ryan.freebern.org

I got a response on my story submission today: the editor liked it, but wasn’t seriously wowed, so he’s passing on it. At least I gave it a shot — and since sending it out, I’ve been looking at more potential markets for it (it’s a flash horror piece) and I’ve learned quite a bit about how it probably falls short, so I have some good ideas for rewriting it before I send it out again. Plus, hey, I’ve gotta get some rejections under my belt if I want to be considered a real writer!

I was fully prepared for a rejection, so I’m not upset about it. I learned from this, and I think it’ll make me a better writer in the end. Now, on to the next story!

I haven’t said much here about how I’ve been seriously working on my fiction writing these days. I’ve put together a few stories over the past month and a half since attending Boskone in mid-February, and I’ve even sent one of them out as a submission to a paying market two weeks ago. This is the first time I’ve tried this since I was 16 and I wrote up a 3000-word piece of amateurish hackery and sent it to Asimov’s and Analog. I kept those rejection letters and still have them, somewhere, I think. But that was a long time ago, when I was young and could barely craft a coherent story, much less one that might be considered by either of those august publications.

When I sent the current story, I had no idea of the editor’s normal turnaround time, so I wasn’t getting my hopes up — many places take six to eight weeks or even more before they get around to reading your story. Today, the editor posted to his blog saying that when he rejects stories, he usually does so within five days of receipt, and anything that’s not immediately rejected like that is currently in his “Read Again” pile. So since I sent my story two weeks ago, I guess that means it’s at least made it beyond the immediate-rejection phase of the editing process. While I would be seriously surprised (stunned, shocked, bowled over, etc.) if my first story submission was accepted by the first market I sent it to, at least I have a glimmer of hope.

If I try, maybe I can get a second submission sent out before I get word on this one. I don’t yet have a big pile of polished stories to keep sending out like some writers do, but you’ve gotta start somewhere, right? And it’s really nice to know that, even if it doesn’t get accepted, my writing is at least worth a second look. I’m keeping my fingers crossed (which makes it hard to type).

You may have heard that McDonald’s is planning on suing Webster’s to make them take “McJob” out of the dictionary. The thing McDonald’s apparently doesn’t realize is that dictionaries don’t make these things up themselves, they just record how people use the language. The fact that “McJob” has entered the dictionary just means it’s in common enough usage that it’s a widely accepted and recognized term. When someone says it, people know they’re talking about a crappy job. Suing Webster’s won’t change that or make it go away.

I just hope this whole deal spawns a new term: McLawsuit, to mean any stupid and misguided trademark lawsuit destined to fail.

I get the feeling that Bruce Sterling is just trying to be ornery because it’s fun to be a contrarian. If you maintain the status quo, no-one talks about it. Discussions don’t go on for long when everyone agrees with each other. When Sterling tells bloggers they’re a passing fad, or says that mashups are a novelty art form that will fade away, it really gets peoples’ blood pumping — notice how I’m blogging it, like the good little sheep I am.

I don’t think blogs will be gone in ten years. People have always kept diaries and daily journals, and blogs are just those things with feedback. People, being generally social, love feedback and want to communicate, and blogs, as a means of communication, are great. You can talk to a whole crowd at once with each post, and it’s quick and easy to keep on top of if you want to do it.

And mashups — sure, a lot of them are just people playing with music, which is okay by me, but probably won’t lead to any great classics. But sometimes you find something like The Kleptones, who take loads of already-great songs and turn them into something much more than the sum of their parts, and you realize that this isn’t just “novelty music.” (If you haven’t listened to the Kleptones’ album “A Night at the Hip-Hopera”, go grab it now. It’s sheer genius.)

And as for the “commons-based peer production” economic model? Sterling may not think much of it, but to me it seems like a successful, if limited, form of socialism. We choose what we like and what is popular by clicking, visiting, and posting about it. The best stuff rises to the top of the popularity heap, and often reaps rewards based on that popularity. It’s a mini-reputocracy, and while the repute may only be among a certain small subset of the population, it can still cause changes in the way the rest of the world works.

So I actually encountered a Daylight Savings Time-related bug today that kept me from being able to do what I wanted to do. It was on an online payment system — when I clicked the “make payment” link, the system consistently told me my session had timed out, despite the fact that I had only been logged in for a few seconds. I didn’t realized until later that the payment system probably hadn’t had its clock set ahead, so when I tried to connect, my session appeared to have been active for an hour, which was beyond their expiration time.

It’s a little bit exciting. It’s sort of like experiencing what the Y2K bug might have been like a tiny bit. Sort of.

I have come up with a neologism.

trengedy, n.

What occurs when the mainstream media seizes on a particular type of tragedy that’s not actually very common, seeks out every instance of it, and reports on them all, making people think it’s much more common than it really is.

Example: “The rash of reports in Summer 2001 about shark attacks was a particularly heinous trengedy.”

Googling this term gives one hit, which appears to be a typo on a foreign language blog. Hence I think I can safely claim I’ve invented it. Now, go forth and use it! Maybe this can be my eventual claim to fame.

Tagging is all the rage. Every site worth its salt these days allows you to tag stuff. Whether it’s your blog, your bookmarks, your books, your music, or your friends, you can add tags to them, usually with just a few clicks and keypresses. What a fantastic way to organize collections and make finding stuff easier! And yet I still see people totally missing the point and using tags incorrectly. I’m an obsessive organizer at heart, and an infovore (voracious consumer of information), so watching people fail to classify information in a useful way makes me cry a little.

What is tagging?

Tagging is classifying things by adding simple, descriptive words or short phrases to them. Ideally, the tags you add encapsulate the key ideas and attributes of something. For example: if I were to tag my pants, I would add “jeans” to all the jeans, “shorts” to the shorts, and “cargo” to the cargoes — some of them would have combinations, like “jeans” and “shorts” — and then I might add colors, like “blue” or “black” or “khaki”. Then when I want to put pants on (which rarely happens, but bear with me) I would tell my robot butler “Show me the pants tagged ’shorts’ and ‘khaki’,” and the robot butler would pull out the pants that match those tags, and I would be able to choose from that selection, instead of having to look through all of my pants at once.

Figure 1: Pants with appropriate tags

How do I decide if a particular tag is appropriate?

Here is a simple guide to deciding if a tag is appropriate. Place the tag into the blank in each of the following sentences. If it makes sense in any of them, it is appropriate.

• “This item is a/an ________.”
• “This item is ________.”
• “This item has to do with ________.”

For instance, I am looking at an alarm clock. I am considering tagging it with the term “bonobos”. Let me see…

• “This item is a/an bonobos.” FALSE: IT IS AN ALARM CLOCK
• “This item is bonobos.” ALSO FALSE: IT IS NOT BONOBOS
• “This item has to do with bonobos.” FALSE AGAIN: BONOBOS ARE AFRAID OF ALARM CLOCKS

Hence, I can be fairly certain that my alarm clock should not be tagged “bonobos”. Let’s try again, this time with the term “waking”.

• “This item is a/an waking.” WHAT
• “This item is waking.” NO
• “This item has to do with waking.” DING DING DING WE HAVE A WINNER

How do I use tags on this particular website I am looking at?

I don’t know, because chances are I have not used that particular website, since there are currently umpty-bajillion websites that support tagging. But, smart person you are, I bet you can figure it out if you look around a little. Does the website have a “help” or “FAQ” link? That might tell you. Or maybe near the “tags” area is a little question mark you can click on to learn about their tagging function.

That said, here are some things to pay attention to:

• When you type in tags, do you use spaces to separate them (like “cargo shorts khaki”) or commas (like “cargo, shorts, khaki”)?
• If you want to use a multi-word tag, do you surround it with quotes like “hulk smash”) or do you use underscores (like hulk_smash)?

Exercises

1. So there’s this guy, right? Let’s call him Bob. He reads a story on a website. The story is about robots and flying turtles and the end of the world. It’s a really great story, so he adds it to his bookmarks on a particular social bookmark website. The website says “For multi-word tags, use underscores between the words. Separate multiple tags with spaces.”

Which set of tags should Bob type?

1. robots flying turtles apocalypse
2. robots, flying turtles, apocalypse
3. robots flying_turtles apocalypse
4. bear hunny christopher_robin

The answer is 3.

2. On the system above, Bob wants to tag something so that his friend Alice knows it’s something she would be interested in. He types the tag for alice. What’s wrong with this?

Answer: Since the system separates tags with spaces, typing for alice will result in two tags, “for” and “alice”. What the heck does the tag “for” mean? It means nothing! You can tell because the three-sentence test for the tag “for” gives us three nonsense sentences. Bob should have typed for_alice.

3. Bob has read a news story about global climate change and Al Gore. He has saved it and tagged it “godzilla atlatl phonetic_spelling”. What should we do?

Answer: Either of the two answers below is appropriate.

• Politely email Bob explaining that his tagging is fallacious and giving him the URL of this post.
• Punch Bob in the face.

I know I’ve been focusing a lot on the future of Google these days, but it’s definitely a very interesting thing to think about. Here is an intriguing collection of thoughts about a potential direction for Google OS based on observed facts and rumors.

It’s neat to see Google working on this stuff, and speculate about how they’re planning to tie it all together into one big, happy network OS. But unless they concurrently work on strengthening the last stinkin’ mile so that customers don’t have connectivity issues that render their computers useless, I doubt they’ll manage to get many total converts.

I do all my writing in Google Docs these days, and I love it. It’s simple and straightforward — I can write my stories, and it saves them for me and helps me organize them, and that’s it. It doesn’t have tons of fancy bells and whistles that I don’t need and it lets me fit a whole lot of text on the screen instead of cluttering it up with toolbars and rulers and stuff. And nicest of all, no matter where I am, if I can get to the internet I can work on my writing.

The problem is that when my internet connection goes down, like it did today, I can’t access any of my work. There was a problem with our cable service for about three hours this afternoon, and I sat here stewing, thinking “What can I do to pass the time until it’s fixed? Oh, I know. I’ll do some writing!” And then I realized my fallacy.

There is evidence that Google is planning on making an offline version of Docs, but right now it looks like it requires running the code on a local webserver installation, which is not optimal. Come on! It’s almost entirely javascript already — why not make use of the nicely-polished, awesome offline storage solution dojo.storage? It uses one of any number of available offline storage providers (a fancy name for “things on your computer that let your browser save stuff to disk”) to allow you to store data locally, and lets you sync the local and remote copies when you do have internet access. There are already demos showing that it works safely. Google really needs to take advantage of this neat thing, to make Docs available even when my network connection isn’t.

I briefly pondered trying to integrate Greasemonkey and dojo.storage to forcibly add this feature to Docs, but then realized that first, it would take way too much effort to both decipher Google’s code and learn dojo.storage, and second, I don’t have the time for that sort of stuff.