Bits & Pieces 2012-10-25

Links and things that I’ve run across recently.

Or Maybe I Need to Learn to Talk Like John Moschitta

… or Paris Geller.

My mind goes back to one episode of Gilmore Girls (“It Should Have Been Lorelai”, season 2, episode 14—and no, I didn’t know that off the top of my head) when Paris was trying to coach Rory for a debate, and trying to get her to up her wpm. (And Gilmore Girls, if you remember, was all about increasing the wpm.)

I finally sat down and turned my sketchy notes into a first draft of my bat-mitzvah speech: 1014 words. At 125 words per minute (a reasonably average speaking speed), that’s over 8 minutes of talking, which is 3 minutes too long.

So I need to cut about 40% of those words. Or else maybe I just need to learn to talk faster.

(However, I’m thinking I’ll clean up and post the full version of the speech in these pages, in a couple of weeks after the bat mitzvah is done.)

Do You Remember the “Internet”

This episode of The Computer Chronicles, from 1995, gave me a chuckle.

Wow! Look at all the cool things you can do with the Internet!

Too bad you can’t do your banking online, though, or search through practically every book ever published, on the road from your cellphone.

Life Is Stranger Than Reality

Here’s a cute piece listing 5 true stories cut from movies because they were too “unrealistic”.

From a more spiritual perspective, here are 10 lies we’ve been tricked into believing.

This topic has been near and dear to me of late, as the characters of my next Ardor Point novel tell lies to themselves as a matter of course, and it’s making them miserable. How often is this normal fare for our real lives, though? (A blog post coming soon—I hope—on ArdorPoint.com.)

A Reason for Life

I’ve finally made progress on Ardor Point #2, which I’m calling A Reason for Life, a story about a young couple, who struggle with their marriage, when he loses his job and falls into a deep depression; but they find strength and redemption from an unlikely source.

Friends, Don’t Send Me Email Attachments

DreamHost’s 40MB email-size limit is starting to get seriously annoying for me. [UPDATE: Except that it didn’t turn out to be DreamHost’s fault.] It wouldn’t be so bad if DreamHost bounced those emails [except maybe they do; I’ve never actually sent an email big enough to test the theory], but they simply drop them into a black hole. As a result, people send me files that I need to have, they assume I got them, and then weeks (or months) later, I run around panicking, because I thought they never sent the file that I was expecting.

I may be looking for an email alternative.

[After some focused debugging, at the prodding of a friend, I’ve discovered that my local server, on my LAN, was configured only to accept emails up to 10MB big. Sheesh! And a bug in the interaction between fetchmail and postfix dropped those messages on the ground. I’m fixing the configuration, at least, to allow much larger emails to be accepted by my local system.]

In the meantime, I have successfully sent and received larger files using Google Drive and via Facebook Messaging.

Today’s Quote

You can always tell when you’re on the road to success; it’s uphill all the way.

(Paul Harvey… or so it’s alleged)