Brian A. Paul

For those of you who do not know, ‘NaNoWriMo‘ stands for National Novel Writing Month. The month in question would be November, just two short weeks away.

In brief, the idea is to produce a 50,000 word short novella, with little consideration for quality of work, between the first and last days of November. It’s something akin to running a marathon. Just get something, anything done. You can always alter, fix, repair, and rewrite after November 30.

I first came across NaNoWriMo in 2004, signed up and failed to produce even a single paragraph. Come 2005, I gamely committed myself to writing again and once again failed. 2006, failure (but I got a whole 2 pages down.)

It’s a cool thing and a cool community. I’m impressed that this many people are publicly setting for themselves a very difficult goal. I love reading, and I love that this many people are trying so very hard to add to the body of literature in the world.

Will I give it another shot this year? I don’t know. Time is already a pretty scarce commodity these days. I’ll just have to see how things go over the next 2 weeks.

As you may or may not know, Lawrence Lessig spent 10 years dedicating his life to fighting bad copyright law. He may be the most influential ‘copyfighter’ ever.

Last June (2007) Larry announced that he was shifting his scholarship and eventually his activism away from copyright. This isn’t to say he’s abandoned the copyfight, but you could say his primary focus is shifting to the problem of ‘Corruption.’ Specifically it seems United States governmental corruption.

This morning he posted the video of the alpha version of his Corruption Lecture.

Whether you agree or disagree with the often controversial Mr. Lessig his lectures are guaranteed to give you pause, make you think and still manage to entertain. To me, that’s worth the hour or so you’ll spend listening to what he has to say.

The current theme is SpotLight 1.3 and I don’t particularly like it. It is marginally better than the out-of-the-box WP theme so it stays until I have time to do something custom.