Why does Trent Reznor hate the internet?

A wee bit of whimsy on Techradar:

…the news that Trent Reznor’s quit the net and that 43 per cent of people without a net connection wouldn’t get online even if it was free baffled me.

Hang on, Firefox needs an update. 43 per cent? That’s…sorry, had to confirm that Firefox wasn’t malicious software. Where was I? Oh yes. 43 per cent is an extraordinary number. I understand why people might be reticent about technology, but WENSELY JUST SECURED A SAFE HOUSE IN RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL #SPYMASTER when you consider all the benefits of going online, they more than make up for @GARYMARSHALL WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE HUMMING NOISE the disadvantages.

Viral marketing and technical tomfoolery

Two of my recent PC Plus features have gone online. First, a look at viral marketing:

The return of the Wispa is a classic example of canny viral marketing in action. In 2007, 93 Facebook groups spontaneously appeared, with 14,000 people demanding the return of the chocolate bar. When Iggy Pop played Glastonbury, crazed chocolate addicts stormed the stage with ‘Bring back the Wispa’ banners.

‘My goodness, what a surprise!’ said Cadbury’s. ‘Those stage invaders certainly weren’t actors, and those Facebook groups definitely weren’t the work of viral marketers! We had no intention of relaunching Wispa, but who are we to argue with the entire internet?’ We’re paraphrasing, but you get the idea.

Then, some PC-related pranks that (probably) won’t get you fired.

Pranks that take an age to set up usually aren’t worth it. So, while it’s possible to grow grass in someone’s keyboard or go crazy with the toolbar buttons in Office 97, that’s an awful lot of effort for relatively little reward. We prefer more subtle tweaks: system tools turned to the dark side, software that appears to have a mind of its own and, of course, demonic PC possession.

Google quick search vs Quicksilver (Mac)

Me again:

The new Google Quick Search Box (QSB) for Mac is designed to make things easier.

Summon it with a quick key combination and you can use it to find and launch applications, track down elusive files, dig up contacts or search the web.

It sounds very familiar, with good reason: apps such as Quicksilver have been doing much the same for years. So is QSB a Quicksilver killer? The short answer is probably – but not quite yet.

The iPhone killer is… O2

Me on Techradar:

We’re told that it costs between four and eight times more money to get a new customer than to retain an existing one, and that the way to make big piles of cash in the long term is to keep your customers sweet.

So why is O2 waving its corporate arse at its iPhone customers?

When subs can’t be bloody bothered

This is fantastic. No Rock’n'Roll Fun spots a couple of typos in a People story about Mel B:

The ex-Spice Girl’s decision to move to the States had seemed liked a wise disappointed when Mum-in striptease six nights She with BELAFONTE, But enough Planet The who her career choice after she landed a lead role in burlesque-themed musical Peepshow.

And that’s one of the more coherent paragraphs.

Hyperlinks to memories

Another .net column has made its way online. This one’s about attention and the way that gadgets can remove you from the moment you’re filming, photographing or tweeting about.

Photos and videos are hyperlinks to memories, icons that your brain double-clicks to bring back the full experience – the sights, sounds, smells and sensations of a happy day or a crappy one.

Increasingly, though, we’re using gadgets to record the whole experience. That makes us passive observers, not active participants.

Wrote for luck (or: odds and sods I’ve picked up from writing a book)

I mentioned the other week that I’d written a book and promised to share some of the things I’ve picked up about the writing process, submitting to agents and all that stuff. And then I didn’t. Sorry, it’s been one of those weeks.

This is one of those posts for which the phrase “your mileage may vary” was coined: things that worked for me may not work for you, things that matter to me might not matter to you, resources that I’ve found may not be useful to you in the slightest, and it’s entirely possible that my book is a big load of shite that doesn’t deserve to be published. But on the off chance that some of this might be helpful, I’ll post it anyway.

What I did wrong the last 200 times I tried to write a book

I know this sounds incredibly basic, but the one thing my various abandoned book ideas have in common is that I eventually realised that I wasn’t interested in them. The plot didn’t work, or I had a brilliant start but no idea where to go from there, or my hero was an utter dick. Unsurprisingly, the books quickly ran out of steam, with cries of “this sucks!”, “This is too hard!” and “What a dick!” respectively.

This time out I had a rough idea of the whole thing (although it changed a lot as I scribbled) and more importantly, I liked the characters I’d come up with. It’s not in the text, but I know what kind of music they like, I know what kind of beer they’d drink, I know what they’d find funny and I reckon they’d be a hoot to go for a drink with. And because I know that, a lot of the writing process involved me sitting in the pub thinking “Okay, X needs to do this. How would he go about it? He wouldn’t do it that way or that way. Would he…?”

The other big mistake I’ve made in the past is trying to write in my usual writing environment. Obviously if you don’t write words for a living this probably won’t be an issue for you, but for me the combination of particular hardware and software keeps me in work mode, not making-stuff-up mode.

What I found really effective was to get away from computers altogether and work in a notebook (a paper one), with a nice pen, in the pub. When it was time to put it on the PC I used Apple’s Pages (I use MS Word for work) on the Mac or Office 2007 on the PC (which I don’t use for work words at all).

You need to make room to write

One of the other differences between writing on a PC and writing on paper is that unless you’ve got special magic paper, you aren’t constantly distracted by incoming emails, tweets, system boings, pop-ups and all the other crap that you get on a computer. A bit of distraction isn’t bad – it’s nice to let your mind wander and listen to music, and if you’re writing somewhere like a pub or a coffee shop the odd overheard conversation can give you ideas for dialogue – but for me the right environment was away from computers, mobile phone switched off, hunched over a notebook in the corner of the pub.

I found I needed a routine too. Pub night worked for me, as did scribbling in the early morning/late night when everybody was either still in bed or had gone to bed. I didn’t even think about the book during office hours (roughly 8am to 6pm), because that was work time.

The downside of that is that unless you want to spend ten years writing your book, you’ll need to sacrifice things. In my case that meant magazines, books, video games, DVDs, blogging and dicking about on the Internet.

Momentum matters more than details

Writing and editing involve completely different mindsets. I found that I got more done – and stayed cheerier – by ploughing on with the story and not worrying about errors until later. You’ll spend a lot of time editing (I went through six drafts) anyway, so there’s not much point in stopping every couple of pages to look for typos, fix formatting or any of the other things you’ll catch later.

For me at least, the feeling I was making progress was more important than worrying about whether things were adequately described, funny or even comprehensible. Better to write 9 pages that’ll need major editing later than spend six hours on a single sentence, I think. I always find that when I switch mental gears from writing to editing, I can’t switch back again.

You really ought to read Anne Mini’s blog

Author Author is a marvel. Anne Mini goes on a bit – deliberately – and repeats herself a lot – that’s deliberate too – but her blog is the best resource I’ve found for fiction writing. It’s written from the perspective of agency screeners, so a lot of it is how not to write: it details the traps people fall into, the danger of the Frankenstein manuscript and so on. It’s also superb on bigger issues such as how to deal with rejection, how to get the right kind of feedback from family and friends and anything else you might possibly want to know.

No matter how good you are, you’ll make some massive cock-ups

Once you’ve got something approaching a finished draft, it’s a very good idea to get people you trust to look at it – because they will spot all the cock-ups you missed. Stuff that seems obvious to you won’t be to anybody else, you’ll get names mixed up, you’ll have characters doing things that appear to be out of character or that don’t fit with the world you’ve described, and (in my case at least) things you think are really, really funny aren’t. Without help, you won’t spot them all.

You should really buy, borrow or blag a laser printer

You’re going to be doing a lot of printing, even before you start thinking about sending your stuff out (proofreading on paper works in a way that it simply doesn’t on screen. Mistakes jump out at you). A typical supermarket inkjet printer does about 100 pages to an ink cartridge.

I think that’s probably enough for now. I’ll no doubt come back to this in the not too distant future.

Opera 10 is too good to ignore

I thought I’d say something constructive in an op/ed for once, so I’ve written about Opera 10. It’s moved from alpha to beta, and it’s really rather good.

Internet Explorer 6, the gurning half-wit of the browser world, has nearly 17 per cent of the market. Opera, a truly great browser, has 0.72 per cent.

That’s lower than Netscape (0.74 per cent), which was shot and turned into glue months ago.

To say that Opera is better than Netscape or IE6 is like saying having sex with the love of your life is better than being boiled in oil while being stabbed with knives, or living in Doncaster.

Cover me in axle grease and throw me to the sexbots

Sexy robots. Oh yes. Yours truly picks five lady robots, and T3′s Katherine Hannaford picks the boy-bots.

How good is Summer Glau? She’s so good that we’ll happily ignore Sarah Connor’s endless moaning and the fact that Glau is so thin her arms couldn’t contain a Duracell battery, let alone a robot skeleton. She’s gorgeous, and she rocks a short skirt in a way that – thankfully – Arnold Schwarzenegger doesn’t.

With photos, naturally.

Hey, ISPs! Why not tell the truth?

Should ISPs advertise broadband services that don’t – can’t – deliver what the ads promise? Of course they shouldn’t.

If you aren’t unemployed or self-employed, BT is choking your connection at the very times you’re most likely to use it.

On the subject of iPlayer’s bandwidth demands BT says “We believe there is a real issue that content owners like the BBC need to address.”

Maybe there is, but there’s an issue BT needs to address right now. Its advertising specifically says you can use Option 1 for iPlayer, and you can’t.