Some of you may remember my technology policy / technology news site Technocrat.net. The site is reactivated. It's intended to be a more mature, and hopefully more relevant, forum than Slashdot. No ACs, a special focus on technology policy and high technology outside of the conventional corporate model, but conventional tech news as well.

I'd really appreciate it if you'd create a login on the site and submit articles. Especially original work, which hasn't always been well recieved on Slashdot - they seem to prefer linking to other people's coverage. RDF and RSS are available at http://technocrat.net/rdf and http://technocrat.net/rss, so you can keep track of articles from elsewhere.

Bruce

It's time to tell the truth. I am a 55 year-old man. My name is Andy Kaufman, and I live in New York City.

I am sincerely sorry to everyone for all my lies.

--Andy

Please read this article. And please pass the link around, if you agree with it.

Thanks

Bruce

A few irrefutable facts about humans:

1. They see faces everywhere.
2. They are biodegradable.
3. Base 10 zeroes excite them.

Here's a little something to excite you:

1. 1 Million - Congrats to Archie Binnie!
2. 2 Million - Congrats to Anonymous Coward!
3. 3 Million - Congrats to ronc_LAemigre!
4. 4 Million - Congrats to Anonymous Coward!
5. 5 Million - Congrats to jefu!
6. 6 Million - Congrats to The Bungi!
7. 7 Million - Congrats to nytmare!
8. 8 Million - Congrats to Anonymous Coward!
9. 9 Million - To be announced soon
10. 10 Million - To be announced soon

Thanks to India for inventing the base 10 zero. Where would we be without it?

I just got back from Starsky and Hutch.

Surprisingly funny. I bet the DVD will be great.

Best part was how anyone in the theatre under 30 didn't get about 70% of the best jokes.

Now I'm hoping that they'll make a CHiPs movie. I wonder what other late 70s to early 80s TV shows would translate well into movies?

Oh, and if you're not watching TRIO every night, you're really missing out on some fantastic television.

There's no "Ask Slashdot" topic available for user journals, but I am intrigued by this reader's question, and I thought it was worth a try to tap into the collective wisdom of Slashdot.

Hi Wil,

you mentioned some time ago in your blog that you did a presentation on writing your book(s) using open source tools. Have you posted these slides (or whatever the medium was) anywhere?

I'm asking as I am about to embark on a writing project that will be north of 80,000 words (assuming I get past the 5,000 word 'pain barrier' that killed me last time) and recent experience with M$ Word has, quite frankly, scared the bejaysus out of me.

Anyways, if you get this it would be great to see you share some of your experiences using OSS to write.

thanks
Conrad

[1]http://www.wilwheaton.net/mt/archives/001401.php

I replied:

Hi Conrad,

Sadly, I didn't use any slides . . . that's *way* over my level of preparation for anything I do.

My talk pretty much focused on how I used OpenOffice.org to compose and edit my two current books, and what some of the pitfalls were.

I can summarize briefly for you: OO.o is a fantastic word processing suite, and did everything that I needed it to do. I was particularly impressed by the "stylist" in OO.o, which exists, I think, because they use some sort of XML-ish language behind the scenes. The stylist allowed me to assign something similar to "classes" to diffferent areas of my text, and was extremely useful in the design of "Just A Geek."

The only time I ran into an annoying limitation was moving to and from the .doc format, because OO.o and MSWord don't play nicely in regards to formatting. I worked around this by using .rtf format, when I needed to send my work out to other people (for notes and stuff). There were a few limitations in formatting, but they were purely aesthetic and didn't affect the actual data in any way.

I briefly looked at Abiword and KOffice, and found them both to be well-written and stable, but they were far more limited than OO.o.

In terms of just putting together a manuscript without regard to formatting, you could work very easily with Kwrite, or Kate, the same way that many other writers use BBEdit on the Mac.

When I finally had a finished product that I liked, I used OpenOffice.org to print to a .ps file, then used the ps2pdf13 command line tool to convert it into a .pdf document, which I sent to my printer. I understand that the newest version of OO.o has a very robust built-in pdf converter which makes that extra step unnecessary. I should also point out that converting files to .pdf on *nix always results in smaller filesizes than if you'd done it on a Mac or Windows platform. Hooray for us.

I'll post this e-mail to my Slashdot journal (CleverNickName) and maybe some of the Slashdotters will have good advice of their own to share with us.

Best of luck with your novel. Just go one scene at a time, and you'll be past 5K words before you know it!

Wil

My presentaton was pretty much limited to "I like this, I don't like this, and this thing was cool." I didn't have the time to get into a 1:1 comparison among all the different Open Source word processing suites. Do Slashdotters have any comments or suggestions? I find myself using Kate more and more when I compose weblog entries or shorter columns for magazines and the like. I occasionally use Abiword to compose and format letters and fax covers when time is a factor (Abiword loads much faster than OpenOffice.org.)

HahHahahahaHAHAh!

What a clever play on words I made ;-)

Next journal topic: Coming soon!

While reading this article about designing "experiences" in the Globe and Mail, I came across this interesting tidbit: If you're a frequent Prada shopper (and who on /. isn't?), the loyalty card in your wallet or purse contains a RFID tag that announces your arrival in the store. When you encounter a saleswoman, her handheld computer brings up your tastes, buying history, vital statistics and personalized suggestions from in-stock and coming inventory; the handhelds also place orders and book change rooms. Every item for sale bears an RFID tag. The RFID tags are courtesy of IDEO, and their website has a nice write-up of all the RFID-powered stuff at Prada, including the changeroom! I'm guessing this isn't coming to Wal*Mart's changerooms when they implement RFID. (Another write-up can be found here.)

• Bill Clinton likes
• naked
• naked
• naked
• naked
• naked
• naked
• naked
• naked
• naked.

Happy leap year! Will your code keep working on February 29th?

--gal

You made the top ten list!

No PointsName Hp [max]
1 20342 Morc-Mon-Hum-Mal-Law died in Sokoban on level 6 [max 9].
Killed by an owlbear. - [79]
2 15917 Morc-Mon-Hum-Mal-Law died in The Dungeons of Doom on level 12.
Killed by a xan. - [68]
3 4171 Morc-Wiz-Orc-Mal-Cha died in The Dungeons of Doom on level 6.
Killed by a water elemental. - [59]

It's cold comfort to be three fucking rocks away from beating Sokoban, only to have a fucking OWLBEAR show up out of nowhere, and whack 70 fucking hit fucking points right off you in one fucking turn.

Gods, I love this fucking game. >:-)

RetroCRUSH is a pop culture website run my my friend Robert Berry.

On November 20, 2003, Robert wrote a humorous article called The Worst Sex Scenes Ever: A Look At The Most Unsexy Sex Scenes". On December 30, 2003, his article was stolen by the UK Tabloid The Daily Star. Robert writes, "The UK tabloid 'The Daily Star' printed the same feature, with the same movies I used (even failing to omit a joke entry for the film Deliverance that I also included in my feature). Instead of crediting my site, however, they credited a seemingly fictitious American magazine named FILM. Not only did they highlight the films I mentioned, but they lifted three separate quotes from my article and attributed them to FILM magazine readers who responded to a (apparently non-existent) poll." It was subsequently syndicated to at least 30 other news organizations without crediting Robert, who is the author of the story.

Robert recounts his conversation with Kieran Saunders, the News Editor at the tabloid: "He said, 'Well, if it's on the internet it's up for grabs. You can't copyright anything on the internet.' I told him that was untrue and he then refused to speak with me further, and said all future communication needed to be sent to their legal contact, Steven Bacon in London. I even tried to call back an hour later to speak with the actual author of the piece, Emily Rose, and Saunders answered the phone, stating, 'I told you never to call here again, speak to our legal group' before ending the call."

From bOINGbOING:

Brazil to fingerprint Americans in retaliation for Homeland Security indignities
The Brazilian government has retaliated against a US plan to fingerprint Brazilian visitors to the US by fingerprinting US visitors to Brazil. The judge who enacted the regulation has exempted citizens of countries whom the US intends to fingerprint from the Brazilian requirement, and has had a little Godwin's Law moment in his publicity regarding the decision:

"I consider the act absolutely brutal, threatening human rights, violating human dignity, xenophobic and worthy of the worst horrors committed by the Nazis," said Sebastiao da Silva in the court order released on Tuesday.

How dare they! How dare those ungrateful Brazilians! Don't they remember when the USA saved their asses in that one war? They OWE us! They're acting like the Bush administration ignores silly things like treaties, international law, and diplomacy! Those are just relics of the Old Europe.

I tell you what: if those Brazilians hate America so much, they should just move to France.

It's not the new year yet, but it seems like a good time to give thanks.

Long story short, I've had a good year. Great job, short commute, and dating again. I've become focused, but with great flexibility. I'm not sweating the big stuff, or the small stuff. The good stuff is in the middle.

May your holidays be commercial-free,
$$$$$exyGal

============

• Santa - He's nude, dude - don't let the kids see this.
• knows if you're - Smart people know a lot.
• naughty - Naughty has a new meaning these days.
• or nice - Polite.

============

comments disabled

Someone left this in my blog. It must be seen to be believed.

The hilarious (and scary) thing is, the dialogue it generates is right on par with the stuff they used to give us to say.

I made it into the Hollywood Reporter!!

It's a very positive article, and it's nice to read something about me in the entertainment press that isn't framed in a negative light:

Wil Wheaton might have become a minor celebrity with roles in "Stand by Me" and "Star Trek: The Next Generation," but he has become a major online star with his www.wilwheaton.net Weblog. So much so that the actor signed a three-book deal -- for books directly stemming from his blog -- with a major publisher.

The first book from publisher O'Reilly & Associates is out shortly and is titled "Dancing Barefoot," a book Wheaton self-published and sold 3,000 copies of from his Web site in four months. Up next is "Just a Geek," which will contain some of his blog writings on the rigors of being an ensign on the Starship Enterprise. The third book is tentatively titled "Wil Wheaton's Website Design."

This is really awesome, because everyone in the industry reads the Reporter. I understand that there's a mention in Variety today or Monday, too, and together they could translate into some meetings for me.