Fighting Crime with Radioactive, Magical Mosquitos

At the Fireside today I plan on hand writing again.  I still haven't had any valuable insights about the process.  The thing that I keep coming back to is that it's slow.  Is slow more careful, deeper writing?  So far, not to my experience.  Is transcribing cool?  Does it add a special layer that I can't get through normal editing?  Not that I've seen, yet.  I'll hang onto that yet for a bit longer under the assumption that I'll still be learning more about the process over the next four weeks. 

 I don't have much choice as far as handwriting or not at this point because my options for Fireside writing are, well, let's see, hand write or pout, and I'm not big on pouting.

We do have a laptop in the house, my son's, an old powerbook he inherited from me.  Recently, somehow Snape ended up with a problem--the OS went bye bye for reasons unknown.  So, my original reasoning of "I'm not going to abscond with my son's computer every Tuesday for my own stuff" has become "and even if I wanted to, I couldn't use it."  So as a gift I'm going to take the poor Mac to the mighty techs and see what they can do with it.  

Tech voice in Kami's head:  Did you try starting it with a bootable CD?

Little kid sulky voice:  Yes

T:  Did you remember to hold down the c key?

L:  Tried that.

T:  What about the CD reader, does it sound like it's spinning?

L:  Yes!  I'm going to pout now.  See my lip?

I'm sure the boy would loan it to me if I asked, especially if I showed my lip, but this is good for me.  At least, I think it's good for me.  Is this just a case of me being stubborn?  Why do I want hand writing to be different, better, or at least teaching?

I guess because I haven't published yet and I want a magic radioactive writing mosquito to come along, annoy me by whining near my ear, land a couple times so I swat at it but it escapes with blinding mosquito speed, and then zap!  It bites me where I can't get to it and infuses my blood with that special something that turns me into The Belly Avenger!

Hey wait, I wanted a writing--

The Belly Avenger, mild-mannered housewife and goat wrestler by day,

Stop, no, I wanted--

Superhero by night, she fights crime with her hypnotic belly dancing, helping the helpless, saving the savingsless, and bringing jerks to justice.

Oh I give up!

Time to head to the place of all things good techie, Power Mac Pac.  See ya at the Fireside with my pen, paper, and apparently my hidden powers of belly dance.

Meet Abba

I gots me a new laptop! Yup, you read right! Me! A laptop!

Woot!

We spent about an hour and a half going through them at Best Buy with lots of help from two awesome sales associates. The one he found for us and that TC jumped on is an HP Pavilion TK-57. And before any of you say anything about our choice other than "Good call" or "Yay," I'll have you all know I tried to call everyone I knew with a laptop for recommendations (that means Carole and Steve, Kami, and my Mom, who just got a new one with help from computer whiz Curt), and absolutely no one was home (or near their phones). So I trusted to Fate, and Zack and Olympia and TC (and hey, how can you go wrong with a sales associate named Olympia?).

I'm very excited to get to know my new laptop. I'm calling him Abba, as in the bishop title, not the band. Though I kinda like the band. Maybe both are appropriate.

I have a huge learning curve, though, with Vista and the new Word program. And I asked about issues with the new Word program, remembering that Steve had major problems, so I feel somewhat girded for battle. I'll be playing with it today. No, I'm not currently using the laptop to write this--we pick it up today from the store, as I used their coolly dubbed Geek Squad to optimize it for me.

Whee! Laptop! I'm so excited!

Card in my pocket

I have a business card in my pocket for a salesman at Portland, Oregon's Power Mac Pac. Man I love those guys ...

It looks like there's a good possibility (keeping my fingers crossed) that we may be able to get an iMac by the end of November!! Okay, that was totally out of control there. I wasn't going to use any exclamation points. But I'm extremely excited. I was going to get a G5, but I found out that I'm waaaaaaay behind the times. For one thing, all the Macs now have dual processors, the primary (original) advantage the G5s had over iMacs when I was shopping for them. Another thing, with rare exceptions all the iMacs have CD and DVD burners. Who'da thunk? The sweetest part is that the older iMacs work fine with Apple's new, bulging Leopard version of OS X. I have to admit that my heart kinda sunk when I saw the advertising declaring "300 new features!" I don't want those features, dammit! But I don't want to be caught with an outdated operating system on the web again. And it turns out that we get Leopard free.

Yes, I said older. In this case, having an older iMac is a bit of an irony. You see, they're still on the market, but a certain company has made a heap of money on a wee thing called iPod and iPhones and that gave them the capability to produce fabulous new stuff. This fabulous new stuff got sent out while the 'old' iMacs were still brand new, they themselves having only recently come out. The new ones are only about $100 more and come with lots more memory, and are faster, etc. so these 'old' iMacs are now being discounted. This makes them affordable for us. Besides, there's not much point in a fractional amount of more speed when we're on dialup. As long as Leopard boots up blindingly fast, I could really care less.

I could blah blah blah about this a whole lot more, but right now I'm just basking in the possibility of, for example, accessing certain features of my blog that are invisible, being able to visit certain websites without crashing, having updated security protocols so that I can do online banking again (I used to online bank but last year in January the entire secure universe upgraded, leaving me behind) and so forth. And it'll be neat to peek at the weather forecast without actually opening the full webpage. I'm not sure how they pull that off, but it's fascinating, and brilliant for someone with dialup. Get me *just that* on the webpage, without the ads and stuff. And there she is. Yay!

Oops, I'm still blah blah blahing. I'll stop now.

So keep your fingers crossed for me that the Nissan doesn't break down or that I get a call from a relative who has a health emergency or some other such that will shatter my excitement in one swell foop. I can wait until next spring, but UHHHHHHH!

Kicking Frustration Out of My Way

Today is not starting as well as I'd like, so I'm taking aim and kicking the frustrating out of my way. And mainly, that is all computer stuff.

I tell you, if it weren't for needing an email to do quick correspondence, I'd be sore tempted to rid myself of the internet altogether. Sure, blogging is fun, but its been sporadic of late, both the ones I write and the ones I read. Email is fun to check, but usually its just my daily doses of newsletter stuff, like the weekly weather updates and my notes from the universe (which I do love) and the Ideal Bites on green living. Pretty much everything else is just time-taking stuff, like cruising through cool merchandise sites that encourage me to spend money (I ordered toys yesterday) or reading up on news I'd rather not read anyway, just because its there.

Which explains why I haven't been online much at all lately. No Messenger, just online once or twice a day to check email and cruise blogs. If I leave the computer on, I end up checking email everytime I pass (though if I checked earlier that morning, that's pretty much it for the day). I can feel myself slowly phasing out of the internet altogether and while I'm sure writer who depend on internet connections would poo-poo this, I can't help but feel that this is a much better state of mind for me to be in. I think if it weren't for my daily newsletters and blogging, I wouldn't be online much at all.

Which makes me think . . . would that be so bad? So far, I've gotten more writing done by not doing it on the computer. Can't surf the net as a distraction if there is no internet hooked up to your typewriter. My procrastination now end with clean cabinets and organized files rather than three hours wasted online with nothing to show except three lost hours. And nearly 75% of my stress comes from the computer. The antivirus won't work, the monitor freezes, the Word doc closes on me . . . I can't think of anything else in my life that causes me as much regular frustration as the computer does.

So I find myself getting away from it more and more. Thinking about how easy it would be to just pop down the hill and check email from the library computer. How much space I would have in the sitting room if we got rid of the computer desk.

Sure, I'll need a computer to plug in my ms's after I've finished with the rough draft, but that would be a swell thing for a laptop to do. Not connected to the internet and sitting back at the kitchen table like I do with my typewriter. Heck, I could even get one with a wireless modem and go hang out on the neighbor's porch and ride their wi-fi like they invited the neighborhood to do, or go have a sit down at Starbucks, do my email and call it good.

Man, it's a good thought. I really like that thought. I think I'll aim for that. Then I can add another rocking chair to the sitting room and maybe a low set of bookshelves for the expanding collecting of books and toys and when folks come over, we can hang out in the sitting room with tea and biscuits and the desk won't jut out into people's hips and the computer hum won't be an obnoxious drone. And I bet I could even keep up my blogs by writing them during my downtime here, then sending them when I wi-fi.

Hee. And now all my techie friends are shaking their heads because once again Ris is plunging herself three steps further back into the 80s.

Did I mention the toys I ordered are updates of the 1982 G.I. Joe articulated action figures?

Yo Joe!

Peering Through the Contruction

Slowly piecing my days back together, but it's been slow going lately. It seems to take more time to prepare and then debrief after a vacation than it does to actually take the vacation itself. Add the fact that my Mom underwent elective surgery on Friday and will need help at home for at least the next week, and my days have slowly not become my own. If they ever really are, having a toddler and a dog and a husband to keep up with three-quarters of the time. I've given myself permission to take the one quarter that is mine when I'm not doing dishes and cooking and keeping up with the places to do whatever sounds relaxing. Like reading far too many comic books or watching back to back mystery shows on TV.

Which means not a lot of script writing happening. But I'm still muddling through.

In other news, we are piecing the computer back together, now, too. It's running faster and with less errors since TC did a hard core system restore, but now we have to weed out all the newer programs that the restore corrupted (like Norton, unfortunately--I'm back to emailing them to get Live Update to run again) or deleted, like my Word program. Which isn't a big--I have the disk for the Word program. I just haven't dug it out of the basement boxes yet. And TC's graphics card. Everything is HUGE on the screen right now and slightly pixeled at times. But it's nice to be able to boot up and run programs without waiting ten times longer than what we should, and my new spysweeper program, which I got up and running again with very little difficulty, totally rocks.

I'm still jonesing for a laptop though. I eyed the cheapies on sale for Father's Day, but I think I'm going to wait out the next six months and go for a nice, low end Mac laptop at the beginning of next year. Because I just read about this cool writing program that combines notes, research and does lots of neat formatting and it is only available on a Mac. And TC's games don't run on a mac, so he won't be tempted to abscond with it. And I do miss our old Mac . . .

I guess Kami's infected me with all her talk of a new Mac. Change is good, though.

But for now, the Lady Gray is calling my name. Time to get typing so I can at least make a show of keeping up with Script Frenzy.

Low-teching It

This weekend I'll be purchasing a typewriter. I've been wanting one again for years, actually, not much longer than I sold my old one to the English Department for use by the teaching assistants. Computers were the Big New Thing with the internet exploding all over the place and I just lost my head, I think. Plus I was trying to be helpful to the other T.A. who didn't want to use the ancient machine we'd been given. And I needed the money.

No more! I want a typewriter! I have a dream, and it's a good dream, of sitting at my kitchen table in the morning, a cup of coffee at hand, two stacks of paper to the side, one stack blank, the other my continuing rough draft, and my typewriter humming along with the birdsong until my clack clack clackety clack drives all the birds away from the back porch. No internet. No word program crashing half way through writing up my script synopsis (grrrrr), no sitting where I'm the first thing everybody in the house sees, where the TV can grab for my eyeballs and the clutter in the living room stabs at my sense of cleanliness.

Just me, my coffee (which I now have the ability to make!), my stacks of papers and my typewriter. And maybe a plate of madeleines. And my dictionary. And music on the cd player.

Ooo, I'm so looking forward to this weekend!

At the Port

I finally got back to work on Masks after being very bad and writing, oh, about 14,000 words on the 'short story' project which is now definitely a novel. The threat of having no choice but to get a PC when I update my computer (thanks Ris for the reminder) kicked my butt into gear. And it's not like tormenting Mark is no fun.

When I next write, priests will be knocking on his door. Mwa ha ha! The feedback I've gotten on this version so far has related the following:

Want more evil priest action
Want Mark to show training more
Want to know more about the religion
Want to see Master Evan be more calculating
Intrigued by Gutter

I will take care of this, oh yes I will ...