in 2004, didn’t read it in 2005, and decided that I probably should read it/skim it for 2006. I rediscovered Baty’s checklists and reminders that helped me to reconnect with what made nanowrimo fun:

  • Get a magic totem that you always have with you when you write. For me, this is my black fedora-type hat that I wear. When Liz sees me wear the hat, she knows I’m writing.
  • Get the music going. I have a Baroque playlist on Rhapsody that helps put my brain in the right mood.
  • Make the writing a priority. I’m astonished at how many low-value activities I discard during nanowrimo.
  • Have fun. This should not be work (though there’s effort).
  • Go for quantity, not quality. I think I took my story way too seriously last year. I was also trying to figure out a plot, what would happen next, which was not good for me. I worried too much about it. The main thing is to meet the daily word quota. It gave me great freedom to bring boring scenes to an end and start up something fresh.
  • This year, I read in and out of Samuel R. Delany’s book About Writing, and it really turned my thinking around on plot. His contention is that plot is what you remember in retrospect. But for the writer writing, the process is more about structure: I just finished a slow passage with two people, I now need a fast passage with lots of people. Or: The last chapter took place in the past, the next chapter needs to take place in the present. The structures a writer uses to help him or her write a novel don’t have to be as elaborate as Henry James, and they don’t need to be obvious to the reader (solving that puzzle is part of the reader’s fun) but I think they’re like a rhyme scheme for a poet: they provide spaces that the writer’s imagination is challenged to fill, and that challenge is part of the excitement of writing and imagining a world and characters. They also help to pull the writer along and keep the discovery process fresh.
  • Delaney is also pretty strict about writers starting at the beginning (no funky playing around with time, few flashbacks) and, even more importantly, setting the scene. Describe the setting. I found this to be incredibly valuable in getting my character into a physical space that would often come back to play a part later in the scene. I’m a believer in this now.
The Sunday prior to Nov. 1 I was strapped for an idea. I looked through my notebook and other loose pages for novel-length ideas, and was about to do my long-unapproached ghost story, but that’s always struck me as maybe novella length, working toward a single effect, and not suitable for the grab bag that is the novel.

I was about ready to grab Sue’s idea, till I thought for some reason about all the self-help books I’ve collected on my shelves. I thought, “Hm, what if someone goes to see lots of self-help gurus? Then, I could just spew all this self-help gunk I’ve been reading for years in the character of a guru, and that would up my word counts effortlessly!”

Well, not effortlessly, maybe, but I found the experience of writing about memory improvement, tarot, meditation, and journaling all helpful in the sense of putting down what I think I know into a narrative stream. And too, it was always a pleasure to do a core dump of these subjects and see my word count go up and up without having to worry about plot, character, or emotion.

My idea for the book’s structure was that my character could go to a guru then spend a chapter consolidating his gains or losses, then off to the next guru and consolidation. A very simple two-part structure, with an introduction and an ending. Any development, if it happened, would happen on its own along the way.

The structure worked quite well (though I never followed it strictly, it did help get me started), as I was never really strapped for stuff to write, though I did often wonder “what can I put him through next?” The tarot and meditation sections both kept me busy for 3 or 4 days apiece, which I thought was pretty cool. This structure also had the very helpful gambit of bringing in someone new every couple of days. I was always surprised by who showed up to take the stage for the next bit of guru-dom, and even I chuckled to myself now and then and shook my head at what what these strange people were doing and saying.

Another thing that helped me out this year was my decision to go for 2000 words/day when I wrote. I missed about 3 days early on in the month, and the “2000K every-day” mantra eventually got me back on track. I finished two days early with an incredible (for me) 5000-word burst that finally put me over the top. (I knew I had to work late the next two nights, so I had to make the heroic effort or work even harder on those two nights to do both my work and the novel.) I find it very easy to generate about 1000-1200 words in a sitting, but that last 500-800 words were a struggle. When I could, I broke the writing up into two daily sessions about 1000 words each, and that worked very well.

Nanowrimo always teaches me something about my writing process and I learned a lot that I hope I’ll take back to my short-story writing. Someone in my writing group asked me why I did it, why not just write the novel normally. A couple of reasons would be:
  • It’s more fun this way.
  • I like doing it with Sue.
  • I need the practice. I get hours and hours of writing practice in November that I don’t get throughout the year.
  • I’m often surprised in a way that I’m not when writing normally. I didn’t know I had this idea in me, and I didn’t know that what came out would be pretty good (I’d say I got about a third or more of really good material that can be shaped later.)
  • It helps me remember that writing can be fun, that sometimes I don’t need great ideas to get started. All I need to do is sit down and write.
Links

Links Roundup - Hard Drives Failures, Flintstones

The main theme of these links is recovering or preparing to recover from hard disk failure, inspired by a co-worker’s sad experience last week. Most of these links come from the indispensible Lifehacker site (what did we do before Lifehacker??)

Recover data from a crashed hard drive - Lifehacker
http://www.lifehacker.com/software/disk-recovery/recover-data-from-a-crashed-hard-drive-146386.php

Ask Lifehacker: Reinstalling Windows? - Lifehacker
http://www.lifehacker.com/software/windows/ask-lifehacker--reinstalling-windows-137288.php

Why you need a Linux live CD - Lifehacker
“Help2Go is running an article on why you (a Windows user) should download and burn your very own Linux live CD in prepartation for your darkest Windows hours.”
http://www.lifehacker.com/software/disk-recovery/why-you-need-a-linux-live-cd-136639.php

Dowload of The Day: BartPE - Lifehacker
“BartPE is a free utility that lets you build a live CD-based copy of Windows XP that can be used for data recovery.”
http://www.lifehacker.com/software/downloads/dowload-of-the-day-bartpe-116599.php

GRC|SpinRite 5.0 to 6.0
http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm
Hold your nose re the web design and explore the screenshots and stuff. Been around for years, has a great reputation

SpinRite - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpinRite
Includes a link to criticism of Spinrite’s marketing claims

Geek to Live: Build your “PC on a stick” with MojoPac - Lifehacker
“Set up your “PC on a stick” with portable software MojoPac, a standalone Windows installation that runs directly from a flash drive or iPod. Plug in your MojoPac-enabled portable drive into your buddy’s PC, launch Windows from it, and use any application or document directly from the drive, no footprint left behind on the host PC. Great for anyone who works on several PC’s on a regular basis - or who just wants to separate certain apps and documents from a computer they use - MojoPac is a convenient, portable Windows virtual machine.” http://www.lifehacker.com/software/windows/geek-to-live--build-your-pc-on-a-stick-with-mojopac-208338.php

Backups
http://www.langa.com/backups/backups.htm
This is the strategy I use

ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive Project Blog: Biography: John K on
Flintstones Animators
“I love cartoons where you can tell the animators apart. The tricky part is figuring out what names belong to what drawing and animation styles! “The Flintstones” when it runs in syndication, has a stock set of credits on the end of each episode. They list four animators. And, if the names ever agree with the persons who actually animated a particular episode, it’s sheer coincidence. And get this… In the early days of Hanna-Barbera, one animator would animate a whole 25 minute cartoon by himself!”
http://www.animationarchive.org/2006/09/biography-john-k-on-flintstones.html

Writing the Perfect Scene
http://www.rsingermanson.com/html/perfect_scene.html
Hard-core fiction-writing structure; I like this scene stuff but I think his snowflake method is loony
https://brownstudy.info/page/173/
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