Why I don’t trust George Bush.
I wish I had a real candidate I could vote for, rather than against. I’m tired of voting for the lesser of two evils. More than any others, this election I know I’m going to have to be voting one-handed; with the other it will be necessary to hold my nose.
…Pocket Full Of Rye. The latest in my re-visit with Dame Agathe Christie (I’m going back through Christie, in rough chronological order, depending upon availability of the hardcovers in local used book stores). It’s a Jane Marple, from Christie’s nursery rhyme period.
Characterization? Be serious, this is Christie; only minimal characterization allowed. The plots, of course, are everything for Dame Agatha, and it’s a good puzzle. I’d forgotten that this was one of the few Christies that doesn’t end in an arrest, though we know who did it (as do the police) and we get what is the final proof of the matter at the end.
Rex Fortescue is murdered, followed by a couple of other members of the household, in circumstances reminiscent of an old nursery rhyme. There’s a connection between Miss Marple and one of the victims, which brings her out of St Mary Mead to act the part of Avenging Angel, which she does so well.
Dame Agatha plays absolutely fair with us, and dangles everything in front of our noses, leaving it up to us what construction we put on the facts. That’s the part of Christie that I’ve always loved the best; she doesn’t waste a lot of time trying to lead us astray; she knows full well that we’ll be happy to do that all on our own, without any help from her, thank you very much.
While the current state of the art in the “cozy” owes much more to Sayers and Marsh, than Christie, she is still valuable, as she’s the quintessential puzzle-plot builder. Her novels are generally all very short, compared to today’s work, mainly because she spends very little space drawing three-dimensional characters. Add well-drawn characters to a Christie plot, though, and you’ll approach the perfection of the “cozy” art form.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden points to an EBay auction that is almost heart-rending.
Somebody who obviously has some trouble with self-editing is selling a manuscript, hoping to hit the Big Time financially. So far it appears he wants $150K(US), and the best offer he’s received as of the writing of this is a negative $698US (IOW, instead of buying the manuscript they want him to pay the costs of publication). I’ll give him this: it’s an interesting stunt to pull publicity towards it and himself. I haven’t read the manuscript, but I have read the sample paragraph, and I flashed back to the Star Wars kid. Be careful of the attention you draw, it may find you wanting.
“Oh, if only I had a Name, then I could sell millions of copies of my book!” In some ways, this unspoken claim is true. Some books do get sold to a publisher by Name Only. But not many. And if the first doesn’t merit it, the second won’t be sold that way, barring a very few exceptions. (Please don’t mention Jeffrey Archer in this context.) Likewise with the audience. Yes, I think Stephen King’s name on it could put the Portland, Maine, telephone directory on the bestseller list for a short while, but no longer than that. And it would greatly damage sales of his next few books, as the audience continued to hold a grudge against him for tricking them this time round.
As one who has a modicum of experience in this field, let me say that good writing is Hard Work. It’s not as easy as it looks, children. I can’t pass on the quality of the whole manuscript, but from the looks of the sample paragraph (and extrapolating from the assumption that the sample is what the author considered if not the best writing in the book, at least representative of the writing in it) there’s a lot of work to do on this. Find any currently selling novel with something resembling the final sentence in that paragraph, I dare you. Calling it purple would be an insult to purple prose. Words must be cut and polished, like gemstones, before they will shine.
“I’ve spoken the language all my life, it’s not very hard to write it,” is an attitude I’ve encountered too many times along my journey. It’s Not True. Reality Check? To say someone “speaks like a novel” or “sounds like a novel” is a criticism of their speech patterns. Spoken word and written word are different beasts. While the written word contains within it pieces which pretend to be spoken (next time you and your friends have a conversation, imagine what it would read like if every word, every sound, were transcribed, and you’ll see what I mean by “pretend”) it’s more than that. And it’s the more that causes the problem.
To write, read. Don’t read for ideas, but read for the sound of the language used. Read until the rhythm and sounds of the language become ingrained. I don’t care what the subject is, but you should. You should be reading the kind of book you’re trying to write. I don’t mean this too specifically; you don’t need to read books similar in plot to what you’re wanting to write. But read the genre. If you’re going to try for a bestseller, read bestsellers. You will write like what you read, at least at first, so be careful what you put in your mental hopper. Don’t settle for poor quality. The computer maxim, “Garbage In, Garbage Out,” applies here as well. To write like the best, read the best.
…it wasn’t going to work. Southern California air traffic control turned their back on the local boys and installed a bunch of servers from Redmond. Techworld has the not altogether unexpected tale of the result.
At least they were intelligent enough to know that you can’t count on Windows to run unassisted. They had an automatic shutdown cycle set up every 49.7 days, and made it a regular procedure to manually reboot the server every 30 days. Except they missed one manual cycle so when the self-defense shutdown happened, 800 planes were stranded in the air for three hours.
Anyone care to filk a new verse for “When Will They Ever Learn?”
The rules for the presidential “debates” have been agreed to, I see. All sorts of details agreed to — except, of course, the details that count. The room temperature, who has control of the thermostat — now that’s important. Also the height and placement of the podium, camera angles, may the candidates use their legs, all sorts of important stuff like that.
No mention of any penalties assessed for failing to answer the question, though. Just once I’d like to see them appoint a referee (or panel of judges) who would award 5 minutes of free face time on national TV to the opponent every time a candidate declined, in the judgement of the referee, to address the question and instead used the time to regurgitate a portion of his standard stump speech. Now that would be a debate worth watching!
It reminds me of the musical Chess. “The board will come from Sweden. Non-aligned wood.”
This will be short and brutal, but, I’m sorry, I think that’s all this book deserves. Just finished A Sudden, Fearful Death, by Anne Perry. It’s a Wiiliam Monk novel, the first of the series that I’ve read. Also the last. The paperback was 439 pages long, of which a little over 50 were actual mystery, a similar amount was interesting atmosphere and characterization, and the rest long, repeated semi-lectures about how terrible it was to be a woman in the 1850’s. She got her point across effectively early on, but she didn’t let having done so stop her. The constantly repeated refrain got old, quickly.
I picked this up because I liked the Pitt novels, but here her preoccupation with telling me I wouldn’t want to be a woman in 1850 really got in the way. After 40 or 50 pages of it, I got the point, I understood it, and wasn’t interested in repeating the lecture. As if all the preaching wasn’t enough, the major characters all misinterpret a piece of evidence, the true meaning of which is patently obvious, not for just a little while, but for nearly 200 pages! And don’t try to tell me it was because they lived in such a repressive time that no one could conceive of the correct interpretation. At least two of the major characters said the thought out loud, in contexts other than this piece of evidence. They could conceive of it, they just didn’t. Maybe that bit was intentional, an auctorial gift so I could feel smugly superior to those nasty boys who repressed women so badly. If so, it failed miserably. It merely made me not want to waste my time with any more in this series.
Best news I’ve heard in a long time: Mel Brooks is writing a sequel to Spaceballs!
Jakob Nielsen, the man I love to tweak (I mean, just try and use his website to find something useful and you’ll see what I mean; the site’s organization resembles nothing so much as a herd of cats) almost gets it right with his latest. The misuse of radio buttons and check boxes has always been one of my pet peeves as well. But he does overlook something important in his rush to accuse yet another designer of incompetence.
His example deals with the text on a registration page. The site in question offers what are clearly two mutually exclusive options: Send me email about other offerings, or , Don ‘t send me any email. The site in question offers these two choices on its user registration page, and uses checkboxes for each of the choices.
Nielsen’s point is that since the options are mutually exclusive, the proper user interface widgets to use are radio buttons, rather than checkboxes. Which, strictly speaking, is correct.
But there’s another issue playing here. The web is a two-way street. Web site visitors aren’t the only people with goals to satisfy. Not only are there reasons for users to visit a web site, there are reasons for the site builder to create the web site in the first place. The user’s goals need to be met, true, but so do the site owner’s goals. Web sites should not be considered as a Win/Lose proposition for either party; as in all sensible transactions, the goal should be Win/Win.
And it’s in the site owners goals where you may find a reason for this design choice. Nielsen doesn’t give the URL he found his particular example on, so I can’t discover if the design choice was intentional or not, but I want to take a minute to talk about a reason to make this design choice intentionally.
The use of checkboxes here makes it possible for the user to select mutually exclusive options by mistake. And, presented with mutually exclusive options, the site owner would then “guess” which of the two mutually exclusive options the user actually meant to click — naturally, the option most beneficial to the site owner.
Now, it’s true that I wouldn’t personally select that method for increasing the circulation of my marketing literature. But the oceans of “fine print” found in business today confirm the exploitation of conclusion-jumping (and similar mistakes) by the customer as a widely-used method of doing business. As customers we may not like it, but it’s commonly practiced, and widely accepted.
While outspoken critics of designers assume the designer is in control of the website, it must be noted that they generally do not. Oh, some few powerhouse “name” designers have enough existing business prospects to be able to pick and choose projects, and walk away from contracts when the client insists on doing something they find unappetizing. But the vast majority of us are at the mercy of our clients. We don’t own the site, we’re just the hired help; just as liable to be replaced or outsourced as any other working stiff. We may preach good design practice at the top of our lungs, but when the resolute client/employer replies, “Should I find someone else to do this, then?” we have to decide just which of our design principles is actually worth fighting for. And, when making a small (for let’s face it, this particular design decision isn’t earthshaking in its repercussions) compromise in the absolute purity of our design enables us to eat or pay the rent, we will, however reluctantly, make the compromise.
It reminds me of my days in Network Security. Whenever I would set up a network, I explained that the firewall wasn’t there to set company policy, it was there to implement company policy. It was the company executives who would tell me what traffic should be allowed. I would explain the risks associated with each, and the rewards of permitting it, but the final decision wasn’t mine, it was theirs. Everyone has a different definition of “acceptable risk.” My job wasn’t to impose my definition, but rather to support theirs as effectively as I could.
What’s my point? Only this: Don’t jump to conclusions. This particular example may not, in fact, be a design “mistake”. Company policy, rather than designer incompetence, may be the reason it’s there.
OK, so we’re still just starting this up. Be patient and when you get back it’ll be much more ready for your consumption. (or Dysentery.)
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