||||Sushi Writes About Things

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.

The new NaNoWriMo website launches in a week. I’m running around like a headless chicken thanks to MLing, having a social life, trying to get other work done, and oh, being away last weekend and this upcoming weekend. This thing called a social life is really getting to me, but at least I’m getting it out of my system before Nano season officially begins for the masses.

What many people don’t realize is that Nano season begins much sooner for me. My brother contacted me about the family coming down to visit me this weekend for my dad’s birthday. The fact that my dad and I aren’t very close at all (the least close of all my family members) aside, I have an airtight excuse in being away this weekend. But it also happens to be Nano season, and as we all know, Nano eats my soul even more than usual during October and November. Not that it doesn’t during the rest of the year, of course, with many of my social interactions being with Wrimos, but the soul-eating definitely goes into overdrive and obsession during Nano season. You would think my family is aware of this since I did Nano as a high school student while living with them, but no, every single year they still ask what Nano is. At least my brother, who is like me in that he is Internet-savvy and geeky, has figured out what Nano is after all these years and even commented on it last year when Nano trended on Twitter. He still thinks I’m nuts for doing it, which is expected. My parents primarily care about my writing to get published and therefore rich. It doesn’t work like that, but that’s a separate subject altogether.

So how do I explain to my family just how important Nano is to me? They sort of know what Nano is but don’t really value writing unless it’s going to make me rich. You know, because all writers are rich, right?

The last few days have been days of not writing. I’ve been doing this mysterious thing called having a social life (le gasp), and this social life has eaten up my evenings as of late. Oops?

But I do have one very big announcement, something I’ve been sitting on since applying. I am now a NaNoWriMo Municipal Liaison for the Atlanta region! We Atlanta MLs are now the Fabulous Four in my head. Now I have access to the ML forums, a place that has felt like a super secret chamber to me in years past. This year is going to be, as is said in Teen Girl Squad, sooooooooo good.

Also, when did Nano become less than a month away? Is the proper response YAY or AAAAAH?

I’ve talked about Instantfox and its amazingness before, but apparently its calculator is less than stellar, at least for this particular example. Why? This just happened.

I don’t think that’s the answer you meant to give. You don’t have enough significant figures for that degree of accuracy, for one.

Delicious, the bookmarking site I have grown to love, relaunched today. I noticed it this morning when people on my Twitter feed were complaining about it and when my unofficial Delicious Android app failed to bookmark a link after several attempts, but as I was at a friend’s house and using my phone to access the Internet, exploring Delicious and its new features would have to wait until having access to a real computer.

I got home, plunked myself in front of my computer, and started exploring. Unfortunately the people on my Twitter feed who were complaining had lots of good reasons to do so. There are some good things about the new Delicious, but many of the things I loved about the site, including the little things, are now gone. They’re probably not gone for good, but they’re small enough to make me realize how much they affected my use of (the old) Delicious. Since Delicious is a site that I’ve used daily for over four years, changes to the site don’t sneak by this power user easily.

I understand Delicious is thinking of itself as back in beta, but this is not a good approach to take when a site already has a loyal userbase. A change that take away the features that drove your users to the site in the first place is a great way to drive users away. The fine AVOS folks are seeking feedback on the new site, and I’m definitely sending them some feedback (maybe even this post). There’s something to be said about preserving the best in a site you’ve come to love.

That aside, let’s take a look at the new Delicious.

The Good (or at least the interesting):

1. Stacks: Stacks are collections of links designed for sharing. You can create a stack for anything you want, from foreign language resources to cookie recipes to NaNo resources. I don’t see myself creating too many stacks, but I can see them being fun to browse.

One thing that went through my mind: If the folks behind Delicious now think people aren’t bookmarking and tagging links because it takes effort, what makes them think people will curate stacks? Doesn’t that take even more effort?

The silly part of this is the name. Why on earth are they called stacks? Wouldn’t “collections” be better? When I think stack I think of a pile of stuff or of programming. Maybe the name is a tribute to StackOverflow, but that’s stretching it.

2. Profile pictures. They definitely adds a less asocial component to the site. The problem is that my default is so cute that I don’t want to change it.

3. You can still add bookmarks, so the core of Delicious hasn’t really changed. I’ll address the specifics of this in a minute.

The Okay:

1. Bookmarks are called links now. Does the name bookmark really turn people off? I’m indifferent to this change as I’m going to call them bookmarks forevermore, but I’m curious.

2. Spaces no longer separate tags. Commas do. This is so Delicious can support multiword tags, and while it’s not a bad change, the comma thing is something I need to get used to.

3. The new design of the site. It’s much looser than the old Delicious, and most of it is something I can get used to. Still, it feels less mature than the old version, like someone going through their wild youth before settling down.

The Not-So-Good:

1. I have no idea how the tags in my sidebar are chosen, but I can tell one thing: They’re not my top n tags. They appear to be tags I’ve used recently based on a few clicks. I’m not sure how I feel about this. I much prefer a combination of the top tag system and a recent tag system so folks can get a better glimpse of what I bookmark. Another thing that is painfully missing (or at least not in an obvious place) is my overall tags page. I have over two thousand tags. A proper tags page is essential, and while tag bundles weren’t essential for me since I let my bundles die with disuse, they are essential for many people.

2. While we’re on the subject of tags, there is no sign of tags when I bookmark a page with the Delicious addon. Yes, I can add tags, but I see nothing about recommended tags out of my own tags or popular tags for a link. That feature was essential for me. I needed (and still do) to remember what tags I had already created so I could tag appropriately. There’s also no more autocomplete for tags. This is absolutely killer for me. I could keep typing and have no idea if I misspell a tag. I have to spend several more seconds a day typing in tag names. Seriously, Delicious. If nothing else, bring back these tagging features. I look at the bookmark me page many times a day, and making this page pleasant is essential to my Delicious experience, as well as the experience of many others.

3. No more bulk edit. This saved me so much work in organizing my tags.

4. If you try to change the privacy of a private bookmark, the “Save as private” checkbox isn’t checked, making you think the bookmark was temporarily public. This can cause a lot of unneeded panic. Fix this.

5. I can’t see how many total pages are in a given tag or in all my bookmarks. All I see are pages 1, 2, 3, 4, and an arrow to go to the next page. This helps me absolutely none. If I want to go to the nth page, where n is a very large number, I have a lot of hopping to do. I have to go the fourth page and the last page after the fourth page I can access, and then the last one after that.

6. Somewhat related, Delicious no longer tells you how many bookmarks are saved under a given tag, making this game much more frustrating. I know I have many more than ten bookmarks tagged “privacy”, for example, but I can’t find out how many more. I can’t even browse past my ten most recen bookmarks under a given tag. This alone makes me want to quit Delicious for another site. I don’t use Delicious just for bookmarking things. I use it to tag things I want to read or watch or do, and those lists get quite long after awhile. Every now and then I go through those lists and take a few off or take care of them so I can remove the tag. Now that task is practically impossible.

7. The redirects. All the pages saved in Delicious are wrapped in a Delicious wrapper, which redirects you to the site in question when you click. No. Just… no. I want to know exactly where I’m going before clicking. Yes, I can copy and paste the link in my browser or in an IM window, but that’s not quite the same. Dear webmasters, please don’t wrap your links around redirects.

8. In new Delicious you save the URL, then add tags and comments and mark as private. Just no. I don’t private bookmark often, but when I do, I want it to stay private. Not being able to edit the URL also means I don’t get to cut out the RSS junk that some RSS readers like to add. Being able to edit the URL is something that must come back.

The question I’m asking is… what now? I’m not a fan of Diigo, mainly because there’s not an easy keyboard shortcut to bookmark links. Yes, this is extremely important to me. The Delicious addon broke me in that way. Toolbars are terrible, and I refuse to add any. Pinboard.in isn’t free to join, but I could be convinced. Freelish.us appears to have been down for days for status.net maintenance, so I can’t judge it yet. What other options are out there for someone who maintains an 18,000-bookmark collection (and growing) and enjoys browsing the links of others? Right now it doesn’t look like Delicious is the answer. I really wish it were.

I spent the last part of this afternoon wandering around my college. I hadn’t been on the campus for almost two years, but the appearance of the campus was almost exactly as I remembered it. No new buildings, no major renovations. The main thing I noticed was that a couple of offices on campus had switched places, but those things tend to happen.

No one recognized me during my wanderings. This was probably for the best; I just wanted to take everything in and go on a nice long walk. That I happened to be wearing a shirt from that college (I was wearing it as a pajama top and forgot about it when leaving) probably helped my case for being a student. The big question is how much longer I can blend in like this. Eventually I’ll start to age and not look like I did at graduation, meaning folks will think of me as more of someone walking through the campus and less of a student.

That day, thankfully, is not now. For now I’ll keep on wandering.

I love being a geek, but there’s one problem with it. The problem is that I’m up at 3am because I was fixing geeky things. Here the geeky things were things on the Wikiwrimo site, hammering them into shape before Nano season really gets going. This is particularly important as one huge feature has been broken for months and I never noticed. Oops.

Which brings me to the big thing. You can now just sign up and edit! Just create an account and start editing the wiki. We’ll see how much spam the site gets as a result, but I do have a few measures in place to prevent some of it with more ideas in case the spam gets bad. The big weapons haven’t been brought out yet.

So get to editing! And especially find your region and write about it. I can’t write about all the regions, and you know yours better than I do. Even a few sentences are better than nothing; those few sentences can encourage more folks to edit the page to a great article. So what are you waiting for…inspiration?

It’s Friday, and I haven’t been getting down at all; I’ve been trying to fix my SSH instance on my phone and wishing I had copied my ~/.ssh folder to my new computer. That would have made my life so much easier, but did I think about that? Noooooo.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, you can smile and nod politely. I’ll understand. Or you can have a few links.

If you are curious as to what I’m talking about, SSH, or Secure Shell, is a way to connect to other computers securely. The Wikipedia article isn’t terrible, though parts of it are very detailed. SSH lets me access my chat client from anywhere, among other things. If I start using a terminal-based text editor for writing, then I could also run that in screen and access that anywhere with an Internet connection. Aww yeah.

Do you love making snap judgments of people? Go to town. Right now you can judge people on the introversion/extraversion scale as well as a smart/dense scale. You can also add your own photo to the database.

Apple is worth more than lots of things. Here are some of them. Of note: All the illegal drugs in the world, the GDP of Denmark, and every home in Atlanta combined.

Do you have all the feelings? Leave those bags for someone else. Someone will send you a song for your feelings. Eventually. Apparently there’s a bit of a backlog. I submitted my feelings last night and haven’t gotten a song yet. You can also go through the feelings of others and find songs for them.

And finally, This is a giant chalkboard with an enormous math equation on it. Yes, it’s a real giant chalkboard in New York City with a real equation. Whether you like math or not, this is pretty neat, especially the solution. All of us should keep that solution in mind.

It’s no secret that I love Linux. I’ve used it on three computers so far, and though I didn’t install the system myself, my phone’s operating system is based on the Linux kernel. So there’s a lot of Linux love in my life.

But I’ve never installed Linux on anything besides a laptop or desktop. I’ve definitely never installed Linux on, say, a dead badger. Parts of this are amusing even if you know nothing about Linux, like attaching the external SpiritInTheSky adapter and installing the badger’s operating system. When you get to the badger’s operating system, you see what’s really going on with the badger.

It’s a good thing installing Linux on dead creatures hasn’t become more popular, isn’t it? This sounds like a really nerdy story idea.

Troy Davis was executed today. For those unfamiliar with this case, Troy Davis was convinced of murdering a police officer in Savannah, Georgia, in 1989 and sentenced to the death penalty in 1991. The execution itself had been delayed several times until finally happening tonight.

There is doubt behind Troy’s guilt. Seven of the nine witnesses have recanted their testimonies. The theory behind interrogation and eyewitnesses in the field of legal psychology tells you that people can be persuaded to believe almost anything easily, and in fact some of these witnesses were coerced to testify against Davis.

But the thing that really bothers me is watching the online reactions. People are casting blame on the entire state of Georgia. I know many of them are referring only to the folks who caused this travesty to happen, but seeing those call out everyone in Georgia disturbs me. Lots of Georgia residents, including me, didn’t want this to happen, and now Georgia’s known as the state that executed a potentially innocent man to people all over the country–no, world.

Dear rest of the world,
We didn’t want this to be.
Love, Georgia’s good folks.

So tell me. Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty? Isn’t that what our justice system is supposed to be based on?