As you might surmise from “Link 2” and “Link 3″ above the masthead illustration, this blog is still, as they say, under construction.

I’m at the low end of what looks from this vantage point to be a very steep learning curve as regards the technology of blogging. For the first time in more than 20 years, I feel like a true computer illiterate.

My first experience with computing technology wasn’t even a computer — exactly. In the very early 1980s, I acquired a Xerox 850 dedicated word processor. The word processing program was hard-coded into the CPU box. And the CPU box was about the size of a standalone dishwasher. Seriously. Desk height and a couple of feet deep. It weighed a couple hundred pounds, and it moved about on casters. It came with a magnificent black-on-white, portrait-oriented display, though. And the keyboard had an early version of a touchpad mouse. It was called (again, no kidding) a CAT, an acronym for something or other. The floppy disks it used for data storage were 8” in diameter — the size of a 78 RPM record — and really were floppy.

A year or so later, another then-comic book writer named Gerry Conway — he’s now a producer on *Law and Order: Criminal Intent* — showed me his new personal computer. Sure, it processed words, but it could also do other exotic things, among them communicate with other computers using something called a modem.

Then, Gerry showed me a service called MCI Mail. It was a cross between the two technologies we now call email and fax. You could send electronic messages to other MCI Mail users, but you could also upload files (in ASCII format) to be printed out on the other end and delivered as hard copy. The cost was about the same as sending a document by Federal Express — but it no longer took 24 hours to get where it was going.

I was sold.

I bought my first personal computer, a Kaypro 10, from a store called Friendly Computers in Los Angeles. With the expensive daisy wheel printer and the extravagantly fast 1200-baud modem, I believe it cost nearly $7000. The Kaypro 10, pictured below (additional pictures here), had 16K of memory and a massive 10-megabyte hard disk; it came with a bundle of software (some of which actually worked) and, at about 40 pounds, was considered “portable.” The built-in screen was green-on-black and measured 9″ diagonally. The operating system was called CP/M. The interface was a command line.

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Friendly Computers was well-known in town for the quality of their service and for the care they took in teaching customers how to use a computer. My instructor was Beth Slick (then Woods). In my first lesson, Beth presented me with a stark choice. Either I could learn to control the computer, or I could let it control me. The former meant achieving some degree of mastery over the operating system and application software. The latter meant living in a state of perpetual dependence and confusion. I chose the former.

I was an idiot. I had no idea what I was letting myself in for.

One piece of bundled software that didn’t work very well was the Kaypro’s modem program. A sympathetic friend gave me a copy of another program, one that demonstrably *did* work but whose manual was written entirely in geek-ese. In those days, there was no “plug and play.” (Hell, there was barely even “plug.”) Modems didn’t configure themselves. That was the user’s job, and it typically involved tweaking a long list of interdependent software and hardware settings until the modem, the computer, and the communications program proved willing to cooperate.

A couple of blocks from my apartment in Burbank, there was a 24-hour coffee shop called the Copper Penny. I took the manual and a couple of packs of cigarettes to a booth there, read the manual over dinner, and then, over what seemed several gallons of coffee, read it again — and again — and again into the wee hours of the morning until, finally, I thought I understood it.

Turns out I did. Stomach sloshing with cheap java, brain amped on nicotine, I walked home and before dawn had the modem working.

How I long for the good old days — when men were men, and computers were weight-lifting apparatus, and modems were intractable — the days before RSS, CSS, XML, XHTML, PHP, pings, trackbacks, URIs, and comment spam!

I can’t believe I have to go through the equivalent of the goddamn coffee shop experience all over again!

Can somebody even *do* that at age 57?!

I guess I’m going to find out.

Just a short note this time.

Spent all day Thursday with Mary Skrenes, my co-writer on *Hard Time*, rummaging around inside the mind of Ethan Harrow’s primary antagonist in the second season of the series.

I’m exhausted.

Making yourself think like a sociopath is very hard work.

Aside to Steven Grant: You’re right about my newfound technological illiteracy. In fact, I’m planning to write a post about it. But there is too an RSS feed on this page! Scroll down the right column and click or stomp or drag or spit, or whatever the hell it is you’re supposed to do, on RSS!

Do any of you watch Project Greenlight on Bravo (Thursday, 10pm e/p) ?

Here’s the premise: Ben Affleck and Matt Damon sponsor an Internet contest in which writers submit screenplays and directors submit sample reels. Affleck, Damon, producer Chris Moore, and, this season, horror director Wes Craven pick one from Column A and one from Column B. The lucky director and writer get to make a movie for a studio. The TV series documents the making of the film.

But is the real objective to make a movie…or to stage a “reality” show?

For the second year in a row, they’ve matched up a script and a director who should never have been allowed in the same room with each other. This time around, they’ve gone one step further and chosen a script that couldn’t possibly be filmed for the alloted budget.

Okay, I know Hollywood executives can be that stupid. I’ve even seen it close up. But two years in a row? On national television? And they’re not even a *little* embarrassed?

No. And I think I know why.

Also for the second year in a row, the documentary series is devoted to making the novice director look like a hapless, indecisive dork. The poor schlub and his moviemaking dreams are reduced to objects of ridicule, while the sharp, savvy producers struggle mightily to keep him from “self-destructing” and taking the film with him.

And that, I think, is the real purpose of this series: to glorify the sage, efficient, highly professional, highly polished producers at the expense of the contest winners.

It’s the ultimate Hollywood concept. We’re supposed to stand in awe of these commanding, visonary yet hard-nosed, pragmatic figures who make the movies and entertain the world. We’re supposed to understand that they’re a different breed from those of us outside the biz — smarter, quicker, hipper, worthy of adulation.

We’re *not* supposed to think about which dipwad *hired* the director.

Just something amusing I ran across online:

Abstinence pledges make you horny. A new eight-year study just released reveals that American teenagers who take “virginity” pledges of the sort so favored by the Bush administration wind up with just as many STDs as the other kids.

But that’s not all — taking the pledges also makes a teenage girl six times more likely to perform oral sex, and a boy four times more likely to get anal. Which leads me to an important question: where were these pledges when I was in high school?

— Bill Maher, Salon.com

You won’t often find me trolling the news sites for items to post here. Enough other blogs do that. However, commentary from Bill Maher (or George Carlin) could become a major policy exception.

Maybe it’s ADD. I used to think in in long, carefully-crafted, almost legalistic arguments. Now I think in plosives. Like this one.

I make no claims for the following as carefully-reasoned political discourse. It’s more like a hunch or an instinct.

Whenever Proxident Bush— I can’t bring myself to call him “President”; it just feels wrong, like calling Scott Bakula “Captain”— anyway, whenever he talks about his vision of an “Ownership Society,” this line from Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” comes to mind:

When you got nothin’, you got nothin’ to lose.

Conversely, when you got sumpin’, you do got sumpin’ to lose — and you fear losing it — and that’s what the Proxident’s “Ownership Society” is really about: making sure every American has a stake in the status quo, a vested interest in the well-being of large corporations, and therefore a reason to vote Republican.

You probably know the old adage: “If you owe the bank a thousand dollars, the bank owns you. If you owe the bank a billion dollars, you own the bank.” Well, we all know people who are owned by their possessions, and that, too, is at the heart of the “Ownership Society” concept. If you own a billion shares, you own the corporation. If your net worth is based on a few thousand shares, your continued existence becomes contingent on the corporation’s profitability. In a very real sense, the corporation owns you.

So let’s call this “Ownership Society” idea what it is: The Republican Dream. Every American a slave to corporate interests. Sort of a Middle Passage for the middle class.

Which brings to mind this tidbit from the same song:

Ain’t it hard when you discover that
He really wasn’t where it’s at,
After he took from you everything he could steal?

Oh! No, wait! I’m sorry — that’s the Proxident’s plan for Social Security. Another discussion for another time.

Several people have already written, asking me how to leave a comment.

Click on the word “Comments” at the bottom of each post. If there are already comments present, it will display them, along with a form for entering your own. If not, you’ll just get the form.

(Yeah, there was a glitch in the Inaugural posting that prevented that. It’s been fixed.)

Against the screechings of my better judgment, I’ve decided to start a blog.

My judgment screeches because it knows it’s only a matter of time before I say something here that I’ll regret. I’m cursed with a big mouth, lots of opinions, and a somewhat deficient self-censoring mechanism.

But there are other considerations that outweigh my inevitable faux-es and pas-es.

I make my living as a writer. There is only one characteristic that distinguishes writers from non-writers: writers write. (That’s why there’s no such thing as an “aspiring writer.” A writer can aspire to sell or publish, but only non-writers aspire to write.) Anyway, writing for a living requires writing every day. Writing every day requires discipline. Discipline requires enforcement.

I’ve lost the habit of writing every day. I need discipline. I need enforcement. You’re looking at it.

I intend to post something on this blog every day. If I fail to do so, that failure will be very public, and I’ll be embarrassed by it. I don’t enjoy being embarrassed. So maybe, just maybe, making this obligation will help transform me into a habitual writer again.

And you get to watch.

I’ll try to make it provocative for you.