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Sometimes the writing isn’t the most time-consuming part of “writing.” There’s quite a bit of housekeeping involved.

The one question that’s came up repeatedly, is where to submit fiction? Being a gal with a speculative/futurist outlook, I tend towards science fiction. So a good place to start is the list of SFWA Qualifying Markets.

This is an important list to be on. The magazines1 must meet the current SFWA “minimum wage” to qualify. Currently this is six United States pennies per word. While not a lot, it means the writing is valued. It also means the markets have a certain level of prestige.

It’s time for my weekly word count check-in. At the end of every week, I post a screen shot from my writing results spreadsheet. This shows the current week and the three before. My week starts on Monday. The numbers are current through Sunday night. I also only average over six days. This allows me one day of no writing that doesn’t impact the weekly totals.

This week the number look about average, but I feel I didn’t do much. I had a serious lull in the middle of the week. A couple of big bursts early and late in the week rounded out the numbers. Hitting 50K would’ve been nice. But I just finished a 2K techincal post. Verifying the code while writing really drags things out. No more tonight.

This project was a few weeks in the making. When I started there was a problem with some of the software not behaving. I leave the hardware driver voodoo to those that understand it. After an update this morning I was able to get all the parts working. So what exactly is a WiFi VPN access point?

It’s the combination of several pieces of hardware and software that when running on my Pogo provides me with:

Killed by spam. But not just closing, everything will be deleted.

That didn’t take long. This will be Apple’s legacy.

One thing that’s taken a few days to sink is how Apple managed to improve the keyboard on the new MacBook model. During the announcement Tim Cook mentioned that the key tops were 17% larger than the current MacBook keyboards. I noted it in my live blog on Monday, but didn’t think too much about it.

This evening I thought about going to an Apple Store to see it in person, but decided to do a virtual comparison first. Using screenshots I put together a quick comparison of the new and old keyboards. The new MacBook is about 1.3” narrower than the MacBook Pro that I currently use. I adjusted the size of pictures so the comparison would be accurate. (It’s not perfect, but it’s damn close.)

The article goes onto say, “It remains unclear how intelligence agencies would get developers to use the poisoned version of Xcode.”

Getting the hacked Xcode package out in the wild would not be that hard. Before the creation of the Mac App Store, Xcode was a direct download from Apple.com. As with anything that’s served out on to the Internet, it’s possible that it could have been intercepted and replaced with the hacked copy. The CIA and it’s friends have showed remarkable competence and hacking, diverting, and collecting web traffic.

Of of the things announced today, Apple’s ResearchKit strikes me as the one thing that will have a long-lasting impact on the world. I think Apple might realize it too. Making ResearchKit open source was a main point in the presentation.

This is about actually getting data into the hands of researchers. Medical research is expensive. It involves paying people for participating in the study, and the time it takes for each consultation. Some researchers have turned to online platforms to find a population for the study. The downside of the is some people are participating just for the money. In some cases it has become a job. PBS recently produced a segment about these professional survey takers.

I watched the Apple event this morning so you wounldn’t have to. Tim Cook covered a lot ground in the 90 minuite event. The last half-hour was devoted the Apple Watch.

It’s time for my weekly word count check-in. At the end of every week, I post a screen shot from my writing results spreadsheet. This shows the current week and the three before. My week starts on Monday. The numbers are current through Sunday night. I also only average over six days. This allows me one day of no writing that doesn’t impact the weekly totals.

I was shooting for more, but a bug in the Pogo software left me spending my time troubleshooting instead of writing. The average turned upwards again. I’m happy with that.