Kate Schaefer

splinister @ 10:18 am: Easy PC
Six weeks ago I purchased an ASUS Eee PC. For those not in the know, the Eee PC is a range of über-portable laptops whose genesis originates from the hypothesis that when people travel they mostly need to check email and browse, and that doesn't require a high spec machine. The first Eee PCs ran off a Linux operating system, but now there are models that utilise Windows XP if you insist on a Windows security blanket. I've been happy with the Linux OS.

My desire to buy the Eee PC sprang from the frustrations of modern travel. These days I aim to travel light. I try to pack everything into one bag - preferably a carry-on if it's a flight. Especially if I'm only going to be away for a couple of days. I have a small laptop, which is only 14", but it's impossible to tote it, with its power supply, and the rest of my gear in one bag. It's cumbersome and heavy. If I have to negotiate security checkpoints, traverse endless airport corridors, walk to train stations, travel up and down stairs, search out accommodation, and suffer adverse weather conditions, I don't want the bother of also dragging around a lot of kit.

The Eee PC is a simple rugged machine, with a keyboard that is just big enough to operate. I wouldn't want to use it all the time, but it's perfect for light writing and emails. I'm using the Surf Eee PC (in black), which has a webcam, a 4GB hard drive, 512MB RAM, and a 7" screen. USB pen drives and memory cards are cheap and plentiful as muck these days so extra memory is not a problem. There are newer niftier models of Eee PC coming out all the time (although those of us in Europe are getting them at a slower rate than the USA). The battery life is around 3 hours, but you can shave an hour off that if you have the WiFi enabled and are doing a lot of surfing and browsing. It's a jewel: tiny, lightweight, and functional.

Now a confession: I have a slight passion for bags. I'm not a crazy person with a room dedicated to them, but I like to have different bags for different occasions. Recently I purchased a Charlotte Reid handbag, which you'll see in the photographs. I bought it for a variety of reasons, but never considered that my Eee PC could actually fit inside it. But with encouragement it does! It's like a magic trick that has passerbys looking askance when a fully formed laptop pops out of my handbag.

I've also noticed that when I use the laptop in a café, or out in the wild, that it always attracts attention. People peer at me over menus and around the side of their newspaper. Eventually, someone will ask about it. So far 100% of the time it's been men who have approached me. I know there are geeky women out there (hello, me!), but they seem to be thin on the ground, or maybe they are less forthcoming. Perhaps the Eee PC is the new way to meet people, the perfect conversation starter in a tech-obsessed world. I'd imagine that any single woman or man could set up a Eee PC in a trendy café and wait for the polite enquires to start. A shared interest in gadgets is a solid starting point.

Tags: review, tech, writing

dirtylibrarian @ 01:18 am: perspective, humor
Seen on a number of people's blogs lately, but worth sharing again:

Things Younger than John McCain

Tags: humor, politics

dirtylibrarian @ 01:09 am: unread book meme
What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read. (I partially bolded the ones I started, to show how far I got).

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey (Given to me by my elderly neighbor as a child who nicknamed me Esmerelda)
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Actually, I don't feel too bad about that.  Still plan to theoretically read many of these, but still...

from theda

Tags: books, reading

prof_brotherton @ 01:46 am: Interesting Stories (some follow-ups)

That “wizard” fired for practicing the black arts in a Florida school is confused and disturbed by the widespread support from the internet.  He said:

“Is there so little going on in these peoples’ lives? I don’t know what these people are thinking. That they are my advocates and that somehow a profanity-laced e-mail is going to benefit me?” he said. “They’ve got some issues of their own. If I met any of these board members, I would apologize to them profusely.”

Well, I spread the story.  It does have a sexy, outrageous angle.  It’s a lesson in what we gossip about, and maybe more or less.  The core of the story if/when true was pretty disturbing to me.

Meanwhile, what astrologers think about the presidential race is apparently news.  McCain is as superstitious as they come, so he should take heed, and we should laugh.

And finally, a friend of mine (Jeffrey Lockwood) who solicited me for some ideas for his class this spring, makes the news for his class on SETI and writing to aliens.  Cool!  Check it out.

Originally published at Mike Brotherton: SF Writer. You can comment here or there.

Tags: education, general, personal, popular events, science, science fiction

wiredferret @ 11:37 pm: Sunday night of a good week
Sometimes the contrasts of my life are dizzying. I think I like it like that. On Friday night, I was bantering over wine and a tasty cheese plate. 24 hours later, I was holding a feverish child and running through my lullaby collection. I like both of these things, both of them are a part of who I am, and so much more. I can be a vigilant defender of usability. I can be good at cakes. I can be horrible to get up in th emorning. I can be the first person out of the house. this week, I need to write two articles, and then I get on a plane again and go soak in an atmosphere unlike anything I've found anywhere else.

And tonight, I'm doing laundry.

badgerbag @ 09:46 pm: Pushing myself
Well I've been pushing myself to walk more and walk with just a cane instead of crutches, or around the house or super short distances without the cane at all. I can do it, where I could not have some months ago. It's great. But, the thing is I think I have pushed somehting too far because last night I started hurting like hell, and though I mostly laid in bed today it still does. The dire thing that happens in the small of my back on the right side has activated. It is like little knives stuck in there or something trying to gnaw its way out. And it goes down my leg. Any breath of cold or breeze or touching my leg is crazy. A sort of firm touch is okay. But, a bump or a light touch hurts. My foot and calf are very painful. The one spot up by my knee on the outside, the place where they stuck a lot of electrodes during the nerve study, I could scream...

Anyway, it's vicodin time for the 2nd night in a row. I had to slow way down today, walk less, and right at kid bedtime I realized there was no more bending and stooping. It was a struggle to pick anyting up off the floor, something that unfortunately coincides with needing the floor to be clear for crutches.

I spent a very pleasant day with everyone... kids swirled around... there was minimal fuss with them... they ate with very little fuss about it and never fought. The cutest picture of a house finch in a tree, ever, was drawn cooperatively (there were house finches at the bird feeder, computers were consulted, bits from North American Wildlife book read aloud.)

All day I laid in bed and went through the first 3 Marq'ssan books. I started doing a detailed character index but realized that would take too long. So, it turned into a skim and summary for each book. I will really enjoy re-reading these for real, all at one go, over a weekend or something.

Noticed a basic structural element of the Marq'ssan books. Stuff happens, then, PROCESS. So everythign else is punctuated by "aliens argue" or "the collecitve has a steering committee meeting".

In the morning I read the Jane Austen Choose your own Adventure book, "Lost in Austen". I tracked my points, but not Failings or Connections. It was FUN. OMG. I'm giving it to my mom for her birthday and I can't wait to pass it to my sister also. The ending that I didn't get gave me shivers and made me tear up a little.

wiredferret @ 10:06 pm: Green Eggs and Ham
Baz read it all. We had to help him sound through new words a few times, or remind him to read the word that was actually there, but WOW! He read a book. A big book (you do not realize how long Seuss books are until you read them to a child. You are still in ignorance until the child reads them to you. An HOUR.) But he did it, and I am so so proud.

Evidently, they will have a celebratory meal tomorrow. ;)

Tags: baz, milestones

james_nicoll @ 11:54 pm: What's the right term
For the psychic ability to realize that you should have stopped talking about three sentences ago?

[Not relevent to any recent events in my life but I know I will use it at some point]

elisem @ 10:26 pm: calling my WisCon posse....
Hey, if you have asked me about helping out, I have a definite Thing that needs helping with.  It's on Saturday night, preparing for the Haiku Earring Party.  I am trying to make sure I get dinner, by the simple expedient of accepting a dinner invitation I have been offered, but I also confess that setting up for the Haiku Earring Party is the time I am most prone to melancholy missing of Mike. I keep looking over to the little kitchen space and expecting to see him there slicing cheese and broccoli and stuff, and making his Fordean observations. So it occurred to me that I could, you know, ask if my various helpy friends who have been asking what's needed might want to help out with this particular task. (A bunch of you have done it before, and are wonderful and experienced; it's not as much prep as some parties, as our decor is mostly Earrings On A Table and some Food On A Different Table, plus a Table At Which To Write Haiku.) 

Not sure yet on the timing of dinner and all, but as I find out, I'll let you know.  Probably I'd set up the team with a diagram, and then join you as soon as I have et.

Let me know if you might want to lend a hand.  Thank you a lot. A lot a lot a lot.


(There's a little other prep on Saturday morning, going with me to the Farmer's Market, maybe. But Saturday night is the big thing.  Set-up of the table is no longer a mad scramble, now that I have Katie along with me. In fact, she mostly chases me away once I get to the fidget stage, so she can set up in peace. Hee!

carolineyoachim @ 10:10 pm: Sale!
I just got an acceptance from Shimmer for my short story "Firefly Igloo." What a lovely way to end the weekend!

Tags: sales

alicebentley @ 08:07 pm: Not online much at all this weekend. Spent yesterday driving into town with the top down. It was quite warm!

Today - completely unrelated! - has been eaten up with coughing and napping to escape the coughing. I have one more scheduled task to do this evening, them I'm going to down some Nyquil and pass out. We shall see what tomorrow will bring.

ritaxis @ 07:09 pm: a question about London airports
If you were going to fly in and out of London, and the price was the same either way you did it, would you choose Gatwick or Stansted? Those are the choices, and there is apparently only a fifteen minute difference in arrival or departure.

The passenger has no special destination in London -- he's jusgt messing around on his way to California and back to Prague.

(our cheapest places to fly in and out of appeared to be London, Shannon, Dublin, Nice, Manchester, Krakow, and Malaga, in that order. The easiest places for him to get to, he said, were London and Krakow. London's cheaper than Krakow. Also probably simpler to wander in for a few days, though also probably more expensive to hang around in)

on another front, I have deadheaded the front roses. The first bloon is just about over.

Tags: frank, seasons

jaylake @ 06:59 pm: [cancer] Department of weird sensations I'd never have thought to experience
( Moderate medical TMI under cut for the squeamish )

Tags: cancer, funny, health, personal

ross_teneyck @ 06:28 pm: 2008 Movie Checklist: Prince Caspian
• Iron Man [My review]
• Speed Racer [My review]
• The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
• Kung Fu Panda
• The Incredible Hulk
• WALL-E
• Hellboy II: The Golden Army
• The Dark Knight
• The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars


Oh, yeah. Thumbs up on this one.

Like the first one, this movie stays pretty true to the book, although the battles are rather larger and more elaborate. Some details of the plot were changed, but nothing major. The people in charge of these movies clearly respect their source.

Also like the first one, they play the Christian underpinnings straight, just as it is in the books: it's there, but the audience can choose to pick it up or ignore it. I think that's far and away the best choice.

I'm a little sorry to see William Moseley (Peter) and Anna Popplewell (Susan) go with this movie. (Although if the franchise lasts all the way to The Last Battle, we'll get to see Peter again briefly. Poor Susan, alas, gets written out. Unless the movie chooses to change that, and personally I would applaud if they did. But I digress.) Anna is particularly good here; there are some very nicely underplayed reactions between her, Peter, and Caspian.

It would probably not have occurred to me to cast Eddie Izzard as the voice of Reepicheep, but I have to say it worked brilliantly. The only other person I can see doing the role justice is Antonio Banderas, and that would probably have reminded people too much of Puss-in-Boots from the Shrek movies.

By the way, there's a scene late in the movie where if you can avoid thinking, "Huh, Birnam Wood," then you're a better man than I.

Anyway, it's good and you should see it. IMDB claims that Voyage of the Dawn Treader is scheduled for 2010, so drive up those box office receipts and make sure it gets made!

scarlettina @ 06:31 pm: I have had a lovely weekend
Yesterday I was hugely productive, running errands, planning projects, doing household chores. I was rewarded for my effectiveness with a yummy meal at Blue Onion Bistro in the most excellent company of wanton_heat_jet, and then attended shadow_and_veil's cocktail party.

This morning, dim sum in the International District with JH was delightful, as was our walk along the Fremont cut (the canal that runs parallel to the major arterial off of which my street abuts). The path along the water is green and lush; ducks and geese paddled along the shore. We got to see all manner of pleasure boats, everything from kayaks and peddle canoes to tall sail boats and wooden personal craft. The sunlight was wonderful--not too hot--and I seem to have gotten my first color of the year.

miss_swamp and livingdeadpan's baby shower was a great opportunity to catch up with a lot of people at once--coolest baby shower ever. The catering was impeccable (and I send a shout-out to lisagail on that account), there were no embarrassing baby shower games, and the music was fine.

I am now going to indulge myself and have a pleasantly lazy evening at home.

Life, for tonight, is good.

Tags: social butterfly

johnaegard @ 06:20 pm: Courtesy of the good people at promasque.com:
( PUFFER FISH GOALIE MASK! )

Yet another reason soccer will never be as good as hockey: less pufferfish content.

fringefaan @ 05:13 pm: Back from Crooked River
Had a lovely weekend at my parents' lovely log house on the rimrock of the Crooked River canyon. I love the high desert landscape out there, the views of the volcanic mountains, and the scent of the desert, the sage and juniper, the feel of the dry air. Mostly sat around chewing the fat with the family, although I did get out in the hot sun long enough to get some color and lose two games of PIG to the younger nephew after winning the first. There were a couple of flowering bushes near the house that were just crawling with honeybees, and I stood by them listening to the incredibly dense hum of industry. You almost never see honeybees around Seattle anymore, after too big die-offs in the past decade or so. Last night we drank a couple bottles of wine with salmon dinner and talked religion and politics. (What else?) I think I ended up defining god as the parts of life you can't control or anticipate. Thus spake the Reverend Ramdu. The elder nephew drove me to the airport today. He's graduating from high school in a few weeks, and he and a buddy are taking a road trip to Southern Cal to do some surfing and to Colorado for whatever. Or something. They'll make it up as they go along, maybe figure out a couple things about how to live a life. Stepping out into the world.

My family rocks. And that's certainly something you can't control or anticipate.

Tags: family

pantryslut @ 05:20 pm: mid-weekend miscellany
1. My jaw hurts. I have no idea what I did to it (and get your mind out of the gutter), and it's not on the side that usually hurts/grinds/pops. It feels like a muscle pull, to be honest (I said out of the gutter!).

2. I just had a quiet little supper on the porch: grilled lamb chops rubbed with zaatar, over arugula dressed with a little lemon juice. We had three of the first zucchini come in the box this week, so we threw those on the grill, too. Really, really delicious.

3. As black_pearl_10 reported, someone finally took that curve by our house a little too fast and a little too drunkenly at about 2 am last night, and plowed into G.'s car and the car parked in front of him. I was asleep in the back of the house at the time, and heard nothing. Acoustics are impressive.

4. imnotandrei may be allergic to the bottlebrush tree right in front of our house. Bummer.

5. More soon, including a proper update.

d269330400, posting in wiscon @ 07:13 pm: Wiscon Memberships - Update: Sold to dlandon
I won't be using my Wiscon memberships... Want? Know how to transfer them?

Item Name: Adult Membership
Total: $45.00 USD

Item Name: Child Care Membership
Child Care Age: 20 months

mjlayman @ 08:03 pm: The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
This is an apocalyptic story where plants, named triffids, start growing all over the world and as they grow, they turn out to have stings they can whip at people, and then they start getting up and walking. They have oil that can replace fossil oil, so in the UK, where this story takes place, they're farmed, with the sting cut off. Then one night there's a shower of green lights from the sky and many people go out to look. In the morning, they're all blind. The triffids turn out to be carnivorous -- they sting and sting and then eat lots of the blind people. There are people who are not blind -- our protagonist was in the hospital because he'd gotten some triffid oil in his eyes and had bandages on.

From this point, we follow our protagonist as he finds different sighted people using different methods of trying to save themselves. Some try to save the blind, as well. It's a study of how effective different methods of post-apocalyptic managing are. The book shows us each minuscule society and how many end. One of the amusing ongoing bits in the book was how many Brits expected Americans to come save them -- they just had to hold out until the US planes got there. But triffids were worldwide and we were almost certainly in similar straits.

The book was published in 1951, four years before I was born, and the language and mores didn't bother me and I just muttered at the misogyny. One of the big things that bothered me was that the society that seemed most likely to survive (I vote the human race died out, they didn't have enough diversity) was setting up with polygamy. Now, Watson & Crick didn't discover DNA until 1953, but humans had been breeding plants and animals for millennia. You can't have the three women just have the one man's children. Each woman has to have every child by a different man in order to get enough diversity.

Wyndham was very careful to make it clear that the triffids and the green lights were Earth-based phenomena -- Soviet commie triffids and a falling satellite with some kind of nerve gas -- but it makes a lot more sense for both to be alien, from the giant triffid ship that picked us for the next farm and moved on. I can see that he wanted to show us the options for just Earth, but it makes a much too coincidental coincidence.

Something that is almost never included in books like this are people like me. My meds will run out, I can't walk very far or work very much, but I would probably see (I watch most sky stuff on TV so I don't have to haul a chair out and down the ramp so I can sit and look up without falling). So do they take me along to teach people how to do things? A number of the groups were primarily intellectuals and many of them didn't know how to do things like plow and set up pumps, etc. I know how to do a lot of useful stuff I can't actually do anymore. Or maybe I'm just as useless as most of the blind people. It makes the story less black and white, but I'd like to see it explored more. There are a lot of disabled folk.

It's a pretty good book for being 57 years old, and Ghu knows, we've had tons of jokes from it*, so even though I question some of it, I'd still recommend it primarily to see how you react to the different societies. Most of our group didn't like it.

*Years ago at a Balticon, an elevator broke with the doors open. The hotel people were worried that people would get in, push buttons, not go anywhere and get mad, so they put a large potted plant in front of the door. We made triffid jokes for the rest of the con.

Tags: books