fine whine

To say that I was discouraged today about my so-called novel would be an understatement. To say that "I am not going to pretend that I’m not doing so well with my novel." as I did Monday is a bad double negative, and in fact an incorrect statement. I'd meant to say that I wasn't going to pretend that I wasn't doing badly with my novel, which in fact I was. Doing badly with my novel, that is.

I am, of course writing this several days from the date that is above this. I left this as a draft and returned to it only after having given up on said novel, attempting to write another (which I also abandoned) and having written two other entries about such (this and this).

This whole lack of motivation/bad novel thing did not make me happy. As such, in Monday's entry I pretty much trashed Bruce Sterling's Zenith angle, and he dropped by my site within hours to leave me words of encouragement.

Seeing his name in my email (I get a copy of every comment before you ever get to read them), I was totally deflated. Here was a guy whose book I'd said was "very, very bad" and he had seen it. In retrospect the book's not very, very bad, but it's not great. I wrote the words in question mere minutes after putting down the book, the last chapter of which I'd sped through due to annoyance and a nasty headache.

For what it is, and that is a fictionalized look at events parallel to the paradigm shift (sorry, just had to use that phrase) up to and after the 9-11 attacks from the perspective of a practicing geek, the book works. It probably feels more dated now that some of the principal political players have been re-cast as evil, and all the more so since there hasn't been any more major terrorist happenings in the intervening years. At least, not on American soil, where it matters.

So Bruce, thanks for stopping by and for the kind words. I didn't hate your book, and I will in fact pick up others from the library.

Also, in the intervening time, another author dropped by and weighed in on the issue. He's Pauly D, author of Consumer Joe (soon to be made into a feature-length blockbuster film, or perhaps just a TV show) and he's stopped by here before. Nice to see you again, Paul! Now I feel bad for aggregating his blog and never visiting it to leave comments.

Shockingly enough these two aren't even the only published authors to have visited my little corner of the web lately. Lee Goldberg stopped by and commented on my entry about his book Unsold TV pilots. At least I didn't insult him too.

Incidently, I'd deleted that comment accidently, but was able to recreate it from my emails. Sorry about that, Lee. Stop by again some time, okay?

I've never quite known what to do with stuffed animals. I've amassed some ten or twelve of them over the years, and they tend to just sit around here and there. I have a stuffed lion, a home-made Pound Puppy-lookalike, a number of zoo souvenirs, a stuffed bear bearing a sash reading "Pave the whales" and more. They just collect dust.

If I really did anything with stuffed animals, though, I'd want some of these: Ugly dolls by wishingfish.

Don't ask me why, I don't know.

For the vast wealth of information bouncing around the internet there aren't many links between the individual (tid)bits. I can find reams of biographical information on the life, political and professional, and even his entire filmography (as himself and otherwise) of former wrestler, actor and governor Jesse Ventura. That's not enough, though.

Tonight as I am watching Ricochet, I was struck by something. In it, Jesse Ventura gets run through by a very, very mean John Lithgow (I hope I didn't give anything away). I thought back to the last two films I'd watched with Jesse in them, and in both cases (Running man and Predator) he doesn't live to the final scene (oops, there I go giving things away again).

Knowing those bits of information, I wanted to know more. Does Jesse Ventura ever live through an entire movie? As he is the star of Abraxas, guardian of the universe, through that one he probably makes it, but what about the others?

I could always put it out on Ask MetaFilter or Google Answers or Ask Yahoo, or send it to Cecil at The Straight Dope, but then I'd be asking a person, querying the collective knowledge of people, not the collected information among the databases.

I tried Asking Jeeves, but it was useless. I remember the days when that site was useful, but now it looks so unfamiliar and unfriendly and, well, useless that I doubt I'll try to use it again in the near future. I shouldn't need something like Ask Jeeves, though, should I?

It's all out there somewhere, so why haven't we connected all the dots and dotted all the Ts? Inquiring minds must know.

Lacking anything better to mention, I'd like to take a moment to complain about my computer at work. More specifically, I'd like to complain about using it, as one of my issues is with Microsoft Outlook and another with Last.FM and yet one more with my Wordpress pages and web email.

First, my AutoCorrect doesn't work. For a long time I'd disabled it completely without incident, but lately as I send out more emails I find myself signing them with THanks, MIke and that's unacceptable in a professional environment. Unacceptable to me, that is, as I am constantly barraged with emails rife with typos and the wrong names and all sorts of errors (heck, I've sent one or two myself lately). It just bothers me to make such a fat fingered mistake, and so consistently to boot. Enter AutoCorrect--it was designed for situations just like this, right? Too bad it just calmly ignores my double capitals, even when I have specifically entered every possible permutation of "THanks" down to "TH" and still it mocks me with its inaction. There's no possible way this can be user error other than spending a little too much time on the SHIFT key.

As for Last.FM I've grown somewhat tired of hearing the same music over and over. I'm unwilling to make the effort to listen to new music, though, despite that being the main object of the service; that is, to introduce new music to people based on what they already like (and dislike). I think I'm just to finicky, or just too lazy to go back and hit "BAN" every fifth track or so when they try to slip in some bad reggae or worse.

Also irking me in a vaguely computer-related fashion is the recent onslaught of spammers trying to slip links about casinos, porn, grey market drugs and roulette table plans (I kid you not) onto my pages. They're wasting my server cycles and my own cycles as each one generates an email and a link I must click to destroy them. I'm looking into adding some WordPress plugins to take care of them, but I only care so much.

So today Jessica forwarded to me an email about the bunnies of angryalien.com. It was probably new to her but I'd been there so long ago (and even remembered watching their rendition of Jaws with the actual theme music, not its replacement) but it was nice to revisit a funny site like that.

Rewind to a couple days back when (Gawker scion) Screenhead.com links a couple days ago to a graffiti repository, filled with examples of stencils, tagging and whatnot. I immediately thought of Banksy, British street artist extraordinaire who'd I'd stumbled across not too long ago myself. Naturally his name (and site) soon was passed around the so-called blogosphere.

Before that there was a boingboing post about a site sighting wireless towers that were concealed or disguised, just days after I'd found a company building them (whilst searching for pictures of saguaro catci, I kid you not). I sent the link to BB and got a brief credit and minor traffic spike. Woo hoo. It stands that I was there first, for what that matters.

Recently I've also stumbled across Paul Davidson's blog post about the classic AIM bot "smarterchild" which I'd been shown back in college days when people in my classes were programming clones of it. Admittedly the post in question had the gist of "I'm sure I'm the last guy to find out about this" but still, I am left feeling that I was somehow ahead of things without gaining any advantage over anything.

So, the real question (other than "do I spend too much time like this?) is, "Can I leverage this into making money?"

Or merely, "Who cares?"

So I was searching around for some sort of information on what happened to GeoURL, the proximity database for sites and pages that worked based on so-called ICBM coordinates. A GeoURL tag on a page would lead to all the other registered places nearby.

Inevitably this was a bunch of LJ and DeviantArt people, but not always. Lots of sites were slowly adding themselves to the database, and then...

GeoURL closed for renovations.

Well, that's a fine how-do-you-do, you might say--if you speak in the manner of folksy, down-home characters commonly played by William H. Macy in movies.

GeoURL being down mainly means that I don't have an easy way of knowing what DeviantArtists and other online folks have set up shop nearby. I suppose I'm okay with that, since I don't really like dealing with people in real life anyway.

Anyway, every now and then I'd make half-hearted attempts to track down any information at all about the ongoing status of GeoURL's so-called renovations. Most of the time I found only other half-hearted attempts and no answers.

This time around, though, I hit something similar to paydirt. On an email list dubbed Geowanking, one of the head honchos, Joshua Schachter posted this:

I'm looking for a new home for it, still. It needs a rewrite for
performance reasons and has considerable bandwidth and CPU
requirements...

Well, at least now I know. Nearby that information was a link to A2B.cc, which "offers a very similar service" amongst other things (by which I mean a search engine and GPS software and more).

I've only been playing with it a little bit but I've already added this page to it. I can't see much reason why anybody else wouldn't want to do the same with their web stuff.

Of course to really get the full experience I need to get some GPS equipment. Christmas is coming soon, after all.