“I have no opinion on the subject. I’m a blank slate. Tell me yellow is green and I’ll smile and nod.”

“So you don’t think colors are important?”

“Not when it comes to my curtains. Do what you like.”

Angela Booth on why writers should blog, especially newbies.

Doesn’t validation feel great?

I haven’t done a oneword in awhile. In fact, I believe I’ve only done one before this. Here’s number two.

“How could you be so dense?” she hollered, whacking him on the head. “That parking spot was metered, we’ve been swindled out of our change.”

Am I on (the right) track?

It’s been roughly six months since the sleepless night that kicked off this blog. The insomnia struck again Monday night.

Doing what you love has become something of a meme in the blogosphere. The sermons at church this month have been about knowing God’s will for life decisions. It’s even turned up on Slashdot. All the buzz eventually kept me awake wondering what my next step should be. I know I want to write, but I’m no closer to knowing what sort of writing I want to do. Writing for one of the bigger sites I read would be a blast. In fact, I applied to one of them. Didn’t make the cut, this time, but at least I was in a position to try — thanks to this blog. That’s a form of progress, I guess.

I’d love to be a novelist, but who wouldn’t? Last I heard, no one was handing out huge advance checks to first-time authors. I have yet to try my hand at characters and plots. In the meantime, I’d jump on just about any paying writing gig. Assuming I have the time.

Money and time. If you have one, you lack the other. I spend an awful lot of time making someone else rich. If I could support my family by writing, I’d be out the door yesterday. Even if I had to do some freelance software development for awhile, at least I’d be in transition mode, and my time would be my own.

I know what my passion is, and it’s not what I spend most of my day doing. When do you get to the tipping point? When is it time to hop off the old train and catch a new one? When does the desire beat out the dollar signs? Or — best of all — how do you keep both?

I need a lead, a business plan, an idea, some kind of open door. The clock’s ticking.

(Continued from Part 3)

OK, I’ve given a few reasons why I love and hate my Tablet PC. Here’s the reason I’ve come down on the hate side, and why I’m selling mine:

The Tablet PC is terrible for writing.

Ironic, no? Unless you’re the type of writer that writes every word out longhand first, this machine is not going to be much help. Sometimes I do lean that way. I wrote the first 4 or 5 SRC posts by hand on the Motion and then converted them to text. However. By the time you run the recognition engine on your chicken scratch, fix all the wrong words, and delete all the random line breaks, you may as well have retyped the whole thing — and retyping has its own benefits. A post often begins life in my Moleskine notebook. I do most of the editing with fresh eyes as I’m transcribing into the computer. You don’t get the same effect when you’re correcting the tablet recognizer’s typos.

When I bought the Motion, I was looking for an ultraportable machine, something that could replace my generic Windows laptop. I wanted a machine I could program on, and something that might change the way I looked at portable computing. For two years, the Tablet PC did just that. Despite its immaturity as a platform, the tablet is perfect for many users: managers, students, medical professionals, artists. Anyone who moves around a lot, and needs to jot things down literally on the go, would be very happy with a Tablet PC. That’s not what I’m looking for anymore. I want to write, and I want a machine that gets out of the way and lets me write. I’ll need something portable that also happens to be a good platform for development using open-source tools — just in case I find myself doing odd software jobs while making the career jump.

Which leads me back at long last to the Powerbook. I’m hoping for one more update to the line before they switch over to Intel processors next year. That’s the rumor, anyway.

So, anyone want to buy a Tablet PC, with docking station and sleeve, for $700ish?

(Continued from Part 2)

Last time it was all about the love. Today, as promised, here are my top few tablet gripes.

• No one has yet come up with a decent user interface for the pen. There are some decent third-party apps, but Windows itself is still very pen unfriendly. Column-based menus are a pain to navigate. Entering ad hoc text into, say, an IM, is aggravating. You can peck at the onscreen keyboard, use Graffiti-style single character recognition, or write your text out longhand and hope the tablet understands what you wrote. There is no way to teach it your personal handwriting. I hear this may be improved in Windows Vista.

• The Motion is SLOW. It’s barely adequate for development at a blazing 933 MHz. I finally got a desktop machine at work, so that’s not as much of an issue anymore. Newer, graphics-intensive apps like Google Earth tend to crash a lot. Yes, I know there are newer tablets that perform much better.

• I don’t go to many meetings. That sort of negates its usefulness in that arena.

• Orienting the screen in portrait mode is the most natural for me, but most Web pages and applications are optimized for 800×600, not 768×1024 — leaving the tablet user with some horizontal scrolling to do.

• The display driver doesn’t play well with some apps. Like I mentioned, Google Earth tends to crash, among other things.

• I can take notes in my handwriting, organize them just like I would a paper notebook, and search them later — but the format is proprietary. If I decided to leave the Tablet PC platform, I’d have to change my entire organizational paradigm. If I leave Windows, all the notes I ever took with the tablet are history, unless I print them all out. This is great for Microsoft, but not so good for me. So I never really committed to Journal or OneNote fully. I don’t want to get locked in — something I’m facing with PersonalBrain right now.

I’ll leave my biggest personal gripe (which may or may not be an issue for others) for the next post.

(Continued from Part 1)

Fast forward a year, from spring 2002 to spring 2003. The Vaio was my main workstation (work being too cheap to buy me a desktop machine) during that time. However, the object of my gadget lust was a Motion Computing M1200 Tablet PC. I just had to have something I could tote around to meetings and still run programmer-type apps on. I cashed in a developer discount, endured the long wait for the tablet to arrive, and sold off the Sony.

With 1GB of RAM, it outperformed the older Vaio slightly. The 12-inch screen was huge for a slate-style tablet. With the docking station, I could plug it in at work and use a keyboard, mouse and separate monitor. And boy, did I love taking it to meetings and showing people how I could write right on the screen. No one had ever seen anything quite like it.

After two years with the Motion, I still find it incredibly useful for many things. Here’s a short list:

• Couch surfing cannot be beat. Unlike a typical laptop, you can comfortably goof around on the Web and watch TV at the same time… as long as you aren’t doing a lot of data input or IM. More about that tomorrow.

• Stall surfing. Yeah, um, so I’ll leave the details of that one up to you.

• Ebooks are almost practical. The screen is big enough for two pages side by side if you like, and you won’t break your back carrying the tablet around.

• Notetaking is completely natural. In a meeting environment, you have to hunch over your traditional laptop, peering at the screen and banging away at keys. You aren’t looking anyone in the eye. You look antisocial. The tablet, however, balances right on one knee, or sits on the table like a notepad. You scribble your notes in it and can search back through them later. Microsoft’s OneNote is actually pretty good at this, although it tends to force you into too much structure.

• It’s a social device. You can load up something on your screen and pass it off to someone else to look at. They can mark up what you’ve done and pass it back.

• It’s a good quick-and-dirty recording platform. I loaded n-track on it and recorded several band practice sessions.

• It’s a digital picture frame. When people come over for parties, I set it up on its easel and have it slideshow through our photo library (which is stored on the iMac upstairs and accessed via WiFi).

• Instant messaging using ink is way cool. This assumes that you’re both using a current version of MSN Messenger.

I also have a list of gripes, of course. Check back tomorrow for those. Hey, I think I’m getting the hang of this serial posting business.

I love my Tablet PC.

I hate my Tablet PC.

I’m about five seconds from buying a Powerbook.

First, some background.

Rewind to early 2002, when I started a contract job doing Windows development. After working in the server room for a few days (no empty desks in the office), I realized I’d need a laptop so I could work in the relative comfort of the conference room. I had seen and drooled over Apple’s Titanium Powerbooks for awhile. I’d also heard of this little application called Virtual PC, which would let you run Windows applications on a Mac. Time for an experiment. I bought a lovely TiBook from a nice fellow on eBay, grabbed a copy of Virtual PC, and installed a few small apps: Windows 2000 Advanced Server, SQL Server, and Visual Studio. I proceeded to work on a large web project in Virtual PC on my Powerbook.

It was a miracle (or at least a testament to Apple and/or Connectix) that this worked at all. I was debugging an IIS application in Visual Studio, running on Windows Server, in a little window on an Apple laptop. It was also like working on a 286. It took Studio ten minutes to compile the app and another ten minutes to attach the debugger. It would be tough to justify my $90-per-hour paycheck at this rate. With a heavy heart I sold the masterpiece that was the TiBook, and picked up a Sony Vaio. A little bit of color left my world that day.

(to be continued)

We here at SRC, Inc. like to be fully buzzword-compliant. With that in mind, we are pleased to announce the following:

• Categories are out.
• Tags are in.

Thanks to the super-cool Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin, posts now belong to tags instead of categories. Explore the tag cloud on the sidebar to browse posts by tag. In the post header, click on the » symbol next to each tag, and get a treat!

The plugin features lots of other gimmicks — viewing related posts, combinations of tags, suggested tags, and more. I’ll add more as I get braver about hacking up my template.

It bothers me that I’m not posting frequently. It’s not that I don’t want to — I’ve just been treating posts like polished essays, and spending upwards of an hour on every one. Well, some of the more popular bloggers out there don’t even bother with titles, and just spit out a sentence or two every couple of hours. While following my daily train of thought is not the purpose of this blog, there’s something to be said for keeping the gears lubed. With that in mind, I’m going to do my best to throw out at least one post a day. This one’s already taken too long to write. See you tomorrow morning at the latest.