Recently in Everyday Category

So I finally broke down and downloaded the sampler of the first Twilight book, just to see what all the fuss is about.

So far, I'm not terribly impressed by the writing, though I have been enjoying that the book is set in the PacNW, and that the character has spent the first 10 pages or so complaining about all of the things I love about my distant but still beloved home. I imagine, though, that if I bought the whole book and read it cover-to-cover, I'd discover that Stephenie Meyer is a hell of a storyteller. That's got to be true on some level, or the book wouldn't have grown into such a huge phenomenon.

The truth is, in the first several pages, the writing isn't impressing me, but it's not turning me off, either. It's not perfect, but it doesn't have to be. It's possible to be a great storyteller and an average writer. Actually, that's the point I'm trying to make: work hard on telling great stories first. Beautifully crafted, sparkling writing without a good story is constructed decoration.

In other book news, I've read all five books from the Temeraire series twice in the last month and a half, and I enjoyed them as much the second time as I did the first. Naomi Novik is both a great storyteller and an exemplary writer. It's kind of a weird mix of fantasy and historical (revisionist) fiction. A bit geeked out, for sure (which is definitely a plus, from my perspective) but absolutely delightful.

The first book is called His Majesty's Dragon, and as an added bonus, you can download free copies of it for the Kindle (iPhone app or device) or for any other e-reader you use. You can also get your hands on a free PDF of the whole book, but that's a bit more difficult to wrangle.

Be warned, however, that this is incredibly shrewd marketing, akin to a drug dealer giving you the first hit for free. You'll likely end up buying the other four books in rapid succession.

Enjoy!

Zoe is really into finding things recently. Somewhere along the way she picked up the phrase, "you found it!" which she uses for all sorts of things. If she asks for a glass of water and it takes me a minute to get it to her, she'll say, "you found it!" when I get it to her. She uses it when she finds toys, or when we're looking for Amy at the grocery store. It's adorable.

Another of Zoe's favorite things these days is recognizing emergency vehicles when we are out driving. This is probably because they are so distinct from the rest of the cars and trucks on the road. (She also loves "bid tucks," which she also names by color: "Da. Dada. Da. Da. Da. Bid Tuck. Red bid tuck.")

She also knows them by sound. Once in a while, when she's hanging out with her mom, she'll say "a-ance" (ambulance) because she hears the siren. Amy, who has a hard time hearing low pitches, especially at distance, often cannot hear them at first, though they usually come in range quickly. Or she stops what she's doing and listens, and she hears the siren.

Today she said it, and Amy (as usual) didn't hear anything. But she listened hard, and still didn't hear anything. "I don't hear anything, Zoe," she said.

About 10 minutes later, both of them heard a siren, and Zoe looked up at Amy and said, "you found it!"

Zoe works on her animals from varohaub on Vimeo.

I'm reading Getting Things Done again, hoping to myself silently that this time around I'll get the system up and running and keep to my guns long enough to reap the benefits of an "organized life." (Whatever that means.)

It's not that I don't believe in GTD—really, I think it's the best organizational system in the world. I've had more than a few sips of that Kool-Aid, but like everything else in my life, believing is one thing and performing is another.

It's beautiful outside tonight--the kind of crisp coldness that I associated with Autumn in Portland when the leaves are changing Summer is gently slipping away. It doesn't get cool like this a whole lot in South Florida, so we're trying to enjoy it as much as we can. I wore a sweater yesterday!

We had dinner with some friends in a huge mansion that one of them is housesitting this week. It was a gigantic house, surrounded on three sides by canals. There is so much money down here, it's hard to describe. Sometimes we drive through the canals, passing by mansion after mansion and yacht after yacht, and I wonder where it all started. Where does all that money come from?

I'm still at the Streaming Media West conference, on a break and preparing to make the trip to Mountain View to visit Lars and Anne. Just now, I'm sitting at a table in the middle of the convention center, very close to the wireless node that is providing Internet access to a pretty sizeable chunk of geeks, nerds, and geeky nerds in suits (the business types).

It's day two, the sessions weren't particularly exciting today, and I'm a bit worn down. So I just threw on my headphones and put on Frou Frou. Amazing! Suddenly everything is much better. Honestly, I could sit here for hours watching streaming media types walk back and forth from session to session without getting bored. That says something about the music, doesn't it? It helps me focus, and it makes everything more beautiful.

And that is beautiful.

Zoe laughs her head off at the chihuahuas wrestling on the couch on Vimeo

We're housesitting a chihuahua for a couple of dear friends this month. Tiny is a bundle of energy, which often gets redirected in some very negative ways. She jumps up, bites gently to get attention, barks and growls a bit, and her mother told me she chewed up the carpet a couple of weeks ago.

In other words, she's got some issues.

I'm no expert on dogs, so I went online to see what I could find. A lot of the advice I saw talked about the "pack mentality" of dogs, and especially about how important it is to be the "alpha dog" in your house.

And a lot of the sites referred to a guy called "The Dog Whisperer." His name is Cesar Millan, and he has the uncanny ability to come into a house where a dog is misbhaving and somehow, with what looks like no effort at all, bring the dog under control.

He's so good, he's got a show on the National Geographic channel. Unfortunately, it's not part of my cable package. But National Geographic has posted about thirty short clips from the show (click through the "view more clips" link . . . you'll find them). I watched about twenty of them last night, and I was transfixed.

For Millan, the idea of "pack mentality" goes to a new level. He uses phrases like, "calm/assertive" and "calm/submissive" to refer to the way owners and dogs should act, respectively. He "bites" dogs gently, "touches" them instead of hitting them, and never raises his voice. He holds himself in a way that tells the dog that he's in charge, and he doesn't back down (even though it's assertive, not aggressive) for any reason whatsoever.

Last night, I tried some of the techniques I learned from watching the short clips. And this morning, Tiny was a model of good behavior, following me around the house, laying down when I asked her to, and even waiting patiently for the nanny to come through the door, without barking once, even though Bella (our chichi) was barking and charging the door like crazy.

I'm so amazed by how well it worked, I've got this yen to travel to L.A. to study with this guy. That won't happen, but I plan on getting his book.

Now, if I can just figure out how this whole "alpha dog" thing applies to human relationships . . .

File this under "I'm not as crazy as I thought."

Matt Haughey just followed up on Merlin Mann's confessional post about Since U Been Gone, the incredibly addictive new Kelly Clarkson single.

Yes, I'm talking about that Kelly Clarkson. Kelly "American Idol" Clarkson. I mean, I always kind of liked her, but the Idol music is all pretty nasty drivel. Or worse, it's great music that the Idol contestants turn into some trilly pop lameness.

Since U Been Gone is still pop music, make no mistake. But it's great pop music.

The best part of all is the way, on the chorus, the baseline goes 3 (of the root), 4 (the root of the sub-dominant), 1. It's one of the best bass lines ever. Been done before, but I'll always like it. Always.

For me, the whole thing started at halftime of some football game. (It was an important one, I think, but I can't remember which one. Not the Superbowl.) She was one of the acts, and she sang the whole thing totally live. I could tell because the sound guy mixed her really poorly. But regardless of the bad mix, she sounded great, and I remember thinking, "hey, that's one hell of a song."

Thank God I'm not the only one who thought it. I guess I'm not (totally) crazy.

Update: you can (sort of) add Jason Kottke to the list.

Kudos this morning to Boing Boing for catching the scariest machine on the planet, the (and I'm not kidding about the name, people) E-Z Catch Harvester, which is literally a chicken vacuum.

Watch the video, and make sure you hang on long enough to see the chickens shot out the butt end of the machine into the cages. It's like a miniature version of the human cannonball trick, but it happens over and over until the cage is chock full of chickens, ready to be shipped off to some meat processing plant.

I guess we weren't getting chickens from farm to fast food with enough speed.

Update: the Brightcoop site has taken the video down. Considering how popular the video was, I'm not surprised. I looked everywhere for copies of the video online and finally found one. I don't have the bandwidth to spare, but if anyone out there does, I'll be happy to pass the video along to them. Just ask.