A fascinating development from UC San Diego in biotechnology. It doesn’t seem super-practical at this point, but new emerging technologies rarely do at first. 10 years from now, you may have to feed your monitor and televisions.
via Laughing Squid
Tobias Buckell did it. Daring Fireball does it. There’s a growing trend of turning off commenting on internet websites, and at the moment, I have comments turned off here while I tinker with the site. Matt Gemmell makes the case for why this is a good idea.
via Marco.org
Sam Sykes (a wonderful writer who you should check out, and a client of mine) takes on an editorial by Bryan Thomas Schmidt that seems to be saying, among other things, that we should be writing stories with more morally upright characters. The quote from the article of discussion that made me nod in agreement with Sam was:
What kind of future are we positing for our children? What kind of heroes are we offering them as role models? Don’t we have a responsibility to do better?
Sam’s response, in my opinion, is spot-on:
A writer has one responsibility: to tell her or his story.
It gets better from there.
Taken in Abilene, Kansas this summer. I’m very, very rusty.
This cracked me up to no end. I make fun of Iowa quite a bit, having gone to college in the corn fields, but I gotta show some respect to this.
via BoingBoing
There’s some good food for thought here. I’m cranking away on some responsive design work, and my approach has not been to design for specific breakpoints, but the breakpoints that make sense as I increase viewport size. I do admittedly go back and add some “polish” with media queries targeting iOS though.
Look within, and discover how often I failed miserably or succeeded joyously at my goals set for 2011 back in good old 2010.
The reviewers at Tangent Online have deemed my story “You Have Been Turned Into a Zombie By a Friend” a recommended story for 2011.
I am, of course, quite honored to be in such esteemed company, and am very pleased that Mr. Kevin R. Tipple remembered it fondly enough to mention at the end of the year.
This is the first design I did not mock up in Photoshop first–I designed it in the browser. I’ve yet to get around to looking at it in older IE browsers, sorry. I reserve the right to change things in the future, but this should pretty much be the basic stuff. There’s a lot of responsive design and CSS3 work into this one, so it should look good on a mobile device and iPad.
Comments are currently removed. I’m still trying decide if I want to have them at all on the new site. You can point feedback at me on Twitter or Facebook though!
For the first time since I launched Clockpunk Studios in 2009 ( my web design company that specializes in author and publishing websites) I’m pretty busy at the end of the year. Normally, business drops off in December quite harshly as many clients spend time with their own families. It usually gives me some time to wrap up the year and work on internal schemes, but not now.
This is not me complaining. Quite the contrary. I’m as excited to work on client projects as much now as I was when I started the business. But it’s causing me to delay some things, like getting back to this blog regularly.
I intend to spend some time in the next couple of weeks redesigning this blog a bit, to make it more mobile friendly and cleaner, easier to read. I also want to go over my personal goals for 2011 and check my success and talk about the things I failed to do and why. It helps keep me honest about them. And I’ll also be working on my goals for 2012.
I can’t say that I feel like I’ve changed a lot in 2011, except in the sense that I’ve realized I can’t do all the things I want to do in the time I have. I’ve started to realize that my dreams of being a professional writer/web designer/photographer are pretty much conflicting with one another, and at best I might manage two of them, but not three. But more on that later.
Mostly, 2011 has been like 2010, only better. Business has been better, growing slightly! My life feels more in balance. But I do feel a bit tired, coming up on the end of it. I’ve been working hard for the last few months, and I never took a real vacation this year, in the sense of not just traveling for business or family. I believe I need to make time to travel to recharge my batteries, and more importantly, disconnect. I had this week scheduled for that, but I’m frankly inundated with client email and calls on a daily basis regardless. It’s getting harder to see how I can sustain things the way they are and go on a vacation in the future, especially one where I wouldn’t have web access.
About the closest thing I have to a competitive advantage is that I try my damnedest to offer the best support possible, responding to emails any time, anywhere so long as I’m awake. But I think this policy may be starting to burn me out, to be constantly worried about clients needing something. The constant iPhone dinging and checking. It’s a bit much. I’m not sure what to do about it yet. It’ll be something I have to address in the coming year. If anyone has any advice on the subject, I’d love to hear it.
But as far as problems go, it’s a minor one. My biggest problem is deciding what risks to take next. What ways to stretch myself and grow. There’s food in the fridge, money in the bank, and the rent is paid. And as far as I know, I’m not suffering from anything uniquely terminal. I’m very grateful for what I have this year.
I hope your year is wrapping up nicely as well, and I hope you’re thinking ahead to all the great things to come. Let’s all kick butt in 2012.
My story “Groob’s Stupid Grubs,” a story of a goblin’s hopes for his idiot children, is available in Black Gate 15.
I recently finished the first draft of a YA novel called Takedown Notice set in the net-mage universe of my stories “Captain Blood’s B00ty” and “One Click Banishment.” What happens when the Magical Association of Atlantis finally gets the upper hand against the net mages in the spell program copyfight?