Well, there I went again. Easing into the old, lazy routine and saying, “Oh well, one more week won’t do any harm.” Now, the rest of September wasn’t very bad. Nor was October, when I went to Austin City Limits and said, “Well, I can get used to this.” Wrong. In swooped November like some sort of winged mastadon, and stole me away to its horrible nest of tusk-toothed flying monsters to entertain the prehistoric demon spawn. Here’s what I’ve been working on that has kept me from doing anything productive with this site for the past three (THREE!) months. My humblest apologies. I do not speak Mastadon.

November — NaNoWriMo and everything else

I started NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) again, and I was determined to win. Two-three hours of my day gone instantly. But I WON IT! Incidentally, the most useful program I used was not some fancy-shmancy writing program (like DarkRoom, which I have always loved), but Google Docs. That’s right! A simple word processor. All that blank space in any other program would have made me have all sorts of allergic reactions (for example, to obligation and responsibility — I have these anyway, but they’re mostly infrequent). Aside from the wonky word count-alyzer, Google Docs was actually fantastic for my productivity. And I got some pretty sweet writing out of it. Here’s a snippet:

Then, I actually had to do stuff (here I am, reduced to complaining about homework). For everything except Logic, I had a game plan. With Logic, I either messed around with some haphazard guesswork or sat around bawling for a bearded little elf man to turn my quantifiers into gold. You’ll just have to guess which tactic actually worked.

One of the things I discovered about Logic is that it isn’t very logical. My intuitive leap was usually not correct, except in some very simple situations. And proofs are horrible in all situations. But that’s over and done with, and I should make some sort of decent grade in there. And then, never again!. It’s funny how many times I’ve told myself that only to have a similarly horrible class crawl up to my door to say, “Hello.”

“Hello,” indeed.

Other stuff

I made a live development section of my site. It’s called Sandbox — for obvious reasons, and also because I never get tired of using the Sandbox theme for WordPress. I have two projects in the works right now. One of them is a new design for this site; the other is a little site for my friend Erica. Both of them use Cufón, which I have found both extremely easy to use and extremely flexible. Now, some notes:

• I haven’t used @font-face yet. That’s next on my list.
• I don’t think Cufón is suitable for body text. It works fabulously in headings though, which is where I will continue to use. The lack of selectability is a problem, but not a huge one. And you can use links in Cufón just fine!

Feel free to check those out and leave me some notes/tips!

In closing

I hope I don’t have too many more of these doldrum periods. It’s boring for you guys and it’s boring for me. But it’s tons of fun for demon mastadons, so you guys keep your eyes open, okay? Okay.