Yeah, so last week’s writing session? Not so much. Stuff happened, I got lazy, it didn’t happen. This week I made a point of sitting down and doing some development while Natalie was napping. I think I only spent about half an hour on it, but I got act 4 outlined. At this rate, my problem with NaNoWriMo is going to be that I’m ready to start too early…

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But before I get to that, the breaking news of my life that isn’t insane: It’s time to quit caffeine yet again. I’ve gotten hooked on it, again, in ways that are kind of creeping me out. So I’m going to stop. Again. I had a Pepsi this morning; that’s it. No more from here on out.

Now, on to the insane part: NaNoWriMo. Am I going to do it again this year? It would seem so. I think, actually, that I’m in a better place for it this year than with either of my previous attempts. I currently have Acts I-III of the “practice novel” outlined, and may get the whole outline completed by November. I also have managed to rearrange my schedule so that I usually have ~1 hour after Nene goes to sleep in which to do whatever I please. (There will be two date nights, which I refuse to break, plus three nights of an extended visit with friends, plus Thanksgiving, none of which I expect to get any writing done on. But that still leaves 24 days in November, plus a couple of 2-hour writing sessions.) I am therefore more prepared with planning and time than I have been in the past. I don’t know that I expect to “win” (i.e. finish the first draft of the novel and hit 50K words), but I do expect to at least get a good head start.

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[On banned books:] “Run to the bookstore and get that book. If the school board tells you you can’t read it, it’s probably what you need.” –Stephen King

It’s that time of year again. Banned Books Week begins on Saturday. Celebrate by going out and reading a book someone doesn’t want you to! More info here and here. (The ALA’s site appears to be a little flaky and maybe in the process of being revised; watch out for broken links.)

I’m sort-of cheating this year; I’m in the midst of a list of books that are commonly challenged anyway. Coincidentally, as soon as I finish Huxley’s Brave New World, I had planned on moving on to Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. It’s nice when things work out like that.

In other literary news, Eyebrows has pointed me toward a pretty neat site that I feel the need to share with all y’all. DailyLit delivers books in manageable installments (daily, weekdays, or M/W/F) to your inbox. Some books have fees associated with them, but there are also many (particularly those in the public domain) that are free. Eyebrows recommended it as a good way to catch up on some philosophy texts I’ve always meant to read; the idea is that breaking them up into smaller chunks will make it more possible for my brain to digest, and having a chunk in my inbox every morning will make it easy to keep up with it. For a trial run, I’m starting out with Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, which is only 35 installments. If that works out well, I’ve got a to-read list set up that should keep me busy for a year or so.

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The largest decoration in my cube is a poster. More specifically, it’s a poster of a map of the Internet, circa 2001. (I’ve even managed to narrow down the possibilities of where my office might be to four and marked them appropriately.) It’s nice geeky fun and all, but it’s been there for years and years now. I’m ready for a change.

I don’t know what to put up instead, though. I thought I’d just add a poster to my ThinkGeek wish list, but most of what they’ve got is Despair stuff. While appropriate in many ways, it’s not what I want to look at all day, every day. The charts of things like the universe and the solar system are fun, but… Meh. I’m not big on just plastering my favorite actor/musician/TV show/athlete/movie/book/visual artist/city/recreational activity/pet type/food group/lifesaver flavor of the moment on my cube wall, either. (OK. I might maybe consider an “art” poster. Maybe Van Gogh or Vermeer. Or Escher… I dunno.) I kind of want something geeky and fun, but I’m not sure what.

Then, too, some part of me is half-considering taking the money I’d spend on a poster, buying a pack of 4×6 photo paper and some push pins, and creating my own “poster” collage from images out of our photo library. Which would also have the benefit of being easily changed as new photos were taken. The major problem with that, of course, is the time and effort involved. (That doesn’t account for ink, but a 100-pk of paper is $15 at Target according to their web site, but I’d only use 20-30 sheets of that, and push pins should be cheap, so there’s room for ink expense in there too.) But… You know, I’m kind of liking that, the more I think about it. I could print off a couple of images at a time and add to the collage little by little… And I already have a few printed off and stuck up. Doing this would clear up some clutter elsewhere on my cube wall without my needing to discard the photos.

Hm. You know, this has possibilities. I think I might try it.

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It’s a really good thing we have digital cameras, because we’d be going broke trying to buy and develop enough film to cover all the pictures I’ve taken of Natalie just over these first 13.75 months. Nope, not proud of her at all. Three new ones in the public gallery:

Sunny Days (my current iPhone wallpaper)
Light (my current computer wallpaper at work)
Looking Out

There’s a private gallery “Playing Outside” with more for those with access, as well. I think (if I do say so myself) there are some really cute ones there; it was difficult for me to choose just a few to go public.

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Who needs hackers? Palin e-mail hack reveals obvious vulnerability

“This revelation raises the possibility that any public figure with an e-mail account on a public service provider such as Yahoo or Google (Gmail), might need to protect her account with something the general public cannot easily guess.”

OK, do I have to say this? Duh. You don’t set your password to “password” or your eldest child’s birthday or your dog’s name or your husband’s middle name. You don’t write your password down and tape it to your monitor. (You especially don’t write it on your monitor. True story.) And you don’t go on national TV and blab to the entire nation the answer to your security question. Or if you do, the instant your interview’s over, you go change the damned question. Better yet, do it during a commercial break before the interview is over.

Even better, don’t use Yahoo, or anything like it. Go grab your own private hosting, if you need something non-government. It doesn’t cost that much, it’s less of an obvious target, and you’ll probably have better control over the security. Plus, you could have a cool address like sarah@palin.com. Yes?

The part of me that’s been mildly security-indoctrinated is having a conniption fit right now, when you pair this with the allegations I’ve seen elsewhere that there was some official business in the e-mail account accessed. (These allegations were apparently brought forward “months ago” and I missed it. I think I need to go learn more now, although I’m almost afraid to.) Bad enough to conduct state business on a Yahoo address, which resides on unsecure servers accessible by unknown individuals and by virtue of being a large well-known public e-mail venue is a prime target for hacking in the first place. But if you’re going to do that, you know, at least don’t open the door for any relatively observant and curious individual to get into it without so much as having to hack in the first place.

I’m supposed to trust this woman with national security when she can’t follow basic information security procedure? I mean, I hadn’t thought about it that much before (other issues, you know), but I sure as hell have now.

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I do like Van Gogh, but he’d been hanging around here a little too long maybe. Time to change. Here’s the new theme. *does a quick twirl, like a little girl with a new dress* I’m lazy today; it’s minimally altered from the Craving4Green theme that comes free with my one-click install of WordPress. But why reinvent the wheel if you don’t have to?

It’s not perfect — damned if I can get that “Recently Heard” out of the links listing (maybe I’ll start using it again, I don’t know). Not even by deleting the link category; it’s somehow become my default, so WP won’t let me delete it. Also, I’m not too fond of the list bullets. But it’ll do for now.

Enjoy!

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Photographer Kevin Scanlon speaks to Mental Floss: “I think it’s great that some digital cameras are affordable enough for just about anybody to buy one. My 5-year-old niece has a big, pink digital camera. Great photography can come from anyone, anytime. Sometimes, it’s being at the right place at the right time. However, that doesn’t mean that everyone is a photographer, just because he or she has a digital camera.”

At which point it occurs to me that I should clarify something: I am not a photographer. Well, let me rephrase that. I suppose the act of taking a photograh makes me a photographer in a strictly literal, technical sense. But I am not A Photographer. I am an amateur. I dabble. I make no pretensions on that score. OK, I own a fancy digital SLR camera. That doesn’t make me a photographer any more than owning a fancy ergonomic keyboard makes me a writer.

For that matter, I don’t consider myself to be A Writer, either. You want a writer, go talk to Shad. I squeeze in a blog post here and there, I schedule two hours two out of every three weeks for fiction (and often actually get 1-1.5 hours in). She does it every day. Again: I am an amateur. I dabble. It’s a hobby — one I am increasingly serious about and actively trying to improve my performance in, but a hobby nonetheless. “Writer” is a descriptor for something I do in my spare time, not something I am, if that makes sense.

And the truth is, I have no real desire to be either A Writer or A Photographer. I’m a little self-conscious about sharing my work, actually, if you really want to know. I think if I ever actually had a novel published I’d be a nervous wreck, waiting and hoping for validation from people I’ve never even met in the form of sales and afraid of having made a fool of myself on a national stage.

So why do I do it? Why do I schedule time to work on these skills that are never going to be of any concrete use to me, never be used for anything at all? If I don’t want to be A Photographer or A Writer, why bother? Because I enjoy it. I like it when light and color and contrast and inspiration come together just right and a shot turns out well. I am thrilled when I find just the right turn of phrase to describe a face, the embroidery on a gown, an emotion, the feel of the air at a specific time of year. And I am happy because I did this, I made this nice thing. I do it, in other words, for myself. And that’s plenty for me.

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Sunday’s photo session didn’t go very well. I had planned to go to a state park and have a lovely time getting some exercise and some nice pictures. That was before the storm. By lunchtime, it was fairly obvious that the original plan was not going to work. At a loss, I thought, OK, I’ll take some pictures around the house. Challenge myself to make the everyday look interesting. Except then I wound up just making piles of things for still-lifes, which… OK, isn’t an invalid option, but wasn’t what I wanted to do.

In the end, I mostly took pictures of Tim baking (an activity relocated to Mom and Dad’s when our power went out). And Natalie. Of course. They were neither as many nor as good as I had hoped, but I guess not bad for a day when nothing seemed to be turning out quite the way it should. I guess. I’m disappointed, personally. But then Sunday was just that kind of day.

For some reason this link, no matter what I do, seems to always go to page 2 of the gallery. If you only see 3 photos, scroll down to the bottom and you can click back to page 1 to see the rest of them. (There are 15 total.)

14 September 2008: Baking Bread Etc.

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I have been very bitter about and rather resigned to the idea that my vote doesn’t really count in the Presidential election because Indiana’s just going to throw its Electoral College votes into the McCain/Palin pile anyway. Mucho thanks to Eyebrows for informing me that I might just be wrong about that.

Electoral-vote.com

The map is compiled from polls conducted by neutral polling companies. According to this, we’re only “Barely GOP” — McCain has only a 2% lead in Indiana. (The numbers for the past few Presidential elections are listed too, if you hover over the state; if you take a look there, and remember that my Presidential election experience begins in 2000 since I turned 18 in 1998, you may understand why I felt the GOP vote was inevitable. Especially after 2004.)

So. Indiana may still cast its votes for McCain. Looks like we’ve gone GOP for the past four elections, at least, even if sometimes by sort of a slim margin. But now I feel much more like my vote does count, like there is a chance. And like I should encourage all my Hoosier friends to be sure they’re registered and to take the time to vote this November.

If you’re not registered to vote (in Indiana or elsewhere!), click here for information on requirements and how to get registered. This is important, folks. Let’s do this.

(This has been your PSA for the year… Thanks to Lyric for the registration info link.)

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