||||Sushi Writes About Things

I’ve been keeping this a secret for weeks, but since it was announced this weekend I can finally announce it.

You probably know I’m going to the Night of Writing Dangerously, the write-a-thon fundraiser put on by the Office of Letters and Light. But not everyone can travel to San Francisco for the event. That’s why this year, the Atlanta region is putting on its very first Evening of Writing Wildly. It’ll be on the same night as the Night of Writing Dangerously from 5pm to 10pm at Oglethorpe University (think northeastern Atlanta), who has kindly donated a space for us wild writers to use.

There will be prizes. There will be speakers. There will be performances. And there will be food, even if it’s a potluck dinner. And if we get the wifi set up and ready to go from both places, the event may even have me making an appearance from the Night of Writing Dangerously!

So if you live close enough to make the drive to Atlanta, you should come! It’ll be a blast.

After several days straight of NaNo, NaNo, Wikiwrimo, NaNo, it’s time for something completely different.

The cow song.

What is this I don’t even.

One of the challenges of running Wikiwrimo is researching all the material that happened in past years. The NaNoWriMo website has a site archive, but the archive isn’t complete due to some of the archives being lost and the most recent years being missing. The Wayback Machine at archive.org wasn’t much help either, for the archive was way behind and didn’t have much to offer in the past few years from NaNo.

Until now.

I was looking up the 2009 article featuring YWP forum moderator Cylithria Dubois on the NaNo front page and couldn’t find it online thanks to the site wipe. (Even though what you see gets wiped every year, like the forums, the news archives generally remain. However, this year almost everything apparently got wiped in the transfer to Ruby on Rails.) Since this was an important citation for the article, I turned to the Wayback Machine even though I knew the archive might not work. And then it did. So I tried for the main NaNo website, and sure enough, there’s a NaNo page from June. Hooray! This will make researching for Wikiwrimo so much easier. There are even pages (though I don’t know how many since I haven’t clicked too thoroughly) for the lost year of 2004.

Researching things for Wikiwrimo just got so much easier.

I have a problem, Internet. My printer is acting up. It’s a HP Photosmart C4240 All-In-One, and today it decided not to detect my black cartridge after printing a few pages, therefore rendering it unable to print. I tried unplugging it and plugging it back in, taking both cartridges out and putting them back in again, cleaning the cartridges, and messing with CUPS and the drivers. No luck. This appears to be printer-independent, as I plugged the printer into my laptop and got the same thing.

This problem is particularly frustrating as I was planning to go around town and put up some flyers for NaNo, but I can’t do that if I don’t have any flyers to put up. Sigh.

So how do I fix this? Anyone know?

A couple of things:

If NaNo is messing with my productivity and sleep schedule now, imagine what it’ll do in November. No, life, I need to get work done. I can’t spend all day on the NaNo forums. I would like to have money to fund my Night of Writing Dangerously shenanigans and write-in food and drink fund.

I also need to figure out what to cook for the first week of NaNo. A couple of years ago I was smart enough to cook enough food for a week and heat up individual portions as needed. Yes, this meant that I ate a lot of the same thing for nearly a week, but that was worth being able to sit down and write without worrying about food to me. Maybe I’ll get lucky and I can stock up on cheap non-crappy frozen dinners again before the first for those really desperate times. (I already got two of them in anticipation of November first, along with a few packs of ramen. Don’t worry, I eat real food most of the time. The ramen I ate the evening of NaNo site launch is an exception, not the rule.)

So I need some quick meals that I can cook before the first, preferably things I can cook all at once, freeze, and then pop in the oven or microwave before eating. Quick and inexpensive to fix are always better. I’m cooking for just myself, so just about any recipe will give me enough for leftovers. Ideas?

Soon after the new NaNoWriMo site launched last night, I found myself on there, refreshing intermittently while doing other things.

A proper review of the site is in the works for the next day or two. I have to give the new site time to get some of the old features back.

But there’s one very big thing from the relaunch.

Wikiwrimo is the very first site featured in the Procrastination Station… meaning it’s on the front page of NaNoWriMo right now.

Oh. My. Baty. Threads I’ve started have been featured there, but never a website I built. Then again, Wikiwrimo is the first NaNo-related site I’ve built. Still, seeing it on the front page of NaNo is ridiculously awesome. I BUILT that site, after all. My Wikiwrimo is all grown up.

Well, that was a fun weekend. Caves and camping and hot tubs and saunas and campfires and tents and novel planning and meeting new people (some of whom I may get together with again while in San Francisco for the Night of Writing Dangerously!).

All told, I stayed a day longer than I intended, meaning that when I returned home after an Internet-free weekend, my mind was scrambling, especially with the NaNoWriMo site launch imminent. The launch still hasn’t happened yet. I hope I don’t have to go to bed with an old NaNo site, but it’s looking more and more likely, especially once you take my schedule for the first half of tomorrow into consideration.

The excitement is building, though. I can’t wait.

Guess whose idea it was to go out of town right before the NaNo site relaunch?

Okay, it wasn’t entirely my idea, and I made these plans before the new NaNo relaunch was announced. In fact, when I was making plans to be away last weekend, I was still of the mindset that the site relaunch would be happening then and planned accordingly. (Thank goodness for smartphones.)

But thank goodness I’ve managed to chop away at a good chunk of my to-do list before NaNo, though I’m still wondering how many of the great threads from this year I’ll get around to archiving after getting back. The archivist in me is running around like a headless chicken at all the threads being lost to the site wipe and trying to save the best of them before relaunch. A nearly impossible task, I realize, but someone has to make it happen. And who else cares enough to make it happen?

When Steve Jobs stepped down as Apple’s CEO, I was hoping that it wasn’t because of his health and that I wouldn’t have to write this post for a very long time. But here we are, not even two months later, and I’m writing what I hoped wouldn’t be written for decades.

You know those sayings about ideas coming in droves or when you have too many? That appears to be happening to me right now, at least about the last part. I blame the #nanolanta chat room for helping me come up with this idea, even if I did hint at the idea myself.

I can’t write the idea this year. Well, I could, but most the research is experience-based, and that experience can’t happen until next year. All I can say is that you have a year to read or reread Adventures in Wrimonia if you haven’t already. I’m just saying.