Various random stuff that I wanted to write down.

Cool Apps I saw this week
The pipes are clogged I tell you. That’s what I was thinking when I heard Yahoo had launched something called Pipes. Tubes might have been a better name : )

As a programming language enthusiast it made me happy to see a mass market implementation of a visual dataflow oriented programming language. A very slick Javascript UI. For awhile, JD thought that they had done it with some Macromedia technology.

Speaking of Macromedia technologies, JD showed me www.etsy.com

That’s definitely very slick.

Fantasy Sports
The “Influential Fantasy Sport Observer” phenomenon is one that I experienced for a while. It has to do with my controlling nature. But it doesn’t help my team. I have gotten better at it. No matter how many times I observe my fantasy team within the course of a game, my fantasy players will not magically improve their performance. The best you can do is to start a team with the belief that you have set the optimal lineup and leave it till the next day. I’ve noticed that the phenomenon is more pronounced when the team is doing badly than when it is doing relatively well. Grrrrr…. it might explain why I was obsessively watching the team earlier in the year. It’s better now. Seriously it’s better now. I only check the teams like 3 - 4 times a day.

Writing
I’ve been doing a lot of my recent writing with Scrivener. RL used it for NaNoWriMo 2005  I think and he mostly enjoyed the experience. I’ve been playing around with a number of applications for writing. For NaNoWriMo 2005, I used Tinderbox to write a novel. That didn’t turn out badly since I finished the novel. Last year, I experimented with a number of other writing tools, WriteRoom, Avenir, Jers. I didn’t seem to enjoy any of them. WriteRoom showed that full screen editing works well for me. WriteRoom was good for that but it was too limited. Plus it used to be free but now costs money. For NaNoWriMo 2006, I finally settled on Smultron. Not a bad editor, it had full screen editing but I never felt comfortable with it.

I can hear Mic saying “why don’t you use Emacs?”. I don’t know why. Emacs would fulfill the primary purpose of a writing tool i.e. a tool for editing text. I have a hard time getting my thoughts focused on writing when I’m in that environment. My thoughts feel more logical, more constrained by my technical training. It’s not Emacs fault that I cannot switch my mental context.

Enter Scrivener. It’s an application that is growing on me. I want to see how much writing I do with it this month before I’m completely sold on it. The early going appears promising. I’ve written my most recent blog entries and my performance reviews with it. It has a nice full screen editing mode with some added amenities. It reminds me of Avenir which I was almost sold on. The key difference for me was Avenir is a novel writing tool while Scrivener is a writing tool. I’ll get a lot more use out of Scrivener than I will Avenir.