Much more posting here in 2010. But first to deal with this nagging cold.

Elizabeth Gilbert at TED, talking about the fear that lingers behind the nagging need to write, the curious nature of genius and what happens when you keep showing up to do your job.

Bonus points for using Tom Waits as a positive role model.

After taking a few days off post-TEDx, I’m back on-course, at 13, 339 words. And today is not yet over (though the finale of Mad Men looms, with a giant time-sucking sound.)

I’ve driven past, or under it nearly a hundred times, but today was the first time I had the opportunity to spend time inside The Brown Center, the glass-curtained building with the thrusting overhang that opened on the MICA campus a few years back.

All I can say is: Wow. Modern spaces can often be cold and odd and, while The Brown Center is certainly quirky, it fits in nicely on MICA’s semi-urban campus, reflecting from the outside and providing amazing vistas from the inside.

The building sometimes appears mirrored, sometimes clear.

Clouds and church reflected in the glass wall.

The view out, from upstairs.

It had been years since I’d thought of this beautiful passage about writing until I heard Scott Simon quote it this morning at TEDx MidAtlantic. It comes from the amazing play The Real Thing, by Tom Stoppard:

“Words… They’re innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they’re no good any more… I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you’re dead.”

You can see Scott Simon’s magnificent presentation here:

(No direct link, sorry. Select his talk from the scrolling list on the left)

Maybe it’s because we used to work for the same newspaper. Or maybe it’s because she nails the details of Baltimore in her books. Or maybe it’s because the woman can write the hell out of a book and leave you wondering how she does it.

Whatever, I’m a fanboy, a homer. So here’s summa Baltimore’s pride and joy, Laura Lippman.

Who remembers this great movie about finding the writer’s muse?

Here’s a not-quite-so-random thought following last night’s penultimate episode of Season 3 of Mad Men:

What if the next episode jumps as far forward in the timeline as is normally reserved for a new season?

Why? Last night’s episode was both a hard ending (Don, crushed and defeated) and a beginning (The real 1960s that got underway following the death of a president).

But the problem is, picking up a week or even a month after the events of the last episode is too soon to accommodate the massive changes to come, both in society and in Ossining.

So, my prediction, based on nothing other that a pinch of logic and a cup of wishful thinking: The final episode of Season Three jumps all the way to December, 1964.

Merlin Mann on “The Top … Habits of Amazing Writers.”

Somehow I’ve gotten this far in life without hearing Vladimir Nabokov’s voice or seeing him move. Oddly cartoonlike for such a wickedly good writer. I love how he’s clearly enjoying the hell out of himself here.

I’m almost at exactly the daily count that I need to hit if I’m going to be on track for NaNoWriMo, but I’m only about 1/3 of the way toward my Day One goal of 5,000 words. I figure that’ll be far enough in to tell whether this idea has some momentum and, if so, to give me a little buffer should things slow down as I’m told they do in week two.

UPDATE: Finished at 4,212 on the day. Not bad – more than double the average quota, though I know for certain I need to bank some excess because of the looming TedX Midatlantic, which looms in all its massive time-suckerness on Thursday.

Nick Hornby, on writing. Thanks, PBS, for the non-embeddable clip. Skip to 5:30 to get the the good bits.

Crummy video quality, but worthwhile to hear Stephen King talk about how a story idea can just kind of appear directly in front of you.

This site has been quiet as I burned the midnight oil, along with new colleague Kiel McLaughlin to launch the new Johns Hopkins University web site.

I think it looks pretty good, but then, I’m biased.

Six weeks from start to finish, so there are still (many) rough edges to polish, but we wanted to get this live in time for the Inauguration of our new university president this past weekend.

I think I now understand how Windows partisans feel when people like me get all smug about how viruses just seem to like that particular operating system.

Because I’m in a similar sitch at the moment with WordPress. As you may have heard, all hell broke loose this weekend as a worm had its way with WordPress installations that were neither updated to the latest version nor hardened. All of my sites fared well, but not everyone was so lucky, from uber-blogger Robert Scoble to countless tiny sites scattered across the net.

Andy Inhatko has an informative and, well, entertaining wrap-up of what it took for him to get back to normal.

John Gruber casts a much more gimlety-eye at the whole mess, saying, finally, that WP is not for absentee-admins. I’m with him on that.

As with OS X updates, I’m very bullish on WP updates, especially of the security-enhancement variety, as 2.8.3 and 2.8.4 were. I also believe that, if you really, really care about the sites you build (or, especially, build for people who hand you a paycheck on a regular basis), you should go even further in ensuring security by:

• Nuking the “admin” named account as your second order of business, after creating a new admin-level account with a non-obvious name.
• Requiring long, difficult passwords from all users above “contributor” level.
• Renaming your database tables from the standard wp_
• Putting server-level access rules in front of your admin dashboard.
• Backing up your databases regularly. There’s even a simple plugin that will do that for you at a set interval.

Is all of this worth what you get from a self-hosted WordPress site? I still say yes, but if you’re not willing to take the minimal steps to guarantee the security of your site, then you will probably be happier in the long run with a hosted wordpress.com site or any of the many alternatives out there.