Writing/Weblogs

I was so thrilled yesterday to get some fan email! Well, almost. I suppose I should have recognized right away from the message that something was wrong, but my desperate need for praise and approval blinded me for a while. Here's the message, with my (almost) fan's name omitted: DEAR MR. HINES, MY NAME IS...AND I AM IN FIRST GRADE. I CAN'T WAIT FOR YOU TO COME TO OLD BETHPAGE GRADE SCHOOL NEXT WEEK. I READ YOUR BOOK, THE MONSTER'S TEST, IN SCHOOL TODAY. I LOVED IT. YOU ARE A VERY GOOD AUTHOR. I CAN'T WAIT TO MEET YOU. YOUR…

I got to know the Garden Poet, a.k.a Keith Ecklund, when we hired him to do some extensive landscaping on our previously unpoetic yard. Whereas another prospective landscaper was going to prepare a detailed computerized plan, showing every detail of what they planned to do, Keith basically showed us the landscaper's equivalent of the proverbial business plan sketched on the back of a cocktail napkin, a very sketchy conceptual outline, and said "trust me." We did, and we ended up loving his work. I enjoyed looking out the window and seeing Keith perched on the seat of his idling tractor,…

I've already heard from some new HinesSight viewers (well, almost all the viewers are new, actually), who said some nice things about our humble weblog--especially the photo of Serena, which seems to be the favorite post so far. Some problems also were pointed out, and I'm trying to fix them. I'm slowly learning some of the tricks of the trade of the Internet, such as "don't reduce the margin of Word files unless you want some browsers to see what you've written as a teeny-tiny one-word column that stretches on for near-infinity." No, I didn't mean to do this with…

Man, what a relief, to be ahead of the curve by ten days. Yesterday's Living Section in the Oregonian had a fairly extensive story about blogs, a.k.a. web logs, which this here thing is. So if I hadn't decided to start HinesSight on January 2, I'd be behind the curve right now. Instead, I'm ten days ahead of the (Oregonian) curve. Of course, I'm years behind the weblog pioneers, so from that standpoint I'm way behind the curve. Well, I guess I'm right where I'm supposed to be, which is preparing to send out emails letting folks know about HinesSight.…

Had to skip posting yesterday, due to a lengthy defragmenting process on my cranky computer. If you have never watched SystemWorks defragment a disk, consider adding this to your list of life's to-dos. Observing the process is strangely addicting. You start with a colorful map of your computer's amazingly fragmented hard drive, bits and pieces of files stuck here and there, all over the place. Then, through some mysterious process, the All-Knowing Optimizer goes about reshuffling those bits and pieces into a neat and tidy coherent system. Dot by dot, you watch (for hours, in my case) your computer change…

click to enlarge Over Christmas I did a complete reading of my 450 page "Return to the One" manuscript to a wonderfully attentive audience. No one budged from their chair, asked for a bathroom break, or even made a sound. Many thanks to my daughter, Celeste, for lining up most of these folks. She's known them since she was a little girl, and might even be able to still remember their names.