Between Borders

When people in the US and Canada reach for a sheet of paper to write or print on, chances are they reach for a piece of Letter-sized paper, measuring 8.5″ by 11″. When people everywhere else reach for a sheet of paper to write or print on, they reach for a piece of A4-sized paper, measuring 210mm by 297mm.

Screenwriters produce an intermediate product. Although a screenwriter has to be a good writer to make a sale (with occasional market-driven exceptions) what they sell isn’t what the general public pay money for. Put broadly, screenwriters sell instructions for film-makers. Which is why screenplays have so many technical constraints and requirements.

Prose writers, however, are selling the finished product, so they can please themselves with regards things like formatting and typeface choice, right?

Wrong!

Take away our styled hair, cotton underwear and antiperspirant and what are you left with? The Savannah-dwelling, hunter-gatherer social hominids we like to pretend we aren’t.

This less sophisticated truth is a useful thing to keep in mind…

Filling out forms isn’t high on most people’s lists of fun things to do, even on a rainy afternoon. And web-based forms are less fun than most, despite their being electronic and theoretically amenable to all sorts of nifty automation.

The general lameness of web browsers as a user interface aside, my own irritation meter hits the red zone almost any time I’m called on to enter my address details. I live and work in Australia but many of my commercial dealings on-line are with firms outside the Lucky Country. This often makes filling in the address forms presented by these firms an adventure and occasionally makes it impossible.

Copyright isn’t on a par with the right to life, liberty, fraternity and equality before the law. It’s a privilege extended to us by our fellow citizens…

Making drug use illegal is stupid, counter-productive and morally indefensible.

TraceRoute started life as a small utility developed by Van Jacobson in 1988. Originally developed for various flavours of Unix, and distributed as compilable C source code, there are now versions of the utility for VMS, Mac OS, Mac OS X, OS/2 and the various flavours of Windows.

The Year is 1997. The month is September. Finals time. And a more hotly contested, more widely open to upset finals series is not within living memory. For the first time since the inception of the National Football League almost six years ago the final five consists of teams from five different states.

The quest for truth permeates much of the world’s literature, from the Grail romances of the Middle Ages, through the early picaresque novels to the moral fables of the world’s great religions. All use a physical journey to symbolise a spiritual quest — a quest for truth. Both the modern adventure story and the detective story are descendants of these romances and fables although the detective story marks itself off by internalising the quest for truth, transforming the physical journey into an intellectual one.

The idea of writing a novel is surprisingly popular. It seems that nearly everyone who reads a novel or two entertains the notion that they might, one day, sit down and write one themselves.

Of the reasons given for these notions never advancing beyond a Sunday afternoon’s daydream, lack of time is the most prevelant.

After all, even assuming research and planning for one’s Magnum Opus is complete, everyone knows that writing a novel is a painstaking, almost all-consuming task which will take months if not years. Or will it?