Well, here is my first iPod touch posting. What do you call this? Pod-blogging? Sounds a little too much like podcasting. One thing for sure — it’s a lot harder to type this way, one finger (thumb) at a time. I seem to actually type faster and with fewer errors using just my right thumb, for what it’s worth.
Here’s an idea — Dvorak keyboards for IMing! While Dvorak hasn’t edged out qwerty when multiple fingers are involved, I bet it would be way more efficient for two- and even single-digit typing . . .
I never really paid attention to Dvorak until, well, yesterday. A colleague asked me on Friday about the “great Dvorak-qwerty debate,” which had come up at a workshop we were attending. So in searching for a good summary of the debate, I got a crash-course in the theory behind Dvorak and liked what I was seeing. I think it’s a solution in search of a problem, and in tiny keyboards the right problem may have at last come around for it.
Well, here’s one serious problem with pod-blogging — no down arrow! If the text goes below the fold and you do an intermittent save, there’s no easy way to get to the bottom of the post. So, either I keep posts short (considering how long it takes to type this way, not a bad proposition) or just don’t manually save . . .
Or ask Apple to add arrow keys?
N
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Recycling is cool as well as socially responsible, right? So I’ve been busy moving over old posts (all of 2007 to the present are now up) and more recently I’ve been creating new pages with the sidebar content from the old site.
This morning, I found a great quote that I wanted to add to Received Wisdom, and figured that it was as good a time as any to get that page over here too. So in between bites of cinnamon toast I inserted lots of italics and blockquotes and had the opportunity to revisit some of my favorite quotations collected over many years of reading.
The review reminded me that both the “Found Objects” quotes (little pieces of logosam* that I have found bobbing merrily on the surface of the written word over the years) and the longer “In Context” quotes really follow stream-of-consciousness arcs if you read them in sequence. It’s an interesting breadcrumb trail of my journey of discovery.
Anyway, just wanted to point you to the new Received Wisdom page and encourage you to wander through it. Feel free to leave a favorite quote or two in the comments, too.
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* the word equivalent of flotsam and jetsam
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Well, as you can tell, the plan to live-blog Balticon yesterday didn’t work out. There was a hotspot — ETWireless — but it wasn’t connected to anything. I guess you could say that I couldn’t phone home with ETWireless. . . .
I hate getting up early on the weekends, especially both days. But yesterday was for Balticon, which was a blast, and this morning was to go to the broom-closet studio of Umbrella Radio up the road from Cafe Hon in Hamden, to record an installment of “Arts on Air” hosted by my friend Ian “The Sign Guy” Hochberg and featuring Chris Stewart of the Write Here, Write Now workshops and Gregg WIlhelm of the CityLit Project. I haven’t been on the radio since college days and I really enjoyed the opportunity to share airtime with such talented folks.
If you’re interested, tune into Umbrella Radio at the link above this Thursday at 3:00 Eastern to hear our program. Rumor is we might be invited back to do a regular literary chat segment with Ian, which would be worth getting up early for on weekends.
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You can still find the original Sotto Voce at its traditional home. Over the next few (…), I will be moving the old site’s content — entries and sidebar posts — over to this blog. In the meantime, the rule is: new stuff here, old stuff there.
I’ll be posting the old entries with their original dates. So until everything is up, the new SV will be growing above and behind this entry. So if you’re easily disoriented, you might want to take something like dramamine or whatnot.
A housekeeping item: I still want SV to have a retro mood, so I’m starting off with the “Old WordPress” theme until I can find a retro theme that I like better and that’s not fixed-width, so that I can put up typecasts at full scale.
Sotto Voce will continue to feature typecasted entries, of course, but this new format will allow me to get more stuff up, in different forms, faster and more spontaneously. I’ve figured out how to blog on the go using my iPod touch, so hopefully SV will feature more live-blogging and semi-spontaneous stuff, maybe even pictures and podcasts.
Like tomorrow, for example. I hope to be able to live-blog from Balticon 42, where one of my writing heroes, Connie Willis, is the guest of honor. I’m staffing the MWAB table all day with my pal Gary, so if you’re around, please drop by.
Let’s see if I can pull this off. I don’t just mean the live-blogging; I mean the whole move. At least it doesn’t involve packing up boxes.
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