More writing tonight, as usual - got home from work around 6 o'clock or so, grabbed some dinner, headed straight for the basement cloister and worked until the letters started moving themselves around. Looking forward to seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. I'm hoping it won't be a train, but I think I'm okay. ";->"

Ed's escaping from the Gmail planet. Hey, Ed: For what it's worth, I've got a lot of love for pobox.com. Pretty good email services in general, but mainly I've been using their forwarding services for a few years now. They keep l.m.orchard@pobox.com working, while I've moved my real inbox about 8-10 times since 2000 or so.

Because DRM on e-books is a silly thing

• John Scalzi says of e-books, "No DRM, because DRM on e-books is a silly thing." You know what was a weird feeling? Finding that my persistent search feeds on "Hacking RSS and Atom" started returning links to a DRM-less PDF edition of my book as a torrent hosted at various Russian, Romanian, and Middle Eastern sites.

• Now, being idealistic and a rank novice, I can't say much at all about sales and my experience with it. I'd like to take some sort of stand against DRM as a writer and claim benefits to sales, but I've got to defer to my publishers' wisdom and experience on the matter. Though, I've gotten the impression that the book is doing fairly well. They've asked me back for another go, so that's got to count for something.

• But, I can certainly say that it didn't take long for my book to get shared out - lately I've even seen it appearing in hundred-book torrents listing the entire quarter's releases from Wiley. It's somewhat amazing, when you think about it. But, still, I'd appreciate it if you'd pop on down to your corner book store and buy a copy for yourself. ";->"

Cory Doctorow says nice things about James Patrick Kelly's "Burn" podcast. I couldn't agree more. I've been listening to the podcast and got the print edition under the tree for Christmas. Really great story, based in a far-future post-singularity universe where people on a planet named Walden are trying to preserve more pastoral ways. Meanwhile, the previous tenants of the planet are trying to burn back the quick-spreading forests the Waldeners are planting.

Yoz Grahame throws a nifty early-stage Ning-based OPML Community Server my way, based on my early-stage PHP OPML Community Server code. I, of course, immediately cloned it for myself for near-future tinkering. It's all still just doodling with coincidentally working code, but I think there's a lot of potential here.

David wonders about my Haloscan comments. Actually, yes, they've been working pretty nicely so far - I think my hacked-up implementation is still a bit awkward yet, but I have gotten a comment or two per day so far. This is the first time I've played with Haloscan, too, so I'm actually pretty impressed with the service. Offers RSS feeds to monitor new comments and a fairly slick bit of JavaScript for integration, on top of which I've built my own customization of their inclusion code. And, with the way I've tried keeping the domain name out of comment thread IDs, I suspect that the comments are portable if you change OPML Community Servers.

There's a fix for outline icons in the OPML Editor on Mac. Funny, I don't think I've ever seen these icons on my outlines - that, or they disappeared so early that I forgot about them entirely. Nice!

I'm definitely not a morning person, but I've got my coffee and a cat in my lap - so it can't be all bad.