Lisbon. That Peruvian flute music you can't get away from these days, no matter where you go. And American Indian headresses. Okay. Well, Paris has a chain of Indian-themed restaurants called Indiana.
Friday, May 13, 2005
Remaining true to their heritage
Lisbon. That Peruvian flute music you can't get away from these days, no matter where you go. And American Indian headresses. Okay. Well, Paris has a chain of Indian-themed restaurants called Indiana.
Saturday, May 07, 2005
They do things behind my back
As I am wont to do, after I got home from work last night I settled down on the couch with a DVD (from the second season of Babylon 5) and the ThinkPad, because of course I can't remain fully absorbed by just the DVD and snacking, I also have to be playing Risk and occasionally checking e-mail, and surfing. (The web-surfing is usually related to the DVD. Like, "Hmm, I wonder what Mira Furlan has been doing since the last B5 movie. And who's that guy who plays Kosh?")
I was using wi-fi again for this, of course, which is how I noticed that the long-running problem of the ThinkPad's wireless gimcrackery bogging down my CPU had somehow resolved itself. I'm wireless right now, and the CPU usage is flickering between 2 percent and 15 percent, rather than spiking at 80 or 90 percent, as it had been. I hadn't done a thing to bring this about, unless you count thinking really hard about uninstalling all the IBM wireless software and using Windows XP's.
Meanwhile, all the tasks on my Palm Tungsten E spontaneously put themselves into different categories. Rather than wait for them to put themselves right again, as the ThinkPad had, I put them back myself. Took 25 minutes. Then I backed up all the data on an SD card. Then I ran a HotSync.
The PDAs are usually well-behaved (though short-lived: I've somehow killed two Sony T615Cs, and my Tungsten T3 died, too, though it seems to have resurrected itself), but Windows machines just do stuff. We've all experienced it. You go away from the machine for a half-hour, come back, and the disk drive is just whirring away like crazy. "What are you doing!?" But of course it never tells you.
I was using wi-fi again for this, of course, which is how I noticed that the long-running problem of the ThinkPad's wireless gimcrackery bogging down my CPU had somehow resolved itself. I'm wireless right now, and the CPU usage is flickering between 2 percent and 15 percent, rather than spiking at 80 or 90 percent, as it had been. I hadn't done a thing to bring this about, unless you count thinking really hard about uninstalling all the IBM wireless software and using Windows XP's.
Meanwhile, all the tasks on my Palm Tungsten E spontaneously put themselves into different categories. Rather than wait for them to put themselves right again, as the ThinkPad had, I put them back myself. Took 25 minutes. Then I backed up all the data on an SD card. Then I ran a HotSync.
The PDAs are usually well-behaved (though short-lived: I've somehow killed two Sony T615Cs, and my Tungsten T3 died, too, though it seems to have resurrected itself), but Windows machines just do stuff. We've all experienced it. You go away from the machine for a half-hour, come back, and the disk drive is just whirring away like crazy. "What are you doing!?" But of course it never tells you.
Friday, May 06, 2005
It's a small world after all
And now you will have that tune running through your head for the rest of the day, demonstrating the fearsome power of the Internet.
It's pretty cool when you can read about some software in a book (a book I saw reviewed on the Internet, although in this case I bought it at Brentano's, not Amazon), order and download the software, and then have the creator show up in your blog. I'm always pleasantly surprised when I see evidence a stranger has passed through here, since a lot of my friends don't, ferchrissakes. The best bit of Internet serendipity came a couple years ago, when my long lost half-sister e-mailed me after a distant relative stumbled across my main and sadly neglected site.
This whole blogging thing would be even more interesting, of course, if the entries concerned, say, the completion of my 23rd novel, or my new deal with Dreamworks. Or perhaps not necessarily more interesting: Kevin Smith has a blog and his topics include the quality of his bowel movements (also spoilers on "Revenge of the Sith," so read with care).
Another Internet-related goodie that showed up this week: Yet another once-in-a-lifetime moneymaking opportunity from a Nigerian lawyer representing the estate of an oil executive who died in a car crash. The roads of Nigeria must be littered with the carcasses of intestate millionaires. Hard to believe people fall for these scams, but they do. And I have a vision of half the population of Nigeria hunched over their keyboards every night, sending out e-mails to unsuspecting Westerners.
More tech: We saw Mark Knopfler in concert here in Paris last month and I noticed that the flicked Bic cigarette lighter has been largely supplanted by the small glowing square -- that is, the screens of cameraphones pointed at the stage. This phenomenon has manifested itself just in the past two years; it was then that we went to our last concert, Bruce Springsteen, and there were no cameraphones in evidence. In a couple years the phones will have full quality sound and video capability and there will be a couple hundred simulcasters in the audience.
And, lastly and inevitably, a tech annoyance: Like any good ThinkPadder, I check IBM's update site regularly and download and install all the recommended driver and software updates. And once again I seem to have touched off a conflict, this time involving the vast array of wireless gimcrackery my T41 ThinkPad claims to need. The beast can latch on to and hold a wireless connection with blinding speed, but it burns up so many system resources to do it that it bogs everything down, including e-mail and web-surfing. So I've turned off the wireless, dragged an Ethernet cable out of the closet, and am now operating at flank speed once again, and growling softly.
It's pretty cool when you can read about some software in a book (a book I saw reviewed on the Internet, although in this case I bought it at Brentano's, not Amazon), order and download the software, and then have the creator show up in your blog. I'm always pleasantly surprised when I see evidence a stranger has passed through here, since a lot of my friends don't, ferchrissakes. The best bit of Internet serendipity came a couple years ago, when my long lost half-sister e-mailed me after a distant relative stumbled across my main and sadly neglected site.
This whole blogging thing would be even more interesting, of course, if the entries concerned, say, the completion of my 23rd novel, or my new deal with Dreamworks. Or perhaps not necessarily more interesting: Kevin Smith has a blog and his topics include the quality of his bowel movements (also spoilers on "Revenge of the Sith," so read with care).
Another Internet-related goodie that showed up this week: Yet another once-in-a-lifetime moneymaking opportunity from a Nigerian lawyer representing the estate of an oil executive who died in a car crash. The roads of Nigeria must be littered with the carcasses of intestate millionaires. Hard to believe people fall for these scams, but they do. And I have a vision of half the population of Nigeria hunched over their keyboards every night, sending out e-mails to unsuspecting Westerners.
More tech: We saw Mark Knopfler in concert here in Paris last month and I noticed that the flicked Bic cigarette lighter has been largely supplanted by the small glowing square -- that is, the screens of cameraphones pointed at the stage. This phenomenon has manifested itself just in the past two years; it was then that we went to our last concert, Bruce Springsteen, and there were no cameraphones in evidence. In a couple years the phones will have full quality sound and video capability and there will be a couple hundred simulcasters in the audience.
And, lastly and inevitably, a tech annoyance: Like any good ThinkPadder, I check IBM's update site regularly and download and install all the recommended driver and software updates. And once again I seem to have touched off a conflict, this time involving the vast array of wireless gimcrackery my T41 ThinkPad claims to need. The beast can latch on to and hold a wireless connection with blinding speed, but it burns up so many system resources to do it that it bogs everything down, including e-mail and web-surfing. So I've turned off the wireless, dragged an Ethernet cable out of the closet, and am now operating at flank speed once again, and growling softly.
Tuesday, May 03, 2005
The inside story
Yesterday I had an endoscopy, where the doctor feeds a tube about a half-inch in diameter down your throat. There's a bright light and a small camera at the end of the tube, so the doctor can look around your esophagus and stomach and anywhere else he'd care to virtually roam. Step One of the procedure is swab your mouth and throat with a local anesthetic. Getting a general anesthetic was also an option, but that seemed a little extreme for a little endoscopic look-see. Also time- and money-consuming. So, a local.
Step Two is to put a small plastic apparatus in your mouth so you can't bite down; it's held in place by a big rubber band that's wrapped around the back of your head. It was at this point that I thought to ask how long this procedure was going to take, but with the plastic bridle in my mouth it was too late.
Step Three is getting the camera down in there. They made two attempts to feed the tube down my throat, and I gagged impressively both times. The doctor allowed as how this was a matter of physiology, not willpower, and I'd have to be put under. Which meant delay, and a bigger investment of time and money than I cared to make, so I asked him to try it again. This time I managed not to choke. He looked around for maybe 30 seconds, then the tube was gone, the mouthpiece removed, and I was left with a fresh appreciation for Jenna Jameson's skill set.
The bill was an American-sized 950 euros, but then, this was the American Hospital outside Paris. I'd decided to seek treatment for the hiatal hernia there so that if I said, "Everything is going dark...." someone would understand me. On Friday, Herself and I saw a surgeon there, who declined to immediately pop me open and wrench my stomach back into place. Instead, he sent me along to the endoscopy guy. Who confirmed that I have some small ulcers, and some pain in the wallet. Next step comes tomorrow, when I get the acidity level in my esophagus checked. I can't help but think I have better things to do with my time and money.
I haven't been writing, but I did bestir myself sufficiently to download two note-taking and thought-organizing programs, BrainStorm and NoteMap 2. I first read about BrainStorm in Hitchhiker, M.J. Simpson's biography of Douglas Adams, and was all hot to try it. Later, it occurred to me that the fact that Adams used the software might not be much of an endorsement -- he seems never to have gotten his shit together as a writer, although what he did write, on those rare occasions when he could, was often wonderful. NoteMap's target audience seems to be lawyers and other besuited types, and its web site is much more corporate-looking than BrainStorm's. And though I've just started to explore both programs, their approaches seem to reflect an artistic vs. corporate approach. BrainStorm seems looser, like a comfortable flannel shirt. NoteMap seems a bit more hierarchical and better organized. It remains to be seen whether one is better than the other for taming the megabytes of notes, lines, scenes, excerpts and other junk that accretes around one of my story ideas. Also, whether either program is better than, say, a stack of 3x5 cards.
Step Two is to put a small plastic apparatus in your mouth so you can't bite down; it's held in place by a big rubber band that's wrapped around the back of your head. It was at this point that I thought to ask how long this procedure was going to take, but with the plastic bridle in my mouth it was too late.
Step Three is getting the camera down in there. They made two attempts to feed the tube down my throat, and I gagged impressively both times. The doctor allowed as how this was a matter of physiology, not willpower, and I'd have to be put under. Which meant delay, and a bigger investment of time and money than I cared to make, so I asked him to try it again. This time I managed not to choke. He looked around for maybe 30 seconds, then the tube was gone, the mouthpiece removed, and I was left with a fresh appreciation for Jenna Jameson's skill set.
The bill was an American-sized 950 euros, but then, this was the American Hospital outside Paris. I'd decided to seek treatment for the hiatal hernia there so that if I said, "Everything is going dark...." someone would understand me. On Friday, Herself and I saw a surgeon there, who declined to immediately pop me open and wrench my stomach back into place. Instead, he sent me along to the endoscopy guy. Who confirmed that I have some small ulcers, and some pain in the wallet. Next step comes tomorrow, when I get the acidity level in my esophagus checked. I can't help but think I have better things to do with my time and money.
I haven't been writing, but I did bestir myself sufficiently to download two note-taking and thought-organizing programs, BrainStorm and NoteMap 2. I first read about BrainStorm in Hitchhiker, M.J. Simpson's biography of Douglas Adams, and was all hot to try it. Later, it occurred to me that the fact that Adams used the software might not be much of an endorsement -- he seems never to have gotten his shit together as a writer, although what he did write, on those rare occasions when he could, was often wonderful. NoteMap's target audience seems to be lawyers and other besuited types, and its web site is much more corporate-looking than BrainStorm's. And though I've just started to explore both programs, their approaches seem to reflect an artistic vs. corporate approach. BrainStorm seems looser, like a comfortable flannel shirt. NoteMap seems a bit more hierarchical and better organized. It remains to be seen whether one is better than the other for taming the megabytes of notes, lines, scenes, excerpts and other junk that accretes around one of my story ideas. Also, whether either program is better than, say, a stack of 3x5 cards.
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