Busy Day

So... it looks like either Blogger changed something or my Day Job network folks did, but now when I try to start a new Blogger post from work, it gets to the loading screen and just sits there. So no more posting from work.

You can see what this has done to my ability to post (it's had a similar effect on my writing blog as well). My evenings tend to be anything but conducive to blogging, even over here.

But I figured I should make an effort to get something down for today, because today was pretty danged awesome. And busy.

1) This was not actually today, but yesterday, but... last week, I (finally, after having decided to do so a couple of months ago) bought a new cell phone. Which means that Penny inherited my old phone. I'd even bought her a case for it. When I picked her up Friday afternoon and showed her my new phone, it took a few seconds for her to realize what that meant, and then she LOST. HER. SHIT. It was adorable. (Note: It's not a phone any more. All cell functions have been turned off. It's basically just an iPod Touch with a laughably small capacity, now.)

2) We got up at pretty near the usual weekday time so that we could eat breakfast and get dressed and head out to watch Alex play soccer.

(A few weeks ago, Matt told me that Alex had been mentioning soccer a lot as something he enjoyed -- he'd never said a word to me -- and that he was going to sign him up for a kids' league. Matt also, naturally, got roped into coaching.)

I do not like sports much, and I especially don't care much for soccer, but watching teams of 4-5-year-olds play was almost but not entirely unlike soccer anyway. None of them could figure out which direction they were supposed to run. They'd kick at the ball and miss, multiple times in a row. Run up to it to kick and come to a dead halt just before doing so, so precisely it looked like something from a cartoon. Run in a little circle around the ball without ever touching it. Politely stop and wait for an opposing team member to line up his (or her) kick instead of jumping in to steal the ball. It was, in a word, hysterical.

I saw three (minor) injuries during the two games, and not one of them was inflicted by another child (even accidentally!) which I thought was really saying something. Anyway, it was a fun way to spend an hour, much to my surprise.

Then we came home and Alex changed out of his soccer gear and into street clothes so that we could eat an early lunch in preparation for...

3) Ripley's birthday party at Chuck-E-Cheese! Okay, the kids' enthusiasm for this entirely outstripped my own, but I actually like CEC's pizza, the kids were mostly pretty well-behaved, and the birthday girl went ga-ga for the stuffed penguin I'd crocheted for her. (So did some of the adults. It was very gratifying.)

4) After that, we went to the mall (breaking my two-year run of successful avoidance of its parking lot) so that Penny could get her ears pierced. I'd told her that she could have it done when she turned 10 (which is when I got mine done the first time), but she'd been waffling over the possible pain until just recently, when a couple of friends from school talked her into it.

I got a bit of sticker shock -- apparently, earrings for piercing cost more than twice what they did back in the early 1990s, when I had my last piercing done. What's up with that?! But once I got over that, Penny gleefully picked out some little studs with her birthstone (peridot) in them. She decided it would be best if she distracted herself with a game on her phone, so she did that while the attendant popped her ears. She did really great, actually. She let out one moderately-loud "Ow!" with each pop, and a series of small "Ow, ow, ow, oh ow"s afterward, as the nerves ricocheted, and then it was done. When we were in the car, she told me they didn't hurt any more, and about an hour or so later, she told me she could touch her ears without them hurting. (She's spent the whole rest of the evening dancing around singing, "I got my ears piereced, I finally got my ears pierced!" in delight.)

5) From the mall, we headed over to my parents' house. This morning, while planning the day, Alex had protested the earring trip with, "What are we going to do for me?" I asked what he wanted to do, and he said, "I miss Grandma and Grandpa." So I called my folks and they enthusiastically agreed that we should come over. So we did, and the kids played happily for a while, and then my parents took us out to dinner. Mmm, Mexican.

It all made for kind of a long day, but both kids were pretty awesome, I have to say. There was some whining here and there, but by and large, they were about as patient and cheerful as anyone could have been expected to be.

'Cause my kids are awesome, that's why.

For Four

Yes, I ran out during my lunch break yesterday and got myself a Verizon iPhone 4.

The Verizon store was insanely busy, but they'd obviously brought in a bunch of extra staff for the day, so there were no lines. (One woman told me that they'd anticipated a line in the morning, but the weather seemed to have discouraged it.) So I was there for all of about twenty minutes and walked out with my new phone.

And in further good news, the website is a little confusing. I'd assumed I was required to get a "Talk & Text" plan, which has however many minutes plus unlimited text messages. But I only talk for about 30 minutes in a month, and I usually send fewer than 100 text messages, so the person helping me assured me that I could get the smallest "Talk" plan and do one of the cheaper, limited "Text" plans. Which means that my new phone should cost only slightly more per month than the old one did, instead of being significantly more.

Then I went to get my allergy shots and found the doctor's office completely closed. So I went home to sync my new phone and load it up before heading back to the office.

I spent half the afternoon turning the phone on and marveling at the way I had reception in my office. Not just "had reception", either, but usually a full three (of five) bars! I can actually send and receive text messages now without having to go out and stand in the lobby!

Whoohoo!

...Yup, I'm a dork.

Snowball

It snowed last night. Not a lot -- just enough to stick to grass and trees, but not enough to make the roads treacherous. My favorite kind of snow, really.

It makes me marginally less sad that I can't go to the Verizon store right now and get my iPhone 4 that I've been planning on getting since it was announced. After all, standing in line in the winter is not nearly as much fun as standing in line in the summer.

But it doesn't matter, since we have a stack o' deliveries to do today and I just got smacked with a Proposal-Type Thing, so I have to hope I can swing by the Verizon store on my lunch break or after work and pray they're not already sold out. Yeah, I know -- not much chance.

We'll see.

Photo Woe

I've been a pretty loyal Apple/Mac customer for ten years now. Their stuff Just Works.

Except for when it doesn't.

I acquired a copy of iPhoto '11, and installed it with a great deal of glee. I let it convert my library, shunting everything into a single massive package file, and then it started scanning my pictures for faces. Awesome! That was going to take a while, so I left it overnight.

The next morning... it had crashed. Oops. Oh, well. I started it back up, and it promptly crashed again. And again. And again.

I poked around online for help. I opened the package file and deleted portions of the database to no avail. I downloaded a separate utility application and had it rebuild my entire library. That chewed up another 20 GB of my hard drive (glad I'd cleared out some space recently!) and I left it sitting for yet another night. When I got up the next morning, the rebuild log file told me it had encountered something like 400 critical errors, but had finally got the job done.

And sure enough, there was my photo library. Finally. I started going through the "Faces" it had recognized and labeling them. Except that only 1 tag of every five was a face at all. And the ones I closed out as not-faces didn't stay gone. iPhoto wouldn't let them go.

Well, whatever, I didn't need face-tagging, really. I went into the main photo album and started playing with stuff. I couldn't get it to display photo keywords on the main thumbnail screen. And when I tried to add a face tag to one picture, the interface was ridiculously clunky. And broken. It wouldn't let me move or re-size the tags, and wouldn't let me delete them once they'd been created. I thought maybe the system had gotten its memory scrambled -- that happens sometimes -- so I shut it down and went to work.

When I got home last night, I fired it back up to see if I could get it to work properly. iPhoto's main screen loaded, and then I was treated to the Spinning Beach Ball of Death. Better still, it locked up my entire system instead of just the one application. I had to do a hard-reboot. Well, maybe the memory was just screwy from all the rebuilding. I tried again.

Same result. iPhoto was Not Loading, and whatever it was doing while it was Not Loading, it was also locking up my whole computer.

Argh. So I gave up and deleted it. I deleted iPhoto '11, and the rebuilt library, and then I plugged in my backup drive and fired up Time Machine and went back to a backup from about a week ago and restored my old, unconverted library, and my old version of iPhoto that doesn't have face tagging but which, you know, actually works. That took all of about 45 minutes to do -- and 10 minutes of that was doing the delete of the rebuilt library package.

iPhoto '11? Pretty much crap, at least on my machine (though I'm willing to entertain the notion that it was crap because my machine is a few years old). Time Machine, now... That's some software that Just Works. I've only needed it a handful of times, but on those occasions, it's done exactly what I wanted it to do, exactly the way I wanted it to do it. I love my Time Machine.

Yep, I skipped yesterday. Why? Because our wimp of a school district gave us a 2-hour delay for what amounted to approximately seven snowflakes in my back yard. Their automated system called us at 5:20 to tell us about it, too, so we slept in an extra half-hour, and the rest of the morning was slightly crazy, including me having Penny with me at work.

So, yeah. I skipped. I also ate some cake at a co-worker's post-baby shower/welcome back party. I'm just a rebel, I am.

And in other news, it's finally been announced that there's going to be a Verizon iPhone! Yay! So now I know what I'm doing with my Christmas money, as soon as it's released. And yes, I am tempted to take the day off from work so I can get up early and go stand in line. Though February will not be nearly as pleasant for that as July was. So we'll see. I've waited this long; I can probably stand to wait a little longer. Also, I need to decide whether I want the 16G or 32G model. (Much as my technophile's heart wants the 32, I've only once had a problem with wanting more space on my 8G phone, so I'm not sure the extra 16G is worth the extra $200. Not when I've got my iPad.)

The Other Half

I posted about Penny's birthday party (with pictures) yesterday, just in case the IS dragons were still up to their tricks today (and it looks like they are, so yay for planning ahead).

The rest of the weekend was pretty awesome, too. My book was released sometime Saturday while I was at Penny's party. (If you read via RSS you may have missed seeing the new link on the sidebar, in which case here, have a link!) I posted it to my writing blog and to Facebook as well, and I've received several very nice comments. The publisher doesn't provide any sort of sales numbers, so I won't know how many I've sold until they pay me, but apparently it's at least three! A co-worker is taking me out to lunch today to celebrate.

Both tomorrow and Wednesday, I'm doing publicity stunts -- Tuesday I'll be in the Q&A hotseat on the publisher's mailing list, and Wednesday I'm "hosting" their livejournal community. That one will probably have a contest to win a free copy of the book and possibly my writing some flash fiction based on participant-provided keywords, so feel free to drop by and heckle!

Sunday, Vicki came over and we drove up to Richmond (actually, just past Richmond) to the Apple Store so I could buy my iPad. It was nice to have someone along for the drive (which had insane/stupid traffic yet again -- WTF, people? Is it really necessary for both lanes to slow down to 30 every time there's an exit ramp?) and to share in my geeky joy.

Apparently, I screwed up, though, because she was about five minutes from buying herself an iPad as well when I interrupted her mesmerized play to tell her I was going to go look at accessories. (She's going to New York in a few weeks, though, and told me she's made a point of planning to go to the Apple Stores there, as well, so I decided that she was saving that big/fun purchase for her trip to the mothership store.)

After I'd bought that (and a new Mac Mini for our kids'/guest computer) we made our way to the food court to have some lunch. I did really well with lunch, too -- fruit and soup! -- and then we had to pass the Godiva store on our way out of the mall. Oh no!

Then for dinner, we had taco salad and homemade guacamole -- we'd gotten about a pound of tomatillos with our CSA box last week, so I was looking for ways to use them up. (I still am, really, as the guac only used up about a quarter of them. Suggestions/recipes welcome!) The guacamole turned out really good, though -- I was basically using this recipe, only without the hot stuff, and I finally figured out my idea ratio of mashed avocado to diced to get just the right texture. Even Penny went back for seconds! It made a lot, though. I need to pick up some chips or something to eat with the leftovers!

Back to work today, though it looks like it's going to be a slow week. Brace yourselves to hear lots of bouncing about the iPad, I guess! (So far: two big thumbs up, though I'm still trying to find a good document editor that isn't too expensive. It doesn't need a lot of bells and whistles, but I do want to be able to do some basic formatting, like italics and centering, and I need to be able to edit multiple files, and I need to be able to transfer the files back to my hard drive somehow -- email would be acceptable. I tried a couple of free apps that promised to link to Google Documents, but both of them horked on me when I actually tried to download and access files. I'm now pondering Apple's own Pages app, which is $10. It doesn't connect to Google Documents, but I'm fairly certain I can trust it not to hork on me.)

Convinced

Okay, so I've pretty much talked myself into buying an iPad.

I was going to buy one while we were in Chicago, actually. We met our friend Rachel for lunch, and Matt teased me with the information that there was an Apple Store in the same shopping center. We considered stopping in after lunch to "Oooh" and "Ahhh" at the pretty shinies, and he may have thought I was joking, but I had every intention of buying an iPad right then and there. A planned impulse buy, if you will.

Unfortunately, by the time lunch was over, the kids were both tired and cranky and we decided they would not have the patience necessary to follow us around while we indulged in an extended geek-out, so we did not go to the Apple Store.

I thought about making an iPad my next diet reward, because my next diet goal is technically my last diet goal, the point at which I will switch from dieting to maintaining. And that's a big deal, and deserves a big reward, right? Except... it's sort of a moving target. I'm fairly happy with the weight I am now. Most of my lingering dissatisfactions have more to do with the excess stretched-out skin (which dieting won't fix) and my overall proportions (which dieting won't fix).

I'm still actively dieting right now, because I'd kind of like to drop another three or four pounds to get to the next roundish number -- but I admit I'm not putting a lot of effort into it. I've been pretty much floating for the last couple of months, and the telling bit is that I'm not all that concerned about it. I'm okay with where I am, even if the charts tell me I should lose another fifteen pounds.

So rather than reaching some foreordained "goal" and throwing myself a big party before flipping the switch from "lose" to "maintain", apparently I'm more doing a slow melt into maintenance mode. Which is possibly healthier in the long run, but it makes it hard to decide at what point I have earned a big diet reward, like an iPad.

Then I thought about making an iPad my reward for getting my book published. I mean, publication has been a dream of mine for many, many years. But let's be honest: my book is not going to make enough money to pay for an iPad. Even the lowest-end one, without any accessories. And isn't seeing my name in print its own reward, anyway? (And since it's an e-book, does it really count as publication?) I'm waffling, here... so maybe it's not quite big enough to count?

And then I was thinking about my trip to Atlanta that's in a couple of weeks. I'm going for my cousin's wedding, but while I'm excited that I'll get to see that side of my family again, we're not exactly close. And while I'm sure their friends are wonderful people -- again, not close. I'm not going to be hanging out with them constantly over the weekend. So I've been pondering what to do with my spare time while I'm there. I'll have a few hours Friday afternoon, and most of Saturday (the wedding is at 5, so I'm on my own until 3 or 3:30 before I have to head back to the hotel to change), and most of the day Sunday.

I'm considering going back to the zoo or the aquarium, so I can actually pause to look at the things that interest me instead of being pulled along at top speed by the kid(s). I might look up some attraction I've never been to before -- possibly even something not very kid-friendly that I might not otherwise get to see.

I briefly considered staying in my hotel room and taking advantage of being free of the distractions of family to get some writing done. And then I thought, "Nah, I'm already going to be lugging my camera with me and trying to travel carry-on only; I don't want to drag the laptop, too." And then a quiet little voice in the waaaaaay back of my head said, "You know, if you had an iPad, it would be a lot easier to write on the road..."

"No, no, no," I told myself.

"And you could load it up with pictures to show Grandmom and the rest of the family. You know Grandmom loves pictures."

"But..."

"And it would make it easier to read e-books at the gym."

"I'm not sure--"

"You know you want it."

So... long story short: What with all those excuses and rationalizations combined, I've pretty well talked myself into it. I'm still waffling slightly over whether to shell out the extra $130 for 3G capability. (If I can't get a wireless connection, what will I want to do over 3G on the iPad that I couldn't do on my phone? How do I know when I haven't yet quite worked out exactly where the iPad will fit into my daily life?)

I was waffling over whether to order it online or make a trip to one of our (semi-) local Apple Stores (they're both about an hour away). But the online store says "Ships in 7-10 business days" which means it might well not arrive in time for my trip. So I need to figure out when to do that.

Relief

Lots of little things to be happy about, today:

The AC was fixed. The guys showed up a bit before 3, replaced a capacitor, and were gone before 3:30. It took until after dinner for the house to actually cool back down, but as soon as I could feel the cold air blowing from the vents, I felt better. The brain is a funny thing, ain't it?

* * *

I updated my iPhone's OS last night to iOS 4. Multitasking doesn't function on the 3G (I wasn't actually expecting it to; the 3G has a lot less memory, and multitasking is, by definition, something of a hog) but I finally figured out this morning how to get the feature I wanted most, which is the spring-loaded folders. Now I can cluster all my books/book-reading apps together, and all the games, and all the useful-but-seldom-used utilities together and still have them all on the same page, and getting to them is two taps instead of several swipes.

And it's not new to this OS, but while I was exploring, I finally figured out how to get Caps Lock to function. (I knew the possibility was there, but it wouldn't work for me. Apparently, there's a switch in the settings to turn the ability on and off that I'd never noticed before. I don't know why they'd have made it "off" by default, though.)

I'm still considering an Android for my next phone, though. I love my iPhone to pieces, but I'd really like to be able to get calls and text messages while I'm at work. I would totally upgrade to the iPhone 4 if I could ditch AT&T for Verizon. Are you listening, Apple?! I missed a message yesterday setting up lunch with friends, and it made me sad. More critically, Penny's caregivers tend to try my cell phone first when they need to get in touch with me, and if my phone actually worked, I could get into the habit of carrying it around with me so I'd be available. So I'm looking at going Android for the next two years, at least. (But is there a PVZ app for Android?! I might have to keep the iPhone around just for that!)

* * *

I finished the first round of edits on the story I've been working last night. I want to give it another polish before I send it out, but if I don't manage it, at least I've got something to send.

* * *

And just this morning I learned that Adin, who's looking to move to this area, got a job! Now she just has to find someone to rent her current house. Anyone looking to move to Richmond?

Patentable Idea

Hey, Internets! You know what I want right now? I will tell you! I will tell you for free, Internets, and then you can make it for me and I would even pay you for it, after giving you my awesome idea for free. That is how much I want this thing:

I want a device, approximately the size of a cell phone. It could be a little bigger, if it had to, but it wouldn't need a display or a keypad or anything. The cell phone would contain the standard internal workings for each of the major wireless carriers (ideally, actually, it would be modular, so that you could build the device to spec for each customer, but that's not a requirement, it's something that would be nice to have). It would also contain some memory -- it wouldn't need much, just a few MB, really.

I would rent this device for... a time. A few days, maybe a week. And I would carry it around with me, like I do my cell phone. And every 5 or 10 minutes, the device would check its signal strength (for phone and data) for each of its chips, and record that in memory. And at the end of my rental period, I would bring the device back to its home base, and plug it in, and be presented with a graph, charting signal strength for each of the major carriers (or the carriers I chose to track, if it's a modular device) across the period of my rental. For special bells and whistles, I suppose the device and its resulting graph could do other things, like tell me the device's physical location at each reading, but that would take a bit more memory, and anyway, it's not all that necessary: I know where I've been and approximately when, over a week's span. And if I were renting this device with the specific purpose of trying to make sure that I'm going to get a cell plan that will work everywhere that I'm going to be, then I would be extra certain to make a note of when I'm at a place that I'd especially want the phone to work.

'Cause here's the thing: I love my iPhone. I really, really do. And in 9 out of 10 locations that matter to me, my signal strength is just fine. But that tenth location, Internets? That tenth location is my office, where I spend something like half my waking hours. And when I'm in my office, I get no signal. About once a week or so, on particularly clear days, sometimes signal will eke through long enough for me to receive a text message. But it doesn't last long enough for me to send a reply. If I want signal when I'm at work, I have go to out to the lobby and wait five minutes or so for the phone to realize it's found a (weak) signal again, and then make my call or send my message.

I've been living with it, because I do love my iPhone, and anyway I had a 2-year contract with AT&T. But that two years is ending in about a month. And the new iPhone 4G is shiny and all, but it didn't blow me away. There are other smartphone options now. Some of the Android phones look pretty slick. Braz has an EVO 4G, and it's very pretty.

So I've been asking around my office, and have gathered that T-Mobile's signal sucks in the building, but the people with Verizon and Sprint are both pretty happy and can make calls inside and everything. Though they aren't making them in my office, which is not only windowless, but it doesn't even have a wall on the exterior of the building. I'm in a tiny little shielded cinderblock cave -- which will be awesome if ever there's a tornado or a radiation leak or something, but as far as cell signal goes, pretty much blows chunks.

And even if I can get those people to bring their Verizon and Sprint phones into my office so I can see signal bars there -- then I'm faced with wondering how their signal is at the places I spend the other half of my waking hours. Like my house, say. Or the gym. Or my parents' house. How about down at KT's? How about elsewhere along my daily route? It sure would suck if I got a flat tire halfway to Alex's daycare and didn't have a signal on my phone to call AAA with. And I'm pretty sure my officemates aren't going to loan me their phones for a few days so I can check it out.

Why doesn't this device exist, Internets? Or does it? Help me out, here, Internets!

Whinging

Oh, for the love of Pete... I've seen at least five hysterical articles today about AT&T's new data plan pricing.

The worst of the lot included a little chart to show you how much more the new plan was going to cost you:

This chart is what really made me crazy. The math in it is completely whopperjawed, so I'm going to indulge myself in a little rant, here.

Item 1: The "Old Data Plan" didn't have tethering as an option, as near as I could tell. Where did this number even come from?

Item 2: Let's indulge in just a little bit of elementary economics, for a moment: The "price per MB" line is only valid if you use exactly the maximum amount of data allowed. Now, let's ignore the tethering options for a moment. I went and looked up my bills for the last two years (I signed up with AT&T when I got my iPhone in July '08) and the most data I've used in a month is 26MB. And that was a significant outlier in a month I did some traveling and spent a lot of time with my phone as my primary internet source. Most months, I come in around 7MB. But let's go with the outlier. Let's even double it: 50MB per month.

If I'm using 50MB a month, then on the old data plan, I'm spending 60 cents per MB of data. On the new "Data Plus" plan, it's 30 cents per MB of data. Boy, that sure looks like savings for me! In fact, though the price per MB changes as the number of MB used changes, you're still saving about half the original cost if your usage comes in at less than 200MB per month.

Now, if you expect to use more than 200MB in a month, you're paying for the 2GB plan, which... still costs less than the original unlimited plan. Number of people who are actually going to end up paying more for (untethered) data plans? NOT. MANY.

Thus endeth the rant.

Now, they are kind of screwing us on the tethering. If you're using your cell phone as your modem, then it's going to be easier to exceed the data limits, because you're no longer hitting web pages that have been optimized for cell phone use, and you're downloading bigger things for use on your bigger computer. And charging extra for tethering without giving you an extended data package kind of blows, too. Is there any kind of extra load on their system when you're tethering instead of just surfing and downloading things via your phone? It seems to me that there shouldn't be, but I'll be the first to admit that I don't know the technology, so those are words I'm willing to eat, if someone explains to me that yes, really, there are extra costs that at least partially justify an additional $20 per month for tethered dataflow as opposed to standard data flow.

But. BUT. Tethering really shouldn't be most peoples' go-to option anyway. Cell phone internet use is slow, even with 3G. Even with 4G. It's improving, but it's still crap compared to regular broadband. So mostly the people who are relying on cell phone tethering are, I assume, only using it when they can't put their finger on a broadband connection. Business travelers, I would guess, make up a solid majority of these people (and also a solid majority of those who are in danger of popping the data cap. Cell tethering is not going to be a viable option for, say, gaming). In which case, if you are not making your companies shell out for the cost and/or writing it off on your taxes as a business expense, you are an idiot anyway.

So, all in all, my opinion of the new data packages?

It doesn't matter. Because I'm on an iPhone. That awesome math I did for you earlier? It's a fake. I don't pay $30 a month for my data package, because the iPhone package I got is completely separate from the standard AT&T price structure. And I have no idea whether that's the price package they have to stick with when my 2-year contract is up in July, or if they make me move to one of their standard packages. But I might go with a standard package anyway, if I can, because I have never exceeded 200 minutes a month in talk time, and or 30MB a in data, and I could save a bundle.

Kindling

A couple of days ago, Neil Gaiman twittered that his short story collection Fragile Things was on sale at Amazon for only 99 cents for the Kindle edition. (It is still on sale this morning, which is why I'm including the link. No idea how long it will last, of course.)

I don't have a Kindle.

But I have an iPhone, and the Kindle app for the iPhone is free. (And why wouldn't it be? Sure, Amazon would like me to buy a Kindle -- but I'm sure they'd much rather I get their app for free and then give them money for the books. There will always be more books to sell, but 99.9% of customers are only going to have one reader device, and they're only going to replace it every few years.)

What the hell, right? So I downloaded the Kindle app, and I bought the book, and then I spent an hour poking around Amazon's Kindle Store looking for free books to download. There are lots. Most of them older books in the public domain, but some are first books of series, or excerpts from authors who want to whet your appetite. I downloaded some foreign folk tales and a couple of classic novels and a couple of what will probably be bad trashy romances (but hey, they were free!).

I'm about half-considering switching to the Kindle app the next time I have to buy books for Book Club -- they're almost never books I'd want to keep, anyway. Might as well not have the physical book cluttering up the house until I get the time to take it to the used bookstore, right? (Though being able to re-sell the physical book has obvious advantages, so I'm still pondering it.)

Certainly, I expect I'll be downloading the Kindle app for my laptop -- not because I expect to do a lot of reading on it, but just because it's got a larger hard drive, and I'm not going to want to keep my entire e-library on my phone.

I don't think I've "chosen" Kindle as my e-reader app of choice. It happens to be my first (not counting plain documents and PDFs, obviously) but only because of the serendipity of a sale. I'll probably eventually collect the other free e-reader apps as well.

(Additionally, it occurs to me just now that I had been debating with myself over which e-reader to get, if I were going to get one, and I'd put the iPad in the running with all the others... but because the iPad can have not only its own native reader app but also a Kindle app and the Nook app and assorted others as well, then the iPad kind of wins hands-down on functionality, because it's always going to have all the functionality that all its apps have. Which nudges me a little bit closer to making an iPad my next diet-goal reward. Assuming I ever get there, but that's another post for another blog.)

I'm sort of looking forward to seeing my physical book library do what our physical music library did, really: we didn't throw away any of our old CDs, but we never got them out. So we chucked the cases and packed them into binders. I don't think either of us have opened the binders for months. Years, maybe. I'll probably take them to the storage unit, the next time I do a big household purge, because right now, they're just a barrier I have to step over from time to time. We haven't stopped buying music, by any stretch of the imagination, but now we buy it online. Sometimes, someone gives us a physical CD as a gift, but that's about it for the physical growth of our music collection.

I don't see myself replacing most of my physical books with e-books (though there are a few favorites that I'll probably eventually purchase digitally), but I can certainly see myself turning toward digital versions in the future. It cuts down on clutter. It cuts down on dust. It's easier to move. And while I do enjoy the visceral sensation of holding a real book in my hands, I don't mind reading on a screen, and my phone is a hell of a lot more convenient to take with me to the gym or the doctor's office.

Labored

Saturday, we went to John and Sam's house to celebrate John's birthday, and Mom's, and a friend of John's whose birthday is also in September. Sam's parents and her sister Kim and Kim's husband were there, too, since Sam's parents had come to town last weekend for John's art exhibition. It was crowded, but it worked out pretty well, and we had a great time. There was cake, and lots of noise, and playing outside with the neighbor's dog, and lots of good food.


And then came my Weekend Of Fun. (That was sarcasm.)

It started, as these things often do, with the internet.

"Huhn," Matt said Sunday morning, scrolling through his usual slurry of newsfeeds. "The Snow Leopard upgrade disc is actually the whole thing. It says in this article that it'll work to upgrade any prior OS, or even on a completely blank disk."

"Huhn," I said. "So, can I borrow your Snow Leopard disk, please?"

One reboot later, I was looking at the install screen and clicking on choices. English, yes. American English, yes. The hard drive, yes. Yes, yes, yes... Go! It started installing, and I walked away to fix Penny's lunch.

A bit later, Matt came into the kitchen. "It says there's some problems and needs to run the repair," he said.

Eh, bad sectors happen. "Go ahead and tell it to go," I said.

A few minutes later, Matt came back into the kitchen. "It, um, didn't work," he said.

Well, dang. No Snow Leopard for me, I guess. I went out to look at the computer. There was an awful lot of text detailing the problems, and some of it was in red. "Irreparable. Please back up your hard drive as soon as possible, then reformat and re-install."

Well, crap.

"I've got a copy of DiskWarrior," Matt said. I let him run it while I finished my lunch and gave Penny her shot.

It didn't work, either, though it generated even more text. Words like "disk malfunction" and "will most likely worsen" jumped out at me. I started cussing and whining at my twitter followers.

Just out of curiosity, I attempted a reboot without a CD in the drive anyway. The computer churned for four or five minutes, then turned itself off. I ran DiskWarrior again, and got the same result. Interestingly, though the text suggested a hardware malfunction, when I ran the hardware diagnostics, I got an all-clear.

Okay. First step: backup my stuff. Luckily, all the stuff that would kill me to lose (like my writing and my very favorite pictures) is all in online repositories like Google Sites and Flickr, but I still have a buncha gigs of music and a buncha gigs of movies and a buncha gigs of less-beloved pictures that I would be pretty pissed to lose. Matt had a spare hard drive I could use (he's going to upgrade his main hard drive with it eventually) but not an enclosure to fit it to let it function as an external drive.

Braz has a whole bunch of empty enclosures, though, so he volunteered to loan me one. We packed up the kids and went over to Braz's, and spent a couple of hours hanging out and playing Rock Band, which was fun and helped de-stress me a bit. I took a cute picture with my iPhone of Alex playing drums.


Then we went home, and I hooked up the hard drive to my computer, and after some wiggling (the USB cable didn't want to stay plugged in) started backing up my stuff, starting with the essentials.

USB is slow. I didn't finish backing everything up until Monday morning. My plan had been to wait until the backup was complete, then wait until Alex was down for a nap, and call Apple to make sure I'm still covered with the warranty plan and if they'd set me up to ship the computer back to them for repairs. In the meantime, I got set up to do my computing on our guest computer, figuring that I'd be without the laptop for at least four or five days.

But once the backup had finished, I figured I wasn't losing anything if I played around with it myself. After all, everything was backed up. Why not reformat and reinstall?

So I did, and -- somewhat to my surprise -- it worked. Then I remembered that I still have a firewire cable left over from when I had a firewire iPod, and putting my backed-up files back on the hard drive went much faster. And I spent the rest of Monday fiddling around with it and getting all my applications and settings back where I wanted them. (Including one frustrating problem with iPhoto that finally resolved into not having copied all the actual pictures over that I thought I had, even though the thumbnails were still there. You'd think there would be a cue in the program to tell you when a picture is missing! It would have saved me a few hours of hair-pulling.)

Anyway, it might turn out to be a blessing in disguise -- it cleared my hard drive of a lot of cruft programs that I haven't used in years and years, and got me a nice chunk of hard drive space back.

Now, whether I still have a mechanical failure that's going to cause my hard drive to continue to degrade over the next however long, I'm not sure, so I'll probably be investing in a nice big external hard drive in the near future to use to back everything up.

So that was my Labor Day, pretty much. Whee.

But this morning was Penny's first day of first grade, and that was much happier. Yay! She didn't seem nervous at all, mostly just excited. She found her way to the classroom without any trouble, and after she'd gotten settled at her desk and I'd taken a couple of pictures, gave me hugs and kisses (but didn't try to drag it out, like she sometimes does) and set to work on her first first-grade assignment.


That's my girl.

Book 'Em.

Book club at our house tonight. Which means that sometime between now and when I head for home, I need to figure out what I'm going to serve, so that I can stop at the store on my way home and buy it.

Good thing I already have a bottle of wine ready to go, I guess.

So I'm leaving work at 5:30, stopping at the grocery store on my way home, getting home and making dinner, eating dinner, cleaning up the kitchen, living room, dining room, and downstairs bathroom (good thing the maid service came yesterday) and setting out chairs and food for book club before 7:30.

Note to self: Don't plan on anything requiring more preparation than "open package, put food on serving dish" or I'll run out of time.

---

I'm trying out a new "to-do" app on my iPhone. I fidgeted with several free ones, but they didn't have any of the features that made having a to-do application worth the effort of entering things.

This one is missing one key feature that I want, and one or two "would be nice" features, but their website says they're working on the key feature for a future release (which will be free for people who've already bought the app), and it's got lots of other nice features. I don't know if it's going to replace my Daytimer for my work list -- writing is still faster than the phone, especially if what I'm entering has big/long acronyms, which almost all my work tasks do (iPhone really needs a caps lock feature). But I have my phone with me all day, unlike my Daytimer, which mostly just stays at work, so this is a good way to capture personal tasks and things that I happen to think of when I'm not at work.

It's got a matching desktop application, and I downloaded the trial version, just to play with it. It's got more features than the mobile app, which only makes sense, including the feature I want for the mobile app. And it syncs perfectly and wirelessly with the iPhone, which is nice. But since I'm not at my Mac all day, I don't think I'm going to be paying for the desktop app when the trial period runs out. It's handy, but not handy enough to justify the price tag.

Tweet, Tweet

I've started posting my daily to-do goals on twitter each morning. Not everything on my to-do list, which is absurdly long and grows faster than I can keep up, but the list of things that I really have to get done that day and, if there's room left over, the other tasks that I reasonably think I can get done for the day.

It's a useful addendum to the full list, because the full list is rarely less than two pages long (and often up to three) and can be kind of overwhelming. And it doesn't include appointments and meetings, which I do put in the twitter list. So gathering the day's tasks together for twitter forces me to consider exactly how much time I've got to work with, and how long I expect each task to take. It makes me prioritize the tasks on my list and address things on an as-needed basis.

Interestingly, with the day's list in front of me, I'm more productive, mostly because I don't get overwhelmed by the "everything" list and end up doing nothing. I allow myself breaks: Finish this task (or this part of a task) and then I can spend ten minutes skimming my RSS feeds.

It probably makes for boring reading for my twitter followers, but that seems to be the order of the day for twitter, really -- I have friends who tweet flylady tasks, workout progress, waking and sleeping habits, and every leg of every trip (including seat assignments). Twitter seems to be as much for personal reference as it is for communication. It's a peculiar little tool.

Ahhh.

Much better.

I had a busy, productive work day. I sketched out some ideas for my schedule when Penny starts school, and a couple of them actually seem viable, at least for the short term. I made it to the Y and spent half an hour on the reclining bike. (Had to adjust the difficulty a few times; I'm still figuring out what my level is, but I'm finally getting the hang of it.)

I got home just before Matt and the kids, and while we were doing the usual get-home things (wash bottles and little cups, make lunches for tomorrow, etc) my cell rang, and it was the concrete guy. He wanted to come over and talk to me about expanding the driveway and make sure we were on the same page, and he thinks he can get started in about a week. (*Note to self - need to contact the HA and see if we have to get it "approved" first.)

And while I was getting ready to make dinner, the phone rang, and it was the DHL courier. Wait, let me back up: I'd checked on the status of my computer yesterday at lunch to discover that it had gone from "On hold - part ordered" to "Completed" and "Your tracking number is..." So I clicked on the tracking number, because I always do, just to see if they'd already picked it up.

DHL's website said, "Delivery attempt failed." ...Wha? I checked the dates, and apparently Apple had completed my repair and shipped the computer off on Saturday, but the repair status website hadn't updated, for whatever reason. (Databases don't sync on the weekends?) So DHL had tried to deliver my computer and, it being a signature-required delivery, failed. Well, crappit. So I printed out the signature release form, stuck it in my bag, and took it home.

When I got home, there were two delivery attempt stickies on the door -- the courier had come by at 11:30, and again at about 3:30. Dangit, I'm at work, people! The notes said they'd come back again today, so I signed them, and I signed the release I'd printed out, just to be safe, and put them by the door so I could tape them up on our way out in the morning. I grumbled a little, but since I really wasn't expecting to get my computer until Wednesday at the earliest, I was still ahead of the game.

Anyway, while I was preparing dinner, the DHL guy called. "I'm about to head back for the day," he said, "and I thought I'd see if you were home before I went, so I can drop off your box."

Yes, yes, yes!

I don't know if that's standard DHL policy -- but FedEx and UPS have never done anything like that for me, and so either DHL or that particular courier now have some major bonus points in my book.

So I got my computer back, all fixed, whoo! They'd turned off my desktop picture and changed my screensaver, and for some reason my WoW shortcut had been moved, but otherwise everything was fine.

Anyway, I made a lovely dinner -- curried salmon with couscous and green beans. Penny didn't like the curry sauce, but Matt and I did, so next time I'll just cut her piece off beforehand and bake it with butter and lemon.

Alex was feeling good for most of the evening -- all smiles and giggles -- and managed to stay up until 7:10, which is pretty late for him (we usually end up putting him to bed between 6:45 and 7, when he turns into the FussMonster). He's almost mastered pulling himself to standing, and is trying to figure out how to take steps while holding on to things. (That'll still be a while in coming, but he's working on it.)

And after the kids were in bed, I caught up on websites I haven't been able to read for a week (oh lolcats, how I missed your funny!) and dove into WoW.

Ahhh. A good day.

New Week

Optimism did not work as well as I'd hoped on Friday. When I went to pick up my new glasses, they were the right prescription -- but the wrong frames. (They gave me the glasses anyway, so I can see -- luckily, the wrong frames are not horrible -- and are re-ordering the glasses with the right frames.) And when I tried to stop for my allergy shot, they looked at me like I'd grown two heads and told me that after failing a vial test, I needed to wait a week before coming back. Would've been nice of the first person to have told me that, so I didn't burn an hour for no purpose. The status for my computer repair changed from "in progress" to "on hold - part ordered." Having no idea what the part is, I can't even hazard a guess as to when I'll get the computer back. The fact that the repair shop didn't have it, however, isn't the best sign.

Saturday morning started out right on the same vein -- I tried to take Penny out to use a gift card she'd gotten for her birthday. The store wasn't where I remembered it being, and I wound up driving from one end of town to the other and then back again before I found it.

But the afternoon improved -- KT and I went to the beach. It was the perfect day for it -- a few clouds, but not too many; warm enough to swim but not so hot that sitting on the beach was miserable. The beach was packed, but we found a spot and swam for a bit, then settled onto our towels to enjoy the weather.

Some kids near us were feeding the seagulls, and it only took about five minutes before they had an entire flock of the sea-rats hovering around waiting for treats.



We couldn't decide who was funnier: the kids, who would hold up a Cheeto in the hopes a bird would take it from their hands and then shriek and fling it to the ground as soon as it looked like they were going to get a taker; or the tattooed bikini-bimbos just behind them who huffed and rolled their eyes and were indignant about the whole thing. I do think my favorite part was the bimbo who finally got up, stalked the four steps over to the kids and said, "Could you stop feeding the birds now?!" angrily, then stomped back to her towel... about five minutes after the kids had run out of Cheetos.

After we'd had enough of the sand, we wandered up to the shops to pick up souvenirs for the kids (I got Penny a shell that had been painted with the Batman logo) and then down the street to look for somewhere to eat. KT had originally wanted seafood, but we walked about three blocks without seeing anything but fast food (and one raw bar, but while I will occasionally eat sushi and am trying to learn to like fish, I am really not a fan of shellfish), so we eventually turned into an Italian place. They had wonderful food (and a cute waiter), so we felt pretty good about it.

Sunday was the usual errands, plus a trip to Target to get cards for a couple of Penny's teachers and new shoes for her. (With laces! Pink ones!) I've started teaching Penny how to tie her shoes, starting with the initial cross-and-through step. She's pretty awkward just at that first step, so I'm going to leave it there until she's got that more or less mastered, before trying to move on to making the bow.

Speaking of learning and growing: Alex, who still doesn't really crawl all the time, has decided to move on to bigger and better things. This morning, he pulled himself to standing at the couch, and for just a few seconds, there, looked like he was trying to figure out how to "cruise" sideways.

This week starts out calm, then crescendos -- I've got Book Club Wednesday evening, then Thursday morning is the elementary school's "meet-and-greet". Thursday afternoon, the daycare is having an end-of-summer party and then they're closed Friday, so Matt and I will probably each take a half-day off to stay home with the kids.

We're doing another proposal compilation at my work this week, too -- the boss wants to have it all assembled and ready to go by Thursday so as not to interfere with anyone's long weekend plans, but I suspect that means I'll be doing last-minute changes into Friday. (Not sure how that's going to play with the kids being home all day... I might need to get my parents to babysit. Of course, they've spent the last two and a half weeks in Cancun, so they're probably ripe for some grandkid time anyway!)

It's a new week. Let's hope it goes better than the last one.

Magic Bus

Nope, I have no idea what the title is about, either. This is what happens when you force me to come up with titles every day.

Had a good weekend, though. Got my iPhone, finally, months after deciding it was what I wanted and then waiting for the new phone announcement in June and then waiting for the actual release date, and then working through a couple of glitches...

Glitch #1 turned out the be that I'd apparently set a PIN on my old T-Mobile account at some point in the past, without which they wouldn't turn my phone number over to AT&T. I tried all the PINs I ususally use, without success, so I had to go down to the nearest T-Mobile store (half an hour away -- the one that used to be a couple of blocks from us closed, dangit) to prove that I'm who I say I am, and get it reset. (I'm still not convinced that I set that PIN. The guy at the store told me what it was, and it rang no bells at all. My suspicion is that I agreed to a temporary PIN at some point and scrawled it on a piece of paper with the intention of changing it later, and then forgot to do so.)

Glitch #2 popped up last night when I went to use it for some music while I was putting dishes away. Songs that I'd ripped off my CDs (or downloaded illegally, back when I was still doing that, shhh) played just fine, but music I'd legally purchased from iTunes would show me the album art, and the counter would tick, but no sound would come out. I couldn't even play the sample clips when the phone was connected to the iTMS. Some poking around discovered that, specifically, the phone wasn't playing w4p files, but that was no help, because they're supposed to be supported. I fiddled with settings and spent an hour looking around online in help files and another on hold with Apple's tech support line (I never did get through -- I gave up and decided to call back today from a speakerphone). Later, trying to play some game I'd downloaded, the phone hiccuped and reset itself, and when it had rebooted, all my music was working just fine. So... I dunno.

The other glitch, which is entirely my own fault, was downloading a "game" for the phone which creates bubbles when you drag your finger over the screen, and then lets you pop them by tapping on them... and then letting Penny play with it. Now she wants to borrow my phone to play the game every thirty seconds or so. This morning, while watching Dora, she clutched my phone in her hot little hand, desultorily swirling her finger around the screen without even looking at the bubbles.

Anyway, we had a fairly good weekend, iPhone aside. We took the kids down to visit my parents for a couple of hours while Matt and I got some shopping done, and I finally got around to listing a whole bunch of crap on our local FreeCycle list that I've been meaning to get rid of. It's not all gone yet, but most of it has been spoken for, whoo! I'm all in favor of crap reduction.

The only frustrating part to the weekend -- and even this was kind of funny -- was that Alex quite suddenly and completely out of nowhere seems to have decided to come up with a case of separation anxiety. If he could see me, then he was not happy unless I was holding and/or playing with him. And if he saw me turn away from him (or heaven forfend, walk away) then he would burst into tears.

He only did it for me -- sitting in his jumper between the kitchen and green room, while I was cooking at Matt was folding laundry, Alex actively leaned toward me and cried, even when Matt tried to turn him to face the green room and play with him. It was all about Mommy Mommy Mommy this weekend. It'll be interesting to see if he pulls it out when I drop him off at school Wednesday.

On the other hand, he's so close to crawling, I can taste it. He'll definitely be crawling before Penny's birthday. He gets up on his hands and knees and rocks back and forth, trying to figure out how to get his legs and arms coordinated. This is earlier than Penny. I don't remember her doing the rocking thing much at all, but I do remember she started crawling on Mother's Day, which means she was about nine months old; Alex is six and a half. I wonder if that means he'll crawl longer than she did, or start walking earlier?

Truer Words

Penny, this morning, as she scrolls through pictures I've uploaded to my iPhone...

"Wow, Mommy! This is a magic phone!"

test

I'm sending this test post not only via email, but from my new iPhone!

...Because I'm a geek.

Cruft

I stumbled across this last night while I was surfing, and was sufficiently entranced to bookmark the essay and make a note to say something about it later:

Why Your Internet Experience Is Slow about the amount of bloat and cruft that attaches itself to websites these days. We all know it's there, but this is an actual analysis of a page, and it's pretty astonishing.

...The irony of linking to this from an autopost blog host with plenty of its own cruft has not escaped me.