Anti-social networking continued
As a child I hated this time of year. Family and friends had provided me with some material Christmas goodies, New Year’s meant school was about to start again, and my thank you cards remained unwritten. Not a very difficult choice for me as a young boy. I could read about elves and dwarves kicking evil orc ass, play Yar’s Revenge on my Atari, watch the end of year continuous marathon of black-and-white Twilight Zones, or take a couple of hours to write Thank You cards.
Me totally ungrateful? Not in thought, although in action…. My Thank You cards usually arrived around Valentines day on a good year.
Now today, I have so many options. Given that story, you’d think someone like me would like the simplicity of facebook and MySpace. Such an easy way to automate life, no? Exhibit A: the SuperPoke application. All I have to do is load the application into my facebook profile and scroll down to it.
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Click on the “Mass Poke!” link in the upper left and bring up the giant potential poking list.
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It’s so easy to be in the Christmas spirit, and since all of my friends really are my friends on social networking sites, I’ll simply click that glowing red “Select All” button and scroll down to the many different canned messages.
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SuperPoke you’re my hero! So many choices you offer me to truly communicate. You even offer me the option to thank all of my friends with the push of a button. Were I to be less coherent, nay even doing some uninhibited drunken surfing (oh no, I never do things like that), the greatest idea of the moment might be to “have a spot of tea” with my entire social circle. But no, this is Christmas, it’s the time of year to slam those Thank Yous out through my computer port and move on with my life.
I deleted SuperPoke and returned my facebook profile to it’s former naked plainness.
Something must have changed in my lifelong search for simplicity where everything could be magically accomplished by double-clicking on, “Yes, please send out my Thank You form letter.” Never able to get enough of what I don’t really want? Probably. Growing up and maturing and finding out what’s really important? EEEK! The M-word, but yeah, that’s closer to it.
I’m going back to card and letter writing, on that cardstock and paper stuff for some messages. Heck, any of you guys want a card or a letter, let me know. Why? Just because.
Tuesday Humor
I never know who to really credit these videos to. To whomever made this, you are awesome.
Plain Text vs. Rich Text Format
A couple of months ago I got hooked on the blog Becoming a Writer Seriously after the author and maintainer, Tom Colvin, made a comment here. I’m now a regular reader of his blog, and recommend it to anyone who spends even the slightest amount of time writing anything.
I read one of his earlier articles, In Praise of Rich Text Format – The Universal Format for Writers, and started thinking about how I archive my stories on my laptop. I didn’t do anything about it at the time, but his argument for lucid document format choosing stuck in my head.
Last month I received my first email from a friend with an attachment in the new, highly annoying, highly incompatible docx format from Microsoft Word. It didn’t take long to find some docx converters, but this further annoyance made me think once again about all the different document formats, free and proprietary, scattered across my computer. The receipt of this docx document prompted me to take action.
After some back of the napkin cost-benefit analysis, I decided to go with only two document formats for my writing. The majority of my writing is now done in Plain Text. Plain text forces me to concentrate on just the writing during the draft stages. It’s hard enough for me to avoid procrastination and just write, and one way I’ll procrastinate is spending hours formatting unfinished works, only to reformat them again the next week… sometimes even the next day. Plain text enforces a no frills writing environment, one procrastination problem solved. Plain text also works very will with Subversion, the revision control system I now use and love. This combination makes it very easy to save many drafts of my larger works, easily compare different versions of the work, recall older versions, and not litter my computer with multiple “draft” copies or bloated, versioned copies of Word or OpenOffice documents. And, of course, anyone on any computer can read plain text format.
A couple of my works require extensive formatting beyond just tabs and whitespace. These stories would lose their meaning without the bold, italics, and altered indentations. For these documents I now use Rich Text Format (RTF) for the reason Tom suggests in his article:
[T]he more active we become as writers, the more likely it is that we must trade our work with others, manipulate our text in other programs, like page layout programs, or post our articles on a blog. There is one format that can easily move our text, along with its formatting of type font, boldface and italics, to other writers and programs — and even between PC’s and Mac’s. Of course, that format is RTF, or Rich Text Format.
I believe, and hope, that (X)HTML will win out in the future as the universal document format, but right now that format is too geared for web based usage. Until that day I will stick to RTF and Plain Text.
Blog changes
This blog is about a year old. After the busy, successful year I’ve decided to make some changes. The first change is how my content on this blog is licensed.
As a person writing fiction novels, I see the use, even necessity, for a Copyright on those particular works.
But this blog has turned into my online voice and persona. It’s a medium for my ideas, a place for me to contribute to the greater social conversation available throughout the web. Treating this blog the way I treat my fiction occurs to me as inappropriate.
As of this moment, and barring the few exceptions noted in specific posts, my blog has been opened up under the Creative Commons license listed in my License page.
I believe that the majority of my content on my blog should be available for use by anyone who might find it useful, whether that be a single person or a large corporation.
Consider the change of license proactive, not reactive.