Sandra’s Miscellany

Okay, let me make one thing clear from the get-go: I suck at learning to do something new on a daily basis. This habit-making thing has never been my strong point.

So I joined this 100 words for 100 days group. The idea is that we write at least 100 words each day for 100 days. Every day, each participant posts what day they’re on and whether they hit 100 words or more (usually posted as merely 100+ in an attempt not to intimidate other writers who’re struggling). If you miss a day — if life piles it on you or you get busy and forget — you start over at Day 1. It’s all about forming the habit of writing every day rather than “when the muse feels like it”. Sounds great, doesn’t it?

I’ve started over about 12 times.

What is it about this that’s so darned difficult? My current theory is that I’m not writing at a specific time of day. If I were to always get up 30 minutes early and write my 100 words, I’d probably be okay. But I don’t. Some days I write at lunch. Some days it’s the last thing at night before bed. This inconsistency is, I think, killing any attempt on my part to form a habit.

Ah well. Tomorra is anutha day.

Day 1, to be precise.

Can you believe it? The dSO and I are thinking about moving into a house. We have a couple of candidates we’re looking at, but haven’t completely decided whether to pursue it or not.

My biggest problem isn’t with moving in. That’s a cinch: Cart my clothes over and I’m done. It’s the getting of things that gives me the heebie-jeebies. Furniture! Ick. Cookware and dinnerplates! Ick. A sofa! Ick.

I’ve lived for the past 6 years with as many things as will fit on a nice-size boat, and that’s been wonderful. There’s a freeing feeling to being able to pack up your life into a van and go somewhere (which we did for Hurricane Rita).

I’m not saying I don’t have plenty of junk to deal with, because I do — papers that just don’t quite make it to the garbage, a drawer starting to bulge with photographs I still need to scan, the paraphernalia of being a pubbed author (bookmarks, author copies, my little Post-It notes with my name on them). If I were to put my mind to it and make some decisions, I could get that stuff down to a single box. So it’s not as bad as it sounds.

But I am pondering how it will be to live with general “stuff” again.

I suppose it’s not the stuff so much as my attitude toward it that matters. If I don’t let it own me — if I see the stuff as a collection of tools rather than as a millstone around my neck — I’ll be okay with it. I’ve called the Salvation Army to come cart off all my furniture before… Maybe the trick is to be able to do that again.

Regardless of what we decide, we’ll still be on the Texas coast, contrary to anything my fake bio may be saying in the front of Dead Reckoning….

It’s not often that a movie annoys me, but this one did. I just watched it last night with the dSO — yes, I’m catching up on last year’s films — and we both felt like it had entirely missed the point.

If you can imagine a cliche in gender relations, this movie had it. Okay, that’s just bad writing, and yes, cliches are cliches for a reason. Most of the actors did their best with bad material, and most of the time they did okay, Woody Harrelson excepted. I just didn’t believe his character at all and he looked very uncomfortable in the role.

But the thing that really got to me was the subtext that flowed throughout the storyline. Josey Aimes kept saying she didn’t want to be taken care of, and that she didn’t need a man to do that for her, and then the following occurred:

• Her father saved her from a raucous and potentially violent union meeting.
• Her male lawyer (Harrelson) used his testosterone-dripping self to intimidate
• a male witness, whose belated honesty “saves” Josey from being labeled a slag.

So the dSO and I turned off the DVD player and wondered what the male writer of this screenplay thought he was doing. Men are still riding to the rescue, giving women their power, and generally sitting at the crux of a story that ultimately had nothing to them.

I know, it sounds weird to say that a movie about the first class-action sexual harrassment suit had nothing to do with men, but the story would have been stronger had Josey been the one pointing out to the union men that she and her female coworkers could be these guys’ mothers and wives and sisters and daughters, and did they really want them to be called bitches and whores? Or sexually molested in dark corners of the mining pit?

And why did Josey’s case turn on whether or not she’d been [spoiler alert] raped when she was in high school?[/spoiler alert]

Hello?

The thing is, the story should have been about women figuring out how to get their own power — using the law rather than retaliation, using their brains rather than their brawn — and making a difference for women struggling in such situations. Rather than being against men, they should have been for themselves.

And on top of the general annoyances, the mining manager and owner were portrayed as hypocritical, power-heavy idiots, when in fact, these guys probably honestly believed that they were doing the right thing. The thing about bigots is that they really do believe in what they’re doing, and think the reasons they’re doing it make perfect sense. It takes a strong shot of compassion (or head-banging) to get them to see something differently. But let’s not reduce them to one-dimensional villains. Please.

So I was extremely disappointed, and in some cases appalled. This film did everyone a disservice — the women, the men, the managers, the grunts in the pits, and most especially, the real-life women who stood up in 1989 and brought this lawsuit against the mining company where they worked.

Maybe the screenwriter should have stuck closer to the real story. If he had, he might have brought more respect, more humanity, and more dimensions to the film.

Have you ever downloaded a piece of shareware or freeware (perhaps for ripping DVDs or converting .mp3 files to .oggs)? Once you got it installed, were you able to use it?

The makers of this software, generous souls that they are, clearly assume that I have a degree in multimedia or have in-depth knowledge of DVD tracks/articles/sessions/whatever.

Well, I don’t. I’m a regular person who simply wanted to rip Persuasion to disc so I could watch it on my laptop rather than carry around the DVD. I don’t want to have to understand which track is the movie, which is the gubbins in the front, or which track to select to get English. None of these things are actually defined, by the way — I have to intuit from things like file size which track contains the movie, and then half the time I ended up getting the French version. Or portions in English and portions in French.

Say what? Or, ce qui?

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been indulging in some serious reading about user interaction.

Not usability. User interaction. Very different things.

It started with the STC Conference Master Writers course taught by Sharon Burton. Some folks thought it was a snooze but I found it incredibly useful — a crash course in cognitive theory that totally transformed my view of users in general, and my company’s users in particular. Our users are so emphatically not “just like us” that I can’t imagine anyone less like us.

Then I moved on to The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, by Alan Cooper. This short book is a little repetitive, but I think he may know his audience — engineers — very well. Some of them may need to hear the same message over and over, in slightly different ways, to fully grasp what he’s saying. (And that’s not a slam against engineers — it’s a matter of how their brains are hard-wired.)

I’ve been skipping around in Cooper’s About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design, and hope to finish this one by the end of July.

And all of these things have contributed to my being seriously interested in user interaction design. If I wanted to move to California, I’d probably start by applying for a job at his joint, Cooper Interaction Design. I’d love to apprentice somewhere in his group, because they clearly have the answer for the craziness we’re forced to put up with in software and hardware design.

In the past, the dSO would curse a piece of equipment or a web site or software app, and I’d think, “He’s so inflexible. He just needs to learn the product.” But now I’m thinking that he’s got it exactly right — that designers and developers are creating toys for themselves rather than for the 75% of people who aren’t like them at all.

Now, to try to get this message to other parts of the organization….

Imagine my surprise to open a hefty envelope from Silhouette and find 3 copies of Dead Reckoning — under the Mills and Boon Intrigue imprint!

The cover is substantially the same, but with a slightly different boat (a more correct one, actually). What a trip!

I had no idea they would select DR for distribution under Mills and Boon, but it’s pretty exciting.

Woohoo!