I'm screwing with the template here. Things may go squirrelly. Brace yourselves.

One of the completely surprising Christmas presents I received this year came from a chap I hardly knew up until a month or so ago - James McNally of the excellent Consolation Champs blog.

I think we may have bumped into each other's blogs somewhere along the way, and one of James' other blogs (Toronto Screen Shots) came up in conversation at the office several times when we used to look after the TH!NKFilm account. James has been blogging even longer than me - he started in the summer of 2000. You could get lost for hours just browsing through his archive - it's terrific stuff.

Cutting a long story short, James and I met up for lunch just before Christmas. Excellent session in which plates of fish & chips were polished off along with a couple of pints of Guinness, and the world in general was set to rights. Pretty much what you'd expect when two Irishmen get together for a nosh.

Completely out of the blue, a few days later, James very generously made me a present of a one-year Flickr Pro subscription. A simple and easy thing to do, I guess, but what a lovely and thoughtful gift.

I've been feeling a little guilty in the last few weeks, as the time ticks down on that Pro account without me doing anything with it. So tonight I finally installed the latest Flickr upload tool and I've started squirting a handful of photos up there, getting familiar with Flickr again.

This post, then, is mainly an opportunity to thank James for the lovely thing he did, and also an excuse to point to what is one of my favourite family photos of all time.

This is my Dad and my daughter Lily, hanging out before her First Communion last year. The look of pride on Da's face says it all.

Checking in on my Flickr account just now, I see that I did actually upload this photo some time ago - but what the heck, I still love it. There's another, very similar shot, taken a few seconds later, but there's just something about this particular photo that does it.

Inspiration can pop up in the most surprising places. Words of wisdom are often found where you'd least expect to encounter them.

At Christmas, some good friends of ours gave Charlie a copy of Madeleine L'Engle's "A Wrinkle in Time". I picked it up a few days ago and just finished it last night.

I only heard about this book for the first time last year. Seems it's a very popular and well-known children's book over here in Canada, even winning a coveted Newbery medal in 1963. But growing up in England, somehow Ms. L'Engle's work just never showed up in my circle of influence as a child.

It's a distinctly odd, but utterly delightful book - well worth a read, whatever age you happen to be.

At the back of the paperback edition I was reading, there are a couple of extras thrown in to pad it out a bit. I like that - kind of the old skool version of the special features on a DVD.

One of the pieces included is the acceptance speech Madeleine L'Engle delivered on receiving the Newbery. There's a section in the speech that really resonated for me, so I thought it was worth sharing here.

Discussing the act of writing and the challenge of coming up with stuff that will stimulate and expand young minds, she says:

So how do we do it? We can’t just sit down at our typewriters and turn out explosive material. I took a course in college on Chaucer, one of the most explosive, imaginative, and far-reaching in influence of all writers. And I’ll never forget going to the final exam and being asked why Chaucer used certain verbal devices, certain adjectives, why he had certain characters behave in certain ways. And I wrote in a white heat of fury, “I don’t think Chaucer had any idea why he did any of these things. That isn’t the way people write.”

I believe this as strongly now as I did then. Most of what is best in writing isn’t done deliberately.

Do I mean, then, that an author should sit around like a phony Zen Buddhist in his pad, drinking endless cups of espresso coffee and waiting for inspiration to descend upon him? That isn’t the way the writer works, either. I heard a famous author say once that the hardest part of writing a book was making yourself sit down at the typewriter. I know what he meant.

And I think I know exactly what he meant, and what Madeleine L'Engle meant too.

The hardest part of writing is just writing. Sitting down, every day if possible, and just writing. Everything else just comes.

It can be hard to do - and it gets even more painful when you haven't done it for a while. But when you do it regularly, it gets better and starts to feels easier. Want to become a better writer? Then write.

(The full text of Ms. L'Engle's speech is online, btw. It's a good read.)

Catching up on feed reading over the last week or so, I was entertained by a post at Mathew Ingram's blog that mentions the Dunbar Number.

As Mathew describes it, Dunbar's Number is "a theory that Robin Dunbar came up with, to describe what he thought was the maximum number of people that one could interact with on any kind of personal level. Dunbar figured the average was around 150." It's an interesting thought.

The moment I read this, it reminded me of something I'd stumbled across a few months back and had completely forgotten to blog about. Looking through my my del.icio.us tags, I found I still had a link to this lovely Wikipedia entry that describes the concept of the Erdos-Bacon Number. [EDIT: Seems Firefox, or Blogger, chokes on the umlaut in Erdos, darn it - I've had to strip it out]

As the Wikipedia article explains, "An individual's Erdos–Bacon number is the sum of one's Erdos number—which measures the "collaborative distance" in authoring mathematical papers between that individual and Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos—and one's Bacon number—which represents the number of links, through roles in films, by which the individual is separated from actor Kevin Bacon."

The Erdos–Bacon number game is similar to the idea of Dunbar's Number, in some ways. Both thoughts could probably trace their origins back to Stanley Milgram's "small-world experiment" of the 1960s which, in turn, led to the idea that everyone on the planet is roughly six degrees of separation away from everyone else (as popularised by John Guare in his 1990 play, by the undergraduate game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon and, for a while there in the late 90s, by an early social networking site).

So this got me thinking...

Mathematicians can have an Erdos number, measuring the collaborative distance between them and some extraordinarily prolific Hungarian mathematician (Erdos apparently wrote academic papers with a total of 502 co-authors in the course of his career).

Actors (and others) get to have a Bacon number, defining their collaborative distance from that hard-working actor (including, notably, the late Pope John Paul II - who apparently had a Bacon number of 3).

But what's the equivalent numbering schema for the blogosphere?

Six Degrees of Robert Scoble? Nah, too obvious.

The Engadget Number? Hmmm... too impersonal.

Trouble is - the blogsphere is such an amorphous, multi-headed beast that narrowing the numbering system down to any one blog or blogger is just too limiting. As with the Erdos-Bacon thought, we need a compound numbering system to level the playing field a little (and, well just because it's more fun).

Ladies, gentlemen, bloggers of all stripes - I give you: The Doctorow-Arrington Number.

In the best tradition of such things, an individual's Doctorow-Arrington Number is the sum of that individual's Doctorow number and their Arrington number (well, duh). The Doctorow number measures one's collaborative distance from prolific Boing Boing contributor, electronic freedom fighter, author, and all-round good egg Cory Doctorow. The Arrington number, of course, is a measure of steps of separation between an individual and TechCrunch uber-blogger Mike Arrington. Put 'em together and what've you got? (Bibbety Bobbety Boo *cough*).

For the record, btw: both Boing Boing and TechCrunch are currently listed in the top five most popular blogs according to Technorati. There are other, more popular blogs I could have gone with, but... well they're just not as much fun.

Now, as we're discussing things in the blogosphere, "collaborative distance" requires a little extra definition. Anyone can comment on a post at TechCrunch, but does that mean they're only one degree of separation from Mike Arrington? I think not. Similarly, lots of people pick up the stories at Boing Boing and point to them from their own blogs - but mere trackbacks do not count here.

So here's a handy guide to calculating your Doctorow-Arrington number. Just as in the Erdos-Bacon game, the lower your total number the better.

First, determine your Arrington Number by figuring out how you'd score on the following scale:

10: You subscribe to TechCrunch and read the feed regularly
9: You know Mike Arrington's email address (not hard)
8: You've been called an idiot by Arrington in a comment thread at TechCrunch
7: You've met Mike Arrington in person at some industry schmoozefest (again, not hard)
6: Mike actually responds to your emails
5: You have Mike's cell phone number
4: You've met Mike Arrington in person at his home
3: Mike links to you, like, all the time
2: You once worked for or with Mike, or were on the board of some startup with him
1: You currently work for or with Mike, or are a close family member
0: You are Mike Arrington

Secondly, let's figure out your Doctorow number - your collaborative distance from Cory Doctorow - using the following handy scale:

10: You took the kids to Disney last year
9: You have read all the books (but not on the Kindle, goodness no!)
8: You've downloaded/listened to podcasts of/shared/mashed up/translated or otherwise enriched any of the books
7: You met Cory at some giant industry geekfest event somewhere
6: You or your blog have been Boing Boinged
5: You have an email or phone-based relationship with Cory
4. You worked with Cory at Open Cola or some other gig along the way
3. You sit on a board with Cory at ORG, EFF, or elsewhere
2. You are Mark Frauenfelder, Xeni Jardin, David Pescovitz, John Battelle, or Joel Johnson
1. You are Cory Doctorow
0. You are Randall Munroe

Simple. Now add the two together, and you have your official Doctorow-Arrington number.

I think my personal Doctorow-Arrington number is a rather dismal 10. But then, as Doc recently pointed out "...the best of blogging isn't measured by influence, popularity, traffic ... In fact, I'm not sure what makes blogging good is measurable at all. That's because what makes blogging good is nothing more than being interesting, useful or both."

Indeed. And it occurs to me as I finish writing here that this over-long post is an example of neither. Still, it tickled me for a short while. To bed...

It's sort of ironic, really.

When I first started blogging, in early 2001, I was already working on the agency side and very focused on accounting for my time during the day in billable increments. Back then, I'd get pangs of guilt if I took time out to draft blog posts during working hours - knowing that it was not something my employers really understood or saw much value in.

Now, of course, things have changed considerably. I'm happy to be able to say that I work for an enlightened employer who not only understands the merits of blogging - it's actively encouraged as a part of my daily job. The pain is that, of late, I've had precious little time either during the day or at home in the evenings to keep up this thing.

January is always a busy time in this business - new annual PR plans settling into place, new budgets getting confirmed, and lots of new business opps knocking on the door. But I do miss the old blog when I don't look after it for a while. Must try to give it more love in the months ahead - it's hard to explain, but I do feel so much better when I'm blogging than when I'm not.

So. There's a few proper posts in the works, but let's take care of some outstanding business first.

1. Best wishes for a speedy recovery to my boss, Joe Thornley. Joe's just had a pretty unpleasant medical incident which, naturally, he has blogged about. Get well soon, Joe. It's weird not having you around.

2. A hearty welcome to two new Thornley Fallis colleagues - Bob LeDrew and Michael Seaton. Two terrific blokes with two great blogs. Great to have these two on the team.

3. Mentioning Bob's "Flacklife" blog reminds me that he and I are in the second round run offs for this year's Canadian Blog Awards.

We've both been nominated in the "Best Business/Finance Blog" category. At the risk of spiking my chances entirely, I'll confess that it feels a little odd to find myself under this heading - I've only ever written one thing here about "Finance", as far as I know (although it's a little thing I'm still inordinately proud of), and while I am indeed in business, I've never really considered this a "business blog" per se. Still - I guess Uninstalled isn't a perfect fit for any of the other categories either.

What ever happens, I'm tickled to have been nominated (for the second year in a row - yay me!), and delighted to find myself in the company of some fine bloggers, including (in addition to the aforementioned Mr. LeDrew) the Canadian Silver Bug, Christian Parsons' Idea Drunk, the excellent Kate Trgovac's My Name Is Kate, a blog I hadn't come across before called Canadian Free Stuff (um... I guess that's about as much as Business/Finance blog as Uninstalled is), and Heath Slawner's particularly fine Major Persuasion.

The voting is open until end of day, January 30th. Good luck to all!

About to head out the door to CES in Vegas. Lots of stuff I have to catch up on here - plus lots of work there. Happy New Year all. See you in the desert.