Writing

I ran across a terrific blog post by Thomas Borowski discussing his TextExpander snippet for Pelican blog posts. I have my own snippet for such purposes, but love his solution for Slug creation. TextExpander is one of those small pieces of software I use every single day and can’t imaging doing without. The premise is simple, a short bit of text expands and turns into a large amount of text. For example, I use dates a lot in my day job, so I have several simple snippets that dump dates in the right format. Number one on the list is ,ds which expands into 2014-03-22. ...

Yes, I’ve mentioned it before, I love my Prius. It’s a great car and I’m not ashamed to say it. I love the cool technology and the pleasant ride, and I love the great mileage. It is a terrific car. But, I do love, lust after, and dream of the Porsche 911. Yes, it’s Porsche, like Portia. What a lovely car. So I had to park next to this lovely machine this morning while I was getting my coffee. Who knows, maybe a little of the 911 magic will rub off on my lowly Prius. ...

It has been a while since I’ve posted anything. Some fun stuff going on, so here are some updates. I finished NaNoWriMo 2013 as a winner! What a fun challenge. Everyone should give it a try. If you have ever thought of writing a novel, start thinking about it now for the 2014 NaNoWriMo. Start roughing out an outline. My NaNoWriMo masterpiece turned out pretty cool. I am now going back through and documenting all of the gaps in the story and documenting the timeline. After NaNoWriMo, I picked up the Aeon Timeline tool using the generous discount offer. It’s a pretty cool tool and hooks into Scrivener. ...

Catbird is an actual bird! “The catbird seat” is an idiomatic phrase used to describe an enviable position, often in terms of having the upper hand or greater advantage in all types of dealings among parties. According to Douglas Harper’s Online Etymological Dictionary, the phrase refers to the Gray Catbird and was used in the 19th century in the American South. Source ...

Below is a paper I wrote for a college lit class. It was a fun research project. Enjoy – Bill Dragons appear in our oldest mythology and folklore. Dragons have been a source of terror and mystery, throughout history. They populate early mythology, medieval literature, the Renaissance, and modern fiction. The dragons of today share many characteristics of the dragons from our earliest folklore and myths. No longer the feared hero’s antagonist, or the confidants of emperors, today dragons live on in our fiction. ...

I make no claim to understand people. In fact, I’m often confused by peoples motivations or responses. For a long time, I was convinced that my lack of understanding was a result of my own limitations. I believed I was either naive about the situation, or I had put up too many barriers between myself and others to ‘grok’ their meaning. We all have so much in common, so why is basic communication so difficult? We are all born, we all die, we all suffer, and we all experience occasional joy. ...

Packing, boxes, tape, more boxes more tape…. That’s my life for the next few weeks. I’m getting ready to move. Finally facing reality and ditching the too-big house and moving into an apartment in the part of town where stuff actually happens. And I am going to use this opportunity to shed much of the stuff I’ve been hauling around for the past thirty years. We’ll see how that goes. ...

People are funny. Most folks require a certain comfort level to ask certain questions. But coming out on your blog does encourage those close acquaintances or friends to ask questions. That’s cool. So here are the most common couple of questions. By the way, I’ve noticed including certain words in a blog title, such as big, ass, gay, and party generates an interesting array of visitors to the site. I’m not sure what they are hoping to find :-) but I hope they are not too disappointed. ...

John Scalzi ruffled some feathers again on his blog when he used a gaming metaphor to try and explain to the Straight White Male players in life that they are on the lowest/easiest setting. It’s an interesting read and plenty to think about. Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is – Whatever: You can lose playing on the lowest difficulty setting. The lowest difficulty setting is still the easiest setting to win on. The player who plays on the ‘Gay Minority Female’ setting? Hardcore. ...

I had a rough day yesterday. I let myself go to a dark place and the resulting big ass pity party wasn’t pretty. The trigger is always something trivial or on the surface silly. In this case, a distant semi-relative posted about their engagement on that awful so-called social media site, Facebook. I threw in my congrats because that’s what you do. Of course the little green jealousy monster started whispering in my ear. Everything is so perfect for them…health, youth, love of family and friends…why them? ...