With their country in the midst of a colossal disaster – The Japanese citizens can teach plenty of lessons to the world:

1. THE  CALM: Not a single visual of  chest-beating or wild grief. Sorrow itself has been elevated.

2. THE  DIGNITY: Disciplined queues for water  and groceries. Not a rough word or a crude gesture. Their patience is  admirable and praiseworthy.

3. THE  ABILITY: The incredible architects, for  instance. Buildings swayed but didn’t fall.

4. THE GRACE  (Selflessness): People  bought only what they needed for the present, so everybody could get  something.

5. THE ORDER: No looting in shops. No  honking and no overtaking on the roads. Just  understanding.

6. THE  SACRIFICE: Fifty workers stayed back to  pump sea water in the N-reactors. How will they ever be repaid?

7. THE  TENDERNESS :Restaurants cut prices. An  unguarded ATM is left alone. The strong cared for the  weak.

8. THE  TRAINING: The old and the children, everyone  knew exactly what to do. And they did just that.

9. THE  MEDIA: They showed magnificent  restraint in the bulletins. No silly reporters. Only calm reportage. Most of  all – NO POLITICIANS TRYING TO GET CHEAP MILEAGE.

10. THE  CONSCIENCE: When the power went off in a store, people put things back on the shelves and left  quietly.

Since I wrote about reduced-functionality writing programs, and the benefits of a text tool with few or no bells and whistles, new ones have been popping up like spring lilies on Apple’s App Store. With prices ranging from free to $25 or more, they’ve become a really interesting genre of writing tools.

Of course, they are not without their drawbacks — no printing, saving only as plaintext, etc. They were all about nothing but providing a “clean piece of paper” approach to writing. Until now, that is. Yesterday, Byword appeared on the App Store’s “New and Noteworthy” page. It’s a functional “step up” from OmmWriter and Writeroom, maintaining the “plain piece of paper” interface, while allowing on-the-fly choices for rich text or plain text, printing, minimal formatting and saving to PDF. Nice. And exceptionally affordable, at $4.99 ($3.99 for the rest of today).

With the launching of the new blog (yes, this is going to be a blog), I need a new name. Gizmodia never went the way I wanted it to on Tumblr — it was supposed to be about techie things, and, while I’m pretty much a dedicated geek, I never did a particularly good job at writing about it. Mostly, I just ended up reposting random things that caught my eye. Sure, there were a few good posts that I’ll port back here and properly illustrate. But mostly, that site’s a waste of bandwidth, and about the only use I’ll have of it now is as a pipeline to updates on Facebook — and even that only worked on occasion.

So, anyway, a new name. I don’t think I want to bring back Blather de la Semaine, either, or any other old names I’ve used before (I can’t even remember most of them). This is supposed to be a more creative site about music, photography and writing. But what to name it? Suggestions are welcome.

I decided this morning to move my blogging back to my own domain, and go back to using WordPress (for now). Posts will still go to my Tumblr as links, and from there, on to my Facebook. Next, I’ll be looking for a simplified posting tool for WordPress (that runs on Macs and PCs)…

I’ve been playing around a bit with a very cool (and free) word processing … nay, writing … program called Ommwriter. They currently offer two versions. One is free, the other is cheap. It is available only for Mac, and you can get the paid version from Apple’s App Store. The free version is available at the OmmWriter web site.

To say this app is simple would not do it any justice, although it is pretty simple, as you can see if you watch their little introductory video:

Introducing OmmWriter D?na from herraizsoto&co on Vimeo.

The obvious focus of this software is creating a writing environment that is free from distraction. In my case, I have it set to display a completely blank screen, most of which is defined as writing space. Some quiet wind chimes play in the background as I type. The font is a simple, clean san-serif. And I have the key-click turned off, as the free keyboard sounds are pretty annoying. The pay version has a sound that is just like an IBM Selectric. Nice.

Ommwriter is not an ordinary word processor. There’s no formatting, setting of indents, outdents, tables, image insertion, or any of a myriad of other things that we’ve come to expect from a program like Pages or Word. Ommwriter is about writing. The usual user interface is a blank screen (or background image) with a blinking cursor. No menus, no inspector windows. Nothing. As I mentioned, I have just a blank screen that looks like a piece of paper.

I am tempted to type, “It was a dark and stormy night…” It would look quite appropriate.

At any rate, if you are a writer, and you use a Mac, you may wish to look into this. Or not.