So I'm coaching the junior boys' volleyball team at my high school this year. The athletes look fantastic, and picking the team is proving difficult.

One thing I like to do is see how they react to weirdness, and distraction. I get them to serve, one at a time, and we do penalties for each one missed (like push-ups or "burpees"). Next, they serve again, but I stop each kid before their serve and ask a question, just to throw their rhythm. Here is a list of some of the questions, and the actual answers I got. Let me stress, too, that every single answer was stated as a question, or better put, as a guess.

Q: What is the capital of Canada?
A: Quebec?

Q: What's eighty-one minus thirty-seven?
A: Like, sixty-something?

Q: What's the capital of Nova Scotia?
A: Manitoba?

I asked this next one as a joke, but the answer was given with dead seriousness.

Q: How many wheels are there on an 18-wheeler?
A: Uh, four?

However, this question was answered before I could even finish it:

Q: Who founded Micros--
A: Bill Gates.

Did I mention they're great athletes?

I waited a long time for the new Apple/Motorola phone. My current Motorola phone was a very sturdy and long-lived StarTac, and I love Apple, so the combination of the two seemed like a perfect marriage. And I wanted to stay loyal to these companies, to support the excellent products I had experienced previously.

But after a string of delays in introducing the phone, I caved and bought the Palm Treo 600 instead. And I love it. It has a camera, cell phone, keyboard, PDA and MP3 player all built into one slick little device. (I will write a bit more about this purchase later.) So I was terrified of buyer's remorse when the ROKR phone was unveiled earlier this week.

Thankfully, by my judgement (and the popular analysis), this phone is a major flop. Rather than repeat what is being said, you can read up on it yourself, here.

I admit I am an Apple zealot. What is even worse is that I don't own anything from Apple, unless you count iTunes and Quicktime software. I love following their new gear, so when I saw that Steve Jobs' intro of the new iPod nano and the Motorola ROKR phone was available for viewing online, I rushed over there to check it out. That's when things went wonky.

The sound and video was so choppy that it was impossible to watch. I figured the servers must be overloaded with people watching, but that seemed a bit amateurish for Apple. After some investigating, I saw that the web site had autodetected that I was using Quicktime 7, so it sent me the H.263 version of the video. H.263 is a highly compressed standard that downloads quickly, but relies on the processing power of your computer to show the video correctly. Sounds great, except that my computer isn't fast enough to display it. And there was no way for me to select the non-H.263 version of the video! So I had to actually uninstall iTunes, track down Quicktime 6 on the internet, install that older version, and then bingo, I was able to view the video perfectly.

The worst part is that there is no way to install iTunes without Quicktime 7, to my knowledge. Boooo Apple! Boo!

Oh well, Guess I have to upgrade my computer to... hey, how about a Powerbook?

Be careful of your typing. Hoping to see a video of Steve Jobs introducing the new iPod nano, I accidentally misspelled the domain and ended up here.
Was I happy to discover that there is such an organization as the "Association for the Alignment of Past Life Experience?" Yo Holla! But me wanna see shiny iPod, dammit!

I failed. That's the short story of my attempt to write a long story. Not only did I fail to write a winning novel, after paying my $50, I didn't even submit what I had written. Here's why I still consider the weekend to be a huge success.

Like many self-proclaimed "writers" that I know, I have a hard time writing unless I feel I am... how do I put this?... allowed to. What this means is that you have to let yourself feel okay about spending large amounts of effort doing something that is, by most estimations, entirely worthless, and practically indistinguishable from wasting time. One friend holed up in Montreal for two months, and told me about how he spent the first week or so telling himself that he had permission to write; his brain kept chiding him that he was crazy to think his thoughts were deserving of record, and that his ideas were small and had no value.

I think this is the difference between writers and wannabes. I did my best writing when I was in a university writing course, and I was forced to spend hours on my work. I had to write. Of course it makes sense: you spend the time, you get the result. For me, unless there is someone with a legitimate claim on my results, someone who expects and cares about the outcome, I can't rationalize spending hours crafting prose when I could be completing other tasks with predictable, worthwhile outcomes. Like cleaning the bathroom.

In Stephen's King's book "On Writing," he warns that if you're not driven to write all the time, if you don't need to write, you should avoid writing as a career. But I suspect that the need was sapped from me (or perhaps I let it leak) when I let my commercial options lead me, instead of pursuing what actually interested me.

I only mention this because last weekend made me need again. Sure, I didn't write what I consider a finished novel. What I did was live a reasonable life, late mornings, with dinner and party visits, and long, satisfying stretches of writing at other times. I produced one hundred pages of fiction, with a plot that I like, but with a need for lots of character development and rewriting.

Let me say that again: I wrote one hundred pages of fiction. In three days. And I wasn't exhausted and manic. Maybe if I'd gotten up early and avoided all outside contact I could have gotten finished. Who knows. I don't care. What I care about is that at that comfortable rate, I could easily write four hundred pages in three weeks. Then, I could take a couple weeks off, relax, and return for another two weeks of editing.

So for $50, I discovered that writing a novel fits easily into my next summer vacation.