Copper Robot: Mitch Wagner's old blog – go to www.MitchWagner.com

I’ve been thinking for a while about how short-form journalists and bloggers need their own writing tools. Other specialized writers have them: Scrivener for authors of books, Microsoft Word for office workers, Textmate and BBEdit for programmers. But short-form nonfiction writers have needs not met by those other apps.

Or, at least, I don’t feel like MY needs are being met. Everybody else seems happy with the tools they have. So it’s probably just me.

What I need is something that allows me to package research materials and the final article in one place. Generally, speaking, when I do a blog post, I have one or two interviews, a bunch of URLs, and maybe one or two images. I want all of those things in one place, and yet divided up so it’s easy to find what I’m looking for.

Also, I write my articles in plain text, using Textmate, and I want to keep using Textmate for that and have the final draft of the article included with the research materials

Also, I’ve been organizing a series of webinars, and I want to keep all the materials for that — contracts and presentations and PowerPoint templates and speaker bios and photos — together, yet easy to find.

And, sometimes I go on business trips to specific events, like a conference in another city. Again, this results in a bundle of materials, including URLs, travel documents, e-receipts conference notes, and final blog posts, that I want to keep in one place, but organized so all the components easy to find.

Lately, I’ve been looking at OmniOutliner from the Omni Group to keep all of those kinds of information organized. OmniOutliner is kind of a hybrid between a simple word processor and simple spreadsheet. It seems to provide enough structure to organize projects, while not so much that I’m locked in.

I’ve only been using this a couple of days — only one full business day. We’ll see if it sticks.

OmniOutliner is $39.95 for the basic version, $69.95 for a pro version with added features such as support for inline audio recordings (so a student can record a lecture while simultaneously taking notes in OO). That’s a bit pricey for my needs, but I paid for a Pro license several years ago, when I was feeling spendy, and I never used it much.

OmniOutliner comes from the Omni Group, which built Omni Focus, a personal task manager and productivity app that’s more or less the dashboard for my whole life. Every little or big thing I need to do gets dumped into Omni Focus.

Some of the user interface conventions for Omni Group products are a bit odd to me. They make a lot of use of inspector panes; and little dots at the end of rows of information to use as handles to move those rows around; and very tiny icons. I found those things confusing when I first tried Omni Outliner. But that was years ago, and since then I’ve grown so accustomed to Omni Focus that the interface has become quite comfortable.

OO has an iPad version coming out shortly. It’s already been submitted to the App Store, so I’m expecting it any minute now. I’m looking forward to it.

I’ve been reading an insanely great book, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus.

So far, it’s been a history of American Indians from about 1000 AD to about the 17th Century. The author Charles C. Mann, starts by outlining American Indian history as he was taught it as a child in school, and as his son was taught it later: When Europeans came to America, they found a nearly depopulated continent, inhabited only by a few roaming bands of aboriginal hunter-gatherers living in a child-like state, who were nearly wiped out by superior European technology and colonialism.

That’s pretty much the way American Indian history has been taught to European-descended Americans for centuries. Each generation has put its own spin on the child-like state of the aboriginal American population. Earlier generations thought of the Indians as lazy savages. More recently, we’re more likely think of them as innocents living in a state of harmony with nature.

Both views are baloney, Mann says.

Instead, the American Indians lived in sophisticated societies. In Central America, the Inka and other peoples had some of the most advanced premodern civilizations the Earth has ever seen, with cities rivaling European contemporaries, monumental architecture, and advanced astronomy. In the American Northeast, the Indians lived in networks and confederations of villages, subsisting on hunting and fishing and farming. Trade networks linked Central America to Canada and beyond.

I’m now reading sections on the story of English colonization of the American Northeast, including the First Thanksgiving and Plymouth Rock. According to the accounts the English themselves left, the Indians were healthy, tall, and clean. They ate diets with a lot of fresh vegetables, including maize, which was, by European standards, extraordinarily nutritious. They wore complicated haircuts and decorated their bodies with body and face paint, and jewelry.

The English, on the other hand, were smaller due to poorer nutrition, drab, filthy and foul-smelling. Indians bathed frequently, which the English considered perverse; an Englishman might never have a bath in his entire life.

As for technology, the Indian technology was in many ways superior. Indian houses were warmer and more comfortable than English — again, this is according to the English’s own contemporary accounts. Moccasins were better footwear than boots. And Indian canoes could literally paddle rings around English longboats. English sailing ships were superior to anything the Indians had, but the Indians learned to operate those by the 17th Century. Guns had greater stopping power than bows and arrows, but at least in the 17th Century they were less reliable, less accurate, and useful at shorter distances.

So what did the Indians in? Disease. Europeans were used to living in proximity to domestic animals, and Indians had relatively few domesticated animals of their own. By the time of the Pilgrims, it was more than a century since Columbus, and European-born diseases had ravaged more than 90% of the Indian population. As blogger Teresa Nielsen Hayden notes in a 2006 review of the book: “The story of the settlement of the Americas isn’t one of pioneers finding themselves in an untouched Eden. They were resettling a post-holocaust landscape.”

Mann’s views are revolutionary, but he’s not getting into weird territory. He’s not arguing that American Indians had supernatural powers, or used alien technology brought down by the saucer-men. He’s not saying the Indians lived in Utopia. They fought wars — less savage than Europeans, but still there were wars. When Europeans were hostile, Indians struck back violently, often against a completely different group of Europeans who had nothing to do with the original offense. They tortured prisoners, and also their children and themselves — they viewed resistance to pain as part of becoming an adult, and the only way to get resistant to pain is to experience a lot of it.

However, Mann’s views are bound to be controversial, because how Americans view Indians is part of our national character. Earlier generations justified manifest destiny by claiming that Indians were brutal savages who didn’t use the land.

More recently, the environmental movement is built in part on the idea that the Americas were unspoiled wilderness until Europeans came in and ruined it. That’s also untrue, Mann argues; the Indians cleared the Great Plains by fire to make grazing land for buffalo, and the Amazon rain forest may be at least in part a result of Indian engineering.

And by “traditional” I mean “unhappy.”

I’ve thought about this occasionally through the years. I remember — intellectually — that I was unhappy a lot of the time when I was a kid. Who wasn’t? I remember being bullied a lot in fifth grade, and again in eighth grade. In eighth grade I spent so much of my free time locked up in my bedroom reading that my parents shipped me off to a psychologist.

And yet, when I remember my childhood and adolescence, I remember being happy.

I don’t think this is selective memory, either. I think I did have a pretty happy upbringing. I had a great family. I went to great schools. I lived in a safe, comfortable neighborhood.

And I had great friends.

My overwhelming memory of childhood and adolescence is just hanging out. At parties. In the backyard playing marathon games of Risk. Recording bootleg records and tapes using microphones propped up next to stereo speakers.

Before learning to drive, we rode bicycles for miles and miles and miles, to bowling alleys and movie theaters and discount stores and, a couple of times, up a narrow, winding, steep road to the planetarium and back with cars screaming by at 50 miles an hour six inches from our elbows.

One of these friends has been posting to Facebook dozens of snapshots taken of us during that period. It’s been a happy, sad time going through them. Happy because it brings up all those good memories. Sad because of the vast ocean of time that exists between now and then, and how not all the happy kids in those pictures crossed that ocean into the 21st Century.

Another reason it’s a little sad is that I wish that somehow I could cross that ocean and go back and be that person, and be with those people, again. If only there were some way to do it without giving up the great life I have now.

I’ve been messing around with Dragon Dictate on the Mac a little bit. My first impression: this is not software to mess around with. This is a serious tool, and requires some time to install and learn to use effectively.

It takes about a half hour to 45 minutes to install and configure, which is way more time that I’m used to spending on setting up software. It installs on two CDs, which reminds me of installing software in the 90s when it came on multiple floppy disks. Then you train it to understand your voice, by reading a passage of text into the software. That takes about 10 minutes.

Then you’re ready to start dictating. I found it understood my speech extremely well. On the other hand, navigating the cursor backward and forward in the text proved to be difficult. And using Dictate to actually operate the computer, opening applications and navigating between windows, was overwhelming for me.

None of this is Dictate’s fault. Dictate is not a toy, it is serious software and takes work to learn to use.

I really do like dictate on the iPhone and iPad – as a matter of fact I dictated the first draft of this blog post using Dictate on the iPhone.

One of my major problems using Dictate to write on the Mac is that I like to revise as I go, sometimes I’ll go just a few words and change what I’ve written. I’m finding Dictate’s cursor navigation to be overwhelmingly difficult. But maybe I just need a new way of working. Indeed I am writing this paragraph on Dictate with the Mac, and it’s kind of cool.

I think I’ll continue fooling around with Dictate and seeing if I can master it. That kind of thing is fun for me. However it is not fun for most people, and so I think Dictate is not going to replace the keyboard and mouse for most people. However, I can see where Dictate would allow people with repetitive stress injuries and other disabilities that prevent them from using the mouse and keyboard to be completely productive on a personal computer

That’s important to me, because I worry about that. On those nights when I can’t sleep and am staying up in the dark staring at the ceiling worrying about stuff, one of the things I worry about is that I might develop some kind of scratch that is that I will develop some kind of repetitive stress injury that prevents me from using the mouse and keyboard. Which would be awful for us, personally and economically, because we depend on my being able to use a personal computer to bring in income. For us RSI would be like a ditchdigger losing the ability to operate a shovel. However, now I know that if I do get RSI, I will be able to continue to work. So now I can spend my time at night worrying about cancer and Alzheimer’s and the complete Soviet style collapse of the American economy. So Dragon Dictate has made me more productive at worrying.

All right, I can see that Dictate works better if I use a different style of composing first drafts than I’m used to. I’m used to revising as I go and I think with Dragon I’m better off composing stream of consciousness and then going back and revising later.

How about you? Are you using Dragon Dictate, not because you have to, but as an alternative to typing?

I’m grateful to be living in the social media era when breaking news happens, as it did Sunday night and as has happened all too often in the past few months (Fukushima, Libya, Osama, etc.)

Previously, if you wanted to stay on top of news as it happened, you had to park yourself in front of the TV and listen to the talking heads regurgitate the same three facts over and over. Now, you can keep Twitter running in the background and keep busy doing other things while waiting for new information to become available.

I know that Twitter, for all the publicity it gets, is a niche activity. So maybe it’ll be helpful to go over just how to do that.

Key to my system for keeping up with news on Twitter is a Twitter list I call Breaking News. It’s a list of nine Twitter accounts that tweet out frequent updates on world, national, and local San Diego news. You can follow the same list if you want, just click on the preceding link and click the “Follow This List” button. You need a Twitter account to do that, of course.

So I walked into my office Sunday night after dinner, thinking I had about an hour or two of work to do before breaking for the night. I checked Twitter when I got to my desk just to see if anything interesting was going on and– HOLY CRAP! OSAMA BIN LADEN DEAD?!

So I did what I always do when news breaks and I’m at my desk. I opened up that Breaking News Twitter list in an application called TweedtDeck, and let it run on a slice of my desktop. I continued to work busily away and glanced at Twitter occasionally to see if anything new came up. You can do the same thing in your Web browser; you don’t need a dedicated Twitter application.

Eventually, someone tweeted a link to a URL where the White House would be livestreaming President Obama’s address. I opened that page in a browser window, and kept it running while I kept working.

Eventually, the livestream window changed from a blank screen to a view of the White House, and I tore out to the living room to watch Obama with Julie. I felt pretty pleased with myself; I got there and we had the TV switched on just as Obama walked down the carpet to give his address.

When the address was done, I returned to my office to finish work, and kept that Tweetdeck column running in a corner of my desktop to watch for further developments. Of which there weren’t any, not really.

When news is breaking like that, I check that Breaking News list on the iPhone first thing in the morning, as soon as I’ve gotten up out of bed. Regrettably, that happens all too often and the news is seldom good.

On a happier note: I use a similar system, with a list called Tech News, whenever Apple makes one of its several live announcements each year. I can still get work done and keep on top of the news.

I promised myself I wouldn’t get distracted from work by chasing down a lot of Obama news. Plenty of time for that during my breakfast and lunch breaks, and after work. But now I find myself reading my favorite crazy anti-Obama blogs for entertainment and humor value.

The party line from the anti-Obama crazies: Obama’s speech was terrible, it made a mockery of this fine moment, made it all about him. Obama did nothing, he simply extended programs that Bush started. Bush gets credit for this, not Obama.

Oh, wait, I just remembered another crazy blog to check.

Note that I am not linking to these blogs. I am not getting into fights with these people. I wasted too much of the last decade doing just that. Yes, I am chicken.

Also note: I’m not saying you’re crazy if you oppose Obama. There are good reasons to even hate him — I don’t myself, but he’s made some terrible decisions.

Want to know if you’re crazy, or a person who rationally opposes Obama. Here’s a simple test. Answer this question: “Was Obama born in the United States, making him a natural-born American citizen?”

If your answer is “Yes, of course,” then you’re not crazy.

If you give any other answer … well … don’t despair! Medical science can do wonders with pills these days, and you can have every hope of one day leading a full productive life.

As for the speech: I, too, thought it maybe was too much about Obama, but not so much that I found it offensive. Overall, it was an unmemorable speech — and that was just the right note. One of Obama’s best qualities is he does not strut and gloat over victories, as his predecessor did. That strutting and gloating becomes propaganda defeat, as we saw with the “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED” banner.

Speaking of which: The crazies are still pissed off about that banner, still explaining what it REALLY meant. Sheesh, give it up people.