One of the benefits I see coming from disabling comments is the number of links you end up getting back to your site.

Almost a year ago I wrote about the fact that blogging was ready for disruption. (I still think it is.) And that the new “pro blog recipe” was a blog without comments.

Lately this topic seems to have risen its head again yet not in the same way as it has in the past. In fact, rather than there being a debate for or against a blog having comments it appears that most independent bloggers have resolved that a blog without comments is simply much more enjoyable and manageable while larger outfits still see the need to engage the community.

Matt Gemmell, who recently shut off comments on his personal blog, added a few reasons to the fray. Here is one of his reasons that I have also enjoyed since turning comments off on my personal blog.

I feel more willing to publish short pieces, and to write more frequently.

When I had comments on I wouldn’t publish anything that I thought may not start a conversation. Which ended up leading me in a direction I simply didn’t want to go in – I was starting conversations for the sake of starting conversations. That isn’t why I have my personal blog and I don’t want it to be. So, off went the comments. And it isn’t because I don’t want to hear the opinions of those that read my blog. It is because I don’t want to write simply for the gratification of receiving comments. It has been very liberating.

There is still a place for comments on blogs. Even personal blogs. Some blogs have very good reasons to have comments on them. In fact, even Jason Kottke turns on comments from time-to-time when they are needed. But there are better examples like Horace Dediu’s Asymco. He has made it plainly clear that he runs Asymco in order to work with his community on figuring out a problem. He wants feedback, questions, answers, rebuttals to his hypothesis and blog comments is his primary way of accomplishing that.

So while the debate rages on – and all debates are good when they furnish constructive conversation – unlike Gemmell I firmly believe it is a matter of choice by the publisher rather than a cut-and-dry answer. There are pros and cons to having comments on or off and, once weighed, the publisher can then make a decision on how he or she would like to run their own blog.

To begin, and for no reason whatsoever, we’ll start with Communism.

“Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production.”

Now you know.

When lunch break hit, I was hurting pretty badly. So I ended up sitting just outside the Swedish American Hall for a while and finally, while Om and I were speaking outside, Om said: “Go get some rest buddy.” Good advice.

That is Om in a nutshell. Easily one of the nicest and hardest working guys around.

His and Fred Wilson’s post made me try to figure out exactly when I began blogging. My best guess is somewhere in 1997. Unlike Om I haven’t been blogging every single day and I only made my living on blogging for a short period of time in these last 14 or so years. Someday I’ll have to write up my experiences though… it’d be fun.

Although I wish the app supported Markdown format (rather than just HTML) I’ll take it.

Just in time for our trip to Ireland too.

Update: A small, yet very welcomed update, is that the Posts tab is now the default tab rather than the Comments tab. This makes things so much quicker. Again, a very, very nice update to WordPress for iOS.

John Gruber’s Daring Fireball is a recipe that is working and the cooks are busy in the kitchen adding a pinch of this, a pinch of that and seeing what works for them.

So far none of these recipes have become better, in this blogger’s opinion, than its master recipe but several have certainly managed to create their own dish that works well enough to feed their own mouths.

What is the Daring Fireball recipe? It consists of the following:

• 1 multiple-times-per-day updated link log.
• 1 not-so-frequently updated blog with longer, well-written posts.
• 1 (or two) audio podcasts (to taste).
• 1 weekly RSS feed sponsorship.
• 1 well-curated image-based ad on each page view.

From outward appearances this recipe nets Daring Fireball a very decent sum – which is why the cooks are in the kitchen. With no inside information here is what one can surmise based on what is public knowledge.

The three main ways Daring Fireball generates revenue is through its weekly RSS feed sponsorship, The Deck Ad Network, and sponsorship of 5by5 Network’s The Talk Show. Daring Fireball also uses affiliate links and sells Tshirts from time-to-time but I do not believe these to be major contributors to its profit. They may both contribute to its ability to generate revenue but I believe the bulk of its profit come from the three channels I’m covering here. Without knowing more about how The Deck Ad Network and The 5by5 Network distribute revenue it is impossible to know exactly how much revenue goes to Daring Fireball but we can do exactly what the other cooks are doing; make assumptions and get close.

Daring Fireball currently charges $6,500 USD per week to sponsor the RSS feed. This recently increased from $6,000 within the last few weeks, and increased to that not too long ago from $5,000 USD and so on. So to figure out the yearly revenue generated through this single sponsorship program would depend on where you start and end the year. But, lets jump out on a limb and say that a weekly sponsorship has cost at least $5,000 for the last year. That’d be about $260,000 USD per year from the RSS feed sponsorship. At $6,500, should it maintain or go up higher from here, it’d be $338,000 USD for the next year.

The Deck, of which Daring Fireball is only 1-of-52 members, has a current cost of $8,300 USD per month. Or, sponsors can pay to buy a day, called a “roadblock”, for $8,300 per day. With 27 sponsors in the month of September that is about $224,000 USD generated. (Assuming The Deck had sold absolutely no “roadblock” ads. If they had it’d be significantly more.) I’m assuming that The Deck distributes revenues based on a traffic-based model of sorts (more page views == more moolah) but I don’t know exactly. But even if you were to split this revenue evenly among all parties that’d be nearly $8,300 per month for Daring Fireball. Based on nothing other than my gut Daring Fireball’s 4M+ page views per month make up a fair amount of The Deck’s overall traffic and so, one could assume, that Daring Fireball gets a slightly larger share than my math suggests.

5by5 is currently charging $3,000 USD a month for its Livestream sponsorship (which The Talk Show does each week) and $3,000 for its bandwidth sponsorship as well as individual show sponsorships which they don’t publicize the price for. It is very difficult to tell how 5by5 would distribute this revenue but, again, I’ll make some assumptions. I assume that a bandwidth sponsorship is all for 5by5. Bandwidth is a bill that goes to 5by5 and not the hosts. Bandwidth for a show as popular as The Talk Show could easily be a few thousand dollars per month (not to mention editing costs, etc.) So if we take the bandwidth sponsorship off the table I can only assume that The Talk Show generates about $9,000 USD per month. $3,000 for the Livestream sponsorship, and $6,000 for the two episode-based sponsorships that are within the show. Plus donations, Tshirts? I think I’m underestimating the revenue-generating power of The Talk Show but I can’t be sure.

Not counting the revenue Daring Fireball generates with its affiliate links and tshirt sales; it is my assumption that Daring Fireball could generate upwards of $550,000 USD per year (going forward). And I believe I’m underestimating because my assumptions are probably low. Again, the affiliate links and tshirt sales are probably fairly good revenue generators but the bulk of Daring Fireball’s profit likely does not come from these two channels.

Why go through all of this to figure out how much revenue Daring Fireball generates? Because it is exactly what wannabe-pro-bloggers are doing every single day. They do this math based on the information they can gather and decide to take a stab at it themselves. And with Daring Fireball’s RSS feed sponsorship increasing every few months why wouldn’t they? And good for them. The more the merrier. I just have one request.

I hope that those that decide to use Daring Fireball’s recipe decide to do whatever they can to make it all their own. Don’t just add a little more salt and pepper – change the main course from fish to beef. Make every ingredient from your own garden and don’t use the same brand ingredients Daring Fireball does. Make something unique that will inspire others to do the same. Be a good cook not a copy cat.

Oh, I’m using Mark Jaquith’s Markdown on Save WordPress plugin and it works great.

“For me, that’s the real beauty of writing. Ideas can be noisy, heavy things. Trying to ignore them is like trying to ignore a bored cat. It will sit on your chest while you’re resting. It will paw at you while you work. It will purr, it will scratch, but it will not go away until it is acknowledged. Writing is how I acknowledge an idea, so it will finally go to sleep.”

See, I’m not the only one that uses cats to illustrate an idea.

For years I’ve been following the speculations thrown-out by industry pundits in order to formulate my own opinion of what’s to come at Apple’s next event. This year is no different as I’m tuned in with my ear-to-the-ground and my finger-in-the-air about what is to come at WWDC. I’m really very, very excited about Monday’s event. Moreso than I’ve been for a WWDC in a few years.

But I may choose to back away a little from all of this speculation because the phrasing of various bloggers is getting a bit out of control and it ends up in me being misinformed rather than informed.

Let me explain. When someone is riffing on what Apple’s upcoming, already announced, iCloud service will be it is OK to write posts like “What I think iCloud will be?” or “Based on the current information, iCloud could very well be”. But, that isn’t what is happening. The expectation for what iCloud will be has already been molded over months-and-months of rumors that “people in the know” (that is, people that have been following the rumors for months) already have a pretty hard and fast opinion about what iCloud is.

I’m included in this group. I’ve read enough speculation about iCloud and examined enough about iCloud’s competition to have already formed my opinion of exactly what iCloud could be. On Monday I’ll either be very happy or very disappointed as whatever iCloud ends up being may not align with my idea of what iCloud should be.

Take for example AOL/TechCrunch’s MG Seigler (whom I read regularly) who recently wrote a rather gloomy post about iCloud.

“One killer feature of iTunes in iCloud was supposed to be the ability to mirror songs. That is, for iTunes to scan your hard drive, identify your music, and give you access to those same songs in iCloud without any uploading necessary.”

Emphasis mine. Notice “was supposed to be”.

Was supposed to be? How does he know what iCloud was supposed to be? No, no. What we’ve all wanted from every product from Apple, including the upcoming iCloud, was for it to ease the biggest pain points in whatever area Apple happens to be touching on with its next product. In reality what we all wanted iCloud to be was a much, much better and more consumer-friendly offering than Google’s or Amazon’s music-in-the-cloud services. One of those pain points is obviously this whole uploading your music to the cloud business. But that doesn’t mean that it will be (though I’m willing to bet it will be better in many ways). But, supposed to be? No. Only in our minds.

I realize that we’re all supposed to read these speculative blog posts with our “hypothetical glasses” on but after a while it begins to grate on me that writers (and Seigler is not alone) tend to believe there own opinions as being fact before they’ve even seen the products they are speculating about. That somehow their own ideas about what a product should be become what the product “was supposed to be” even before they see what the product actually is. And I think that leads to people like me being misinformed.

So, perhaps I’ll slowly back away from all of the speculation that happens before an event like this and try only to follow the headlines. I want to make sure that I’m informed enough to know what is going on but not informed enough to be misinformed.

Thanks to the Macworld team for reaching out and including my post in the article.

And for the past few years I think this has settled down a little. The standards those few pioneers set in the beginning are still around. Most blogs today have a fairly similar feature-set and layout. Even when the layout is dramatically different than the status quo the feature-set is still just about the same.

I believe the blog format is ready for disruption. Perhaps there doesn’t need to be “the next” WordPress, Tumblr, or Blogger for this to happen. Maybe all we really need is a few pioneers to spearhead an effort to change the way blogs are laid-out on the screen. There are still so many problems to solve; how new readers and also long-time subscribers consume the stream of posts, how people identify with the content of the blog on the home page, how to see what the blog is all about, how to make money, how to share, and how interact and provide feedback on the content.

Several rather new trends are appearing in the pro blogosphere that started only a few years ago but are now becoming the new pro blog recipe. These trends simply weren’t there 7 or even 5 years ago. Disabling comments is seems to be the main dish (though 4 years ago it was debated). Having a podcast on-the-side is the side-dish. Add to that some sponsorship opportunities in RSS feeds, and a sprinkling of an ad network to taste, and you’ve got yourself the modern day pro blog recipe. Actually, all you really have is a direct mirror of what John Gruber has put together with Daring Fireball – but, nonetheless, these are the trends among pro bloggers and these must be taken into consideration when coming up with a brand new blog format that could set the trend for the next few years.

Syndication has also changed. It seems just yesterday that people thought full-content RSS feeds would destroy their ability to make money blogging. It turns out that could possibly be the most profitable part of their blog’s business model.

Having a Twitter account for your blog, or simply being selective with what is tweeted from your blog (which is my current model), is where things may very well be shifting. Today it would be unthinkable to see sponsored tweets in amongst the links to posts but give it a few years. Today’s Twitter feed is yesterday’s RSS feed. I imagine there will be sponsored tweets too and, in the near future, people will be just fine with that.

Exclusive, paid-for email newsletters had a spike earlier this year with a few services launching and some key figures in the industry taking a stab at them. I have no inside information on how those are turning out – but there is reason to believe that the blog could also do with some exclusive, paid-for content. It may not work for your blog about Hobbit-lore but perhaps it’d work for an incredibly good cooking, investing advice, design-and-code-tutorial, or architecture exam review blog.

Something I’ve always had issue with is that there aren’t enough “home pages” on blogs. That is why the home page for my site is my about page rather than a reverse chronological list of posts as most blogs are. I have that page too but people landing directly on cdevroe.com should not be introduced to my website by only seeing the latest few posts I’ve written. It wouldn’t be a very good introduction and, very well, may not even represent what my blog is about. Because this is a personal blog and not a blog about any one topic, the latest few blog posts would be a very bad representation about what this site really is – a personal blog.

Most blogs that try to earn a buck want to put as many clickable items on their home pages as possible. They probably feel that if they didn’t you’d never go anywhere besides the home page. I can say, after pouring over the stastics of my home page, that isn’t true. A fair percentage of the people that have come to my home page have stayed on that page for a few moments (presumably reading the page) and subsequently clicked on the blog or diet page(s), done a search, or gone to my Twitter account. All good things. I hope that someone solves this issue in a much better way than I have because I really do believe there is a lot of room for improvement here.

Advertising on blogs has simply never worked well. Yes, publishers have made money. Yes, advertisers have increased sales by purchasing ad space on blogs. However, for the core-subscribers to a blog the ads are just noise. Ad networks like The Deck do a very good job at striving to keep a higher quality product by controlling the ads and how they are displayed. But, arguably, even at that level of curation we still just end up with an ad in a sidebar on a blog. I wish there was a better answer for making content “free” to blog subscribers but – at present – advertising is our mule.

Some people claim the trackback is dead. I don’t believe that to be true. In fact, I rather like trackbacks. I like when blogs show me what others have written about a particular blog post. I like them even better than comments. Perhaps if blog software, and the theme of a blog, used the optional excerpt of the trackback standard better they’d work much more like comments (and be much more valueable) than they do now.

Reblogging, Retweeting, Sharing/Liking on Facebook, etc. are all ways to have a post be spread outside of a blog’s audience. The modern day word of mouth. There is no doubt that these tools work very well for some blogs while on others they do nothing. I have these options on my blog and, while I do get a few people using them per day, they serve little purpose then to remind people that if they’d like to share the post they can do it quickly and easily. But in reality, if a post is simply too good not to pass on it will be passed on whether you have a big Facebook button on your blog or not. These tools aren’t going anywhere in fact they are going to become even more ubiquitous – but it’d be nice if someone with an ounce of taste figured out a way to make these options pretty as well as easy to use and, as a hat-trick, much more valuable to all parties involved.

I know, I know, I’m going on and on about this but all of the above is just the tip of the iceberg as to why I believe that the blog format is ripe for someone to really begin innovating again. We have all of the tools and over a decade’s worth of content – all we need are some pioneers.

All good questions. Here is how I write on iPad.

First, I use an application called iA Writer. This application gives me a distraction free writing environment that has just the right amount of features to make writing easy.

I do not use nor own an external keyboard for iPad. Never have. In fact, the on-screen keyboard in Writer has a custom keyboard with few shortcuts that I find very convenient.

I also edit within Writer. I read and re-read (unless I’m in a rush for some reason) the post until I’m happy with it. At this point there is no HTML, no links, no images, no videos in the post.

I then copy and paste the text from Writer into WordPress for iOS. I immediately save the post as a Draft (just in case). At this point I’ll either add the links, images, or video. If there is a lot of media to add to the post I may wait until I’m on my MacBook Pro to finish the rest. Sometimes adding a lot of HTML to a post using iPad can be cumbersome. I’m hoping that WordPress for iOS, at some point, adds a custom keyboard for written HTML quicker.

When the post is finished I’ll then schedule it to be published, usually sometime in the morning the next day since I typically write at night or very early in the morning. This gives the post time to stew a bit and gives me a chance to yank it if I end up not feeling good about the post. It also gives my blog a feeling of consistent publishing rather than a sporadic schedule.

And that is how this post was written.

Barz weighed in on Color’s $41M funding. I haven’t done so because I feel it has been a big distraction and much of the coverage has been by those that clearly have no insight into this industry (I consider myself someone who has very little valuable insight into such things). Barz has that insight. And his take is both sobering and balanced. He mainly comments on Henry Blodget’s take in Business Insider.

“It leads me to believe that Mr. Blodget’s piece might be satirical.”

And then…

“Mr. Blodget points out all the reasons why investing $41 million at this stage is a good idea. For instance, he points out that with that investment, Color is worth at LEAST $41 million to any buyer! Even if they spend half of it, Blodget assumes that the company would then have $20 million in cash and $20 million in a good idea developed! I mean, LOL. The investors can’t lose, he points out, because they have preferred stock. “

If you knew Wayne you’d be LOLing right along with him. I love the ending…

“Funds with a lot of money get to start the bubbles. Like a big ponzi scheme, the first ones in reap the most benefit. Because in a bubble, there’s always someone next in line ready to add more air. Until there isn’t.”

Subscribe to Techonomic Man. You will not regret it.

• Photo and video uploads now work on iPad 2
• Made the post status (such as “Draft”) more clear in the posts list

I use my iPad to write posts and, now that I have iPad 2, I hope to do it a lot more often while on the go. WordPress for iOS has been making very steady progress lately and this update is a very timely one.

Why are these updates key for me? Because iPad 2 would instantly crash when trying to add a photo to a blog post. I was able to work around it by using iPhone but it was pretty frustrating. Also, I write posts, save them as drafts, and then schedule them for publishing all from my iPad. This allows me to pick the time that a post gets published regardless of when I feel impelled to write it and also gives me time to edit them (which I did poorly on yesterday’s post). Being able to see which posts are in draft right in the posts list is a very welcomed update.

Thanks WordPress for iOS team.

Here is the description of the book from the website:

“The world of business is coming full circle. The rise of the Internet and the empowerment of the common consumer has created a fundamental shift in how businesses are expected to behave. To take advantage of this opportunity, businesses will need to look backwards and scale the caring their grandparents’ businesses exhibited towards their customers or watch their competition pass them by.”

I think everyone can agree that modern day businesses don’t feel nearly as warm and cozy as the businesses of yesteryear. If anyone can instruct today’s businesses on how to use the social web to “scale caring” – Gary is the man to do it.

The post is both touching and honest. It reminds me of the better days of blogging when people wrote journal entries rather than gadget reviews. When people wrote about how much their day sucked rather than how much their Internet connection does. When people wrote about family vacations rather than writing about topics that are good search engine fodder.

We need to get back to blogging.

Phil compared writing the same 221-word passage using six different devices (including Pen & Paper) and shared the results on his site. It is very interesting to see the results and how far text-input on devices has come over the last few decades and even the last few years.

/via John Gruber.

I’ve never liked the word “content” but I love when people set goals before themselves to write more. Anton Peck created Project52 this back in 2007. He has now reissued the challenge and is accepting anyone/everyone with a blog to join in on the fun.

I’m in. And over 200 others (so far) are in as well. This sort of reminds me of NaNoDrawMo in that it sets out a goal for people to strive after. Although I failed pretty miserably at NaNoDrawMo this year at least it got me to draw more. So whether or not everyone on the list writes at least 52 posts next year – I’m willing to bet they’ll all write a bit more – and thats great.

At first it was all about how to get the bits from here to there. Then it was how to link them together and to navigate through them. Then it was about adding media. Next came display ports and fitting well-designed information on them using both text and rich media together. The next big challenge was bandwidth – using it efficiently, increasing it, and making it affordable. And on and on the challenges came and went.

The next challenge for Web designers, according to Jason Santa Maria‘s article on A List Apart titled On Web Typography, will be choosing font faces. Until somewhat recently a Web designer would have to go through some technical fire-circles to use font faces outside of the normal ‘system fonts’ that come standard on every computer in the world. Due to the limited choices, designers haven’t had too much of a challenge about what font to use where.

Not anymore.

Web designers, according to Jason, are going to have to dive into Typography like never before. They will need to learn what font faces go well together, how many to use, how to use weight and selection to invoke certain emotions, etc. He lays out some really great rules to follow in the article but even he admits that his rules are breakable. His point is, roll up your sleeves and be prepared to work hard at this.

Two things excite me about the future of Tyography on the Web. The first is that we’re going to see an explosion of Web sites that incorporate font faces that we haven’t really seen on our screens. You know that feeling you get when you see a really well designed poster, magazine, book, manual, or anything else that is printed thesedays? You’re about to have those same feelings when you look at Web sites. The second is that old school designers, those that got ink on their hands when they started their career, are now the guys that know more than the new guys. The technical hurdles for using non-standard font faces on Web sites have been removed and the creative juices can now begin to flow from even the most non-technical designers. The field is wide open.

In a word, the world of type on the Web is getting interesting.

“With this general statement of my principles and belief I will proceed to describe the plan and apparatus it is my intention to test. In explaining these, my object is to learn to what extent similar plans have been tested and found to be failures, and also to obtain such suggestions as your great knowledge and experience might enable you to give me. I make no secret of my plans for the reason that I believe no financial profit will accrue to the inventor of the first flying machine, and that only those who are willing to give as well as to receive suggestions can hope to link their names with the honor of its discovery. The problem is too great for one man alone and unaided to solve in secret.”

That paragraph is wrapped in wordy goodies.

Editors note: I updated this post to reflect that in fact Wilbur, not Orville, wrote this letter. My apologies.

Continued from Day two: The shell.

The warmth of the egg startled him at first. He never expected, in this cold, for the egg to be as warm as it was. Putting his hand back on the egg he tried to gauge the temperature of this massive, greenish egg that had suddenly appeared in his backyard. He figured it had to be near body temperature. It wasn’t hot to the touch but it was more like holding your own hand.

Putting a little of his own weight into it, he pushed the egg with one hand. It didn’t budge.

He looked around it quickly to see if might be sunk into the earth in such a way that it would prop itself up some. It didn’t seem like it. It was setting nicely in some sort of grass. It couldn’t have been his grass because his grass was covered by at least a few inches of snow.

Snow. Snow usually meant tracks. He hadn’t noticed any tracks in the yard that looked abnormal. A few from him, walking back and forth to the barn since the last squall. A few from Rufus, his 50lb. collie-mix, that seems to go right under the egg. Where was Rufus?

That dog was always on the go. Ted couldn’t remember the last time he saw him. Probably around breakfast on the day he found the egg. That was almost 48 hours ago now! Rufus’ tracks went directly under the egg and out the other side towards the back of the barn. It didn’t look like he was injured by, well, whatever might have left (or, laid?) this egg here.

Anyway, Ted Arnold was no tracker. Even in snow. He never picked up that trait. Whenever his brother would show him deer tracks during a hunt and say “See, this is a doe and she was moving pretty quickly through here towards the river. She left some poop right here, which means she’s definitely a doe by the way the stool doesn’t clump like a male deer’s does.” Todd would just nod his head and mumble something about figuring that himself. In truth, Todd had no idea what they were looking at. Sure he saw the tracks, he saw the poop, but he didn’t know if they were coming or going, made by a female deer or a sasquatch. The only thing he could think about when they were hunting was getting back to the cabin to warm his freezing toes by the fire.

His brother’s skills might have come in handy today if there was a single track out of the ordinary here in the snow. It hadn’t snowed since the day before the egg appeared. So if anything was here that could have left tracks, they’d be clearly visible. And they weren’t. What could have possibly laid such an egg and not leave a single track? What could have built a small nest for the egg without moving so much as a snowflake? Maybe Ted was just so bad at tracking that he couldn’t make out the tracks. Who knows?

He decided to call his brother and ask him to come over to have a look. Ted Arnold made for the house pretty quickly once he had made up his mind to call his older brother David. Ted had David’s number on speed-dial. They talked often to coordinate fishing and hunting trips.

David’s phone just rang and rang. Weird. Ted was sure that David had an answering machine. He decided to try David’s work number at the shop. David’s day job, now that he wasn’t helping out at the farm anymore, was a mechanic for the local GM dealer. Since GM wasn’t getting a lot of work lately David was usually only there in the morning. But Ted thought he’d try it anyway.

“We’re sorry, but this number has been disconnected.” was what Ted thought he heard the voice say over the phone. Disconnected?

Looking out of the window at the egg, which sat about 25 yards away from the back door, Ted noticed that it had begun to snow. Well, that’d mean that his brother’s tracking skills were no longer of use. He’d try him again later.

Hanging up the phone Ted walked outside into what seemed like an amazing squall. The flakes were coming straight down and were the size of half-dollars. Everything was getting a fresh coat of snow, and quickly. Everything but the egg, of course. The egg was way too warm to let snow sit on it for very long.

Ted began to wonder if the egg was in danger of getting too cold. He thought back to the hen house. How all of the mother hens would cover their eggs to keep them at a constant temperature. Why didn’t this egg need to be protected? Was something going to come back and sit on it? Why was it so warm?

Then Ted thought about what could make the egg so warm. Something must be warming it from the inside of the egg, rather than the outside of the egg. There was nothing underneath it that could be heated it from below. So there was only one answer that he could think of.

Life.

To be continued…

“NaNoDrawMo is a personal challenge to push would-be artists beyond the bounds of comfortable “when I have time” practice for one month and see what happens.” All of my drawings are being done using the incredible Acorn by Flying Meat.

NaNoDrawMo – Day one: Discovery.

Ted Arnold, a farmer from New England, notices what appears to be an egg just outside of his barn. Cautiously he approaches the object wondering where it may have come from.

As he stares at it for a few minutes from about 10 feet away he remembers a distant memory from when he was younger. Long before his father died and left him his corn-feed farm that he had run for over 40 years. Long before his mom died when he was 8 during one of the hardest winter storms in the history of Vermont.

This memory was from a time when his father used to tell him and his sister stories around the fire. Stories from when he was young. Stories like the time when his grandfather brought his father and his aunts and uncles on a boat from Wales and immigrated to the United States. Coming through New York City, trying to find work, slowly building up enough money to get to Vermont and ultimately building the family farm. The story that was coming to mind now, however, was a story of the time they thought they found something outside of the barn and his grandfather made his father and the rest of the family stay in the house for nearly an entire month! His father explained how he had no idea what happened after they found, whatever it was, out by the barn. His grandfather wouldn’t say anything. He barely ate, slept, or talked to them for the month. The children just went about their business of doing their school work, playing card games, and doing some of their chores that they could do – indoors.

When the month was over, his father told him while staring at the fire, his grandfather came back into the house nearly sulking. He had never seen his grandfather, or his father for that matter, cry. But when he described the way he held himself he knew that this was about as close to that as possible.

That was all his father told him. That was all he knew! And now, could it be, whatever had happened so many years ago is happening again? A strange object has appeared in the same spot his father described in his story. But now, there was no one around to tell him what it was. No one for at least 4 miles, actually.

He decided to get a little closer to it.

Continued in Day two: The shell.

“NaNoDrawMo is a personal challenge to push would-be artists beyond the bounds of comfortable “when I have time” practice for one month and see what happens.” All of my drawings are being done using the incredible Acorn by Flying Meat.

Oh, his site is Pink for October for a reason.

Tim Ferriss, who I had the pleasure of sharing some barbecue with in Austin a few years ago, is preparing his second book – with the working title – From Rapid Fat Loss to Strongmen: A Guide to Becoming Superhuman.

I’ve read Tim’s first book, The Four Hour Work Week, and I really enjoyed it. Pouring over my blog’s archives I can’t believe I never mentioned his book or even did a full review. Short review: Worth the read and chocked full of great advice. Read it.

He’s looking for help with doing some research for this book. So if you’re a Ph.D, MD, or an elite athlete (why are you reading this blog?) – give him a shout.

It couldn’t be more easy to participate: “I’d love to be able to post a few guest haiku of the handwritten variety. Anyone willing to try is welcome to send an image of a self-written haiku.” Howard says in this post a little help from my friends. If you’d like to participate, just send your handwritten haiku (as a JPG image) to howard@nonbreakingspace.com.

“In our own time, I wonder if the very slowness of books makes them more valuable in the face of all the quickness around us, if their singular nature will prove to be their saving grace. And if so, can that inspire the design of a reading experience on the web that strives for the same lack of haste? Can we envision a future where leisure has its place?”

You really should consider reading the entire entry. Grab a cup of coffee, or maybe start some dough for bread, and enjoy.

Editor’s note: I don’t know Mandy Brown but her blog is definitely in the top three well-written blogs that I subscribe to. Every post is excellent. Her blog will, more than likely, make my Best of 2009 ((See my Best of 2008 list.)) list.

Random 60: Penmanship. | Favorite on Viddler.

How is your penmanship? My penmanship is little more than chicken scratch. Since I’ve started writing more I’ve been practicing my penmanship. It is slowly getting better but I have a long way to go.

Here are some tutorials that I’ve followed, so far, that have helped my writing a little.

• Improving your handwriting.
• For reference: An image of the alphabet in cursive.

Yes I actually had to refer to an image of the alphabet in cursive to get back into the swing of things. That is how long it has been since I did any serious amount of writing in cursive.

Here is an example of how bad my penmanship is (click the image to zoom).

How is your hand writing? Come on, be brave and show it off in the comments!

I’m spoiled by a rich-editor in WordPress, that saves drafts automatically and even has multiple revisions, and so I’m sticking with WordPress for now. But if I was going to use an application to write with – it’d be MarsEdit.

Oh, and the latest version supports Tumblr now. Which is excellent.

“This is how I design. This is how I code. This should really be how I write.”

Word Shaun, word.

The above sentence isn’t even close to what could have been written if I had just followed the directions.

Source: Growing Sentences with David Foster Wallace.

Random 60: Can not find writing paper in stores! | Favorite on Viddler.

I know that writing letters is at an all time low – but is it so ‘unpopular’ to write that writing paper should be absent from the store shelves? I went to a few stores and not only didn’t they carry paper, they looked at me weird when I asked if they carried it!

What would John Adams and Thomas Jefferson do? I know, I know, probably Twitter each other.

Thoughts?

Alex Payne, one of the many talented people behind Twitter, recently wrote on his blog his thoughts on blog comments. In a nut, Alex felt that by leaving comments off he’s elevating the level of conversation. That, if he had comments turned on, there would be less than desirable comments written on his blog. That, by turning comments off, it forces people to reply to his blog posts from their own blog. Since people don’t want to write stupid things on their own blog the level of conversation would automatically be risen. Smart.

Alex isn’t the first person to share this sentiment. I’ve written about blog comments in 2004, again in 2007, and have thought about it many times since I began blogging around the turn of the century. In 2004 I was commenting on the indirect benefits for turning off comments. The main benefit I highlighted was that by not allowing comments, you’d be forcing people to link to your site from theirs, creating more link backs to your site, increasing your blog’s audience, and improving your site’s Pagerank on search engines. All very good things for any writer. I suppose those benefits really just improve Alex’s reason. Improving the conversation while at the same time doing well for yourself.

In 2007 I was, in an ironic sort of way, responding to Jeremy Keith’s thoughts on leaving blog comments off. He said that he didn’t like having them on because of they were “examples of antisocial networking”. He made examples of YouTube and Digg being saturated with worthless comments. I’ve recently reread my post and I think I worded my response quite well, so if you’re interested, give it a read.

I think my thoughts hold up, two years later, that Digg and YouTube are, well, Digg and YouTube. Digg, generally speaking, is meant to act as a human filter for the world’s news. The comments on a Digg are, for the most part, about whether or not that particular news item, link, photo, video, or whatever should be worthy of being on Digg at all. Digg has gotten so much better than it was when it first reached critical mass. YouTube, however, still has a lot of maturing to do. The community is so vast that as you browse around the site you will see that thoughtful videos usually are rewarded with thoughtful responses while not-so-thoughtful videos are not. The nature of the beast I suppose.

There are edge cases, of course. Where you have a thoughtful video that gets the attention of the trolls. Where dumb people with nothing to do flock to a particular video and, for no other reason than their own personal entertainment, tee off in the comments in a tirade of incredibly distasteful, worthless, and (even I’ll admit) humorous commentary.

I suppose my main reason for agreeing to disagree with Jeremy was because, well, my site isn’t that popular. This isn’t Digg. This isn’t YouTube. I don’t have the problem of having millions of troll-like morons looking for an excuse to yell things like “first” or, well, any other worthless response (let alone the off-color ones). If I did I’d probably deal with that in my own way. This is, afterall, my house. I very much doubt I’d ever turn comments off entirely. One of my core beliefs, which I mentioned in my 2007 note, was that I thought of blog posts as the beginning of or the response to conversations. I still feel that way. I wouldn’t write anything on my blog, ever, if I didn’t in some way want someone to think about what I’m writing about and, if they chose to, respond to it. That is why I write.

Daring Fireball, one of my favorite Weblogs of all time, which made my Best of 2008 list, and is run by my friend John Gruber, also leaves comments off. John, who recently linked to Alex Payne’s thoughts, has covered this topic a few times. Based on what he’s written publicly about this topic I can safely say that he is in agreement with both Alex and Jeremy. And he has reason to. Jeremy’s main point about how there are too many worthless comments out there has a lot to do with scale. Daring Fireball has enough scale, though no where near the scale of Digg or YouTube, to create those types of moderation problems for John. You see, John curates Daring Fireball like a rooftop garden in a busy city. He cares for it. Every pixel. He cares for it as though it has very limited space. He uses that space efficiently. It is like he needs to get the greatest quality vegetables possible from the absolutely least amount of area. Besides John’s writing it is probably the biggest factor in the success of Daring Fireball. With as much traffic as he gets (which is about 1.2M hits per month according to his Sponsorship page) he would probably run into the problem of trolls. When John goes off on jackasses (which are some of my favorite posts, by the way) I’m pretty sure other jackasses would chime in.  With regards to Alex’s main point, about the fact that Alex really enjoys well thought-out discussions rather than terse commentary, John also tends to link to many people that mention his site in thoughtful posts. John enjoys good writing as much as anyone. In other words, I can see why blogs like Daring Fireball leave comments off.

TechCrunch, one of the most popular blogs right now, has comments on. It has some troll activity. It has some comments that, in my opinion, aren’t worth all that much. But, some people have used the comment area on TechCrunch to do a great job of responding to not only TechCrunch’s commentary but also to the TechCrunch audience. Gary Vaynerchuk, someone I consider a dear friend, runs a Web site called Cork’d. (You can read my interview with Gary about Cork’d, if you’d like). When Cork’d got hacked, and TechCrunch promptly reported on it, Gary took the opportunity to directly communicate what was going on through his own blog and through TechCrunch’s comments. I’d love to hear Michael Arrington’s thoughts on comments on TechCrunch and why they’ve chosen to leave them on for the majority of their posts. I’m positive he has an opinion on this matter.

Again, I’ve been blogging for 10 years. Longer than it has been called blogging. Longer than there has been any form of personal content management systems. This topic of comments, and whether or not to have them on my site, has been debated in many conversations with other bloggers at blogging meetups and conferences, with myself in the shower, with the road while I’m driving, in my own brain, and many other places over those years. I struggle with it. All. The. Time.  My strategy, as of today, is that if it even became a problem where I began to regret having comments on – where the comments I get on my site do not have a value to quantity ratio that I’m happy with – or when my goal is for people to link to my site from their own sites for the sake of getting linkbacks – then maybe I’ll turn them off. But not until then. And neither of those situations have happened in all of these years and I doubt they will any time soon.

I’m just happy to know that other people think about these sorts of things still too. That, even after 10 years of publishing on the Web, we’re all still struggling together with the same fundamental issues that the Web, in all of its social greatness, has imposed on our efforts of sharing ideas. No matter how good the tools get, no matter how many people jump online worldwide and join the conversation, we will always have the decision to make of how we’d like interact. What we’re comfortable with for us, for our companies, and for our Web sites. The learning curve is, as far as I see it, infinite. And I’m okay with that.

For the past several weeks we’ve been interviewing for various positions at Viddler. We’ve gone through several resumes, conducted a few interviews, probed referrals for information about the interviewees, sent follow-up questions, and generally debated the fate of our would-be potential new team members for what seems like weeks. This is an interesting process on both sides of the table. I’ve been on the other side of the table more times than I care to recount, but it really is an interesting process to pour over one’s career (or lack thereof) to somehow build an opinion of someone.

It is somewhat disingenious to be sure. We could never really, really get to know this person based on a one-page document that they probably threw together the night before their interview. “Experiences? Why yes, I have those! X, Y, and Z. I’m familiar with them.” Seldom do resumes reveal the extent of that familiarity. Did the person take the time to prioritize the things they are experienced in based on the amount of time they’ve spent with them? Or, did they list them in order of the supposed importance for the job at hand? Or, did they write down anything they thought might be good to know for the job? No one can be sure – really – at least for the first few weeks they are on the job.

Then there is the entire struggle to really get to know who someone is. To peel away the nerves, the front they are showing in order to impress us, the bullet points on the resume, and the clothes they wore to the interview to reveal who the person is after they’ve known us for a few years. Do they like to cook? Have they traveled? Do they want to? What do they think about family? Religion? The state of the economy? Are they really a morning person or are they just saying that they are? Time, it seems, is the only tool that can be used to find out the answers to these questions.

Sorry. I’m ranting. That isn’t what this post was supposed to be about.

I wanted to review Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain. I just finished it the other day. The book reminded me of this process. Kitchen Confidential, it could be said, is the resume of Anthony Bourdain – a New York City chef that has 30+ years experience working in what he calls “The under belly”. The book begins with his first experience eating a raw oyster in French waters when he was just 9 years old. That one, raw, delicious oyster changed his entire life. I’m guessing it would be the first bullet point on his resume.

But this book serves as something much better than a resume. Resumes are cold, factual, and do not leave room for too much expression. The “story”, if there is really a story in this book, is revealed to us in a rather haphazard way. He bounces around through his career to slowly describe who he is through what he experienced. Want to know his thoughts on meat? You’ll slowly begin to draw that picture based on several experiences he had at many of his jobs. Tip: Don’t ask for your meat to be well done. Want to know when to order seafood? Learn from the guy who buys the stuff in the hundreds of pounds. Hint: Not on Monday or Tuesday. What about his thoughts about personal work ethic? Immigrant labor? Race? Gender? Or even about who should or should definitely not own a restaurant? You’ll need to read the entire book to find out.

I’m not sure what I find fascinating about Anthony Bourdain other than his style of thought. It is obvious, when he’s given the opportunity, that he chooses his words fairly carefully. I suppose I see an older version of myself somewhere in there. Someone who notices the little things, enjoys the fine things, can only afford the not-so-fine things, and yet has the privilege to once and a while dip my hand into the “fine things cookie jar”. A self-reflective kinda dude. It could be that I would love to have his job (not the chef bit, but the traveling eater raconteur bit). Either way, I’m enjoying my attempt to glean as much experience vicariously through Anthony Bourdain as I can. His show, his books, his blog are all my tools in building my own food, travel, and writing resume without the expense.

Kitchen Confidential, for some one that even remotely enjoys food, the restraunt business, or interesting people, is an essential addition to the book shelf. It has inspired me to continue to do what I love, to be willing to have my mind madeover later in life when my ideals are proven incorrect, to learn as much as I can from every single job that I do in order to make the next one better, to build a list of hard working people that I wouldn’t mind working with again in the future, and to eat weird in hope of epiphany.

I’ve long respected Roger’s opinions of movies. It turns out I agree and respect his opinions on a great many things. Consider this my recommendation to subscribe.

Source: Roger Ebert’s Journal (Sadly it seems “blog” isn’t a good enough word.)

Ps. You can have a post-script on a blog, right? Anyway – I think I should take a taste of my own medicine and get back to some real blogging myself. Hmmm.

“Say the thing with which you labor. It is a waste of time for the writer to use his talents merely. Be faithful to your genius. Write in the strain that interests you most. Consult not the popular taste.”

Not that I’m planning on going against the grain just for the sake of doing so, but I like the sentiment to always do what you feel passionate about rather than conforming for audience or peoples.

I recommend adding THIS DATE, from Henry David Thoreau’s Journal to your reading list.

Source: THIS DATE, from Henry David Thoreau’s Journal.

• Use capitalization, punctuation, and proper grammar.
• Type more than two words at a time. You know, complete a thought or message.

In April of this year I wrote somewhat at length about that second one.

Source: A Few Social Etiquette Rules for Instant Messenger Use.

Here is an excerpt:

“I mean what else could I have done with roughly 83 hours of free time? Stretched out this is over two weeks of full-time labor, double the amount of time it takes to learn to be a pilot, or the record time a person has circumvented the entire planet Earth solo. Ok, but do those things have anything to do with a mysterious island, a plane crash, love triangles (and sometimes even love squares), black smoke monsters, invisible cabin dwellers, polar bears in tropical climates, self-projecting children, time traveling consciousnesses, or JOHN LOCKE? I think not.”

Source: Waking Ideas: LOST in time.

Source: Jupiter, Venus, and Earth’s Moon are BFFs.

I’ve been subscribed to Sarah Marchant’s blog, dreamdust, for a while. I believe Mike found her photos on Flickr, suggested her profile to me, and it went from there. That was years ago. Recently, however, Sarah has been on fire on her blog.

She posts about her life, plain and simple. It isn’t that her life is any more exciting than any of our’s – it is just about the way she looks at things, describes them, and focuses on details that would go unnoticed by most of us. Most recently I’ve enjoyed fair warning, Yucky things, and Oh good, she’s talking about compost again.

I suggest visiting her site. If you like what see, subscribe.

Source: dreamdust.

In January of 2005 I quipped that sending email at 4:00am after working all day probably wasn’t the best time to write anything important.

I still try to live by these principles, but sometimes I slip up, especially when I’m typing on my iPhone. Whether it be an email, text message, or a post to Brightkite I find myself making small mistakes that I think I could eliminate if I just slow down a little.

Here is a good, or rather bad, example of what I’m talking about. It is a newsletter from a venue in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania called the Sherman Theatre letting me know what is going on there.

It takes a speical, I mean special person to spell a word wrong in two different places. But I’m just as guilty of this as anyone. Two examples from this morning: my note about cast iron pans (hastily typed on my iPhone), and my misspelling of Billie Jean (no excuse).

True, it is impossible to go through life without making these types of errors and I will not be losing any sleep over them. But mistakes like this don’t have to happen often.

Which is why I’m now going to change my procedure a little by adding the word ‘slowly’ to a one of the steps in my writing procedure.

1. Quickly type.
2. Read.
3. Edit to make ideas coherent and fit with the overall theme.
4. Slowly re-read and check spelling and grammar.
5. Publish.

By doing #4 slowly I’m able to eliminate a few steps of the steps I was putting into practice in 2004. Now, I need to use this procedure on this very post so if you’ll excuse me…

This time Michael chimes in on the slow, yet steady, growth of his site. When comparing steady growth over “initial launch hype and fast growth” he remarks:

“But it’s definitely more valuable than quick, unloyal, unfocused traffic.”

Dude gets it.

Source: Steady Growth.

Oh, before I begin, let me just say that I’m completely open to the fact that I could be dead wrong with any of my thoughts below. If I am wrong, please feel free to correct my thinking in the comments section.

TechCrunch doesn’t seem to be doing a whole lot “digging” lately.  It seems like, for a lack of a better way to put it, the TechCrunch editors need to be spoon fed stories rather than them hunting them down and finding them.

Maybe the volume of submissions that they get is such that they simply do not have time to go out and find any other stories.  Or, maybe the fault lies on me, for not continuously emailing the editors or driving to their office and barging in, demanding that they cover various things going on at Viddler.

Or maybe they’re just like me. They only have 24 hours in a day and they need to focus on what does them the most good. Maybe they only cover Twitter, Yahoo!, and many other Silicon Valley-based companies because they’re far more interesting to their audience than Viddler’s new customizable player.

It could be that since I failed to go out and tell them about Viddler’s API, our business-to-business Web services, or our Vidgets – that they would have never known about them otherwise.

Let me be clear; I certainly don’t feel shunned by anyone at TechCrunch.  In fact, all of my dealings with everyone there (past and present) has always been great.  They’ve covered Viddler’s launch, and embedded our player on many occassion.  They just don’t seem to be paying attention to some of the things happening over here on the east coast, and I’m wondering what we might be doing wrong.

Some have commented to me; “So long as your users know what is going on, you shouldn’t worry about the TechCrunch audience.”  In some ways I agree with that statement, but we want everyone to know how great Viddler’s services are maturing to be – and we think that those that read TechCrunch deserve to know as much as Center Network’s readers.

I have seen many discussions about TechCrunch and its editors, good, bad, and downright ugly – I hope this post doesn’t come across as anything other than me being honest.  I want the entire world to know about Viddler, and I believe TechCrunch to be an excellent technology blog/online magazine that could be instrumental in helping us achieve that goal.  It just isn’t doing so right now.

Hey TechCrunch! Put Viddler on your radar. Please?

(The above post also relates to any one or any company that covers the technology space. Let me know of other outlets that should be covering Viddler that aren’t and I’ll try to contact them.)

I believe the price for a link and write up in his feed when first launched was around $750 per week? I know in October 2007 it was $900 per week. I remember looking only a few days ago and it was $1,250 per week. Now I look and see it is up to $1,750 per week and that it is sold out until at least 2009.

Two quick points. I guess the price should have been higher eh John? Second, this is so well-deserved and justified that I’m really happy it is happening to such a hard working “blogger”. And, from out of the mouths of those who have opened their wallet to sponsor Daring Fireball, completely worth it.

Congratulations John for all your success with Daring Fireball. You have absolutely earned it.

Michael Mistretta, easily the youngest author whose blog I’m subscribed to, recently took a trip to Zambia.  In “Going Beyond Automatic: Photography in Africa” he gives the broad strokes of what the “Automatic” setting is on your camera, and how it takes practice to master “Manual” mode. He also talks a lot about why it isn’t important to focus on the gear you have but the way you look at shooting.

In the very first sentence of this piece I see Michael being slightly frustrated by something that ends up happening far too often to me.  He says: “I haven’t had the chance to write down much of what I experienced and accomplished while in Zambia.” I find I often “move on” to the next thing and forget to reflect on where I’ve just been – and writing seems to help me to reflect.  I need do it more.

Michael’s photos from Zambia are striking.  What an excellent opportunity for someone I’m sure will be an incredible photographer for many years to come!

Source: Going Beyond Automatic: Photography in Africa.

But then she throws in two quotes from people in the area (no doubt to give her article a little feeling) and this was one of them.

“”It sounds like a good idea but at the same time I don’t know if the plane could hit and maybe the nose could hit the ground and the whole thing could explode,” commented Dallas resident Tom Rechtin.”

The other quote she threw in was actually pretty good.  The person remarked how the system sounded good and was all for increasing the safety of the airport.  But then this guy, out of nowhere and having no engineering experience, just says out of the blue that he hopes the system wouldn’t make a plane completely explode.

Sometimes in articles such as this reporters will try to throw in two contradicting opinions in order to give the piece some balance.  This makes complete sense, of course, when the two opinions make sense or are from people that have some sort of experience with what the piece is dealing with.

Sarah, all I’m saying is that I think you could have found a better quote.  In fact, here’s one for you from me, Colin Devroe, on what I think of the new system having not seen it and having zero experience in aviation and the airport industry as a whole beyond flying on a few planes.

“If the system cost ten times as much and only saved one life, it’d still be worth it.”

If you’re going to quote morons, it might as well be this moron.  Now I think I’m going to dig up a few other articles she’s written.  If only the site made that easy.

I also began to try to improve my writing of instant messages.  This too is something I’m still working on improving.  But I didn’t want to write about my personal goals to improve my writing – but rather on the several styles of writing instant messages that I’ve seen after years of communicating using this medium.

In my experience there are a multitude of writing styles found in instant messaging.

The first that comes to mind is the fast, ill-formed, and often sent instant message style.  This style boasts bad capitalization, grammar, spelling mistakes, and very short messages that, when strung together, complete a thought.  Here is a quick example:
 

“dude” 

“you hav to see this”

“i took a picture”

“of this guy outside”

“an he was crazy, lol”

This is, without a doubt, my least favorite writing style that I see used within instant messages on a daily basis.  I know several people who send messages exactly like this example (yet this is an example and not an actual message I’ve ever received).

The second style is one step closer to the style that I try to employ, which is a style that boasts longer individual messages, usually completing a thought, but devoid of capitalization and punctuation.

“so I went to the movies the other night saw a good movie with my friends what did you do”

You might think I’m kidding with this example.  I’m not.  I get messages like this all the time.  In fact, this writing style resembles the writing style that my mother uses when writing email, which forces me to put off reading her email until I can force my way through it without throwing something.

Obviously, there are many variations of these first two examples – of which you could probably provide me many cases – but the style that I try my very best to use every day is one that boasts proper capitalization, punctuation, decent grammar, spelling, and completes a thought with each single message.  The limitations of instant messaging, on occasion, can make it hard to complete a thought with just one message, but normally it can be done.  And this isn’t to say that every message and every conversation I hold via instant messaging are long winded – in fact I’m still very much trying to improve my writing style – but by and large I try not to leave out punctuation and capitalization at all costs.

How do you style your instant messages?

For those of you that do not know, I used to run a small blog with a few friends where we tried our hat at writing about geeky topics. We called it TheUberGeeks.net, or TUG.n, and we’ve recently begun working on its resurrection. We’ve got some big plans (as big as they can get giving it our night and weekend attention for the next few months) and I hope that anyone that used to subscribe will find their way back to TUG.n.

We’ve got two new articles up there and we’ll have at least a few more before this week is out. The two most recent articles were written by me:

• An iPhone FAQ – covering the top questions I receive from people that see me with an iPhone.
• Porting Mac applications to Windows – An interview with Cris Pearson of plasq – where I conduct a short interview with the CEO of a small software development company about the challenges of porting software with a small team.

I’m looking forward to seeing Chris’ Song of the Week return in style as well as Josue’s coverage of several TV series. In the next month or so we’ll have several pretty neat announcements there, so keep your ear to the ground. Actually, just subscribe to the TUG.n feed, and that will keep you up-to-date.

We’re back baby!

This is just a quick rant, written on my iPhone which is less conducive to writing more than 140 characters than I’d hoped, but I hope to try a little harder starting tomorrow.

Mason reckoned that most people sitting in this room were far too nervous to do even light reading. Anyone waiting in this room was probably in trouble for something.

Staring at the neatly stacked magazines led Mason’s mind to the neatly stacked books on the corner of Mrs. Jenzi’s desk in fifth-grade. Each book stacked according to size and thickness. Mrs. Jenzi’s stack of books consisted of the normal teacher’s aides for various fifth-grade subjects, a roll book, and a small pamphlet on the top for the U.S. Army.

One day while in class Mason asked Mrs. Jenzi about the pamphlet. She explained to the class that her youngest son David had joined the Army and she had everyone explain what they’d like to be when they grew up. When it came time for Mason to explain his future-dreams he simply said: “An artist” and sat down quickly.

When Mason was four years old his grandmother had given him a set of colored pencils and a pack of paper that….

“Private Mason Thurman?” – a voice said suddenly, interrupting Mason’s thoughts, and rather loudly considering that he was the only person in the room.

Mason stood up immediately, clicked his heels: “Yes, sir!”.

“Captain Jenzi will see you now.” said the Private who was probably even younger than Mason. He had a small stack of papers, probably only three or four individual sheets, in his hand. He constantly took the paper that was on the bottom and put it on top, visibly nervous about something.

“Private?” said the man holding the door. Mason was shook from his day-dreaming and walked into the cigar-smoke filled room. The room had a table with a map on it with a hot cup of coffee and an ash-tray with a smoldering cigar in it holding the map to the table. Captain Jenzi sat behind his desk quickly skimming a stack of papers with Mason’s photo clipped to them.

“Private Mason Thurman please have a seat.” The Captain’s voice was fairly welcoming. It reminded him of Mrs. Jenzi’s warm and welcoming voice on the first day of school.

“Do you know why you are here Private?” he asked without ever looking up at Mason. “Yes I believe I do sir.” Mason said while he was clearing his throat and sitting down.

The Captain slowly lifted up his head, which remained slightly tilted, looked Mason straight in the eye for what seemed like an hour. “Are you okay son?”. “Yes, sir I’m fine thank you.”. “Good.”

“It says here in my report that you had some trouble during a mission yesterday, is that true?”. his voice started to become more serious and less welcome as he spoke and quickly went back to skimming the report in front of him.

Mason remained silent, unsure of exactly how to begin to answer the question.

“Is that true Private?” the Captain asked in a loud voice now looking directly at Mason, waiting for an answer.

“Yes, sir. I just. Yes, sir.” Mason truly didn’t know what the Captain wanted to hear so he just kept his answer simple.

“It says here that you, under the direction of your CO, ummm, Jefferson, refused to shoot a few Indians that had recently had a run-in with a few of our men. Is this accurate?” the Captain spoke fairly quickly as if he wanted to move on.

“Yes, sir.”

“Why is that? Why did you refuse a direct order?”

“I, I guess I didn’t want to shoot anyone that was unarmed. I thought maybe they should be brought to a trial or someth…”

“Private listen to me closely.” said the Captain as he leaned over his desk getting as close to Mason as their current positions in the room would allow. “You have to get your head out of your little dream world when you are on a mission. These Indians that we’re dealing with are God-less, and would have no problem taking that silly haircut that you have there right off the top of your head. Do you understand that? Do you understand that many of these Indians will never, ever, have a gun in their hand but that they are much more dangerous with their arrows and knives than you probably ever will be with your rifle. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“No you’re a good kid and a good soldier. I can understand that violence doesn’t come naturally to most people but for your own safety you are going to need to get tough.” — the Captain stopped speaking to catch his breath. He sat back in his chair visibly working out a plan in his head.

The phone rang.

“Captain Jenzi” answered the Captain on the second ring. “Then go get him and bring him back here. And if he won’t come. Make him come. And if you can’t make him. Get rid of him.” he was almost yelling into the phone as if he was speaking to someone that couldn’t hear. “Actually, I’ve got just the man to help you out. Where are you?” — there was a short pause while the Captain was writing something on a small empty sheet of paper. “Okay, give my guy 15-minutes to join up with you. Then be sure to do what needs to be done. Thank you.” he said, hanging up the phone.

“Ok, Mason. Now is your chance to prove me right. I am going to set you up inside of a new group of men. A clean slate. I want you to be a man, get tough, and do what needs to be done. Can you do that?”

“Yes, sir!”

“There is an old Indian chief, who fought against Custer’s army of all things, who needs to be taken into custody no matter what. Do you smoke or chew?”

“I’ve tried chew a few times but….”

“Here take this. I rarely chew tobacco and this might go along way with your new men. Shows you to be a real man. Here, take this note to your new CO and he will put you on a mission that is leaving in just a few minutes. Private O’Malley here will drive you down to the rally-point. That is all.” — the Captain stood up and left the room so fast that Private Mason barely had time to stand up and salute him on his way out.

“Let’s go, I have to get back here for our next meeting.” — said Private O’Malley.

“I really hate chew, so what am I supposed to do with this?” asked Mason.

“Pretend. Let’s go.”

They drove down the road which was in the center of several small Army buildings. Some were barracks for the men, others were wash-houses and mess-halls. It wasn’t long before they were approaching a group of about 40 men who were waiting for pickup. All of them standing around, barely talking, watching their breathe in front of their face. It was already fairly dark. The sun had gone down pretty quickly today as the day’s were progressively getting shorter and shorter.

“This is you. I’ll drop you off here. Actually, give me that note. I have to see your CO about something anyways. Good luck Private.”

Mason left the Jeep without saying anything. He slowly walked into the group of men and immediately spotted a kid that was really nervous. Mason thought this might be the kid’s first mission. He figured he’d position himself next to him because anyone would look tougher than this kid. Mason popped some chew into his mouth, which began to water immediately, and slowly walked over and sat down next to the nervous kid.

A few minutes past and Mason was already getting cold. Just then he heard the sound of the approaching trucks, their lights just beginning to break the night sky over the hill.

The story continues: Sitting Bull (A short story).

[tags]short story, sameer barkawi, writing[/tags]