Our daughter Elana has started her gap year in Israel. She’s blogging her adventures. Combined with Skype, phone calls, and updates from the program on Facebook, give us a great view into what’s going on 6,000 miles away.

Echoing the “Anatevka” scene (“You’re going to America? I have a cousin in Chicago”) that closes Fiddler on the Roof, the local falafel guy used to work at our kosher pizza place here in town. Elana’s realizing that I wasn’t kidding when I made up the three rules of being Israeli: We did it better, you’re wrong, and there is no line.

The over/under on hummus being a staple of her diet is 4 weeks. But it’s great following the action online.

I’ll be continuing my WordCamp speaking tour at WordCamp Philadelphia on October 30th. I’m giving the latest version of Parsing Strange, my WP internals talk that dissects URL parsing, SQL generation and user-serviceable parts you might run into. With custom page types and custom taxonomies gaining interest and traction in the WordPress community, this talk is a good backgrounder to the mechanics of joining tables representing social (or other) graphs, and selecting relevant content that you want to be displayed as a result.

Professional WordPress co-author Brad Williams is organizing, and the speaker slate covers an incredible range of topics. It’s the best $20 you can spend — you’ll be getting a high-speed, in-depth technical potpourri for about $3 an hour, or less than you’d spend drinking Starbucks that whole time. Just remember that it’s in Philadelphia, so while there are no bad questions, there are answers that involve having a D-cell thrown at your head.

I am a visual learner and continue to use the school calendar image for thinking about times and dates. You know the calendar setup: it’s two rows of months, September to February on top and March to August on the bottom; our parents had them in planners and wall calendars in the 1970s. To this day, it’s how I visualize dates, forever bound to Labor Day in place of New Year’s when it comes to marking an annual cycle.

The two-by-six month grid is a periodic table for time, grouping months and setting agendas. March is the beginning of the warmth series; spring is in the middle and summer is at the most exciteable end. Sepetember is the beginning; between school, Rosh HaShanah and my birthday, it’s how I’ve always marked time. But starting the mental year in September means Thanksgiving is square in your sights, the first milestone of the year, just 10 weeks after new books and teachers. That may explain my life-long fascination with the holiday. Winter holiday season is just past the mid point, but by looking down a row you know you’re exaclty halfway to the official start of the next summer. February is the mid point. I never thought to look below February and see August, summer smiling back at me but also the on-ramp to a new school year. There’s a comfortable reason that February is short – you’re eager to start the next group in the table.

Conversesly, it makes sense that July and August are tag-teamed months of 31 days. You don’t want them to end. It’s getting to the last pages of Tales from the Jersey Shore and Deep Tank Jersey. August 31 is a carriage return (if you ever used a typewriter) up and to the left. Back to the northwest corner, as my band director would say. The first page, the beginning, the best of times, the worst of times, and other allusions to formal education.

Here’s the deal: even without the visual calendar cue, you know it’s coming. The end of summer isn’t just ticking off those last few boxes, more scared of losing them than the last three squares of toilet paper in a public bathroom. When you wake up, you need a sweatshirt before the day gets warm and humid. You can smell fall in the air; it smells like leaves that are ready to hit the ground. You see cars laden with the accoutrements of a Long Beach Island summer driving off the majors into your neighborhood, some early immigrants back to reality. The seagulls lose their black feathers, going all white to match the weather. A friend once pointed this out to me, on the very last day of summer, motioning to a gull that was working the salt and pepper feathered look. She knew because she spent most of her life at the shore, for a few years even when school was in session, and yet she still had a mental last day of summer. The gulls mocked her loudly with their squawks and silently with a whiter shade of pale on their heads.

Growing up, any day that you could steal from the beginning of September was a huge win. You’d take one of those beckoning early September days and stuff it right back in your pocket. If you could break free of school clothes shopping or cleaning your room or band camp (before the days of summer reading lists) maybe you could sneak in a day in flip flops, or jury-rig the antenna on the living room FM receiver to pick up WJRZ from Ship Bottom, NJ, or play whatever board game you discovered that summer spread across the floor, completing a perfect hat trick of a summer recap. It was perfect, until you heard the gulls, chased inland from the shore by an approaching storm.

Aside from all of the unsettled feelings created by the Facebook Places privacy un-settings, there was other news coming out of the little “f” today: Facebook acquired Hot Potato. I’ve been a fan since Justin Shaffer first described the idea to me in the Times Square Hard Rock Cafe. Anything that sounds good over heavy metal and chicken fingers usually plays out well when there’s less ambient music and better food, and I was definitely a fan of the service.

Perfect fit for Facebook. Congrats to Justin and the team. I guess there’s even less of a chance that Justin’s blog will be updated this year.

I’ve entered one final writing contest this summer: Erika Napoletano challenged readers to come up with 300 words describing a picture. I made it well under the wire (time and count wise) this time, and you can see my tribute to urban cruft in the comments section of the entry announcing the contest.

Vote for a winner. I won’t even try to game the system and tell you to vote for me, because it’s not like I’m giving out great prizes over here to my loyal dozen or so readers (discounting family members paid to look for typos). But, like, I could use the prize, even if it’s a bag of Cheetos needed to complete my lying-down dog yoga pose.

One of the joys of having a bit of time off is that you can follow an interesting idea or thread to its illogical conclusion. There’s no concern about deadlines, work products, or meetings to snap you back to reality, pulling your head out of whatever cloud (private, public or hybrid) it was in at the time. Most recently, the interesting idea was thinking about how everything I learned in my first electrical engineering course can be explained by rock and roll, and the illogical conclusion involved the words “lethal voltage.” But I’m getting ahead of the story.

Amplification and sound reinforcement has always been a sideline interest. I’m pretty sure it started when I was taking clarinet lessons and always had fifteen spare minutes on either end, waiting in the music shop, to look at the electric guitars and basses and dream of being Ace Frehley or Gene Simmons rather than Benny Goodman (and if anyone comments that Billy Joel’s Scenes from an Italian Restaurant has a clarinet solo, I’ll force you to listen to “Lite FM” until your ears beg for mercy). First real hook was doing sound for a school event in the gym that let me run microphones and house music. Three years at WPRB-FM doing commercial production, engineering, and listening to everything from bluegrass to Blue Oyster Cult helped; at the same time I was taking intro level physics and EE courses and learning how the sounds were actually produced and amplified. The hook was set, deeply.

Two events propelled me forward in my love of all things loudness-related. First was the epiphany of understanding how an electric guitar produces sound. In my high school-physics addled brain, this made no sense — a steel string vibrating without microphone or any direct electrical connection to an amplifier produced sound. Throw in a real physics class taught by someone who understood magnetism (and therefore made it part of the curriculum) and a lot of time working on balanced inter-studio lines at the radio station and I finally “got” how pickups work, and in reverse, how speakers produce sound. The second event happened about three years ago, when Bubba and I were auditioning effects pedals at Sam Ash (OK, he was auditioning, I was paying for them). Each effect was merely shaping the waveform coming off of the guitar, and looking at the schematics I saw things that jolted quarter-decade old memories of Professor William “Supersonic” Surber, one of the highest output, greatest signal to noise ratio teachers I’ve ever had.

Everything I learned in that class could be explained by an effects pedal or an amplifier. I now wish I’d paid better attention every time he said “we used to do that with tubes.” One of my longer-term projects — setting the next hook — is to do a short lecture of basic EE circuit forms using nothing but an electric guitar, effects pedals and an amplifier. Let’s face it – learning about voltage controlled filters is not something everybody wakes up and wants to do, especially when it’s mid-November, you’re hung over from a Thursday night party, and you’re worried about the differential equations problem set you didn’t finish yet. I’d teach “VCF via FCA” – that is, Frampton Comes Alive, using the wah effects on Show Me The Way to demonstrate how a voltage controlled filter works. We’re well past visual or literal learners; we’re into audio processors.

Back to that too much time on my hands bit (modulo the Styx reference, thank you). I’ve discovered Ted Weber Loudspeakers and his tube amplifier kits. No pre-printed circuit boards, no step by step instructions. These come with a bag of parts, some basic construction foundations, and enough braided wire to hang yourself. You must love any website that warns potential builders to be comfortable working with potentially lethal voltages. Men will cook if dangerous open flame is involved (this explains tailgating, winter time grilling, and s’mores) and men will use science if other lethal side effects are possible (hence McGyver, James Bond, and audio engineers). I will wield Ohm’s Law like Thor’s hammer, but in a gentle way.

I talk a good game but I’m still a nerd at heart, and I ordered some basic literature on tube amplifiers just to refresh old EE knowledge and help me decide if I’m going to be paying the electrician and sheetrock contractor to repair whatever damage I cause when I power on my kit. The first book on the reading list is Morgan Jones’ Understanding Valve Amplifiers. I had a bit of trepidation, because (a) “valves” is both a very British and very dated (not always redundant) phrase for “tubes” (b) the author refers to himself in the third person in the intro and (c) he uses “whilst” in each of the first three sentences. But later in the first chapter, he is explaining how you might be fooled doing something as simple as measuring the current going through a light bulb, because the resistance of the bulb increases dramatically as it warms up. This is why light bulbs fail when hit hit the light switch: they get the most current going through them when cold.

It was one of those “so that’s how it works” moments. I’m hooked. Again. Time to clean up the soldering iron and clear a workspace, because I’m ordering the kit.

Robert Heinlein was the first science fiction author that I read. Not read as in one book or one story, but read as in going to the library (pre-Amazon days), finding every single piece of his work, and checking them all out early in the summer and using those long, hot days by the YMCA pool to work through what is essentially the sci-fi canon. In the 35 or so intervening years I’ve taken the same approach to Cory Doctorow, John Scalzi, Charles Stross, Greg Bear, and others, but Heinlein definitely imprinted a love of the genre.

Scalzi has a blog entry about Heinlein as seen through a new biography of his life, as part of Tor’s online forum dedicated to Heinlein. What I liked about Scalzi’s commentary was the way in which he captured Heinlein’s bad days as a writer. When I half-joked about crossing “writer” off of the potential career list, I did so knowing that there are authors who are more prolific and creative than me, and many late-night slots, plane trips and hours spent in proximity to outdoor water are made wonderful because of them. I never thought that being a writer meant having a bad day at the office. Scalzi shines the same light on science fiction authorship that Rush drummer Neil Peart aims at the rock and rock lifestyle in Road Show.

Here’s a point-counterpoint of the new and newer that’s left me scratching my head a bit. EPSPN Magazine and Stymie Magazine jointly announced a sports fiction contest, with the winner(s) gaining a highlight in ESPN, Stymie, or somewhere other than the tearsheet above the men’s urinal (or maybe there too, courtesy of the afore-mentioned bathroom print vehicle). The supposed deadline for notifications was “on or about July 15,” according to the rules posted online.

July 15th has come and gone. I called ESPN’s magazine editorial offices, left three messages, and haven’t heard a thing. No word back, not even a “not our department” return call. That’s not a healthy kind of arrogance, even if it’s just ignoring a call you have no idea how to handle, and it’s certainly not the kind of reader appreciation the print industry should be expressing at this juncture. I see issues getting smaller, not thicker, which means the print ad market isn’t supporting the editorial content like it once did. There’s nothing on the ESPN or ESPN Magazine websites that even acknowledges this contest, let alone an update on number of submissions, notifications or

The real story and timeline can be found on Stymie Magazine’s Facebook page. Not their website, mind you, but their other online home away from their online home. Turns out they didn’t get the submissions from ESPN editorial until July 18th (read down the update list), and they’re just now bucket-sorting them. So those of us who pushed to meet the deadline, met the length restrictions and otherwise played by ESPN’s rules will enjoy a much closer relationship with Stymie’s loosely-run and looser-knit community, while playing the waiting game.

And there’s the difference. Stymie, an online (until now) magazine, has an open line to its readers, makes them feel part of the editorial process, and lets them see the issues being crafted. ESPN, which I started reading when I felt Sports Illustrated wasn’t keeping pace with the changing face, faces and facets of sports, feels horrendously old school right now.

Short form: My friend Erik and I both have day jobs, but have talked for years about starting our own comics business. He’s the artistic one, the creative spirit, and knows his way around the watercolor aisle at Jerry’s Art Supplies. I’m the nerd, the sci-fi hound, the content manager, the business guy, and the annoying manager type. We’ve been friends since sixth grade, and Erik’s been drawing comic characters for as long as I’ve known him. The cost of entry, available fan base, and ability to mesh audience with content has never been lower, larger or easier (respectively).

So say “hello” to Amphibimen Comics. Follow us on Facebook, where you’ll find updates on our various ideas: t-shirts, art prints, stickers, of course some comic books, a chap book or ten and whatever else we can find ways to produce on a small scale (extremely limited edition figurines?)

There’s a backstory, as there always is: My late aunt and uncle owned a children’s clothing store, and one of the larger plush toys they sold was a very dapper looking frog, wearing a bow tie and notch collar, named “Neil”. I adored that stupid frog. It wasn’t healthy, and it went on for a while.

Between Erik and me, Neil The Frog became a minor super hero. He was battling evil with Jewish neuroses and all of the aplomb, gravitas and, well, hygiene you’d expect of a swamp guy who was forced into literal hemi-semi-formal clothing. This all went on very quietly until Erik and I were charged with painting windows for a high school event (OK, any Freehold Township residents, it was the very firstFTHS Battle of the Classes in 1980), and Erik drew Neil in a variety of superhero like poses, making (I thought) outstanding analogies to the sporting events we were supposedly promoting. Neil became our own goofy Olympic-caliber mascot. Our teacher advisor didn’t see eye to raised eye with us, and Neil’s debut on the wire-reinforced windows was somewhat short-lived.

Fast forward 30 years, and Erik and I have decided to bring the Amphibimen, their villanous rivals, and an assortment of other ideas out of Erik’s sketchbooks and into t-shirts and iPads everywhere.

I decided to spend some time working on writing projects as I’m between jobs. Seemed like a good idea – dust off some short story ideas, enter a few writing contests, polish up the blog a bit, and of course finish the mythical, much-discussed but oft-ignored hockey book. What I’ve really done is write two stories, polish a book excerpt as a short story, ignore the book and spend more time promoting Professional WordPress.

Here’s what I’ve learned about life as a scribe:

You’ll need a real job to pay the bills. Industry standard payment rates for short stories range from 5 to 10 cents a word. So that 3,500 word sci-fi story that involves faster than light travel and quantum wave fluctuations will net you about $250 if you’re lucky. Do this for the joy of seeing your name in print, or to grow your own brand awareness as a writer. Or better yet, because you love writing.

You need a lot of ideas. I’d always thought of writing as a serial affair, cranking out one idea and then moving on to the next. It’s a portfolio management exercise, like any other job. At any time, you need a good dozen ideas kicking around, so that if get a sudden flash of creativity or think of a clever artistic device you can immediately apply it to a work in progress. I guess this is why writers keep notebooks; I use Evernote to clip ideas from lifestream to appropriate wordstream.

There are a ton of magazines, online and print. I’ve always been fascinated by magazines: narrow interest, editorial mixed with reporting mixed with photos, regular content updates. Like news reporting (and the main reason to read newspapers, comic strips), magazines have bloomed in online only mode. Finding an outlet for your keyboard frustrations isn’t hard given resources like Duotrope, but you still have to write what the editors want the readers to read. More publications means more background reading and stylistic interpretation. I don’t really want to rewrite my short story about finding small miracles in Lake Placid, NY as a faith-based story, because it’s a hockey story first and foremost. Improving your writing is about finding your voice and then sticking to it, I think.

Deadlines help. I loved writing on deadline for SunWorld Magazine (OMG that was 15 years ago, and yes, I did submit columns via email). If I establish deadlines for the hockey book, it might get done. Having a writing schedule for Professional WordPress was critical to getting it done and avoiding scope creep.

Bottom line – I’ve learned quite a bit, have a much deeper appreciation for writers, editors, and publishers, and will not do the math comparing the hourly return on writing short stories to that of bagging groceries at Shop Rite.