WriteLarge.com

Here's a query letter that I just opted not to send. I'm posting it here for you to enjoy.

Please consider publishing my "appreciation" of Terry Brook's Sword of Shannara. I pitch Brooks' work as a suitable alternative to those looking to fill the hole left behind when they finished Lord of the Rings. Chris Tolkien can re-write his dad's works all he wants, Terry Brooks does a lot better job of doing what Tolkien does -- only without all the fucking elves.

Frankly, there are too elves in Shannara. At least, one unfortunate elf. But she's really only in the Scions series, and she's not so much an elf as a pointy-eared lady-man.

Gaia likes my work computer because it doesn't have any "poop" in it. This is because I explained to her that my desktop at home -- my Ubuntu machine -- took a poop last week and won't work anymore. She's very disappointed at the lack of Tux Paint in her life.
So, we sat down at the "Pooputer" as we're calling it now, and managed to chisel 25 minutes of tux-paint out of it before the poop kicked in and pooped the pooputer to poopington. She was pleased and the results were, as always, tuxpaintriffic.
I like my work computer because it was paid for by someone other than me. I think, in the future, I'm going to try to negotiate a private laptop into all my employment arrangements.
Sure, the world is moving away from platform/hardware based document processing/storage, but that is exactly the justification for including a laptop in my work requirements. I don't need to be tied to just the office intranet anymore. I work everywhere. Even when I'm not at work.
The fact is, when I'm away from the office, I shouldn't use the computer that has poop in it. Everybody, but especially my office IS people, should appreciate that.

A church on Wisconsin Avenue freakin' exploded, man! Ask me what it was like on scene! Ask me!
I don't Freakin' know! I don't cover breaking news any more!
I've been quietly blogging at Ocono.com for a month or so, and today was the first time since I left Journalism that something happened in the city that I kind of secretly wish I could cover.
Of course, breaking news isn't really Ocono.com's forte, but I thought a Google news search was probably in order. You hate to leave your readers looking for news you're not offering them, but you hate to pretend news isn't happening.

Chatting with PRL today, he says: "Some days feel like successes and some feel like total failures."
And I ask, "Why don't they teach you _that_ in business school?"
I tweeted about it earlier, you may recall.

I just wish someone had sat me down and said: "Look, it doesn't matter what you do in life. There will be things that will suck. The trick is to minimize those and maximize the things that don't. Then everything will be ok."
I like to imagine that wise sage then leaning back in his comfy wooden college professor chair and smiling at me. Then he'd lean back in and with a twinkle in his eye, tell me this: "Also, one day, your boss' boss is going to use you as leverage against your boss. When that day comes, the best thing you can do is be quiet and slowly creep out of the room as if you were invisible."

I explained this sentiment to my wife last night. "I don't want to change the world," I said. "I don't need to make waves or break the system down. I can work the system. I just don't want to be hassled."

And she says, congratulations. You've turned thirty.

I'm pushin' an Elephant up the stairs. I know this. But let me tell you, in December, I got almost _no_ Telemarketing calls from advertising reps. The first week of January, I've received at least 13. I don't even bother checking my voicemail at work because it's someone looking for a call back about any possible spending I might have in mind for their special "Womens Health" Pull-out section.

With the new year, I have made a commitment to spend less time looking at or even considering print advertising. Unless you're going to deliver me the kind of metrics that I get from online ads, don't bother calling, mkay?

Seriously, Print is dead. Why advertise in a medium that nobody cares about, can't demonstrate its effectiveness, and is old before the next edition comes out? Am I under-estimating the shopping power of old people in nursing homes who still read their daily newspaper? Maybe. But I guess I don't really care. I know for a _fact_ that Google Pay-per click is driving traffic to my website. I have to take my rep's word that my print ad is.

Look, Newspapers and Print Periodicals still have a vital role to play in our society. It's just too bad that the lazy bastards who run them can't be bothered to figure out a way to re-monitize their products so that they'll be around in five years to continue to fill that role.

There will always be a niche audience who reads Newspapers and print periodicals. But that niche is going to get more and more unimportant to me going forward.

Today's entry in my "Art of War" calendar is an excerpt from Chapter 1: "On assessments."

"Since you adapt and adjust appropriately in the face of the enemy, how could you say what you are going to do beforehand."

In other words, it's folly to try to explain what you're going to do before hand when what you are going to do depends largely on what happens at the event. This reminds me of the why I don't like going to meetings. In my four months working in a genuinely corporate environment, I have discovered that planning and meetings are a crutch of the weak and untalented.  There is no reason to put more work into planning on how to do a task than you would put into actually doing the task in the first place, and the only reason most meetings happen is so that the weak and untalented have a paper trail that protects them when failure occurs.

I hate that the default setting in Microsoft Office is four a 1-hour meeting. Like Merlin Mann, I often wonder how much more could get done in a day if meetings were 10-15 minutes by default.