random things.

Today's addition to the blogroll is Squeaky Wheel Seeks Grease. (Is that an original name for a blog, or what?) I just spent a bit of time going through her archives, and boy howdy, can she write. I particularly liked this post on Windbag Moore's latest agitprop piece "Sicko".

Speaking of writing: I've had the Neo for a day and a half now. My usual output per day is right around a thousand words. Some days, I only manage to get down a paragraph...but it's a really good paragraph. Other days, I crank out half a chapter. Most days, however, my natural cutoff seems to be right around a thousand words--nothing awfully prolific, but it adds up.

Yesterday, my word count was 2,500, and I can't recall having parked myself at a desk for the specific purpose of writing. I just dashed out all those words in quick spurts of typing during the day, thanks to the fact that I had a lightweight writing machine with practically unlimited battery life handy. Sit on the couch with the kid while he's reading a book and watching Mickey Mouse Clubhouse? There's a paragraph or three. Sitting in the kitchen waiting for the baby's milk to warm up? There's another paragraph. At the end of the day, all those quick little five-minute writing sessions add up.

got an ipod? got too much money?

A few days ago, I wrote about simplification.

This is not it.



A seventy-odd pound jukebox that serves as a docking station and speakers for a four-ounce iPod? Talk about taking a great concept (the simplification of your music CD collection) and turning it upside down.

But hey, it's a free country. Statistically, there are roughly three iPods for every man, woman, child, and village goat on this planet, so I'm sure there'll be plenty of people out there who can't wait to turn their pocket-sized music player into something the size and weight of a respectable minifridge.

so long, laptop.

So the big brown truck of happiness showed up today and dropped off two packages: my eagerly-awaited Alphasmart Neo, and a CH Flight Yoke.

The Neo is simply excellent. If your daily routine includes a bunch of writing, for whatever reason, this thing is the device for you. It's about the size of a standard sheet of paper, weighs less than two pounds, and still has a full-sized keyboard. There's no waiting for it to boot--you turn it on, and a second later, you're looking at the blinking cursor waiting for your text input. If you turn it off, it'll pick up right where you left it once you get back to it. Every keystroke is automatically saved, so there's nothing to save manually. The memory has eight file spaces of 64k each, which comes to about 10,000 words per file. (It doesn't seem like a lot of memory in the age of multiple gigabytes of RAM, but this thing is just for ASCII text, and 64k times eight is a lot of text.)

When you're finished with the writing for the day (or week), you plug the Neo into your PC via USB cord, open Word or any other program that accepts text input, and hit the "send" button. Your scribblings paste themselves into the desktop program as if a speed typist on crank is hacking away at the keys.

Best of all: the thing is so light and sturdy that you can take it anywhere, and the battery lasts 700 freaking hours of writing time. (That's a month of non-stop writing.) Apparently, these things are popular with a lot of schools, and they run all year on one set of AA batteries. There's no laptop ever built that comes close to even a tenth of that kind of runtime.

Yeah, I probably sound like an Alphasmart rep, but this thing really is all that and a bag of chips. It's utterly useless to anyone who needs anything other than a word processor, but for writers, this thing is the best invention since Gutenberg's press.

Oh yeah, the flight yoke is the berries, too. Flying a Cessna with a stick just doesn't feel quite right, and the yoke adds a lot of realism. If you're into flight sims, and you can stand the snickers of your friends and family for getting your geek on with a flight yoke bolted to your computer desk, I highly recommend it.

Thus end today's product reviews. If anyone from Alphasmart reads this, contact me for my snail mail address, so you can send me a check and/or some free loot.

thoreau says: ditch your iphone.

Okay, so Thoreau was a tree-hugging hippie, but he had some salient points. His views on taxation and civil disobedience are laudable, for example, and the older I get, the more I find myself agreeing with his ideas on simplification.

Five years ago, I would have been in line to get my paws on an iPhone. I used to be a gadget hound of the first order--when the original iMac came out, I did stand in line, money in hand, to purchase one of the first ones for sale at the CompUSA in Nashua. I used to be a proponent of what my friend Mark calls "the all-singing, all-dancing multimedia device", coveting and buying gizmos that shoehorned the maximum amount of capabilities into as small a package as possible. The first Windows CE handhelds? I had a bunch of them, despite the fact that the software sucked, and their batteries lasted a tenth of the runtime offered by Palm's devices. Hell, I would have bought an iPhone simply for the fact that it says "Apple" on it, and because it's shiny and glossy.

Fast forward to today, and I'm not very tempted to get a combined phone/music player/web-browsing-and-email device. (And no, it's not just because the piggy bank for toy money is chronically empty these days.) Sure, it looks gorgeous, and I have no doubt that it does all those things in a beautiful and simple fashion, but it doesn't fit my recent trend towards simplification.

My carry guns are one example of this trend. I didn't wake up one day and decide to pare my carry guns down to just S&W K-frames--it just sort of evolved that way. When I made the K-frame my regular carry piece, it was the simplicity of operation and complete reliability that was the initial factor, but after a while I found that I also really enjoyed not having to carry extra magazines. (Speed strips are far easier to carry around--just stuff a pair into your front pocket and be on your way.) Then I appreciated being able to keep all my brass, and after a while I realized that I shot the K-frame better than anything else. I actually ended up carrying the same gun all the time, instead of switching to the Carry Gun of the Month every few weeks, and as a result my skill and comfort level with the old S&W improved quite a bit.

So I ended up getting a duplicate for my carry gun, which is identical in every respect except the length of the cylinder chambers. (My Model 13 is a .357 Magnum, and my Model 10 is a .38 Special.) Both guns are set up identically, with the same grips, loaded with the same rounds (.38 Special +P LSWCHP), and they ride in the same holsters. You can't tell them apart without reading the roll marks on the barrels. Now I have a backup gun for the one I carry, and if the M13 ever breaks or gets taken after a self-defense shooting, all I have to do is get its twin and stick it into the empty holster. I don't have to worry about finding leather, keeping magazines loaded, futzing around with "feed-friendly" carry loads, or getting used to a different manual of arms. Simple is good: you can see the loaded status of both guns just by glancing at the cylinder, both operate in exactly the same fashion, and there's no extraneous fiddle-faddle. Even the sights are just grooves in the topstraps and no-snag low front sights on thick barrels. Recoil is next to nothing even with the +P carry loads, and both guns put those 158-grainers exactly where you point them.

Well, since the simplicity concept works well in that particular area (self-defense weaponry), I started thinking that it might work well in other areas as well. The idea is to pare down the required hardware for a task to the most simple form that still allows full functionality.

I use laptops for writing, and up until recently I usually bought the most powerful machine I could afford every few years. Then I realized that I really only use my portables for writing, and that I didn't need the extra capabilities afforded by a new laptop. I started to regress my writing machines to earlier technology, just to see how far I could downgrade before getting less productive, and to my surprise I found out that writing on an old machine actually enhances my productivity because it offers fewer distractions than state-of-the-art hardware. A ten-year-old Powerbook will still run Word as well as a brand new MacBook, and it won't beckon with World of Warcraft. Then I took that equation to its logical conclusion, and bought one of these, which only lets you do writing...700 hours of it on one battery charge. No email, no Internet, no games, nothing but empty storage space to fill with letters, words, and sentences.

That Thoreau fellow...he may have been a patchouli-scented tree hugger, but that "simplify" thing seems to work pretty well. We seem to be in the middle of the ADHD Age, and our tools and toys reflect that. Buck the trend and try to shed the fluff for a little while, and it might just amaze you how much you can get done when your technology serves you instead of distracting you. I'm a complete and utter capitalist, so I get a twitch whenever somebody starts ranting about "unchecked consumerism", but maybe we don't need the latest and greatest all the time, and the term "obsolete" is used far too liberally.

truth in advertising (sort of.)

Robin, in one of her rare beer moods, brought home a sixer of Beck's Dark from the grocery store. The cardboard carrier has the following claim on it--each line in progressively smaller script:

America's
#1
Imported
German Dark Beer

Well, golly gee. Can we make an even more specific claim to excellence? I think there are all of three imported German dark beers available in this country. They need to hang on to their #1 sales spot in that niche, otherwise they'll have to reprint the whole run of carriers to include an even smaller line at the bottom of the original claim. This one would have to read "that's called Beck's Dark".

oh, the shame.

Today I managed to break a 1.2-million-dollar aircraft. (Thankfully, it was mine...and a digital rather than an actual aircraft.)

I spent my past forty-odd flight hours trundling about Europe in a Cessna 172, which has fixed landing gear. Today, I decided to do a leg of my pretend cross-Europe flight in my old pal, the Beech Baron 58...which has retractable landing gear. (Some of you may anticipate where this is going.)

So I come in for a perfect landing at Vaernes in Norway...80KIAS, two notches of flaps, textbook flare, and touchdown right on the numbers, smooth as silk.

*skreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee*

"Hey, what are those sparks in front of my windshield?"

*facepalm*

That'll damage your ego. Nailing the last twenty-odd landings with a fixed-gear C172, and then neglecting to hit the gear lever on final and ignoring the "GEAR UP" warning on the dash that's merrily blinking away. Put back the keys for the light twin and go back to the Sky Moped, rookie.

Light blogging...I've been busy juggling the kids. (Not literally, mind you.) I get a few hours in the evening, and maybe another hour or two in the middle of the day, during quote-unquote "nap time", which Quinn spends playing away in his room six days out of seven. The short one is putting on some weight, and now only wakes up two or three times a night as opposed to every hour and a half.

Mark Pixler, of Dillon's Blue Press catalog, has asked me for permission to run "Why the Gun is Civilization" in their September issue, which is enormously flattering. I may be able to contribute more to The Blue Press in the future, which is even more flattering. Their readership/recipient list constitutes a non-trivial amount of readers, which is an awful lot of exposure for a little niche blogger like myself.

tales from the place where great britain used to be.

In this month's Reason magazine, we learn that an English chap called Brian Seaton got in a bind with the law for forgetting a Swiss Army knife in his luggage when checking in for a flight to go on vacation. The police in Leicestershire charged him with "possessing a knife in public without good reason".

It took Mr. Seaton nine months and ten thousand quid to clear his name.

The kicker: the Swiss Army knife in question was a retirement gift from his employer of more than twenty years...the Leicestershire Police Department.

***

In other news on the subject, the U.K. now has more than 20 percent of the world's CCTV cameras, even though it constitutes only 0.2 percent of the world's inhabitable land. In another article in the same Reason magazine (entitled "Tony the Nanny"), Brendan O'Neill lists the shameful accomplishments of Tony Blair in the field of civil liberties erosions. As of July 1st, smoking is banned in all pubs, clubs, and workplaces in the U.K., there are "anti-youth gadgets" installed in some public areas to drive away "loitering" youth by means of high-frequency noise, and the police have the right to issue so-called "Anti-Social Behavior Orders", where a police officer can forbid a citizen from walking on a certain street, using foul language in public, or even wearing a hooded sweatshirt, all without the need for proof of any guilt or misdemeanor.

The article closes to say that Blair's legacy is "life in a permanent state of parole" for the citizenry.

That, of course, is the only difference between the liberal utopists and the conservative ones: one group wants the government to be your mommy, the other wants it to be your daddy. You can bet your behind that someone in Washington has been taking notes on the accomplishments of Blair's New Labour in the field of public order, and those ideas are going to make their way over here sooner or later. And don't make the mistake to think that only the liberals are going to try a page out of Blair's playbook--there are plenty of so-called conservatives on this side of the pond who see nothing wrong with that kind of degree of surveillance and police authority, as long as they get to determine which kind of behaviors to suppress.