meomeoim

One of the most frustrating things about working with unix is the lack of a user interface, everything is command line. Try explaining stuff like awk, grep, vi and ls to new users and the complaints start to roll in. What tops the list has to be the lack of command recall using the arrow keys. We've all been conditioned that pressing up-arrow will bring back the previous command so we can make edits instead of typing the whole thing over again. No more. Below is a short series of commands that can be added to a . profile that will enable the arrow keys to behave in unix like they do in DOS: set -o emacs alias __A='^P' alias __B='^N' alias __C='^F' alias __D='^B' Note that ^P refers to the keysequence control-p while editing the file using vi , so actually typing in the characters probably won't work.

A couple things. One sad. One good. First sad: Despite pledging my devotion to Mike on Dancing with the Stars and posting the call-in number on twitter and Facebook, he did not get enough votes to stay on. And now I am sad. Because he endeared himself to me. He doesn't seem like he'd be super adorable, but he really is. Mike on DWTS - you will be missed Oh well, I'll just throw all my support behind Macchio, since he's going to win DWTS .  Good thing: I ran an impromptu caption contest on Twitter and Facebook last week. I said who ever came up with the cleverest response would win a signed copy of a book. I based my decision solely on how much I laughed upon reading the caption. Here's the picture: And here's the winning tweet : The caption is especially fitting, because although you can't tell, I am in fact wearing a Star Wars shirt in the picture.  It was this shirt, actually (from Threadless.com ): Thanks to everyone for participating in that. I had a l

If you know me, you know I'm a huge fan of blink 182 and Mark Hoppus. I also really enjoy helping out people whenever I can. So a few weeks ago, when Mark Hoppus started putting blink 182 paraphernalia up on ebay to raise money for the Red Cross efforts in Japan, I was like, "I'm in." I bid on and eventually won the orange shirt he wore in the music video for "Dammit." As seen in the video below: Naturally, I was excited enough by that. "Dammit" was the first song I heard by blink way back in the day, and I still think it's a fun song. The shirt came today, and it's awesome, and I'm excited. But along with the shirt, there were a couple blink 182 stickers, and  a hand written letter from Mark Hoppus. Since I saw it, I have shouted "It's the coolest thing ever!" no less than 15 times, because it is in fact, the coolest thing ever.

Here's what I hate about reality TV: I get attached to people, then they get voted off and I never see them again. I want to see them again, every week for a half-hour to an hour for the next 3-7 seasons, until they start to run out of interesting stories. I still talk about much I miss James from Big Brother Season 9 and Flex from Daisy of Love 2 and Fabio from Top Chef Season 5 & Top Chef: All Stars . Eric is crazy obsessed with Big Brother, but I think he gets annoyed when the season is because of how much time I spend talking about how much James was than everybody else on the current season. I'm thinking about this because I really enjoy that Mike fella on Dancing with the Stars . I find him very amusing, but since his dancing skills aren't the greatest, I know it's only (a probably short) matter of time before he's gone, and I'll relegate him to the long list of reality stars I miss. There should be a show with just former reality stars living toget

Okay, I've been writing this blog in my head for about a month or so, and I was trying to decide how I would break the news to everyone. But by the time I got to say things, everybody had already heard. And if you haven't, here it is: I've got a deal with St. Martin's Press to publish a four book young adult paranormal romance series called the Watersong series. I think they're shooting for a fall 2012 release. The Wake book I've mentioned a few times, that's the first book in the series. Here's the article from the NY Times about the deal: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/24/self-publisher-signs-four-book-deal-with-macmillan/ There's also going to be many articles in the future about it. So many, that I'm sure you'll be sick of hearing about me, if you aren't already. But the big question on everybody's lips isn't what the deal is but why ? If I've sold over a million books and made close to $2 million dollars o

There's some buzz on the internet about me, and I'm not at a point where I can say much about it. But here's what I can say - I'm writer. I want to be a writer. I do not want to spend 40 hours a week handling emails, formatting covers, finding editors, etc. Right now, being me is a full time corporation. As I said before in my post - Some Things That Need to be Said - I am spending so much time on things that are not writing. I like writing. I even like marketing, especially when it comes to interacting with readers. And I don't mind editing. I just don't want to run my corporation, because that takes away from writing and everything else that I actually enjoy doing. Also, I have not had time to get Lost Without You ready yet. I have a book that is almost ready to publish, but because of everything else going on, I have not had time to get it ready and publish. THIS is a problem. I am a writer, but that doesn't mean anything if I can't get a book to re

I watched The Next Three Days three days ago, and I've been listening to the soundtrack ever since. It is awesome . It's Danny Elfman, but I had no idea it was Elfman, and I can always call Elfman. That's not to say anything bad about him, but there was just something extra fantastic about this score. Especially the songs by Moby. Phenomenal. It really elevated the film to a whole new level. I do like Moby, though. I always feel weird saying that. But "Porcelain" and "Natural Blues" are amazing songs, and I stand by that. I'm writing a blog, but I don't really have a lot to say. It's just been awhile since I updated. My cat got fixed last week, so I'm obsessing over her incicion to make sure she'll live. She doesn't seem to care at all that she had an organ removed, but she does get incredibly irritated when I don't give her my undivided attention. And I'm not giving it to her now, so she's meowing at me. So I should

I've spent the last few weeks trying to integrate sametime dojo widgets into a portal theme and I used firebug extensively to debug my code. Dojo is difficult to debug because of the way it injects code using the requires function, everything shows up as an eval . Firebug Extensions I didn't know this, but there are quite a few firebug extensions out there, though none really for dojo. IBM has developed a dojo extension for use in their rational developer products, but since I use eclipse I was out of luck. Thankfully IBM has a history of participating in the open source community and appears to have contributed their code to the firebug community. The code can be found at http://code.google.com/p/fbug/source/browse/#svn%2Fextensions%2Fdojofirebugextension I downloaded from their SVN server and executed the build.xml, drag/dropped the resulting dojofirebugextension-1.0a6.xpi into firefox and now I have a nice dojo interface for firebug. Thanks to Patricio Reyna Almandos and

I don't own Jurassic Park . Not even VHS. That doesn't sound like much to you, but this is a fact: Jurassic Park came out on tape October 4, 1993. Do you know how I know this? Because I had it marked on the calendar. I obsessed about it with an unhealthy fervor. I wanted to skip school that day so I could go buy it, but I eventually convinced my parents to pick me up from school so I could go get it. I distinctly remember my mom and dad picking me up my classroom and apologizing to my teacher for me being such an irritating spaz all day. I probably disrupted the class a thousand because I just could not wait to get the movie. So to me, it's very strange that I don't own it. I don't even know where my VHS went. It's just gone, in the magical pile of things that got lost when my parents split up. Also in that pile: my Stray Cats .45 for "Stray Cats Strut," She-Ra's horse, my TMNT Halloween costume, and my awesome Jurassic Park t-rex that had a chunk

My Australia obsession is at an all-time high this week, and I'm seriously considering a visit. It's just a very expensive, very long flight, and I'm not a huge fan of flying. If Australia were like an hour away, I'd probably live there already. Here's fun fact (although I'm not entirely convinced of the factual nature of this fact): When I was a small child, I really wanted to move to Australia. My parents told me that before they knew they each other, they had both separately made plans to move to Australia, but at the last minute, these plans changed. (I don't know if they were really "plans" so much as "briefly wanting to," but this is the story as I remember them telling me.) Anyway, I became convinced that in a parallel universe, my parents had moved to Australia, met each other, and still conceived me. So in another universe, I'm Australian. And thus began my unnatural feeling of kinship to a country that is very, very far away

If you haven't already done so and you can afford to, please donate to RedCross.org and/or Shelterbox.org to help those hurt in the disasters in Japan. I know a lot of people can't afford to give much, but every little bit helps. Also, if you know of any other good relief efforts that are worthy of donations, please post them in the comments section. I know I'll check them out, and hopefully, other people will too. The phenomenal Zoe Winters pointed this app out for me called " Focus Booster ." It sounds stupid because it's basically just a timer on your computer. Okay, it's not basically that. It is that. But somehow, watching the time go down has kept me focused, and I've actually managed to get a lot of work done. I think I ended today with almost 8,000 words, and the awesome part is that it only took me four hours to do it. Because I just stayed off the internet when the timer was counting down. It was some bizarre psychological trick that total

I attempted to unplug. I did for awhile. I got some work done tonight. Not very much. Only about 2,000 words. I was hoping for more like... 10K. So that's a fail in my mind. I have some time left to write tonight, so I might still get some done. I'm blaming my lack of enthusiasm on the past few weeks, and trying to switch gears from business and logical thinking to more creative type stuff. But I'm taking a break, because my brain has requested it of me. So, I thought, hey, why not let you all in on my writing process since people are asking me a lot about said writing process? Okay. Here's how it works: I sat down at 8 PM to write. But first I had to move around in my office so it was just so. I printed off the outline for the book I'm working on and reread it. I also played with my cat. I listened to my 90s playlist really loud, mostly skipping to the Gin Blossoms tracks. I wrote for about 15 minutes. Then I checked twitter. I donated some money to the Red Cross a

I make my living on writing books, so it's funny how much time has been spent not writing. I plan to get back to my roots this weekend and really dig in and get some writing done. That means I'll be unplugging myself from the internet. Probably not completely, because I don't know if I could survive a full 72 hours without tweeting about something. But I won't be answering emails, checking my Facebook, or blogging. I will be avoiding the internet as much as possible. Starting today, at 5 pm central time, I will be off those things until Monday. I will instead be writing a lot and relaxing a little. And not worrying about anything else. Everything else can wait until Monday.

I am a fangirl. Mostly of cult classics, 80s films, superheroes, obscure actors, one-hit-wonders, and bands popular in Australia. But I'm a fangirl about pretty much anything that catches my fancy. Here's a struggle I've had my whole life, and maybe it is just a "me" thing, but I feel like it's something I'm seeing in the real world. All the stereotypical "dude" geeky things I like are socially acceptable, and all the stereotypical "lady" geeky things I like are frowned upon. Even as a kid, I was treated cooler when I brought my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to school for show and tell than when I brought my Barbie. And stuff I classify as "dude" doesn't mean that ladies can't or don't like it. It's just the sci-fi/fantasy stuff that seems to be more populated by male geeks than lady geeks. You may ask yourself, what is lady geek stuff? Well, I didn't even realize that's what it was until a blogpost I re

More insight related to my work with the integration of sametime into a portal theme. If anyone runs into this error: SystemOut.log:[3/7/11 12:41:01:852 EST] 00000022 STLoginServle W com.ibm.rtc.stproxy.servlet.STLoginServlet loginbyToken  CLFRX0055E: unable to retrieve login credentials the message is a little misleading. Yes, it cannot retrieve the login credentials, but why exactly? The proxy will produce this error if it cannot find at least one of the following in the request: password LtpaToken LtpaToken2 SametimeToken  In my case I was using SSO through a Webseal reverse proxy and I failed to qualify my junction as an LTPA junction . Webseal wasn't sending the token causing the above error.

Something I just wanted to clear up - a lot of people seemed to think that m last post "Some Things That Need to Be Said" was directed at people sayid negative things about me. It wasn't. I actually wrote it for all the people telling me that I'm an inspiration & that they were completely sold on the self publishing idea. I don't mind so much if people read something about & decide I suck. It bothers me more if somebody reads something about & gets the wrong idea & makes a major life decision based on that. I want people to research & be careful. That's all I'm really saying. Tonight was the season finale of SouthLAnd. I haven't it yet because I'm tired & in bed, but everybody should watch it & do everything they can to keep it on the air because I love SouthLAnd lots. And since NBC took Law & Order away from me, I needs crime drama that I enjoy. And no, Law & Order: LA does NOT count. At any rate, I wrote this b

I feel like I should update my blog, but I don't want to talk about me. I've talked about me a lot and everybody else has talked about me and it's just enough of me . Let's talk about William Fichtner . You may say to yourself, "I don't know who that it is," and you'd probably be right, but then you'd look at a picture of him and go, "Oh yeah! He's that guy from the thing!" Yep. That's William Fichtner. He's been in a number of television shows and movies over the past twenty years, including The Dark Knight , Prison Break , Armageddon , Mr & Mrs Smith , and Crash . And I've always enjoyed him. But on Friday I saw on Drive Angry , and it officially won me over as a hardcore fan. Okay. So I know what you're thinking. "Drive Angry 3D? Really?" Yes. I expected it to be horrible. But it wasn't. I seriously loved it. And I would say at least 90% of that love came from William Fichtner's protrayal of

Hollowland is getting revamped in preparation for my work on the sequel, Hollowmen . I've already began drafting the outline, and I'll hopefully be able to start writing the book in earnest sometime next month. Hollowland got a new cover today, courtesy of phatpuppart.com (who also did the covers for Lost Without You and Honalee ). I'm thrilled with the new cover. Meanwhile, I've got a small stack of paperbacks with the old cover of the bleeding heart on it. So I'm going to sign them and sell them off. I don't have the paperbacks up with the new cover yet (I'm hoping to work on that later today or tomorrow). But if you want to get your hands on the cover with the heart - now is the time to get it. UPDATE : I've sold out of the heart paperbacks of Hollowland . Thanks to everybody for bought a copy!

Oh, the internet is saying so many things about me. I don't understand why the internet suddenly picked up on me this past week, but it definitely did. My inbox has been flooded and I jumped up over 1,000 followers on twitter. Which was just in time for all my Charlie Sheen retweets. The past few days have mostly been spent with me answering emails (and not writing - which makes me sad). Meanwhile, I've been reading things written about me here and there, and hearing what everybody thinks this all means. I've been thinking about what I wanted to say about everything. Well, I've come up with it, and I have a feeling it will be a very long post. I am not going to rehash things I've already talked about. Like how this happened. If you actually read back in my old blog posts, I was blogging as everything happened. I've publicly written down exactly what I've done. So if you're really curious about all that, check out my FAQs and scroll through some older bl

I've spent the last few weeks integrating a web based sametime chat client into websphere portal and ran into a curious problem. It seemed that on occasion the buddy list would not populate, all I'd get is a dojo busy indicator, but if I refreshed the page everything would be fine. Time to open up firebug. I have to admit that dojo isn't the easiest javascript to debug, they've really stretched the capabilities of the language, but I finally tracked it down to a piece of code during the execution of: ST_Client = new sametime.WebClient({}, "STClient"); At some point it tests if it should display the buddy list right away or add the task to a queue for later execution, and in this case it was adding to the queue. So who is supposed to deal with the queue, and why wasn't it being done? Turns out that there's some code executed in the login stproxy.login.loginByPassword() that iterates through the queue and displays the buddy list. I was running into a rac

Julie at A Tale of Many Reviews tweeted this link to a really great post about how book bloggers can help writers. It gives a lot of tips on how to reach bloggers, and it's much more helpful and specific than anything I've said. So if you're a writer, and you want some ideas on how to get the word out about your book, I would highly suggest checking this out. Read: here. The one thing the blog doesn't mention is what happens after your book is reviewed. If you submit a book for review, no matter how they review it - even if its a scathing 1-star review - your only response should be: "Thank for you taking the time to read and review my book. I appreciate the time and work you put into it." That's it. That's all you can say. I meant to write more, but Charlie Sheen is on 20/20 right now. And he just referred to beating up his hookers and porn stars as "tomfoolery and skulduggery." And Ambien made him do it. So yeah... I gotta go. Read the