The word of the week is obsequious.
April 7 - Approved!
All things considered, today was a pretty
good day.
I was busy as all heck though! Running
around during the day to get things done before heading out to Cordova Bay to
get some editing done on the novel took up a goodly amount of time. Plus, I was
at my writer's group Meet N'Greet around dinnertime, which went VERY well: it's
hard to tell some nights if people will be more into general conversation than
games but MAN, they were talkative tonight! It was hard to tear myself away
from the conversation at the end, since we all had to go home, but it boded
very well for the rest of the year that we have such a fun, intelligent and
genial group who gather every few weeks.
Ah, but the main thing today was: I was
approved for my( second-time-around )new laptop!
It was actually rather surprising how
smoothly the process went; I was in and out of work in about half an hour or
so. Papers filed, deposit paid and silly grin plastered on my face, yup. Sunny
and bright, perfect weather to run around skipping for joy with a new toy...
er, laptop for doing my writing with, tucked safely in my pack.
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| Look, it's smart enough to find my lost marbles! |
Having spent hours late in the evening
properly setting up my new PC, I'm really happy with the unit, with none of the
knuckle-dragging the Acer S3 vex-hibited. Admittedly, the SSD storage space is
pretty limited and I'll have to be careful with what I install, even with using
Dropbox for my files - I can supplement my storage with flash drives, if
needed.
The main thing is now having a portable computer
that doesn't struggle to do what I need it to do. That's really what it's all
about and in that regard this new Samsung Ultrabook is wonderful.
April 8 - Siberian Mysteries
Everyone loves a little mystery, right?
Stories about mysterious places have always
peaked my interest, especially ones that involve ancient places and things that
can't be readily explained even buy modern science. And where better to find a
mystery then somewhere remote, like Siberia? We're not talking about ordinary
mysteries here either; no, we're looking at things that defy the normal and
make silly faces at reality, possibly diving right into the down right unexplainable.
Mysteries that involve inaccessible places
are always the best mysteries and the deep northern parts of Russia are just
that: inaccessible. Very few people live or travel there willingly and if you
DO want to visit, you really have to be
prepared for a journey of epic proportions. You also have to be prepared to see
perhaps a whole lot of nothing, as mysteries don't tend to draw attention to
themselves, you know.
In this particular inaccessible mystery, what
one would hope to see you would be strange underground domes, made of metal,
that are warm as the spring breeze, even in the middle of winter:
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| Yes, he's riding a reindeer - no, that's not a Frozen joke. |
Stories like that of ancient
Atlantis, lost civilizations and even the aliens are all rolled into one with
this tale and it's fascinating to read. The adventure was made by one Ivan
Mackerle and his team and you can read about it here as well as see pictures from his expedition. Not that I believe every word, mind you, but it's fascinating
nonetheless. With stories like these, the writer in me joins hands with my
inner child and dance around the possibilities that places like this suggest
about what our universe may contain.
And the truth? It's still buried somewhere deep
in the permafrost in Siberia.
April 9 - Halfway Point
Novel update: Today marks the halfway point
of editing my novel.
Twenty chapters have been thoroughly edited
and although I don't consider the first half of the book complete, it's
incredibly far along the way towards being finished. The second half of the novel
still needs to be edited, of course, but that's on track with my current pace
for being done by the end of May 2014. That likely includes a few weeks of
tweaking and putting in little touches that make the whole better than the
parts, which is all just part of the editing process. If you're curious about
that, this article has a neat little summary of what an author should look for
when editing their first draft; useful advice!
And then there's people who make BIG
mistakes when editing...
In all the headlines this week was Heartbleed,
a HUGE bug in the security code used by millions of websites the world over.
If you haven't read what all the fuss is
about, this article is a succinct and useful summary of what Heartbleed's all
about and what you need to do about it to protect yourself. Don't be
complacent; go and read the article, then change your passwords - this article
has a short list of the major sites affected.
If you don't, you're taking your chances
that someone else will change your passwords for you.
April 10 - Diamonds for Batsy!
Batman turned 75 today.
To celebrate the singular distinction, a
special animated short was created by none other than Bruce Timm, who was a
cornerstone of the original Batman animated series on television in the 1990s.
It's a fantastic short, done in the old 1940's serial style and you can see it
in all its glory below:
To be honest, Batman's a little moody for
my tastes. I much prefer Spiderman, for all of his introspective uncertainty
and bigger zest-for-life then ol' Batsy has - or at least shows, anyway. Yet
the enduring brilliance of Batman can be perhaps be best summed up by saying
that he's an ordinary man who dedicates his life to a cause so completely that
he transcends his circumstances and became something greater.
I
think we can all learn a lesson from that, which may last for at least another
75 years.
April 11 - Being Punctual
Are you a Grammar Nazi or a member of the
Punctuation Police?
I'm not either, but had to laugh when I stumbled across a series
of photographs of terribly-punctuated signs. While I'm excellent at spelling and
have a solid vocabulary, sometimes punctuation is a bit of a grey area. I can
see how some people might be confused, especially if they have a
not-so-great-grasp of the English language to begin with, in all it's strange
and twisted convolutions of rules and exceptions. I present to you an example
below:
On a related note, I've enjoyed this year
of not sweating as much about being early or even perfectly on-time for work.
In my previous job, I had a very narrow window of arrival and departure, no
more than 5 minutes, due to the restrictions placed on us by the monitoring
company. Having your DM get a phone call because you were late to work was
rather stressful and while that never happened to me personally, I still
stressed about punctuality. My current job has started to get that way again
and that's not a good sign, I think - casual lateness is something to be
discouraged, I agree, but when a workplace starts seeing the clock as some sort
of holy institution, that rings warning bells in my brain.
I hope it's just a phase they're going
through and will grow out of, in time.
April 12 - Driving Cloud Storage
Don't you love it when things get less
expensive overtime? It's so rare...
In the tech world, that usually means
things get faster and smaller, the less expensive is a relative term and tends to
take a long time overall. Price points do fall: high-end laptops were $4,000 twenty years ago when I was in university and now they're $1,000-ish. Still pricey but not out of the reach of ordinary people.
Cloud storage has been somewhat pricey for a couple of years, but the whole industry got a kick in the pants this week when Google nose-dived the pricing for all of its cloud-storage plans across the board. While my own 50gb of Dropbox space runs out in September, I'll be picking up 100gb of GoogleDrive space for a mere $2.00 a month. That's right: for a Toonie a month, I'll be set for space on my mobile devices - how great is that kind of a deal?
This week's blog was again composed on my
phone by voice, which amazingly took even less time than last week. I did manage to install Dragon
Naturally Speaking 11 on my new laptop, but I couldn't get the microphone
working; frustration. I ended up having to download the Dragon 11 install as a
torrent as I couldn't find my install disks( I own a copy )which was an
adventure in itself, as I discovered that - as I suspected - torrents are rife
with sneaky malware and trojans. Case in point: the torrent I downloaded was
infected with a trojan botnet virus, which probably makes the torrent host a
fair bit of cash from stealing valuable personal info as he 'generously' lets
people the world over download and install his little backdoor bug. So you have to know how to keep yourself safe when torrenting.
Scumbags and criminals: they're only a
click of a button away. Be warned!
April 13 - Rollin' LARGE
Usually I sing the praises of tiny homes,
but this week I found something different: a big trailer.
A really, really BIG trailer. Take a
gander:
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| That's a man in a white shirt by the wheel. |
Now, that looks like something that can
only exist where there are no bridges to go under, or cross, for that matter. I
searched the 'net for anything that could relate to giant RV's, trailers or
other similar massive rigs but came up empty. My closest guess as to what the
thing is used for is as mobile accommodations at a massive mining facility,
perhaps in Australia? I'm not sure; if anyone out there has any idea what this
mobile motel / apartment is used for, please let me know.
If not, it's no... big deal.
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| Everyone needs a day off to catch up. |
Since I'm only working two days this coming week, that leaves me five days to devote to my novel. Well, four, as today( Sunday )was again devoted to catching up on other things and getting in some relax time after a busy three days working; spring weather really seems to bring people out in droves. There was only one twit in the whole lot too, which was nice; I've seen very few idiots on a daily basis this last year, which has been wonderful... I don't think I've smiled as much in the ten years at my last job as I have in this single year at Staples, which tells you a lot.
All for now - lots of work to do this week to get at least another 5 chapters edited, at least!
