Category Archives: Cyberspace & Technology

Just Great

The day began at 5:15, when Liam woke up. Exactly three days after HRH came home with a cold, the boy has it. I discovered when I woke up at this ungodly hour in response to the boy’s pitiful wail that so do I. That makes three colds for both of us in the space of four weeks.

I do not operate well on five to six hours of sleep. I’m an eight to nine hour kind of person. There have been very few full nights of sleep for me over the past month, be it due to insomnia, illness, or something unidentifiable that kept waking me up.

Blend all of the above, and you have two cranky people in the house today. Joy.

If you want me, I’ll be in the corner muttering darkly about the injustice of it all.

ETA: Also? The Sympatico web mail log-in thing never works for me. Ever. I hate it. I should be able to access my main e-mail no matter what.

ETA #2: Oh, after an hour of searching in frustration, I discovered that it’s because web access is *not* actually bundled with my regular internet service, like it says all over the place on the web site. I have to subscribe to and pay for an extra service in order to access my mail. I hate corps and badly designed/explained services. ARGH!

fps 2007 Charity Auction!

First things first: Today marks the launch of the annual fps on-line charity auction! It will go live on eBay later today (that’s November 23 2007, for anyone reading this in an RSS feed). Every year the fps readership chooses a different charity to whom the proceeds of this auction will be donated, and in the past recipients such as the Canadian Cancer Society have benefited from an astonishing amount of money raised through this charitable venture. This year’s recipient charity is the Canadian Cancer Research fund. There’s a slew of awesome stuff like DVD box sets, books, animation artwork, t-shirts, software, posters, and rare limited-edition collectibles such as pins, promotional items, books, commemorative stamps and PVC figures to bid on. It’s the perfect opportunity to find something special for the animation fan in your life. (Or, you know, buy stuff for yourself. You deserve special cool stuff too.)

fps On-Line Charity Auction 2007

Please help us spread the word, and to raise funds to help improve the quality of life for those living with cancer.

(As soon as the auction is live, that image will become a direct link to it.)

Randomness

Wow; rereading my monthly Liam round-up, it must seem as if all we do is watch TV and movies with him. We don’t, of course. It’s just that they leave such an impression on him that they’re what he talks about and re-enacts and incorporates into his play.

It’s getting harder and harder to write these monthly posts. I have an ongoing draft in which I note things down all month, but when it comes time to actually expand them and link everything together in some sort of semi-coherent order, it takes longer and longer. I may start evolving them into a slightly different format. I have no idea what just yet, but something different, to save sanity and time.

I finished editing my 2002 YA novel at a writing jam last night. Next on the list of things to do: write up a precis, chapter summaries, a hook, craft a query letter and sort through all the agents I’ve bookmarked. You know, in between all the parenting and writing the other, actually contracted, book.

I’m so tired, though, that I think I’ll take a short nap then settle down with some hearthcraft research books before I have to go pick the boy up. He woke himself up coughing at 5:15 this morning, and as I hadn’t been able to get to sleep till midnight-thirty, my eyes are now rather dry and red and my brain is pretty fried.

Jam Sessions!

Three days after I bought my first new DS game, I have bought my second. Now I, too, can make music on my DS!

Jam Sessions was worth my money for the ear training exercises and the free play mode alone. I only know two of the twenty songs included in the game (non-game? bah) so the playing-along mode is pretty useless to me, unless I use it for ear training as well. If I used effects more than I do in real life I’d be more excited about the wide variety of sound alteration available to the player. The basic guitar sound is fine on its own for me. All in all, this is pretty flexible for messing about with. The recording option is convenient and I’m looking forward to using it, although at the moment I don’t know how much music it will hold. Have I already composed original chord sequences for verses and bridges? Yes. Do any of them match the three sets of lyrics I have written within the past eighteen months? No. Of course not.

I have discovered one drawback so far. The way the DS has to be held and the buttons pressed and the stylus moved all at once means my hands get tired from supporting the weight and stretching, as the original DS is a hefty little thing. Makes one wish for a DS Lite. In candy apple red, of course (or what they’re calling crimson in the new limited edition bundle).

ETA: I should clarify something lest someone leap to an incorrect conclusion. Yes, I have a couple of perfectly good instruments, and yes, I make up music with them, and yes, this program is but a hollow shade of what a real guitar would be like. My problem is that my instruments play only one or two notes at once, and thus I can’t get the subtle colour difference that (for example) a Cm versus a Cm7 chord can provide. If I’m writing an ensemble piece it’s easier for my brain to begin with a chord that sounds right for the rhythm guitar, which I can then break down into its key component notes and pass them to different melodic lines. And I don’t know what chord is going to sound right unless I hear it, and as I don’t own a chord instrument or have the time to learn one, this works pretty well for me. It saves a time, and a lot of calls and repetitive questions fielded by my guitarist. Also, it’s fun. I like it when learning tools are fun.

Busy

Today:

Went to Best Buy to get a new CD player for Liam’s room, and naturally it was out of stock. This was so that we could once again use the nice relaxing CDs we played when he was much younger, before the first CD player died and left us with only the radio. (Anything to try to recapture the normal sleep routine.) What I didn’t do at Best Buy: walk through the DS games aisle to see what was there, which is a pity because I just checked on line and apparently they have Jam Session in stock! I forgot it was being released today. Argh.

Picked up a couple of small baskets at the dollar store for assorted odds and ends on my new closet shelves. Finally remembered to buy foam brushes so that I could stain the door of my office.

Did the tour of the pet store and little bookstore, as we always do while we’re running errands at the mall. Did not buy the adorable Abyssinian kitten, or the fluffy and killer-cute Golden Lab puppies that scampered back and forth with Liam and licked his hands through the glass. (Obviously they didn’t actually lick him, but he knew what they were doing and giggled and said “Puppies lick Liam!” anyway.) Did not buy books, but not for want of trying: Liam went through several but handed each back to me with a calm “Thank you, no, Mama”, and the book I was looking for wasn’t in stock.

Bought Liam a track expansion set for his trains.

Unexpectedly bought myself my first DS game: Brain Age II, as it was on sale for $15. (Why the second and not the first? Because it had a music game on the back cover.) This marks the first game I have actually purchased instead of borrowing. Now addicted; I enjoy this sort of game. I am the poster girl for casual gamers and people interested in non-games (please, someone come up with a better industry label). Must go back and buy the original Brain Age and Big Brain Academy very soon. The sale’s on for another week.

The boy went down for his nap with a minimum of fuss, only screaming for about twenty-five seconds before settling down to play and fall asleep. He napped for an hour and a half.

Stained the French door we hung in the doorway to my office months ago while the boy slept.

Played trains and Brain Age with the boy, who was very interested in helping me write letters on the touch screen. Not so helpful were his random decisions to draw letters completely unrelated to what was going on: “Letter… B!” “No, Liam we need a letter N!… Oh, drat.” “Your score is: negative six trillion.” Also, during a different exercise he kept talking at the game when the DS was trying to recognize our voice response, so we kept getting those answers wrong too. But we had lots of fun anyhow. (The game will undoubtedly be impressed when I improve astronomically when playing alone.)

Liam did his first watercolour painting with brushes. He told HRH that it was an airplane when they put it up on the fridge.

We prepared and ate dinner early at five o’clock. We wondered if the boy was feeling rushed at night, and that’s why he was having meltdowns. He ate a huge dinner (rice and barbecued sausages and a whole scrambled egg! er, we’re out of veggies, and he won’t eat tomatoes from the garden at the moment), had a popsicle for dessert, had a bath, brushed his teeth, put on a new set of Nemo jammies, and snuggled first with me then with HRH to read books. He asked halfway through the snuggling for cereal and milk ( “Hot milk, Mama” he specified, which he hasn’t had in, oh, months) so I got him a little bowl of dry kamut flakes and a sippy cup of warm milk. He polished both off while HRH read, then did the goodnight round in his room in perfect relaxation ( “Night-night, Peter and FlossieMossyCottontail, good little bunnies,” nod nod nod), and snuggled up in bed. Then he held the empty sippy cup out to HRH and said, “Oh, thank you” before snuggling back down again. HRH and I backed out of the room and gave each other a silent high-five. Not a peep has come from the room. We’d been trying to figure out what was wrong. Nothing had changed in the weekly routine earlier this week: we were doing everything at the usual times, but the way the boy was reacting we wondered if he needed more down time before bed, and backed everything up accordingly. Looks like we were right. This means HRH will have to leave work half an hour earlier than he already does in order to pick Liam up sooner on the two days when he’s in daycare and HRH is working; that way we’ll have a bit more leeway for his brain to encompass what it needs to encompass, time to decompress and fit some quiet playing, a calm sit-down family dinner, a bath, and plenty of snuggling and reading before bedtime. (It’s not as if we were skimping on or missing any of these things before, but any chance to do more of it without a family member feeling rushed is a good thing in our books.)

Then HRH made me watch the Iron Man trailer. Through the first half I was wondering why people said it was so awful, and then the second half kicked in. Atrocious. So bad it isn’t even funny. Iron Man isn’t remotely like RoboCop. Gah!

And now, I think I will have sangria and read. Or maybe curl up in bed and play the DS. Or maybe all of the above.

August Eve

I’ve been cleaning up and sorting files and posts and things today. It’s Lughnassadh this week and I do a thorough backup of my system every sabbat, so that will happen later too.

It’s the last day of July, which means that tomorrow is the first day of August! If you haven’t signed up for the August Writing project yet, you still have time. For once I’m not actively engaged in contract writing, so I won’t be scrambling to try to fit not-work-writing into the schedule as I have done in previous years, breaking my brain and any chance of relaxation I had thereby. Last year I wrote a series of fairy tale-based poetry for half the month before things got too crazy. I had no idea what to write this summer, until as I was cleaning out files I found an idea fragment I’d typed out quickly and forgotten. It’s literally six words and a question mark. I think I’ll give it a try, which means sitting down later today and sketching out a schedule and breaking the writing down into thirty-ish parts, because I’d like to actually write the whole thing during the month for the sake of balance and completeness. It won’t be long, only a few thousand words, so that won’t be an issue. I just want to see if the idea will work.

Wiktory!

Maybe it was the purposeful look in my eye and the screwdriver in my hand as I approached the tower with the intent of removing the hard drive, but I gave it one last try, and voila — the desktop is functional again!

(Perhaps I will just never turn it off again. Why it worked this time and not the countless other times I tried in the past ninety minutes, I do not know.)

Yes, I have already backed up all my work files to my Gmail account. All my important personal writing stuff is already on the thumb drive I carry in my purse, and… no, I didn’t save the latest Pandora stuff to it last month. I will remedy that immediately.

Then… to work!