Man did I start something today. So I’ve been working on an article that is due in a week or so and the first draft got reviewed today. One of the first comments in the Word document read like this:

“FYI—the standard now is one space after end punctuation. I replaced all the extra spaces but didn’t track them.”

Whaaaaa?

You’re supposed to use a single space after end punctuation? Really? Where did that come from? How long has it been this way?

This naturally led me to walk around and ask anyone I saw how they do it. My unscientific survey came up with nearly a 50-50 split broken into these two camps:

“You use two spaces?”

“You mean you’re only supposed to use one space?”

The latter group typically then had an existential moment where they considered what else is wrong that they thought they knew. At one point the single space people (Jeff, Paula) were standing looking at the double space people (Me, Alan, Tom) with all of us trying to decide which group was crazier. Even the Word grammar checker couldn’t take a stand by making the number of spaces a configurable option. (The weasel.)

I understand the reason for it, typewriters with mono-spaced fonts versus computers and all but I am still shocked that it took until today for me to find this out. What’s even more bizarre is that arguments over this have been happening on the Internet for years.

I still haven’t been able to peg a date on when this changed happened so I would love to know. Until then the one argument that really swayed me toward single space (ignoring of course all the official style guides and typesetters that say it is the way) came from the Wikipedia Manual of Style

“The bottom line for me, however, is the Emacs commands for moving between sentences: M-e moves forward one sentence and M-a moves back one sentence. These two commands are really handy. If you need to navigate long, unbroken lines, like when editing Wikipedia, they are to live by. Oh, but they only work properly when two spaces are put between each sentence.”

If double spaces are the emacs way of doing of things I think it is pretty clear I need to hunker down and teach myself not to do it anymore.

After passing this along to at least three different people I’ve decided to post it here. That Merlin Mann makes me laugh.

The funny thing about writing a blog but not administering the blog is that sometimes you login and notice that WordPress is all different. It’s kind of like coming home finding that someone has redecorated your house. You leave and everything is arranged in a nice 16th century Japanese Imperial decor and you come back to find wall to wall IKEA. Now, I’m not saying that one is better than other. Who knows, if IKEA existed in 16th century Japan the emperor might have taken a fancy to it. It’s just jarring to go from one to the other, that’s all.

So anyhow, the real reason why I am here is to give another example of the usefulness of Twitter. On April Fool’s Day, Andy Ihnatko wrote a hugely funny gag story using only Twitter. Through the first few tweet’s I wasn’t exactly sure what was going on but by the time he picked up his traveling companion I was already laughing. By the time the airbags were deployed I was laughing out loud. Once I got to the end I had forgotten all about IKEA.

The real problem though is that Twitter is so darn transient that there is no good way to provide a link to the full story. Luckily someone else out there did the work for him to archive it all up. Seriously, go read it, it’s ha ha funny.

There was an article on 43folders the other day that talked about the value of constraints on creativity. The idea was that the best stuff comes from situations where you really have to stretch the intellect due to having to fit whatever you’re doing into a metaphorical box.

Kind of like when in the movies the hero must fix the spaceship with only a plasma torch, the glove from a space suit, a length of rope, and a package of bologna.

Right now my most interesting self-imposed creative constraint is the utterly useless Web 2.0 poster child, Twitter. For those not familiar with it, Twitter is what someone clever coined a “microblogging” site. That means you get to make post like any other blog only you get a grand total of 140 characters to work with.

That’s right, that brilliant piece of 156 character literature isn’t going to fit.

Now the vast majority of Twitter is basically what you might expect it to be.

“Going to work”

“Eating lunch”

“Going home from work now”

“Oh crap, I’m in a bind now, if only I had a package of bologna.”

That kind of day to day stuff, to me, is mundane for a reason. It’s completely and utterly boring. I barely want to live through it much less announce it to the world. What I like about Twitter is trying squeeze something funny into a super small package. It forces you not only question ever word but every character.

For example:

But the brilliant part of the software is the character countdown number in the upper right hand corner. It just dares you to use all 140 characters:

If you happen to also be into this crazy thing you can find me at twitter.com/glammi. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go update it about wanting to find a bologna sandwich.

So I get this email from my friend Sean:

“You going to put up a status update on the nose and/or the wife’s leg/ankle/whatever it was that got blown out during her fall? Simply having a baby doesn’t relieve you of your blogging responsibilities, especially with the whole “closure” thing.”

And a good point he makes. I forget sometimes that this blog doesn’t just update itself or that it can read what’s bouncing around in my brain. While at first glance a mind reading blog might be considered a bad thing it would have to better than a brain eating zombie blog.

It’s all just a matter of perspective really.

And praying that WordPress doesn’t spawn any zombie processes.

To answer his question though, here’s the new nose which is actually still the old nose just put back in the same place where it used to be:

(iSight + Photo Booth + a green painted bedroom == a great way to distract 3 year old big sister so that newborn and mom can take a nap.)

I don’t really have a picture to prove it but my wife is all healed up as well. She also has a whole new respect for basketball players on TV when they go down with ankle injuries. That being said, she really wouldn’t have liked it the other day at our lunchtime basketball game when Tim rolled his ankle after throwing down a dunk. On the upside he didn’t let his bad ankle stop him from watching the Xavier near disaster with me yesterday. In fact, I will believe to my dying day that when he introduced me to Grape Crush that the rally began.

So there we go, status updated and loop closed. But just on the offhand chance that WordPress has gone all zombie on me it’s time to throw him off the trail:

lammi-mbp:~ lammig$ touch ~/brains.txt

A while back Jonathan asked to be a guest poster on the blog. I’m not sure why, but he was passionate about it so I figured why not. Thus I now I have a Jay Leno/Joan Rivers to my Johnny Carson. I’m still trying to decide if this is a good thing or the worst mistake I’ve ever made. –Grant

So the other day I asked Grant how he would feel about a guest post on his blog. The conversation went something like this:

Grant: Sure, send it over here and I’ll make sure it meets my high standards before it gets posted.

Me: Standards? In your last blog you talked about eating rats!

Grant: Touché. I guess I’ve hit rock bottom.

Well, that’s not entirely true since I cited a blog topic from the future, but basically he said “Okay” and welcomed a change of pace from his standard blog scenario.

I broke down my first blog into a few steps. Honestly, I have no idea how many steps it will end up being, so we’ll just play it by ear.

Step 1: Get permission to post. Done.

Step 2: Come up with a blog topic. I thought that coming up with a topic would be easy, but that has actually proven to be the most difficult step in my process (which could be replaced by a more difficult step in later steps, I just don’t know yet). I could write a review about something, but everyone does that. I could rant about something, but then people would think that I am an angry person. I could complain about something else, but that is probably less interesting than ranting and besides, no one likes a complainer. After much consideration, it appears that this will be a blog about blogs. Somewhat redundant, don’t you think?

Step 3: Write. In progress.

Step 4: Review. I’ll do that later.

Step 5: Post. This comes after the review that I’m doing later, so you could say that step 5 will come later later.

Step 6: Observe blog statistics. I have always dreamed that any blog I write would be one to generate a lot of user interest, and that those people would leave lots of comments that would spur discussion and possibly form topics for later blog posts. As much as that would make my day, I’m predicting that there will be 2-3 comments, with at least two of those people asking me to never post on Grant’s blog again. If that ends up being the case, you can be sure that I will have a snappy comment rebuttal that will end all negative comments towards me (don’t test me on this one).

Step 7: Return to step 2.

I have thought about starting my own blog before, but as I see it, most people that do that quit updating after about three months (take Yan for example). As soon as the blog is created, there are constant entries, sometimes more than one a day. After a while, it turns into an occasional update, maybe once a week. After that maybe just an update once a month or so…and then after that the blog effectively takes a hiatus. I don’t want to do that, thus I’m starting small-scale on someone else’s blog. I guess we’ll just have to see how it goes.

People ask me what I do a lot. Most of the time I don’t really have a good answer. When I was developing full time it was easy. I would just say, “I’m a software engineer/developer/programmer/whatever” and wait for the disinterested look to set in so we could move onto a different subject. Now that I have a half silly/half interesting title so the glazed over eyeballs have disappeared.

“Oooh. A technology evangelist. What is that?” they say while instinctively reaching to cover their purse or wallet.

For a while I tried the, “Well, I mostly sit around and think big thoughts” answer. Unfortunately people didn’t find that particularly satisfying, kind of like they were expecting something good like a steak and instead got a White Castle slider.

Aaaand that will be the part of this post that everyone remembers, Lammi bagging on White Castle. It was like a conversation that I had with a friend years ago about sliders:

Me: “You know, there’s little guarantee that that thing is made from beef. There’s a real good chance it is made from a rat.”

Friend: “But it’s a good tasting rat.”

*Sigh*

Anyhow, enough about food and more about me. Part of what I do is work on super secret projects that I can’t mention because they’re secret. Another part of what I do is help plan corporate strategy by looking into new ideas and examining what else is being done in the market. Imagine a mix of General Patton and Joan Rivers but only applied to software.

“We’re going to move this functionality to the front and start a new push for the Transmogifier market here. Oh and did you see where so and so put that dialog box in their last release? That’s like wearing a compiler after Labor Day with no accessories, what were they thinking?”

I also write. And then I write some more. And then after that I write some more. The good news is that we have an in-house editor, we’ll call her Sarah. (Because, well, that’s her name.) She has the unfortunate job of making sure that all the letters I write to paper form words and sentences with things like coherent thoughts connecting them. I just got back an article I wrote that she went over and it looked like a red pen exploded all over it. Then after it exploded it called a few of its red pen friends over and they exploded on it too. Thank god she doesn’t proof this blog, it would probably be too much for her to bear. I mean look, I’ll just type a sentence that is pure punctuation.

.!;,’::.!,..;.

That would drive her nuts.

But anyhow that’s what I do. I do secret stuff, I plan and strategize, I write, and I drive my editor to the brink of insanity. I still won’t eat White Castle’s though.

(Seriously, it could really be a rat. Yuck.)

For some reason today I got to thinking about word processors. I think it was because during a meeting I started to wonder if Word had outlived its usefulness when it came to writing design documents. Perhaps all design from start to finish could be wiki based? That’s something to ponder but that’s as far as I got since, you know, I needed to actually be paying attention during the meeting.

Seriously, I even made a note on my paper that reads:

“Blog idea: Word templates”

I think that note is actually an accident since I meant to write “Word vs wiki?” but the conversation had moved on and someone had said something about templates. Reading my poorly transcribed note made me think of two things.

1. It is good that I didn’t choose court reporting as a career.

Judge: “Would read back the last statement please.”

Me: “The defendant claimed that the box had fallen off the back of a truck and a roast beef sandwich sounds like an excellent idea for lunch.”

I wonder if you can be held in contempt of court if you were a working officer of the court? Something else to ponder.

2. I don’t recall ever using templates from a word processor.

See look, here’s MS Word and Pages, check out all those templates.

I automatically look for the one named something like “Blank Document”. In fact, all my writing tends to be essay type stuff, I can’t recall the last time I wrote a formal letter. I don’t even know if I own stamps to send a letter. Come to think of it, I don’t think I know how much a stamp costs. That’s probably bad. *Shakes fist at online billpay*

Thinking historically I must have at least written a resume with a template although it’s been so long I don’t remember.

Let’s try it this way, let’s list out all the word processors or text editors I remember using and see what I did with them.

1. Bank Street Writer - I used this in junior high to write many a five paragraph theme. If memory serves it didn’t support word wrapping so I doubt it had much in the way of templates.
2. WordPerfect - This was the main high school guy in all its DOS glory. I also used it in college on some crash-happy Mac Quadras. I even started the VMS version once on the VAX because I simply couldn’t believe that it had been ported to that platform. (Does anyone wonder why they are niche player today?) Anyhow, college papers don’t require templates, they just need ghost writers. Ah, yeah, err, forget you just read that. A ghost writer must have written it.
3. LaTeX - It’s true, I’ve used LaTeX. But it was in college and it was very experimental time. I don’t remember much about it other than it had to do with very complicated and advanced math which I’ve barricaded into a dark and distant corner in the back of my brain. To inquire further would run the risk of letting all that junk out and quite honestly it’s not worth it.
4. vi - Templates? Ha ha ha. Um, no.
5. Emacs - Couldn’t tell you, I gave it up once I found vi. Although I’m sure I could use it to write a lisp macro that would generate templates for me. You know, if I hadn’t found vi.
6. TextMate - Excellent for Ruby on Rails programming but I’ve never used it for documents.
7. BBEdit - Mostly like TextMate with the exception I have a non-eval license key for this one. I’ve typed loads of plain text documents in it but I’ve never needed a template.
8. MS Word - Used it for more documents than I can count, no template recollection.
9. Pages - Ditto.

So there we have it, a walk down memory lane that proves beyond any worthwhile doubt that I don’t remember using word processor templates. This was a fun exercise and I’ll tell you what, this post’s format was spot on. I should probably save so I can use it again, maybe make a template or something. Hey wait…

Before we get rolling with the new stuff let’s pause for a minute for a little more old stuff. Honestly we could do it the other way around and put the new stuff first and the old stuff second as a kind of addendum. But you know, that’s just delaying the inevitable, it’s best just to get the darn thing out of the way so we can focus going forward. It’s like when you’ve just eaten way too much Skyline and you’re ready to get going on your way but that Skyline wants to see the world again. So it really really really pays to deal with that first. Not that I’m implying that the old stuff is, well, poop, but you get the idea.

Right.

So, all this talk about stacks got me some responses from people that fell into one of two camps:

1. You must a be big freaking slob.
2. You’re insane to be writing a blog post about stacks of a paper.

Through the power of digital photography I’ll prove #1 completely false. The other one, well, the jury is still out but my lawyer doesn’t seem particularly hopeful about the outcome.

So right now my desk looks like this:

and this:

There it is, thirteen stacks of stuff officially at the moment. Everything is orderly though, right angles and whatnot. So slob, no, obsessive compulsive, err, maybe.

One of the more interesting things I’ve noticed about my new job is how much more “stuff” I seem to collect. For whatever reason there seems to be more (and varied) files and printouts and pictures and videos and stacks.

Oi the stacks.

When I was still writing code all day, or least pretending to, I had one stack. It was the “This junk needs to be taken to the recycling bin downstairs but that implies carrying it all downstairs which considering the fact that downstairs is downstairs from where I’m at makes it a royal PITA stack.” Eventually the stack would quite literally reach a tipping point and the stack would become a pile at which time something simply had to be done.

Now I stop and look around and I have a least eight and a half stacks and I’m highly suspicious that there are another couple that quickly hide whenever I look in their direction. The old recycling stack still exists, which is a testament to laziness in that I could, if a standing wall were not withstanding, easily hit the recycling bin from my current seat. Given a couple of tries I could probably even do it left handed.

But now I’ve also got a TestTrack Pro stack, a TestTrack TCM stack, a Surround SCM stack, a book publisher stack, an unread magazine stack, and several funny little note card stacks that I blame entirely on Merlin Mann and David Allen. Well, truthfully, it isn’t all their fault, JK Rowling should shoulder some of the blame for interrupting The Process as it were.

If we really geek out and consider folders on a harddrive stacks then I think I’m just going to cry. Or perhaps I’ll just starting drinking. Heck, maybe I’ll do both, that seems like a reasonable multitasking pair.

And just imagine when Leopard ships with actual stacks. “Yeah, I’ll have a vodka martini. No, Goose is fine. And do you have a box of Kleenex back there?”

Now I have high hopes that the stacks will get better after they get much worse as the new TestTrack and new Surround releases get out there. I’d just as soon spill the beans and tell you all the new features now, I mean we’re all friends here. That way the product specific stacks could be merged with the recycling stack and I’ll guarantee you when that happens the bin will be getting a visit or twelve. Unfortunately, I can’t do that yet. I know, it’s killing me too.

I can give you a hint though. Or can I? Hmm, the decisions. Let’s just say that the new TestTrack will help me deal with the stacks. Kind of. Sort of. Unfortunately his brother Surround will just be an enabler and allow more stacks. Metaphorically, hypothetically, dodgy grammatically speaking that is.

So, anyhow, that’s my random observation of the day. I’ll even sum up the whole post in case you skipped to the end. “Blah blah blah stacks blah blah vodka blah blah blah I really shouldn’t so I won’t sorry about that blah blah to the blah.”

Someday, if you’re really lucky, I’ll work up the courage to talk about my lists. That’ll make the stacks look like simple piles of paper. Even the stack that’s made up of lists.