Boston Globe (My photo was used, a competitor was actually mentioned in the article)

Boston.com (haven’t been able to bring myself to watch that one yet)

TUAW.com (That’s me back by the end of the cattle guards with David Nunez, a partner in DINO)

OK, that’s enough tooting.

There will be more to come for the Subverted Industries brand. Keep an eye out.

~w

I love tools. When I say “tools” you probably think about screwdrivers, hammers, power saws and the likes. Yes, I do totally love those things. And drills, and Dremels, and bits, and blades and all sorts of others. But I also love paint brushes and art boxes, word processors and idea databases, drum pads and synth keyboards, soldering irons and multimeters. I have a fascination with the tools and the processes that people use to create, make and produce. And chisels.

I have such a fascination with these tools that I buy a lot of them. I have the curse of being able to pick up just about any medium of creation and make something pretty darned mediocre, and sometimes a little better, my first try. (You may think this is a gift but, uncontrolled as it is in my case, I assure you it is not.) Paradoxically, this leads to a lot of boredom for me in my creative life. It’s why I keep buying tools and paraphernalia for different, usually only slightly different creation mediums. I like using these tools, being in the process, but I get bored with it as soon as I see that I can do it. Not necessarily well, mind you, but I seem to be satisfied about the time that I understand what it takes to get to something good. What I actually seem to be good at, mostly, is understanding what it takes to make something of quality in any one of these areas – woodworking, painting, writing – but what I’m bad at is actually going through the process to the end, over and over, until I not only understand what is needed to go beyond the mediocre-or-a-little-better phase and into the something-that’s-actually-good phase, but actually do it.

The good news in all of this is that, after years and years, I finally began noticing and understanding this a few years ago. I’ve been confronting it and tackling the monster and things are getting better. I do more now, and dabble less. (Oh, I still dabble plenty, but mostly in a few more focused areas instead taking the shotgun approach to hobbies.) I’ve begun to finally admit to myself that I need and want to be good at something, not just passable at a lot of things. And those things I want to be good at are getting the attention.

I know that this is working because, finally, I seem to be rather uninterested in the fiddly mechanics of other writer’s processes. Sure, I am still entertained and even enlightened when Cory Doctorow repeatedly tells aspiring authors to “write every day” (something I totally understand the importance of now) but I’m not so concerned about whether he uses an antique Underwood or the latest version of Open Office to write his novels. It is liberating to realize that I’m finally (mostly) past this barrier. I should point out, though, that I have found some very useful tools that do actually help me write (Scrivener/Evernote/DEVONthink and similar idea-drawer databases in particular) and without my previous levels of interest, I am sure I would not know some of the useful things I know about writing today, but it’s a relief to realize that, finally, I know that above all writing is about putting words down, hopefully in an interesting arrangement. 

Who needs fancy tools to do that?

But, in the years both before and since the creation of this entity, I find myself regularly looking up at the clock at exactly 11:11 – multiple (well, 2) times a day. It happens to me several times a week.

Now, obviously one would be more inclined to notice times one is attuned to, in the same way that one who has just bought, say, a Ford Escape seems to notice that suddenly there are a large number of Ford Escapes on the road.

What I wonder is this: am I just noticing 11:11 more than any other time because I happen to look at the clock at this time and it registers with me, or is my (subconscious) internal clock somehow accurate enough to have me look up at the clock at exactly 11:11 unusually often?

Yes, 11:11 is a memorable time. But isn’t 10:10, 9:09, 1:01, 12:12, etc?  I don’t notice seeing these others more than a handful of times here and there. 11:11 happens at least every couple of days, and regularly more often.

What’s up with that?