Miscellany

[chipotle]

NaNoWriMo

My experiment-for-me isn’t going terribly well, but that’s not something I’m too upset about—when it comes down to it, that’s the point of an experiment, right? In retrospect, I wish I’d picked the other unwritten experimental novel I’d thought of, although of course there’s no guarantee it’d have gone better. I’ve let my current project lapse but will go back to it—I’ll fail, rather than quit.

Part of me’s tempted to try to get going on the other project and see if I can make a mad dash, but I don’t think it’s a good idea. I’ve reminded myself that I really can write 1000–2000 words a day even on weeknights, although I’ve also reminded myself that I do better trying that if I go off to a café to do it.

While I know NaNoWriMo isn’t competitive (in theory), I’ve been astounded watching people on my friends list dramatically outpace the expected rate. We’re talking people averaging 3000–4000 words a day. Zoinks. During my most prolific writing time, back around my college days, I managed that on my best days, if I’m remembering right, but only by virtue of a lot more free time: a few hours of classes each week, or part-time jobs.

Also: my muse is a nerd

Yep. I’m back on thinking about Ruby on Rails projects, which is not entirely tilton’s fault but I may blame him partially anyway. I want to do a trouble ticket system for the Excursion Society—

—and, oh, yeah, that’s something else I’m getting back to. I had something of an emotional stall on it, but I’ve decided that yeah, I really do think it’s a worthwhile idea, thanks very much, so I’m beating myself into moving forward on building its initial area. Then I can work on getting other people over to start building the real adventuring areas. (The central area I’m working on, “Cracked Conch Cay,” is designed to be more of a social area/nexus, and if the MUCK is really successful, it may well be completely superceded.)

But anyway, I’m trying to get my head wrapped around a simple unrelated project first, just for my own amusement—a catalog of reviews for Keurig K-cup coffees. I have the database set up… and as of yet, nothing else. I’ll see if I get anywhere, and then I’ll see if I can figure out how to deploy the damn thing, which is the one big question mark with Rails applications. (I have lighttpd and FastCGI set up on Parmesan, my G5, but that doesn’t really do much good for me.)

AIM versus GoogleTalk

Okay, I’m not really getting too down on AIM, but AOL’s stunt with the automatically-added AIMbots earlier this week irritated me. And, you know, both the computer IM clients that I regularly use support Jabber, and that’s what GoogleTalk is based on. So, I’m going to be trying to be logged into GoogleTalk a bit more often than I have been (which is, well, never). Unfortunately, the Sidekick only does AIM and Yahoo! Messenger, so I’m stuck with those two. (Does anyone I know actually use Yahoo! Messenger? I’ve gotten the impression that AIM is the market leader here in the US, but MSN Messenger is more popular in Europe.)

So, for the ones and ones of you who might use it: my GoogleTalk name is in my LiveJournal profile now.

Comments

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

Actually, I blame Microsoft more than Apple for the "users are idiots" approach to UIs. Apple's goal is always to be more like the "For Dummies" books, which don't actually treat users like dummies but just assume that you're probably starting from zero knowledge. The more comfortable you get with a good Mac-like interface the more you discover it can get out of your way. (Not all Mac applications do this well, including a few of Apple's own programs, but it seems to be what the intent is, at least.)

Microsoft, though, gave us "configuration wizards," the Microsoft Office Assistant, and the "inductive user interface" concept that channels users down one path. (Microsoft Money was the first IUI use, and it wasn't too bad, but the default XP start menu that takes up half the screen and gives you half the functionality is IUI-style.) And they're the people who think that by default the OS should decide what programs and even what menu commands you're not using and *hide* them from you so as not to make you feel too intimidated.

...or to sum it up in a sentence: Apple's UI occasionally makes me want to slap it for being too consciously pretty, but Microsoft's UI is more likely to make me want to beat it with a stick for treating me like an idiot. :)

I haven't looked at Trillian in years, but you might want to keep an eye the Windows GAIM port. While GAIM in general used to suck, it keeps plodding along and getting better with each plod. (Their big outstanding problem, with file transfers, looks like it's going to be fixed in GAIM 2.0.)

[mordrul.livejournal.com]

That was the other major problem I had with Trillian. You could not transfer files from AIM to Trillian, nor vice versa. And that was really a deal-breaker right there.

I will admit Windblows has its share (okay, way the hell more than its share) of problems and examples of explicit stupidity in its UI. But I still, personally, find it preferable to what I've seen on the Mac, and more importantly Trillian's interface. I would have put up with it though, had they not decided to integrate Wikipedia links into the program. So when a friend says something fully half of all the words were underlines with useless trash that would spawn a tooltip Wikipedia entry. And I could not find a way to turn it off no matter how thoroughly I combed the options settings and the help file (which generally speaking is rarely if ever actually helpful). So if Gaim actually becomes useful with 2.0 then I might give it a serious consideration.