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Christmas has come early

kindleLook what Santa (i.e. Sarah) got me!

I’ve been on the fence about the eBook thing, not because I am so fiercely loyal to dead trees, or that I see it as some sort of threat to the publishing industry.  My main gripe about the Kindle is that it provides such a great reading experience, plus the ability to one-click a ton of books from Amazon’s catalog, which is essentially like locking a heroin junkie in a narcotics factory.  But now that one is in my hands, let the floodgates open.

First impressions: this thing is amazingly light.  I think it weighs about as much as my phone.  Also, the screen is shockingly clear, especially when I’m sitting in bed with a light over my shoulder.  It would not work in a no-light situation, as it is not backlit, but if you can read a book, you can read this screen.  It is so amazingly crisp though – it looks more like the fake display sticker they put on an LCD that you peel off to reveal the actual screen.

The first book I bought was On the Road.  It took me about 60 seconds end-to-end, and I was staring at the pages in my hand.  They also have a service where you can email yourself a PDF at a special address, and for 15 cents a meg, they will reformat it and zap it over the air to you.  I did this with Rumored to Exist and for three nickels, had a copy on my kindle, perfectly readable.

(Hint to other Kindle owners: you can download any of my books for free and zap them over to your kindle.  The complete Konrath library will cost maybe a buck and some change.  Or you can email it to another address (prepend .free to the domain name) and it will do the convert, but you get it next time you sync with your PC.  I have not tried this one yet.)

Anyway, I really like it.  It will be perfect when I’m stuck in airports this holiday season…

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Requiem for an iPhone

Well, my must-last-two-years-according-to-AT&T iPhone 3G just crossed the magical Apple rainbow at nine months.  It was working fine, but it started developing a crack in the back case, just above the dock connector.  It probably could have lasted another year, but I figured I would make the trek to the Apple Store and see if they would swap it for a new one, even if I didn’t have AppleCare, and they did.

First, if we’re in a recession, it sure didn’t look like it in the Bay Street Apple store.  They were wall-to-wall with people grabbing Apple gear for the holidays.  I’m curious what their actual numbers are for sales in the holiday season, and also curious if these new Microsoft stores are doing anything comparable.  Anyway, I made an appointment for the genius bar, and managed to get in at exactly the specified time.  And the swap was no hassle.  Thanks to the whole iTunes-centric backup recovery paradigm and the fact that I backed up right before leaving, the whole thing went almost seamlessly.  (Only exceptions: my WiFi and voicemail passwords vanished and had to be re-entered when I got home.)  I also sprung for AppleCare, just in case, and a new screen protector, which they installed for me.  (It’s pretty much impossible to put on an adhesive screen protector in a home with a long-haired cat, unless you don’t mind staring at a few stray cat hairs on your touchscreen for the rest of the protector’s life.)

What’s weird is that while the Apple genius boxed up my old phone and got ready to pitch it off to whatever Chinese landfill/salvage dumping ground old iPhones go to at the end of their lives, I felt slightly emotional about seeing it go.  Granted, I got an exact clone of the old model, and it even looks identical because it’s in the same old case, but I still felt slightly sentimental about seeing it go.  I think part of that is because this is one of the first cell phones that wasn’t just a vague utensil I occasionally used to make calls, but an actual fully-fledged computer that I used for a wide swath of applications within my somewhat-connected life.  I mean, I really used the camera; I listened to pretty much every Rockies game I could this season, and when I couldn’t listen, I followed along in the MLB app; I sent and read many an email; I used it as a real web browser, not a postage stamp approximation of a web browser; I found myself texting a lot more than I typically would; I even wrote a few blog posts on it.

I guess there’s always been this lack of a suspension of disbelief in my use of a palm-sized computer, either because it didn’t do what I wanted, or it had such clunkiness in what it did do.  Like, I used to have a couple of Palm OS non-phone devices, and while those were decent phone books and occasional game machines (mostly Dopewars), there was a big line to be drawn with all things connected, because there was no way for me to surf the web or read emails on those things.  Yes, you could attach on some giant pack the size of the actual device and sort of use it as a crappy cell phone, and maybe run an email program that barely worked, but there was a pretty hard stopping point in the usefulness of these machines, and it was clear that I would also need to carry a cell phone and a laptop to be semi-functional in the field with these.

I guess now we’re truly reaching this age where we can have a palm-sized computer that can really run apps and really do things and because of that, I feel the same kind of emotional (and somewhat stupid) bond I feel toward some of the primary computers I have in my life.  I mean, when I finally kicked to the curb my entirely obsolete PC that was my primary writing machine from 1991-2001,  I felt a bit of remorse to see that beige rectangle go to the garbage, even if it was fully useless even as a doorstop by the time it went in 2005.  There were many good memories of that thing sitting on my desktop as I chipped away at various books.  And I felt the same kind of nostalgia as that tiny black piece of plastic and glass (which probably had more CPU and memory than said PC) got sent back to the void.

And a side note, iPhone wise – I was tapping away while standing in line at Taco Bell, and curiously got a WiFi connection and didn’t know why.  Then I realized I was standing next to a Starbucks, which has an AT&T hotspot, and at some point I logged in at a different Starbucks, and the new magical AT&T hotspot connector mojo worked without interaction.  That sure beats the old days of having to enter a thousand characters of login info, including a password you can never use or remember.

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A tale of two balls

…baseballs, I mean.  Calm down.

First, here’s a little early xmas present I got myself the other day: a signed Troy Tulowitzki ball. I netted it from eBay for only twenty bucks.  The guy also had Matt Holliday and Jason Giambi balls going for about ten bucks toward the end of their auctions, but I did not splurge as much as I could have.  This is only the second ball in my collection, the first being a Rockies spring training 08 ball that John Sheppard gave me at my wedding reception. I need to avoid getting into this particular hobby, though.  I think the ideal baseball collectible is the stack of plastic cups I have on top of my fridge.  They’re ideal because they always change from season to season and stadium to stadium, and every time I buy a five dollar Coke at the ballpark, I add to my collection.

On the subject of this, I saw this movie last night on Netflix called Up for Grabs. It was the story of the 73rd home run ball hit by Barry Bonds in the 2001 series, and the fight between two men who each claimed they caught the ball.  The story in a nutshell is that one guy caught the ball but then apparently dropped it when he was tackled by a horde of people, and this other dude picked it up in the ensuing melee. Of course, both sides disputed this, especially since the ball was going to potentially auction for a few million bucks.  Spoiler alert: a judge ordered them to auction off the ball and split the proceeds.  Fine, except the plaintiff in the lawsuit ran up something like $650,000 of legal fees and essentially made this lawsuit his full-time job.  When the ball got auctioned off almost two years later, it went for about $450,000, which the two guys split (and then had to pay income tax on.)  So yeah, sucks for that guy. There’s a lot more to the story, but it was an entertaining documentary. If you have netflix, give it a look – it’s watchable online (or on your PS3 or Roku box, if you’re now doing that.)

The moral of the story, I think, had to do with the greed and sensationalism of current-day baseball, which isn’t a good thing to have rolling through your head as you’re cruising through eBay listings looking for Rockies collectibles.  So I’ll stick to collecting the plastic cups for now.

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Back in the U S and A

I’m back in Oakland.  I got back late late last night, after a very long travel day.  We weren’t able to check in online at the hotel (nevermind that the hotel computer had one of those whacked-out non-US keyboards where the backslash character is Control-Alt-Shift-Start-Caps Lock or something) and we left early to get to the airport, expecting some giant snafu involving visas or whatever.  Turns out there were absolutely zero people at the Zihua airport, and we got in quick and then had three hours to kill.  We then had a puddle-jumper to Mexico City, where we then had another four hours to kill.  Then the flight, then customs, then waiting for luggage, then the skytrain to the car, then a drive from SFO to home.  The door to door time was fifteen hours.

I took the day off for sanity purposes, which was good.  It also meant I got to drive back to my old neighborhood of South San Francisco to see the dentist, get some x-rays and see how the Mexican dental procedure held up.  He said it’s fine for now, but I’ll need a new crown in the long run.

I posted photos here although I have not sorted/tagged/captioned anything.  If you see something and want to know the story, holler.

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XEmacs annoyances on the road

Every time I rely on something on a new computer and take it on the road, said computer/system throws a pain-in-the-ass problem at me.  And the difficulty of said problem is inversely proportional to the availability of either time or internet access.

Case in point: I do a lot of my writing on my home computer, which is a Macbook, but which I did not want to bring on my current trip because of size, and mostly because it’s my main computer, thus is not as easily replaceable in case of theft or damage.  Instead, I transferred over my current book project and installed a copy of XEmacs onto my netbook, which runs Windows XP and doesn’t include such niceties as a functional emacs, or pretty much anything else.

I get to my destination, and suddenly find a neat problem: the M-q command, which fills the current paragraph, does not work.  “Filling” a paragraph, to you non-emacs types, takes a paragraph that has a bunch of uneven lines, like say a first line with two words, a second line with 100 words, and so on, and rejustifies it so it more or less fits in a standard page width, which is I think 72 characters by default.  But when I would do this in a paragraph that began with a tab, it would indent the entire paragraph one tab.

There is no clear documentation on how to fix this, or even how to explain why it happens.  I remember that ten or twelve years ago, this inexplicably started in GNU Emacs, and after a lot of head-versus-wall bashing action, I found some magic elisp to fix it.  But that was ten or twelve years ago, and more importantly, the same code did not fix XEmacs.  Was this a Win32 issue?

I don’t know, but I found another oddity: XEmacs insisted on creating a ~/.xemacs/init.el file when I picked the Options > Edit Init File menu option.  And it could not create that directory.  And if you’re in file explorer in Windows, you can’t create a file that starts with a dot.

Tip #1 and the long way around:  go to where you installed XEmacs (probably c:\Program Files\XEmacs), go into site-packages\lisp, and add your code to site-start.el

Tip #2 which didn’t dawn on me until days later: go to a dos prompt (sorry, “command shell”) and simply do a mkdir .xemacs, and it works.

Back to the initial problem.  I can’t entirely explain why this worked and why the thousand other things I tried did not work, but here’s my solution.  Add this to whatever .el file you can get to start up with XEmacs:

(setq auto-mode-alist (append '(("\\.txt$"  .  paragraph-indent-text-mode)
("\\.html$" .  html-mode)) auto-mode-alist))
(setq text-mode-hook '(lambda ()
(turn-on-font-lock)
(auto-fill-mode 1)
(setq adaptive-fill-mode nil)
(local-set-key "     " 'tab-to-tab-stop)
))

The space between the two quotes in the second-to-last line is an actual tab character and not five spaces.

Worked for me after that.  Next lesson, if I ever figure it out, is either how to get ispell to work right on Windows machines, or how to install a hacked copy of OSX on my netbook and forget all of this nonsense.

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Hello from Mexico

IMG_1643I’m writing from a hotel room in Ixtapa, Mexico, where I’ve been hanging out for almost a week.  We flew down last Saturday, and fly back on Sunday.  This has been our first real vacation since our honeymoon in the Bahamas in 2007, except for long weekends, trips back to the Midwest for holidays, and the week I took off to move into our new place, and it’s been long overdue.

Mexico’s a strange place.  First, it’s strange that my didn’t-pay-attention-twenty-years-ago Spanish is somewhat functional here, and fragments of it have been coming back to me as we stumble through menus and tours.  Yes, most of the people here, especially those in the tourism-related industries (which is pretty much all of Ixtapa and Zihuantanejo) speak English.  But they also like it when you try to use Spanish, and they all seem to love trying to teach you a few words here and there en Espanol.

We’re in one of the poorest states in the country, and once you leave our hotel, you can see it.  Ixtapa’s not much more than a marina, a row of resorts, and a couple of golf courses, but Zihua is a pretty beat city.  Walking the rows of open markets and ramshackle properties, pretty much the only high tech things you will see are Coke or Corona signs.  Any feeling you may have about being the Ugly American here is quickly dissipated by the thought that at least the pesos you’re throwing out there are going to someone who needs them.

A dollar is worth 12 or almost 13 pesos.  Prices in pesos still use the dollar sign though, which first freaked me out when I picked up a room service menu and saw a can of Coke for $35.  I can’t really tell how much we’re spending or how good or bad of a deal it is, because we’re charging a lot of stuff back to the room, and there’s the whole ‘monopoly money’ factor.  Anything less than 20 pesos you get back in change will be in coins, and the paper money is very colorful with pictures of Indians and pyramids.  Also, the Banco De Mexico on the 100 peso bill is in a font that looks like the Iron Maiden logo, which is very metal.

Most days, we have been doing nothing but sitting on the beach, reading or writing.  I have crossed the 50,000 mark on this book, which means it is officially done as far as NaNoWriMo is concerned, but it’s really like 30% done, and that’s just a first draft, so don’t look for a pre-order any time soon.  We also took a long tour where we got to see a tilemaking operation in the countryside and wander through a town that had a big open market.  It was all centered around this one Catholic church that had a Jesus that looked tragic in a Faces of Death sort of way, bewildered and on his knees dragging a cross, bloodied and beaten.  Not exactly the airbrushed and toned Jesus I was used to seeing as a kid in Indiana.

We also went on a long tour yesterday on ATVs, which was a lot of fun.  It was mostly through woods and farmland, and most of the farms here grow coconuts, or raise cattle.  We also got to cruise at top speed across a wavy oceanfront.  ATVs are fun as hell, and it makes me want to buy a couple and tear up my land in Colorado to put in some kind of dirt obstacle course.

And the bad news.  First, there was an earthquake here last Sunday.  There were actually three, a 3.7, a 4.6, and a 4.2; I think we only felt the middle one.  It wasn’t much, a very quick shake that we thought was just someone next door or maybe below us, and we didn’t hear confirmation of it until the next day.

Second, we got sick.  We were both careful about what we ate and drank, and they purify everything here at the hotel, but something got us.  It was a horrible, flu-like thing where I was feverish and totally weak for about 24 hours, and then it went away.  So, Montezuma had his revenge, but a day later, I was for the most part better.

And also, on last Sunday, I was eating a piece of cake, and one of my crowns fell out.  It was my lower rear one, and it and the tooth appeared to have no damage, but there was some sensitivity, and immediately went ballistic.  “Mexican” and “Dentist” go together like “Turkish” and “Prison”.  I got an appointment the next morning with a dentist in Zihua who had an office about as clean and friendly as my last dentist in Astoria (which isn’t saying much, but it wasn’t like the dental scene in that Tom Hanks castaway movie.)  He shot me up with novacaine, cleaned everything, glued the crown back on, told me in broken English that I needed to get it redone as soon as possible (going back next week, in the US…) and then charged me roughly  $40.  No paperwork, no insurance hassles, no waivers to sign, nothing.  It was truly a “you are not in the US anymore” moment.

So here I am, the temperature outside double what it is back home, no rain or gloom.  No turkey yesterday, and the only football on the tube was the no-hands variety with the round ball.  Lots of pictures to upload when I get back on a real internet connection, so stay tuned.

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A final coda to the season

Oh yeah, I have not updated since the end of baseball season.  People keep commenting about the Yankees buying the World Series, because it’s great to hate the Yankees.  My general opinion on that is, “eh.”  It’s no secret teams with high payrolls have more success, except the Mets have the second-highest payroll and 2009 didn’t work out so well for them (24th place in win/loss); the Cubs threw down about $135 big, third in payroll size, and finished like 7th in a 5-team division.  (OK, it was 16th of 30) The Marlins were dead last in payroll and almost won a wildcard; the Mariners shed almost $20 million, but they still spent more money than the Phillies did to win the World Series in 2008.  Houston is in the top ten money served, but finished 24th.  And my beloved Rockies just barely made the top twenty in the salary department, but were sixth place overall. So more payroll means more success, except when it doesn’t.

I’m pretty neutral about the whole Yankees hate thing, except for the fact that I’m a fan of whoever is playing the Red Sox, and that makes me somewhat happy they were able to win.  But I only passively watched the games.  It seems like it was months ago that the Rockies lost, and I’m starting to get the itch, wishing I was back at Coors Field with AM radio in ear, and a bag of Cracker Jacks in my lap.  I think this will be a tough year, hot stove-wise, since a lot of my favorites from the 2007 series may be going elsewhere.  (Hawpe, Atkins, Torrealba) and some of the big weapons of this year will also wander elsewhere (Beimel, Giambi, Betancourt).  Hopefully, the owners will lock down some good names for 2010.  And hopefully, I’ll get at least one weekend at altitude to see a few games.

Until then – winter ball?  I don’t think the iPhone has an app for that…

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Marathon

It’s been a while.  I’ve been busy working on this NaNoWriMo book writing marathon.  It’s day 15, and I should be at 25,000 words, and I’m just shy of 32,000 words, which is good news.  The bad news is I took yesterday off, I barely picked at things today after sleeping in, and I go on vacation next week.  I am also slowly running out of steam, and I’m not terribly excited about the project anymore.  Part of this is due to two artificial constraints I have added.  One is that I have been limiting myself to only the first third of the book, because this is the weakest third, and normally, I’d jump straight into the final third, and totally screw everything up.  I need the base writing done in the first third, so that’s where I’m focusing.  The other problem is that I’ve been avoiding going back to re-edit or revise the old stuff I’ve already written, but I know it needs lots of work.  It’s all filled with passive verbs, simple telling versus showing, and not a lot of good storytelling.  I’ll get to that eventually – right now the only goal is 50,000 by the end of the month.

In less than a week, I will be in sunny Mexico.  I have done zero preparation for the trip, aside from getting a Frommer’s book (or maybe it’s Lonely Planet, I forget.)  It will be a nice change from the weather here, which has been dipping into the 40s some mornings.  The cats have taken to sleeping on top of our cable box/DVR, so I’m also expecting a near future of no TV unless I can find a way to block that off.

I’ve wasted the morning googling old crap about malls.  One of the main problems with this book is it’s much harder to research late 80s stuff from Elkhart on the internet.  I thought researching Summer Rain was bad, but try finding anything about Scottsdale Mall on the web.  There’s one page on deadmalls, and there’s what I posted, and that’s about it.  I don’t want to have to start pulling crap from the Elkhart library to research this, because it’s not a research project – it’s a friggin’ novel.  The same goes for music, although I can actually find Indestroy’s album on iTunes.

All of this reading about malls has me thinking about going to a mall, but I don’t even know where one is around here.  I know where the closest strip of Best Buy/Baby Gap/Home Depot is, and we have this big outdoor mall, but I want to walk the corridors of a half-dead, remodeled last in 1978, dried-out water feature covered in fake cotton snow mall.  Meanwhile, I get distracted by posts like this great time capsule of my past: a post about Factoria Mall, outside of where I used to work in Seattle.  That place was a dump, but my first year of work was in an office right next to that place, and it became one of those default places I’d always end up, especially when I needed something from Target.  Scary stuff.

Must go write…

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NaNoWriMo, day one

So there’s this thing called National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo.  It’s a contest of sorts, where writers have one month to write a 50,000 word novel.  There are no prizes or judges, and there’s no real anything except motivation to throw together a book as fast as possible.  This isn’t anything new; I tried to do this back in 2002, but between a trip to Vegas at the start, a horrible case of the flu, and a story line that was largely unsustainable, I dropped out pretty fast.  This time, I will be in Mexico for a week of the time, and I’ve got a more involved job, plus I’m also married now, so I don’t have as much time as when I was single with no friends in New York, and coasting in a job where I could spend long periods of time chipping away at an outline.

I have been outlining a book for a few weeks ago; it’s actually an idea I’ve knocked around for years, and I have parts of a rough draft that weighs in at about 60,000 words.  The book, structurally, threatens to weigh in at close to the word count of Summer Rain, or about 180,000-200,000 words.  The book is somewhat biographical, and takes place in high school.  I have often said I don’t want to dip back into this style of writing, and there are some obvious issues with doing this.  But I feel like I need to get this out of my system and behind me, and the only way to do that is to actually write and finish the damn book and put it behind me.  Maybe nobody will ever read it, but I need to get it done and on the shelf.

My biggest problem is that twenty years is a long time ago, and my memory isn’t what it used to be.  When I was writing Summer Rain, that period was only a few years behind me.  I also had a decent paper trail, including old emails, diaries, checkbooks, bank statements, letters, and even a copy of my bursar’s record, with the prices of every thin dime the university shook out of me back in 1992.  I have moved eight times since I started Summer Rain.  Since I graduated high school, I have moved fifteen times.  Each time, a little bit more falls off the truck or into the recycler, and I have almost no record of anything anymore.  I need to be a lot more loose with dates and details this time around.

There’s also the issue with writing about other people.  I always run into the problem that I write some story about someone from 1988, and the story is about love lost or lessons learned, and I get an email that says “WHAT THE FUCK DUDE MY CAR DIDNT HAVE 14 INCH RIMS IT HAD 15 INCH RIMS”.  Writing about space aliens from mars doesn’t generate this kind of thing, and it’s a real crapshoot, because I can obsess over these tiny details, or I can just omit so-and-so from the story entirely, or make up some new character, or whatever else.  But knowing that someone will read the story eventually and get on your case because maybe you painted them in a bad light is always unnerving.  And the work of combining and amalgamating and fictionalizing characters is always that – work.

So I’ve been re-reading John Sheppard’s Small Town Punk (the original version, not the Reader’s Digest version) and that’s got me geared up.  I’ve also been doing a lot of outlining using OmniOutliner on the Mac, which is a pretty useful program for this sort of thing.  I usually have really terse outlines, and then I write for 30 or 40,000 words, and then I start forgetting what the outline is or what I covered, and I have to stop and re-read and re-outline everything, which is a huge waste of time.  I hope that I can stick to this outline and keep things rolling.

Today was day one, and my wordcount was just over 3000.  I think you need something like 1667 words a day to hit the magic 50K, so I’m slightly ahead.  I hope I can work out some more slack and keep going.  I’m also somewhat forcing myself to write very linear, starting at chapter 1 and going forward, instead of hopping around.

Anyway, that’s what’s keeping me busy – if I vanish for a bit, you know why.

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Cart racing

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My work had a team-building event today where they brought us to an indoor go-cart track and set us loose for a while on a twisty course with gas-powered carts.  I raced 40 minutes of an hour-long race on a three-person team, and had a car change about halfway through because my throttle broke. Then I spent the last part of the race in a sliding car with cold tires.  I finished the practice round in second, but finished sixth in the full race.

Overall, it was a lot of fun, although it left me sore as hell, and made the commute home interesting.  I kept wanting to slam into turns and shave corners.  The whole experience reminded me of snowmobiling in Alaska, down to the annoying helmet.

If you ever have the chance to do this, here is one big tip: when the track safety guys blue flag you and tell you to let the guy behind you pass, ignore them.  I actually let people pass when I got flagged, and I was the only one who did.