Because I am a (mostly) out-of-practice programmer, I intend to build an application to help me with this task.  Some features that I have planned for NaNoTools (name to be fixed later) are:

• Text editing (duh)
• Live word count
• Daily word count stats
• Planning calendar
• Word sprint tracking

Any WriMos have suggestions as to features that they would like to see?

The issue I have with it isn’t with the contents of the show.  Teach the kids to exercise, teach them to share, teach them to learn from the world around them.  Not a problem.

The issue I have is that, as with most shows where English is the primary language, they don’t speak proper English.  Dora and Diego teach Spanish; I have to presume they’re doing it properly.  Likewise with Kai-Lan and Chinese.  But it seems that kids shows want to dumb down the English language, which I feel is a completely backwards way of thinking of childhood education.

I shouldn’t feel stupider after watching a show with my kids than I did before it started.

Did my parents feel this way?

I will be going out of town for a while, and will not have a TV while away.  What I would like to do is watch a DVD or two¹ on my laptop, which I will be bringing with me.  But I also need ideas of what to watch.

So far, I've watched the complete series of Babylon 5, and am currently watching Battlestar Galactica.  My main criteria are:

• A continuing storyline.  If I'm going to be watching an entire series, I don't want them to press the reset button at the end of each episode.
• A completed or continuing series.  I don't want to watch a series that got canceled before it reached some conclusion, such as a season-one cliffhanger and no season two.  For the same reason, I don't want to get hooked on a show that has only had a single season, as these seem (to me) more likely to get cut off before they reach a critical mass.

1. Buy a dumpster, paint it gray and live in it for 6 months straight
2. Run all of the piping and wires inside your house on the outside of the walls.
3. Pump 10 inches of nasty, crappy water into your basement, then pump it out, clean up, and paint the basement “deck gray.”
4. Every couple of weeks, dress up in your best clothes and go the scummiest part of town, find the most run down, trashy bar you can, pay $10 per beer until you’re hammered, then walk home in the freezing cold.
5. Perform a weekly disassembly and inspection of your lawnmower.
6. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays turn your water temperature up to 200 degrees, then on Tuesday and Thursday turn it down to 10 degrees. On Saturdays, and Sundays declare to your entire family that they used too much water during the week, so all showering is secured.
7. Raise your bed to within 6 inches of the ceiling.
8. Have your next door neighbor come over each day at 5am, and blow a whistle so loud that Helen Keller could hear it and shout “Reveille, Reveille, all hands heave out and trice up”.
9. Have your mother-in-law write down everything she’s going to do the following day, then have her make you stand in the back yard at 6am and read it to you.
10. Eat the raunchiest Mexican food you can find for three days straight, then lock yourself out of the bathroom for 12 hours, and hang a sign on the door that reads “Secured-contact senior hull techs.”
11. Submit a request form to your father-in-law, asking if it’s ok for you to leave your house before 3pm.
12. Invite 200 of your not-so-closest friends to come over, then board up all the windows and doors to your house for 6 months. After the 6 months is up, take down the boards, wave at your friends and family through the front window of your home…you can’t leave until the next day you have duty.
13. Shower with above-mentioned friends.
14. Make your family qualify to operate all the appliances in your home (i.e. Dishwasher operator, blender technician, etc.).
15. Walk around your car for 4 hours checking the tire pressure every 15 minutes.
16. Sit in your car and let it run for 4 hours before going anywhere. This is to ensure your engine is properly “lighted off.”
17. Empty all the garbage bins in your house, and sweep your driveway 3 times a day, whether they need it or not. (hands will remain at cleaning stations for 120 minutes)
18. Repaint your entire house once a month.
19. Cook all of your food blindfolded, groping for any spice and seasoning you can get your hands on.
20. Use eighteen scoops of budget coffee grounds per pot, and allow each pot to sit 5 hours before drinking.
21. Have your neighbor collect all your mail for a month, read your magazines, and randomly lose every 5th item.
22. Spend $20,000 on a satellite system for your TV, but only watch CNN and the Weather Channel.
23. Avoid watching TV with the exception of movies which are played in the middle of the night. Have the family vote on which movie to watch and then show a different one.
24. Have your 5-year-old cousin give you a haircut with goat shears.
25. Sew back pockets to the front of your pants.
26. Spend 2 weeks in the red-light districts of Europe, and call it “world travel.”
27. Attempt to spend 5 years working at McDonalds, and NOT get promoted.
28. Ensure that any promotions you do get are from stepping on the dead bodies of your co-workers.
29. Needle gun the aluminum siding on your house after your neighbors have gone to bed.
30. When your children are in bed, run into their room with a megaphone,and shout at the top of your lungs that your home is under attack, and order them to man their action stations. (“Bong bong, bong bong, action stations, action stations, bong bong, bong bong”)
31. Make your family menu a week ahead of time and do so without checking the pantry and refrigerator.
32. Post a menu on the refrigerator door informing your family that you are having steak for dinner. Then make them wait in line for at least an hour, when they finally get to the kitchen, tell them that you are out of steak, but you have dried ham or hot dogs. Repeat daily until they don’t pay attention to the menu any more so they just ask for hot dogs.
33. When baking a cake, prop up one side of the pan while it is in the oven. Spread icing on real thick to level it off.
34. In the middle of January, place a podium at the end of your driveway. Have you family stand watches at the podium, rotating at 4-hour intervals.
35. Lock yourself and your family in your house for 6 weeks. Then tell them that at the end of the 6th week you’re going to take them to Disneyland for “weekend leave.” When the end of the 6th week rolls around, inform them that Disneyland has been canceled due to the fact that they need to get ready for Engineering-certification, and that it will be another week before they can leave the house.
36. In your grim, gray dumpster (refer to #1), with 200 of your not-so-closest friend (cite para. 12) regardless of gender, suffer through PMS!
37. Sleep on the shelf in your closet. Replace the closet door with a curtain. Have you wife whip open the curtain about 3 hours after you go to sleep. She should then shine a flashlight in your eyes and mumble “Sorry, wrong rack.”
38. Renovate your bathroom. Build a wall across the middle of your bathtub, move the shower head to chest level. When you take showers, make sure you shut off the water while you soap down.
39. When there is a thunderstorm in your area, find a wobbly rocking chair and rock as hard as you can until you become nauseous. have a supply of stale crackers in your shirt pocket.
40. Put lube oil in your humidifier and set it on high.
41. For ex-engineering types: leave the lawn mower running in your living room eight hours a day.
42. Have the paperboy give you a haircut.
43. Once a week, blow compressed air up your chimney, making sure the wind carries the soot onto your neighbors house. Ignore his complaints.
44. Every other month buy green or red marine primer and put it in a paint sprayer. Spray it over the roof of your house onto your neighbors car. Ignore his complaints.
45. Lock wire the lug nuts on your car.
46. Buy a trash compactor, but use it only once a week. Store the garbage on the other side of your bathtub.
47. Get up every night around midnight and have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on stale bread.
48. Set your alarm clock to go off at random during the night, jump up and get dressed as fast as you can making sure you button up the top button on your shirt, stuff you pants into your socks. Run out into the backyard and uncoil the garden hose.
49. Once a month, take every major appliance apart and put them back together again.
50. Install a fluorescent lamp under the coffee table and then get under it and read books.
51. Raise the thresholds and lower the top sills of your front and back doors so that you either trip or bang your head every time you pass through one of them.>
52. Every so often, throw the cat in the pool and shout “Man overboard, starboard side” Then run into the house and sweep all the pots and dishes off the counter. Yell at the wife and kids for not having the kitchen “stowed for sea.”
53. Put on the headphones from your stereo set, but don’t plug them in. Hang a paper cup around your neck with string. Go stand in front of your stove. Say … to no one in particular “Stove manned and ready” Stand there for three or four hours. And say again to no one in particular “stove secured.” Roll up your headphones and paper cup and place them in a box.

• I write on the computers at work and at home.  I transfer back and forth using email.  I spent a day writing to a file that I had emailed home from work.  Unfortunately, it was in the temp folder from when I opened it from my email client.  Net result – a full weekend day’s work lost.
• My family has been sick.  Not convieniently all at once.  One person recovers just as the next gets sick.  That has left me with no time for writing.

The net result is that this year’s attempt at NaNoWriMo has been aborted.  I will continue to work on my novel, but will now work on quality rather than quantity, and be able to make a presentable work rather than a word-count-padded one.

My count is now at 7446, which is approximately where I should have been three and a half days ago.  Time to play a bit of catchup.

More fun was offered in the form of an H1N1 vaccination today.  My arm is still stiff from that, but I can’t even convince myself that it’s a reason for my falling behind on NaNo.

Guess I’m going to need a productive weekend.

Anyway, I got a bit of writing done during lunch.  495 words (about a page and a half, handwritten), which brings me up to a running total of 4106.  Unfortunately, that leaves me 896 words behind my daily milestone

Guess I know what I’m doing when the kids go to bed tonight.

Why would I do this?  Because I’m crazy.  Actually, because I want to be able to work on it during breaks at work, which is very difficult when my writing is at home.  Emailing it back and forth is probably just going to cause confusion, in addition to excluding transit time in my writing periods.

It just so happens that I am duty twice during November, giving me lots of time with not much else to do than write.  And luckily for me, the first day of duty is also the first day of NaNo, which should give me a half-decent head start.

Let the madness begin.

He claims that this will improve movie making, as producers can find out exactly where his test audience loses interest.  But I’m pretty sure this isn’t a good use of a declining stockpile of medical isotopes.