That is completely awesome. It’s a great series. Unfortunately it looks like we’re going to have to wait for book 6, which will now be released as part of the re-edited and published-by-an-actual-publisher book 3. You know what? I’m ok with that — it’s so great to see someone create something so great and succeed through this sort of hard work and determination.

These are the first two books the six book “Riyria Revelations” series by Michael Sullivan — good, solid pulp fantasy in the grand tradition of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Sullivan’s world has some depth, however, and the episodic tales are significantly more complex than you might initially think. The stories draw upon thousands upon thousands of years of history, and I suspect it’s all leading towards a…well…a revelation that will likely be one of the turning points in that history.

Great characters, well written, fast-paced, and altogether fun so far. Recommended.

It turns out that extrinsic incentives — the old “carrots and sticks” system of punishments and rewards — really don’t motivate us very much at all. This isn’t to say that things like money, benefits, promotions, and bonuses aren’t important, but science tells us that after a certain level (i.e. when pay is already fair and equitable), extrinsic motivators aren’t really all that effective.

True motivation is something at once more simple and more complex. Intrinsic incentives — those motivations that come from within and are part of our fundamental character and make up — are the real reason we strive to excel, why we take such satisfaction in producing exceptional work, and are what lie behind our real passions and drives.

Pink postulates that there are three elements to intrinsic motivation: Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose.

The first element, Autonomy, is based on the observation that people are more likely to be engaged in and passionate about something if they are free to be self-directed — allowed not only to choose what they work on, but to find their own solutions, strategies, and approaches to the work involved. Pink puts forth “four Ts” where autonomy and self-direction matter: task, time, technique, and team.

Compare these two situations: In the first, you are asked to work on a project you select, on your own schedule, using methods you choose, and with a team that you recruit. In the second, you are asked to work on something you’re not interested in, on a schedule someone else sets, using methods you have no influence over, and with people you can’t trust, don’t like, and find difficult to work with. Which would you find more motivating? Where would you do your best work? Autonomy is an absolutely fundamental part of motivation.

Mastery, Pink’s second element, is based on his belief that we each have an innate “desire to get better and better at something that matters”. This drive is what lies behind that seemingly magical state known as “flow” — where time falls away when you’re working on a clear task that is just challenging enough without being frustratingly difficult. When our tasks are just slightly beyond our current level of mastery we are inspired to push ourselves to get better and accomplish ever greater things.

The third element, Purpose, provides a grounding context for the other two. “Autonomous people working toward mastery perform at very high levels. But those who do it in the service of some greater objective can achieve even more.” If you believe that what you’re doing has a purpose larger than yourself — say, as an example, ensuring there is choice and innovation on the internet and safeguarding the future of the open web — you’re going to be even more motivated to accomplish amazing things.

The book mentions both Wikipedia and Firefox as examples of what people can accomplish when driven solely by intrinsic motivation. All three elements are present: contributors are autonomous (entirely self-selecting and able to scratch whatever itches they like), highly skilled and driven to continually get better at what they do, and they usually have a pretty fundamental belief in the purpose and importance of the larger project. Working together over several years, the people involved with these projects have accomplished what most sane people would have believed was impossible only a few years ago. Intrinsic motivation is powerful, powerful thing.

If you’re interested in understanding the power of intrinsic incentives (and, to some extent, the dangers of extrinsic incentives) and harnessing those to motivate your team or open source community to even greater feats of awesome, I think Drive is definitely worth reading.

So as pretty much everyone in the world knows, Apple announced the iPad yesterday. Unlike apparently everyone else, I actually don’t have a problem with the name. Legal pad, note pad, hockey pad, bachelor pad, launch pad…etc. etc. etc. Come on.

Anyhoo…while I’m crazily excited about the iPad (and I will be ordering one the second Apple lets me send them money), I don’t think it will be a Kindle killer for me. It could be for a lot of people, but the way I use my Kindle doesn’t really lend itself to immediate replacement by the iPad. It’s too big, for one, and too heavy. And the Kindle’s buttons are ideal — I often read my Kindle lying on my side (on the sofa or in bed) and the buttons are great. The iPad’s swipe-to-turn-the-page thing is just not going to work for that. As others have said, the LCD screen is a double-edged sword…while I desperately wish e-ink were more contrasty, I’m not sure I could spend more time staring at an LCD screen than I already do. I’m on my laptop or iMac 10-14 hours a day as it is — I use books and my Kindle as a way to rest my eyes, and the iPad won’t work for that either.

I also like that the Kindle is a single-purpose device. Like John, I’m able to read longer and more complex works on my Kindle than on my laptop, with a much better ability to focus. Reading on my laptop, I fall into the trap of responding to IM pings or just flipping over to check a quick email or jot down a note or quickly glance at my Twitterstream, at which point I get lost in the other distractions. The Kindle, on the other hand, is just for reading, a step away from the hurly burly of the internets and all the shenanigans therein. The iPad seems like it will split the difference — other apps will be available, but without background applications there won’t be IM pings and whatnot. I’m not sure what that will turn out to be like in practice.

We will see. I am going to get an iPad, and I am going to try reading some books on it. I’m very much hoping that Apple continues to allow Amazon to have their Kindle app on the iPhone and iPad because at that point they’ll have to compete on the price of content, and less expensive ebooks are something I’m Very Interested In. Once I’ve had a chance to do an actual comparison of both as an eReader device, I’ll post a review.

Honestly, this is all jetpacks and flying cars, anyhow. I like living in the future.

For example, the Project Gutenberg page for The House on the Borderland is a pretty dry and library-catalogue-like affair, and it doesn’t really contain all the information you want about a book, such as the original publication date and length.

On the other hand, the ManyBooks.net page for The House on the Borderland includes a brief synopsis of the story, the original date of publication (1907), its length (50,975 words, 140 pages**) and a handful of user reviews and ratings (average rating: 5 stars).

So if you’re looking for a Project Gutenberg book to read but are having a hard time digging around the Project Gutenberg site, check out ManyBooks.net. The site isn’t perfect by any means, but I find more approachable, more useful, and easier to browse than the Project Gutenberg site itself.

I chose this book because its title reminded me of “Keep on the Borderlands“, one of the first Dungeons and Dragons modules I (and most everyone my age) ever played. The novel, of course, has nothing at all to do with the game, but it doesn’t matter — once I started reading I could hardly put it down. Even when I thought I was done with it (there are a few draggy bits in the middle) I kept reading, drawn to continue turning the pages to find out what ever happens at the end of this absolutely bizarre story.

I liked this book at lot, and I think anyone who likes horror, scifi, or anything in between will enjoy it as well. It is strongly reminiscent of H.P. Lovecraft, so if you’re a fan of that master of nightmares, you might give this one a go as well.

If you’ve never heard of it, Project Gutenberg (Wikipedia page) is an almost entirely volunteer-driven effort to digitize, archive, and distribute “cultural works” (mostly books). It was established in 1971 and now includes over 30,000 free ebooks that you can read on a wide variety of devices including computers, cellphones, various mobile devices, and ebook readers.

Project Gutenberg contains some amazing, unparalleled works of literature and it is an incredibly valuable resource that just doesn’t seem to get the credit (and support) it deserves. This challenge has two purposes:

1) To inspire people to read some of these wonderful old classics, and
2) To support Project Gutenberg.

Here’s the challenge

1) Set a goal: Pick a number of Project Gutenberg books you think you could read over the next year. This can be anything from a conservative 2 or 3, a more ambitious one per month, or a hardcore no-holds-barred one per week. The number is entirely up to you. Post a quick comment here if you would like to make your goal public!

2) Make a donation: Donate a few dollars to Project Gutenberg. I’m going to donate $2 for each book in my goal, but that’s just a suggestion. Just try to send ‘em a couple of bucks if you can.

3) Find some books and start reading. Each time you finish a book, blog a quick review of it, fire off a tweet about it, or post to Facebook about it. Encourage other folks to play along, donate a few dollars, and read some of these amazing pieces of literature. Project Gutenberg is a great and under-appreciated project that is doing some fantastic work, so let’s show ‘em some love.

Not sure where to start?
Here’s a quick baker’s dozen of some of the fantastic books available through Project Gutenberg:

• Hound of the Baskervilles, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin
• Walden, Henry David Thoreau
• Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
• The Voyage of the Beagle, Charles Darwin
• Anne of Green Gables, Lucy Maud Montgomery
• Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
• Dracula, Bram Stoker
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
• A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
• Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Jacob and Whilhelm Grimm
• Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
• Harvard Classics bookshelf (for a real challenge)

Stickers!

Here are some stickers you can put on your weblog if you decide to participate. Link the sticker to this blog post, and we’ll see how many people we can get reading some old classics and supporting Project Gutenberg.

* Disclaimers: I’m doing this just for fun. I am in no way associated with Project Gutenberg, and they have no idea I’m doing this. Having read their legalese I think I’m ok calling this the “Project Gutenberg Project”, but I didn’t ask for their permission (so the name may change!) If you decide to donate, please go to the Project Gutenberg site, and follow their directions.

Very cool original stamp graphic is from Wikipedia and is in the public domain.

Happy reading!

I liked it, but it’s awkward. The novel has two narrators — an older woman in her 50s who works as a concierge for a building of private apartments, and a 12 year old girl who lives in one of them — and various chapters, set in a different typeface for each, are told from the point of view of one or the other. It’s…odd, and I can’t say I found the technique to be particularly interesting or necessary. The narrators also spend an awful lot of time in their heads — there is a whole lot of telling-rather-than-showing going on, with big chewy passages wherein one or the other ruminates about art or philosophy or the nature of family or some other such thing.

The beginning is choppy — the concierge’s character is developed in fits and starts, and when first introduced the little girl isn’t terribly likable. In fact I never really developed any sort of affection or attachment to the child — she feels rather more like a plot device than a person, having no convincing emotional development or depth. The concierge, however, who is the actual protagonist of the story, is much more fully fleshed-out, and the middle of the story is spent largely watching her transformation and development.

But then it all goes awry. I won’t post anything that will spoil the story, but suffice it to say that I didn’t care for the ending (and the bit leading up to the ending) at all. It’s heavy handed and feels horribly contrived — the choppy beginning of the story lead into a reasonably well paced and flowing middle that is unfortunately destroyed by a sudden, sledgehammer-like ending. It felt very much like an editor or creative writing class had ravaged some subtler and more ethereal ending that was more in fitting with the narrative, so the author replaced it with something that attempts to be shocking, but is actually just abrupt and hollow.

Recommended? Not really. There are lots and lots of books better than this, but then there are also lots and lots of books that are much worse. A definite middle-of-the-pack showing.

Dresden Files #1 Storm Front

Magician’s Nephew; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; A Horse and His Boy (first 3 books of the Narnia series) — If I have read these before, I don’t recall doing so. The first book was brilliant, the second book was great, the third book started well but slowed and got bogged down and a bit dull. Will finish the rest of the series some other time (I’ve been told it’s pretty much downhill from LW&W, anyhow). Recommended, but I’m not entirely sure I understand the breathless praise the series often gets — nostalgia is a potent force, it seems.

We stayed in a house in a small town called La Roque sur Pernes in the south of France for two weeks (pictured above). There was no internet, no tv, no radio. I didn’t take my laptop or cellphone. I did take a bunch of books, and there was a shelf-full already there. The result is that I read a lot. Here’s the list, with very short reviews.

• Anathem, by Neal Stephenson. Awesome, A+++, will definitely re-read it. Highly recommended.
• Moving Targets, by Margaret Atwood. Must read for Atwood fans, missable otherwise.
• The Good Earth, by Pearl S Buck. Fantastic.
• Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger. This was a third re-read for me, so obviously I love this book.
• Toujours Provence, by Peter Mayle. Meh.
• My Life in France, by Julia Child. Fun and interesting. Julia was quite a woman.
• Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, by Dai Sijie. Excellent. My favourite of the trip. Short, one-sitting sort of thing, but absolutely fantastic.
• World Without End, by Ken Follett. Another medieval page turner, but very, very similar to his other medieval page turner (the story of which happened in the same town some 400 years earlier). Good, but not great.
• The Hero and the Crown, by Robin McKinley. Erratically written and awkwardly paced. Feels like the outline of a more epic trilogy that just never got written.
• Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson. Sadly, this one doesn’t hold up. Loved it when I first read it however many years ago, sort of slogged my way through it the second time. Luckily Stephenson has already completely redeemed himself with Anathem.

Vacation lesson #1 – I love reading. I’m going to be making a lot more time for it again, mostly by getting up at 6am and not opening the laptop ’til 10am. Turns out it’s a really nice way to start a day.

Earlier this month, the good folks at Bookeen launched (as in: actually shipped) their third-generation ebook reader, appropriately called the “Cybook Gen 3“. I’ve been watching their progress avidly, and the second I heard that the Cybook was shipping my credit card and I leaped into action. Being quick on the draw, I managed to get my order in early enough to get one of the first shipments. Within days (possibly hours) their initial supply had sold out and all other orders were delayed from a Nov 2 ship date to sometime in mid-December.

I received my Cybook (from Paris, via FedEx) on Nov 7 and have been using it daily since. I’ve taken some pictures, which you can view over at my flickr photo set.

It is, as I say, very much like living in the future. There are some rough spots of course, but also some unexpected highlights. Here’s a quick rundown:

Readability: The contrast and resolution on the Cybook are great. I’m really impressed by the clarity and readability. These e-ink based ebook readers do not include a backlight, so you can only read them anywhere you can read a regular book. The Cybook screen is nicely matte, so there’s no glare issue whatsoever. Grade: A-.

Memory: The Cybook comes with 64mb of content memory and has an SD slot for memory expansion. The 2gb of additional memory I’ve added will allow me to put somewhere in the region of 3000-5000 books on it. Grade: A+++ I’m living in the future.

Weight and size: roughly 300g including cover and battery; roughly the same height, width, and thickness as a 300 page regular (non-trade) paperback. Grade: A+.

Battery life: the Bookeen folk estimate that a full charge should last around 8000 page turns. The e-ink technology apparently only draws power when changing what’s displayed, using no power otherwise. At this point I’ve read around 300 pages and the battery indicator is still pegged at 100%. Grade: A+.

Ghosting, page turn speed: Both excellent. I have seen no evidence of ghosting yet, but this may be an issue that takes a few tens of thousand of page turns to appear. I will post an update later if this happens. Page turn speed (the length of time it takes to completely change the display after pushing the button) is excellent. Not instantaneous, but still faster than actually turning a page in a physical book. No complaints here at all. Grade: A-.

Formats: The Cybook allows you to read ebooks in four formats — mobipocket, HTML, PDF, and plaintext. The mobipocket format is, by far, the best. HTML is second best being quite readable with functioning hyperlinks (assuming the hyperlinks are within the same document — these things aren’t hooked up to the internet). Plaintext is OK, but hard-wrapped formats get all messed up — I need to find a script to un-hard-wrap the Gutenberg plaintext files. PDF — well it depends for what size paper the PDF was formatted. If the PDF is formatted to a paperback-sized page, it’s fantastic. If the PDF is formatted to 8.5×11, then it’s utterly illegible with no way to resize the fonts or zoom the pages (that I have found). Grade: A+ for mobipocket, B+ for HTML, B- for plaintext, D for PDF.

User interface: Overall the UI is good, but not great. The “menu” button (which you use to navigate back to the main library screen, set bookmarks, adjust font sizes, etc) is awkwardly placed. The main “select” button is really too clicky — it’s just loud, when it should be silent. The little rubber cover for the USB port is a bit flimsy, doesn’t really get out of the way sufficiently, and is bloody impossible to remove when the cover is on. I am somewhat tempted just to rip it off now and save myself the trouble of dealing with it entirely. Otherwise, the Cybook is great. Grade: B.

Cover: Nicely made, well designed, good fit. Only comes in a somewhat disappointingly ugly brown and costs an extra $40. Hopefully other covers will come available over time. The cover is absolutely essential, however, even though it is brown. Don’t fool yourself into thinking otherwise. It’s worth every penny. Grade: A.

Manufacturing quality: The Cybook is well made and feels very solid. I definitely don’t feel as if I have to baby it or be excessively cautious when slinging it into bags or backpacks. The cover helps, of course, and I strongly recommend you buy a cover if you get one of these. Grade: A.

DRM: Buying ebooks (mobipocket format, f.e.) requires that you enter your device PID before you can download the book. This, I assume, is how they’re enforcing Digital Rights Management (DRM), which is just a fancy way of saying “you can’t lend other people your ebooks, ever”. Given that ebooks are currently priced roughly equivalent to physical books, this is an annoying pain in the ass. Publishers are really going to have to rethink the pricing scheme on these things, because paying the same for a DRM’d ebook and a regular physical book is just nonsense. Grade: bullshit.

Overall, I’m very happy with my Cybook. It’s small, light, comfortable to read, and does its job well. Unlike the rumoured Amazon “Kindle”, it doesn’t do wifi or have a keyboard or read email (wtf), but I’m really OK with that. I spend all day on the Internet — when I’m reading it’s quite specifically an opportunity for me to get the hell away from the machines.

I’m very excited by the possibilities Amazon’s ebook initiative may open up. Currently buying ebooks can be challenging — the seller sites tend to be atrocious, and selection is slim. Being able to buy mobipocket-format ebooks through Amazon.com (with all its reviews and whatnot) would be absolutely brilliant. We’ll see what happens on Monday!

¹ – “Kindle”, seriously? Def’n: catch fire; cause to start burning. That’s a little Fahrenheit 451 of them.

If you do, I would be very interested in either borrowing or buying it from you. I’ll pay shipping and maybe send you a nice present. Leave a comment or email me at deb-at-dria-dot-org ! Thank you!

(Amazon lies about shipping estimates. Lies lies lies.)

Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.

Link.

• eBookMall (PDF, MS Reader, Palm Reader – $8.99)
• eBookMall (MS Reader, Mobipocket – $8.99)
• eBooks.com (PDF, MS Reader, Mobipocket – $8.99)

It’s somewhat annoying that the electronic edition is $1 more than the paperback, but I will continue to be confounded by eBook pricing for quite a while, I suspect. Either way, it’s a fun read.

Updated because I managed to fubar the actual links somehow. I need a better blog editor, clearly.

Since I couldn’t find any books I was actually looking for, I just browsed the fairly enormous selection of books they had on hand. I ended up buying nothing.

The reason is this: brick and mortar bookstores do not have handy, book-specific reader reviews or “related” links. Each time I picked up a book, I wanted to read more about it. What did other people think of the book? Were the recipes well tested and reliable? What was the average reader rating of the book? How many people had bothered rating it at all? Were there other books I might like instead of or in addition to this book?

In short, I have become absolutely reliant on Amazon.ca. Not only do they almost always have the book(s) I’m looking for “in stock” (ranging from 1 day to 6 weeks for delivery), but they’ll usually give me a 20-40% discount off the top, package it up nicely, and send it to my door. They also provide a huge amount of additional information about the books from editorial and reader reviews to the ability to “search inside” the book for specific keywords.

The traditional bookstore is utterly doomed. It’s already obvious — bookstores are no longer just bookstores, they’re also movie stores, music stores, random gift stores, magazine shops, and coffee shops. There is absolutely no reason, whatsoever, to go to these places any more. More often than not the books I’m looking for are things I’ve read about on the web, and the web usually includes a handy link to Amazon so I don’t even have to search for it. Click once to read all about it, then click again to put it into my shopping cart.

Amazon is not only more convenient than a regular bookshop, it’s also more useful, more comprehensive, and more responsive. I can’t remember the last time I’ve gone to a bookstore and found what I was looking for. Usually I come away disappointed, thinking “well, I’ll just go order it on Amazon”.

This used to make me sad, but now it’s just how things are. Book selling has evolved. Not entirely in good ways (Amazon isn’t “cozy” or “friendly” in the way good bookstores can be), but in enough ways that the brick and mortar stores are approaching the level of being quaint throwbacks to an earlier, less convenient day.

Honestly, I don’t have this kind of time, and I swear to god if I read about the Whitbread Award one more time I’m going to scream.

Clearly I am not cut out for the book blogging business.

That said, however, I am not retiring Parchment Moon. It will live on as a book-related blog, but the content is going to be largely me jibbering on aimlessly about books I’ve actually been reading. Like (or, more accurately, quite unlike) American Tragedy (haven’t quite found the inspiration to pick that one back up yet, which is a bad sign…might give it another go tomorrow, but if that doesn’t work, it’s getting shuffled back to the bottom of the stack). Sporadically, I imagine, I’ll post bits and pieces of Particularly Fascinating Book News, but not like I originally intended.

Ok, that’s all. Bye.

Anyhow, I’ve been posting over there more than I’ve been posting over here. Now, it’s time to eat, drink, and be merry. So merry merry one and all, I hope your Christmas has been safe and happy.

Parchment Moon

Parchment Moon is a weblog about books, writing, language, and other literary things. Mostly books, tho’. Anyhow. There you go.

Come & Talk to Me from the album “Secret World Live” by Peter Gabriel

This is one of the books I’m currently (re)reading:

“American Gods: A Novel” (Neil Gaiman)

Recently, Time magazine published a list of the 100 best novels. But the praise of professional critics hardly matters to the book-reviewing readers at Amazon.com. A compilation of the best of the worst… about the best.

The first part is that I have started writing again. The plan is this: one thousand words per day, minimum, outside of weblogs and personal journals. The trick here is that the subject matter has to be different. No blithering on for one thousand words about the random crap with which I filled my day. No talking about websites or games or other random crap I found on the internet. This is supposed to be more exploratory stuff — fiction, non-fiction, whatever. Exploration into realms about which I do not normally write. Delving deep into memory and self to carve out pieces and put those on paper. It’s actually a lot less cliche than it sounds.

I’ve been on this new regimen for three days now. The first day I managed to get twenty-one hundred words out before I faltered and fell silent. Day two was seventeen-hundred words. Day three (just now) was another seventeen-hundred. I’m not allowed to cheat, either. If I do two thousand words on one day, it doesn’t mean I get out of the one thousand words the next. Minimum one thousand words, every day. Maximum: unlimited. No carryovers. No touchbacks. Tag.

It has been interesting so far, in that I’ve already found myself thinking about what I could write about at various points throughout the day. I could write about my childhood heros, perhaps, or my recently acquired love of cooking. Maybe I could put out a thousand words about Zen and what it means to me, or at least how I interpret it (which, for what it’s worth, is probably quite unlike what any real Zen student would tell you). How about how I learned to love reading and language? Maybe a piece about my utter disdain for current advertising and marketing and how they’re missing the boat by trying to lie to us incessantly, bombarding us with blipverts that we simply Do Not Believe (seriously, guys, your audience is smarter than you think). I could easily churn out one thousand words about joining a (women-only) gym and starting a new workout regimen (don’t let anyone tell you for even a second that women are less competitive than men). A thousand words about the death and secret rebirth of television as a medium for storytelling. A thousand words about my first trip to the local library (which I haven’t yet done). When I think of it, I jot these ideas down for later retrieval, but haven’t needed to use them yet.

When I actually sit down to write, of course, all bets are off. As yet, there has been no pre-planning. Tonight’s Daily (I’m calling them Dailies) started off with a somewhat vociferous rant against Margaret Atwood which churned itself into a thousand words about Canadian Culture. Yesterday was about cooking, food, dinner parties, and some reflections thereupon. The day before was (quick pause while I go check) about embracing change, later turning into a bit about the strange clash between horror and beauty that we all endure every single day. None of these topics were preselected — they just happened to be what poured out of my brain and into the keyboard while I had the word processor open to a blank page.

Naturally, the vast majority of what I’ve written is utter trash. Breathless at times, totally disorganized, wholly unrevised. Just raw. But that’s ok. For now, that’s all I want — I just want to get into the habit of producing a certain amount of raw content on a daily basis. Writing, you see, has two phases. Generating raw content is, by necessity, the first. The second, which can only happen once the raw content is available, is revising. Unlike sculptors, writers don’t start with a block of material and just spend their time taking away the parts that don’t belong. We need to create the block first, and only then can we start chipping away at the edges. Right now, I just need to produce giant chunks of rough marble.

The second part of my new writerly regimen is this, my weblog. In addition to the one thousand word not-for-other-people minimum, I intend to spend ten to fifteen minutes churning out an entry for my weblog (not including revision and additions). This has two purposes. First, it will mean my weblog gets updated daily, which I’m hoping will draw in more readers. Behind this interminably timid exterior, I really do crave an audience. Second, it will get me used to the idea of actually writing for an audience every day. The one thousand word minimum is all well and good, but if I don’t get used to the idea of having other people actually read my writing, I’ll eventually end up cheating by typing the word “house” a thousand or more times, until the word itself becomes utterly nonsensical and loses all meaning. So, yeah. The weblog entries are intended to keep me at least partially anchored in reality. Writers write to be read. Anything else is just intellectual wanking.

The third and final part of my new regimen involves reading. I used to read a lot. Books upon books every week. I had no TV, I wasn’t caught up in the whole gaming craze, I wasn’t yet jacked into the Matrix (read: Internet). I had a lot of hours to fill, and I gleefully filled them with books. In bulk. When I lived in Montreal I would spend $300-$500 every paycheque on books, often going downtown daily just to browse the bookshops.

Then I stopped reading. Not entirely of course, but from a diet of three or four books per week, I ended up down to about one per month, usually read in ten page increments right before bed. That’s no damned good. I love reading, and so I’m going to make time for it again. I don’t have a minimum daily allotment, but I’d like to be able to spend a couple of hours every day, on average, just sitting on my butt with a book.

And with that, I think I shall.

(43 mins, including revision. 1056 words. So much for 10-15 mins.)

I’ve also started going to a fitness centre. So far, so good. Of course, I’m two whole days into this, so “so far” isn’t really that far at all. The nice parts are: a) the place is really, really close to where I live, and b) it never takes more than half an hour to do a full workout. I bit the bullet and signed up for three months. Wish me luck.

Devmo is going well, with lots of stuff going on lately. We’ve made some significant progress towards moving to beta, and it’s all very fun and exciting. Watch this space for beta announcements in the near future. Woo!

In other news, it turns out that Firefoxes are really damned cute.

That’s about it. My friends zab and blizzard and shona are in town for the Ottawa Linux Symposium this week, which is always much fun. Busy busy.

Boolean and I just finished watching The Elephant Man, starring John Hurt and directed by David Lynch. This is an utterly phenomenal movie, telling (part of) the story of Joseph Merrick. It’s tragic and heartbreaking, while also somewhat uplifting. I won’t bother with any more trite cliches, I’ll just strongly recommend you rent it sometime soon.

Food

Last night, somewhat on a whim, I did a garlic-rosemary sirloin tip roast with potatoes, onions, and asparagus, accompanied by a nice bottle of wine from Portugal (Quinta D Encontro ‘Bairrada Superior’ 2001, $19.95 @ LCBO). Sirloin Tip roasts are roughly half the price of Prime Rib, which is a bonus, and I think Sirloin Tip actually makes for better sandwiches. Tonight’s dinner was leftovers, transformed into total yumminess as Hot Roast Beef Sandwiches with Cordon Bleu Beef Gravy, extremely fresh thick-sliced white bread from the local bakery, and fresh, very lightly steamed, peas. So, a $22 hunk of meat from the local grocery fed 4 people for a nice proper meal, and had enough leftovers for 3 more sandwiches (I’m having the last for lunch tomorrow).

Games

A bunch of us have been playing a strange little web-based space game called Ogame lately. It’s interesting, fun, not very time consuming (unless you’re phik), and a strangely interesting diversion every so often. It’s not for the weak of heart, however, as there’s basically no documentation. Still, if you like space games (or even just resource management/building games with an exploration/piracy twist), you might get a kick out of it.

Books

Tried reading Kurt Vonnegut’s Timequake. Didn’t make it very far. It…I dunno. Maybe I didn’t give it enough time, but after an hour’s reading, it still felt very much like he was just rambling aimlessly. Felt much more like a drunken weblog than a novel, I’m sad to say. Abandoned it.

Started reading Oblivion, a recent book of short stories by David Foster Wallace. I’m only about halfway through the first, but I’m enjoying the hell out of it. It’s a bit of a jarring leap from Roald Dahl to this, I find, if only because Dahl’s stories are actually short, while Wallace’s first in this volume is 64 pages long or so.

Work

For those of you who don’t know, I work for the Mozilla Foundation, managing the Devmo project. It’s coming along nicely, but we’re always interested in having more people come on board to help out. If you’re interested in Web or XUL development, drop by the Devmo Wiki and take a look around. The place is still a bit rough around the edges as we’re still officially in “alpha” stage (which, here, really means we’re still building stuff), but we’re hoping to shape things up for a beta in the near future. Comments, suggestions, editorial help, and content are always welcome.