It seemed so sim­ple, at the time. Let’s hop into the way­back machine and go back to just before Hal­loween, 2007.

I was in a funk, for sev­eral rea­sons. Part of it, I’m cha­grined to say, was about a girl. Part of it was out of whack lev­els of sero­tonin and dopamine in by brain. And part of it was a deep uncer­tainty about writ­ing. I knew I could write, but it had lost all fun, all fla­vor, for me. I was torn between sev­eral projects, intim­i­dated by the idea of blog­ging about them as I wrote, resent­ful of my writer’s cri­tique group, and just gen­er­ally out of sorts about writ­ing. I was no longer con­vinced that a pas­sion for sto­ries and the abil­ity to write was enough to make a writer.

So, in keep­ing with a sacred tra­di­tion of ambiva­lent writ­ers going back to Plato, I went to a SciFi con­ven­tion. Mile Hi Con, a lit­tle local thing they do every year in Den­ver. The big ses­sion of the day was with David Weber, and I was look­ing for­ward to it. I love his Honor Har­ring­ton series and wanted to grill him about my writerly con­cerns. I sat through the open­ing stuff and waited patiently for him to start tak­ing ques­tions. When he did, I got called on.

“Before you had book con­tracts and oblig­a­tions,” I asked, “did you ever think about just giv­ing up on writ­ing and doing some­thing else?” I wanted to know if my wishy-​washiness was a nor­mal part of the process.

In ret­ro­spect, he gave me exactly the answer I should have expected from a pro­lific, pub­lish­ing writer, the same answer I’d have got­ten from Isaac Asi­mov or Stephen King. No, he never thought about it. Weber has been mak­ing a liv­ing from the writ­ten word in one way or another (he wrote a lot of ad copy before Baen signed him) since his was six­teen. He’s never had any doubts.

Well, crap, I thought. That’s no gor­ram help at all.

I wan­dered around the con for a few more hours, bounc­ing back and forth between two groups of friends who had showed up inde­pen­dently. Even­tu­ally I found my way to a tiny pre­sen­ta­tion room about 20 min­utes early for the next ses­sion, one on query let­ters. The folks from the pre­vi­ous pre­sen­ta­tion were still milling about in the empty room, among them a midlist SF writer named Hoyt and her hus­band (who iden­ti­fied him­self as an actual rocket sci­en­tist). We started chat­ting, just killing time, and I fig­ured, why not try them.

“Oh, yeah,” Mrs. Hoyt said. “I’ve tried to quit sev­eral times. Never sticks.” She and her hus­band explained that writ­ing is a hard trade with lit­tle to no reward and the only rea­son to do it all was if you couldn’t stop your­self. They passed on some advice on the same ques­tion once given by Orson Scott Card: If you can walk away (from writ­ing), walk away whistling.

It seemed so sim­ple, so free­ing. Just don’t be a writer. See if I can do other things. And for a while, it was free­ing. So free­ing that I quit a bunch of other habits, too. About that time I became increas­ingly frus­trated with the fail­ure of the Demo­c­ra­tic party to do any­thing to stand up to the now minor­ity Repub­li­cans, so I stopped fol­low­ing pol­i­tics and stopped lis­ten­ing to the Rachel Mad­dow Show on Air Amer­ica. Then I stopped lis­ten­ing to pod­casts at all. I didn’t stop fol­low­ing the mobile tech world, but I did stop actively par­tic­i­pat­ing in it. I stopped blog­ging and stopped post­ing on forums, only lurk­ing in silence. Now, I thought, I’ll have time to devote to other pur­suits.

As it turns out, aside from the afore­men­tioned girl, I have no other pur­suits. And as the month of Novem­ber drug on, I sank deeper and deeper into depres­sion got to the point where my close friends really started to worry about me. My par­tic­u­lar neu­ro­chem­i­cal imbal­ance man­i­fests itself mostly as Bipo­lar Dis­or­der (with notice­able splashes of OCD, ADD and anx­i­ety dis­or­der for fla­vor) and I started doing a text­book BPD behav­ior known as rapid cycling. I’d be mostly ratio­nal one day, then com­pletely bugshit emo­tional and out of con­trol the next, then back to nor­mal, then bugshit again, on a just about daily rhythm. It was spooky, and not just for me. I’d have to leave the room at work so I could go cry about…

See, that’s the thing, on this side of it, with my ratio­nal brain back in con­trol, I’m not really sure what all the fuss was about. I know I was in a lot of pain, and a lot of it was lone­li­ness and the fear that that I’d grow old and die alone, but while I can see now that it doesn’t have to be that way, and there’s things I can do to improve my life, at the time it really seemed hope­less, that there was no way out. It’s a good thing I no longer carry any­thing with me that can tear open a carotid artery, is what I’m say­ing.

I hit rock bot­tom around the end of the month, and it became clear that I couldn’t go on like that. And then it hap­pened, in the back of my mind, shout­ing to be heard over my bat­shit inter­nal mono­logue, I heard a voice. My voice. But not any­thing like the thoughts I’d been hav­ing. It was calm, ratio­nal, and most impor­tantly, full of prac­ti­cal sug­ges­tions on how I could change things so they wouldn’t hurt so much any­more. Over the course of a day or so, I started to lis­ten.

And one of the first things the voice (me, I get that, I’m not schiz­o­phrenic) told me was that I needed to start writ­ing again. That I can’t walk away whistling, I can’t even sur­vive very long with­out writ­ing. (It also told me to see a real psy­chi­a­trist instead of let­ting my GP pre­scribe brain drugs and to clean up my damn apart­ment already, among other things.) But when I start writ­ing, to write for me, no one else. Write for the story, not the audi­ence. I had become so caught up in thoughts of mar­ketabil­ity and pub­li­ca­tion that I’d for­got­ten about story, about the magic of telling a tale. I’d become so hide­bound about avoid­ing groans from my writer’s cri­tique group that I dreaded sit­ting down to write.

I won’t make those mis­takes this time (I’ll make com­pletely new mis­takes, but I’ll burn that bridge when I get to it). This time around I’m approach­ing writ­ing not as a soon-​to-​be-​bestselling-​author prac­tic­ing his craft, but as a reg­u­lar per­son with a hobby. A hobby I don’t seem to be able to walk away from, a hobby I might just need to keep my san­ity, but a hobby nonethe­less. Once I’m done writ­ing a book, and only then, I might think about shop­ping it around for pub­li­ca­tion. Maybe. But the writ­ing, that’s for me.

And to keep that bat­shit nut­bag in my head down to a dull roar.

As you may have heard, Google has a “kill switch” fea­ture in Android that allows them to remotely remove soft­ware they deem mali­cious from Android-​based cell phones. While some poten­tial end users are up in arms about this fea­ture, the reac­tion from the devel­oper com­mu­nity has been much more mild.

Some of the appli­ca­tion devel­op­ers for Google’s Android plat­form said they weren’t aware of a kill switch fea­ture the ven­dor report­edly has put into its mobile oper­at­ing sys­tem, but they weren’t too sur­prised either. “We’re not too con­cerned. We’re not mak­ing mali­cious apps. It should be fine and I totally under­stand why they’d want to do it,” said Jeff Kao, co-​founder of Eco­rio, a Toronto-​based developer.

Google Android Devel­op­ers Not Sur­prised By Kill Switch — The Google Chan­nel — IT Chan­nel News And Views by CRN and VARBusiness

Josh Curry and I dis­cussed this on the lat­est Max­i­mum Geek (Episode 28, just posted), and we came down squarely on oppo­site sides of the issue. Josh sees it as an abom­i­na­tion, yet another way Google can get cor­rupted by the power they wield. Per­son­ally, I don’t see it as much dif­fer­ent from Microsoft’s Mali­cious Soft­ware Removal Tool, which is installed with every copy of Win­dows that has auto­matic updates turned on. It gives Google a way to remove soft­ware that poses a real dan­ger to phones or net­works, but users have to trust that Google will use it only as a means of last resort. Most users and devel­op­ers seem will­ing to give Google the ben­e­fit of the doubt on this, where the same peo­ple were much more alarmed when the secre­tive and heavy-​handed Apple was revealed to have the same fea­ture on the iPhone (it’s prob­a­bly worth men­tion­ing that while the iPhone kill switch was a secret uncov­ered by code inspec­tion, Google spilled the beans on the Android kill switch themselves).

Go ahead and read Josh’s take and then let us know where you stand on the issue. Can Google be trusted to use this fea­ture benevolently?

Read­ers of the old blog will notice a few reruns today. I found the Win­dows Live Writer posts on my desk­top hard drive and decided to repost the ones that were still rel­e­vant. If you’ve seen them before, sorry for the redundancy.

The cur­rent debate about whether or not to allow off­shore drilling misses some cru­cial facts.

We have no guar­an­tee they’re going to drill at all. It’s in the best inter­ests of the oil com­pa­nies to keep demand high and sup­ply low in order to max­i­mize their (record) prof­its. The oil com­pa­nies are sit­ting on mil­lions of acres of land already that they have leases to but refuse to drill. It’s in their best inter­est to keep that oil in the ground for as long as possible.

Amer­i­can oil com­pa­nies have nearly dou­bled their exports in the last year. So even if Exxon­Mo­bil gets to drill in the Gulf of Mex­ico, that doesn’t mean increased sup­ply (and thus lower prices) for Amer­i­can con­sumers. Exxon­Mo­bil can and prob­a­bly will sell that oil to China or India.

Even if they drill, and even if they sell it to us, we won’t see it for at least seven years. This infor­ma­tion comes straight from Bush’s own energy pol­icy experts. It takes a long time to set up the infra­struc­ture nec­es­sary for indus­trial oil extrac­tion, trans­porta­tion and pro­cess­ing. So even if every­thing goes our (the Amer­i­can con­sumers) way, we still won’t see a drop of this until 2015.

Basi­cally, off­shore drilling is a dis­trac­tion. It has noth­ing to do with our cur­rent energy cri­sis, won’t help Amer­i­can con­sumers in any mean­ing­ful way and essen­tially amounts to lit­tle more than a land grab by the oil com­pa­nies. It’s a handy stick the Repub­li­cans think they can use to beat up democ­rats with an under­in­formed Amer­i­can populace.

Whether it works or not is up to you.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted what I’ve got on my Treo’s Today screen, so here it is.

I’ve gone with a very basic look here, but one that works sur­pris­ingly well while at the same time pro­vid­ing a slick, mod­ern look. The white text on solid black is eas­ily read­able indoors and out, and the flat look of the title bar and soft­keys is notice­ably less dis­tract­ing in other appli­ca­tions, notably eReader.

I’m only using three Today plu­g­ins. The top one is the Sprint dial lookup plu­gin, but you’ll notice it’s smaller than it should be, and the icons are oddly indented. This is because I’m using the RealVGA hack from WMExperts.com to run my device at 96dpi and thus use the plu­gin from the older Treo 700wx on my 800w. Below that I’ve got the Web Search plu­gin that Palm pro­vides. I pre­fer this to the newer Google Today plu­gin because the Palm ver­sion dou­bles as a web address bar, à la Chrome’s Omni­bar or Fire­fox 3’s Awe­some­bar. Typ­ing a raw URL into Google’s own plu­gin searches for that address rather than going straight to it.

The rest of the Today screen, the vast major­ity of it, is taken up by SBSH Software’s Pock­et­Breeze, using the Mono White theme found on their forums. As you can see, this gives me a clean and unclut­tered view of my daily com­mit­ments (be they appoint­ments, tasks or even spe­cial events like birth­days or anniver­saries) along with today’s weather and a graph­i­cal view of my time. The tabs along the side give me quick access to doc­u­ments, tasks and projects, con­tacts and a more detailed view of the weather. All with­out leav­ing the Today screen, and all eas­ily con­trol­lable with just the d-​pad when I’m on the go.

The only place this solu­tion falls short for me is that Pock­et­Breeze only sup­ports one Today plu­gin per tab, unlike Spb Diary or Ulti­mate­Launch. Still, it and the Start Menu com­bined pro­vide access to vir­tu­ally every­thing I use often on my phone, and keep me firmly in con­trol as I go about my day.