I've just made a strange discovery.
Apparently, it's a lot easier for me to write drafts for the book after I've had a drink or two. I wrote more in the last hour than I did on all of Saturday.
Perhaps this has something to do with the way alcohol affects the mind's inhibitions? After a few drinks it's often easier to talk to people because you're not as worried about how they'll react. You're not censoring yourself.
One of the things that slows me down most when writing (other than trying to get started at all) is the constant nagging in my mind about whether I'm saying what I really need to say, if I'm covering things in enough depth and so on.
Hmm. I wonder how this will all play out.
I'm terribly impressed with some of the folks at Apple. They get the power of weblogs in a very important way. Over in Dave Hyatt's weblog, he's been responding to various other weblog entries about their new Safari browser. For example, here he responds to one of Mark's complaints.
As a member of the Safari team, he introduced himself a few days ago on his weblog and has done an excellent job of responding and keeping the community informed.
I hope that other tech companies understand how important and revolutionary this is. Imagine, product team members actually communicating directly with the public rather than filtered thru the typical PR organizations and layers of administrative crapy.
I've been hesitant to do much of this in my weblog, not being sure how my employer would react. In the few cases I have, the response has been immensely positive. I'm sure that Dave has found this to be the case too.
John has noticed this too it seems. Yeah, he gets it.
I really hope this spreads. The world needs more of this.
I seem to have relapsed.
A few years ago, I had a habit of laying down "for a few minutes" only to wake up many hours later. While it felt very good, the experience was quite disruptive to a normal sleep/work cycle. Until recently, it hasn't been much of a problem.
But yesterday I managed to screw up a little. And today... Well, let's just say that I didn't go to bed until 3:30am. I woke up around 11am and had breakfast. Then I decided to brush up on some reading (FAA airspace regulations) while laying on my bed (mistake). I probably read for 30 minutes or so before I fell back asleep--and woke up at 4pm.
Ugh.
Getting back on track is going to be a challenge. If past experience is any guide, I can either do so gracefully over the course of 4-6 days, or I can sacrifice one day and do it a bit more abruptly.
You think I'd have learned by now. Don't lay back down when you've only been awake for a few hours. It almost always leads to something like this.
For several days last week, the cavernous convention halls here became battlefields in the copyright wars. On balance, the entertainment cartel didn't seem to be doing very well.
The iTrip is a cool iPod add-on.
I should have attended the bloggers dinner in SF last night. I didn't do nearly as much as I expected. That would have been more fun, I suspect.
Ben Hammersley says:
In what must be the fastest, most in-depth, distributed product review in history, Apple's new browser, Safari is being bashed about all over the blogosphere.
I think Apple has done a good job with Safari. It's a first public beta and I've only seen two big complaints: (1) the lack of tabs, and (2) the various CSS bugs that Mark has been finding. Let's give Apple some credit. They're building a cool iBrowser.