I've learned fairly recently that my email composition style is apparently egregiously improper. Like most every other Gmail and Outlook user, when I reply to an email, I post my response at the top of the email and let the program quote the original message below. Old school Usenet types argue that this is improper. One should never quote the entirety of an original message, as the original sender can just look in his own email archives for the original message, the presence of a quote doesn't guarantee that nothing was altered, and sending all that extra text wastes bandwidth. Instead, one should only quote the portions of the original message which are relevant to the response, which should be written below the original quotation. Both Gmail and Outlook, however, place the cursor at the top of the reply, so it takes thought and effort to move the cursor and delete the excess text.
As I said, I only learned recently that I've been committing such etiquette offenses all along, and I have a hard time caring too much. Gmail just hides the extra stuff anyway, and storage isn't an issue. Still, at work I've been playing around with the proper bottom posting style, and I've found that I really like it. Students will often write me with a bunch of different questions, and it's so much clearer to quote each question and respond to each one-by-one. I've gone back to my original, lazy top posting style for most correspondence, but I'll quote and reply when needed, generally whenever the sender has asked more than one or two specific questions. In my reading about the topic, I found Outlook QuoteFix, a handy add-on to Outlook that'll move your cursor and signature to the bottom of all your emails if that's your bag.
While I'm not too stuffy about top vs. bottom posting, I do insist on sending all of my emails as plain text rather than HTML in Outlook. I've also discovered the option (in Outlook's Options > Email Options) to "Read all standard mail in plain text", which means never having to see someone's awful email stationary again.
On vacation I read Roman Blood, first in a series of mystery stories set in ancient Rome by Steven Saylor. Saylor's books are known for being exceedingly well researched. His history knowledge is a bit better than his writing, but the story is exciting enough. Amusingly I had to remind myself at times that the far-off world the story's set in wasn't a fantasy setting like so many other books I read, but a time and place that actually existed. The murder case in Roman Blood is a case that actually happened, and many of Cicero's words are taken directly from written counts of the events. Couple this with HBO's Rome and you'll get a very good idea of what life was like back then.
I'm reading the next book in the series now, which is a set of short stories. Not sure if I'll go on from there, but I recommend picking up one of his books for a good look into a cool time in history. While all the books are part of a series, I think they're all separate stories, so you can pick up any of them and probably follow along just fine.
I find myself having a hard time coming up with the energy to write full blog posts lately. Take this story about Time Warner offering DVR boxes for free that don't have a fast forward feature in them so you can't skip ads. I was going to write an entry about how corporations try to spin copy protection as a feature, and tie it to this piece commenting on this piece about how Universal Music isn't offering its DRM-free music files over iTunes. I would then tie that to a comment by Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing about how music companies really want to be able to sell you different versions of the same song, like how Microsoft has different versions of Windows Vista. You'd "get" to choose whether your album plays in just one stereo, or also on your car (for an added fee), or also on your iPod (for an added fee), and so on. They try to spin the idea by saying that people with only one stereo will appreciate being able to pay less than people who need the rights to play the album on multiple stereos, but of course no consumer really thinks like this. Referencing the Time Warner article, Jeffrey McManus says, "Has any customer in the history of DVR technology ever stepped up and said 'you know, this DVR thing is terrific, but what I’d really prefer is to lose the ability to skip commercials so that I can satisfy the needs of businesses in every stage of the value chain?'" (via).
So anyway, I was going to write this whole article about that (which I sort of have in the process of writing this), but then I got lazy and just linked to the original story with del.icio.us and added a few comments. The internet can breed laziness this way. Why write an article and expend actual effort and thought when I can just link and add a few comments? If you read my weblog, you might already know my position on the matter, and reading my comments might be redundant. Indeed, if you read my weblog, you probably also read Boing Boing and a few other like it, so you've probably already read people talking about the same thing more eloquently than I. Sure, if I put forth the effort to research what I was talking about, you'd get some value from reading what I write, but if I'm just going to regurgitate what other people have already written, why bother? If a sentence or so will do, a link is good enough, and you can make the connections yourself if you feel like following the link.
My post frequency has dropped considerably over the years, but I'm not sure the quality has. I'll frequently start a post, realize that a few sentences attached to a link are good enough, and just go with that instead. I am fairly proud of the assortment of links I throw on del.icio.us. I sort of prefer the idea that in running a blog you're as much an editor as an author, and mostly my blogging time is spent coming across articles and deciding which things to link to rather than coming up with new ideas to write about. I think you get as good of an idea of what I'm interested in by what I link to as you would if I wrote long posts less frequently. (Aside from the rare, more personal stuff, which I put up only for Vox friends.)
Movable Type 4 looks attractive, and over the weekend I spent some time trying to decide if I wanted to move from blogging on Vox to running MT again. The "pro" side has lots of bullet points, chiefly flexibility and having everything under my control, while on the "con" side are just two things: not having to manage a web host, and having to pay someone for hosting. Vox is free, offers only a few set customization options, and doesn't let me map my domain to it. But, it lets me restrict posts to just my friends, which is a huge win. Kwc and I exchanged some emails recently about how many free services there are now which do stuff you used to have to configure yourself on a web server you pay for. Having everything on your own server is great, and knowing that you own it is important, but for the moment, I don't mind separating stuff between Vox, del.icio.us, and Flickr and hoping that Six Apart and Yahoo! are trustworthy enough.
Counting from when I started using LiveJournal, I've been writing online for about five years now. Thanks for sticking around, even if I'm too lazy to write full posts most of the time. You probably had lots of other stuff to read, anyway.
Problem: it's hard to store comic books. You can put them in boxes, but when you stack the boxes you have to constantly move the top ones to get to the bottom ones, which discourages one to file them, leading to big stacks of comics lying around because you're too lazy to unstack the boxes.
Solution: DrawerBoxes. Each box pulls out like a filing cabinet, so you can stack them up and still get to the ones on the bottom. I just bought five of them, and they work great. Detailed reviews can be found here and here.
Dark Horse recently announced Dark Horse Presents, an initiative to produce short serialized comic books for MySpace. The first, Sugarshock, written by Joss Whedon no less, appeared yesterday. It's good, but the computer screen just isn't the right format. Newsarama syndicates one page of Powers each day. It's one of my all time favorite comic books, but it wasn't designed as a daily, so the pacing doesn't work. You can't get a whole page onscreen at once, so you can't appreciate the artist's layout properly, unless you shrink it down to a point where you can't read the lettering (try Marvel's digital comics on a 17" monitor). Marvel used to have a method where you could click on each panel and it would pop up and zoom in, but I'd imagine that took a fair amount of effort for their web team to craft, and it still meant you had to see isolated panels of what were drawn to be one whole page.
The web is just built for the short format. YouTube videos are great if they're a minute or two long, but you don't ever want to watch a full-length movie at your computer. Short news articles and blog posts, good, long, researched pieces or novels, bad.
What does work very well on the web is the comic strip. I regularly read PvP, Penny Arcade, XKCD, Boy on a Stick and Slither, VG Cats, The Perry Bible Fellowship, and Marmaduke (sorta). The traditional comic strip format works so nicely on the web. You can read a strip without scrolling. A funny strip is easy to email to people. You don't need sound to enjoy them at work. And comic strips expose a true talent for compressing a story into a few small panels. If you want to tell a five-part story, each day's installment still has to be funny. That takes real skill.
This isn't to say that the web is perfect for comic strips. Few webcomic sites provide good indices of their archives. Try going back and finding a particular Penny Arcade strip you remember finding funny. Ideally each page would tag its strips by subject matter for easy reference down the road. And all that lettering on each strip is just part of the image, so Google can't index the scripts. Still, as digital distribution of comic books continues to be a hot topic amongst the big publishers, and with DC launching its own online service soon, I'd like to see more attention paid to the comic strip than the longer form book. No matter how you try to shoehorn it in, you're always going to want to read a full-length book in your hands, printed on paper. The strip, on the other hand, loses nothing in its conversion to pixels.
I've written up some of my Deathly Hallows thoughts here. I'll probably add to them as I think of more stuff about the book.
Wands are only as powerful as the wizards who use them. Some wizards just like to boast that theirs are bigger and better than other people's.
–Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, page 415
In college we used to like to make up believable lies and spread them around campus.
If you were to spread a fake spoiler about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,
what would it be? "Hermione dies" seems a little too easy. You want
something ridiculous, but good enough that people will fall for it.
"Neville kills Ron" has a ring to it, but it's too similar to the real
spoiler from book six.
We saw Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix last night, and it totally lived up to the hype. I had just a few minor gripes (why did they establish that Ron, Hermione, et al couldn't see the thestrals and then not play that up for humor when they were flying on them?), but I think it's my favorite of the movies to date. They mostly cut out the right things to cut to let the story move forward, though I'd maybe have liked a few scenes to be a bit longer. Another minute with Sirius wouldn't have hurt, nor would have explaining a little more clearly why they all get mad at Cho. Rowling's strength is not in writing action, and I found the ending battle to be more exciting on film than in the book. Like the cemetery scene at the end of Goblet of Fire, the end could have been scarier and sadder, but it worked. I especially liked the way the Order of the Phoenix and the Death Eaters flew around and flicked spells at each other, and then how the Voldemort vs. Dumbledore battle looked like they were conducting an orchestra with their wands. It was no Yoda vs. Darth Tyranus fight, but the following internal conflict between Harry and Voldemort was great. They're lucky Daniel Radcliffe grew up to be a good actor.
Books: Show us the longest book you've ever read. (All the way through.)
This doesn't quite count, but it's a good excuse to mention it, as I just finished it last night.
For my birthday Greg gave me the one volume edition of Bone which collects 13 years of the comic into one 1332 page monster. It's a great value, if fairly unwieldy to read. The original issues were black and white. They're going back to and coloring them now, and they look great, but it's neat to have the whole B&W series all in one book.
Bone is a very fun fantasy read. It apes a lot of traditional fantasy but does a great job of keeping the feeling light but still making the stakes seem high. It's one of those things I knew I should have read ages ago but never got around to, and I'm glad I finally did.
