apple

iPad!

I really thought the shipping notice I got on Friday might have been an April Fool’s joke, but my iPad 2 actually arrived today! Pretty much right on schedule with the estimated 2-3 weeks from when I ordered it, though a bit ahead of the ship-by date it had listed for a good long while.

I have a thing about not buying first generation Apple products, and I was skeptical about the original iPad. But I played with them in the Apple store over the last year and liked it more than I’d expected to, and I knew I wanted to get some sort of e-reader eventually, so I figured I’d get one when the 2nd gen came out.

And now I have my iPad 2 and it’s very shiny. Still mostly figuring my way around and setting things up, but so far I’m pleased & the Smart Cover is a thing of brilliance.

By erin, ago

iWednesday

I spent a large portion of the afternoon mesmerized by the shininess of the Apple iPad. Even though it has a horrible, horrible name. For about an hour I seriously considered getting one, since we were planning on replacing our MacBook later this year anyway and we don’t use it for that much. And it seemed like it would be a good happy medium between my iPhone lust and my AT&T loathing.

And then I realized since it’s app-based I can’t really do anything useful on it and would be deprived of my beloved Scrivener. So I am going to have to ignore the shiny for now. Someone call me when it runs OS X.

In better news, I tested USPS requested package pickup today and it seems to have worked just fine, so I now have an alternative to walking to the post office in the snow when I have something larger than print envelope sized to mail.

And we are rolling toward the end of our epic LOST re-watch. Season 5 is a lot more, um, inconsistent than I’d remembered. Still good, just missing something. But I know the finale will make me cry again, so maybe I’ll forgive the inconsistencies in a few days.

Still in revisionland, of course. I’m not sure I’m going to have a finished(ish) draft by as early in February as I’d wanted, but it’s starting to look novel-shaped again, which is something. It still needs massive amounts of work but the structure is getting there and that’s making my brain hurt marginally less.

Bucket, as always, remains unimpressed.

unimpressed bucket 2010

By erin, ago

on working and technology

After almost a month of questionable network connectivity and trying everything we could think of to fix it, our Time Capsule (Apple wireless base station/backup device) was declared dead at the Apple Store yesterday. They gave us a new one. The network is now much, much happier and back to being quick like a bunny, and backups are no longer glacial.

*hugs internet*

Seriously, I’m a geek when it comes to my internet access. I get twitchy when I can’t check my e-mail. My Google Reader is my new best friend. Having to wait five minutes for a page to load makes me crazy. Sure, I like to unplug completely once in awhile but I don’t like having to do it involuntarily and when I have stuff to do.

These past few weeks of lousy connectivity (not completely lost, just intermittent and slow, which was almost more annoying because it was teasing me) made me realize how web-based a lot of what I do can be.

Sure, I can write and paint without the internet. I can paint without a computer at all, but I prefer typing to longhand writing. But I can’t manage anything in my Etsy store without an internet connection. Thus the sale on originals got extended longer than I’d intended, but that’s alright.

And I wonder, sometimes, if I’d be as inclined as I am to push forward with trying to get my novel published if it weren’t for the incredible presence of the publishing industry online.

There are countless informative blogs by literary agents and editors out there. I follow a handful of agents on Twitter, even. There are forums and websites and it’s all so accessible that I’ve learned buckets of stuff about an industry I had no clue about just about a year ago.

(Really. I had a vague concept of publishers and agents and whatnot but I didn’t even know what a query letter was.)

Because of all that easily accessible information I now have ideas and plans and I feel like I know what I’m doing. It doesn’t feel as daunting as it once did. The process of getting from manuscript to bookshelf seems challenging but not mystifying anymore.

I think the point of this post is that I love the internet and I’m glad my little network of computers is happy again because it makes me more productive, even though my job doesn’t seem all that technical.

By erin, ago