Adventurer Dies Quietly

There are not many obituaries left to be written like "John Fairfax, Who Rowed Across Oceans, Dies at 74" published recently in the New York Times.

At 9, he settled a dispute with a pistol. At 13, he lit out for the Amazon jungle.

At 20, he attempted suicide-by-jaguar. Afterward he was apprenticed to a pirate. To please his mother, who did not take kindly to his being a pirate, he briefly managed a mink farm, one of the few truly dull entries on his otherwise crackling résumé, which lately included a career as a professional gambler.

Mr. Fairfax was among the last avatars of a centuries-old figure: the lone-wolf explorer, whose exploits are conceived to satisfy few but himself. His was a solitary, contemplative art that has been all but lost amid the contrived derring-do of adventure-based reality television.

And then there was the fact that rowed across two oceans. Rowed! No sail or motor other than his back and arms row row rowing his boat across the waves. It took 180 days for him to cross the pond from England to the U.S., then 361 days from America to Australia.

The hurricane slowed him down a bit.

Best quote? Here you go:

On July 19, 1969 — Day 180 — Mr. Fairfax, tanned, tired and about 20 pounds lighter, made landfall at Hollywood, Fla. “This is bloody stupid,” he said as he came ashore.

Bloody stupid indeed. Rest in peace Mr. Fairfax.

Reading is Social Now

As we follow recommendations from the people we follow online (my wife calls them my "fake friends"), reading is not necessarily a solitary activity these days. From Steven Johnson on the Findings blog:

My article/essay/blog post reading has become intensely social. I think easily more than half of the articles I read in the average day come from passed links on Twitter. Those social recommendations are a tremendous source of serendipity, much more interesting and unpredictable than they are given credit for. It’s not just an echo chamber of predictable fare from a close circle of friends, partially because I follow a lot of people from different fields who are not personal friends: musicians and political writers and food writers and movie critics, etc. And also because they’re often retweeting interesting links from people I’ve never even heard of. This is not a new idea: it’s the strength of weak ties argument essentially. But I’m surprised that people still underestimate the power of those weak ties in terms of making surprising and rich new connections.

This is very true for me. I find a lot of great new things to read that would never have crossed my radar thanks to my "fake friends" and have grown because of it.

Seeing Coulton in Style

So, Julie and I found out our Internet pal and songmeister Jonathan Coulton was coming to our hometown of Chattanooga to open for They Might Be Giants at Track 29.

Score!

Since my birthday is imminent and we already have our income tax refund we decided to whoop it up and spend the night downtown at the famous Read House hotel. We have reservations for dinner at Porter’s Steakhouse.

We needed a break so bad right now. The next 36 hours are going to rock in so many ways. After I finish this latté from Starbucks we’re going for a dip in the hot tub.

Pictures? Of course! Here are a few.

Grab a Bucket and Start Bailing

The ship is sinking and it’s time to put your back into it and start bailing water out of the boat, but which bucket do you use? They all look so useful!

Just as I got the idea for this terrible metaphor, I froze. There are too many bit buckets to choose from and it’s time to take a big boy gulp of my own medicine (that I only wrote about last week!) and further refine my writing workflow. Before I get into that (What? Again?!), let’s take a look at the market because this post has a clearly defined trigger.

Look! Something shiny!

Last night I stumbled across a fascinating notebook app produced by @fabulouslyretro called Meernotes, which led to a similar product Pad & Quill. Both are, in fact, fabulously retro, but I don’t think they will end up in my writing stable. Ultimately, Day One is going to be the app I use for journaling.

And iOS apps like these two are only the beginning. A few others in neutral alphabetical order include Daedalus, Elements, Nebulous Notes, Notesy, Plaintext, Simplenote, Writeroom, and Writing Kit. These are just a few and all of them run on my iPhone and iPad with the exception of Daedalus, which has a super cool “piles of paper” file structure that is more functional than it sounds. That’s part of the problem for me though. I don’t need a cool filing system to play with, I need a place to write.

The problem isn’t finding a writing app, it’s choosing one that suits your writing habits and sticking with it. All of these apps share core capabilities of accepting your words and syncing with Dropbox, but likewise each offers a slightly different twist on appearance and function.

Then we come full circle from iOS to the desktop and Mac OS X for a virtually bottomless list of bejeweled bit buckets is available for a writer’s use. Many powerful tools tempt writers with their siren song of features. TextEdit is bundled with every Mac and is enough for most work. If not, Pages and Microsoft Word (among many other word processors) are waiting with a glut of features to catch you. Then, there is the world of text editors where you find TextMate, Text Wrangler, and BBEdit, and don’t get the neckbeards started on vi and emacs. Another goodie for round-tripping from mobile to Mac is nvALT.

Then, there are writing environments like Ulysses and Scrivener. Scrivener is the one for me and just about my favorite place to work couple with BBEdit for its syntax highlighting and advanced text handling. QuickCursor makes short work of switching between Scrivener and BBEdit.

Also, Markdown. And for the record, I wrote this post in BBEdit and posted it with MarsEdit.

There’s more. Groan. While writing this brief piece I also thought about Byword, iA Writer, Mariner Write, Nisus Writer, and VoodooPad and the real bit buckets like DEVONthink, Evernote, and Yojimbo (which I really want to like but it just doesn’t fit into my workflow). I just didn’t have the heart to go back and weave it into this piece.

Now that I’ve inundated you with fiddly bits, give them a review if you haven’t already and pick the ones that suit your needs. Then, delete the others. That’s what I plan to do today.

Update on Saturday, February 4, 2012 by Eric Beavers

Phase I complete: Sticking with two workhorse writing apps on my iPhone. Those would be Elements and Writing Kit, with Elements being my “go to” app. Also leaving Day One because it’s perfect for logging brief entries; a personal Twitter if nothing else.

Mac Writing Tips

Take my word for it Mac writers--I’ve wasted the time for you--you only need a couple of things to finish your work. If you want to focus on writing, do this:

1. Learn about Markdown (can’t thank @gruber enough for this one)
2. Buy Scrivener for Mac for longer work
3. Pick a plain text editor for Mac OS X (it’s helpful to sync with iOS)
4. Pick a plain text editor for iOS (it’s helpful to sync with Mac OS X)
5. Write (this part is all you)

MultiMarkdown is worth checking out for writers who need another layer of formatting such as formatted tables.

You're probably on a budget. If you need anything else to make it pretty, I suggest Apple Pages over Microsoft Word. If you want to make it really pretty, then you should leapfrog word processors to Adobe InDesign. Then, I'll have to write something else for you.

Pro tip: for the serious writers who made it this far, you really should look at Scrivener. It's a game changer. You won't look at writing the same after you understand it.