So my Great Idea, which I lobbied for and shopped, which finally started to move as I was on my way out (and which I almost stuck around for) looks like it’s going to go out in a couple weeks, while I’m in Europe.

I understand that if I rejoin Expedia I can get credited in the press release, but otherwise will not be mentioned, which… I don’t know, I understand that I’m not there and they’re not going to issue a press release that says “thanks for the original idea and detailed implementation plan to Derek Zumsteg, who has since left” but I’d still like credit.

Anyway, I said early on that I didn’t care whose name was on it as long as it got done. I meant it, and it looks like that’ll happen. When it happens, if I’m around. I’ll post a long discussion of what happened and how the idea originated.

Back to the book.

Sign-stealing done. ~94p left, 11 days.

Windows XP’s auto update finds something it wants for you.
It downloads and installs it.
It pops up a dialogue that asks you to restart now, or later. There is a bomb timer on the dialogue, so that no input is considered consent in 4:45.. 44… 43…
Later makes it go away, only to return after a couple minutes.

I’ve been using PCs since you could buy one. This is one of the most annoying things ever. I’ve put up with it for a year, but it’s entirely broken and for all of the other updates they’ve done, Microsoft hasn’t fixed it.

Downloading a huge backup of your site’s databases? Burning a DVD? Doing some massive computational task? Screw you, we’re rebooting whether you like it or not. You’re only human, you can’t stay awake forever (and if you want to hire someone on the other side of the planet and give them remote access to your machine to click the dialogue box for you while you sleep, best of luck to you).

I’m okay with a single nag. But what’s the expected behavior for the “restart later” button? It’s not “annoy me again in ten minutes”. It’s certainly not “annoy me again and restart if I don’t respond because I’m making lunch.”

What you want to happen is to send it away until you’re done with whatever it is prevents you from rebooting right then.

Bad design happens, and I can see where update functionality like this probably doesn’t go through a quality design phase. But really, a year of people complaining – a year of everyone at Microsoft being subjected to it themselves – and no one’s thought to tweak this?

(btw, how to fix this)

If I can go another hour without working on the book, this will be the first day in ages that I haven’t spent any time working on the book. I spent this morning gathering ingredients, and then a couple hours cooking and prepping, and then from five on a bunch of people came over for dinner.

So:
– I had no idea how much time it can take to entertain. I understand why people spend so much on catering now
– That felt really good
– My friends are cool
– Now that it’s over, I’m about half happy I had a good time and relaxed and half overwhelmed with guilt and dread

Bat corking finished.

~125p of rewrites left, and I leave for London on 8/20. Things are going to get worse before they get better.

After Paper of Record destroyed itself, denying me access to the Sporting News, I’ve had to rely a lot on Proquest which I can access through my local library.

It is, without a doubt, the worst system I’ve ever been forced to use. I remember the bad old days of library systems when you’d have to crazy stuff like
subject:baseball +casey +stengel
hit ‘enter’ and hope for the best. I would love to have one of those systems lately.

If I had to sum it up, I’d say “Proquest doesn’t do what you tell it to and provides radically different results given only slightly different inputs with no feedback as to why.”

Here’s an example. The opening Proquest “Basic Search” page looks like this:

In the search box, operators like “AND” and “OR” don’t work as they’re described in the search tips. More frustrating, it will not return results it obviously has.

The date range doesn’t work at all. Searching within two dates always returns results outside of the range. There’s no message as to why. Did it fail over? Were there no results? No clue.

The “database” dropdown allows me to select the “Proquest Newspaperes” and the New York Times. Once you’ve selected that, the results sometimes improve. If I search for some strings and don’t get any results, narrowing it down to one paper often returns what I’m looking for.

Proquest doesn’t have any of that documented or hint at it. Why would it? “Your comprehensive search failed. Would you like to limit it, search each possibility one at a time, and turn up more results?”

Gosh, that’d be great. Or, better yet, why doesn’t the comprehensive search work like that?

The date limits, I should note, do sometimes work when searching individual sources. Whether or not they’ll work on any given search, even if it’s a source that’s honored date limits in the past, is randomly determined at time of search submission.

Here’s how bad this is: I’ve been using other sources to find references to New York Times articles and then gone to Proquest to search only the NYT only that day for that headline, and my success rate is probably 75%.

As an added bonus, at random times it will throw up a login screen which is impassable. Then I get to start over.

I’d love to use Lexis-Nexis, which I understand is far more difficult to use but 90 times as powerful. Let me at it. Except that it costs (I believe) $900,000 for an indvidual license.

Google, would you please smash these guys and hurry? Researchers everywhere are crying out in pain for a search solution that works. I’ll write you a spec and everything.

After a particularly hard stint of rewrites and reresearch, I had a ton of books out on my desk, and took the opportunity to order my shelves of baseball books by color. It’s a pleasing look — oddly reassuring. However, the fact that I did it makes me wonder if I’ve finally cracked under the stress.

Today was the Hidden Ball Trick and the nth revision of the Black Sox chapter.

I went to the grocery store this morning and the cashier asked me if I had the day off and I told her I was unemployed. “Any prospects?” she asked. I laughed. I don’t know.

Every day I think the chances I go back into IT drop by a percent, half a percent, and I’m more likely to try and stick it out as a writer. Which would certainly make life spicier.

I got up this morning determined not to let the deadline stress get to me. I made breakfast, finished up some new material on the steroids chapter (turned out nicely), and moved on from there. All in all, I wasn’t as productive as some of the other days lately, but I’m a lot happier with the product, and I’m settling in for the evening session with the M’s game on, and I feel pretty good.

I took on a fairly huge chapter today (it runs 50 printed pages double-spaced) which has been in pretty good shape through the whole process. It was part of the initial proposal, which means in some form I’ve had years to work on this.

Anyway, I run through it really quickly, happy that it’s largely light work with a little tweaking, addition, and subtraction. I get to the end and there’s a note that the chapter runs too long (which it does). My editor would like to see 5-7 pages trimmed (and gave some really good advice on how to get there).

I started at the note for a good minute, not really believing I’d just read that. And then I started the second pass, cutting for length.

So my editor mentioned in passing that she “really gave it to me” on two of the chapters.

Here’s what she means.

Every page in the chapter looks like that. On several, the notes continue onto the back.