Manuscript, unformatted: 192 pages. 89,385 words in 17 chapters. I added and cut a ton of stuff in this version.

Microsoft Word has, btw, been a huge pain in my ass through this whole thing in a way it’s never been before. It’s been unable to hold formatting, for instance, which is a ridiculous pain in the ass when I’m breaking chapters out, editing them, and pushing them back into the larger manuscript.

Anyway. Tomorrow’s the Seattle-to-Portland. That ought to be fun. And by fun I mean “not really that fun at all”.

Second draft’s revisions are done. Two quick chapters and I’ll have this off, and we’ll see what they say.

Got the sign-stealing stuff revised. A couple of cites to pick up and a possible move of part of it to another chapter that should be easy remain, but right now, the first revision’s about 96% done, not including new material. I’m 96% exhausted.

In case you weren’t already of that opinion

My resume’s got all kinds of impressive, huge stuff, doing anti-fraud measures that saved millions of dollars, building out cryptography systems, whatever.

I can’t get my Aeropress to make good coffee. I’m baffled. I think this means I get sent back to coffee from crystals or something.

Seriously, it’s
– ground beans
– hot water
– a plunger

And all I’ve gotten out of it so far is some really weak stuff I wouldn’t use to water a plant. I’m ashamed of myself.

I’ve been using Mozilla/Thunderbird since early versions. I’ve been through crappy point releases, weird UI, the whole thing. I’m starting to abandon it, though, because there’s one serious bug that drives me nuts, and no one seems to care.

Say I’m in a text box, like the one I’m in right now. If I type one of a couple characters – the single quote ‘, the forward slash /, for instance, it brings up the find dialogue and then my text goes there.

The problem is that this doesn’t happen every time (like it’s not happening now) but it does happen most of the time, and I type really fast. So if I’m on USSM typing a post out and it happens, before I know it I’ve typed a whole set of words in there and I’m angry.

You can go search for this bug and find angry references, fixes that don’t quite work, but there’s no plans to fix it. So I’m drifting off to IE 7 and other browsers.

One bad UI bug, and I’m so frustrated and angry I’m tossing the product. If this was a shrink-wrapped piece of software, or a website issue, the lost sales would get this ripped out in a week, if that.

Bye Firefox. It was fun for a while.

Remaining: ~3 chapters (one might get pulled back in)
New chapters: 1? That’s going to be interesting.

Or, to put it another way — 85% done with the revisions for this draft. This is exhausting.

When I was a teenager, working at Target, I drank Coke like crazy. Or Pepsi, if it was on sale. For my lunch break, I’d buy a 2-liter bottle of whatever was on sale and drink it. The whole thing, sometimes. Coke, by the way, is by far the superior for the high-volume cola drinker. Pepsi’s faults are much worse over the course of a can, much less a couple of glasses.

In college, I went through soda like crazy. I’d pile up cans on the help desk where I was working, and I kept pallets of the stuff in my room in case I ever decided to drink all six cans in the mini-fridge at once or something. I had trouble sleeping, my skin was pretty bad, and sometimes, after going through a string of Cokes, I’d feel my heart doing a hummingbird impression. So I stopped. I started to sleep well for the first time in years, my skin cleared up, and my heart’s been fine. I didn’t drink any cola of any kind for years (though I did go through Sprite (and Citra, for a while) like crazy during my time at Wireless). I didn’t have anything significantly caffinated until maybe a year ago.

But I love the smell of coffee. I like the taste. So I started drinking it once in a while, not ordering a decaf when having a meeting over coffees with someone at work, and since then, it’s been a long slide. Today I bought a grinder and made a drip cup for the first time in almost ten years.

I’ll skip the philosophizing. I’m hoping I don’t buy a $150 coffee grinder while I’m semi-employed, because I’m not sure a “required author tool” would get by.

My replacement iPod arrived today. It was all new-in-plastic and everything.

Didn’t work. Doesn’t output anything to the headphones. Wheeeeeeeeeeee!!

I do a ridiculous amount of searching, from random internet stuff to combing Proquest (and the totally broken Paper of Record, which has been returning blank results for some time now), and I’ve noticed something weird lately– Google kinda sucks.

I don’t know when it happened, because I used them exclusively for so long, but on a few things I was dissatisfied with, I threw the same query to MSN, and the results were way better. Yahoo, same deal. I’d heard complaints that Google’s last re-indexing pretty dramatically screwed things up, but I’d never really noticed it.

I’m really surprised.

So the good news is that my publisher keeps flipping out over the book. They’re just loving it.

The bad news is they want to move the release date up.

I’d hoped that this would be a fairly lazy summer, with me working on the book, doing more research as required, getting some quality biking time in, and spending more time with my wife while I figure out what I want to do next.

That looks like it’s not going to happen. I’m not sure how I should feel about this — overjoyed or depressed. I’m both right now.