Thanks for showing up, you 23 people you

The Daily News blogs, including Come on Feel the Nuys, were down again this morning, not even accessible to readers, let alone the bloggers who write them. But once again, all is well with the server in Denver, and we're back in the proverbial saddle.

This site's been pretty much fallow, not counting my Writely rantings in previous entries. That's a quick and sloppy way to link four blog posts in a single clause. Apologies.

And I'm only excited about 23 people hitting 2,000 Days yesterday because ... guess I don't know.

If you blog in the forest, and nobody reads it, is it still there?

That makes no sense whatsoever.

Daily News blogs in stasis

The reason I don't post here too much is that I do a whole lot of blogging for the Daily News.

But today the Movable Type interface over which we blog is down, even though most of the blogs themselves are up (although comments are kind of wobbly at present).

Stiill, we can't post. Over here in the Blogger universe, I've been keeping This Old Mac and This Old PC going pretty good, and we're in the process of creating a new, technology-related blog over at the Daily News, so all the techie crap will go there when the time comes.

Quickly, here's what I saw today that's cool:

Get the first five years worth of BoingBoing, the world's premiere techno-geek blog, in one big, geeky 17,000-post file. This link isn't the file itself -- would I subject you to that without warning? -- but it will get you there. Seriously, if you want to know what's what with the Internet, technology and just plain geekiness in all its forms, BoingBoing is there for you, multiple times a day.

I know you use Mac OS X, but have you ever tried Mac System 1.0? You can read about it and actually download the damn thing here. Go back to the Mac's very beginnings ... although I suspect this bad boy will only run on 68K machines. Don't have a working Mac Plus lying around? Didn't think so. Go here to emulate it. Even a PC can do it.

Does "Marmaduke" puzzle you. This guy explains each and every comic.

The U.S.-Mexican border ... as volleyball net. From the L.A. Weekly.

A Nietzsche-"Family Circus" mashup from Losanjealous.com.

And last but really first, because it's a blogger doing real get-out-of-the-house journalism, Mack Reed of L.A. Voice does an LAPD ride-along on Skid Row, where a greatly increased police presence is trying to deal with a very out-of-control drug-fueled situation.

Your applications are moving

Besides Gmail, Writely, Google's web-based spreadsheet, the calendars offered by both Yahoo! and Google, and the big daddy, Microsoft's rumored Web-based Office, the move is on from programs installed on individual PC hard drives to hosted applications and storage on servers somewhere out there on the Internet, maintained and upgraded automatically for you, with functionality from any Web-connected device.

Of course, we'll have to pay for it, but if prices are good, it just might be worth it. And some might be ad-supported and hence free to users. It's where computing -- and the world of work -- is headed.

Writely to Blogger -- what's the frequency?

As I said a couple of posts down, Writely is a cool tool for posting to Blogger, but is there a compelling reason to use it instead of the Blogger Dashboard?

Well, the big fly in the Writely-to-Blogger ointment is that none of my Writely-created blog posts come over with the title, even though they are titled in Writely.

The thing is in beta, so I can't expect the world, and as I said in the post directly below, Writely does what it does pretty well -- but is it worth doing?

As a replacement for the little-known Pote, which has proven very useful to me when I wanted to write a review and save it to the Web for later downloading and e-mailing, Writely is a proverbial quantum leap forward. The fact that it's so darn fast is a serious plus. Also in its favor are the ability to save in some key formats: Word, Open Office, HTML and RTF (add Save As Text, please!).

As I've said, true Word format with margins and smart quotes are what I really need. Have you ever sent a text file without the smart quotes and relied on your editor to get them right? I have. It's never worked out. And that's why writers NEED to submit copy in Word format with the smart quotes all set up -- it saves work for the editor and makes the writer and editor happy. And we all want to be happy.

Writely can indent and print ... but nothing's perfect

Someone suggested that using the Tab key in Writely would indent the paragraph -- and possibly also work in HTML.

Now I'd prefer a true indent that Microsoft Word recognizes as such and would be able to modify in Word format, but even looking like a paragraph indent would be preferable to the typical Web situation in which all paragraphs begin flush left and the only way to tell one paragraph from another is to double-space in between.

Hey, that tabbing worked. Not as good as an automatic indent when you hit the Enter key, but I'll take it. (In case you didn't notice, the tabbing didn't hold up as HTML in this blog post.)

And how's the printing? I'll try it now.

Well, it prints great ... except for the "Page 1 of 1" at the top and the URL at the bottom. I guess for REAL printing, you'd have to Save As Word or Open Office and print from there. Not having to do that -- another feature that Writely needs, along with margin control, to be ready for prime time. Meanwhile, I'll publish this to the Blog.

For those reading this -- and not This Old Mac or This Old PC -- you may be wondering why I'm blogging on this very computer-centric topic at 2,000 Days in the Valley. If you need a reason, let that reason be that, at its core, it's about blogging and blogging tools, so maybe it's OK at 2,000 Days. And it's equally PC- and Mac-related, and not so teched-out that the average person couldn't potentially benefit from.

One thing about Writely, what it does, it does pretty seamlessly and quickly. There's almost no waiting for the page to refresh because little pieces refresh on their own. I think it uses the browser's ability to write HTML on the fly to do this -- a programming triumph that really makes the user experience better. And the reason why it won't work with Safari, I believe.

Writely just a few rocks short of a full load

Yeah, I get that Writely can do basic HTML, like bold, italic and such, and there's even provision to bring in photos.

But to make this useful for writers who are submitting material for publication, it's vital that Writerly kick out both text files and Word-formatted documents with "smart quotes." So far, the quotes don't look all that smart.

And I can't seem to get an indented first line on a paragraph. That's HTML-y but not very writerly -- sorry Writely.

I appreciate such HTML hacks as writing in different colors. But what about turning all this mush into a traditional Mac or PC file that can be e-mailed to an editor?

Wait!

Click on the File menu and you can Save As a Word, RTF, Open Office (yeah!), or PDF (double fuckin' yeah!) document. Do it, and a dialog box pops up with a file name ready to be saved on your own PC. Yeah! Now we're talking.

All they've got to do is keep building this thing, and when the Internet flows like air and water, we'll never "buy" applications again. While Writely, Blogger, Gmail and the like are free at present, I'm not opposed to paying if they help me get stuff done.

At present, as an aid to writing on Blogger, Writely is pretty much a toy -- it uploads instantly, but the title of my Writely document doesn't make the leap -- I'm left with title-less blog posts, for which I have to insert said title via the Blogger Dashboard.

And you can only configure Writely to post to a single blog. That wouldn't work for me, since I've got four Blogger blogs. And while the HTML formatting is great, why wouldn't I just work in Blogger's Dashboard in the first place? Well, one reason is that Blogger chokes on browsers that aren't IE 6 and above or Firefox. Writely, like Blogger, doesn't work on Safari, but if Writely functions as promised -- and continues to do so -- on such oldies as IE 5 and Netscape 4, it'll be a boon to my Powerbook 1400 and the whole world of This Old Mac.

If for some reason I didn't have instant Web access (and this happens a lot more than you'd think), Blogger already allows posts to be e-mailed in. I can blog offline with a mail program on This Old Mac, for instance. That means Netscape 4.7. Writing blog posts, if you don't factor in HTML links and photos, is pretty simple and well-suited to e-mail composition.

So is Writely more than a toy at this point? Well, it's better than Pote, which I actually have used to compose documents. But any competing text-editing product, in my view, must confront the basic formatting of Microsoft Word, and by that I mean indents, smart quotes and adjustable column widths.

Give me that, and I'll be pig-in-shit happy. That's what makes Open Office such a marvel of free-software success. You can play in the Microsoft Office world without paying $300 plus whatever it takes to upgrade periodically for the privilege. Even the Daily News is on board with this one -- we all have Open Office, not Microsoft Office.

For now, just give me my Writely paragraph indent. And soon.

What the hell is Writely anyway?

Want to try Google's latest assault on the desktop before it even becomes Google-ized?

Well, I'm doing it right now -- Writely, the technology that Google recently bought, brings Microsoft Word-like text editing to the browser, with a toolbar surprisingly like Word's, document length of up to 500k, and the ability to take what you write here and open it to collaboration with others. No extra software required. And you can create and modify documents from anywhere with Web access and with a ton of browsers, old and new. It even supports Netscape 4 and IE 5, both of which I use on This Old Mac .

Did I mention that it's wicked fast? Hell, give me a ton of disk space on some Google server somewhere, and I'd pay real money for such a service, as will, I suspect, businesses large and small. Imagine never having to update or maintain an application, nor a server. That's where Google is headed -- and the world wil march with it, I expect.

There's even a Print button, which I assume takes your document and prints it out on your local printer. Have to try that one.

You can also bring in documents from various formats (I'm a bit shaky on which ones besides Word and regular text at this point) and take your Writerly documents and directly publish them to your blog. I'm not quite sure why you'd want to do the latter, but it can be done, and if there's a compelling reason to do it, I'll sure tell you.

Until now, I've used the little-heard-of Pote.com to write text files online -- and Writely sure looks better, as it has actual formatting, like bold, italic, underline and even did the links you see above.

I tried to start a Writely account a month or so ago, in the wake of the Google announcement, but they were closed to new users. No longer.

Update: It took a couple of tries but I did manage to publish this entry to 2,000 Days in the Valley from here. It was pretty easy to set up (about 80 percent intuitive) and of course works on Blogger because both Writely and Blogger are owned by Google. All went well except that the entry had no title -- I thought it would pick up the document title from Writely, but it didn't, and I finally entered it manually through Blogger Dashboard.

Valley restaurants get robbed, New York Times notices

We can debate from today to tomorrow, or from today to an hour from now, why it's a big deal when the New York Times covers L.A. or the San Fernando Valley, and I really don't keep an eye on what the NYT is doing.

Luckily Kevin Roderick does it for me, so I have him to thank for pointing me to this New York Times story on the takeover robberies plaguing Valley restaurants, including the new Barone's location in Valley Glen and the Valley Inn (in Sherman Oaks??).

The biggest thing I got out of the story is that the Ski Mask Bandits, as they're being called, just might have a law-enforcement or military background:

“I heard the rumors like everyone else that it is ex-cops,” said Sophia Brodetsky, who owns the Valley Inn, a restaurant in the Sherman Oaks section where robbers struck this month. “They used very short sentences, were very on top of what they were doing and had this whole intimidation routine.”

Police officials say those theories are pure conjecture, but they concede they are baffled.

“Anything’s possible,” Sergeant Sands said. “We don’t know who these people are. Sometimes people who are organized may have had some prior training, but there are police magazines that show the movements, too.”

Wearing ski masks and sometimes two sets of clothes, the robbers enter restaurants at closing time and order everyone to the floor. One robber presses his gun against the cheek of the bartender, while the other brandishes a rifle for the cashier.

Within three minutes, it is all over; the till is cleaned, and the safe, too. Sometimes, they take the money and watches of any customers unfortunate enough to have lingered until closing time.

“They had their finger on the safety of the gun,” said Mr. Monteleone, a co-owner of Barone’s in the Valley Glen section. “They were very, very calm. There was no shaking, no range even, in their voices.”

Alas, they're not all THAT bright when it comes to the risk/reward equation:

Because most restaurants make most of their money in credit card purchases, the take for the robbers is usually under $1,000, the police said.

“Who would do an armed robbery for a few hundred dollars?” said Rodolfo Costella, the owner of Ca’ Del Sole, a restaurant popular with Universal Studio executives, and the latest one hit by the robbers. “If you think about the time they spend planning this, if they really worked, they would make more money.”

So it's true -- crime doesn't pay. And one of these Ski Mask Bandits could end up a very unhappy, seriously wounded camper, like one of the guys who tried to knock over the Maxon's Pharmacy in Sherman Oaks on Aug. 18.

It's the end of the world as we know it

I followed a few links from the Blogger site, and it lead me to the Blogger Help Group, where people have been plagued by this problem SINCE JULY.

The upshot: Blogger ain't gonna do nothing. But you can get your photo capability back by DUMPING INTERNET EXPLORER AND SWITCHING TO FIREFOX. I've been avoiding Firefox because I like Safari on the Mac and use IE at the office, but I finally bit the bullet and downloaded Firefox, and as you can see, I can get photos on the entries with no problem.

How could Microsoft let this happen? They've already lost the entire Mac market for browsers, now the same thing has happened for PCs? Guess they're too busy with Windows Vista to notice.

Another day and Blogger is still screwing me

I STILL can't succesfully upload a photo. What gives? Megan uploaded a photo. What makes her so special and me a pile of shit? I've got photos I want to upload, dammit.

And now I learn that Blogger, already owned by Google, is being assimilated into the whole Google Accounts nexus of services. Voluntary at this point, eventually the Blogger-only accounts will be eliminated and you'll have to convert your blogs over to the new Google Accounts system in order to keep them. I hesitated, because they say you "can't go back," but I'll do whatever it takes to get the godforsaken photo uploading to work again.

I looked over the new "features" of what they're calling Blogger Beta, and nothing there excited me too much. They say it will be easier to do new posts in the Dashboard, and there will be no waiting for a blog to be republished when an entry is added. Instead, the blog will build itself "on the fly," whenever it's accessed by a reader. Can't say that I care about that, but if it works better, I'm all for it.

And there's a whole thing about creating "private" blogs that can only be accessed by those whose e-mail address are approved in the system. It's supposed to be for "family" type blogs, or perhaps business-related ones. I guess it's just another way to communicate between individuals or groups. My whole idea of blogging is that it's supposed to be there for all to see (or ignore, as it were), but I can see the value in using blogging technology for other, less-public forms of communication.

I remember when I first heard the word "blog." I had no clue. In the past, I had published my own Web pages through Yahoo, but I didn't understand what a blog was all about. Well, the whole thing blew up pretty fast, and the Web became, for a short while, all about blogs. Now that blogging has jumped the shark (was it the Huffington Post that signaled the "jump the shark" moment?), it can be seen as what it is: a software mechanism and organizational method for presenting content on the Web. How's that for heavy theory? More simply put -- blogging helps people manage the information they want to publish on the Web. It arranges it by chronology and topic, and it streamlines the presentation and programming required. That wasn't any simpler. Damn.

Why can't I post a photo?

Why, Blogger, oh why, can't I upload a photo?

The end is nigh

Don't let our daughter get wind of this.

Six Thousand

The counter just hit 6,000 visitors (there are 7,475 total page views), so I'd like to thank all of you who have clicked over this way in the past year since I started counting. Between my other Blogger sites and the new Daily News blogs, I haven't been posting here quite so much, but 2,000 Days in the Valley will continue.

I know blogging has jumped the shark, but I can't say exactly when it happened, or what specifically caused the shark-jumping, but it's probably all for the good. It has gotten me writing (albeit not for money, but that's another story for another day), and there's something very attractive about instant, middle-man-free publication.

And now that I've used Movable Type over at the Daily News, I have to say that Blogger is pretty darn good as far as blogging software goes (although, as I've said before, I am waiting for Safari support, you Blogger people, you).

Pin the tail on the blogger

Since I'm posting to, at last count, seven separate blogs, it's time to sum up:

At the Daily News' Hollywood Babble On, I go on about CBS' summer reality staple in He Ain't Heavy, He's My Big Brother.

Over at Table Talk, there's Bubba Gump's Shrimp Vegan Co., on the city-mandated vegan menu at the Santa Monica location.

At Come on Feel the Nuys, I whine about what it takes to keep a blog atop the Dailynews.com home page in The Daily News Is a Harsh Mistress, and I bemoan our rising electric bills -- and the plasma TVs that use as much electricity as a refrigerator -- in Our Friends Electric.

I take my musical temperature at Jazz Guitar Journey (it's tepid at best) in I Have a Confession to Make.

At This Old Mac, I examine the recent Internet-borne love for a 10-year-old Macintosh laptop in Powerbook 1400 love.

2,000 degrees in the Valley

It's 99 degrees at 9 o'clock at night -- hell, it hit 110 today on both of my outside digital thermometers. One hundred ten. The air conditioning can't keep up. We've had it on 80 for the past two weeks -- otherwise it stays on all the time. Now it's on 80 and the house refuses to dip below 82 degrees. There's just too much heat.

We did escape. One of the grandmas babysat the almost-3-year-old, and we went to a barbecue in Pacific Palisades. Yeah, it was sort of cool enough to be outside, but not really. We left at 5 p.m. schvitzing plenty, just in time for the 106-degree return.

It's all numbers. And way too many over 100.

Gotta prep for tomorrow's 6:30 a.m. tricycle ride. See ya.

Recent rants

In keeping with the Daily News' recent outpouring of blogging, I've been doing a lot of ranting and raving over there. Here's a summary:

Get ready for Talk Like Gordon Ramsay Day

It's called 'raw food' because it's not cooked

The New York Times discovers the Valley, sort of

And over in computer geekdom:

Wireless Internet -- so close ... so close and yet so faarrrr-rr

Ted Greene -- fighting over the legacy

Over at the Daily News blog, I've written about the controversy over what will happen to the musical legacy of Ted Greene, the legendary guitarist and teacher who was found dead in his Encino apartment little more than a year ago (and who I saw perform exactly a year before his death).

Is your blog backed up?

Ilene brought this up recently, and I have started to look into how you can back up a blog. Of course you could just go through the archives and save each page, month by month.

But there are services that will take care of it for you, including BlogCollector and Backupmyblog.

And for users of Blogger, there's How do I create a backup of my entire blog? but sheesh, that looks complicated.

Over at Come on Feel the Nuys

A posting flurry today over at Come on Feel the Nuys:

Today Van Nuys, Tomorrow the World

The Potty Chronicles Part I and II

Joe Pass and the San Fernando Valley

Movable Type vs. Blogger

The new Come on Feel the Nuys blog uses Movable Type, so that's a bit of an adjustment. The best thing about the Blogger front end is that it handles photos so easily. You upload the image, select the size and placement, and it does all that Photoshoppish crap for you. I've resisted image editing of any kind up until now (even though I semi-regularly post to the big Daily News Web site and should be uploading photos with the stories.

But overall, Movable Type is intuitive enough to let me upload photos, create links and add to the blogroll. Police-reporter-turned Web guru Josh Kleinbaum cleaned up some of the problems -- he outclasses me in geeky knowledge and is so enthusiastic, I think we'll have to hose him down periodically.

So for the moment, this blog is turning meta -- a blog about blogging. Is blogging all about compulsion? Yes.