Oh yeah, did I mention?

I'm surprised to discover that I've written almost nothing about NaNoWriMo on this blog. I mentioned it before I did it, and I posted when I finished and that seems to have been it. I really enjoyed doing NaNo the last time I did it, which it turns out was FOUR YEARS AGO! WTF happened there? Well, of course I know what happened. In 2005 I was working on the Magic book so I didn't want to mess up my flow with a different project. In 2006 I wasn't writing ANYTHING and I was creating a crapload of code and sort of unsure what I was doing writing-wise. 2007 … I'm not really sure why I didn't last year, it just didn't feel right. This year it was mentioned on a mailing list I'm on and it did feel right so I signed up. Of course I've written just over six thousand words so far, which puts me … about six thousand words behind. D'oh! Part of the whole NaNo scheme is to paint yourself into a corner by announcing to the whole world you're doing it so here's my page where you can see the current wordcount. Of course, this blog is littered with me setting writing goals and watching them blow right past but I'm hoping this one will recapture some of the magic of the last NaNo. Look, if I could do it writing mainly on the train to and from work I sure as hell ought to be able to do it on my half-assed quasi-employed schedule I run these days. So here I go painting myself in a corner again. :-) Today I made a real effort to put some words down and found a new trick that seems to shut down my procrastination methods. I ignored the word count, I ignored my timers, and I walked away from my desktop with it's various blinking lights and attention demands. Took the laptop into the living room, turned off the wireless and opened the "full screen mode" of my word processor. (I use Scrivener for writing these days, keeping TextEdit for code. (And I apparently never wrote a post about Scrivener either. Man. They should get some real talent in this dump of a blog!)) I put a DVD-Audio disc in the player (Talking Heads - True Stories) and just wrote for the length of the album. Then I got up, did some housework. played a couple of videogames then put on another disc (Remain in Light this time) and repeated. Somehow ignoring the word count was the magic key to writing a bunch.
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Neat Cartography Article

(I tagged this as politics, but don't let that scare you. It's poltical analysis and it's about as non-partisan as you can get.) This is a neat site where several ways of drawing the 2008 presidential turnout are displayed. It's interesting to look at the maps and it makes something really clear: it's not so much that the coasts are "blue" and the "heartland" are "red". Instead, the cities are blue and the rural areas are red. For example, look at the southwest in particular and you can really pick out what I think are Las Vegas and Phoenix. Or in Texas you can see El Paso and San Antonio pretty clearly. (I found the site via Rands's Twitter.)
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OmniFocus, WebDAV, and OS X

Long time blog readers will know that I'm an enthusiastic user for OmniFocus. My biggest outstanding issue with OmniFocus was that syncing the iPhone would take an excruciatingly long time. Lately it had gotten so bad that every couple of weeks or so the phone would power off while still syncing and eventually I'd have to delete the app and data from the phone and start all over again. I've been syncing from MobileMe's iDisk and lately I've been noticing that iDisk was randomly really slow. I decided today to try switching OmniFocus from iDisk to a WebDAV server. I found a page with good instructions on setting up WebDAV on OS X. If you go do to do this please note two things: I'm able to use a self-signed web certificate just fine, and you should look at comment 19 about using digest authorization. I did both of these, so now OmniFocus (both the computer and phone clients) is using SSL and an encrypted password, so that's pretty nice. And the WebDAV server is inside the LAN, so syncs at hope are pretty much instant. I've only been running this for a few hours so far but it appears to work much faster than using iDisk.
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Must be time to complain about being a California voter again

I'm a permanent vote-by-mail person so I've been working on my ballot. California does way more direct voting (the Propositions) then I like. First off, I don't know that I really trust the populace at large to make decisions. But the main issue is that everything gets funded the same way - it's a bond! We need a bond for hospitals! We need a bond for high-speed trains! Guess what all these descriptions of these Propositions say? "This does X WITHOUT RAISING TAXES" (and they say it in all caps like that). Well no, it doesn't directly raise taxes but it does institutionalize a debt that somebody has to pay someday. Basically the government of California has become a college freshmen who got three new credit cards and maxed them all by Christmas. It has to stop! Look, I'm all in favor of high-speed trains and of course I support children's hospitals. What's funny is that California knows how to to solve the problem. Cities and counties can put bond-based propositions on the ballot, but they have to fund the payment of these bonds with either a sales tax or a property tax. So everything is funded, all the time. Oddly this means I don't ever see "tax-free" huge bonds at the county or city level, only at the state level. Ask me if I want to pay an additional hundred bucks on my property taxes and I'll probably say yes. Ask me if I want to just pile more debt into the future and I have to say no. It's just poor fiscal management. Even if we really, really want that high-speed train. (Besides which, we still haven't figured out how to get BART to San Jose or make CalTrain really attractive and usable but now we're going to build trains to LA?) And let's not even talk about the whole "Wait? Equal rights for gays? Can we make a constiutional amendment to prevent that?" morass. Ironically I don't mind that one as much because it's at least easy to figure out what the not-bigoted stance is and neither side wants to use a huge unfunded bond to create money from thin air. Some of these other ones take some research to handle properly.
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