The Cliché Finder is a fun little tool. It compares the list of clichés published in the Associated Press Guide to News Writing to your text and highlights any matches:

Ken Starr, who is spearheading the campaign to get the President,
says he’ll leave no stone unturned in his intensive investigation
to discover the true facts behind the latest sworn affidavit.

Taking leave from his prestigious law firm job, Starr has left
gentle hints that so far we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg.
He paints a grim picture of the the red-faced pillar of society
who has tried to sweep the facts under the rug.

Both sides have unleashed a storm of protest in the ongoing battle
for the reins of government. But defenders are few and far between
for the disgraced and dishonored President, who aides say is
nervous and distraught.

I don’t know if it’s particularly useful, but it won’t help you find that forgotten can of corn.

I’m somewhat obsessive/compulsive. Today, I finally took care of one of the little things that has bothered me for years: I reorganized our entertainment center.

I pulled out the TV out and vacuumed up two years of dust bunnies.

We have a pair of Sauder Audio Piers on either side of the TV. One we use for storage of movies, the other holds all of the various electronic bits that keep us entertained. Because of the heat build-up, I’ve had to keep the glass door opened for as long as I can remember (or whenever we got the XBox 360). With the addition of a PS3, and my general frustration at the dangling cables that were growing like weeds, I decided to pull everything out. After two hours of rearranging and cutting out air holes in the backing, I have the DVD changer, stereo receiver, cable box, HDMI switch and Linksys switch inside the cabinet with the the doors shut. There’s minimal heat being generated by the cable box, but it should be okay. The PS3, XBox 360, HD DVD drive and Vision camera are nicely sitting on top where they can vent heat unobstructed.

It’s the little things like disorganization that always end up distracting me. A couple hours of work and I feel a lot better. Tomorrow we’re going to finish loading our movies into the DVD player and connect a keyboard to it so we can enter the titles. Maybe this motivational streak will keep going long enough to finish my “honey do” list. I know Dena won’t complain about that.

I finally took some time out today and wrote myself a little WordPress plugin today (screenshot) that lets me manage the stories I write. The first step of this is to track the story, word count, and if it’s been submitted, accepted, and/or published. It gives me a nice little running synopsis of my progress for the year. You can see this now, on the right side of my blog.

The next step to this is a daily writing log, so I can track how much I’ve written each day. The statistics from that will be nice, such as average words/day, number of days since I’ve written, etc., but the motivational factor makes it worthwhile.

The last step will be an actual submission tracker. When I send a story off, I want to track where I sent it, how long it lived in the slush pile, etc. With enough data, it should provide some useful information about the lifecycle of a manuscript submission. I think this kind of tool would be useful enough to put up somewhere that anyone can use. I know about the black hole but I don’t think that’s an effective way to organize the data.