Did you ever meet JoePa in person? How will you remember him? Share your photos and videos, and put yourself on camera to share memories and condolences.

First off, let’s get the obvious out of the way: I do not know Joe Paterno personally. I know he’s a coach of some renown at Pennsylvania State University, and I know he is or was respected for placing athletes’ educations before all else (a quality that appears rare). I refuse to use his nickname, “JoePa,” as well, as that would imply some sense of familiarity or admiration, and I hold neither. Secondly, I have no photos nor videos, and I can guarantee that you’re far better without a video of my ugly mug. I will simply tell you how I’m going to remember this strange icon of a human.

Joe Paterno, despite his best intentions – and he held very good intentions toward students – will go down as someone unwilling to compromise his position to help children who looked up to him. He allowed Jerry Sandusky to remain at Pennsylvania State University despite serious allegations² that he was raping children, seemingly never went to the police, and made little effort to see the allegations investigated. Additionally, he appears to have misrepresented the allegations to his superiors who in turn are just as guilty as he is for not contacting the police.

Although Paterno had the right intentions with his students, I believe he valued his position far too much to put it at risk, and instead his inaction put children at risk, allowing Sandusky’s alleged molestation of children to continue unabated — put short, Paterno could have prevented child rape, but didn’t. However many years and good students Paterno may have helped through their education, he let every single one down with his terrible and inhuman decision leaving Sandusky’s actions unreported. For that, he is nothing more than a disgrace to Penn State and much of humanity.

Had Paterno done the right thing, today, he would be among those we can look up to. He would be one who knew that honesty, fairness, and education above all are most important. He was on his way to making the world a far better place — if not the world, at least the tiny slice he inhabited. But he made a choice he could never undo. Paterno became the villain, an irredeemable drop in the world’s cesspool.

I litter this little bit of writing with such statements as the above because I do not believe Paterno is innocent, as much as I so wish he were. I do not believe that he merely “made mistakes” as we all do. My mistakes, and your mistakes, do not lead to another human raping children. Our mistakes lead to late deadlines, fingers burnt on a hot plate, a mistaken date and time, or the occasional flat tire. Our mistakes are often harmless. Paterno’s “mistake,” as some would mistakenly call it, was to let child rape go unreported. His “mistake” was a willful decision to avert his eyes, to continue working with someone who cannot be trusted with children. That is why Joe Paterno did not merely make mistakes.

I did not expect to find a human-powered, systematic, months-long, fraudulent (falsely claiming to be collaborating with us, and worse) attempt to undermine our business, being perpetrated from call centres on 2 continents.

Stefan’s evidence is damning, to say the least, especially when the address accessing their databases comes directly from Google. I’m not sure that Google proper (as in Mountain View) would have approved this, but from their recent changes to search, it’s hard to say what they might be doing anymore. Perhaps they’ve just instated a new motto: “Do no good.”

Honestly, though, I don’t believe this is known within Google, at least not outside of some corrupt group.²  The lack of technical prowess (“human-powered”) about the operation is strange for Google, given its tendency to over-engineer its way out of all situations. Where’s the MapReduce or the AI callers with synthesized voices?³ As much as I would love to believe this goes all the way up through Google, this sounds like something a small group wanted kept under wraps – it’s still pretty damned awful, but no reason to break out the tin foil hats.

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Powerline is a Vim plugin by Kim Silkebækken “which allows you to create better-looking, more functional vim statuslines.” Basically, it makes your status line easier to read and look awesome. Installation is pretty simple if you use either Pathogen or Vundler (I prefer Pathogen), but it does require some custom fonts to get the full fanciness effect. Powerline comes with a patcher to patch existing fonts, but there are some pre-patched fonts kindly provided by Nick Quaranto over in a gist, including Menlo.

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Apple, for all the shit they get for being “closed” and “evil”, has actually done far more to wrestle control back from the carriers and put it into the hands of consumers. Google set off to help in this goal, then stabbed us all in the back and went the complete other way, to the side of the carriers. And because they smiled the entire time they were doing it and fed us this “open” bullshit, we thanked them for it. We’re still thanking them for it!

I’d never really looked at Google’s behavior in this way, even after they’d aligned with Verizon. I’d kept tabs on the situation, but this way of viewing it hadn’t crossed my mind. Siegler raises a lot of interesting points that, frankly, have me looking twice at Google’s behavior lately.

As far as I’m concerned, much of Siegler’s article comes across as very conspiracy theory-ish, which rubs me the wrong way and immediately raises a bullshit alarm in my head. That said, considering Google’s behavior just recently, it does seem that they’re going a bit far just to become (even more) dominant. It’s strange, smells funny, and really comes across as disingenuous. Twitter also seems to agree, if their statement, sent to Siegler, is any indication. At any rate, his article’s worth the read, especially if you (like me) tend to read Siegler as being particularly, and perhaps at times annoyingly, pro-Apple, as it offers an interesting way to see Google and Android.²

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So, this brings me to Phraseology, a relatively new app by Agile Tortoise. Phraseology is like most other editors until you get to its awesome revision tools — tools that I never thought I wanted or needed, and which are now causing me no end of grumbling when I do any writing elsewhere. It set itself apart by being uniquely useful when other editors were content to just edit and synchronize documents. Although Phraseology is great for just writing, its main strength is in revision, when you pull out the Arrange and Inspect tools to tear apart your writing. These instruments make it unique among iOS writing apps, as they allow you to easily rearrange your paragraphs to control flow and analyze your text, identify commonly used words based on their word class (e.g., verb, noun, determiner, and others), and see how your document measures on various scales, such as the Gunning fog score.¹ This allows you to revise your writing far better than similar tools.

It bears mentioning that support for iCloud or Dropbox is not available, though the former wouldn’t be very useful without an accompanying iPhone or Mac OS application. The lack of Dropbox is a ding against the app, but depending on how often you transfer documents between devices, this may not be as important. At the very least, it is not difficult to email your documents to yourself or synchronize using another app, as awkward as it sounds. That said, Agile Tortoise has stated that Dropbox support is coming.

In addition to the other tools, there is one optional tool that you get only by purchasing Terminology, another Agile Tortoise app: built-in thesaurus support. Terminology acts as a dictionary and thesaurus, and includes a variety of sources for most words (excluding neologisms or other uncommon words²). By owning Terminology, you can select a word in Phraseology and look it up, and, if you want, replace it with another word without having to manually copy text back and forth between the two apps. The integration between the two works well, and I personally think it’s a nice touch. So, if you really want a thesaurus that the app supports, it’s worth the extra few dollars (at the time of this writing, it is $2.99 USD). If you always have a dictionary and thesaurus on hand, you may not need it. Again, it’s an optional purchase, so it comes down to your needs.

Phraseology’s offerings are much more beneficial to writers when compared to its peers, which often focus on document presentation, no longer special synchronization or markup formats, or a lack of user interface or features (Phraseology’s user interface keeps well out of your way, resulting in only a slim toolbar on the left side of the screen, so depending on how little UI you want to see, this may or may not be a problem). Phraseology is an app that is suitable for writing more than just first drafts or page layout (which Phraseology cannot do), and is most useful during the most important and difficult stage of writing: revision.

So, I obviously like it. The lack of Dropbox support is disappointing, but given that it is planned, I see little reason to concern myself with it when I have not found any other writing apps that provide tools better than Phraseology. The additional Markdown support is useful, as I write all drafts using it, so that is a benefit for those who do the same. If you require a dark or nighttime display mode for your editors, Phraseology does not currently offer one. Similarly, the font choices are limited, and there are only two ways to organize documents: a main documents list and the “archive.” I bring these up only because they can be deal-breakers for some. Organization doesn’t benefit me as much as it may benefit others, and some people may need white text on a black background to get into their writing.³

Overall, Phraseology is the most useful writing tool I have, even considering those available on Mac OS. Its tools may not be useful for everyone, especially depending on how much you use your iPad for writing, but they are very good at what they do, which is helping you improve your writing. So, I recommend buying it, since I’ve personally gotten a lot of use out of it, but the important thing is that you look at how you write and decide if it can help you.

I initially just wrote this to post on the iTunes app store entry for Phraseology, but it got kind of long. So, iTunes got a slightly shorter version, and what you see here is closer to how I intended the review to read. I do think it’s strange that I wrote roughly 1,200 words just because I like Phraseology, though.

Spifftastic

I more or less revived and partly revised Spifftastic early on this year. I was concerned spam bots would pull my content from RSS feeds, using it to make their spam sites look legitimate, but that’s no longer on my mind. It’s a pointless fight, and anyone duped by a spam site probably isn’t interested in my writing anyway. Instead, the new focus was purely on readability. I wanted a site that I would be comfortable reading, one that didn’t hurt my eyes, and one that focused entirely on my writing instead of a Twitter sidebar or advertising or millions of distractions. Daring Fireball and Marco Arment, whose sites I consider to be extremely readable,² were my primary inspiration when it came to the new design, so kudos to them for having the sense to care about readability. So, while it’s still a work in progress, I’m actually fairly happy with where Spifftastic is now.

Unfortunately, I’ve been incredibly bad about actually writing on here. There are a vast swath of excuses I could pull from to say that I was too busy, but I’m sure if I wanted to I could do this daily. This might change in 2012, but I don’t know and I won’t make any silly promises either to myself or others regarding update frequency. At the very least, I want to make sure that I never feel like I’m obligated to stick to a particular topic or theme as many writers seem to believe they should. If I focused my writing only on a small subset of the world, for one, it would limit me, and for two, it would bore everyone (myself included). Instead, I’ll just do what I can and write whatever I need to write.

Android & Ascension

This is a small point for 2011, but Ascension is mostly dead in terms of sales. It’s not much of a surprise to me, and hopefully not to anyone else, but I’ve been uncomfortable with updating it and it has otherwise stagnated. There are certainly other live wallpapers out there, though I don’t know how many offer the same level of configuration as Ascension. The biggest obstacles to updating Ascension, and really producing anything for Android anymore, are, firstly, that I no longer use an Android phone (and indeed cannot afford one just for testing), having since switched to an iPhone 4S, and secondly, I frankly dislike developing for Android.

The former obstacle is one of the absurd high points of the year, as strange as it is to say that. I now use an iPhone 4S, and I really am stupidly happy with it. Android, for all its niceties (and there are plenty to go around), has some serious problems when it comes to updates and stability. Furthermore, to those who would suggest rooting phones to get updates, I find that to be unacceptable. These are phones for people who should not need to hack their devices to make them work as desired. It’s disgusting, to me, that anyone would suggest purchasing a device that initially makes one unhappy, but think it’s OK because you can void the warranty by replacing the lousy software. It’s a solution that should never need to exist.³

The latter, that I dislike developing for Android, is harder to diagnose. Many different problems culminated in my ending irritation with Android development. This includes the slow emulator (this is the only way I can reasonably test view layouts on differing screen sizes), fragmentation in general (i.e., hardware and software fragmentation), Google’s poor response to fragmentation,⁴ the lack of updates to existing devices, and my disliking Java.⁵ By all accounts, developing for iOS is far better simply due to the APIs that Apple provides, Xcode’s support for almost all things Apple (complain about Xcode as much as you want, it is eons ahead of the corpulent Eclipse), and the wide-ranging documentation on most topics (this is hit or miss, but my experience has shown that Apple’s documentation for both Mac OS and iOS APIs is far clearer). As a result of the two obstacles, I focus primarily on Mac OS and iOS, both of which make me far happier than the competition, both in my using and developing for them.

The Fabled Degree

As I mentioned above, I’ve continued as usual toward getting my English degree from Boise State University (best known for its windy campus and garish blue football field, probably). So far, that’s been going well, despite driving me to the edges of my sanity and patience. My instructors have all given me a lot of freedom to do what I want in their courses, typically by leaving assignments wide open and encouraging experimentation. I’ve never been a fan of rigid assignments and I appreciate anyone who tosses the tired old pedagogical approach to education, so I can’t stress enough that the instructors I’ve had at Boise State University have been incredibly good to me (and other students) by giving us that freedom to do as we please.

There are two important points to my education this year: I discovered I greatly enjoy writing non-fiction and I launched [nc]oetry, my poetry blog. Both of these are going to be rather important down the road, especially as it pertains to both my education and my writing. In addition, they both probably offer a closer look into what my education has wrought upon my tiny brain so far.

The former is by far the most important, though I suppose it’s not very surprising in retrospect. Much of my writing has been non-fiction to begin with, though I often felt that fiction was where I had to be — creating worlds (or expanding on this one), characters, and entire weaves of history are all interesting, but there is something fundamentally cool about being able to say what I wrote is real. Non-fiction has the allure of being true (at least for the most part), something that actually happened, will happen, or even just something crazy that someone actually thought and is now being seen in a new light. So, that connection to reality intrigues me, even if it is frankly very dull when one thinks about it.

The latter is, as far as I’m concerned, fairly unimportant. It reflects one decision though: to consistently write poetry. I update it weekly, every weekend (either Saturday or Sunday — I decided that this week that Saturday gets the retrospective to close 2011, while Sunday gets the poem to open 2012), with either a new poem or a revised copy of an existing poem, though I have not yet provided any new revisions to already-posted poetry. This started out as one of the aforementioned wide-open assignments for a course, and has ended up as something that I care quite a bit about. It will, ultimately, be one of my long-term projects. Whether it results in something greater than itself has yet to be seen, but I have a number of plans for it that should keep it interesting well through 2012.

Going Forward

This is going to be the short schism where I look forward to something or other. Very short, really, because I dislike the idea of setting up expectations for the future.

First off, I can only hope the Stop Online Piracy Act dies in a fiery wreck and takes its supporters with it. The people and businesses behind it deserve nothing less than immolation. Though many of them cannot be affected due to their position in the world (which one would think should preclude them from having any say, as they might as well be holding a gun to our collective skulls), I believe it is in everyone’s best interest to ruin those that can be affected. I hope the Todd Wassermans of this world finally understand why these companies cannot be trusted, even if they cease to support such terrible acts.

As mentioned above, I hope I get my act together and write more overall, though preferably in some way that would actually get me an income (Spifftastic, unfortunately, has little chance of making me even a single cent, especially given how much I loathe advertising). Unfortunately, that last little detail will likely make my life a living hell going forward. English majors, and likely others with similarly frowned-upon degrees, are probably in for a rough ride in the coming years, though that may have always been the case. The uncertainty I face as a would-be writer is, admittedly, very troubling at times, but I don’t feel like this is ever anything more than a mild concern. Like most humans, I’m fairly adaptable – I’m not required to suffer any particular path when there are many others available to us all.

I plan to continue working on my various personal projects in the hope that one of them will at some point show enough merit that it can go beyond the experimental phase. Most of them die out during that period due to some enormous hole I failed to consider, unfortunately. In particular, I will continue working on my little game (which I haven’t actually mentioned before, as far as I know) until I either go insane or complete it. It’s hard to say exactly what I want to do with my projects, however, so I really just want to have enough time to work on them.

So, that’s it. I hope you don’t have any regrets about this past year, because that’s a waste of your time. Enjoy the new year.

Go Daddy runs horrible, sexist Super Bowl ads. PETA members and others who think animals should be treated kindly are fully justified in canceling their Go Daddy accounts because of founder Bob Parsons’s elephant shooting this past spring.

We now already know that Go Daddy is sexist and that Bob Parsons thinks shooting elephants is fun. These two are both pretty awful, though the former is something many companies are guilty of in crafting their advertisements.¹ The latter is also inexcusable, and I can’t imagine why Mr. Parsons needs to kill elephants. There is simply no good reason for it, as he doesn’t need an elephant for food or any other resources, and there’s no reason for him to be in a position to shoot elephants. So, we have two strikes against Go Daddy.

That said, these weren’t enough to get most people on board with destroying Go Daddy. What it really took was an enormous third strike: supporting SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act (that would, ironically, harm everyone but pirates). Following the backlash from their supporting SOPA, Go Daddy did a heel turn and rescinded their support in the wake of many pledging to and following through on transferring away from Go Daddy to another domain registrar. Despite the unsurprising change of heart, it is safe to assume that many still loathe Go Daddy, and Wasserman doesn’t get it:

What’s troubling . . . is the anger against the company for not fully internalizing the opposition to SOPA. It seems as if nothing short of a North Korean-style show of emotion will convince Go Daddy haters at this point and that’s just weird.

The problem is that Go Daddy started out supporting SOPA. They can change their stance, but the fact is that the change reeks of bullshit: they’ve only done it to appease those who believe Go Daddy’s change is good enough (in other words, the Wassermans of the world). So while Go Daddy may have rescinded its support after shooting off a leg and wrecking its reputation, at the core, they are the same Go Daddy. Their support for SOPA showed a clear disinterest in their customers and the Internet in general, broke any trust that many may have had with Go Daddy, and that is why Go Daddy has to burn.

Much of the work contained on [nc]oetry is still in its early stages and hasn’t seen much revision, and there is also the chance first drafts will pop up on there (though I try to at least revise things a few times before throwing them up, as my first drafts are almost always garbage). This also means that I will probably post future revisions of already-posted poems, meaning you can see how things change over time and I might take a moment to explain why I made a change, even if it’s usually just based on how I see a poem after a fair amount of time.

I don’t know where [nc]oetry will go down the road, but I intend to keep it up for as long as I can since it gives me further motivation to continue working on poetry in addition to long-form writing.¹ It may eventually merge into Spifftastic, though probably as a separate blog (i.e., poetry.spifftastic.net or something along those lines). Another possibility would be to replace it with a blog where multiple authors contribute poetry and writing on poetry on a semi-regular basis, but that’s a long ways off. Ultimately, there are a lot of places this could go.

Before anything else, there is the obvious reason I and presumably all others do most anything: because it interests us. This is odd though, because how did anyone decide what interested him or her? With certain things, we can look at them and say “that’s interesting, I want to do that.” Take skateboarding, for instance, you could look at someone on a board and immediately decide that’s something you have to do. If you can see it happening and imagine yourself doing it, chances are you could consider it an interest.

Not all interests are like that, though. You can’t rely on seeing everything interesting. For that, there is my favorite question: “how the hell does that work?”² If there is one question that has driven me to pursue something more than anything else, it’s that. This question has led to programming, the creation of game art, possibly writing³, and lately I’ve decided I must know about typography. I won’t get into what I know about each, especially given I’m still waiting on some books to arrive for the last subject, but I will say that raw curiosity is a greater driving force than any other aspect.

The desire to learn something is probably driving my motivation the most. This doesn’t mean I just enjoy learning all things – I’ve found this out the hard way. Turns out I have a hard time caring about sociology. Overall, though, learning is a joy that cannot be lessened over time. There are so many things to study and cram into my skull that I’m certain I will not run out of material any time soon, at least not within my lifetime. For example, I would eventually like to take a great deal of time to study mathematics. Not because it would benefit me in some tangible way⁴, but simply because I want to know more.

Learning benefits me in more ways than anything else. There is the satisfaction mentioned before, but also the knowledge and skill (where applicable) gained. What could benefit anyone more than knowledge and skill in an area? The ability to think something and accomplish it is not simple, and the more you have available to work with, the better your chances of meeting your goals. I would not be where I am today if I had not learned to create game art, had I not finally decided that I must know how game assets were made⁵ – I could see them to start with, but I had to know how it worked, why games were able to look the way they did. Learning that in turn led to programming, because I couldn’t stop at the surface. The best part of both game art and programming is that I continue to learn about the two, even after many years of practicing both. Writing is the same, there’s no point where I can just stop and announce to everyone, “I know it all, there is no more to see.”

Once I have learned something, I can then use it to learn more – maybe about something new, maybe expanding what I already know. The simple point of all of this is really that learning drives a great deal more for me than anything else. I imagine the same is true for others, be they musicians or programmers or engineers or what have you. Every act should result in a little more knowledge or a little more skill. If I get more than that, great, but anything without one, the other, or both would seem only hollow.

So, as the title suggests, I’ve recently made a rather large change to my usual coding workflow: I’ve begun using MacVim instead of TextMate. I use MacVim in specific, as using regular Vim in the Mac OS terminal is not the best of ideas (it works, but it’s not pleasant). I’ll try to explain why I made this jump and what exactly makes me happy to use Vim now, as opposed to one, four, six, or however many years it’s been since I first encountered Vim. However, I cannot explain why I did not use Vim all those years ago. It probably relates to it being an unintuitive editor, but more on that later.

I’m not sure how traumatic switching editors is for others – some take it better than others, some worse. You can sit me in front of the likes of, say, Emacs or Eclipse (referenced because they both begin with E and do not appeal to me¹) and I will gnash my teeth and probably complain endlessly about something silly. Essentially, I’ve been hooked on TextMate for the past three years or so. Editors without the similar capabilities have not appealed to me. There is a lot to like about TextMate, but the fact is that there is one window and your code is in it; there are no distractions while coding in TextMate. Take away TextMate and I’m very unhappy.

So, I decided to take away TextMate². That’s not entirely true, actually – TextMate has gone nowhere, but I made the conscious decision to not use it. Why? Why in the name of some deity would I ever do that when I have a perfectly fine editor already? Well, because I wasn’t comfortable with the fact that I was a one-editor person. Monogamy is pretty favorable in a normal relationship, but when you’re only really proficient with TextMate and (arguably) Xcode, something’s got to change. May as well take care of it now. It may also be an e-penis thing – it’s hard to tell from inside my own head, but I can’t rule it out. With that in mind, I’ll correct that first statement: so, I replaced TextMate with MacVim.

Now, why Vim? I’ll try to run down the reasons really quickly, with convenient bullets:

• Vim is available on just about every platform I use. Most importantly, it’s on Mac OS and every Linux-based system, but it’s also on Windows. Windows has no shortage of decent editors, but few really stand out as great. Many of the good ones are not particularly modifiable to the extent that either TextMate or Vim is, so I can rule out a huge chunk of them based on that alone.

• Vim is very well-documented. One would certainly hope so too, given its age. This is imperative for customizable editors, since I’m not going to sift through a ton of configuration files and guess what’s what (I’m looking at you, Sublime Text). Hell, it even comes with an interactive tutorial if you’re completely new to it.

• Vim has reams of plugins, scripts, and so on. Again, a byproduct of its age, but also its popularity. I use a handful of plugins, and these account for any perceived deficiencies or lack of TextMate-isms in Vim. In particular, I’ll point out FuzzyFinder, Project, easytags, snipmate, SuperTab, and VisIncr as my favorite plugins.

  The same could be said of TextMate with its mass of bundles, but the aforementioned plugins tend to be more general than that. They address weaknesses in Vim. For example, easytags provides some dynamic syntax highlighting via ctags – I’m not yet aware of any way to provide something of that nature in TextMate cleanly. That’s something that allows Vim to stand out.

Overall, Vim hits at least two of the important points for any editor: I can use it anywhere and it’s highly customizable. The third important point is odd: ease of use. Despite its appearance and intimidating design, using Vim is not all that difficult, but there is the expected learning curve one gets with any new tool. It took a few hours, but I managed to get far enough past my basic understanding of Vim to feel comfortable. I went in, tore up my .vimrc, set up a lot of things specific to my working style, and pored over Vim’s help pages whenever I wasn’t sure about something. As such, the reason I mentioned documentation above is pretty simple: good documentation can flatten out a learning curve, and Vim’s thorough documentation knocks down that wall.

In many ways, my workflow in Vim feels streamlined. I don’t have to use a mouse to do anything – it just doesn’t happen. Even adding files to a project just requires I <C-w> over to my project view and type in a file name. Hell, the file doesn’t even have to exist. That’s how I create new files in my projects now – I add ‘em, open them, and begin working on them. No need to open a dialog to select anything, just get right in there and start working. This is one area where TextMate can, at times, fall short – it’s not a huge issue, but it’s odd how much I appreciate the lack of such a small nuisance.

I don’t think Vim is for everyone. This is partly because it is nerd territory. Coders are not normal people, not a single one of us, and our strange preferences just don’t apply or even matter. Vim is not an intuitive editor, not by a long shot. It is a grossly outdated tool in terms of modern user experience³ – I would be offended to see Vim forced on anyone who was not programming. Really, Vim is just an anachronism that we don’t abandon because it’s well-suited for our purposes. It works for me, it might work for you (depending on who you are), but it won’t work for sane people.

Since I started this little self-improvement attempt, I’ve become rather happy using Vim. Happy enough that I am confident that I don’t need to worry about having TextMate anymore. This isn’t to say I’m getting rid of TextMate – it still has its uses, but Vim offers me the feeling of being uninterrupted in all aspects of my work. It’s hard to beat that sensation, so I plan to stick with it for now.