Purple Monkey

What is this? A mystery. It looks like a meal gone terribly wrong. But is it?







I am vacuuming my bedroom right now. "Well," you say, "not exactly right now because right now you're typing on your computer." No, I am actually vacuuming my bedroom exactly right now as I type this. Or I should say, my bedroom is being vacuumed by my iRobot Roomba 560 vacuum cleaner. Figures 1 through 3 depict debris recovered from my floor by the robot after about four cleaning missions.

I'm very happy with the robot. After using it for six months on tile and thick carpet, I can definitely say that I am impressed with it. When I first got it, I spent more time watching it than I would have spent actually vacumming the floor myself, but now I try to make a point to either be gone when he's working or to do something else productive at the same time.

The other thing about the robot is, it's sort of like a hobby. I spend almost as much time cleaning the iRobot Roomba 560 as I used to spend vacuuming. That's OK, though, because I hardly used to vacuum at all and my floor was kind of dusty, but now I use the Roomba a few times a week at least, so even with all the robot maintenance, I'm only spending as much time as I used to on the subject of vacuuming, but my house is a lot cleaner. Especially under the bed, which I'd be lucky to hit every six months but which gets cleaned every time I vacuum my bedroom with the Roomba. Plus, performing robot maintenance is way cooler than spending time vacuuming.

Labels: devices, images, unsolicited opinions

I've talked to several writers who would like to send stories out to online literary journals but they are hesitant to do it because they're not sure where to send them. Writers want to place stories in journals that literary agents and writing program directors read and would recognize, but there are so many journals and none of them have been around all that long (compared to print journals) so it's sort of difficult to navigate the online journal landscape. There isn't a great way for writers to know whether or not they're placing a story in an online journal that's going to earn them an impressive publication credit on their query letters. So before they offer those First North American or First World rights to a story, they could use a way to access the online literary journal culture in a way that parallels the culture that's grown up out of print journals.

For example, if a writer places a story in The Paris Review or The New Yorker, he knows he's knocked it out of the park. He knows that he's got the most impressive publication credit on his query letter that he could have. How does he know that? He knows because there is an accumulated shared value system among writers, readers, and publishers that has built up a sort of meta-knowledge of the hierarchy of print literary journals over the course of the last fifty years or so. The hierarchy can be debated, of course, but there does exist among writers and teachers of writing enough of a shared sense of which journals to shoot for that it is relatively easy for a student of writing to tap into that value system and get a sense of where one print journal stands with respect to another in terms of the respect afforded to it by the literary community.

An analogous sense of the hierarchy of online literary journals does not seem to exist yet. One reason is that they are relatively new compared to their print counterparts. Another is that there are so many more of them in operation than there are print journals. That stems ultimately from the fact that online journals are much cheaper to produce and distribute than print journals are. Anybody with enough web expertise to start a blog on Blogger could publish his or her own literary journal. So that leaves us with a landscape that is peppered with a tremendous number of online journals, some of them impressive, some of them not, and most of whose names go unrecognized in wider literary circles.

The huge number of online journals reflects the fact that people are, in fact interested in them. They are interested in reading them, publishing them, and writing for them. This isn't a trivial statement to make because online journals publish short fiction, and short fiction as a popular art form has seen a dramatic and steady drop off in readership starting with the arrival of television in people's homes. But in recent years, short fiction has sort of finally found its niche in the post-television era, and its new home is in online literary journals. They are serving up good-quality bite-sized chunks of entertainment perfect for a little unsanctioned break from the cube-farm or studying in the library.

People are reading online journals. I wouldn't be surprised if a decent journal gets more hits in a day than the total readership of any one of about 90% of the print journals that exist. So what's happening today is that readers want to read online journals, publishers want to publish online journals, but a lot of writers are nervous about online journals so they'll send their stories to print journals instead. And they do this because they want to know that they are publishing their work in the "best" journal that will take them. They understand culturally what it means to be published in a particular print journal, but they have no way to differentiate between one online journal and the next. Since it's so cheap to publish stories online, for all a writer really knows, the journal he's submitting to might publish every story they receive, which lowers the status of the online journal to little more than self-publishing or vanity publishing.

What writers need, and readers too, is a starting point. They need to know where to focus their efforts so that they can submit to competitive online journals that will set their work up side by side with the best work being published online. Writers need to know where to send their work if the publication credit they are going to get out of it is going to mean anything on a query letter. If a writer feels that the publication credit is going to be meaningless, he'll send his work a print journal that he knows is a safer bet. Readers need to know, too, where to find the highest quality fiction that the web has to offer.

This is where a guy named Jason Sanford at the online journal storySouth comes in. For the last several years, Jason has been organizing a project called the Million Writers Award. You can read the details about the award yourself at storySouth, but the basic end product of Jason's work is a list of about one hundred notable stories published online each year and the name of the journal that published each one. From this list of notables, the Million Writers Award designates a Top 10 list and each year selects one single winner from that Top 10. What Jason Sanford and storySouth have done is to provide us with a huge dataset that can be used to actually quantify in some way (as far as it is possible using an award system that judges art) the track record of individual online journals as far as their ability to attract, select, and publish short fiction of the highest quality. Again, I refer you to the storySouth website if you are interested in the enormous, labor-intensive process of selecting the Million Writers Award notable list each year. But what I have done is to conduct a sort of meta-analysis of all of the data generated by the Million Writers Award project in order to create a ranked list of which online journals have been historically successful in publishing high-quality fiction.

If you are a writer looking to send work out to an online journal, if you're a literary agent looking for where to find the most respected writers in the online community, or if you're a reader looking for a short list of sites to visit to read the best online fiction, then I present to you, the Thinksimian Top 15 Online Literary Journals:

Thinksimian Top 15 Online Literary Journals as of 2007

1. Pindeldyboz


2. Eclectica Magazine


3. Narrative Magazine


4. Agni


5. Identity Theory


6. Word Riot


7. FRiGG


8. Fiction Warehouse


9. Strange Horizons


10. The Barcelona Review


11. Clarkesworld Magazine


12. Fail Better


13. Stickman Review


14. Mississippi Review


15. HOBART

I'm going to detail my analysis in a different post, which I will link here eventually. For now, you can look through all of my raw data in a Google spreadsheet or in a pdf. In the raw data you'll see the exact score that each journal received and you'll also see the complete dataset for every single online journal that has ever published a Million Writers Award notable story.

Labels: literary journals, serious, text, unsolicited opinions

I've been using OpenOffice.org for a few months now and it's going pretty well. One thing I noticed though is that the Find and Replace in Writer is not nearly as robust as the comparable feature in Word. I'm a pretty heavy user of Find and Replace especially when I'm collecting documents from multiple places into one document, or when I'm importing and exporting a document from different software.

In Word, it's pretty easy to do all kinds of tasks like looking for two paragragh marks that follow a period and replacing them with one paragraph mark that follows a period. In OpenOffice.org Writer, I don't have anywhere near the flexibility to do complicated Find and Replace operations that Word offers. I find myself opening a document in Word to do the operation, saving it, and opening it back up in OpenOffice.

I think my favorite feature of OpenOffice.org so far is the built-in ability to export to pdf. That works great. I made a nice drawing in Draw and I wanted to distribute it to a bunch of people, and there's no way I could count on them all having the same software to open the drawing, so I exported it to pdf and it looked and worked great.

Labels: OpenOffice.org, serious, text, unsolicited opinions

On a typical day I might use between three and five different computers. Usually four. I own all of those computers and I am responsible for buying the software on all of them. In the course of any given week, I regularly use eight computers, for four of them I have to buy software, for the other four I am not even able to install software if I wanted to.

I am getting tired of buying software from Microsoft for five different computer. A copy of Office Professional, which I need because I use Access a lot, costs about $500. That $500 buys two licenses, one desktop and one laptop. So at that rate, it would cost me $1500 to upgrade my computers to Office 2007. I'm sick of that.

I started to look around for altertnatives to Microsoft Office 2007 and I learned about OpenOffice.org. It's kind of a dumb name for a piece of software, with the .org at the end of it and all, but it's nice software. They say it's 100% Microsoft Office compatible, and it is also 100% free. You can install it on as many computers as you like, you can give it to your friends, you can use it as much as you want and it is free. There's no deluxe version that costs money, there's no expiration date, you just download the full version and use it. Any you don't pay.

The OpenOffice.org suite is roughly equivalent to the Microsoft Office 2007 Professional Suite. OpenOffice.org, like Office, has a few core components. OpenOffice comes with Base, Writer, Calc, Draw, Impress, and Math. Those are sort of equivalent to Access, Word, Excel, Visio, PowerPoint, and maybe Equation Editor.

All of the core components are designed to read and write to their Microsoft equivalents, in addition to being compatible with a wide variety of file formats. I've tried opening Access, Excel, Word, and PowerPoint documents from Office 2000 and Office 2003 and they open fine. Access doesn't open so well in Base, but all of the other Microsoft file formats seem to open fine in OpenOffice.org.

OpenOffice.org can read and write to many different file formats, but it's own native file format is a zipped XML format that is human-readable and completely open so that other applications can use it, too. It's the same file format that Google Documents uses, so there's a lot of compatibility between the two. That's actually how I got interested in OpenOffice.org in the first place, because I was reading about the Google Documents native file format.

OpenOffice.org can write all of it's documents to PDF. That functionality is built-in. It's not something you have to buy extra, and it doesn't use the PDF-printer type of workflow that other add-on PDF writers use, it's just a button on the OpenOffice.org toolbar. You just click it and you get a PDF out. That's particularly useful for Base reports, since it's kind of a pain to share Access reports electronically.

There is a portable version of OpenOffice.org, too. It's called OpenOffice.org portable. It's also free, and it runs completely from a flash drive. So you can plug your USB drive into a computer on which you're not even a local administrator, and run the software right from the USB drive. I've tried it on several different computers, and I can barely even tell the difference from the installed version.

I'm going to be trying OpenOffice.org out a lot ore the next year. I think I'm going to try to create all of my new documents in it as a test. If you want to try it, you can download it from . . . guess where? OpenOffice.org.

Labels: OpenOffice.org, serious, text, unsolicited opinions

One of my favorite things that I tried in 2006 is GameFly. If you're familiar with NetFlix, then all I need to say about it is it's the NetFlix of video game rentals.

In case you haven't used NetFlix, here's how GameFly works. You visit the GameFly website and browse their huge catalog of video games. They have games for all of the current systems that anybody is likely to have. You make a list of the games you like, and they keep track of your list on their website. As soon as they can, they send you the first two games on your list. They send them by U.S. mail. You can keep the games as long as you want. When you're done with them, you send them back to GameFly in a special envelope that GameFly sends you with the game. You don't have to pay for postage or anything, you just put the game into the special envelope and drop it into any mailbox. When GameFly receives the game you sent back, they send you the next one that was on your list. You don't have to send the two games back at once, you send them back individually, and every time they get one back from you they send the next one on your list right out to you.

So far, this sounds exactly like how NetFlix works. But there's one small difference. GameFly has some kind of deal with the Post Office that the Post Office in your town is able to scan your game when they sort it, and the Post Office notifies GameFly that you've dropped your return game in the mail. When GameFly receives notification from the Post Office that you've sent a game in, they immediately send you the next game on your list. So in that way, they send your new game out to you even before they received your old one. Before Christmas, I actually received an email from GameFly confirming my return the exact same day that I put the game in the mail. I dropped it in the mail in the morning, and by the afternoon, I had an email telling me they confirmed its return. Two days later, I had my new game in my mailbox.

So they certainly have the lightning-fast shipping and turn-around time down. But that doesn't do you much good if they don't have any games. But they have games. They have way more games than you'd ever find at Blockbuster or Hollywood Video. They have all the new releases, of course, but they also have a fantastic library of older games and games for older systems, too. For example, I never had a GameCube but there were a lot of GameCube games I wanted to play from years gone by. When I got my Nintendo Wii, I felt like playing a lot of the old GameCube games I missed. Since the Wii plays GameCube games, I decided to go back through the reviews on IGN and GamePro and make a huge list of all the GameCube games that got good ratings. I made my list and every single one of the games I wanted was on GameFly, for a system that's not even the most current one.

I was also glad to see that they lend Nintendo DS games, too. That's a lot of fun. There are a lot of DS games I'd like to try without necessarily buying, and with GameFly I can try a DS game for a couple of days and just send it back when I'm done with it.

The other thing I like about GameFly is that they sell their games. So if you get a game that you really like, like Batallion Wars for example, you can just go to the website and click the button that says "Keep It!" When you do that, they charge you for the game, but they only charge you what you'd pay for it in a used shop like GameStop or EB Games. They immediately send out the next game on your list, you keep the one that you wanted to buy, and within five days they deliver to you (free shipping) the brand new case and manual for the game you bought. It's a great service and a great way to build your game library with titles you already know you like.

I hope you try GameFly, and I hope you like it.

Labels: games, serious, services, text, unsolicited opinions

Last week I was driving with a guy in my truck. It was raining, and it shouldn't have been -- not at that time of morning, not that much, not on a day when we were doing what we needed to do that day. The guy looked out the window at the rain that was interfering with what we were doing and he said something like, today is one of those days when I just feel like driving through a huge puddle on the side of the road and drenching somebody walking on the sidewalk.

It caught me off guard when he said that. I didn't expect that from this particular guy. I didn't understand why he'd say that and I had no idea what to even say in response to something like that, so I just didn't say anything at all. I was the one driving, so what he said was an idle threat anyway. I cringed when he said it, and I moved on with my day, with the project we were working on.

Thursday I was on my way to the gym, trying to get there and back in the amount of time I had. I usually ride my bike, but it was afternoon and the rain was starting to come down already so I decided to drive. I was happy with the decision because by the time I was heading down First Avenue, it was pouring so hard that the bike lane looked like a stream. There was a black Jeep in front of me and the driver was messing around, drifting into the bike lane near the curb, into the stream, sending a rooster tail of water cascading down onto the sidewalk.

I watched the impressive shower of water churned up by the Jeep's wide tires. It made me think back to last week, back to what the guy I was riding with said about drenching someone on the sidewalk. It made me sad again to think that the guy said what he did. I was glad there wasn't anyone on the sidewalk to catch the Jeep's wake.

I wasn't glad for long, though. The Jeep was still in the bike lane making its torrential spray and I saw a man walking on the sidewalk against traffic, maybe twenty-five years old, soaked from the rain, carrying a shoulder bag with the strap across his chest -- the kind of bag a bike messenger would carry. He had his hands pushed down deep into the pockets of his long baggy cargo shorts, it seemed like as deep as they'd go. His shoulders were rounded down from how deep his hands were in his pockets, but he walked with a straight back and his face looking forward, as if defiant against the downpour.

The Jeep continued on course and I could see the impact on the walker as the heavy wall of water struck his body. He didn't break his stride. He didn't look away even though he certainly saw what was coming, but the weight of the water pushed him a few inches off his course to his left, enough so that I could notice it. He didn't turn to glare at the Jeep or give the driver the finger. He just kept walking up First Avenue with the sack on his back as if the Jeep's spray was as inevitable as the rain falling down from the sky. It didn't even surprise him that a person would do that to him.

Where was that man going? Was he on his way home from the library? Was he going to his girlfriend's house? He was walking near a bus stop behind him. Had he just stepped off the bus? What was in his shoulder bag? Was it his books for summer school he'd had a hard time buying because they were so expensive? Was it the books from the library he'd placed on hold because he needed them for his thesis? Was his ipod in there? His laptop? A notebook he'd started a story in that morning at Bentley's? He was coming from somewhere and he was going somewhere and he was carrying a bag, bearing the weight of its contents on his shoulder and his spine and hips. He was a man somebody decided to hit in the face with a wall of water for no other reason other than they could.

Seeing that man get wet sucked the wind out of me.

The Jeep continued on down First Avenue, moving into the bike lane for a splash and then back into the regular lane -- weaving to the right and back left again. Eventually it turned right into a neighborhood street and was gone.

I thought of the wet man with his shoulder bag, and it reminded me of a girl I saw the week before. I saw her while riding with the guy who wanted to splash somebody. The guy was talking, telling me about something altogether unrelated. It had been more than an hour since he'd made his comment about wanting to drench somebody. I would have thought he'd forgotten even saying what he did. I wanted to think that. We'd been busy for that hour -- we'd been out of the truck and back in. As we drove by the girl he looked out the window at her and said she'd be a perfect candidate for splashing. The girl was just going from one place to another, walking along the sidewalk. She happened to be walking north on First Avenue, just like the man with the shoulder bag I saw, and if circumstances had been a little different, her shoes would have been ruined by the guy I was riding with.

After the Jeep turned off into the neighborhood the car in front of me was a Chevy SUV, like a Suburban or something. Black. I drove behind it for a minute or two after the Jeep turned off and then the Chevy drifted over the solid white line into the bike lane just as the Jeep had done. The truck was so big, and the plume of water it threw out so high and long I couldn't see past the SUV for a few seconds. The truck moved back out of the bike lane just as we passed what the driver was aiming for. A woman on a bicycle riding on the sidewalk towing a baby trailer behind her. The water from the SUV crashed down onto her and the baby trailer. It was so much water it looked like an ocean wave washed over them, a wave you could surf on like the ones I used to see at the north shore on Oahu.

That was the target. A woman on her bicycle with her baby. The SUV driver deliberately moved into the water to drench the woman with her baby. I drove behind the black SUV all the way to my gym and not once did the driver move into the bike lane. It hadn't been an accident, the driver just wanted to make the girl and the baby wet with dirty road wash.

Three times in less than seven days I was reminded of a blackness in the hearts of people, a small blight there that makes them think, at least at some points in their lives, that soaking a person walking on the sidewalk is a funny thing to do, something to do when you're having a bad day. If our brains are wired for that kind of carelessness, if that's the way we're built to treat a stranger having a hard time on a rainy day, what hope is there generally for us as people? If we'll splash a stranger who looks like us and lives in the same city we do, how can we ask the people of Israel or the fighters in the Hezbollah to act with any sense of restraint? If it's in us to soak a woman and her baby with dirty water, who are we to ask anybody to treat his actual legitimate enemy with forbearance or compassion?

Labels: serious, text, unsolicited opinions