Chandler Project

A quick note today on a new organizer I've been trying out--and already I love it. Chandler (http://chandlerproject.org/) is a free, open-source organizer with the ability to share data with other users or across multiple computers using the online Chandler Hub.

Tasks, to-do lists, calendar events and the like are tracked on a triage basis of "now," "later" and "done," which makes it easy to see at a glance what should be on your immediate radar. There's also an option to create an email directly from Chandler, so that you can take some tasks from start to finish without switching programs.

I'd like to be able to customize the interface colors a little more, but other than that I have no complaints. It's easy to learn and is proving very helpful as I organize all this book launch data.

FreeRice.com

I know I had an idea for a brilliant blog post this morning...but now that I sit down to write it, I have no idea what it was. Sigh. Maybe it will come back to me overnight, perhaps in a dream.

Instead, I'm going to mention www.freerice.com, a site which launched on October 7, 2007. It works like this:

It's a vocabulary-building game--you're presented with a word and four choices of definitions. For every definition choice you get right, a donation of 10 grains of rice is made through the United Nations food program. The rice is paid for by sponsors who place ads on the site.

Now, ten grains of rice may not sound like very much. However, it builds up quickly. I was up to 900 grains after playing for maybe ten minutes. The site totals are impressive: to yesterday's date, 1,008,771,910 grains of rice had been donated. Yes, that's over one billion.

My only worry is that it will be too successful--that sponsors will pull out if the donations get too high. I hope this won't happen. Innovative ideas like this make me think there's hope for the human race yet.

Procrastination with a purpose--two purposes, in fact. I love it. I
think it's already had an efficacious effect on my vocabulary, too.

Third Person Press

I think it's official enough now that I can say...Third Person Press lives! It doesn't have a website yet, but probably by the end of next week. It's a new independent small press founded by myself and two friends. Our first project is a short story anthology titled "Undercurrents", for which we've been putting submission guidelines together. It will feature short speculative fiction by writers who live in or have a substantial connection to Cape Breton. I'll post a link to our website once it's live.

Pure Evil

Here's a product that can't really be described in any other way: candy-tipped cigarillos. Unbelievable. They come in twelve different flavours, obviously to appeal to young people, and have managed to worm through a couple of legal loopholes with regard to packaging. Cigarettes must be packaged in a larger size and display the health warning labels, but cigars fall under different rules. Being cigars and sold in smaller packages, they do not have to carry the labels (which is something that I think should be changed), so these appear in brightly colored packaging that really has the appearance of a "treat."

I'm sure it's no coincidence that there are so many flavours: by the time one tries them all (the obvious ploy) many people will have developed an addiction.

It's a sad commentary on the fact that the drive to make money supersedes all considerations of ethics or morality.

The USA Tobacco Company should be completely ashamed of themselves. I was going to link to their site but why give them a Google boost?