I surprised myself in senior year when I signed up to take Writer’s Craft. I’d never liked the writing process; my so-called poetry was a disaster of fictitious emotion, my stories seemed to launch grandiose plots that went nowhere, I regarded essay composition as the sort of suspicious art mastered by those whom I felt sure would vault themselves directly from business school to corporate management.

But I did take Writer’s Craft, and I enjoyed it; when inspired, and not under duress, I could enjoy writing. I’ve always been good at explaining things to people: teaching and tutoring are incredibly rewarding activities.

So in some ways it’s perfectly understandable that I’d have spent the two intervening years writing on a website and writing a book. And in others, it’s very strange. Read on…

A review of my book has just made Slashdot. Michael J. Ross gives us an 8/10 and an overwhelmingly positive run-down, concluding thus:

Overall, Beginning Google Maps Applications with PHP and Ajax is an excellent introduction to extending the power of Google Maps on the Web, and provides enough detail to both help and entice readers to build their own Google Maps mashups.

Within the next day or two, I’ll have a very sweet example ready to show off on the blog; stay tuned. (ht)

It’s often easy to draw a word’s meaning from context, but in the age of Wikipedia, Urban Dictionary, and Google Define, there’s little excuse for not knowing a word’s precise definition. Here are a handful that I’ve clarified recently, courtesy of my browser history.

Insouciant — Marked by a blithe lack of concern.

Dandy — A dandy is a man who rejects bourgeois values, devotes particular attention to his physical appearance, refines his language, and cultivates his hobbies. Wing may be a spoiled dandy, but he’s an expert swordsman.

Cephalopod — A member of the group of molluscs that includes octopuses, squid, nautiluses and cuttlefishes. There was a strong cephalopod theme [in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest]

Gamine — A girl or woman of impish appeal. Audrey Hepburn

Pastiche — A work of art that imitates the style of some previous work.

Wanly — Suggestive or indicative of weariness, illness, or unhappiness. My wan expression suggested hours of studying.

Oblique — An indirect or evasive angle. The salesperson’s oblique answers served only to dodge my true questions.

Poncey — The actions of a pompous tosser who thinks their value is higher than it is actually worth.

Cadaver — A dead body intended for dissection. One minute to midnight we hit the street, cold as a cadaver, hard as concrete.

We’ve just posted up the fourth chapter of Beginning Google Maps Applications, which is about the art of geocoding.

Cam was the primary author on this chapter, and did splendid job of researching and presenting the multiple options available—Google, Yahoo, Geocoder.us/ca—and then also demonstrating a finished project, located here. (You can see all of Chapter 4’s source code here.)

In the spirit of Web 2.0, I feel compelled to share a video of my brother’s lizard eating a cricket.

Boy I thought I was clever, until I got it on YouTube and discovered that approximately a gazillion other people had the exact same idea. Viva là interweb.

(And yes, the blurriness is my fault, not the iSight’s. But Gawayne isn’t hungry any more, so the re-shoot will have to hold off until tomorrow…)

I’ve been a fairly consistent user of reddit almost since its inception. It’s elegant, simple, and the links are fairly good. What’s also good is the discussion. Reddit takes the unusual step of ignoring chronology when laying out comment pages: new comments start at the top, and high-quality comments stay there.

This fluidity means that reading the discussions is—on the whole—a positive experience. It also means, however, that the layout of the threads on a given article can greatly change from one visit to the next. They have several built-in features that help you find your old comments and their replies, but I wanted two additional features, so I made a quick Greasemonkey user script to add these. Read on…

John Marshall has posted some gorgeous snaps of his 2006 Wolf River trip. (I designed and host the site, but the artwork is all his…)

I’ve been on Wordpress for just a month, but I’ve got a first plugin to release: WP-Cats, an elegant tool that adds Ajax category management to to the Manage Posts screen.

I had a teacher in high school who felt very strongly about the word suck. Most adults—those who care—object to the vulgarity of a fellatio reference, but he specifically took offense at the suggestion that the act of giving oral sex should be considered something to use as an insult. Our eleventh-grade selves found this pretty amusing; since we held this teacher in high regard, I believe the word did pretty much vanish from our respective lexicons, for the term and sometime afterward.

A fascinating article in Slate this week points out the sheer utility of the word, and suggests that we embrace its use. I must admit, the word is awfully convenient, but I hadn’t been sure why until the Slate piece explained it.