Boxing Day...

I'm reading The Twenty-Year Death, a debut crime/mystery novel by Ariel S. Winter, published as part of the Hard Case Crime series. Just about the first thing you learn about the book if care to pay an attention to it at all is that the work is actually three linked novels, each written in the style of a genre master (Simenon, Chandler, and Thompson).

In my opinion, that kind of publicity certainly sets the book apart from the crowd, but by doing so it sets some pretty high standards that risks undermining your reaction to Winter's work because your attention has been split between immersing yourself in the stories and comparing their respective styles to those of Simenon, etc.

Here, I am in relatively good shape—risk-wise—as it's been a long time since I've read anything by Simenon, and I'm not sure I've ever actually read anything that I link to Jim Thompson's name, so I have nothing to which to compare Winter's effort. On the other hand, Raymond Chandler and I go wa-a-ay back, to my college days, in a relationship that was reinforced by the late Robert B. Parker's interest in Chandler, both as an academic and as a writer (including the task of finishing one of Chandler's stories, which was published as Poodle Springs, under both Parker's and Chandler's names).

Here, I do have a reference point, and in my opinion, Winter's imitation of Chandler's style falls short of the mark. Heck, I thought Fred Reed did a better (and funnier) Chandler in his novel Triple Tap, and I came to that conclusion on my own, without having my nose tweaked by a publisher's marketing slime. And the fact that, in the end, Reed is no Chandler is reduced to the status of a passing thought.

I am, however, a forgiving sort. I've enjoyably finished two of the three stories in The Twenty-Year Death, and I look forward to the third—when I can steal away some time.

Apropos of marketing, I think this is a variant of the marketing error committed some years ago with a country music band called Bering Strait. Those kids were good enough, in terms of their music, to make me—a die-hard fan of symphonies, concertos, and operas—buy their album. Heck, the group was nominated for a Grammy! And yet, when I watched a documentary about the group, it seemed to me that the only message anyone ever seemed interested in getting out about the band was that its members were all from Russia! The band was, in effect, being sold as a novelty act! Ah, well...

Galina and I spent the afternoon shopping. The crowds were manageable.

Improving my org-mode experience, part 1...

I had been moving along with org-mode pretty much on autopilot, especially since things have been working well ever since I started using emacs and org-mode to keep track of jobs and invoice related data.

With my move away from the proprietary Invoice Manager software to the open source BambooImage code, I began to seriously think about what kind of effort would be required to create an org-mode environment in which I could execute some function that would automagically extract billing data from my org-mode files and stuff it into a MySQL database, so that I could use BambooInvoice to tweak the result and publish/print/send the final invoice. Or at least make the process simpler.

But before dealing with that, I had to deal with my use of a "note" for each document that was part of a job instead of a "todo," as it was becoming altogether too cumbersome to keep track of data this way.

Some background:

I first began using the "note" format in org-mode because a note can contain a check box, which enables tracking of progress in an assignment (i.e., in a todo). For example:

* TODO 121226 ABC 12321 (XYZ Attachment) [1/3]
  DEADLINE: <2012-12-28>
  :PROPERTIES:
  :KEYWORDS:    shareholder meeting
  :END-CLIENT:  Acme, Inc.
  :END:
  - [X] cover email (220 twc)
  - [ ] XYZ Attachment
  - [ ] Attachment annex (edit)

The string on the TODO line shows the date received (today), from what customer (ABC), the customer's assignment designation (12321), and a brief description (XYZ Attachment), which also happens to be a link that, when clicked, opens the folder containing these files). This particular job consists of three documents, one of which is complete (reflected by the "X" in the box formed by the square brackets, causing [1/3] to be displayed in the TODO line.

The deadline is self-explanatory. It will show up in my "agenda" for the upcoming week, which I routinely generate every morning.

The "properties" are key–value pairs. I use these for each assignment to identify keywords, end clients, and anything else that comes to mind.

While all of this may look complex, the only part that requires keyboard input in org-mode is shown in bold, above. Everything else is generated using keyboard macros bound to keystrokes, one of which actually cycles through just how much of all this information is actually displayed, keeping the rest out of sight. Typically, my screen will show only one assignment expanded; the rest reduced down to a single line.

What I had noticed, over this past year, is I never looked the progress string at all (except, perhaps, to verify that the "numerator" incremented when the status of a document was checked off), and so, I was not getting any benefit from using check boxes. Indeed, by not making each document a "sub" TODO item, I was depriving myself of the ability to use org-mode properties for each document.

And once I started creating a TODO for each document and storing billing data in properties, I stumbled across a series of three keychords that just blew my mind!

More in part 2, soon...