The new year is upon us, and we finished off our old year and started up this new one in San Diego. We left a week ago, on Sunday, two days after Christmas, with a mad plan to get up really early and make the drive in one day.

For background, last June when we left San Diego (yes, you counted correctly, that’s two SoCal trips in the same year), we left about 7:30 in the morning and managed to get home about 10pm that night—roughly 14.5 hours is the number that sticks in our head.

This time, traveling south—we rolled out at 6:10am and arrived right around 11pm—it took roughly 17 hours. Two things worked against us: snowy roads on southern Highway 97 in Oregon and all the holiday traffic returning to Southern California the same day.

It was grueling.

We spent New Year’s Eve at my brother’s house, playing Balderdash and Left 4 Dead 2 and drinking beers and ringing in the New Year. We had tired kids, so we retired to our hotel just after midnight.

So far my 2010 has consisted of seeing Up in the Air (my brother and sister-in-law watched the kids for us), drinking more beer, and driving home. We left San Diego around 9am yesterday and made it to Redding around 8pm last night—we wisely decided to split the drive home into two days.

The 11-hour drive to Redding isn’t nearly as bad as it sounds; we made really good time most of the way—through Los Angeles especially!—and we stopped for maybe an hour at the Olive Pit in Corning for dinner and, well, to shop for olives.

We made it the rest of the way home by mid-afternoon today, and I’m pleased to report none of the snow and ice we encountered a week ago is there. The roads were perfectly clear and except for some weird inversion-layer fog we hit just out of Weed—and up through Klamath Falls—driving conditions were great.

So, in a nutshell, that’s how my 2010 is going so far. How’s yours?

Ah, Christmas. A time to compile lists of desired items in the hopes that someone will get them for you as a gift. I amused myself by thinking up this list of things that made perfect sense to ask for at the time… but today, just seem hopelessly outdated.

I like to think of this stuff as "incidental technology."

VHS Tape Rewinder

Because you don’t want to wear out your VCR by rewinding the tapes in it. Or at least, that was what I always heard—hence, the dedicated tape rewinder. Don’t forget the ones that look like sports cars!

Floppy disk hole punch

Because it really sucks to have single sided floppy disks—5¼" disks, of course. Now you can make those into double sided disks by making a custom notch on the other side! It certainly beats using a regular hole punch and hoping you don’t nick the magnetic part of the disk inside.

8-Track cassette adapter

You have all these cassette tapes but all you have to play music is an 8-track player. Out of luck? Not anymore! With this adapter you can play your cassettes in your 8-track player, saving you the money you would otherwise have to spend on a tape player—or even a stereo!

Tabletop arcade games

The ironic thing is, I remember seeing these in the Sears toy catalogs and thought they would be awesome to have: Coleco’s tabletop arcade games were sold in the early ’80s and came in the flavors of Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Frogger, and Galaxian. You can read up about the Pac-Man game (with links to the others) here; check out the hot fixed-digital graphic action!

Maybe it’s just me, but this story on Slashdot about Google developing quantum computing is making me nervous. Why? One word: Skynet.

I have an idea that the first real quantum computer will go "runaway" and develop into a true strong AI—the first sentient computer. It’s a science fictional notion, sure, but when they’ve essentially shown that a quantum computer can run without even being turned on—well, what’s science fiction these days?

I’ve been thinking a bit lately about Twitter‘s new "Retweet" functionality. Okay, first of all, there is a scary number of hits when you search "retweet": 9.8 million from Google. That just seems wrong somehow, considering "retweet" is a made up word that’s only been in the lexicon for what, a couple of years at most?

Anyway. In short, a "retweet" is when someone copies and re-tweets your Twitter message, usually by putting "RT @username" in front of it. It’s a way of sharing something you like with your own Twitter followers and it has become very common practice in the Twitter world.

So common and popular, in fact, that Twitter itself has created a "Retweet" button that they’re experimenting with. It’s a handy piece of functionality: it copies the Twitter message you like to your timeline so your followers can read it, but instead of looking like it came from you with "RT @username" prepended, it shows the original tweet with a notation that you are the (re)tweet source.

(Obviously I have this Retweet function attached to my Twitter accounts, so I’ve been playing with it.)

What I like about it is the one-click functionality they’ve built into it: you don’t have to copy a message, scroll back to the top of the screen, type "RT @whatever" and paste the message in—shortening it in case your addition breaks the 140-character limit—and then scroll back to where you were in reviewing your timeline.

However, there’s two things this functionality breaks: the ability to modify the original tweet to add your own comment (if there’s room), and the "branding" of the retweet.

What do I mean about the branding? Well, consider this: every time I manually retweet a message, it’s immediately clear to my followers that the retweet came from me: my image and username are right there, and this is especially handy for people that might be quickly scanning their timelines looking for certain images (people they want to read). With Twitter’s built in Retweet function, this is broken; users now see a tweet from a user they may not follow, so they may not immediately assume it’s something you recommended.

I’m thinking of this in terms of my Hack Bend Twitter account. In that case @hackbend is definitely a brand I’m pushing, in that I want to build awareness of Hack Bend and ultimately build credibility and drive more traffic back to that blog. When I do a manual retweet, followers can quickly and easily see that @hackbend has posted, and recommends something. With the new Retweet function, they don’t immediately see @hackbend, and—if they’re looking for Hack Bend-related tweets—they potentially miss it.

So I’m a little on the fence. I think for my @hackbend account, where branding is definitely an issue, I will continue to do the manual "RT @username" retweeting (unless I just get lazy). Otherwise, on my @chuggnutt account, I’ll keep playing with the auto-Retweet feature. But I’m curious as to what other people are thinking.

An interesting experiment might be to track which style of retweeting generates more traffic; do a Twitter post in one account, linking to a site (tracking hits from Twitter, of course), and then retweet it in the two different ways in another account. There should probably be various controls, but I’d be curious to see which works better.

(As I type in the title to this blog post, I have the line "Remember, remember the fifth of November" from "V for Vendetta" running through my head.)

I blink, and November has passed; tomorrow is December 1st which for all intents and purposes heralds the Christmas season. Well, actually according to the Shopping Gods the Christmas season is already in full swing—but I’m slightly more of a traditionalist than that.

Thanksgiving was nice and uneventful: a big meal, lots of beer, and a small group. I always view these holiday weekends to be taken advantage of in a relaxing sense, so what was I doing out the day after Thanksgiving hanging lights on the house in a snowstorm?

Freezing, that’s what.

Much of my month has been concerned with beer writing (the parts that aren’t concerned with work, and family, and so on): I’m gearing up for the Advent Beer Calendar which starts tomorrow on the Brew Site, and I’ve been signed on as a Featured Writer for RateBeer‘s new Hop Press group blog.

Meanwhile, I actually have some posts queued up in my head for this poor blog here. Maybe over the next few days I’ll actually get them written.

No, I’m not actually participating in National Novel Writing Month, but I toyed with the idea (again), and in doing so I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations to see how manageable it would be. The results were interesting, so I thought I’d share.

The idea, of course, is to write a 50,000 word (minimum) novel in the 30 days of November. Breaking that out by day, you have 1,667 (rounded up) words per day to complete.

1,667 words per day doesn’t seem all that daunting, but once you sit down and start writing some out you start to realize how many it actually is. So let’s borrow a page from algorithm design in computer science and break it down into smaller, more manageable chunks.

In particular, would spending say, five minutes each hour of your day writing be manageable? Yes? Doesn’t matter which five minutes, just as long as you open your text file or Word document or Google Docs account and write however many words you need for five minutes.

So if five minutes each hour works, let’s figure out how many words you’ll need to write for each brief session. In order to determine that, we need to figure out how many writeable hours you have each day. The number I fell upon was 15: assume you wake up and/or are functional by 7am, and can finish sometime in the 9pm hour. That sounds reasonable, right?

So dividing 1,667 by 15 yields 112 (again, rounded up). That’s how many words you have to write each hour for the 15 workable hours you have each day of November to reach 50,000 words and thus a novel.

Can you write 112 words in five minutes? I’m able to hit that in about two, but of course that isn’t necessarily stringing together meaningful prose, or at least something somewhat resembling a coherent narrative. But even if what you write is dreadful, at least you’re writing something.

Spending five minutes each hour to write 112 words? Seems laughably easy! How couldn’t you find the time?

Happy Halloween everyone! Hope you all have a safe trick-or-treating (or whatever it is you do) and thoroughly enjoy the day.

And because it’s Halloween I couldn’t resist running a few of the various weird images I’ve posted over the years. Enjoy!

I was in our local Bend Bulletin today, in an article about seasonal beers. Nice article, mostly accurate, but I was very surprised by the amount of "screen time" I got, so to speak. I only spoke with the reporter for something like 10 minutes on the phone last week.

This makes the third time that I’ve "officially" been in the paper, as an interviewee; the first was for a story on blogging back in 2004, the second was just last year (also on blogging).

But unofficially, I may have been mentioned without my prior knowledge, so it could (sort of) be more than three times: for instance, my blog was quoted (giving attribution to me) back in 2005 but I didn’t know about it until after the fact.

Thank goodness I come across lucid in today’s article, though. Sometimes I’m in those interviews and I just feel like I’m rambling nonsense.

A few years back, Law & Order had an episode where the killer planted a body part in the wreckage of the World Trade Center so that the crime would be covered up, looking instead like collateral damage from 9/11. It almost worked (but didn’t, of course) and got me thinking that the same type of plot device could be used in a different historical context, for instance the London Blitzkrieg during World War II.

So of course I began working the idea around in my head: a body is found in the rubble of a London building, and it turns out to have been planted there to cover up a murder. But since I’ve very little experience reading detective fiction I’ve decided that rather than trying to put that idea to paper myself, some writer out there must already have tackled the subject of mystery fiction set during World War II London. And I’d rather like to read it.

So, the question: does anyone know of such fiction, and/or could point me in the right direction? (Besides Amazon and Google searches, I mean. I’ll do that too, but those are no substitutes for actual recommendations.)