iGoogle: fun and easier than writing

Continuing my informal series on things you can do to put off doing any creative writing, this morning I discovered the web's perfect diversion for anyone wishing to further their procrastinating career: iGoogle.

Here's my iGoogle home page. You can add and delete gadgets with a couple of clicks, and rearrange them on the page by dragging 'n' dropping.

iGoogle is the new name for Google Homepage, and it's basically a fully customisable page which you can use instead of the regular www.google.com or www.google.co.uk. Once you have a Google account you can populate your iGoogle page with Gadgets -- small programs that each do one specific thing like givea weather forecast or show the BBC news headlines. There are all sorts of gadgets including games, and once your page is full of stuff you can just create a new tab and start filling up again. One really neat thing is the option to let Google fill your new tab automatically based on its name. Elliot, for example, created a tab called "Guitar" and Google filled it with guitar chord gadgets, tabulature finders, and other things a guitarist would want to have at their fingertips.

When you create a new tab you can have Google populate it with relevant content to the tab name. Here's my Writing tab.

By far and away the best gadget I've found so far is Boneless Girl: a completely pointless desktop diversion featuring a bikini-clad girl with no bones falling through a sky filled with large bubbles. As she hits each bubble or group of bubbles her body twists and turns in the kind of improbable positions you'd expect a girl with no bones to get into. It might not sound that interesting but the animation is so good I just can't stop watching it. I've put Boneless Girl on my Games tab in iGoogle and can happily waste half an hour watching her bounce around, dragging her out of tight spots with my mouse and flinging her across the sky for more painful-looking bouncing.

When I'm feeling really lazy I can head on over to my Games tab and work through a Sudoku while playing Deal Or No Deal and watching Boneless Girl go through her paces all at the same time. I've only been at it a day and already I've forgotten how I used to waste time before iGoogle.

It's one of those things you've just got to see to understand. To get your own iGoogle go to www.google.com (or .co.uk, your local Google) and create an account, then click iGoogle to get started.

It's fun, and a great way to not write.

Lost In Translation: Episode 7

Went supermarket shopping in Carrefour the other day: an excursion that is incomplete without roaming the children's clothing dept for garments bearing nonsensical slogans. They are an attempt to "be cool" by sporting slogans in English, but in reality they are designed, made, distributed, retailed, bought and worn by people who have no idea what the slogans say, let alone that they don't actually make any sense:







...then the other day I saw this new cafe in the Diplomatic Quarter.

My "Sandwish" is that it wouldn't get in my eyes, mouth and hair when I'm quadbiking!

Lost in Translation: Episode 6

Another great shop sign found in one of Riyadh's busiest shopping streets:

Click to enlarge

"Salaam Alaykum. Got anything for a black eye?"

'70s-mania!

I've just completed bulding a fab playlist of '70s Glam Rock hits for my iPod. This was prompted yesterday when I found (and bought) a couple of excellent "best of" albums in a Riyadh music shop.

When I got home I promptly added them to my iTunes library (which already has some cool '70s stuff), then went on to iTunes Music Store to find all the other favourites that my memory threw up once I started listening to Blockbuster by Sweet.

Here's my '70s playlist:

Page 1 (click to view)

Page 2 (click to view)

Page 3 (click to view)

Page 4 (click to view)

Are all your favourites here or have I missed some? If you're A) not from the UK or B) too young to remember the '70s, does this make any sense at all?

Shang-A-Lang!

"Damn Fine Coffee!"

The memory of a thing is often better than the thing revisited.

I recently took Twin Peaks Series 1 out of the DVD library because I remember having loved it in the '80s. It was a cult hit: weird, kooky, surprising, dark, edgy, and mysterious. Of course when you watch a murder mystery for the second time you will lose some of the mystery and surprise, but that's OK. You're not re-watching to be surprised, you're doing it to feel again what you felt the first time: that warm, tickly, slightly uncomfortable feeling that you're witnessing something totally original and ground-breaking. Twin Peaks hasn't changed since it was first aired, but I have and the World has. Fashions and music move on, historic events shape our world view, new technology in movies makes the impossible a commodity.


Twin Peaks in 2007 still retains its oddness but it has lost its edge; the clothes and hairstyles show its age, some of the gags seem more contrived than before, the villains seem more comical now rather than the dark menaces they used to be. Simply put, it doesn't scare me anymore.

All of this is unsurprising and understandable. I should have known to expect a different viewing experience this time around shouldn't I? I guess I should have, but the desire to feel again what I felt the first time was too great, and now that it's done, even my memory of it is tarnished.

Do you have s special TV memory that DVD technology is about to jog? Think carefully before opening that box.

Do anything but write

Yes!

I've finally realised what my first best-selling book is going to be about. It's not going to be fiction though, but a self-help book aimed at all the budding writers out there who are wondering where to start, and searching desperately for inspiration.

It'll be called 100 Ways To Put Off Writing. Here are the first twenty off the top of my head:

1. Watch a movie
2. Make a cup of coffee
3. Water the plants
4. Feed the rabbit
5. Check your email
6. Go to the supermarket
7. Get a skinny triple latte from Starbucks, but make sure it's "to go" so you can get back to your writing.
8. Go rollerblading
9. Go to the DVD library to return some movies and take out some more for later in the week.
10. Write a work To-Do list, then curse when you realise you've accidentally soiled a page of your precious Writer's Journal with work stuff.
11. Check your email
12. Spend an hour troubleshooting why your Linux laptop doesn't keep time very well, then wonder why it's only taken 17 minutes.
13. Feed the rabbit (he looks like he could do with some Rollerblades of his own!)
14. Take out your Writer's Journal and stare at the blank page for half an hour.
15. Check your email
16. Write an email to someone in the hope that they reply, giving you something to check later.
17. Research writing on the internet and write down in your Journal, "It's vitally important to write something every day."
18. Have lunch.
19. Write some drivel on your blog.
20. Do your job.

See? It's easy. Well they say to write about what you know, don't they?

I think my second book will be about the tortuous but worthwhile path to my first book. I can feel a series coming on...

The Old Writing Game

Yes! I have finally finished my Open University course (A174: Start Writing Fiction). It was only a 12-week unit but it seemed much longer. I chatted with fellow students on an online forum, we did structured activities and posted it there, and we critiqued each other's work. All the way through I was thinking Yes, I want to be a writer and get my first novel published. Can't start yet though can I? Oh no, first I've got to focus on completing the course, THEN I can start being a writer proper.
I went out and bought a nice notebook to serve as my writer's journal, and I've made notes in it (about the course activities). I've even got a smart new Waterman pen that I won in the raffle at a recent Embassy ball. That's right, once this course is out of the way there'll be nothing to stop me. There I'll be, sitting on the grass in the shade of a large oak tree with my pen in my hand, crafting a masterpiece before tea...

Well the course IS over now and reality is very different. I've come to realise that writing is all about motivation, discipline, and staying power. Since the course I've lost my principal excuse for not writing, so I've been coming up with new ones. I'll just make a cup of coffee and some toast, then I'll start.... I'll watch a movie first to get me in the mood... I'll go for a walk to clear my head. If I put into my writing all the energy and creative thought that I put into procrastinating I'd be a bestselling author by now.

This is so frustrating!