NaNoWriMo

Once a year, a few thousand people, inspired by something they read on the Internet, get together and go insane for an entire month. No, it's not Burning Man, although it does get about as surreal by the end.

It's NaNoWriMo -- and if you are not in the know, that stands for National Novel Writing Month. The idea is that you sign up at nanowrimo.org, then spend the month of November writing a 50,000-word novel or 50,000 words of a novel, depending on whether you're leaning toward the letter or spirit of the event.

In case you skipped your math classes, that's almost 1,700 words a day, every day, for 30 days. You'd have to be crazy to try, even if you got some big prize for completion, which you don't. Pretty much all you get is the knowledge of a job well done (never mind the 50,000 words done on a novel), so, yes, you are crazy to do it.

Hmm.

Hmmmm...

T-minus 10 days and counting.

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No, I haven't decided yet.

The description of the upcoming episode of CSI Miami (Monday, November 21), 'Urban Hellraisers' --

'When a group of criminals play out a violent video game in real-life, the CSIs must stop them before they strike again.'

I don't know what's worse, 'forensic scientists' running around shooting at criminals or yet another prime-time sensationalistic attack on video gaming. Now, I know we can't expect reasoned dialogue about the important issues from television, but is it too much to ask for some semblance of responsibility?

Frankly, I would be more worried about this ludicrous behavior, but given the decline in television viewership in general and the networks in particular, and corresponding rise in both Internet usage and video gaming, this sort of propaganda seems more and more like the death rattle of a bloated corpse.

I find it funny that when refs call a Delay of Game penalty, the interruption causes far longer of a delay than if they had let the play continue to begin with.

Unfortunately, due to various life events (see livestrong, among other things) this past month, I'm afraid I have to withdraw from this year's NaNoWriMo event. It bums me out more than I can say, but it is less than the increasingly worse feelings about participating and not being able to write like I need to. It's also a relief.

This does not mean however that I am giving up on the idea. I figure I'll declare a RoNoWriMo (Roberto Novel Writing Month) after New Year's -- in fact, January seems like it might be perfect. I'll check back in.

Today is Dia de los Muertos, a traditional Mexican holiday that honors ancestors and family members that have passed on. This is the first day of winter in the traditional Irish calendar.

It also marks a week since my stepfather passed away. (See livestrong.)

I miss him, but I am so glad he is no longer in pain. This is a day to honor the dead, and I will honor him in my heart today.

This has been a very hard week. I managed to get sick for the first time in months, thanks to the stress and poor sleeping. But it is a new day, a new month, a new season.

It is also the first day of NaNoWriMo and I still haven't decided whether I have the wherewithal to participate now.

Jack was a great reader, who dearly loved the written word. I don't think he would want me to set the writing aside. And I know that I would regret not participating after the great success of last year.

More later.

vim tip of the day. In your .vimrc file, add a line that says:

set modeline

This allows you to set options on a file-by-file basis, using a special indicator on the first line. For example, in my ~/todo file, I might like to leave off line numbers, which I have set to come on by default in .vimrc. I'd use this for the first line of the file:

// vim: nonumber:

The spaces and punctuation are important. Basically what you have available is any command that you normally use :set to turn on or off -- in the above case, :set nonumber would be the command, with :set number turning it back on. Other possibilities include wrap or nowrap to turn linewrap on and off, ruler or noruler to turn on or off the cursor indicator at the bottom of the window, background=dark or background=light to change the automatic coloring.

Issue multiple commands by inserting a colon or whitespace in between, such as:

// vim: nonumber wrap noruler background=light:

Enter :help modeline for more info.

I'm not normally one to dig Flash-based websites, but this one is just amazingly gorgeous: Zephyr Syndicate

It has a Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow feel to it, which is all right by me.

Congratulations! Tom and Tiffany!!!! That is just so cool! :)

Headline of the day: Two Vikings arrested after gas station scuffle. The little mental movie that produces is just precious. :)

New the past couple of days:

• b.la: Tempting fruit
• b.la: Ghost Ships of Los Angeles
• b.la: When worlds collide
• b.la: LA Peace March Photos
• b.la: AIDS Project LA to help out Gulf Coast AIDS organizations

NaNoWriMo signups are only five days away. :) Oddly enough, between the time I first posted about this and the next time I checked, their site went down. Check back in a few days.

I participated for the first time in 2004 and did complete 50,000+ words on a larger work, which was a real breakthrough at the time -- the novel I worked on had been sitting around in various states of disrepair for over 10 years. So NaNoWriMo functioned as some extra bit of motivation for me, to put it mildly -- a context that allowed me to get the work done.

September 2005 has arrived, and I realize that it won't be that long until the next NaNoWriMo event. If I participate again in 2005, I'll need to get a few things accomplished by October, like a basic outline of what I'll be working on, and my writing tools figured out -- what text editors I'll want to try this time around. Since my druthers nowadays is for plaintext and CLI utilities, I'll likely be considering those options rather than a full-blown word processor.

For me, I wound up keeping a journal in MacJournal simultaneous with the writing, so a journaling program is not out of the question for one or both parts, as long as I'm able to get nonproprietary plaintext out of it easily, would be an interesting way to go. Journler would be my current choice for that.

I've written up a brief overview of the programs I used last year for an O'Reilly weblogs post, which you can view at It was a dark and stormy night...

Don't know what made me think of her, but Linda Hamilton popped into my head earlier this evening -- specifically as Sarah Connor in T2. The first movie was definitely cool, and I dug the first iteration of her character there (instant crush for a 15-year-old in 1984, that's for sure), but it was in T2 in 1991 (man, 14 years ago now) that she really ingrained herself in my head as one of those Strong Women archetypes. Nowadays we think nothing of seeing buff women -- still looking feminine but fit as hell at the same time. At the time, though, it was a hell of a revelation. She became kind of a poster child/icon for women and fitness freaks, a role which, I gather from some reading I did this evening, she didn't really want. She also dealt with manic-depression most of her life until finally going on meds.

The original context of my doing some Googling on her was for the workouts she was doing to prepare for T2 -- crazy hours-long workouts, six days a week, with a lot of cardio and a special diet to drop pounds (she had just had a child not that long before, too), not to mention military/weapons training. It was worthwhile as far as the movie goes.

On the lhow.com site, where I spent the most time reading, I found an article that had some basic information on workouts to develop the upper body, variations on what she did during her pre-T2 training.

Among the three workouts, the first was much too mild for my needs, the third was too over the top right now, but the second would fit right in to my current three-days-a-week gym activities. And the exercises seem adaptable to the machines and stand-alones I'd want to use down there. I'm keen to begin next week on the true torso work. More than anything, the article was helpful in winnowing down the overload of information I've got in my head.

I've spent some time over the past couple of days paring down some of my computer interactions, specifically with regard to email and news aggregation feeds, as well as giving both longer delays between checks. The regular distraction had to be brought under control, not to mention the constant less-than-useful infodump. Bah, who needs it?

In a way I'm clearing mental space, I think for the next phase of the year: in exercise, in writing, family life, and new work projects. This will also hopefully lessen my automatically reaching for the laptop to "check the news" (too easily done with wireless at home) rather than a book. Or for writing on the laptop, for that matter.

After 10 years on the Internet, I guess you could say the novelty has worn off.

More to the point, I don't want to substitute one screen for another; having pared down television watching drastically, I don't want to simply take up that time with THE COMPUTER.

Need more time? Find the hours. It's really easy.

Now, having said that, I had intended to do some novel work tonight, but got that workout research done instead -- which is perfectly fine. The novel's planning push may be waiting until the weekend, or at least until tomorrow... er, today. :) Time to hit the sack. Probably past time. At least I've gotten some things back on track after the silly day.

All right, really time for bed. More later.

For some reason, despite getting quite a bit done this relatively uneventful week, it's been hard to maintain a good mood all week long. Not really sure what it's about. One hypothesis is lower calories due to more exercise. I felt pretty great after the gym, so I'm hoping tonight is the same.

At the same time, I've felt quite good about getting on a gym schedule, new thinking on the book, work planning, and other things.

Most mornings this week my AM routine has been interrupted or impaired in some way, usually by stuff going on in the house. I've come to really enjoy my quiet mornings, and perhaps rely on them to some degree to set the tone for the day. Not sure what the solution is.

Interestingly, on that workout list, there aren't any specifically ab-oriented exercises. I guess that's where the gentle back exercises mentioned on the torso page would come in eventually.

Later today I'm going to try correlating that list with what will be available at the gym, machine-wise.

I also need to figure out some notebook solution for taking to the gym and keeping track of things in -- something easily accessible that will stand up to some sweat and abuse. I was thinking possible a smaller Moleskine, but I'm still not sure. Mostly I'll need this for keeping track of the weights and reps. Need to figure this out over the weekend for the Monday workout.

Leaving pretty soon to walk the pooch. A little later, it's off to the gym.

Hans and Denyse are heading out tonight, so I'll have the house to myself if they follow through on the plan.

My wiki obsession is returning, but more the web-based variety than VoodooPad. Must resist. Body strong, mind weak. ;)

I'm down to 46 feeds in NetNewsWire and want to try to keep it under 50. This is very cool. I've also changed it to 1-hour checks. Changed email over to every 30 minutes, then hitting it manually if I'm in the middle of a "conversation" with someone. Basically just trying to minimize the distractions. Plus it gets to be addictively time-consuming "checking the news."

Gym kicked my butt. :)

Downloaded and installed Wikka Wakka Wiki just now. PHP/MySQL-based wiki software. wiki.metroblogging.com uses it, which is where I heard about it. Severely easy install. So far so good. Not sure exactly why I felt the need, but I do that occasionally -- did PHPwiki and a few others last year.

Anyhow, I'm playing with a local wiki, hoping that will satiate my wiki obsession for the time being.

Became aware tonight of certain bones being more prominent "all of a sudden" -- been taking place slowly as the fat goes away, but the awareness was sudden. Cheekbones are where it started, fingers, knees. Kinda cool. :)

I was trying to remember the process just prior to beginning NaNoWriMo last year. I've got the journal either on the hard drive here or on disk or both -- I can go back and check it out. I remember first off trying to decide whether to participate or not. :) Between then and beginning writing is a bit fuzzy. I feel some of that need to jump off the diving board into the pool without too much looking. Chomping at the bit.

Today is Pharaoh's 10-month birthday. :)