The DEATH BAR logs my word count.  As noted passim, I estimated GUN MACHINE to get itself told in 80,000 words.

DEATH BAR RIGHT NOW

VICTORY

but wait

IT’S NOT DONE

IT’S NOT FINISHED

AAAAAAAAA

HAAAAAATE

(dies)

(but KEEPS WRITING ANYWAY)

DEATH BAR

Into the final week of writing GUN MACHINE.  Have been running around doing stuff.  Back soon.

Putting this here in case it’s useful to anyone else.

Opened Gmail this morning in Chrome (Win7) and got a flash message across the top of the browser: “This page has insecure content.”  With options to load it anyway, or not to load.  Blearily, I pressed “do not load,” and things were fine.  What is up with this, I thought?

The Rapportive extension had been a wee bit flaky lately, so I disabled it, closed everything, then relaunched Gmail in Chrome.  Same thing.  So I went looking.  And, lo and behold, I found the answer on a Google support forum.  Which, in my previous experience, had been a wasteland.

Credit for this solution comes from the kind folks at Baydin, makers of Boomerang for Gmail. They don’t really provide tech support for this kind of thing but they went above and beyond the call of duty on this one. Instructions below:

1. Right-click anywhere on your Gmail page and click “Inspect Element”.
2. A debug window will take over the bottom half of your browser. Click “Console” at the bar at the top of this window.
3. Search for the words “insecure content” in the console (search bar at the top-right of the console). This line will reveal where the insecure content is coming from.
4. Disable the plug-in that is creating this message. In my case it was Zemanta, which neither one of us realized was even a gmail plug-in.

Chrome is getting stricter about insecure content on secure pages. You can contact the maker of your plug-in if you want to continue using it w/o receiving this warning message.

In my case, it was actually Zemanta that was throwing the error. Disabled the extension, all was back to normal. Reading around, I see that a lot of people have been getting this error and not knowing why. It seems that, going forward, more and more extensions may cause the error. Now you, like me, can find out which ones and kill them.

This has been brought to you by “If I don’t write this down I will forget how to fix it next time this happens.”

I sent the BERG crew a gift, and they took a photo for me:

(I sent a case of 16.  You can find them here.)

Bits and pieces:

*  I’m attempting to use last.fm again.  This is me on last.fm.

*  I put together an hour-long music podcast for somebody else – basically just a mixtape of stuff – that I guess will be out in a few weeks.  And it really gave me the itch to podcast again.  I may just stick with doing 8tracks pieces more often, because 8tracks are at least licensed, and I don’t think I have the time or energy to do another The 4am run… but.  Geezer needs a hobby, right?

* I’m also trying out Goodreads.  I can be found there at http://www.goodreads.com/warrenellis .  I do have a novel coming out next autumn, after all.

*  And it seems that Dame Helen Mirren announced that RED 2 is go for next year. I haven’t been cleared to say anything, but, well, no-one’s going to argue with Dame Helen.

Anyone remember Siri?

Siri was a voice-activated “personal assistant” for iOS, made by an independent developer.  It was last year, I think.  It was the beginnings of something very interesting.  Voice-driven search agent.  “Siri, call me a cab,” you’d say, and it’d do it.  “Siri, book me a table at my favourite restaurant,” you’d say, and if it had that information and web service details, it would.  Like I say, the beginnings.  It might have wound itself deeper into iOS itself, as well as broading its search and action agency.

And then Apple bought it, a year ago, and it went away.

I bought myself a little bluetooth earpiece, a Jawbone Shadowbox, to make it easier for me to listen to podcasts.  So today I’m sitting at my work table in the back garden, and decide that I want to send a voice memo to someone while I’m working.  I hold down the button on my Shadowbox that activates voice control on the phone, and say “voice memo.”

It redials my last-used number.

I try again.  It dials into my phone provider’s voicemail service.

Hmm.

The hell with it, I think, and, while voice control’s on, I tell it to play a Grouper album I have on the phone.

Terrifyingly, it dials the mobile phone of an executive at 20th Century Fox.

I decided that this was annoying.  And then I thought, wait, Apple bought Siri a bloody year ago.  Siri was apparently capable of telling me the weather in New York City and booking me a ticket to go and see Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.  But the bloody phone voice control tries to wake up a movie studio VP at 530 when I ask it to play a record.

All of which are beyond trivial, as problems go.  I can, of course, just pick up the phone and make it do what I want.  But if you’re going to put voice control on there, and allow third-party devices to access it, isn’t there an onus on you to make it a bit more useful?  Especially when you’ve had Siri in-house for a year?  Maybe this is what’s coming with iPhone 5.  I’ve read that Android voice control is better.

But – at least in my head – there’s a broader point.  People are beginning to come to terms with the idea of the phone screen as ghost box, as viewer and mediator of the invisible world of informational connection and flow.  Augmented Reality is helping that along, in certain quarters.  I am, however, amused by the idea that Apple, whose general design policies seem mostly informed by Star Trek: The Next Generation (and note how the design of the new Star Trek film evoked nothing so much as an Apple Store with added LEDs and lens flare), let something as obviously Eighties-science-fiction as voice interface get away from them.  Which is why I nodded sagely, as is my wont, when they bought Siri.

(Also amused by the idea that, in an era of voice interface, New Aesthetic would become No Aesthetic overnight.  Or, at least, would have to somehow become audial.  Would audio glitch even be possible in voice interface?  Maybe activation pings would become the basis for next-gen chiptunes.)

Noise-cancelling technologies make voice interface more feasible by the day.  If you already have a voice control system, why not tie it deeper into your OS, rather than keep it as a part-functional appendage?  Right now, it’s sort of a vestigial tail on iOS.  And, while I don’t want to seem entitled or pushy – Apple moves slow with iPhone, and, hell, the phone didn’t become a useable device until the 3GS iteration as far as I’m concerned – they bought Siri a year ago, and voice interface is right in the wheelhouse of a company that makes Star Trek goods.  And not everybody wants to look at a screen for everything.

This too-long post was brought to you by Random Jabbering As A Warm-Up For The Day’s Work.

And some days I’m incapable of anything. Took a couple of days off to do a hard reset on my brain. Back at the desk now, to ride the novel down into the dirt.

And I was going to write a whole thing here, but I’ve just been told that a script has to be rushed in, so, no, I guess not.  Tomorrow.

Things and stuff I want to make note of:

John Robb, writer on Open Source Warfare and Resilient Communities, is doing a Q&A at the Well right now.  You may recognise his name: I’ve quoted from his blog, Global Guerrillas, many times here.  I’d like to clip a couple of things, from his introduction and his definition of OSW:

I began in operations (Tier 1 spec ops) and and then became a technology analyst (I was Forrester’s first Internet analyst in ’95)… spent some time figuring out how warfare would evolve over the next decades. That resulted in my work on open source warfare (which has become popular with guerrillas around the world and ended up in a scientific study that was on the cover of Nature magazine), violent superempowerment, systems disruption. After I got a handle on that topic, I started to use the same approach to work on ways of configuring society/economics to weather future disruption/failures. Essentially, strategies of peace.

Open source warfare is a form of warfare seen in a world without compelling ideologies. A world where lots of small groups, each with their own motivations for fighting (from criminal to religious to nationalist to ethnic), can join together to take on a much larger enemy (usually, a nation-state). In many cases, the groups involved don’t even know what they are doing when they engage in it. They just do it naturally, out of weakness. Open source warfare is a form of warfare where any group that wants to fight can participate. Every group can innovate. They can try out new methods of attack. New targets. If the technique works, every other group copies it (as in, release early and often). Groups share info between each other freely since the other groups are co-developers of the war…

Elsewhere, I’ve not been able to keep up or completely parse Jacob Appelbaum’s rolling coverage on Twitter of the following event, but this site seems to have it in a nutshell (?):

After breaching the Dutch CA (Certification Authority) DigiNotar, Iranian hackers managed to sign forged certificates for the domains of spy agencies CIA, Mossad and MI6. Leading certification authorities like VeriSign and Thawte were also targeted, as were Iranian dissident sites.

“The era of disposable robots, sharing our lives, is so obviously just around the corner, with all the resultant goodness and badness.”

– Russell Davies

I’m not completely sold on the “sharing our lives” rhetoric, especially not in the same sentence as “disposable robots,” but that is a statement that makes you (me) lean back in one’s chair and go “Huh.  Yeah.”  Another little future that’s in the process of sneaking up on us from an unexpected angle.  But I have to circle round to “disposable robots,”  and slightly recontextualise that as “burner robots.”

Molly Crabapple began her Week In Hell.

Interesting little article on one of the last remaining maskhara, or royal jesters, of Afghanistan (and why this one may still be around):

Atta boasted proudly of Pashean’s many talents, telling me that in addition to his prowess as an entertainer, he was also a professional blackmailer, a master thief, and a prolific murderer, with an estimated fifty victims killed by his own hand…

And, in Lagos, Jan Chipchase stopped moving long enough to find this odd little piece of cultural disconnect:

In a country where a music video is shot in a day, and a movie can be shot in two – a collation of news clips on the Japan earthquake/tsunami makes for a decent disaster movie.

Japan Bitter Experience!

The comics daily-deal website Thwipster has declared it to be Warren Ellis Week.

Not quite the official global holiday one would hope for, but it’ll do for now.  Thanks, people.

Right now, you can get the hardcover of FREAKANGELS Vol 1 for 32% off.

Or not!

Work to be done!

Katelan Foisy painted me!

I am listening to this!

See you Monday!  Maybe!

Amazing FELL-related tattoo worn by Xochitl Gonzalez.

New DEATH BAR wordcount on the novel:

And I believe I will close out the night with the haunted techno of Cova.  Good night.

I used to be good at this blogging thing, and tens of thousands of people used to visit here every day.  And then I seem to have kind of forgotten how to do it.

LEFT: Molly Crabapple's art for the COILHOUSE magazine party in NYC on the 21st.

In other news, I had to switch my novel-writing software from OpenOffice to, for the first time in probably ten years, Microsoft Word. OpenOffice has developed this weird quirk on my machine where it randomly loses bits of the novel, and disappears other bits that only emerge when I do a copy/paste of the entire document into Google Docs.  (When I was writing Spirit Tracks, some arcane quirk would render bits of the piece invisible in OpenOffice, yet visible in Google Docs.) Since this is the longest continuous document I’ve written in OpenOffice on this machine, I decided not to reinstall it (or install LibreOffice), but to activate the pre-installed MS Word.  My instinct is that it’s a stability issue in OpenOffice, and I don’t know if the chink was in there before LibreOffice forked out of OpenOffice, and I do not have all fucking day to fart about with such things.  Except that, of course, I’ve had to re-learn Word.  And MS Word calculates word counts differently.  So suddenly I’m a thousand words behind where I thought I was, and I won’t be certain that there weren’t uncaught losses to the novel until I do my final proof, and arrrgh.  Nothing’s ever easy, is it?

So I should have been closing in on 40,000 words tonight, but instead I’m at 36500.

And now I’m going back to work, having provided no entertainment or information whatsoever.

Padraig

Squall approaching from Achill

DEATH BAR

Things to do:

Need to come up with the story for my final issue of SECRET AVENGERS, as we just locked the artist for it.

Smash OpenOffice with my bare hands for continuing to randomly lose pieces of my novel and arbitrarily alter the word count when it’s not losing pieces of novel.

Observe that MagCloud are due to announce a new format soon.

Mention this, noting that further details are imminent:

Find the time to write some script on an unannounced comics thing I’ve been working on slowly.

Stop sleeping long enough to write the audio thing I’ve been talking with an acquaintance about.

Register faint concern and displeasure at being referred to as “a giant uncle” by BERG in the new issue of ICON.  (Though it was generally a really nice piece.  Thanks for the copy, Will.)

Xeni Jardin

G’night.

I have signed three boxes of signature sheets for the last FREAKANGELS limited edition hardcover. Also:

Kim Boekbinder successfully reinvented the way she does shows, and illustrated a new path for working musicians in the process. Now she’s applying that to the tour. A ten-date Oct/Nov American tour where each show is pre-sold, and the level at which it is pre-sold determines the nature of the show. It’s quite fascinating to me. Click through and take a look. Maybe she’s playing your city. And Molly Crabapple is doing a unique poster for each date.

Also, I do like me some drums. And this was working for me in the early hours of the morning. Blawan:

I may rig the site for a spate of more regular posting tomorrow.

It once occurred to me that, sooner rather than later, the only way London coders will be able to access government computers will be to spray machine-readable code on walls in view of CCTV cameras.

And then Matt Jones wrote The Robot-Readable World.

DEATH BAR

Also I wish I was going to this, in Brighton, on Thursday, because High Wolf is playing, whom I love, and also The Wyrding Module, whom I’ve just discovered tonight.  If you can get to Brighton, you should go.

Also Katie West took this photo below, and I wish I were there, too.  But I have a DEATH BAR to battle.

DEATH BAR I hate you.

Even in this somewhat dubious report on the SDCC panel about that damned documentary they’re making about me, mentions of this are made.

Ellis’ huge nexus of contacts was never understated

And also "a query was made about how Ellis does not seem to relate to the comics community anymore." (Wanna read about just one of the reasons why?) Which of course just brings me back to this thing I wrote the other week. That query’s got some truth to it, obviously (another example is that I hand the Whitechapel message board over to Si Spurrier this Friday), although I do still monkey around with a few things behind the scenes, consultation and the like. And I can still send people a bit of traffic from time to time.

But I’ve reached the point in the novel now where I’ve emptied out a chunk of my headspace into it, and earmarked the other barrels in the back of my skull that’ll be tipped into the pit of the novel over the next several weeks, and my brain is registering clear areas. Which it doesn’t like, as it is a greedy organ trained to hoover up whatever is in front of it. It wants to make new connections and process new things.  And making new connections does bring me moments of delight like this:

And, yes, surprisingly, it turned out that she did not think I was the Australian musician Warren Ellis. (Whom I haven’t heard from since Nick Cave suggested on French television that he put a hit out on me. Hm.) The email conversation that followed just made my afternoon, and this evening has put me to thinking.  About the nature of engagement, even as I continue to disengage from so many things.

I tell you now: I never feel like I don’t have a whole career’s worth of work left to achieve.  There is still so much to do.