Now, six months later, I’ve finally gotten around to giving Pawsgaard the attention it deserves. It’s taken a couple weeks to clean up the text, but now, finally, I’m ready to call this the final draft.

Check out the final draft of Pawsgaard: A Guineawick Tale by Jon Thysell today! It’s free and available for download for the Kindle (mobi) and Nook (epub), as well as in plain text and html. Also, stay tuned for an eventual publication on Smashwords!

/jon

This is a bugfix release.

Download Weight Tracker ODS v2.2.4 [89k ZIP]

Detailed Changelog:

• Fixed bug 925003: The delta weight column for February shows 0.0 for all values

Thanks to all the feedback and bug reports about the previous version!

/jon

Rice Prep: 40 min.
Meat/Vegetable Prep: 20 min.
Servings: 3-4

Ingredients

• ~3 scoops white Calrose rice
• ~3 cups chicken stock
• 1/2 cup soy sauce
• 2 tbsp. sesame seed oil
• 1/2 cup frozen peas & carrots
• 1 tsp. minced garlic
• 1 tsp. minced ginger
• 1/8 of a yellow onion, diced
• 4 green onion stalks, diced
• 1 tbsp. cooking oil
• 1/2 can Spam, diced
• 1 tsp. pepper
• 3 eggs, beat

Directions

Preparing the rice

First of all, fried rice is traditionally made with day-old rice. Ideally, you’d want to make the rice a day in advance and let it set and dry out a bit. If you can’t make the rice the day before, try to make it as early as possible, and leave it out on a counter to dry out until you’re ready.

1. Rinse the rice with water until it’s clear.
2. Cook the rice using the chicken stock instead of water. I use a rice cooker, so I don’t know the exact proportions using a normal pot. Normally you want the water/stock about half an inch above the surface of the rice.
3. After the rice is done, scoop it into a large bowl and let it air out and dry for a couple minutes.
4. Add the soy sauce and sesame seed oil, folding the rice slowly until it’s a uniform brown.
5. Set the rice aside and let it rest.

Preparing the vegetables

1. Mix the frozen peas and carrots along with the garlic, ginger, yellow onion and green onion into a microwave safe bowl.
2. Fill the bowl with water, cover, and microwave for 2 minutes.
3. Strain out the water.

Preparing the meat

1. In a large pot add the cooking oil and bring to medium heat.
2. Add in the chopped Spam and pepper; stir occasionally until the Spam is lightly browned.
3. Add in the strained vegetables from before; stir occasionally (so nothing sticks to the pot) for 2-3 minutes.
4. Drain out any excess oil/water and drop to medium-low heat

Preparing the eggs

1. Prepare a a small, non-stick, frying pan with butter/oil/cooking spray, bring to medium heat.
2. Pour out half of the beat eggs to form an egg pancake.
3. When the bottom begins to brown, flip.
4. Move the finished egg to a cutting board.
5. Repeats steps 1-4 with the remaining egg.
6. Stack the egg pancakes and cut into little 1/2 inch squares.

Mixing it all up

1. Add the rice into the pot with your meat and vegetables. Go slowly, one scoop at a time, and try to distribute everything evenly (easier with older rice).
2. Add in your egg pieces a handful at a time, pushing the rice around to help distribute the pieces without breaking them down any smaller.
3. Keep the rice on low heat until it’s warm, stirring occasionally so that it doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pot.

Of course you’re welcome to substitute other meats and vegetables as you see fit. Otherwise, I hope you enjoy it!

/jon

I’ve released version 2.2.3 of Weight Tracker ODS, my open source weight loss spreadsheet for LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org. Visit my page The Hacker’s Diet with LibreOffice / OpenOffice.org for more information.

This is mostly a bugfix release.

Download Weight Tracker ODS v2.2.3 [89k ZIP]

Detailed Changelog:

• Fixed bug 914423: Renaming a year that isn’t loaded will overwrite that year’s data with the current year’s
• Fixed bug 884823: Vertical margin should be smaller for metric system
• Cleaned up some of the UI on the main sheet.
• Fixed bug 900766: Chart Raw Weight Data is Connected
• Fixed bug 884706: Cubic-splines cause non-function progess graphs, use B-Spline instead
• Fixed bug 868296: Record high BMI displays record low BMI

Thanks to all the feedback and bug reports about the previous version!

/jon

Note, you’re going to need about 15 lists, 2 basic lists on Twitter, and 13 on Formulists to replicate what I’ve done exactly. Unfortunately for most that means you’re going to need a Formulists Pro account (at a hefty $19.99/month), unless like me you were an early adopter and have been grandfathered in with 20 free lists. Sorry about that. In the meantime I leave the exercise to a creative reader for making this work with a normal Free account.

Ok, the objective is two custom lists that update daily: one to suggest new people to follow, one to suggest people to unfollow. These lists will composite the other 13 lists in a way that meets your rules for followers. So first of all, you need to decide on your rules for following and unfollowing.

My Follow Rules:

These are loose guidelines for the types of accounts I want to follow:

1. Follow mostly people (not stores, brands, or website feeds).
2. Follow people I’ve retweeted, or have retweeted me.
3. Follow people whom I’ve had conversations with.
4. Follow people who have listed me, or are in lists with me.
5. Follow people who have recently followed me (unless they’re on my ignore list).

My Unfollow Rules:

My unfollow rules are a little stricter, as I try to keep my feed relevant and uncluttered.

1. Unfollow those who don’t follow me back within 14 days (unless they’re on my whitelist).
2. Unfollow those who have been inactive for more than 90 days (unless they’re on my whitelist).
3. Unfollow those I’ve put on my ignore list.

So, to start out, I need two normal Twitter lists: whitelist, and ignore. On whitelist I add any account that I always want to follow, even if my rules would suggest otherwise (for example, a celebrity I know will never follow me back, and would therefore pop up in my unfollow recommendations). On ignore I add accounts that pop up in my follow recommendations that I’m just not interested in (like non-people accounts). I’ll need to check up on these lists regularly to make sure I still feel the same way about their contents.

That done, in Formulists I create the following 13 smart lists:

All except auto-suggest-follow and auto-suggest-unfollow are made using the basic smart lists that Formulists provides. All are marked as private (except for the people-i-retweet, thanks-for-listing-me, and thanks-for-retweeting-me) cause I know how some people feel about Formulists polluting the Listed statistic. Finally, to meet my rules above, I have auto-recently-followed set to show for 14 days, and auto-inactive-friends set to hit after 90 days of no tweets. I’ll explain in a moment, but now, on to the setup for the custom suggestion lists.

Auto Suggest Follow:

In order to improve the quality of of the suggestions, I set the “Minimum List Appearances” to 2, so that I get better matches. Note that because I include both Followers and recently-followed-me, new followers are almost always recommended. Also note that I’ve added my “fave” list, which is where I keep the friends whose statuses I dont’ want to miss in the general timeline.

Auto Suggest Unfollow:

Here’s where the auto-recently-followed set to 14 days kicks in. Normally someone who doesn’t follow me back will pop up as someone to unfollow, but by adding the auto-recently-followed as a filter, it hides them for 14 days, giving them a chance to reciprocate. If after 14 days they still don’t follow me, they’ll pop up as an unfollow suggestion.

Workflow:

Now that you have these lists working for you, how do you manage actually following and unfollowing people? Easy. Every couple days I check my suggestion lists. If someone on my auto-suggest-follow list looks promising, I follow them. If I don’t like the recommendation, I add them to my ignore list, and on the next refresh they’ll be removed. For the auto-suggest-unfollow list, any one I want to keep despite the recommendation I add to my whitelist, the rest I unfollow.

In the meantime, I can follow anyone else I choose, trusting Formulist to notify me if maybe it wasn’t such a good follow after all. The smart lists catch those that don’t follow back, even those who wait a long time before unfollowing me.

All this makes it much easier for me to manage who I follow, and helping me prune useless followers. I only wish Formulists hadn’t changed to such an expensive pay model. But then again, most of the Twitter power tools have gone that way, kind of how it all works. Anyway, leave any feedback in the comments!

/jon

Back in October I started looking into what it would take to develop a cross-platform chat bot for Twitter. Specifically I wanted to try my hand at creating a Unix daemon, as well as play around with Twitter’s APIs. I started prototyping in Python, but eventually switched to C#. The result is Jirani.

The code is designed to be as easy to use as possible. Turn on the behaviours you want and specify chat functions that take in messages and return the bot’s responses; Jirani will handle the rest.

Jirani is developed in MonoDevelop against the latest Mono runtime for Linux, but aims to be completely compatible with .NET on Windows. It uses TweetSharp to interface with Twitter, and contains a core library, as well as two example bots: one that runs on the command-line, one that runs as a service.

Check it out and make your own chat bot today!

Jirani on Launchpad

My final count was 51,390 words. Okay, back to goofing off for the rest of the month.

/jon

I’m taking a short writing hiatus (just a tiny one I swear) but in the meantime I thought I’d post a couple of excerpts from this year’s stories. Note these are unedited from draft zero. Okay, I ran spellcheck, but otherwise they’re untouched! It pains me too, cause I can already see problems to fix.

No guarantees anything even remotely like them will appear in the finished works. Anyway, enjoy!

Aman

The mouse dodged the awkward blow, as he expected. They were always faster, but he could endure. The swings that looked mighty to them were as the swatting of fleas. Let them think they could outpace him, outthink him, outfight him. He wasn’t just a lump of muscle; this was his life, tip to tail.

Let them play at war.

Trump

“You’ve heard the rumors,” Pate said. “What do-”

A small light blipped on the desk, and Tom flicked it with his finger. “Here,” he said.

“We’ve picked up the Notrump’s transponder signal,” a voice said. “They’re requesting permission to dock.” Tom eyed Pate.

“Permission granted,” he said.

“Roger that,” the voice said. “Docking to hangar three, ETA eleven minutes.” The light on the desk winked out.

“Just relax,” Tom said. “Inspectors come and inspectors go. You run a tight operation here.”

“Tell that to the company,” Pate said. Tom shrugged, and Pate returned to his graphs. “You don’t have to deal with those fuckers. You lose an ounce of ore, they’re on you like… shit. Fuck. I don’t know.”

“Eloquent,” Tom said. “You want my advice, just don’t be yourself.”

“Fuck you.”

Sorry for swearing. But after a year and a half of working on Guineawick Tales, I needed the outlet.

/jon

This year I’m tackling two short stories instead of one full-length novel. I’ve taken about three days to outline them both; a close shave, but I think I’m prepared.

• Aman
  A short adventure of the Guardmouse Aman, set during the events of Hester and the Kookaburra King.
• Trump
  A bio-tech adaptation of the John Henry folk legend.

Aman is in keeping with my plan to alternate short story, novel, short story, novel, etc for the Guineawick Tales series. I plan for a lot of character growth: the eager upstart Guardmouse will not have it easy. The challenge will be to write a gritty children’s story without going too far.

Trump is a story I outlined in the months before NaNoWriMo last year, after positive feedback and interest on the first few chapters by my former writing group. This year I’ve torn that outline (and those early drafts) apart and have re-envisioned a much tighter story overall.

As with the last two years, both will be written on Cortana, my veteran ASUS netbook. She’s got a 1.6GHz processor, 2GB RAM, 32GB SSD hard drive, and a 12-cell battery.

In layman’s terms that means an ultra portable little monster with a near instant boot time and a fourteen hour battery life. Eight hours with wifi on.

She runs Ubuntu 10.10 like a champ. As with previous years, I’ll be writing in the ever awesome FocusWriter, now using txt2tags for markup. This year I also add bazaar for version control and to sync my work to my personal server (and into my offsite backup system).

I’ll be using Pomodroido on my phone to schedule my time and improve my productivity. I’ll keep track of my daily progress in a spreadsheet.

I’ve been tweaking the whole system for months now. I intend to hit 50,000 words as soon as possible, so that I can get back to editing my other stories and  getting them into readers’ hands.

Best of luck to my fellow writers. NaNoWriMo 2011!

/jon

It’s been a long haul, and there were plenty of distractions along the way. In fact in the middle of editing HatKK I made the decision to revisit Pawsgaard to fix some plot issues. I re-released the story soon after, and in multiple ebook formats.

The original draft of HatKK, Draft 0, was 100,227 words long. I printed it out on 430 double spaced pages, almost a whole ream of paper! It was 2 inches thick!

They say that in your first revision you should cut down your story by 10%. This revision, Draft 1, is 86,746 words, for an overall cut of 13%. Not bad.

The novel is, unfortunately, not yet ready to be shared. It is however, a great improvement over Draft 0. The plot and pacing have been restructured, and most if not all of the inconsistencies have been addressed. All temporary or substitute text is gone. A lot of unpleasant and unnecessarily repetitive themes have been cut out. The complete story is there, readable, and is actually enjoyable.

There will be more work, more revisions. I need to read it through cover to cover and take copious notes. I need to revisit the language and bump up the writing from good to excellent (especially in the first half). I also need to do the same work for Pawsgaard.

I’ve completed a huge leg in what seemed at first like an insurmountable journey. I’ve edited a one hundred thousand word novel, often putting in twenty hours a week on top of my normal job. And now NaNoWriMo is just around the corner; I’ll post my plans for that soon. In the meantime, Hester, the Kookburra King, and I are taking a well-deserved break.

At least until December.

/jon