My three year-old laptop, Swordfish, finally croaked this weekend when the hard drive marked itself nearly 50% bad and then Windows told me to grab what I could and get the fuck out of Dodge, because it was about to burn down. Luckily, I noticed the hard drive getting slower and slower before the warning (hard drive failure is IMMINENT!) and backed up all my important data to my 60GB iPod as quickly as I could.
When it comes to computers, I’m pretty peculiar in some respects. I have machines with dedicated purposes. Swordfish was my internet and writing machine. Redtail is my games-only machine. How I design and install applications has a lot to do with what I use machines for, and so while swordfish was decked out with serious anti-spyware and the like, Redtail I never surfed on and used only to hook up on EverQuest or Guild Wars… so when Swordfish finally keeled, I had to look at Redtail as my last hope. Unfortunately, I used Redtail to such an extreme that it only had around 900 megs free on it. Doh.
A new laptop was needed, anyway, as I never travel without one. So last night, in an attempt to price new laptops, Julia and I ventured out to Fry’s, Best Buy, and Circuit City. It was not our intent to buy a laptop, as I was pretty much convinced after we left Best Buy that going online to buy one was going to be our only option. When we arrived at Circuit City, though, they had the exact laptop I was looking for like a year ago. Okay, it was no longer being made and the chipset was a little on the old side, but it was perfect for my needs in all respects. We returned home with a new toy, and I named it Hammerhead (after Jet Black’s fighter from Cowboy Bebop). I spent a majority of the night transferring my stuff onto it and uninstalling all the superfluous shit they pre-install into their laptops (I really don’t need Microsoft Works… when clearly it Does Not Work).
In other news, Baseball Bias is nearly complete in getting all the bugs worked out of the system in its beta stage. The RSS feed is fucked up, though, and I’m trying to figure out how to fix it. I’ll add it to the list of stuff I need to do that’s not work-related. The one thing about BBB that scares me is that most of my writers don’t seem at all interested in doing this. All but one have responded to my mails; all but one have actually submitted an article and well… it just plain sucks. I can stomp and howl and shout all I want, but I can’t write everyone’s articles for them, so I guess if it fails, Julia and I are out the money we invested into it. And this was no small sum, either. I’m hoping for the best, but it seems like my optimism is biting me in the ass already.
Work’s been okay… I think the hard part’s over (getting situated), and not it’s all about finding things for me to do. Unfortunately, that sometimes lands me on the wrong side of most projects and tasks, but at least they’re keeping me busy and interested in my work, which was something missing from my previous jobs.
I’ve been feeling the urge to write again, but this is so not the best time for it. With the wedding coming up and my work schedule becoming more and more erratic, it’s difficult for me to actually find the time to sit down and dedicate an hour or two to writing when it could be better spent working on something that needs to get done. Since I finished Knight Commander late October last year, and started writing Knightfall for the National Novel Writing Month in November, I logged over 100,000 words in under two months (closer to 125,000 words). That’s a lot of fucking writing in such a short amount of time (for me), and I think I might have overloaded my creative side by giving it that level of access to my free time. By the end of December, I felt as though the wind had completely spilled out of my creative sail and I needed some time to recharge. I just hope it doesn’t take me another year to get back on the horse… of course, that would be just in time for NaNoWriMo 2006, now, wouldn’t it?
Unwound will be starting up after I get married, but we haven’t published a new schedule for it, yet. I’m hoping to sit down with Jesse and Jenn and discuss season three with them in the next week.
Anyway, that’s pretty much all the news I’ve got. Do you dare to comment?
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I’m going to try and do my best to write for BBB. I haven’t had a chance to do my predictions article yet, do to school getting in the way, but with any luck I should have it mostly finished by tonight.
comment. 😛
With everyone being so busy we’ll probably won’t see each other until the wedding.
Send a recent picture so I know who to look for on the 9th ^_~
Microsoft Works…hah.
Good luck with BBB, though. I didn’t know you were having trouble with it. Sometimes in the beginning with things you just have to ride people about doing stuff on time…eventually they’ll get a bit more disciplined, hopefully.
My schedule is crazy busy right now.. it might get a little better once I’m only doing my current job 2 days a week, but I’ll still be working 7 days. So I’d feel more comfortable if I could share Giants duties or something.
Lemme in on the UW goodness.