But each week I have to convert my current work to Word to send to my writing group. I’ve been copying and pasting it, but that’s a pain, and I always have to tweak the formatting a little as well. Not ideal.

In my ideal world, I could write and edit in Vim, then run a script to export it to Word and apply my styles to it (doubled line spacing, etc.). Automatically. Painlessly. Beautifully.

md2rtf is the first step in that direction.

It’s a shell script that takes a Markdown file and outputs an RTF (using textutil, a handy command-line text conversion utility on OS X) which I can then open in Word. I still haven’t figured out how to automatically set the line spacing, and I’m not yet doing smart quote conversion, but other than that it’s working nicely.

(I tried outputting to Word directly, by the way, but textutil seems to ignore HTML paragraphs, so only the first paragraph was getting indented. If anyone knows a workaround, let me know. In the meantime, I export to RTF and then open it and save as Word.)

Is this that much better than copying and pasting? Maybe not by much, but it feels smoother and I’m confident that someday I’ll be able to do it all automatically.

Oh, I’m also working on a script to import Markdown into InDesign. Then I can use Markdown as my base format and export to ePub and InDesign from the same source files. Mmm.

The two most obvious things about the new iPhone are the form factor and the Retina Display. I’m in love with both. My old 3GS now feels like a cheap, blurry toy. Seriously, iPhone 4 is beautiful. I love the feel of it in my hand. The text is crisp and luscious and the phone itself is gorgeous. (It’s super obvious now which apps haven’t updated their icons yet, though. Simplenote and Things, I’m looking at you.)

I haven’t had a problem with the reception, and I can’t reproduce the “death grip” issue that some people have. I guess I’m lucky.

The phone is faster than the 3GS, definitely. It’s not a huge leap, but it’s noticeable and I like it. Fast app switching is heaven. In fact, apps that don’t use it yet (again, Simplenote and Things, I’m looking at you) feel outdated and slow. It’s changing the way I use my phone.

Battery life is a little better than on the 3GS, but not by much. I can’t wait till the day when my iPhone has the kind of battery life I get on my iPad.

I’m loving the camera upgrade. HD video is sweet and works great. (And with the new box form factor, it’s a lot easier to hold the phone. I was always afraid the 3GS would slip out of my hand, but the 4 doesn’t feel that way.) I haven’t tried FaceTime yet. The LED flash and front-facing cameras are nice additions.

I’m not sure how I feel about the switch from Helvetica to Helvetica Neue for the system font. I thought I’d be gaga over it, but I’m kind of wishing I could change it back to Helvetica. We’ll see if that changes over time.

Conclusion: It’s a winner by a long shot. I love this phone.

In so muche that in my dayes happened that certayn marchauntes were in a shippe in tamyse, for to haue sayled ouer the see into zelande and for lacke of wynde, thei taryed atte forlond, and wente to lande for to refreshe them; And one of theym named sheffelde, a mercer, cam in-to an hows and axed for mete; and specyally he axyd after eggys; And the goode wyf answerde, that she coude speke no frenshe. And the marchaunt was angry, for he also coude speke no frenshe, but wolde haue hadde egges and she vnderstode hym not. And thenne at laste a nother sayd that he wolde haue eyren then the good wyf sayd that she vnderstod hym wel. Loo, what sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte, egges or eyren?

English is still changing, as all live languages do, but my mind’s a-tickling with curiosity about what it was like back when the language was in the middle of the linguistic earthquake that eventually brought us the English we speak today.

It’s hard to imagine. The printing press and television and the Internet have solidified English (and most other written languages too, I suppose) so that even dialects you’d expect to have become wildly different — Indian English or Jamaican English, for example — are still pretty close to the standard. (By which I mean American/British English.)

Speaking English in the time of Caxton, when “comyn englysshe that is spoken in one shyre varyeth from a nother,” sounds like walking on jello. Go a few miles from home in any direction and it’s almost as if you’re in another country. Always a foreigner. Kind of unsettling, but then again that’s coming from someone whose home country covers almost four million square miles of mutually understandable dialect — which also happens to be the current lingua franca, no less. For people who speak fringe languages, it’s perfectly normal.

Makes me wonder if the people in those small minority-language pockets have a stronger, tighter feeling of home than I do, because they’re so few in number. Maybe so. But it could work the other way, too — I can feel at home almost as easily in San Francisco or New York or Houston or Seattle as I do here in Utah, and surely there’s some strength in belonging to something massive.

Or maybe it’s the same, and home is home no matter how big or how small. That’s my bet.

Mixed.

I liked having more time for reading and making things. And my mind did feel quieter, less distracted and more focused.

But (and you knew there was a “but” coming because of my use of the past tense in that last paragraph) I missed being social on Twitter. Apparently I need that. I love people and I love talking with people and that’s basically what Twitter is. Also, I get enough time-sensitive emails that checking Gmail only twice a day isn’t going to cut it. (This was news to me.)

So, no more 2x/day limit.

My new goal is where I should have been all along: the middle ground, sane and healthy and ruddy-cheeked. I’ve coaxed my subconscious into monitoring how often I’m checking Gmail et al., and if my middle ground frenzies itself into a frothing every-other-minuteness, I’ll pull back and take a breather for a few. That should do the trick. (If it doesn’t, you’ll be getting another blog post.)

Now to go tweet about this…

My second book release for today is Преступление и наказание (Crime & Punishment). This is an ePub edition of Dostovesky’s novel (which I love) in the original Russian.

This marks my first attempt at creating an ePub from a text in a non-Roman script (Cyrillic), and I was pleasantly surprised at how well it all went. I should note that Stanza displays the book just fine, but I haven’t yet tested it in iBooks.

Note: In Stanza, the Russian hyphenation settings (which seem to only work if you have justification on, by the way) hardly hyphenate any words at all, so they’re basically useless.

I designed the cover in Photoshop. There’s a higher resolution version available on Flickr.

And no, I don’t read Russian. Yet.

The ePub edition of my book Words of the Prophets: Selected Sermons from the Book of Mormon is now available for download.

(The book is a reader’s edition compilation of twenty-two sermons from the Book of Mormon. It’s also available in PDF and you can print a hard copy through Lulu.com.)

The ePub edition of my reader’s edition of the Book of Mormon is now available. You can read it in Stanza or iBooks on your iPhone/iPad, in Aldiko on your Android, or using any number of other ePub readers. (For iPad reading, I should add that the PDFs work nicely in iBooks, and the typography is (ahem) much better than iBooks’ ePub display.)

Maker’s note: I’m finding that my md2epub script has made ePub production incredibly easy. Granted, I’m working with books that don’t involve charts or tables or images or pull quotes or anything complicated, just straight text, but it’s still a breeze.

One other note: The current version of Stanza has a bug where it displays the title of an imported ePub as a random hash string instead of the actual title. They’re aware of it and hopefully we’ll see a fix soon. In the meantime, you can edit the title in Stanza yourself.

The Internet is a magical place. I love the Internet. Much of my life revolves around it. Because of the Internet I was able to start an online magazine which led to my meeting my wife. My day job is web design, and I applied for it because of a LinkedIn forward I got. I’ve made a lot of friends over the Internet, through mailing lists and blogs and Twitter, and I value them.

But the Internet is almost too much, you know? Too many voices, too many things to do, to watch, to read. A steady patter of pings begging for my attention relentlessly, and if I turn my head every time they come, I spend my life turning my head instead of actually doing things and making things and being a real person.

I like this line from Jack Cheng’s article Habit Fields:

Just because you can have instant access at your fingertips doesn’t mean you should.

More and more, I’m finding myself turning things off, trying to silence the buzz so I can get some actual work done — and regain my sanity. I’ve disabled all incoming email and Growl notifications. And even then, I’m still checking Gmail and Twitter every two minutes hoping I’ll have shiny new emails or tweets waiting for me. I have to exit out of the apps entirely if I want to stand a chance at avoiding distraction.

What I’ve discovered: The longer I go in between checking Gmail/Twitter/Google Reader/whatever, the better I feel. I don’t know how long is ideal (a day? half a day?), but I’ll tell you what, it sure as heck isn’t every five minutes.

It’s not just Gmail and Twitter, of course. It’s the whole idea of multitasking. Peter Bregner’s article on how and why to stop multitasking is beautiful. Also, if you haven’t already read the Nicholas Carr’s Wired article on how the web is rewiring our brains, go read it. Now. I’m not convinced that this rewiring is entirely a bad thing, but I do find that it’s harder and harder to finish reading books (which are so much longer than blog posts). And the more I multitask, the less I get done and the worse I feel. (This is one of the reasons why I like the iPhone and iPad — you’re effectively forced to singletask, and it’s an oh so beautiful thing.)

Big blocks of focused time are delicious. Spurts of attention timesliced every which way, not so much. I want more quiet, less noise.

Unplugging is hard for us Internet junkies. After all, feeling the pulse of the world in your fingertips is heady. No man is an island, and extricating ourselves from the web, even for a short time, can be sticky.

But people have been doing just fine for thousands of years without the Internet, and a few more hours away from my email or Twitter really isn’t going to make anything blow up, much as I’d like to think it would. A couple years ago, I couldn’t for the life of me understand people who didn’t have email or who only checked it once every week or two. Now, though, I envy them.

I want to try something radical, something completely crazy like, oh, checking my email and Twitter only twice a day. ;) Twice a day. Man, it feels almost impossible, but at the same time my heart wants to sing at the thought. I’m giddy thinking how much more I could get done each day with all that extra time — more time reading, more time with my family, more time just thinking. Peaceful time. Mmm.

Okay, I’m going to do it. From now on, I’ll check my email and Twitter once in the morning (around 9:00) and once at night (around 9:00), and that’s it. Period.

Which means I can’t check my email for another four hours. Goodness, this is already getting hard. (Yeah, I’ve got it bad.)

Here we go.

That’s right, they’re not only trying to stop adding to the public domain, they’re now actively attempting to shrink it. Sanity, where have you gone?

The more copyright extends its bloated tentacles, the more our culture starts to die. Lots of publishers rely on public domain content (look at all the different editions of David Copperfield or Crime and Punishment, for example), and if it starts hiding under copyright’s shadow again, poof, it’s no longer legal.

In an ideal world, copyright would last long enough to protect the author during his life and, say, until his children or other dependents reach adulthood. Or, at the very most, until his immediate family is dead, but as it is, the whole thing just reeks of greed and corruption.

If this goes any further, I’m going to start wearing black.