29-III-2007.
My laptop arrived (later named nezavisni). With the bloody Vista on it, but I decided to give it a try, for a while. The remote doesn't work, but then what the fuck - it's not a VCR or a TV, it's a laptop.
Later, I sent the UPC and the copy of the invoice, to try to get the 100$ mail-in rebate from Hewlett-Packard. They said that I failed to send "UPC or invoice", ha ha. I blogged it on 30th of june, and four years later, that article is still getting views. HP has become notorious in this respect.
My thread on UA, about programming pencils... which drifted into "dog ate my homework":
I wrote a dozen stories, maybe, and something that may qualify as a novel. Two of my SF stories even got published (first one got even paid, the second won a prize I never received). I'm writing, sort of, for 25 years now, and my opus could fit maybe two paperbacks :). I'm slow. Or rather, not so slow to write, but it takes me a looong time - weeks, months, to get back to it.
Want to talk about technique, down-to-Earth technique. I wrote only my first story on paper, because it was before I had my first computer (zx spectrum, yeah!). Then I didn't have an editor, so I wrote it as comments in a program - 10 REM it was a dark and stormy night...
Then I bought an editor, then another machine, then converted via floppies into pure text, took them to work, ran troff on them for formatting (on the Vaha), then moved them to WordStar, to atarist's 1st Word, then to Word, then to HTML, and eventually into... HTML in memos. I've had a lot of fun programming my pencils :).
Once, after hurricane Isabel, we were without power for 11 days - and guess what, with nothing to do, I took a docket and started adding page after page. Could be that all those years of writing on paper do something to you, you get into the mood or something. I didn't have to change much when I put that on disk.
I still write very little on paper. Even my notes are just a few jotted lines - I don't know whether I use a whole sheet of paper a day.
So, ok, I've told my side of it, now you tell me yours and let me know if there's a good group therapy for (against?) this.
On 31st Lena had a homework in japanese - for good marks she had to be seen at the cherry blossom festival, in a park somewhere in the wider neighborhood of the school, which is maintained by the local japanese community. Her sensei confirmed her status as a ninja, you just suddenly have that feeling and she's surely appeared behind your back, it's just that you don't know when. I didn't make too many shots, because the batteries in the Conica just died. And I did check them beforehand, and they showed okay. Unreliable, that.
When we got in the car, I asked whether they sense in it the smell of stale wet C vitamin, I feel it for weeks and can't think of what could be the cause. We generally don't use them powdered drinks and even less keep them in the car. They all agreed, the smell is there, and after a brief search they found the cause - under the rear window a sandwich was under some papers. Left over from that trip to DC in late summer. How did it manage to stink of nothing else but C vitamin, is uncomprehensible to me. Who knows what is it that we eat here.
Mentions: atariST, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), nezavisni, SF stories, UbiquAgora (UA), VAX (Vaha), ZX Spectrum, in serbian