Cory Doctorow is one of the wonders of the world — a very good writer, a terrific lecturer and an inspiring activist for open-ness. I’m perpetually amazed by his productivity, so was much cheered to come on this essay by him in Locus magazine. It’s essentially a list of suggestion about how to get things written. Top of the list is this:

Short, regular work schedule

When I’m working on a story or novel, I set a modest daily goal — usually a page or two — and then I meet it every day, doing nothing else while I’m working on it. It’s not plausible or desirable to try to get the world to go away for hours at a time, but it’s entirely possible to make it all shut up for 20 minutes. Writing a page every day gets me more than a novel per year — do the math — and there’s always 20 minutes to be found in a day, no matter what else is going on. Twenty minutes is a short enough interval that it can be claimed from a sleep or meal-break (though this shouldn’t become a habit). The secret is to do it every day, weekends included, to keep the momentum going, and to allow your thoughts to wander to your next day’s page between sessions. Try to find one or two vivid sensory details to work into the next page, or a bon mot, so that you’ve already got some material when you sit down at the keyboard.

This echoes the advice of many professional writers down the ages. Graham Greene, for example, used to write no more than 700 words a day — in the morning. But he wrote every single day.

The idea of finding 20 minutes a day is ingenious because it’s something that even the busiest of us can do. I’ve been thinking recently that a mobile phone with a decent little keyboard (step forward BlackBerry) would probably do quite nicely. You could even email the results of your daily stint to yourself.

Other tips from Cory include:

Great stuff.

Many thanks to Adam Szedlak for the link.

LATER: Bill Thompson, writing ruefully about how he is easily distracted.

From Dave Winer.

It’s 25 years ago since the Apple Macintosh was officially launched by Steve Jobs, two days after the screening of Ridley Scott’s famous commercial. ReadWriteWeb has a nice photo gallery of every model. I’ve owned most of them — and still have a couple of the original Macs, plus the first iMac (in tangerine!) and a 1991 Powerbook 100. Sadly, I gave away the Apple ][ that I had in 1978. Otherwise I’d have the makings of a small museum.

I vividly remember the first time I used a Macintosh — and wrote about it in my book on the history of the Internet. The relevant passage comes in the chapter on the deep origins of the Web when I was writing about the work of Bill Atkinson (who invented HyperCard).

In an age of bitmapped screens and Graphical User Interfaces, we have become blasé about drawing and painting packages. But many of us will never forget our first encounter with Atkinson’s baby. In my own case, it happened at a workshop for academics known to be interested in personal computing which was organised by Apple UK at the University Arms hotel in Cambridge.

The venue was a stuffy conference suite ringed with tables covered in green baize. On each table stood an astonishing little machine with a nine-inch screen and a detached keyboard. Compared with the clunky, three-box design which then represented the industry’s idea of what a personal computer should look like, these elegant little machines seemed, well, just gorgeous. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on one.

After an initial spiel by the Apple crowd, we were let loose on the machines. They had been set up, for some unfathomable reason, displaying a picture of a fish. It was, in fact, a MacPaint file. I remember staring at the image, marvelling at the way the scales and fins seemed as clear as if they had been etched on the screen. After a time I picked up courage, clicked on the ‘lassoo’ tool and selected a fin with it. The lassoo suddenly began to shimmer. I held down the mouse button and moved the rodent gently. The fin began to move across the screen!

Then I pulled down the Edit menu, and selected Cut. The fin disappeared. Finally I closed the file, confirmed the decision in the dialog box, and reloaded the fish from disk. As the image reappeared I experienced what James Joyce would call an epiphany: I remember thinking, this is the way it has to be. I felt what Douglas Adams later described as “that kind of roaring, tingling, floating sensation” which characterised his first experience of MacPaint. In the blink of an eye — the time it took to retrieve the fish from disk — all the DECwriter teletypes and dumb terminals and character-based displays which had been essential parts of my computing experience were consigned to the scrapyard. I had suddenly seen the point — and the potential — of computer graphics.

Here’s the video of Jobs’s keynote.

Isn’t YouTube wonderful.

From an email in my inbox this morning:

Dear World:

We, the United States of America, a top quality supplier of the ideals of liberty and democracy, would like to apologize for our 2001-2008 interruption in service. The technical fault that led to this eight-year service outage has been located, and a decision was taken in early November to completely replace the software responsible. The new software became fully functional on January 20, 2009. Early tests of the newly installed program indicate that we are again operating correctly. We apologize for any inconvenience caused by the outage. We look forward to resuming full service and hope to continue improvements in the years to come. We thank you for your patience and understanding.

Sincerely,

THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Thanks to Hap.