John Borwick’s blog

I’m really glad that I’m participating in National Novel-Writing Month, but boy is it hard. I’ve just now written 15,000 words, so I’m pretty far behind, and I’m having a hard time motivating myself.

I’m writing for National Novel-Writing Month again this year. I don’t know if I can keep it up: the pace is 1667 words/day.

If you’re writing, let me know, and I’ll add you as a buddy!

I’m starting to read “Thus Spoke Zarathustra.” I bought it a few years ago mainly because the title is awesome. I think Will Emigh and I then talked about how ridiculous the title is.

Well, this sounds pretty dumb, but I was watching “Little Miss Sunshine” the movie where one of the characters reads Nietzsche. I thought to myself, “yeah, Nietzsche is probably pretty cool,” and I realized that I have assumed that sometime in my life I would read Nietzsche–that it would be impossible to live and not read Nietzsche.

Then I realized that the only way I was going to read anything by Nietzsche was if I actually up and did it. And guess what? I LOVE THE BOOK. I don’t know why, and I’m sure that most people who’ve read “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” would be offended that I like it, but I am at a point right now where I’m reading several texts and they all seem to coincide. Everything from “the 80/20 Principle” to Zen Buddhist texts to Nietzsche says to discover yourself. Nietzsche (er sorry, Zarathustra)–who I don’t agree with on this point–just thinks that people who don’t discover themselves should die off.

I created a little bit of ASCII art, perhaps one of the most awesome mediums ever created. That and gold foil.

I added a bunch of poetry book links to Project Gutenberg on the new poetry wiki.

I have created my own poetry wiki. It’s based on Mediawiki. I’m trying to catalog more thoroughly my poetry knowledge and to understand what I need to learn more.

I just got an article called “System Automation with PXE, Kickstart, and Cfengine” published in the October 2005 issue of SysAdmin magazine. We just got it in the mail today at work!

I’ve written three nodes on everything2 in the last week or so. My initial goal was to write only fiction, but it’s equally helpful just to be able to write.

I would like to write a cron job that replicates my writeup links from everything2, so I can have a list here of what I’ve written. I’ll put that on the “to do” list; with Perl’s E2::Interface, it should be easy.