Penny Hero (dot) Net

I feel a tiny TINY bit bad for those awesome sites who’ve long maintained archives of public domain literature (Gutenberg, C.U.T., and this UK library to name a few), because now they’ve got some serious competition. But at the same time, now they don’t HAVE to maintain those libraries. They probably weren’t making a lot of money off of them anyway, so now they can use those resources for something ELSE.

From the end-user and lit-geek’s point of view, this is HELLA amazing to have access to ALL PD books all in one place… amazing and “why didn’t they do this before?” because Google’s got the resources and the culture to maintain a stable, permanent, growing library. No downtime, no difficulty finding anything… if one of the little guys’ libraries was incomplete, or their servers went down, it’s Bad… But that’s not going to happen any more! I think Google taking this on is a step in the Right Direction toward an open exchange of all kinds of Knowledge. Something tells me that’s part of Google’s vision of the internet. :) Maybe. :) Just a gut feeling.

Anyway, muahahahaha. Now I can read the FULL TEXT of Alexander von Humboldt Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe from 1871 or something else equally cool like old old OLD grammar handbooks. (GOD this would have helped me when i was researching the history of punctuation last year or that old history project I did on the integrated circuit back in high school.

Finding OLD OLD texts in the library was a bitch… first your library has to own the book (or know a library that owns it and send for it), and then you have to go FIND IT… and then you usually have to carry it around. Screw that. I’m not that strong and I used to have to walk to campus… and with my research, I needed to read a TON of old books that almost NEVER were in any kind of electronic form. Thank you Google for giving this to the world so that no one else will have to feel my back breaking pain ever again.)

Anyway, I’m excited about this. Even if I’m a little tiny bit sad for the littler guys who maintain their own PD libraries. This is going to destroy them all, even while it makes literary geeks like me very very happy.

Guess how much work I’m going to get done today… heh.

Anyway, here’s the official google blog post all about this.

Macworld shares the happy OO news.

Microsoft Office alternative, OpenOffice, will ship in a native version for OS X next month.

You have NO IDEA how happy this makes me. It’s soo difficult for me to run OO on my mac, because NeoOffice and running X11 take up too many resources and slow everything down. NeoOffice is really buggy for me and has been both when I was using Tiger and Panther. It was just awful. Friends have tried to help me, have told me to stop complaining and buy some $20 word processor… no one seemed to understand my pain.

I’ve blogged about my wordprocessor pain before and it resulted in some big discussion, which basically added up to “you’re screwed because no one writes FOSS for OSX.

Well, I needed free, I needed open source, and I needed it to be stable. I especially needed this as an English major. And next month, I’ll finally have it!

Well, I wish this’d been released a few months ago. :) Sure would have helped… haha.

I don’t care much for reality tv. In fact, I pretty much hate it. Yup. But this opinion on the “Racial” Survivor show was funny and intelligent:

First, unless four white cops get caught on videotape billy-clubbing a black man, and then all get let off the hook, television has little or no power to inspire racial violence. Second, Americans don’t rise up for anything nowadays, or else people would be rioting over unleaded being $3 a gallon and the president continuing a war most of us oppose. And third, dividing “Survivor” into ethnic tribes is more likely to keep people off the streets and in their homes watching TV, where they ought to be.

My favorite was the “American’s don’t rise up for anything nowadays” bit. SO TRUE. SO SAD!

We need more riots!

This reminds me of a conversation I had last night about how congress needs to grow a backbone and confront the president about the crap job he’s doing. Americans who oppose stuff need to lose their Birkenstock sandals and stop being apathetic. (joke shamelessly stolen from Sherman Alexie) blah blah.

Anyway, somehow that political criticism has seeped into a commentary about reality TV. That’s the kind of “American” mentality I’d like to see more of in general.

I don’t know why I didn’t see this before now (it’s been two whole days!) but, according to lots of news sources (news.google) google opened up Writely for general registration!

I’ve been a really big fan of writely for probably six months now… BEFORE Google acquired them! A friend of mine and I wrote a collaborative project last Winter (about online collaborative writing, no less) using Writely. (It was a very meta-meta written research project. good fun. sorta… actually, not at all. but that had nothing to do with Writely and more to do with the overwhelming nature of our project)

Anyway, I’m excited, aren’t you?!

Why I love Writely:

When my friend and I were searching for online collaborative writing software, Writely was the only one that seemed to be 100% aligned with our goals and interests in collaborative writing. At the time, Writely didn’t yet have the feature to track which writer made which change, and we thought that was a cool deviation from conventional writing tools because we were interested in truly blending two author’s voices and words (although, we’ve sinced learned that there is more to individual voice than a timestamp and a username attached).

Writely was also the only tool we saw that was apparently designed exactly for what we wanted to use it for: write an essay collaboratively. It’s marketed more generally, as an all-purpose wordprocessor instead of as something for technical writers or for corporate collaborative documents, or anything like that.

I loved writely because it was community based, open, and very easy to use. It represented a direction that I think more webbased tools should go in (and perhaps already are): target a specifically more general audience but keep the software simple and contained. Visual interfaces are GOOD when well-designed with “what people actually do” in mind. Keep the feature-set simple, intuitive and specific to the job it’s designed to do (feature-creep == bad). Use open communication forums like a web-forum or a blog to keep in touch with users and keep up with the “what people actually use/need” current.

It’s been my “mission” for a long time (well, since I met Alex Polvi, anyway… who made me realize that my perspective on technology isn’t worthless) to try and help bridge the gap between non-geek “end users” and the tools I know could help them. It started with me wanting to share OpenOffice.org with other English majors, or help them learn how to maintain their computer better so that stuff wouldn’t crash at 3am when they’re trying to write an essay. I tried sharing Ubuntu with some, but it was still too “intimidating” (read “different from windows/mac”) and “buggy” (read, when stuff does break, it really breaks, and sometimes its hard for someone like me to find a linux geek without feeling stupid, or annoying etc).

I want poor students (like I was) to know what’s out there and that they don’t have to pirate the most popular (corporate, closed source, buggy, vulnerable, EXPENSIVE) office suite in order to pass Wr121. They’re already paying enough on tuition and textbooks… their pencils, paper, and wordprocessors should be cheap, if not free!

I knew I was lucky, because I grew up geeky and knew how to search for free alternatives to what most other people used. I also had this nagging problem with pirating software after I left high-school age because I think that the need for piracy at all demonstrates that the industry isn’t meeting its userbase’s needs.

I want it to be possible to use powerful free things (like linux, OpenOffice.org) to do Whatever You Need WITHOUT the need to be a total tech-geek or experienced trouble-shooter.

Anyway, Writely seemed to be totally aligned with my views on collaborative writing, literacy, software, and openness, so I fell in love. Hard. :)

So obviously, I was thrilled when Google acquired them. And now I’m even more thrilled that they’re finally opening registration. Woo hoo!

Anyway, nothing but awesome can come of this… and I’m done blogging for now.

Oh, and btw, here’s the writely blog.

It was Beth’s Birthday yesterday.

And today is a bad day for google videos to temporarily be unable to accept more video… because I had to go to Youtube to upload the clip of her getting a “lapdance”:

Click here for Beth’s lapdance. (this’ll go on google videos instead as soon as they let people upload again.)

Those crazy kids. (yes, she DID give me permission to post it, although she had been drinking a little. I think it’s cute and funny.)

Seriously, though. Happy birthday to Beth.

Even though we didn’t have any candles on the cake Mike made, I think it was a good night, and I’m glad I drove up to see her and say goodbye. She’s going back to Ecuador tomorrow and we won’t see her again until January. :( Beth, I’ll miss you lots! blog lots and lots please! Find another skeleton!

I’d been telling people I worked with in the Writing Center that in a business environment, emails should be short, easy to reply to, and direct.

I thought I knew what that meant… I’m a good writer, confident in my ability to be professional and clear… direct and concise… I asked a client a question 7 days ago about something related to their company… something I needed to know in order to finish something for them, and never got a reply. At all.

I basically wrote:

Can you give us more information about your [type of service] services? For example, which products on your site apply to these offers? How big can orders be? Do you have any electronic or print materials describing these services we can reference?

And then I said “my goal is to do x, y, and z with this information” in about 2 sentences…

I really thought that this was concise enough. It really only asks one question “can you give us more information” and then clarifies what types of information we need. If I saw an email like that in the Writing Center, I would have said “good job with being clear, clarifying, etc” and thought it fit the business environment.

However, like I said, I never got a reply, and today we were about to finish the project for this client and we still had these unresolved questions.

The bosses from Portland came down today and our President shot an email to this client to get the issue resolved because for one thing, time is running out. His email was literally 2 lines long and just asked

“Hey [name], do you do [x] or do you do [y] for your customers with your [type of service] services? Thanks, [Name].”

…

We got a reply in 5 minutes. He saw my email and suggested that it might have APPEARED that I was asking a complicated question simply by having so many words in my query.

So really folks, short is better. It’s better to shoot off a few emails several times a day with specific questions than to put them all into one email and send it out hoping for a long complete reply.

Moral of the story is: ask one question per email. Make it something that the person can answer sitting down in about 30 seconds. DON’T suggest options or alternative ways of seeing the question. “Either/or” emails work well. Essayistic thoughtful ones do not.

DON’T BE AN ENGLISH MAJOR.

I’m sort of proud of this. Just wanted to let you know that some “reporters” actually do listen to people who write to them to inform them that no oats were “abused.”

I suppose he was trying to be funny, but his articles are syndicated as “news” so I didn’t really look too closely at his “humor”. Serves me right for being knee-jerky, I guess, because he quoted my note in its entirety. At least I was polite, or that would have been embarassing. :)

Here’s a direct link to the corrected article.

First, let’s resolve some FAQs:

No aliens were harmed in the making of this crop circle.

No farmers or land owners were harmed in the making of this crop circle. (we had PERMISSION!)

No, we were not really abducted by aliens and forced to act as their personal slaves to promote some alternative browsing lifestyle. We did this of our own free will because we love Firefox!

YES there were GIRLS involved! (like me and Beth!)

Rumor has it that the original idea came from a girl John sat next to on a plane in the not-so-distant past and in a not-so-distant place. The idea spread like a hot hot hot conspiracy theory through the interweb and through our humanoid geeky hearts. It was like wildfire through an oat field! A wild fireFOX spreading through an oat field!

Anyway, it’s true! It’s real! It’s finished! And I was THERE! (I still can’t believe it)

Here are some links to Important Stuff related to the circle:

• The official story we wrote post-circle to document what we did
• The Mozilla bugzilla bug we resolved
• A short video clip from FirefoxFlicks
• The LUG-hosted photo gallery
• My own photo gallery (at the time of this post, not all are uploaded yet)
• My digital camera video clips

I’ll add more links as I find them:
Firefox on Technorati <--all over the place!
all over the place on google search!
Firefox Tales!

We Got Slashdotted!

Crushing oats with 2×4s in both 2am freezing cold temperatures and broad-daylight HOT SUN is… really NOT how I expected to spend a weekend evar in my life. I’m sunburned for the first time since I moved from hawaii, and I’ve got OATS. hehheheh.

WE MADE A FIREFOX CROP CIRCLE! Helicoptors, small airplanes, and GOOGLE!

Everyone got really great photos from the air. I can’t upload any of my photos yet because I left my cable at home. That’s why this is part one of… who knows how many.

Anyway, for starters, check out the firefox flicks video about OSCON where the Mozilla crew hooked up with the OSU crew and started the real work to make this happen.

Anyway, I took some oats as proof I was there, and I got to be the one filmed knocking down the very last of the design. woo hoo!

More will probably show up on other places online. Links to follow as soon as people start posting and digging and blogging.