Monthly Archives: October 2010

Automated Virtue, part 2

Hacks, , , ,

In June I wrote up how I’ve been using Ben Franklin’s 13 virtues to nudge me towards being the person I want to be. Just seeing a daily reminder to practice industry or humility has been a great boon to my practice of life.

The ever-perceptive Sam pointed out that I should just share my calendar with you in case you don’t want to set up your own.


Click the Google link on that widget to add it to your google calendar – or if you are using iCal or some other calendar, you can also try this ICAL link or subscribe to the Atom feed. Hope you get as much out of it as I have.

How to Safely Win an Impossible Book

Lit, , , ,

When I heard that Charles Yu was giving away the mysterious “Book from Nowhere” from his novel I was terribly excited. The book is a McGuffin/plot point in Yu’s novel “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe” – the protagonist is the author who gives himself the book before shooting himself in the stomach.

It’s one of those books.

The publisher actually created a physical mockup of the all-metal book from the story and let Wired give it away in a contest – best comment wins the tome. I dashed off an entry and a few days ago I learned that I won that contest.

My winning comment was what I could get done in a little bit, but I’m so excited to have won that I cooked up a special presentation of the story I wrote.  Charle’s book deals with fathers and sons and families and regret and time and loss and paralysis and so does this.

Click here to read “How to Safely Live on in a Science Fiction Universe”

I wrote this.  I can’t illustrate worth a damn, so I wrote some code to do it for me.  Every time you load that page, it will reach out to Flickr for Creative Commons licensed images on the subjects of mistakes, loss, time, etc.  Much thanks to Tove Hermanson and Sam for their help as my editors.  There are also links in there. Click them.