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By Tgreen, April 1, 2010 10:19 pm

The company I work for uses GMail for our office email, which was not something I was used to but I got into it pretty quickly. It was nice for a change to be able to access work emails from anywhere. Not that I’m desperate to come home every night and see if anything interesting has happened at the office since I left, but it’s let me work from home without hassle, update my boss on some info from two states away, and at least once explain to a bunch of people at once why the A train was making me very late. So after a couple of years of this, I can safely say that GMail = cool.

Recently, though, something unexpected happened that has me wondering if it’s time to rethink my relationship with GMail. As I often do in my job, I had to take a screen shot to send to someone as a way to explain what was wrong with the page I was testing. So as I wrote my notes, I included a little aside that said see attached after I explained the issue in question. As I also often do in my job, when it came time to send the email, I’d forgotten to actually attach the screen shot. Whenever this happened in the past, it would lead to an exchange much like this one:

Programmer: Where’s the screen shot?
Me: D’oh!

Not this week. No, this week, I wrote my test notes and forgot my attachment and sent the email out to maybe half a dozen people when suddenly Gmail itself stopped me with a message that said, you wrote “see attached” but you did not attach anything; do you want to send this email? It was at this point where I wondered if GMail = kinda stalkerish.

So I added my attachment and sent my email and Gmail looked at me with a smug expression that said, yeah, I covered for you this time, but if you continue to slack off like this eventually even I won’t be able to keep your sorry ass employed. And this made me wonder how closely GMail was reading my emails, and if there were any other ways for it to help me out. I mean, I deal with some confidential stuff, so am I supposed to be comfortable with the fact that my confidential email is being shared between me, some coworkers, and GMail? Or should I trust that confidential or not, most of these emails are so boring that they’d put even a computer to sleep? Either way, this just drilled home the point that someone’s always watching us. At least this time it was watching and was willing to help. So maybe ultimately GMail = my new best friend.

Which is why my coworkers are already sick of seeing every one of my emails this week ending with the sentence I really, really want an iPad.

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By Tgreen, April 1, 2010 1:06 am

In theory, it should work like this — you want to write, so you write. Simple. Believable. Like the song says, it oughtta be easy, oughtta be simple enough. And yet, after banging my brain against the inside of my skull for at least 8 hours a day at work, most nights the best I can do is crank out an email or two, perhaps a Yelp review, and maybe a tweet. Certainly nothing more than that. It’s not to say I don’t have the best of intentions. But those intentions seem to melt away once ass hits couch after the long trip home on the D train.

So in the absence of the easy way, what’s left? Why, a stunt, of course. Last November I wrote a novel in a month, and if you scroll down a bit you can read all about it. This month? Well, this month I’m trying something different, if no less ridiculous. This month I’m writing a 100-page script while participating in Script Frenzy. I’ve never written much in the way of scripts, and don’t have a whole lot of interest in it, but for the month of April, Script Frenzy gives me a goal, a deadline, and hopefully the right amount of motivation to write something more substantial than a Waffle House review.

When I sit down this evening to start my script, I have a few options. I can write a movie script, or a TV show, or a play, or even a graphic novel (high-class-speak for comic book). As I write this, I’ve got no idea which one I’ll choose. I wrote a TV episode script once. It sucked. I wrote 3/4ths of a movie script once. It sucked. I wrote about half of a script that was either an animated movie or a hybrid of live action and animation. It sucked. And while I’ve never bothered to sit down and write a comic book script, I’ve sure created many comics in my day. Some of them didn’t suck.

I guess what I’m getting at here is that I haven’t exactly set the bar terribly high as far as script writing is concerned, so assuming I make it to 100 pages in a month, whatever I write is bound to be at least as bad as all the other crap I’ve done, and maybe it might be a little better. Of course, the dirty little secret in all this is I know going into it that it will be almost impossible for me to get to 100 pages in this particular month. But we’ll get to that later. For now, there’s nothing but good times ahead. Hey kids, let’s put on a show!