Truly, it is the end of days.
Here’s a collection of adult human beings as depicted by American infomercials. Picture this being all that survives us. Picture this being all that future generations find of what we were like.
Self Distraction
Self Distraction
Aaron Sorkin’s The Foodroom
Even when I loved Aaron Sorkin for Sports Night and the first years of The West Wing, I was aware that he could be parodied. Then Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip had some problems I thought were peculiarly obvious from the start. And now The Newsroom has a central character I cannot see for how there’s a line of previous Sorkin male characters standing in front of him. So while I still wish I could write like him, I found this new parody alarmingly spot-on.
I’m going to stretch a point here and say that I’m showing you this because it speaks to how we can all fall into traps in our work. But really I’m just showing it to you because I enjoyed it so much.
The Onion on new app “Squandr”
NEW YORK—Sources confirmed Thursday that millions nationwide are signing up for Squandr, a new social discovery app employing GPS technology to match users with others in their vicinity who also wasted $2.99 on the same software. “For me, it’s just a fun, no-risk way to meet new people and talk about how we all blew a few bucks on this app,” said Kelly Harmon, 27, who said she was pleasantly surprised to discover just how many people in her immediate area had the same frivolous spending habits she did.
New App Matches You With Others In Vicinity Who Wasted $2.99 On Same App – The Onion
There are people who believe The Onion news stories. Reading this, I could almost be one of them.
Almost nothing I know, I learnt from Star Trek
It's when you say something that you think about it. In Lighten Up and Take More Time Off (The Blank Screen, 21 April 2014) I used the phrase “change the rules”. The Guardian was arguing that we're wrong to think of productivity as a game and I was thinking that I don't – but that if it were, the one good thing about a game is that you can change the rules. And I got that from Star Trek. I am honestly surprised.
Strictly speaking, I got it from a genuinely superb book for writers called The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion which talks about a particular episode and quotes a director saying this DS9 series was different to Star Trek: The Next Generation in this way :
“In general, the DS9 shows are not as squeaky clean as the TNG scripts were,” observes Corey Allen, a veteran director who has worked frequently on both series. “The characters are allowed to be more flawed and that allows for more latitude in interpretation. In TNG, it always seemed to me that the people were wonderfully and heroically bent on the ‘unbent’ — they were straight arrows. But in ‘Captive Pursuit,’ there’s this wonderful moment of realization — almost without words — when O’Brien is sitting at the bar with Quark, and he discovers the possibility that it’s conceivable to break the rules of the Federation, which hitherto had been inconceivable to him. And suddenly he says, ‘Of course — change the rules.’”
(For more about that episode see the blog I nicked the book's quote from, ThemOvieblog.com)
I liked Deep Space Nine and that was for moments like this, when the Star Trek universe would feel a bit more real, a bit less Boy Scout. And that one point about changing the rules has stuck with me.
I like it enough that I wanted to point it out to you, that I now want to explore it. But I'm struggling to find any more life lessons. You know there's a book, right? Wrong. There are two. All I Really Need to Know I Learned from Watching “Star Trek” (UK edition, US edition) and All the Other Things I Really Need to Know I Learnt from Watching “Star Trek: The Next Generation” (UK edition, US edition). Both by Dave Marinaccio. From the introduction:
For years I’ve related everything in life to Star Trek. But why not? Captain James Tiberius Kirk is the most successful person I’ve ever observed. He’s a great leader, a good manager of people, dedicated, moral, adaptable, at the top of his profession, gets the girls, is well known and respected. There are worse role models.
Okay.
A quick scoot through the Amazon preview of the first book tells me it's all about knowing your place (as McCoy was a doctor, not a… anything else) and always answering distress calls. I seem to remember that being a flawless plan in Star Trek.
But late one night, unable to sleep, flicking channels, I recently came across a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode and I learnt two things from it. First that the days were 26-hours long on this DS9 space station and second that there is no such thing as money.
Sounds like the freelance life to me.
Counting
I said earlier today that my wife Angela Gallagher and I had been at a hospital appointment. It was an oncology one and she was officially signed off after her years of treatment for breast cancer. I come out of there and I write Time and Emotion, a Blank Screen entry – she comes out of there and she has written a poem.
She gave it to me to read on our way home and I sobbed.
I want you to see it too:
Counting
by Angela Gallagher
Six years six months since diagnosis.
Those numbing, cold slivers of words.
Cut by them.
Cut by them.
Six years five months since the lumpectomy.
Secretive, demon growth, bigger than they thought,
Cut out by them.
Cut out by them.
Six years four months since the start of chemo.
(Happy Birthday!)
Ancestors of mustard gas – over the top boys!
Weapons of war.
Poisoned by them.
Poisoned by them.
Six years three months since the hair fell out.
Lying under my husband’s gentle hands –
An odd sharing –
A shaving of the ridiculous remnants. Wisps of hair
cut off by him.
Cut off by him.
Five years ten months since the end of chemo.
Crawling over the finish line, immune system
barely intact.
Poisoned by them.
Poisoned by them.
Five years eight months since the second op.
The insidious spread to the lymph glands –
Cut them out.
Cut them out.
Five years seven months since the start of radiotherapy.
Long past caring about the sex of the medic,
Baring all to the rays.
Burned by them.
Burned by them.
Five years six months since the end of radiotherapy.
Red raw, weeping skin
Burned by them.
Burned by them.
Five years three months since the return to work.
Escaping, tasting the weather again.
The sweet, gradual return to the life everyone else has,
The life lived by them.
Lived by them.
Eight months since I came off the meds.
Bolsters gone, the shedding of the last of the armour.
Saved by them.
Saved by them.
Today.
Today the oncologist signed me off.
Over on Self Distract – Go Cucumbers
This week's personal Self Distract blog is about not waiting for permission, not waiting for anyone but yourself when you want to do something:
Two years after these writers lot met, they are still meeting and they are still writing and they are producing theatre with a company of actors. And they're doing it at the Birmingham Rep.
I think it's an inspiring story – and my wife Angela is one of the ones doing it.
‘Mandatory’ applications from a decade ago
I’ve just found a backup CD that looks like it’s from late 2002 and it’s like a time capsule. Then as now, I was devoted to software and I ran my life through various applications. Of course I mean my professional life as a writer but also, frankly, everything. Not a single day goes by that I don’t use a good half dozen applications and in every case they have earned that spot. They are so good or they are so right for what I need that I can neither comprehend how I worked without them nor conceive how I could ever work without them in the future.
But the future is a funny place. You only have to look to the past to find that out.
This CD is labelled Mac Apps. It’s a backup of my most precious and most used software in 2002. There’s folder of system bits I’ve not bothered to look into yet, there’s a folder I’ve called Nice for some reason. But then there is a folder called Mandatory. Wherever I go, whatever Mac I work on, these are the tools I have to have with me. There are eleven.
Corel WordPerfect 3.5 Enhanced
I’m astonished that this was there as late as 2002. I liked WordPerfect for Mac, I was in a minority there but I did, yet it ceased to exist such a long time ago. I think this was me hanging onto it to the bitter end but the bitter end must’ve come pretty soon afterwards because WordPerfect for Mac doesn’t run on Mac OS X.
Desktop Printer Utility
Not one single clue what this is for.
Disc Burner and Disk First Aid
Notice the c and the k endings. I’m just saying. I could work this pair out if I tried, but it’s not going to happen. Except that I did use a descendent of Disk First Aid just yesterday: Disk Utility. Was it truly ever mandatory, though?
DVD Region Switch Autolauncher
I don’t know what the autolauncher bit did now but region coding, I well remember region coding. This commercial decision to block people from buying DVDs outside their own home region. Even if the DVD they want has never and will never be released there. Nobody with any interest ever stood still for that decision, and I didn’t either.
Final Draft 4.1
I still use Final Draft today. I have version 8.0.3.1 but there is a version 9. I’m unlikely to buy that. But I did buy Final Draft for iPad, it’s still useful enough to me to be worth upgrading sometimes and the Mac one does stay in my dock.
Microsoft Outlook
There’s mandatory because I liked something and there’s mandatory because some firm or client demanded it. Surely this is the latter. I don’t remember there being an Outlook for OS 9, I thought the Mac version was called Entourage around this time. But here it is. And there it goes.
Now Up-to-Date and Contact
Oh, now, these I miss. These I’d be using today if I could. It was actually a pair of applications: Now Up-to-Date was a Calendar and Now Contact was an address book. I remember they worked together very well and that every time I’ve tried an calendar or address book since, I’ve been judging it against these two. If I imagine I would’ve held on to WordPerfect for as long as I could, I know I wouldn’t have given up NUDC willingly. But times move on, hardware and operating systems move on, you can neither buy NUDC now nor run it on any current machines. It’s a loss. Mind you, I’m no longer the power user I was for calendars so the one that comes on my Mac is fine enough for me. Especially as OmniFocus, my current beloved To Do manager shows you today’s tasks along with a peek at the calendar for today’s events. So useful. But I’ll raise a mug of tea to NUDC tonight.
OED
And I will sob about this. Weirdly, it’s not six hours since I told someone the tale. Back when I worked on computer magazines, journalists used to blag more than they blogged. Some people got press trips to Vegas, practically everyone got computers on short- and long-term loans. My biggest blah was this. The Oxford English Dictionary on CD-ROM. The original disc is still on my shelf. But neither it nor this backup copy has worked in a long time. I’d have said since the 1990s but presumably I’m wrong. Still, it’s another victim of changing and developing platforms and operating systems. I miss this more than I can say and I don’t believe you can buy an up to date version: you can only subscribe to an online one for more than I can afford or blag.
PageSpinner 4.1
Not a clue.
Virex
What? Anti-virus on a Mac in 2002 and I called it Mandatory? Let’s just walk away from that. I was young.
I wonder what hardware I was using then. I think it was a black PowerBook but I’m rubbish with computer names and models, I only remember what I do with them.
I’m feeling all nostalgic for a time not a heartbeat ago. I’m feeling as nostalgic for the OED on CD-ROM as you might be for whatever music was in the top twenty in your school days.
But I look at each of these applications, at least the ones I can remember what they did, and I can see how much better things are today. NUDC would look out of date, I know. Seriously, I know: there was a failed project to bring it back in the 2000s and I was right there using the betas and contributing. OmniFocus plus OS X’s address book and calendar together beat NUDC. I know.
Yet in another ten or twelve years, will I even remember what OmniFocus does? It’s not like there’s a huge clue in the title.
Thanks for letting me tell you all this. It’s been a buzz.
Very, very snap review: RescueTime
You know how you hear about something and then suddenly it’s everywhere? I’ve been hearing of RescueTime like it’s a new thing but it’s been around at least for a while and it does this (click to see it better):
If you didn’t click – and honestly who has the time to click? – then what it says is that I have spent about a minute and a half in Photoshop today. And that was the result. A cropped screen grab you can barely see. Oh, and also the wee cropped-even-closer graphic in Save a Whole Second When You’re Installing Software on Macs. A minute and a half. Wasn’t worth it, really, was it?
But it also tells me I stopped by the Omni Group website – not a shock, Omni does my long-beloved To Do manager OmniFocus and my recently-becoming-beloved OmniOutliner – and some stuff about how I piddled about in my Mac’s Finder. As you do.
But if that looks a bit rubbish as a snapshot of my entire working day – it’s now 11:45 and I’ve been writing since 5am so I promise I’ve accomplished more than that – it is a terrific snapshot of the three minutes since I installed RescueTime.
In the free version that I’m trying out, RescueTime does this logging so that you can see where in the world you spent your time. I’m looking forward to how it describes my bacon sandwiches at lunchtime. But armed with all this, you can see where you are effective and where you are procrastinating. You can see what on your computer keeps you working and what keeps you from working too. There’s a paid-for Premium version which lets you work with that information directly: it assigns scores to how distracting various sites or activities appear to be to you and then you can say no more. For the next thirty minutes, or whatever you choose, the premium version of RescueTime will deny you access to what most distracts you.
The premium version has other features and costs $9.99 US/month. The free one is impressing me, a whole four minutes in, so I’m going to keep it around for a time longer. I wrote in The Blank Screen (UK edition, US edition) about software that blocks distracting websites by actually blocking the whole internet but I have never used any of it. This might change my mind.
This week on Self Distract… Right of Centre
It’s not a political thing. If you’ve read an inch of me on this screen, you’re not rushing to think I’m right of centre. But you’re probably also not rushing to think I cry like a baby under the right artistic situations. And that’s what this week’s edition of my long-running personal blog is exactly about.
If that hasn’t intrigued you into reading Self Distract: Right of Centre, at least please promise you’ll keep the bit about my crying to yourself.
Your pocket now carries everything Radio Shack could offer in 1991
This won't speed up your work or give you anything useful that can help with what you're doing today, but it will give you pause. And it will make you appreciate the iPhone in your pocket anew – by comparing it to an advert from 1991.
The ad is for Radio Shack – which was known here in the UK as Tandy but was in other ways identical and doubtlessly ran ads like this – and Trending Buffalo says:
The back page of the front section on Saturday, February 16, 1991 was 4/5ths covered with a Radio Shack ad.
There are 15 electronic gimzo type items on this page, being sold from America’s Technology Store. 13 of the 15 you now always have in your pocket.
Read the full article to see the tastefully understated 1991 print ad in full plus the fifteen things Trending Buffalo is talking about. And maybe even why the writer is called Trending Buffalo.