All the Billion Other Moments

Writing Updates: February 2008

Another month gone by all ready? Yikes!

I made it all the way through the month without missing a day of writing, which if you remember my plan from last month means I didn’t have any weeks were I wrote more than five thousand words. I did write 14,732 words this month though, which is a few hundred more than last month.

Links of Interest (January 31st 2008 through February 19th 2008)

Crime podcast novel gets HUGE boost in advertising: Video of a digital billboard advertising for Seth Harwood’s “Jack Wakes Up”

Tags: [tag]podiobooks[/tag], [tag]podcast[/tag], [tag]audiobooks[/tag], [tag]Seth Harwood[/tag], [tag]Jack Palms[/tag], [tag]Jack Wakes Up[/tag], [tag]Video[/tag],
The parseInt gotcha: I’m pretty sure once you’ve been hit by this parseInt() behavior in javascript you never forget it, but if you haven’t you should learn about it now before you do.

Tags: [tag]Javascript[/tag], [tag]parseInt[/tag],
CSS Tools: Reset CSS: Eric Meyer’s Reset style-sheet (now in its permanent home, with versions numbers). Including this should reduce browser inconsistencies, and help you not to rely on undefined default behaviors.

Tags: [tag]css[/tag], [tag]tools[/tag], [tag]reset[/tag], [tag]development[/tag], [tag]Eric Meyer[/tag], [tag]webdesign[/tag],
CSS Tools: Diagnostic CSS: Eric Meyer’s diagnostic.css (now in its permanent home). Including this stylesheet will highlight elements that are incomplete and may be degrading the user experience.

Tags: [tag]css[/tag], [tag]testing[/tag], [tag]tools[/tag], [tag]webdesign[/tag], [tag]diagnostics[/tag], [tag]Eric Meyer[/tag],
Jason Bateman Confirms “Arrested Development” Movie Talks: I cannot begin to express how much I hope this comes to pass.

Tags: [tag]Arrested Development[/tag], [tag]tv[/tag], [tag]movie[/tag],
Amazon acquires Audible for $300 million: This caught be by surprise. Hopefully it will remain mostly unchanged, although adding stereo support to all the stereo BBC programs they carry would be nice.

Tags: [tag]Amazon[/tag], [tag]audiobooks[/tag], [tag]Audible.com[/tag],

Just a Reminder: Audiobooks = Reading

This comes up now and again, so I’m just going to take the time to remind everyone that if I’ve listened to an unabridged audiobook of something, I’ve read it. You may wish to exclude me in some way from up upon your high horse, but you can’t take away from me the fact that I have read the book (more here).

Writing Updates: January 2008

I’m going to strive to be a bit more transparent about my writing this year. It’s something I have a hard time with, which might date back years to when I learned answering “What do you want to be when you grow up?” with “Be a computer programmer” seemed to be a more acceptable answer to most people than “Be a writer”. So to start I’m going to talk about the past month, and provide a bit of an info dump into what I think the future holds.

Links of Interest (January 28th 2008 through January 30th 2008)

jQuery Validation plugin overview: Examples of how to use the jQuery Validation plugin 1.2 to provide unobtrusive Javascript validation to forms.
Tags: [tag]Javascript[/tag], [tag]jQuery[/tag], [tag]validation[/tag], [tag]development[/tag], [tag]unobtrusive javascript[/tag],
The Dissing of SF: Ever have someone ask you for a favor and simultaneously insult your career? Science Fiction author Robert J. Sawyer had this happen twice in one hour, and he posted his responses.
Tags: [tag]Robert J. Sawyer[/tag], [tag]science fiction[/tag],
JavaScript Pretty Date: John Resig has released a prettyDate Javascript library that can take strings like “2008-01-28T20:24:17Z” and turn them into “2 hours ago”. It works standalone or as a jQuery plugin.
Tags: [tag]John Resig[/tag], [tag]jQuery[/tag], [tag]Javascript[/tag], [tag]date[/tag], [tag]formatting[/tag],
JavaScript Memory Leak Detector: Paolo Severini of Microsoft’s Global Product Development team has released a utility to help find Javascript memory leaks in IE. It can be set to detect things that would leak in IE6, things that would leak in IE7, or actual leaks.
Tags: [tag]Paolo Severini[/tag], [tag]debugging[/tag], [tag]Javascript[/tag], [tag]IE7[/tag], [tag]webdesign[/tag], [tag]memory leak[/tag], [tag]browser[/tag],
Getting HTML 5 styles in IE 7+: Possibly the most interesting thing to come out of the X-UA-Compatible discussions was this method for allowing IE7+ to apply styles to elements it doesn’t support.
Tags: [tag]css[/tag], [tag]IE7[/tag], [tag]Javascript[/tag], [tag]html5[/tag],
Write to Done: A friend (thanks Kate) recommended this spin off of zenhabits.net which is billed as “Unmissable articles on writing. Twice weekly.” So far it’s living up to it’s promise.
Tags: [tag]articles[/tag], [tag]writing[/tag], [tag]productivity[/tag], [tag]howto[/tag],
MD044 – Stan Lee Interview: Veronica Belmont interviews Stan Lee on Mahalo Daily. I never get tired of seeing interviews with Stan Lee. Maybe it’s his voice.
Tags: [tag]interview[/tag], [tag]Stan Lee[/tag], [tag]Veronica Belmont[/tag], [tag]video[/tag],

Links of Interest (January 9th 2008 through January 25th 2008)

Playing for Keeps Characters – Set 1: Three of the character cards Natalie Metzger produced for Mur Lafferty’s “Playing for Keeps”. Shown side by side with the black and wite ink versions.
Tags: [tag]artwork[/tag], [tag]Natalie Metzger[/tag], [tag]Mur Lafferty[/tag], [tag]Playing for Keeps[/tag],
Fresh Pics of Mulder & Scully: Slice of Sci Fi has three photos of Mulder & Scully from the new X-Files movie. There nothing super special, but seeing these I’m a lot more excited about seeing this when it comes out.
Tags: [tag]X-Files[/tag], [tag]David Duchovny[/tag], [tag]Gillian Anderson[/tag], [tag]movie[/tag],
Scott Brick Presents: One of my all time favorite audiobook narrators, Scott Brick, has launched a blog. If you’ve never heard one of his productions I recommend you seek one out and give it a listen.
Tags: [tag]audiobooks[/tag], [tag]Scott Brick[/tag],
New PDF reading software for Sony Reader: Reflowing and resizing will help cope with small-screen issues: Apparently Sony Reader is going to have a way to reflow and resize PDFs for reading. My opinion is the PDF is the single worst e-book distribution method, but this would at least make them usable. Hopefully other devices follow suit.
Tags: [tag]PDF[/tag], [tag]Sony Reader[/tag], [tag]e-books[/tag],

Best viewed in X-UA-Compatible

Note: This post is quite a bit more technical than what I usually talk about.

Yesterday saw the release of A List Apart #251 which is causing quite a bit of discussion. It focuses on a proposal put forth my Microsoft and some members of the Web Standards Project for a new meta tag than will control the rendering mode of IE8.

The first article (Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8) covers the proposal, what it means and why it’s needed. The second (From Switches to Targets: A Standardista’s Journey) documents Eric Meyer’s shift in perspective from being opposed to, well, not opposed.

My initial thought is that it’s a horrible idea. After reading more about it, and seeing the arguments in favor I think it’s a bad idea.

ProgPress Updated

Partly due to the strangeness that drove me to change hosting providers I found out that the previous version of ProgPress had an issue running under php4. That should now be fixed in the latest version (0.8), now available on the ProgPress plugin page

Goals for the New(ish) Year

I’ve never been a big fan of New Year’s resolutions. I don’t even know if anyone has ever followed through on one (aside from “quit making New Year’s resolutions”). There’s nothing wrong with turning over a new leaf when you hang up your new calendar, but it’s not usually my thing. That said, a number of people I admire and respect have decided to set goals or declare their hopes for the upcoming year. I figured I might as well join in.

I’m a bit late to the party on this, but I’m glad, because these are slightly different than what I would have said January 1. In no particular order, here are my goals for 2008. I may revisit them and adjust them as things change throughout the year.

Take the family on more day trips, and maybe do some kid friendly hiking
Write (or do some quantifiable writing related activity) every day. I’m not sure this is reasonable, but so far I’ve managed to pull it off. Some days I only get in ten minutes, but if I wait until I have more I might never write again.
Finish the first draft of the novel I started in NaNoWriMo (hopefully by end of February)
Return to and restart revisions on Miracles (I’d like to have it to first readers by April)
Write and market some more short stories. I received an encouraging rejection in October, but stopped submitting to avoid being derailed during NaNoWriMo.
Redesign this site. I haven’t been happy with the look of this place in years.
Post substantial posts here more often (weekly would be nice)
Keep learning new things. This is a constant goal, and one that I usually keep up with, but it’s worth stating.

Did you make any goals for 2008? Feel free to share them here (or if you posted them elsewhere share a link).