Merry Christmas to me

I've been playing with my new toy today. A very cute little blue Acer Aspire One netbook, mostly thanks to Keri who found a great online deal for the baby Linux version.



It's very cool and the keyboard is great. I tried the smallest Asus eee but the keyboard is too small for my long fingers, but this is just right. Plus I now have a use for my very geeky Battlestar Galactica mini mouse that I got free with one of the sets of DVDs lol.

I love my Alphie but you can't edit on an alphie and a big laptop is painful to lug around, so this is the perfect compromise for times when I'm not just first drafting or am travelling. I don't need a netbook with lots of bells and whistles and a massive HD, it's not my main computer and I have a work laptop if I need to travel with something with bells and whistles and storage. And one day I'll have a mac laptop. I just wanted something light that will get online if I'm overseas and can't use the iPhone for surfing and email and has good word processing and will store my writing files. This does all that in a neat package about the weight of the alphie and just slightly bigger than a trade paperback. It even has games though I'm trying to avoid those...I've already succumbed to a few iPhone games which can prove a nice little time suck if you're not careful.

Now I just need some sort of sleeve for it and I'm all set.

So what did everyone else order from Santa (or Mr Visa as the case may be)?

It's a small world

Also known as you never know who knows who on the internet...or six degrees of techno-geekery perhaps.

Today I was reading blogs on Google Reader (I am a convert to the blog aggregator concept) and saw that Elizabeth Bear had an interview on Adventures in Sci-Fi Publishing, which is a podcast I check out semi-regularly and is quite cool. So I trundled over to iTunes to download the ep and started listening on my iPod while I did some housework the old-fashioned physical way. At the end the interviewer asked Elizabeth one question he'd picked from his Twitter followers.

So, he says, here's the question from BlueTyson. At which point I started laughing. Because here in the real world, BlueTyson is known as my big brother (who does a good line in speedy reviews of mainly Sci-Fi and Superhero type books and stories if you're into that). So there you go. You never know who might be listening or popping up somewhere. Which is probably a good reason to play nice online : ) It also led to me discovering big bro is on Twitter because I hadn't gotten around to telling him I was on yet. The geek is strong in our family. Though he wins, given he is generally employed in computing type roles and uses Linux lol.

In other six degrees moments, I'm off tomorrow to attend a MS fundraising luncheon down at the folks. Mum asked me a while back and I said sure, given I figure you have to support charities that share your initials and do read-a-thons with kids as fundraising (make them catch the book bug young, I say) and are trying to find a cure for a nasty disease. Then she added "there's some writer speaking...her name's Nicola Marsh". Oh yeah, that's my friend, Nic.

The running out the door update

Over half way now on the revision, yay. I've added 33 pages in the first 11 chapters which gives you an idea how talking headish my first drafts get. I figure I'll add around another thirty in the last 8, which will get me somewhere near 97k. Good enough.

In other news, yesterday I scored an iPhone! Yay. Precioussss. Mine. All mine. But not in my pocketses, at least until I get a case. It is very pretty and shiny and does cool things. Go Apple.

And now, off to Mamma Mia because there is never too much Abba in the world! You can dance...you can jive...you know you can : )

What I did on my saturday

1. Swilled evil tasting herbal potions. I have now perfected (and am intending to patent) the evil herbal potion swilling technique as follows:
a) Prepare evil herbal potion in medicine glass. Relocate to bathroom. Have bottle of water on hand. Also mouthwash.
b) Do shot of evil herbal potion while holding nose (note DO NOT LET GO OF NOSE)
c) Chug half a bottle of water while still holding nose (nose holding is KEY)
d) Use mouthwash and rinse mouth well while STILL holding nose.
e) Spit out mouthwash and drink more water. A lot of water.

2. Played around with this because I figured I should finally get around to having a website, having relied on this blog for a while now. And also, you know, the 'if you build it, they will come,' theory of publication lol

3. Watched Ratatouille (cuteness).

4. Made soup because along with evil herbal potion, there is evil diet and really chicken and vegetables and rice cakes is about it. So variety of form is essential.

5. The writing thing. See below.

Progress - Witch 1

New pages - Ten
Intriguing things - Rising to the occasion
Annoyances - Non linear brain
Music - Mika - Happy ending/Over my shoulder. iPod.
Linear/Non-linear - Non and non and non.
Location - Alphie on the couch. Both couches in fact.
Taking care of Mel - Meditation. Evil herbal potions. Very boring food.
Muse food - Ratatouille. Cooking. Website toying.

Checking in

No earth shattering news so far this week. Lulus was fun, the baby got christened accompanied by her two blond sisters looking angelic in white frocks and her also blond big brother looking less pleased at the prospect of three sisters but still pretty cute.

One good thing is that I've discovered that power pc memory for macs is now way cheap (I assume due to the release of the new intel based macs) so mac mini is going in for a RAM upgrade Saturday morning. It generally chugs along quite happily but hopefully 1GB will mean the spinning rainbow ball will become a very rare occurrence instead of just a seldom one.

It will also mean I can play even more happily with Curio which is a fabulous brainstorming tool which produces fabulous collages if you're into that sort of thing for your writing and I'm sure could produce many other fabulous things as well. I discovered Curio via Heidi gushing on the Cherry Forums so if you want to know more about it go here. And Jenny Crusie has had a few posts on Argh Ink as well. Collage heaven. I mean I've barely started playing with it and I managed a good brain dump of stuff about Wolf 2 and my revision ideas for the GH short contemporary book both of which have the girls muttering away. I will be digging deeper this weekend between writing and eating chocolate and hot cross buns and visiting the folks. Sadly it's only for mac users but hey, everyone should be a mac user.

PS For the deformed bunny, I think you might like Curio!

Zokutou, where are you?

Anyone know what the deal is with Zokutou? I need my word count meter, darn it. Call me a virgo but I like seeing the little bar zoom along.

Or anyone know another pretty progress bar site? Pout.

A couple of mac toys: Think (which will blank out all apps but one, allowing you to concentrate on that one app) and Scrivener (a writing tool that looks kind of cool though I'm only just starting to play).

That's about it for me. It's hot. Off to write and keep writing the list of the approximately forty billion places I need to change my email address with due to imminent ISP change.

More changes

And now, this is more like it.

The Psycho one was good and using it was a lesson in quick and dirty editing but I decided two columns was more what I wanted. So back to a blogger template and apply the lessons learned from Psycho. Voila.

This one can stay awhile.

Tricksy

So I went to see the Prestige last night. And all I can say is that Christopher Nolan and Christopher Priest are tricksy hobbits and um, magicians are...not so nice. Interesting movie. Lots of twists and turns and darker than I expected and several ewwww moments but fascinating in the end. Plus Hugh takes his shirt off so, you know, all good! Might have to hunt up the book now.

I spent the first half of the afternoon lunching in the sun by the water with one of my best friends learning about birthing preferences. She's having her first soon and I'm going to be there...yikes. Hopefully it's not so tricksy.

In other news I defeated the Chris Isaak cd by booting up my old windows ME machine. So now I have it in iTunes and the muse is happy. Sometimes older is better.

Writing wise the muse has called time for mulling over for the last week or so. Going to sit down and try and do some brain dumping today to see whether anything fruitful has been decided or whether more time might be required. Revising. Not always fun.

Speed, glorious speed

Ha ha, back to broadband. No more e-snail-mail.

In other news - check out this. My friend Keri, she rocks : )

More tomorrow when I'm awake.