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Thursday, April 29, 2010

Pardon the dust

For almost nine years I have created this blog on blogger.com and used blogger's FTP publishing capability to host it at earthlink.net. But as of the end of April 2010, Google is ending the FTP publishing option. (I have enjoyed their services for free for all those years, so no complaints from me.)

For the time being I will be storing this blog at Google's servers, and ideally nothing will be different, at least for the archives. I do hope nothing goes wrong.

Labels: blogger, blogging

Saturday, February 06, 2010

Change is a-comin'

I recently received an email from Google's Blogger service, which powers this blog, that they are doing away with support for blogs which publish using FTP, of which this is one. They said that fewer than half of one percent of their users' blogs were of this type, and though it was the state of the art when I began it in 2001, time has obviously passed me by.

So I'll be trying to figure out a way forward for the site. Since I've been blogging per se less and less, maybe the blogging function is no longer the most important, I dunno. We'll see.

Meanwhile, what have I been doing lately? I went to L.A. with VonCookie last weekend. When I came back I got the flu. This week I'm going on my trip to the Midwest to research part of the novel I'm working on. And I finished bringing out my novel Make Nice through the Lulu self-publishing site, so if you've been dying to read that book which I worked on from 1997 to 2003, and which I almost got published fer reals, but didn't, you can pick it up there. I'll have a more formal launch of sorts later.

Labels: blogger, blogging

Sunday, January 10, 2010

Uh, happy new year

I didn't mean to stop blogging. I've just been paying as much attention as possible to the novel I'm working on. But something occurred to me over the holidays, as I became aware, in the back of my mind, that it had been a long time since I last made a blog entry. I realized that I'm just not paying attention to pop culture the way I had been, in the period from 2002 to 2007, when I would put up as many as five or six posts a day about politics, pop, and the "bad behavior" I used to take such pleasure in recording and making snarky comments about.

I'm no less sarcastic. I'm just not paying as close attention anymore, because I'm putting as much attention and energy and thought as possible into my novel. Writing a novel doesn't give you as much instant gratification, but it's the only possible thing I'll ever be remembered for writing, so I'm giving it my best shot. Not that there's anything wrong with blogging, which I'll still do. In fact I'll probably do it twenty times this month. Or two. Whatever.

Labels: blogging

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Uncovering a mysterious blogger

This article on Streetsblog, a progressive pro-bicycle and transit website, is fascinating. The lengthy piece, worth reading in its entirety, explains how Streetsblog staff uncovered the identity of a hyperactive negative commenter with his own website, Commuter Outrage. Evidently the man behind Commuter Outrage, a twenty-something conservative who works in a civilian job at the Pentagon, was digging up material for his screeds during work hours using his employer's (and the government's) resources, and Streetsblog's questions about these practices quickly led the secretive fellow to disappear the entire Commuter Outrage website.

Instructive were the easy-to-understand steps taken by Streetsblog staff to uncover the man's identity, along with evidence that suggested he was blogging on his employer's time. Also interesting was the fact that the attacks by Commuter Outrage and its putative staff (really just this one fellow, apparently) were not some right-wing conspiracy, but just some really energetic (if error-prone) work by one angry little man. It's amazing how much one angry, energetic little guy can do on the internet.

technorati: bloggers, privacy, identity

Labels: blogging, closet cases, crypto-fascists, privacy, Republicans, the internets

Tuesday, February 03, 2009

Dept. of Too much information

Look at this -- something called SocialWhoIs. The idea is:

Once you've setup an account on Socialwhois, you can create a more detailed biography (Twitter limits you to 160 characters), add links to more social profiles, and add in some interests, which then become clickable so you can find other people on Twitter and Friendfeed (who have also created Socialwhois profiles) with similar tastes.

Stuff like this is like the opposite of what I want the internet to be like. The guy who posted that has this problem:

While the names of some new followers I get on Twitter or Friendfeed immediately ring a bell, with others, I have no idea who the person might be.

Jesus Christ, if you don't know who they are, why should you care?? Are you really on the internet to "find other people with similar tastes" and interests? Then go to a dating site, you tool!

This is why I'm not on Friendster or Facebook or even LinkedIn. I really don't want to get into the whole etiquette of social networking. It's already strange enough that people whom I don't know follow my Twitter feed, but at least that doesn't require any reciprocal action from me.

Then again, I realize I don't have a great instinct for creating networks of friends in the first place.

Labels: blogging, social networking, the internets, twitter

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

On Open Salon: The 'spiritual, not religious' cliché

The vision of an infinitude of solitaries all practicing their own tiny, self-wrought "spirituality" is really a vision of spiritual death. Instead, I believe spiritual health depends on a recognition of interdependence, service to and with others, and participation in a cultural tradition that has the potential to beautify and conserve society.

More at my Open.Salon.com page.

Labels: blogging

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

The year in blogs

I was sad to read today that Valleywag, a tech industry gossip blog I read because I work in the high tech industry, will be collapsed into its parent property, Gawker. As I wrote two years ago, I stopped reading Gawker a long time ago, and it would be a pain to have to start again, because I really don't want to have to sift through a bunch of crap about... oh, just to take a random example from today, Alex Kuczynski.

I know, who? Thank goodness, then, for RSS and Google Reader. I hope the Valleywag-only posts will have their own feed. Of course, there's always Silicon Alley Insider.

Speaking of Gawker properties, io9, their science and sci-fi-related property -- whose queen Annalee Newitz I interviewed early this year -- always makes me want to surf porn. I don't know why.

My new favorite blog site of the year (new to me, that is)? The Politico site. But now that the election's over I have the feeling I won't find it as compelling.

I wish Michelle Obama would start a blog. That could be awesome. But in the meantime, let me offer this post on Jezebel by writer Megan Carpentier. Recounting the opening today of the Republican Governor's Conference, she writes in part:

Former GOP pollster/strategist Frank Luntz took his turn shitting on the party and McCain today, too, saying, among other things, that "Stevie Wonder reads a teleprompter better than John McCain." Luntz, who was a GOP star in 1994, is so far up Newt Gringrich's ass that he knows what donor's cock Gincrich just finished sucking to fund his campaign in 2012 from the taste alone.

Suddenly I have something to look forward to.

technorati: gawker, valleywag, io9

Labels: blogging, blogs, Gawker, io9, Valleywag

Tuesday, July 01, 2008

BoingBoing - Violet Blue - memory hole kerfuffle

I've resisted commenting on the kerfuffle in which all mentions of San Francisco blogger Violet Blue were suddenly erased last month from A-list blog BoingBoing. But today's Valleywag post by Melissa Gira Grant pretty much blows it wide open, reducing what initially seemed like a sinister case of Big Brother-type memory-holing into a jealous snit by an alleged former paramour.

The point most bloggers seem to be making -- that if this had happened anywhere else, it would have been reported with the usual mixture of glee and outrage on BoingBoing -- is hard to dispute. Pretty much every other aspect, such as Grant's parsing of BoingBoing's too-little-too-late excuse that it is entitled to be as "personal" and petty as it wants to be, is splitting the finest of hairs. There's a lot of harsh rhetoric blowing around the internets about this, including an anti-BoingBoing backlash [for example], and Grant's post will only inflame matters. What amuses me is how much it matters to everyone, making it clear that a high school hallway ethos pervades the internet and those who have become "famous" because of it. If anyone comes out ahead, it's Violet Blue, whose own comments and postings on the affair have shown admirable restraint. One thing I admire about Violet is that she always seems to remember that a few pixels one way or the other don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

technorati: Violet Blue, BoingBoing, internet censorship

Labels: bloggers, blogging, free speech, the internets

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Having fun over there

Breaking my previous record, I posted five entries in one day over at sf.metblogs. The tiger story, she has been good to me.

It occurred to me, as I was updating the fourth, news-filled post, that the tiger story is on the verge of becoming a classic SF story, like the JT LeRoy hoax, the dog mauling, and my favorite of all time, the Condor Club bouncer who was killed by Carol Doda's piano. (In that incident, which happened around 1980, a bouncer was killed while having sex after hours with one of the club's strippers on top of the piano. The piano was rigged to descend from the ceiling with Doda on top of it, her grand entrance. While the bouncer and the stripper were fucking, the piano's mechanism somehow got started, and the piano began rising toward the trap door, which was closed. The dancer was nimble enough to jump off, but the bouncer weighed over 300 pounds and couldn't get off the piano, as it rose to the ceiling, crushing him to death. Best! Story! Evar!!1!)

The 2005 chili finger story came close, but regrettably it happened in San Jose.

Let's see how the tiger's tale measures up:

Sex - no
Money - no, at least until the lawsuits start
Death - yes
Bizarre factor - yes
Celebrity - yes, when you include the lawyers
Happened largely in SF - yes
Took advantage of SF liberal fantasies about itself - yes

Clearly all that it lacks is sex. Sigh.

Labels: blogging, San Francisco, tiger

Sunday, January 13, 2008

Right, that's done

This just in: The NYT raises the possibility that Gawker is over. Me, I stopped reading it sometime in 2005. And I stopped reading Wonkette after the original editor left it. Blogs are not about the subjects they cover or their material. They're about voice. A consistent voice.

I've been spending more time lately filing posts on SF Metroblog, becoming its most consistent poster, though I'm not sure anyone really cares or is reading. I was cheered, however, when a local more famous blogger told me she thought that SF Metroblog did get attention; she was even surprised its writers aren't paid, but that might be because she just got a paid blogging gig. Anyway, I'm posting more there than here, these days, mostly because it's possible to do one or two good posts a day about San Francisco topics but hard to find time to surf around and post the stuff I really like to post about.

However, this is priceless. Some geek wandered the floor at the Consumer Electronics Show -- with a TV B Gone. Now that's anti-entertainment.

In personal news, today I have officially, and for about the fourth time, declared work on my novel How They Scored done, printed it out, and tomorrow I'm mailing it to my publisher. Which means they should be sending my agent a check within a month or so.

Barring any protests from How They Scored's publisher, I'll now go back to work on my India book, which is now titled "Bangalored".

technorati: How They Scored, novel writing, blogging

Labels: Bangalore novel project, blogging, Gawker, How They Scored, novel writing

Monday, January 07, 2008

Too much blogging is bad for you

When I interviewed Annalee Newitz, the editor of new futurism blog io9 on Saturday, she mentioned that working nonstop on the launch of the site for two months had given her her first case of repetitive stress injury.

Today the NYT had a piece on serious health problems of people who blog too much.

technorati: blogging

Labels: blogging

Thursday, November 01, 2007

Experiments

I am experimenting with a new internety thing called Tumblr, using it to manually clip interesting news stories: markpritchard.tumblr.com -- courtesy Alexis. Apparently you can use it to "clip" all sorts of things, but I can't figure out how to make the RSS feed from this blog -- which may well be broken -- appear in it.

I can also train its contents to appear here on this page -- but first I have to figure out a way to keep it from taking over half the page.

Meanwhile, a colleague at work -- I work as a technical writer at a giant software company large enough to have seven tech writers just in our division -- keeps asking me if I plan to do National Novel Writing Month. I said I'm not only already writing another novel as fast as I can, but the NaNo I started in November 2004 took me more than two years to finish and still needs a rewrite. In my opinion, National Novel Writing Month exists primarily to give people permission to start a novel -- and I'm past that point. I may not be past many points in my career as a novelist but I'm past that one.

technorati: writing, National Novel Writing Month, NaNoWriMo

Labels: blogging, novel writing, tools

Saturday, June 23, 2007

Done - er and done - er

Still polishing up my Bangalore book, with helpful comments from friends, and itching to get on my next project. What's that next project? A novel I have a contract to write in six months. Still trying to figure out what to do with it on the web. I was talking last night with A. about trying to do character blogs for each of the seven characters in the book, somewhat similar to what Chasing Windmills does.

They are a vlog dramatic series (now on hiatus), and if you go to that link and click on each of those pictures, you'll see a character blog. Each is written by the actor who appears as a character in the series. So that's like 11 different people each doing a character blog.

I'm not so sure I could or should do seven different character blogs myself and actually write the novel. On the other hand, it might be a good exercise to get into voice and character. Perhaps if I had more than six months it would be a good idea.

Labels: blogging, novel writing

Saturday, February 24, 2007

Inflate, inflate!

Man, since I got my new job two weeks ago the air really went out of this blog. (Update: I just noticed that Badger recently blogged about this very phenomenon.) Let me explain. At my old job I would surf the web from time to time during the day, and post. At my new job I can't do that, not least because the company blocks access to many internet sites. So, sorry about that.

Last night I went to a book party for my friend Sara's book and took some pretty mediocre photographs. People cringe when they see me coming with a camera.

You can come to the big public party for Sara's book on Sunday.

Labels: blogging, literary events, working