ihopesolution.com

I’m sure it will develop its own voice, since we both have, um, firmly held opinions about how things should be done. And odd senses of humor.

Since I tend to use emacs more for writing and org-mode rather than sysadminning, I’ll keep my emacs posts for my personal blog. (And so ends my feeble attempt to justify tagging this “emacs” and watching it hit planet emacsen.)

My current reading pile includes a heaping helping of Austrian Economics. I love this stuff. A sense of economics on this scale rewires your brain circuitry (what a crappy, ubiquitous brain-as-turing-machine metaphor) in subtle and not so subtle ways. It is some of the best non-fiction reading I’ve engaged in in years.

I have to lend these books out. I simply must. I’ve attempted to get others interested in them, with a little success. My brother, who is reliabel in returning books I’ve lent him unread, raved about Ron Paul’s The Revolution: A Manifesto, which got me started on this kick. I’ll next lend him Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt. And I’ve gotten better about lending out other sacred cows; after the Watchmen trailer hit the web I lent my copy to a friend at work.

The realization, which has been slow in coming, dawns that I’ve read book X once, and the odds of me rereading it in the next few years are pretty slim. I can, therefore, safely risk the copy into the hand of others, where they can better and more frequently fulfill their functions as books. A book is at its best when its being read, when a man is bending his soul to the shape of another’s thought. The more capital I can pump into the marketplace of thought, the better served the consumers of that capital; not humanity, but flesh-and-blood humans. I’ve a couple books, mostly reference, that others can read only in the confines of my abode, but they are now the exception rather than the rule.

Download: bib2del

Caveats:

1. bibsonomy handles unicode characters, delicious doesn’t. I opted to delete/edit the few bibsonomy bookmarks that were giving me those errors, but it will error out when you pass delicious a title with a smart apostrophe, smart quotes, em-dash, or other non-ascii character.
2. It is a dumb script. It will take all your bibsonomy bookmarks and add them one by one, with a 1.1 second delay in between to keep delicious happy. If, for some reason, you pass delicious a unicode character and it errors out, it will attempt to readd all the bookmarks you successfully added the last go round.
3. You will need to ask bibsonomy nicely for a developer’s api key. delicious only needs username and password.

I could have written something that stored the bibsonomy bookmarks locally, cleaned up the unicode, and then pushed everything to delicious, but this does 99% of what I wanted it to do.

I’d like to give a shout-out to two fabulous webservices that allow RESTful api access to the information they store on my behalf, and to those brave souls who wrote python bindings to those apis.

P.S. Not only does delicious choke on unicode, but it stores tags as space-delimited strings. Strings! Boggles the mind, it does.

You have been warned.

One of the posts is the first in a series of posts on authors who choose to utilize their first and middle initials in public, rather than their full names. (Thanks to the reality of domain names, and the fact that some organist beat me to it, I’ve decided to go down this route as well.) Interesting concept for a series, or a complete dud? Who knows until I actually post?

But the first post in that series I’ve written, on G.K. Chesterton, blows. Well, it’s not horrible, but it has no zest. Which, for a post on someone as witty as Chesterton, is inexcusable. It’s got the one funny anecdote, but I’m still not sure about the whole format for it.

The other post I’m sitting on is another review, on another science fiction novel to which I had another “meh” reaction. It was simply blah. And is that really worth letting the whole world know?

The Other Distraction

My other distraction is trying to start learning django so I can write my own content management system that not only keeps track of what I publish to this site but also as much information as possible on books I’ve read, as well as tracking the books I own. I want an insanely detailed database of what books I’ve read, which ones I own, perhaps a mini-review or mini-impression of every single one, an easy-for-me system for gathering that information all in one place and setting down to write a review. But time I work on that is time I’m not writing something for the website as it is. Which is wordpress. And I’m not sure I want to get addicted to some wordpress features that I’ll have to take much time, as well as wailing and gnashing of teeth, to properly re-implement in my custom django solution. Icky.

The Third Distraction

Which brings us to the little matter of hey, pf, if you’re working on this website as much as it sounds like, are you actually writing any fiction like you promised yourself? To which I would say, “Hah! Of course not.” I’m not writing more than a few hundred words a week, which would get you a short story a quarter after revising. Not a good schedule. I need to amp up my output. Big time.

Finally

The good thing about having a personal website is that you can whine as much as you want. Whine whine whine!

Extramundane: the infinite empty space, which is by some supposed to be extended beyond the bounds of the universe, and in which there is nothing at all.

That is very near what I would call a perfect word. As is this other one I found:

Stellascript: That which is written in the stars.

I want to write stellascript when I grow up.

My name is P.F. Hawkins. I have a first name and a middle name of which I am not ashamed (unlike Clive Staples Lewis or Pelham Grenville Wodehouse), but my first name/last name combination was not available as a domain name, so I thought I would imitate them in using my first two initials.

I haven’t decided whether or not I am going to use this site as a serious, work-related sort of site for freelancing (I might start copywriting on the side), or if I’m going to ignore all that and go with my life-long dream of becoming a published novelist. Probably the latter. Hopefully after doing this for a few months, the site will take on a life of its own. But in the meantime, feel free to stick around and watch me thrash about whilst I find my voice.