May 2008 - All the Billion Other Moments

Links of Interest (May 9th 2008 through May 29th 2008)

IETester: IETester is a tool that runs the rendering and javascript engines from IE8b1, IE7, IE6, and IE5.5 in a single process so you can see how each one mangles your site in it’s own unique way (currently in beta).

Tags: [tag]IETester[/tag], [tag]Internet Explorer[/tag], [tag]webdesign[/tag],
POC : Implementing HTML 5 Video Element using JavaScript and Flash: A proof of concept allowing use of the ‘video’ tag from the HTML5 draft spec, and having it work, even though browsers don’t yet support it.

Tags: [tag]standards[/tag], [tag]HTML5[/tag], [tag]webdesign[/tag], [tag]hacks[/tag], [tag]javascript[/tag], [tag]flash[/tag], [tag]video[/tag],
Audible.com and Blackstone Audio Royalties: SFFAudio shares some information from Robert J. Sawyer on the royalties he receives from audiobooks.

Tags: [tag]Blackstone Audio[/tag], [tag]audible.com[/tag], [tag]audiobooks[/tag], [tag]Robert J. Sawyer[/tag], [tag]royalties[/tag],
Characteristic Confusion: While investigating line-height Eric Meyer used font-family: Webdings to display “Oy!” (Webdings doesn’t contain ‘O’, ‘y’, or ‘!’). Firefox 3 unexpectedly displayed “Oy!”, which, it seems, is technically correct, leaving him asking “which is less correc

Tags: [tag]CSS[/tag], [tag]font-family[/tag], [tag]line-height[/tag], [tag]Eric Meyer[/tag], [tag]unicode[/tag], [tag]webdesign[/tag],
Growl for Windows – alpha now available: Growl is one of the three apps that excited me enough to buy a Mac, and it’s one I really miss when I’m on my Windows box.

Tags: [tag]Growl[/tag], [tag]software[/tag], [tag]windows[/tag], [tag]notification[/tag],

Novel Snippet

I’m going to be leaving my latest novel draft to sit for a while, but a good number of people cheered me along so I thought I’d toss out a small snippet in case anyone is interested in reading it.

Be warned: It’s rough, this is not my greatest work, and possibly not even a good example ((I’m currently too close to this one to be in any way objective at this point.)). Also it shows at least one quirk of my early drafts that may be a deal breaker for some folks.. When I’m writing along and I come across a character ((Or a place, or race of strange creatures, or a new flavor of pie. Pretty much any noun.)) that I’ve yet to name, I just pick a word ((Usually a word that describes who they are, or what they’re doing in the first scene they appear)) and place it in brackets ([ ]). I do this because I’ve found stopping to decide on a name can kill my momentum deader than dead. Also, as I have developed rather strict language rules for this world I can’t just pull something out of thin air. So even though the second guard is a major character throughout the novel, so far I know him only as [Driver], because when he showed up, that’s what he was doing.

So, if after all that you still want to read it, I hope you enjoy it.

Well that’s done

WIP Novel

[progpress title=”First Draft” goal=”97778″ current=”97778″ previous=”86446″ label=”words”]

Just a quick post to note that yesterday I finally typed “THE END” on the first draft of this latest novel. I’ll post about it in more detail soon, but I wanted to thank all the folks who offered encouragement and support throughout the process. You know who you are. I’d list you all, but I’m sure I’d leave someone out ((and I’m already running late this morning)) (but if you can always list yourselves by leaving comments).

Writing Updates: April 2008

May already? I feel like I just posted one of these. Sorry for the lack of other content around here, but I’ve been pretty much spending any and all time I carved out to write on the novel. How did I do on the “write every day” front? Well, I missed two days in April: my eldest daughter’s birthday, and my wife’s birthday. I’m happy to excuse myself in those cases ((thereby avoiding the feeling I let myself down, which can derail things if I let it.)).

I cranked out 12,926 words, making April an improvement on last month. While I did miss two days I was more consistent in my output I’m pretty sure this comes down to having a daily goal of 550 words, which I didn’t always make, but it seemed to work better than “some words”. Read on for the breakdown