More On This Dime Piece

Here's another thing that annoys me about the dime piece. The transporter had it in his pocket until he got on the plane, where he put it in his briefcase. What did he do at the security gate? Toss a $2million dime into one of those gray plastic tubs?

Dime Transport Story

Jason Kottke pointed to this article about transporting a valuable dime across the country. It's a news item draped in narrative style, but it falters.

I'm rereading William Blundell's The Art and Craft of Feature Writing, a book that I appreciate much more now that I've authored a reasonable number of features. This dime piece isn't really a feature, a sprawling spelunking on a topic, but the lessons from Blundell's book apply to it as well.

Blundell talks about different story structures, and one is a time line, where the action in the story follows a specific chronology. He uses a cattle drive as the framework for a story on true cowboys; Rubenstein uses a red-eye flight to drive the dime piece. But Blundell keeps digressing, using the physical events to lead the reader into more conceptual writing about cowboy life and culture. He does so quickly, but the effect is noticeable. The action doesn't get boring as it does in the dime piece, which just serves it all up to the reader. That would be a good choice for a fast-paced chase sequence, but Rubenstein's piece describes an airplane ride. Blundell's cattle drive is boring, too, but he draws in the reader by doling out the movement. Rubenstein should have mixed the larger issues into the body, skittering away from the flight to look at the valuable dime and its buyer and seller. Or as Blundell says in one of his maxims: Digress often, but never for long

(By the way, Rubenstein may not have had the luxury of column inches to do the story that way.)

Blundell also mentions "tout grafs" such as this one:

But the dime's cross-country trip was the stuff of intrigue, of that there is no mistake. The logistics of moving a $1.9 million dime across the country turn out to be at least as staggering as the notion of paying $1.9 million for a dime.

His view of these in-piece ads? If you have to tell people how intriguing your story is, maybe it's not as obvious as you think. This, of course, is simply "Show; don't tell" in a different guise.

More Air New Zealand Humor

Looking at the description of the in-flight system on Air New Zealand, I couldn't help but laugh at this "feature": "Future-proofed - so enhancements like internet, email, and SMS text messaging can be accommodated in the future"

Why is it a selling point for me that email might appear someday? It's not there now; it just might be in the future.

Never mind that "future-proofed" implies an ability to adapt to new technologies, even though the ones they name are ubiquitous in the present day.

Will My Books Meet Safety Requirements?

From the "Paging an editor" files, this blurb on Air New Zealand's site caught my eye:

Many passengers also like to bring along books, magazines, portable computer games, or walkman-style MP3, CD or cassette players. These are fine so long as they meet safety and size requirements, and do not interfere with the comfort of other passengers.

Yes, do make sure your books and magazines meet safety and size requirements and don't interfere with other passengers.

Hold Our Mail. And Hers. And His.

Melissa wanted to put a mail hold in place for our trip. She wondered if she could do it online; I told her she'd probably need to do it in person so she could show ID.

"You'd think so," she said, "but you'd be wrong." 

Wow, I'm imagining a whole range of April Fool's jokes.

Penny Arcade's Gabe Kicks Out the Douche Kid

Penny Arcade has a lot of news posts today, but you have to read Gabe's account of going to a Pokemon tournament and ousting some kid who was being a jerk (scroll down; they don't have permalinks) and then, two posts later, a little girl's response. Super super sweet, but you have to feel sorry for the little girl.

Checkers Solved

Remember how I said that some abstract strategy games are too complex to be solved by mathematical analysis?

Well, scratch Checkers off the list. A University of Alberta professor spent 18 years solving the game. Played rationally, it always ends in a draw.

via boing boing

Writing Mantras Screensaver

I realized, while looking at a recent round of edits from one of my editors, that I don't always remember all my mantras for editing and reworking text: "Specifics trump generalities" and so forth.

I decided to put them into a screen saver as a reminder. I wanted something that would print a random line from a text file I created.

I hit pay dirt with the Message screen saver, which allows you to put up an arbitrary string or the output of a shell command. After a bit of Internetting, I figured out how to use awk and pipes to get the effect I wanted.

Here's the shell command that the screen saver runs each time it changes messages: awk 'BEGIN{srand();}{ print rand() "\t" $0 }' ~/writing-mantras.txt | sort -n | head -n 1 | cut -f2-

Translation: Read each line of the writing-mantras.txt file and put a random number in front of each one. Pipe the output through a numerical sort, pipe that through head to get the top line, and then pipe that through cut to get rid of the random number you slapped on the beginning.

Neat.

Slightly Surreal Experience

I haven't looked at the print version of the Chronicle's Food section in years, but a little cafe near my work had it on their counter, so I flipped through it while they made my sandwich.

I had forgotten that they have a little "Friday In Wine" box that gives a sneak peek of the main feature that will appear in the end-of-week Wine section. So despite the fact that I know my article is the main feature this Friday, I was still surprised to see the little box say, "Friday In Wine: Fruit Wine Makers Press For Respect." "Hey, that's me!" I thought. I switched sections quickly, as I found the whole experience embarrassing.

Wait, This Is About Game Reviews?

The Escapist has an overview of the flaws and triumphs of video game reviews. Attaching simple numbers to some person's years of work, the importance of an editorial consistency, how consumers make decisions, and more.

Replace game with wine, and you'd have all the same arguments against the wine press. It's probably the same argument that has always brewed between those who make and those who judge.

New Journalism

Listening to an old Fresh Air today (which was in turn a repeat of a very old episode), I learned something astonishing. The narrative journalism I strive toward, the one that incorporates fiction elements into journalism, has a name, "New Journalism," though it's now 40 years old.

And it has an inventor, Tom Wolfe. Huh. I've never read his work, but now I feel compelled to do so. If I'm going to follow in someone's footsteps, I might as well see his shoes.

Homer Simpson And The Pagan Symbol

I'm normally opposed to the culture of pervasive advertising (hence the lack of ads on my blogs), but I admit that I laughed when I saw this chalk drawing of Homer Simpson near an ancient pagan symbol.

Telepathic TV

Television you watch with your third eye!"

No, I don't think it's a joke. I mean, it's not intended as one. I discovered it because recently they had my friend Kate, of Kadon Enterprises on the show.

More Pipes

Ever since I started playing with Yahoo! Pipes, I've been looking for other ways to use it. It's my newest hammer and I'm looking for a field of nails.

I went poking on the New York Times site to see if they have an RSS feed for their On Language column, but no, it's buried inside the Sunday Magazine's feed. No problem. I made a Pipe that grabs the main feed and only lets On Language columns come through. I subscribed to the Pipe's RSS feed, and I'm all set.

Aquamacs: Emacs for the Mac

O frabjous day! While looking up some emacs commands, I discovered Aquamacs, an emacs implementation embedded in Mac UI standards.

Derrick's Web Snacks - Process

When I started work on the "Derrick's Web Snacks" feature on OWF, a sidebar item with interesting web tidbits, I wanted to build something that was easy for me to use. If it took too many mouse clicks to get a link into the Snack area, I would never update it; if I could do it quickly, I would keep it fresh. My ideal solution would allow me to select a link, press a button, and see it show up in the Snacks later that day. (It didn't bother me if it took a while to show up on OWF after that.)

I wanted to automatically incorporate links on OWF, and I figured if I could put them somewhere with an RSS feed, I could show that feed on OWF. (I hand-waved over that point, figuring there must be some simple way to make that happen. Boy, was I wrong.)

I looked at Bloglines's "Clippings" and "Blog" features, but the former wasn't flexible enough—it only works with clips I make from within Bloglines—and the latter required only a few less steps than making the changes in Blogger, though it was somewhat faster.

I settled on a private "snacks" blog to which I could publish links. I have a Dashboard widget that publishes to Blogger, so I could snag a link, bring up Dashboard, paste the link, write a description, and hit Publish. The widget keeps my login information, knows which blog I want to use, and publishes faster than my browser can manage. It takes me 10 to 15 seconds from grabbing a URL to publishing a post.

At some point, as I imagined myself using the feature, I realized that certain items would always get "snacked." In particular, I'd always want to link to the latest digests from Ethicurean. If I wanted to always include them, why should I do it manually? There's a running joke that the best programmers are the laziest ones: We don't see any reason to do work that a computer should be able to manage.

And then I remembered Yahoo! Pipes, a tool the company released in February that allows users to create "mashups" of feeds. I noticed the hubbub when it came out, but I didn't play with it. I knew it could combine feeds in some way and create a new feed from the output, but I didn't know if it could do what I wanted.

I have fallen in love with it. Within an evening, and starting with no knowledge of the product, I had created a series of modules that did what I wanted. My pipe pulls the 8 latest posts from my private links blog, doing some simple transformations in the process. It also grabs the latest Ethicurean digest (blogs and news) and changes the title to "Ethicurean Blogs (or News): [date]" where [date] is the Digest's date, so that users know at a glance if they've already seen it. The pipe smushes it all into a single feed. All I had to do was publish that on OWF.

I wrote a simple set of JavaScript functions that used the XMLHttpRequest object to load the data from the pipe. It would have worked perfectly, except for one tiny problem: For security reasons, you can't have an XMLHttpRequest object fetch data from a site other than the one where the page came from. In other words, because my page came from www.obsessionwithfood.com, I couldn't load data from pipes.yahoo.com. Hm.

I tried creating an iframe object that would contain the feed's output. Safari rendered it in its RSS reader, and Firefox freaked out about the fact that I had a ".run" URL.

I started to wonder if my pipe was doomed to die. I looked for advice about incorporating RSS feeds and realized that the solutions all used PHP, which my ISP has made available for me, something I discovered while working on this.

I've never gotten around to learning PHP—I went straight to the enterprise Java server world—but I figured out enough of the language to build a script that grabs the RSS feed from the pipe, parses it, and spits out HTML.

Too bad Blogger doesn't give you a way to incorporate PHP. I added a PHP include to my template. I added a server-side include. Nothing worked the way I wanted. But then I remembered: XMLHttpRequest doesn't work for addresses on a different server, but my PHP script now sat on obsessionwithfood.com. A few lines of JavaScript, and my snack section showed up.

100 words podcast

I discovered the 100-word stories podcast through Grammar Girl. It's a neat idea: given a theme, write and submit a 100-word short story. The winner gets fame and glory and the chance to choose next week's theme. So here's a question: Why are the individual episodes of a podcast whose tagline is "Keep it Brief" so infuriatingly padded with meowing cats, a rambling host, intro music, and closing music. Given about 45 seconds of actually relevant information (theme, details, etc.), the host manages to create a two and a half minute episode. 

Guess The Programmer's Mistake

For the technically inclined, what did this programmer do wrong? I can imagine the scenario: a deadline, a prioritization of bugs plotted against time-to-fix issues, and the very real question, "How likely is that to ever happen?"

Weird Al's Palindrome Song

To buy or not to buy, these are the lyrics. (The song, Bob, is obviously a Dylan parody when you listen to it.)

RIP Beverly Sills

Joshua Kosman, the Chronicle's music critic and an NPL member with the nom of Trazom, writes the obituary of the famous opera singer.

Will Shortz's Squirrels

Every week, Will Shortz poses a puzzle to a live contestant on Weekend Edition. Then he proposes a listener challenge where the audience tries to guess the answer to his puzzle. The winner is next week's live contestant.

Usually, the Listener Challenges are puzzles, but two weeks ago, he leveraged his massive readership and asked for the best way to get rid of squirrels climbing into his attic. What was the winning answer? Click on last week's synopsis to find out.

 

Safari's Stupid Copy URL Behavior

After a long absence, I've switched back to Safari from Camino. Safari was always too slow, but I want to give 3.0 a try.

I'm happy with it so far, except for the stupidest possible copy-and-paste behavior. If you Control-click a link, you have the option to copy it to the clipboard without visiting the page. This is useful if you're reading a post and you want to send the Permalink to someone, or you see a link somewhere that you know someone will appreciate, but you don't want to wait for the page to load.

But what does Safari do with that menu item? It copies the URL, and the link text. When I paste a permalink into an iChat window, an email, or even a text document, it just says "Permalink" and renders it as a clickable HTML link.

This violates a fundamental rule of good web design: Give the reader a clue about where a click will take them. I want the recipient to see where the link will go so that they know what to expect on the other end. I never ever ever want to send them the word "Permalink."

What possible rationale can there be for this? Who ever wants the text in the anchor element and not the value of the href attribute? The world has become used to seeing http:// etc.

Read The Rules Before You Throw Money Around

A woman in Dallas gave a kid $800 for his #1 spot in Friday's iPhone line. She wanted to walk into the store and buy them out to resell on eBay.

Too bad she didn't read the 1-per-customer rules beforehand. But the former #1 kid got a free phone out of the deal, so someone won.

OED Updates

The OED publishes quarterly updates of changes made to the definitive dictionary of the English Language. Here's the latest batch.