Intersection Logs

Today I took my old, thoroughly retired Behemoth laptop back to the store from whence it came, and they gave me nearly $50 in trade-in for it. Which is ... about three per cent of what I paid for it in 2004, but better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. I feel at least ten pounds lighter with it gone -- it always was an unwieldy lump of a thing, even before it succumbed to WinXP-rot and slowed to a crawl.

Then I put the trade-in gift-card towards a basic e-reader -- a Sony Pocket Edition, which lacks a lot of the bells and whistles of more recent gadgets -- it doesn't have a touch screen or wireless or even an expansion slot, but it works fine for what I want. This way, while my dead trees are in transit I can read without being dependent on the Palm's not-so-great battery.

There was a cardinal in the oleander hedge as I went out this morning. Female, I think, or juvenile, or in off-season plumage; not bright red all over, anyway.

Someone was using an iPad in our local coffee shop this afternoon -- the first one I've seen in the wild, though I've briefly handled one of the display models in the bookstore (and promptly got lost in the interface. Wrong kind of intuition.)

I haven't used my DVD player for a while, and when I came to it this evening, the remote was dead, dead, dead, and not to be revived with batteries. No point replacing it at this point; I suppose I might try a cheap universal remote. Failing that, I can always watch movies on the computer.

I bought a bunch of Tor books today and yesterday. On barnesandnoble.com.

Some of them were books I would have bought in a few weeks anyway, from that Other Retailer. Some of them were hardcovers for which I would have rather waited for the MMPB, but there doesn't appear to be one in sight. That feels a bit like rewarding Macmillan for what from my point of view as a reader is undesirable behavior -- delaying the paperback past the year or so that I've come to expect over the last couple of decades -- but it isn't the authors' fault. And a couple of them were just because.

(EDIT: I know I'm very fortunate to be in a position to do this sort of thing now and again. For quite a while now, the main constraint on my book buying has been reading time, followed by storage space. That's not so for everybody, and it may not be so for me next year, but for now I'm making the most of it.)

The site worked pretty well, and looks clean; it hung once on my outdated Linux Firefox, but that didn't cause any real problems. Their free shipping doesn't come with a capriciously-enforced arbitrary delay; on the other hand they do charge (or at least "put a hold") up front for pre-orders. And I kind of want a Nook, now, but that doesn't make sense at this juncture.

I have no idea what the answer is to the larger questions raised by the whole ebook mess. ( Read more... )

1) It hadn't occurred to me before, but given the recent proliferation of small, fingertip-operated touch-screens as seen in smart phones everywhere, and the expansion of camera-back LCDs, I suppose the emergence of the touch-screen camera was inevitable. My immediate reaction was that I get enough fingerprints on my camera display as it is ...

2) I'm not enthused by the way the netbook market has gone. Everyone seems to have standardized on 10.1 inch screens, which are hardly enough smaller and lighter than my 12-inch, four-poundish Butterfly to be worth the trouble. Also, M$ has come up with a really mean trick; the Starter Edition of Win7 has desktop customization disabled. I haven't seen a non-customizable desktop since before Windows 3, and I enjoy displaying my favorite photos that way. Fair enough not to include the rotating-desktop function of the fancier Win7 versions, but to allow no customization at all is a fairly blatant attempt to drive people to upgrade -- at a price that's a fair fraction of the cost of the netbook. (Also, if there's no second-monitor support, would it even work for showing Powerpoint on a projector?) There are still XP models available, but buy a seven-year-old operating system on a new machine? I don't think so. So if I was to get a new netbook, it would end up being another Linux one, and I may as well live with the limitations of the 7-inch Eee for a while longer.


Edit (11.27): And five days later, I bought myself a cute little red Eee 1005. With XP, as that seemed like the least of the three evils, and I had a hunch it wouldn't be around much longer. The irony is that it has a better webcam than the one on the dragonfly laptop.

I made one strand of another two-strand necklace tonight, cut the wire for the second strand a bit short, loaded it up with beads, tried it around my neck in front of the mirror to see if it would work before I closed the last crimp, and scattered beads the length of the apartment when the end slipped through my fingers.

In other frustrations, it took me far too long to figure out the right combination of server and user info to set up the new mail account that Compuserve is giving me to replace my defunct Classic account. I don't even really need another email address, particularly that one; since I got broadband I mostly kept that account open for the dial-up access when I visited my mother. At least I did manage to set up the POP account in the end, so I won't have to deal with their obnoxious ad-laden webmail site with added AOL cooties.

The local weather forecasters were just showing off their new 3d radar system, a few weeks before they expected to have to use it.

I just bought my very first e-book -- a Mobi version of LOTR, from Harper Collins e-books. Don't ask me for a link there -- the website navigation is idiosyncratic -- but it worked, and it's sitting on my Palm. Thanks to kate_nepveu over at tor.com for the heads-up! Now perhaps that reread I've been hankering after can actually happen, with the book always in my purse and not taking up any space there.

LOTR and Voyage are the things I make exceptions for, the things that lure me into new technologies. (My first VCR. Two cable TV subscriptions and an upgrade to digital cable. A copy of the books in each city I call home. DVDs, and then a DVD player so I could watch them in comfort ...)

My color printer decided to celebrate its fourth birthday by having a mild hissy-fit this evening. The yellow and magenta inks were running low, and when I went to print something it decided the magenta was out, so I replaced that. Then I wanted to print some photos -- and the cyan, which wasn't remotely low, wasn't coming out. I did a nozzle clean, in the middle of which it sat down and insisted on a new tank of yellow -- and then it seemed to be okay.

Also, my eleven-year old TV set (dead basic 19" CRT, but quite adequate to my needs) is jist starting to flutter alarmingly when turned on, though it seems to settle after a while. I seem to remember that sort of behavior being an early sign of senescence in CRT monitors, back in the stone age. I'm on digital cable anyway, so the postponed digital switchover wasn't enough incentive to replace the thing.

If you were designing a digital alarm clock and could only spare one LED to designate AM/PM, why would you have it light up for AM rather than PM?

I treated myself to a new clock radio with an iPod dock. The theory is that I might be more inclined to go to bed earlier if there was something on before midnight that I wanted to listen to; my NPR station fills its dead air with jazz, which I don't care for, until the BBC comes on at midnight, but it's the only thing I can stand to listen to in the morning. The gadget is ridiculously high-tech, self-setting and daylight-savings-time observant, though unfortunately not cognizant of non-daylight-saving timezones. I had to take the iPod out of its rubber skin to dock it -- the first time it's been naked since I brought it home; it looks quite different and unfamiliar. Of course I'll have to reskin it in a couple of days to take it on my travels.

They're already putting out the Valentine's stuff in Target. They also had a couple of Eees on display -- 9" screen ones, with Linux, for $299, but no specs visible.

I went shopping today, and came home with more or less what I was after: ( Read more... )