On the writing process
Sometimes it’s possible to sit down and start typing the beginning of an article, and just keep going until you reach the end, having discovered a satisfying middle about half-way through.
But not always.
This morning I sat down to write something fairly short (about 400 words) on a topic I know well. A few days previously, I’d written almost 200 words about it in outline form, for the benefit of the editor who was commissioning me to write it, so you’d think that conjuring up the rest wouldn’t be a problem.
It was, though. I tried the first approach - write from the beginning and see what comes out. Something reasonable emerged, but I was being far too wordy and faffy. I reached 380 words in no time at all and hadn’t covered half the subject. I needed to start again.
So I returned to the outline I’d submitted and actually used it. The freshly-produced copy was decent in places, so I could paste it down into the second, outline-inspired draft. Things were soon looking much more promising.
I write this post not in some misguided hope that anyone will learn anything from it, but more as a note-to-self. Sometimes I’m guilty of charging blindly into work without stopping to think first about what it really needs. Rather like mending dead household applicances, writing a decent article often benefits from having a cup of tea and a bit of a think beforehand.
Brain dumpings
I’m getting bored with the template for this site. I want to keep it broadly looking like it does (one column, minimalist, horizontal elements rather than vertical ones) but perhaps with a little more … you know … p’ching. Then again, maybe I won’t bother. The built-in Blogger templates make my eyes water, I can’t use those. I dunno. What do you think?
Having got a very exciting commission for an article, it appears that all of the world’s knowledgeable experts on the subject in question are either on holiday, permanently in meetings, or just painfully busy. The article would have been written hours ago, if I only I could talk to someone. Tooth-crunchingly frustrating.
The new mattress we had delivered today smells odd. I wonder if this is its way of flolloping. I’ve left the bedroom window open to air it a bit. I’m hoping it might say “Voon”.
Positivity flippy floppity
Feeling positive about all sorts of things today. I’ve had an enjoyable, ego-boosting week full of compliments and kind words from friends and strangers.
Work is looking good too, with a commission from a national newspaper and some other interesting potential projects looming; I’d better not say what they are because none of them are fully confirmed yet.
Also my web site has gained some unexpected attention; my son has delighted me every time we have a conversation; I’ve managed to keep up fairly regular exercise, despite the weather; and I’m enjoying my weekly singing more than ever. Today, life feels good.
I want backspace in my pen
Today I had to do some editing of several lengthy documents. The only sane way to do work like this is to print it out, sit in a comfortable chair with good natural light and a hot cup of tea, and crack on.
But the downside was the need for me to make notes in the document margins. I found myself struggling to write anything that other people would be able to make sense of, because my handwriting has grown steadily more terrible as my use of computers has increased.
When writing with a pen nowadays, I’ve become very lazy about spelling and grammar, far more so than I would be if I was typing the same text. It’s because I’m so used to having the chance to backspace and correct my errors as I go along - consequently, I don’t worry too much about the errors in the first place. I expect them to happen, my brain allows me to make them, smugly assuming that it can save itself from public embarrassment during the final edit.
My handwriting isn’t just a mess; it’s a chore. I am appalled at the thought of it. The simple solution would be to practice regularly by writing proper old-fashioned letters to friends, instead of flinging half-hearted texts and emails their way every once in a while. But the first solution that popped into my head was: “I want a backspace in my pen.”
Weblogging in local government
As part of some work I was doing recently, I had a chance to talk to a local councillor who has a weblog. The purpose of the conversation was to evaluate what she thought of the blogging software she was using, but uncovered several other fascinating snippets relating to the culture of weblogging within local government.
First was that the councillor’s decision to use a weblog was not at all supported by her fellow party members. They were wary, if not distrustful, of what she might expose on the blog without a certain amount of censorship by party officials.
“Having a blog makes me look like a maverick, rather than a part of the group,” she said.
“My own side see it as a problem. They have to trust me a great deal, not to say something I shouldn’t.”
She didn’t say so in as many words, but it was clear that she felt that not all of her political group did trust her. They even insisted on monitoring the blog during election time.
She’s started the blog to communicate with the local residents she represents, but over time found that the people who read it most were:
- the local press (who treated it as a source of stories)
- the opposition parties (who looked for gossip, and were sometimes the object of it)
- trainee or would-be councillors
The work is ongoing; we’re trying to understand how e-democracy can work better. One important starting point is that “e-democracy” doesn’t actually mean anything; right now, it’s used as a label for everything on the web that’s vaguely connected to politics.
The blogging councillor I spoke to continues to post. She’s prolific by any blogging standards, and much more so than almost all other councillors.
Return of the rodents
A few years ago I had a page on my web site detailing my troubles with mice. This was at a time when we lived in a tumbledown country cottage, which tumbled down in a manner very attractive to mice. They loved making homes inside the walls and the loft spaces, and they especially loved to make our lives a misery by making scratching noises all night long, or passing away in inconvenient places and stinking the whole house out while their furry little bodies rotted away.
My mouse page was only a few hundreds words of waffle by me, but it attracted thousands of comments over a period of two years. I completely owned Google searches for “How to catch mice”, something I was proud of for a while. I should have slapped some ads on the page and made a few quid, but I never bothered.
Anyway, that version of my site was retired in favour of another, and the mouse page lingered comment-less for a while before disappearing altogether.
Now rodents have returned to my life, but in a good way. In recent weeks I’ve been working with Steve Johnston, writing copy for a web site for a company called Green Shield, who make electronic pest control gadgets.
Such is the never-ending variety of a freelance writer’s life. One day the oil business, another day Mac stuff, the next day rat facts. All in a day’s work.
Labels: work
So many Simons
What do you call a group of Simons, especially in situations where they are all web developers?
- Simons (a bit dull, if you ask me)
- Simoni
- Simonae (I rather like this one)
What the world needs is a collective noun for Simons. My colleagues suggest the following:
- A genius of Simons (Simon suggested that one)
- An earlobe of Simons (from Steve, based on the original Hebrew meaning of Simon, “he who hears”)
- An audition of Simons (ditto)
And while we’re on the subject, how about collective nouns for web developers?
- A tag of web developers
- A <body> of web developers
- A class of web developers (maybe better as a div?)
And this one, my favourite from searching Google for “A * of web developers”:
- A frequent mistake of web developers
On second thoughts, that's better suited to journalists.
Labels: work
Things I have learned from my most recent work project
- Natural gas is almost entirely methane
- Gas reserves tend to be deeper than oil reserves
- Conference calls are almost always a waste of everyone’s time (actually, I knew this already but the knowledge was re-inforced)
- One good point, made succinctly, can make a difference
- Oil wells can now be dug horizontally if need be
- The traditional Hollywood depiction of a successful find, with oil spurting hundreds of feet into the air, would actually be a disaster for an oil company
- Google can convert cubic metres into barrels of oil
Yes, I have been writing copy about the oil business.
Labels: work
How and why of Rising Slowly
When I began thinking of how to revive Rising Slowly, my first thought was: "Can I really be bothered?"
One of the things that troubled me most during its first incarnation was that much of the time, each post didn't need very much content. After all, all you can do most of the time is simply point people to a link and tell them what the weather angle is. I simply don't subscribe to the method used on many weblogs which involves cutting and pasting whole chunks of the destination link's text - what's the point? Let people follow the link and read it there if they want to.
The simple act of trying to string out lots of early Rising Slowly posts with additional comment was time-consuming and harder than you might think. It was also tough to be that opinionated about something as universal and uncontrollable as the weather.
So when the time came to re-invent RS, my thoughts turned to slimming it down. I wanted to eliminate the need for me to waste time writing unnecessary blurb, and cut the time it took to add new content.
My solution was to use the tools that are out there already. A Flickr feed for the photos, sucked in automagically from the RS pool - that was easy. Then a del.icio.us feed for the link content. I decided that all most weather-related stories needed was a link and a one-liner from me; I could use that one liner to provide quotes, additional context, or gags, depending on the link and on my mood.
I didn't want to clutter up my personal del.icio.us space with weather links though, so I set up a fresh del.icio.us account just for use with RS. Then I downloaded Cocoalicious and the associated bookmarklet (search the page for "1.0b38" to find it) and added that to Camino. To really speed things up, I gave the bookmarklet a shortcut key ("rs").
To add a new link from my browser, I just hit Command+L to highlight the URL in the address bar, type "rs" and hit return. The page is promptly opened in Cocoalicious with title, URL and selected text (if any) all inserted for me. All I need do is add extra comment, some tags, and hit Post.
This way, each new link takes a few seconds. Photos are pulled in as and when they are posted to the group. It's all very minimal, very quick, and very shortlived.
What do you think of this approach? Is anyone visiting the site often? How does the links feed work out? I'd love to hear any comments you've got on the new approach.
Labels: work
Buy my ebook
Your Life in Web Apps is a 20-page PDF now on sale for six dollars (about three quid) from O'Reilly.
The idea was to explain real-life webapps to people who are interested in using them, but lack the time and inclination to go around trying them all out.
In the ebook, I detail a day spent entirely in webapps (which was only partly successful, highlighting that switching everything to webapps is still some way off); there's also some historical background, about how the development of the web and the recent growth of broadband connectivity have been key to the boom in webapps.
If you already know what you like about webapps, you probably don't need to buy this ebook. But if someone you know - your boss, or your spouse perhaps - is interested and wants to know more, it might be a helpful starting point for them.
Labels: work
Current interests
I'm very keen to broaden my professional horizons, and challenge myself to write about new things.
I still enjoy writing about computers and the internet, but other subjects appeal to me; writing about something is often a good way to learn about it. I'm keen to expand my education.
With that in mind, here are some of the themes I'd like to explore in future writing:
England the obscure: I've long been fascinated by the wonderful detail hidden within Britain's countryside; the geological and cultural landscapes that define our small towns and villages. There's so much to explore and discover within this country; I'd love to discover and write about some of it.
Practical environmentalism: It's easy to buy unleaded petrol and take your tins to the recycling bins at the supermarket, but the urgency to be green is growing ever stronger as our environment becomes more fragile. What practical steps can ordinary people take to be greener than before? Given the dreadful state and high cost of public transport in the UK, what are the best options for getting around? How realistic is it to develop local food production schemes, and what are the challenges involved?
Space of mind: How do people make mental maps of their surroundings and experiences? If asked to draw those maps, what kind of thing are they likely to produce? Can the results be useful for others?
Parenting: I have opinions about everything from CBeebies to frisbees, and I'd like to share them with other parents.
New architecture in the UK: Years ago, as a junior reporter in Cambridge, I took it upon myself to write about new architecture in the city. Visiting new buildings, some of them very traditional and others incredibly adventurous (the Judge Institute of Management was one of my favourites) was a joy, an experience I'd like to rediscover.
Labels: work
Signs of Clue in the UK media
I'm interested to see some of the UK media establishment diving into weblogging, and evidently with some gusto. Some of them are starting to understand the concept.
Following The Guardian's lead, The Times has a list of weblogs by op-ed writers and columnists (well suited to the blog format), but what's more interesting is that they've allowed the blogs to live off the main Times site.
All the Times weblogs live off timesonline.typepad.com, and the newspaper's webmonkeys have made no effort to incorporate the Typepad service under their own domains. To me, is shows signs of a more relaxed attitude and I think that's a good thing. Back in the 1990s, the corporate image would have counted more and someone high up would have insisted that everything be carried under thetimes.co.uk. Now, they're just more relaxed about this sort of thing.
This is a sign of Clue at the Times. Yay.
Now the Beeb has finally started 'proper' weblogging for reporters. (I say proper because they've had content they called 'weblogs' before, but it was just pages buried in the rest of the site and loosely linked together under the 'weblog' title. They didn't have an easy-to-find front page, or a particularly 'webloggy' feel to them.) Starting with a weblog by political editor Nick Robinson, they're now using MT (or Typepad, I dunno) and they're doing things the way you'd expect; a front page, archives, comments, all the shazzam.
Assuming other media jump the wagon as they do in the past, I forsee that within a year, The Sun will have blogs; The Mirror's 3am will have been spun off as a separate bloggy site; the Telegraph will have limped into line behind The Times; even the Daily Mail will have a House Prices blog. The Express will continue to be publishing shite about Princess Diana and not have a fucking Clue about anything.
Labels: work
Notes on the new Grauniad
Caveats: I've always been a left-wing tree-hugging Guardian reader, even when buying the Independent instead. Overall, I'm very pleased with the new look. Most of what follows is nitpicking.
First impressions in the newsagent: it stands out, if only because of the new size. The use of colour works on the front page, in the sense that it pulls in the eye when scanning a row of folded newspapers on the shelf.
This newsagent doesn't have any problem displaying the new paper; all the papers are piled up on a shelf at floor level. I wonder how many newsagents will have any sort of problem with display? How will the big chains, like supermarkets and WH Smiths, display it?
As I pick up the paper, it feels nice and thick, a good weight. As though it will offer plenty to read. (Pick up a redtop tabloid at the same time and feel the difference.)
Today's front page: not as exciting as I'd hoped, perhaps because of a relatively slow news day.
I'm very pleased to see that the front page retains a mixture of news stories, rather than the single theme-story format the tabloid Independent keeps using, much to my annoyance. But notice, none of the front page stories are complete. To finish reading any of them, even the lead story, you're forced to turn to another page. Some of these pages are a long way inside - page 13, 15, 17, 26. The invitation to turn to page 2 at the bottom of Alan Rusbridger's welcome column is styled differently to the others. Is this an error, or an attempt to explain things as they go along?
I'm not keen on the choice of front page photo, and the decision to run it vertically down the centre of the front page. I think there were stronger images to be used (violence in Northern Ireland? imminent petrol supply chaos?).
Page 2: The "Today on the web" column is a nice touch, although it and the rest of the page seem very similar to London's Metro. Designed for Tube and bus commuters.
Internal news pages: There's no escaping this when you have smaller pages; the stories are generally shorter. This is a pity, but you can't have the smaller paper without cutting the word counts.
While photos have been used large and to maximum, "look at us, we're colour on every page" effect, other graphic elements like some maps (page 3, page 17) and charts (page 19) look squeezed and a little overwhelmed.
Adverts: It's worth remembering that a newspaper's articles have to fit around the adverts, not the other way round. Ad space is sold in advance, the news just gets to fill whatever space is left.
Mostly it works OK but I've noticed that intelligent tabloids (like The Times, the Indy and now the new Graun) end up with three-quarter page ads (see pages 8, 12 and 14 for examples) that force the news content to squidge up around the edges. I find this distracting and not so easy to read. The ad is very intrusive. If I were in charge, I'd give advertisers better rates on full-page or half-page ads, to discourage them from buying these annoying three-quarter page ones.
Fonts: I'm not as much of a font geek as some of my friends, so I won't go into any discussion of the merits of the new Guardian Egyptian font. I find all the text very readable and the headlines look nice to me. I might have preferred them to use "The Guardian" in the masthead, instead of "theguardian".
Media Guardian: Good stuff. Plenty to read, Kim Fletcher's opening column full of tidbits about forthcoming redesigns from almost every other paper on Fleet Street. If the Thursday technology pullout is as meaty as this, I shall be very surprised. But what's this "noticeboard" on the back page? A mishmash of ads, puffs and, err, a sort of adpuff thing for Guardian-sponsored seminar. This feature needs rethinking, it just looks like a desperate "What shall we put here?" space filler.
G2: Ohh, look, the marvellous Shortcuts page has been retained, now in pride of place at the front of G2. I'm very happy, I love the Shortcuts style and approach. Tim Dowling, on the new Berliner format:
As the nights draw in and conversation invariably turns to the average summer rainfall in Pembrokeshire, people are prone to the sort of wild exaggeration that unfairly portrays the country as a less-than-ideal holiday destination. In fact, the correct figure is 235mm. Illustrating this point was once a matter of holding your hands anywhere from six inches to two feet apart ... but now you may use the short side of your demi-Berliner G2 as a template, because it's exactly 235mm.
On page 4, "Theg2graphic", today on the arms trade. Is it me, or is this a series of ordinary graphs sitting on tank-shaped coloured blobs? I'm not very impressed. I thought the point of an infographic was to use the graphic elements to convey information in a way that a normal chart cannot. Still, the idea is nice and there's lots of scope for interesting future spreads.
The TV and radio listings are nicely presented, although shifted inwards from the back page. They do need a double spread for visual clarity and the new layout, with colour text for highlighted programmes, works well.
Notice there's no "Pick of the day" column on the TV listings page. Extending the listings to cover nine digital channels means there's no longer enough space.
Conclusions: I've spent all morning reading this paper, and I've enjoyed it. The new size does help, it will certainly help if you're reading it on the move. I like visual design and use of colour, and in the main my complaints are restricted to minor things. There's a lot of scope for tweaking and refinement of this design in coming months and years.
I'm looking forward to the Saturday paper next weekend, which I usually buy at the weekend instead of a Sunday paper. The only thing that might change that is a radically improved Independent on Sunday, which is relaunching as a tabloid soon.
Practical tips for freelancers
Organise everything in tax years.
The most time-consuming and annoying task you will have to do as a freelancer in the UK is submitting your annual tax return.
I find the tax return annoying because much of it refers to things I was doing more than a year ago, and I simply cannot remember the details. If I failed to make a record, I'm stuck.
So start your filing systems (electronic and paper-based) with the tax year, not the calendar year, as your basic unit of calculation.
If you're going freelance now, start a file/directory called '2005-2006', and add to it all the projects, income and expenses you complete, earn and incur until April 5th 2006, at which point start another file/directory called '2006-2007'.
The tax office won't want the detailed contents of your '2005-2006' file until January 2007. This is why the whole system challenges the memory.
Keep everything related to one tax year together
Just to drive home what I've just explained, if you keep all your expenses records for 2005-2006 together with the invoices and work done, it will make the task of doing your tax return much simpler. Add up all the numbers and put the totals in the correct boxes on your tax return form.
A good accountant is worth every penny
Even though they charge you money, a good accountant will save you tax payments. But you still have to keep good records, as described above; even the best accountant can't help you if you haven't got the figures to hand.
To start with, you don't need to spend a fortune on stationery
If you already have work coming in, or a bunch of clients you can rely on, don't spend money on business cards or headed notepaper, you'll just be wasting it.
Invoices don't have to be branded either. I've found a fairly simple .rtf file is the most effective cross-platform means of sending invoices electronically.
Be nice when chasing invoices
Chances are you will need to follow up some invoices that haven't been paid. It's worth remembering that in most medium to large companies, the people responsible for paying your invoice (the accounts department) will not be the same as those who commissioned you to do the work.
Don't call the accounts department and be cross and grumpy at them. Don't shout abuse or make silly threats. Be nice. These people are just doing their job, and it's very likely that the non-payment of your invoice has a perfectly reasonable explanation.
If you're owed money, just be polite and good-natured; you're just spending an afternoon catching up on some paperwork and noticed that this invoice hadn't been paid, and would they mind checking their records?
You will get a much more helpful response if you act nice, even if underneath, you're seething with rage that they haven't paid you.
Discipline yourself to work
This is one of the hardest things to do, and varies enormously for different people. Personally, I find a looming deadline provides all the discipline I need, and work more efficiently when one has been imposed.
Work in a manner that suits you. If you work better in silence, switch of the radio. If you get easily distracted by the internet, resist the urge to visit your fave IRC channel or browse the unread posts in your RSS reader.
Think to yourself: "I'm a professional. I have to deliver professional quality work." What working conditions bring out your best stuff?
Price yourself well
Find the average for your market and refuse any work that pays less. Remember, when quoting your daily rate to a customer, that next month you might not get any work at all. Anyone in business who has worked with freelancers before knows that good ones cost good money. They are paying you for your professionalism, experience, expertise, and flexibility. Charge them accordingly.
Get used to variable income
There will be times when your income seems to dwindle to almost nothing. Don't worry, because there will be other times when the phone just doesn't stop ringing, and everyone wants you in the same week.
There's a good side to this. During the quiet times, when there's not much work to be done, you can be getting on with other things. Gardening, reading books, professional research, higher education, playing with your kids, DIY jobs. Accept that being freelance means there will be times like this, and plan in advance to make the best use of them.
Get used to cashflow weirdness
One magazine I worked for commissioned me in February. The article was for the July edition, which comes out in June, and the copy deadline was the end of April. Company policy was to pay within three months of publication. I got my cheque in October.
Not every job will be as crazy as that (hopefully very few of them will be), but you should be prepared for money to arrive some time after you've done the work.
Sometimes, clients are just plain stupid
They might drive you crazy with ridiculous requests or outrageous changes to the work part-way through a project.
If you think it's wrong, don't start shouting. Talk to the client on the phone and calmly voice your concerns; ask if there's some way you can assist them with reaching some clarification. If they still want to press ahead with Project Insane, you have a choice: do what they want, no matter how stupid, and take the money. Or politely tell them you have other commitments and need to withdraw. Obviously doing the latter might ruin any chance of further commissions, but in some cases that might be a good choice in the long run.
Your clients' office politics affect you
The guy who commissioned you to do Project X might be a very reasonable and smart person, but his boss might be from Planet Foon. Sometimes, your clients' bosses might make things very difficult for you, and in situations like that you need to know that the person who commissioned you is not to blame.
Be honest
If you're swamped and there's no way you can take on anything else, say so. Don't take on work you cannot complete on time or to a high enough standard; having a muddy reputation will not help you in the long run.
Labels: work
Responding to Chris Hollander
Chris Hollander took me to task about my live in one huge text file approach to my work. I've got some rejoinder comments to make, but I haven't got a .Net Passport so I can't post them on his site; nor can I find Chris' email address, otherwise I'd contact him directly. So, I'll post them here.
Chris says:
Sorry folks, but I can't imagine how this could be productive. In doing this, your essentially eschewing every productivity gain thats been made in the last ten to twenty years. your also confining all of the work you do to a single modality; a single way of thinking, a single means of organizing, a single perspective on your information.
Thing is, this is the modality that suits me best. Because of the job I do, and the particular list of clients I have, and the manner in which I work, my needs are very simple: for me, the most important aspect of getting my work done boils down to maintaining a list of things to write, and writing them. It really isn't more complicated than that.
I like having this single perspective on my information. It's the simplest way of storing it all, and viewing it all, and searching it all. It's quick.
Chris goes on:
The author explains that he also tried the notion of many text files instead of one big file; however, he found himself back at the big-ass-file approach once he had multiple machines, and was unable to synch his collection of files.
Well, what I actually said was: "I played about with a variety of sync methods and couldn't find anything that I felt really comfortable with." I was able to synch, just not in a manner that suited me or the way I work.
note to author: this is exactly why the "one big text file" approach fails! invariably, you are going to have multiple machines; even if somehow you find a way to survive with (gasp!) only one computer, you are going to have multiple applications on that one computer. even if you somehow get by with only one application (a text editor, in your case), there are many people/entities/companies/proccesses contributing to "your" information!
Well, that might be the case for many people but not for me. There's usually only one contributor of information, and that's me.
synchronizing your information with information provided by family/co-workers/customers/vendors
I simply don't need to do that. I'm lucky to have such a simplified existance, it seems.
synchronizing information across all of your devices: phone, home computer, portable computer, media devices, living room, car, network services.
More simplicity: I don't have any such devices. Just two computers. That's it.
Saying that your information is "organized" because its all in one big text file is like saying that my junk is organized because its all in the garage.
Ah, but I always know where to look when I need to get hold of some junk.
How I work
If I were to break my work down to essentials, it becomes two tasks:
- come up with ideas for articles that will sell
- write them
This means I spend a lot of time looking for things to write about (via incoming email, browsing web sites, and monitoring feeds), and roughly the same amount of time writing.
I write ideas and rough drafts in my todo.txt file, a large single plain text file that includes all my work in progress, things to do, shopping lists, addresses, notes and ideas. As I write this, the file is just over 3700 lines, or 12000 words, long.
I edit the file in BBEdit, using split view so I can edit two different sections of the file at once. To me this is a natural and very efficient way of working; I know the structure of my file well, and can easily find the section I want to edit next by searching for keywords and section headings (marked with an asterisk, eg *todo or *weather or *books).
BBEdit is set up to display white text on a blue background; I've found this much easier on my eyes when spending many hours a day writing.
Usually, an article will start life as a snippet of text, or a couple of URLs somewhere in this file.
That snippet might get expanded to something much longer - several hundred words - before it gets cut out and moved to a file of its own. This happens when I need to know the exact word count of what I'm writing, and it's easier to do this when the piece is in a file of its own. And anyway, the article needs to be filed away in a logical place on my hard disk.
Because I write a lot of stuff for publication on the web, I often have to file copy in HTML. To make this easy, I write everything in Markdown markup language, and have got into the habit of doing this all the time. BBEdit makes using Markdown very easy and it's a function I use several times a day.
Copy is always filed by email; soon after filing, I send an invoice (usually by email, but some clients like to have a paper copy in the post).
I'm a part-timer, working on Mondays and Wednesdays when my son is in nursery, and looking after him on the other days of the week. Since some of my work needs to be spread over the week (especially Rising Slowly posts), I often write things in advance, setting them up in handler apps like MarsEdit so I can post them with a couple of clicks when the need arises.
Being a part-timer is wonderful because my life never feels dominated by work. If anything, work has a minor role to play alongside my other regular duties. The downside is that sometimes, I have more than two days worth of work to do within the week. That's when I have to work evenings and weekends, as long as it takes to meet the deadlines. Thankfully these situations are rare.
And that's how I work. It's a very simple process, the result of a very simple set of demands.
I'm very interested to know how other people work. I want to explore the mundanities of work processes; what tasks are people required to complete, and what tools (sofware and otherwise) do they use? How do they use these tools? What changes do they make to their work environment to make the work easier to do?
Monday morning
I'm trying hard to get down to work, and facing the problem I face almost every working day: where to start?
I have a feature for MacDevcenter to finish. I need to write some fresh posts for Rising Slowly. My brain is churning with ideas for (non-technical) articles and I can't think of a way to start the process of finding someone to pay me to write them.
I need to finish the newsletter I've been creating in Pages. There's a backlog of photos to process, letters to write, bills to pay and email to answer. I'd quite like to have a block of time for idea-expanding, to see if I can come up with a way of broadening my professional horizons.
It's 1130 and so far today I have achieved very little.
Labels: work
Smugness unsettled
Here's a column I wrote in the week after Apple's big Intel switch announcement. It seemed like a good opportunity to use the old "smug Mac users" line again, so I did.
There's many collective nouns for Mac users, but my favourite is "smug".
Put a dozen Mac owners in a room together and the air will reek of smugness. They are users of the best computers and the best operating system in the world, and heaven help anyone who disagrees with them on that matter.
Mac users have made great efforts in recent years to point out their technical superiority over Windows-using friends and colleagues.
"You poor thing," the Mac user would ooze, "having to spend so much time worrying about viruses and malware. I don't have that problem, you know."
The Mac versus Windows debate has been a religious war for years now, and neither side has ever been willing to give even an inch to the other.
I say all this as a Mac user myself, for the last four years. I've been as smug as the rest of them; moreso, probably.
All of which goes part way to explaining why any Mac users you know might be acting a little strangely now.
Last week, Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple and surely the smuggest Mac user of them all, stood up in a crowded hall in California to make a speech. In it, he told his astonished audience that as from 2007, all new Apple computers would be designed around a new processor, the chip that is the "brain" of any computer.
The manufacturer of the new chips is Intel, famed for its close relationship with Microsoft. Apple's decision to embrace what it previously derided as weak technology seemed like a slap in the face to millions of devoted Mac users.
For a decade, Macs have used the PowerPC chips designed and built by Motorola and IBM. They were more expensive than Intel's chips, but worked harder and operated at far lower temperatures.
The last PowerPC chip to be used by Apple was the G5, a blisteringly fast piece of kit that turned humble computers into processing powerhouses.
Two years ago, Jobs promised that Apple would release laptops with G5 chips, but that promise was never kept. IBM could not produce a G5 that was small enough to fit in a laptop, or that could operate within such a small space without melting all the components around it (these processors get very hot indeed, and need extravagant cooling systems to keep them functioning).
Apple found itself in a quandry. It could hold out for further technical innovation in IBM's laboratories, or it could swallow its corporate pride and switch to a different kind of processor.
For the vast majority of consumers, the change shouldn't matter, or even be noticeable. Most people don't care who makes the components inside their computers, the only thing they worry about is getting a computer that works and is reliable.
But for the army of software developers who write applications for Mac OS X, Apple's award-winning operating system, dozens of questions have popped up. Not only do most of them face extra work just to make their programs work on the new Intel-powered Macs, they also wonder if those same computers could run Windows.
It sounds like the geekiest of concerns, but this announcement is the biggest story in Apple history for five years, and it has got under a lot of people's collars.
Some are confident that Jobs knows what he's doing, and that Apple can be sure of increased sales and greater success in the long term. Others gloomily predict the end of the Mac platform, and even the end of Apple as a company.
Whatever our view of the future, us smug Mac users can be forgiven for sporting a miserable expression for a little while. After all, the last thing we want is to have anything to do with - ugh - Windows.
