I live in my office chair. Live in it. It’s where I do my work. I’m not saying that’s a good thing, or even good for me. But it’s a fact.

Having a comfortable seat to work from is a big deal. In the early days I used an orphaned kitchen chair. It was great for tipping and teetering, but hell on my back. When I moved to L.A. and started screenwriting I bought myself a cranberry ergonomic office chair that looked like it meant business. In less than a year it broke me down until I had to sleep on the floor in order to be able to function the next day.

By the late 1990′s I’d gotten to the point that I hated the idea of working. Not because I didn’t have things to say or ideas percolating, but because work was physically painful. Like a jackhammer operator with white knuckle, the repetitive stress of sitting had worn my body down to the point that I couldn’t sit.

So I did some research. I looked at chairs as devices, looked at ergonomics as science and art (and marketing fraud), and looked at my personal needs, which included being able to slump, slouch, and otherwise fidget while lingering over a sentence or word. After a while, no matter where I started my search on a given day, I kept coming back to a chair that had been brought to market in 1995. The Aeron.   Read more

Decades ago it was commonly understood that ulcers came from stress. Where parasites or other nasties were suspect in ailments of the lower gut, it was obvious that nothing could live in the toxic soup of human stomach acid. In the early 1980′s, however, it was discovered that a specific bacterium was alive and well in the stomachs of many people suffering from ulcers:

Although stress and spicy foods were once thought to be the main causes of peptic ulcers, doctors now know that the cause of most ulcers is the corkscrew-shaped bacterium Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori).

More recently, the conventional wisdom that human beings need to drink eight glasses of water each day in order to be healthy was also challenged. Having heard this advice most of my life, and having generally ignored it except during an epic mid-July crossing of the Mojave Desert in a non-air-conditioned vehicle, and having known of no human being who did follow that advice, I often wondered about its basis in fact.

Apparently I wasn’t the only one. Physician Heinz Valtin,…

…a kidney specialist and author of two widely used textbooks on the kidney and water balance, sought to find the origin of this dictum and to examine the scientific evidence, if any, that might support it.

In 2002 he released his finding that there was no evidence to support said dictum. In 2008 a follow-up study reached a similar conclusion:

“There is no clear evidence of benefit from drinking increased amounts of water.”

So where did this belief come from? Valtin believes it may have have….

…originated from a misunderstanding. In 1945 the Food and Nutrition Board, now part of the National Academy of Sciences’s Institute of Medicine, suggested that a person consume one milliliter of water (about one fifth of a teaspoon) for each calorie of food. The math is pretty simple: A daily diet of around 1,900 calories would dictate the consumption of 1,900 milliliters of water, an amount remarkably close to 64 ounces. But many dieticians and other people failed to notice a critical point: namely, that much of the daily need for water could be met by the water content found in food.

Oops.

And what about the vaunted appendix? Hasn’t it been proven beyond any doubt that the appendix does absolutely nothing? That it is, in fact, an evolutionary remnant of some long-lost bodily function?

Well, no. Recent research indicates the appendix may actually be doing the job it was designed for: repopulating the gut with critical bacteria after a riotous bout of Montezuma’s Revenge:

William Parker, Randy Bollinger, and colleagues at Duke University proposed that the appendix serves as a haven for useful bacteria when illness flushes those bacteria from the rest of the intestines.[6][10] This proposal is based on a new understanding of how the immune system supports the growth of beneficial intestinal bacteria, in combination with many well-known features of the appendix, including its architecture and its association with copious amounts of immune tissue.

Okay: so what does all of this have to do with storytelling in the digital age? Well, I’ll get to that in a moment, but first I want to talk about chicken washing. No, not that kind of chicken washing. The kind you do when you’re about to cook chicken.   Read more

I like sports. What I like most is that sports go against the deterministic grain of storytelling. Where the effect of a story is prepared by authors in advance, the outcome of a sporting event is determined as it unfolds. As a storyteller I can often intuit how a drama will play out because I can see the thin wires of preparation leading to a particular resolution or turn of events. In sports there is no script. Just a cast of characters driven by goals and constrained by a set of rules.

This doesn’t mean, however, that there is no narrative in sports. Quite the contrary. The experience of watching a sporting event can be as emotionally involving, if not physically taxing, as any scripted story. Audience investment in the outcome of a particular game, or in the performance of a particular player, or a decisive moment, can lead to heights of excitement and depths of despair.

As with drama, the ability of an audience to become emotionally engaged in a sporting event hinges on the audience’s mental state. Prepare a safe and supportive context and you get wild enthusiasm. Force them to confront realities they don’t want to confront and enthusiasm will wane.   Read more

It’s almost beyond belief to me that I’m continuing to have trouble with my site host, Network Solutions. I apologize to anyone who’s tried to visit this site or the small site I put up at the beginning of the week. The amount of data I’m trying to move is trivial, but for some reason the addition of one site to NetSol’s server capacity seems to have crippled its ability to send pages to your screen — if it allows those pages to be served at all.

I am once again in tech support hell, and have once again managed to escalate the issue to NetSol’s tech support by demonstrating that the problem is not on my end. I have tried several of the fixes they asked me to try, and if they didn’t make things worse they did nothing to resolve the problems at hand. My hope is that the issue will be resolved shortly.

– Mark Barrett

I put up a small WordPress site over the weekend. It’s on my shared-hosting package, meaning the new site resides on the same sever share that this site sits on.

After pointing people to the new site today I received a message that it couldn’t be accessed. I checked and it worked for me, but when I checked again a few minutes later I got a ‘permission denied’ page, as if the site was unavailable or under construction. Over the next ten minutes or so I was able to replicate the problem on the other site, and even on this site.

My first tech support call to Network Solutions — my site host — went well enough. They showed me how to reset the permissions on my site, and things seemed better after that. Until a couple of hours later, when the same thing happened again.

My second tech support call was less reassuring. Not only was I told that the intermittent errors were a result of total server load, but WordPress was specifically described as a ‘known issue’ in taxing server bandwidth.

Uh…no. If you’re one of the largest hosting providers in the world, and you’re having trouble feeding my WordPress pages to a small handful of visitors, that’s not a WordPress problem, that’s a YouSuck problem.

I’m now being pointed to some helpful tips on speeding up WordPress installs, and have been advised to try using WPSuperCache (a plugin I have considered before), but having one of the most widely-used blogging apps described as a known issue by my site host is a fail.

After allowing malicious code injections into my site, failing to notify me of such in a timely manner, degrading the response time of this site to +30 seconds, and now this, I can’t recommend Network Solutions to anyone else. I’ll probably play out the end of my contract, but between now and then I’ll be looking for reliable hosting without excuses.

The good news is that while I was on hold a robo-message informed me that J.D. Powers might call to ask about my tech-support experience. Please do.

– Mark Barrett

I had occasion over the weekend to dig through some old boxes of scripts and stories I wrote years ago. I found some duplicate copies and stuff I no longer cared about and decided to get right of the dead weight.

I don’t know how many times I’ve heard about writers burning their early works, but it seems to have been a fairly common occurrence. And I can understand the appeal. Fire as metaphor and ritual seems to be a human constant, signaling everything from death to purification to rebirth.

I had about five thousand pages to dispose of, and believe me, I wanted to burn them. I wanted the act, the warmth of the fire, and the ashes. Particularly the ashes.

Because we live in a world dying from greenhouses gasses, such things are frowned upon these days, and recycling is the norm. So I recycled.

But I wanted to look into that fire.

– Mark Barrett

Whether you’re an indy artist establishing a full-blown online presence or just an average tech user, sooner or later you’re going to run into gadget problems that need resolving. It’s the nature of the tech beast that the devices and services we rely on are complicated and regularly in need of reconfiguration.

While even the most automated updating process can go wrong, where most end-users run into real trouble is when they require (or think they require) individual tech support. Even worse, the more obscure, intermittent or subtle a problem is, the more difficult it can be to get tech support to address the problem.

The good news — and I think it is very good news — is that there are some basic things you can do to make the problem-resolution process as efficient as possible. Which is not to say that you will enjoy it, or even that your problem will be resolved, but simply that you will know you took your best shot.   Read more

A couple of months ago I ran across an article (among many) that talked about the explosive growth of gaming on Facebook. After reading the piece I posted an idle question on Twitter, wondering if Facebook would ever been known as a game site first and a social-networking site second.

Obviously Facebook’s appeal transcends gaming. But another article over the weekend also makes it clear that the trend toward Facebook as a game-centric web space continues:

Market research group Lightspeed Research says 53 percent of Facebook’s members aged 18 and over have played a social game, and that 19 percent of those users consider themselves addicted to the games.

It’s also clear that Facebook did not see this coming. Most of Facebook’s games were third-party products, which, in many cases, were being used to rip-off Facebook’s own customers. (Facebook only stepped in to police the abuses when it noticed the amount of revenue being generated, and wanted a cut for itself.)

Beyond the historical perspective, what’s interesting to me about the continued explosive growth of gaming on Facebook is that it may signal weakness in the site’s social-networking premise. (Obviously the number of gamers and frequency of play only benefits Facebook. I’m not arguing that this is a problem relative to Facebook’s ongoing attempts to generate revenue from page clicks or by harvesting user data, etc.)

The premise of Facebook is that it allows you to build and manage your social relationships. But there are two potential problems with this premise. First, although some people treat Facebook as a competition, always looking to generate more ‘friends’, most people have a limited network they want to build and maintain. Once that’s accomplished, there’s not much more networking to do, which for many people is the fun part. Second, even a minimal network can require a great deal of maintenance, including photo and conversation management. While such things might be fun at first, keeping everything up to date on Facebook requires the same numbing process that goes into updating a physical photo album or contact list.

In this context, the explosion of interest in gaming on Facebook may be an indicator that social networking is losing steam on that site. Perhaps users are tired of self-directed building and management, and want a more catered experience. Maybe they’re bored with all of their ‘friends’. Maybe they simply have nothing else to do on the site than feed and maintain their presence, which is the internet equivalent of watering and weeding a garden.   Read more

A couple of weeks ago I was compelled to open the case on my balky computer and dig into its guts. My goal was diagnosing a long-running and progressively worsening series of program crashes and operating-system reboots, all of which were crimping my productivity and putting my data at risk.

It took more hours than I would have liked, but in the end I had my culprit: a bad stick of DDR2 memory, now upgraded and replaced. Along the way I also updated the BIOS for my computer, stress-tested and reconfigured various bits of hardware and software, and killed several trojans and a dormant worm.

I am now suffering no computer ills. My machine is running like an electronic top. I’m confident going forward that I have a stable platform from which to work, and that’s no small comfort given that I hope to do a great deal of writing over the next nine months. My computer is, after all, my workshop, and I don’t need a workshop that blinks out at random intervals.

Optimus Perfecticus
While diagnosing my computer problems I ran a series of tests, including MemTest86+ — which proved decisive. In order to run that program I had to download and install it, which I was able to do after a couple of faltering attempts to decipher the geek-speak instructions.

While performing this relatively simple task I found myself confronting an age-old debate that seems almost generic to human existence:

The answer, always, is found at the intersection of time and money. How much will it cost, and how long will it take, either to pay someone to solve the problem or to do it yourself? (Here I’m assuming that the goal is not one of self-satisfaction, but simply solving a problem by the most effective means.)   Read more

My brother tells a funny story about someone coming to him for help. He politely listened to the person explain their situation, which went on forever, then gave his take. At which point the person turned on him like a lunatic and screeched, “I asked for your opinion, not your advice!”

In the aftermath of that anecdote I broke the concepts down to discern the difference between the two, and hopefully protect myself from a similar experience. Here’s the entire difference between opinion and advice:

• Opinion = “This is what I think.”
• Advice = “This is what I think you should do.”

That’s it. That’s the whole difference between telling someone your opinion and having the effrontery to give unsolicited advice.

I mention this because a peer had a similar run-in with someone in a professional context. While there’s no way to protect yourself from crazies, you can cut down on the likelihood that someone will take offense by framing everything from your own point of view:

• If I was in your shoes…
• If that happened to me…
• I know how I’d feel if…
• That happened to me once, and…
• In my own experience…

That sort of thing. Whatever observations you want to make in reply, make them about yourself. There’s literally no difference in what you’re saying, but for some people it seems to make a big difference.

And in a business context, that could make a difference to you.

– Mark Barrett