[kiyote23]

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life on the dork farm

Thursday, January 26, 2012 :::
 

Obama created more jobs than Steve Jobs' Apple - Jan. 25, 2012:"Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels proclaimed that Apple has created more jobs than President Obama's job creation program did."

And he was wrong. Way wrong. Exponentially wrong. So wrong, you have to wonder about how they teach math in Indiana. Or whether actual numbers mean anything to the Republican Party anymore.


But seriously. This is the Governor of one our states. This is the 21st Century. Whoever wrote that for him had to know that it would be Googled as soon as it was uttered. Can we really afford to waste our votes on a political party that is going to be continually this stupid? Can't blame this one on a cultural war. They really think that we are idiots, and won't pay attention to what's behind what they say.



::: Obama created more jobs than Steve Jobs' Apple - Jan. 25, 2012 posted by Peter Birk
::: at 1/26/2012 02:05:00 AM
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Saturday, January 21, 2012 :::
 


0121121344.jpg, originally uploaded by Kiyote23.

Runaway baby!

Thank you for using Picture and Video Messaging by U.S. Cellular. See www.uscellular.com for info.



::: 0121121344.jpg posted by Peter Birk
::: at 1/21/2012 01:45:00 PM
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Wednesday, January 18, 2012 :::
 

Hello on Vimeo:

Hello from ant1mat3rie on Vimeo.




::: Hello on Vimeo posted by Peter Birk
::: at 1/18/2012 01:40:00 AM
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Tuesday, January 17, 2012 :::
 

"And this is a replica of the actual garden planted by the pioneers who settled this property." The old woman looked pleased with herself as she looked over the garden plot. "We all took a master gardeners class from the university extension office. It took us several years to research what to plant. And then it was even harder to find the heirloom seeds needed to recreate the plot."

Jen scooted away from a large bumble bee that hovered unsteadily next to her arm.

"And then there are the bees," the old woman sighed. "I see bumbles all the time, but rarely see honey bees anymore." She turned to Jen. "The hives are just disappearing, you know, and no one knows why."

"Cell phone towers," John said matter-of-factly, not even looking up from his phone.

"Pardon?" The old woman looked surprised. These were the first words John had spoken for the entire tour. He had been playing with his phone the whole time. She had given up on him and had just been talking with Jen as she gave the tour, but she'd kept her eye on him, worried he might accidentally trample part of the garden by not looking where he was going.

"Cell phone towers are disrupting the bees," John said, still not looking up from his phone. "They think the radio waves are scrambling the bees ability navigate."

The old woman looked at him for a moment before asking, "Young man, would you mind humoring me and putting that thing away for the rest of the tour?"


::: The bees are upset with your angry birds posted by Peter Birk
::: at 1/17/2012 11:56:00 PM
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Monday, January 16, 2012 :::
 


0116121855.jpg, originally uploaded by Kiyote23.

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::: 0116121855.jpg posted by Peter Birk
::: at 1/16/2012 06:56:00 PM
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Saturday, January 14, 2012 :::
 


0114121846.jpg, originally uploaded by Kiyote23.

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::: 0114121846.jpg posted by Peter Birk
::: at 1/14/2012 06:48:00 PM
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0114121701.jpg, originally uploaded by Kiyote23.

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::: 0114121701.jpg posted by Peter Birk
::: at 1/14/2012 05:03:00 PM
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Friday, January 13, 2012 :::
 

I recently finished my fantasy novel, which I've been working on for the past six years or so. To Trust the Wolf is currently available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble, with other formats coming soon. I wrote and published the book using my Mac and my iPad, and I thought I'd share a few notes on the tools I used to do so.

First and foremost, I used Literature & Latte's Scrivener, which I now consider to be absolutely essential to write anything longer than a grocery list. Scrivener allows you to break down your project into small sections, and then easily arrange and rearrange these sections as you see fit. It imports and exports a wide variety of formats, and allows you to collect notes and images without cluttering up your master document. For me, it's been the best digital tool for my writing since I first used a word processor.

But the real icing on the cake for people looking to publish ebooks is Scrivener's built-in compilers, which allow you to create ebooks from your project with just a few clicks of the mouse. The feature works so well and so seamlessly that I was actually able to do the final proof-reading and revisions paperlessly, generating Kindle versions of the book each night and then reading them using the Kindle software on the iPad and making notes where I needed to make corrections.

For writing on the iPad, I use a combination of SimpleNote, Notational Velocity, and PlainText. I use SimpleNote because Scrivener can sync with it, uploading and downloading modified sections to the cloud. Notational Velocity allows everything in my SimpleNote stack to be synced onto my Mac, and vice-versa. Finally, I use PlainText on the iPad because it just looks better than SimpleNote, with the same functionality. The SimpleNote/Notational Velocity stack is actually synced through Dropbox as well, which allows PlainText to access it and makes everything pretty seamless.

It sounds a little Byzantine to describe it, but in practice it works quite well. Scrivener allows me to import/export my work into SimpleNote, which I'll actually work on in PlainText on the iPad. Anything new that I write on the iPad, I'll write in PlainText, which I can get to on my Mac through Notational Velocity and sync into Scrivener through SimpleNote.

One caveat is that SimpleNote, Notational Velocity, and PlainText are all text editors, and so won't handle any rich text formatting. Anything that is italicized or underlined in your Scrivener document won't be in the text editors, and that formatting will be lost when you import it back into Scrivener. The solution to this that I found was to do my formatting in Scrivener using Markdown, which it handles quite well, and then converting it once you're done working on the files on the different machines.

Scrivener comes with a nice full-screen editor, but I find myself writing a lot of things in Notational Velocity as well. Hog Bay Software offers a nice one-two punch of apps that allow for full-screen editing anywhere on the Mac with QuickCursor and WriteRoom. QuickCursor allows you to set up a hot-key combo to open a variety of different text editors anytime you're facing an editing field. WriteRoom is nice, barebones full-screen editor that I've got set to a black background with green text, taking me back to those Apple II days. So I can start a file in Notational Velocity, hit a set of hotkeys, write my file in WriteRoom, and then just close Write Room when I'm done, and QuickCursor automatically does the cut and paste to drop what I've just written back into NV right where I started.

Using these tools, I've created a pretty nice writing setup for both my Mac and my iPad which allow me to focus on just writing without worrying about where things are or how they are formatted. Once I got rolling with this setup, I got more work done on the book in a year than I had in the previous five. If you are writing on a Mac and an iPad, I whole-heartedly recommend these programs.


::: I wrote a book posted by Peter Birk
::: at 1/13/2012 01:40:00 AM
::: Comments:
Hey, that's great. Way to go! look at you, creating people and worlds...
# posted by Blogger Churlita : 1/18/2012 11:30 AM
 
I know! It only took six years, but I got it done...
# posted by Blogger kiyote23 : 1/18/2012 4:58 PM
 
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