Ceridwen’s Cauldron

I actually wrote this last week and have been forgetting to post it for some time. Sorry for the delay.

It’s here! My new mini notebook computer is here! I picked it up on Tuesday, and am actually sitting at work right now typing this on it. Is that exciting or what?

I have named it Siren. It is beautiful. Blue. The keyboard is small, but so is the whole darn thing, and it’s the perfect size for toting around. It weighs about a kilo – probably a smidge more with the upgraded battery I opted for. I don’t even notice the weight of it in my backpack. My only complaint so far is that the case is shiny and will be easily and frequently covered with fingerprints. Aah well. You can’t have everything.

Someone in one of the comment threads mentioned wanting to get a new laptop and wanted to know my experience, so I will share the details of my search, for posterity.

The mini-notes are ideal for what I want them for – something I can tote around on the train, that isn’t ungodly heavy in my backpack (even the Macbook “Air” feels like it weighs a ton by comparison. Yes, I walked around Future Shop picking up laptops and putting them back down to see what the weight was like. A note if you do this – the battery pack is the heaviest part of the laptop, and the battery pack usually isn’t attached to the mini-notes in Future Shop or Best Buy.)

I wanted something that I could word process on easily, that had enough space to save my files, that would connect to my other computers (not because I want to connect to the Internet, but because it’s handy when you want to transfer files, or do something like validate your copy of MS Office.)

For this the mini-notes are ideal – light, even with a small hard drives (they can start at about are about 8Gig, more on that in a bit) is more than enough for word processing files. They have lots of memory ports if I want to transfer files from another computer.

Of course, if you’re looking at getting a mini note, you also have to know what it doesn’t have. It doesn’t have a full-sized keyboard. The largest out there is 92%. (at least, that I’ve seen). It doesn’t have a CD drive. Depending on your model, some don’t run Windows because there’s not enough hard drive space. It doesn’t have a full-sized screen. And it’s mostly not an excellent value for the price – you pay a premium for the extra-lightness. This thing is designed for ultra-portability, and web surfing, and that’s about it. Essentially, it’s a student machine, and that’s who they’re marketed toward – it’s something to tote around to all of your classes and write essays on, for slightly less than the price of a regular computer.

I looked at four types of mini-notes – the Asus EEE pc, the MSI Wind, the Acer Aspire One (which is what I ended up buying) and an HP mini-note that I don’t remember the name of. There are more coming out – Dell has announced plans for a mini-notebook, plus rumours of more coming. This is a new market, and if you’re looking now, it might do to wait a few months and see what pricing and options are like then.

Hard Drive – Mini-notes generally have two kinds of hard drives. Some come with a Solid State drive – a flash drive like you have in an iPod. This won’t break if you drop your laptop. It’s a little bit lighter, and runs a little cooler, since it doesn’t have a drive that needs to spin. It takes less battery life (more on that later) to run. The drawback is it holds a lot less memory than a conventional HDD drive.

I went for the computer with an HDD drive and I have 120Gig of space. For about $50 less, I could have had a solid state drive that was about 8Gig. If you’re concerned about memory, the HDD is probably the better option. To my knowledge, the flash drive is only available on the Acer and the Asus computers – the Wind and the HP only come with HDD.

Operating System – HDD drives also will run Windows, frankly because Windows is a memory hog and would take up too much of that precious 8 Gigs on a solid state. The computers that do have solid state drives run a stripped-down version of Linux. If the solid state intrigues you, the Linux interface is definitely worth a look. I actually like the look of the Acer Linux interface better than the Windows interface.

Battery life – From what I can tell, the average battery life for a 3-cell battery is about 3 hours. I paid a premium on my computer to get a 6-cell battery, which has 5-6 hours of work time. Some mini-notes already come with the upgraded battery (I seem to remember the Wind had about 5 hours of life). It’s an important question to ask when you’re looking.

I’m told that the solid state drives require way less battery life – a friend who used an EEEpc said that the solid state would run for 12 hours of solid use without recharging. However, the Acer website promised me about the same battery life for solid state and HDD drives. So I don’t know.

Keyboard – I mentioned smaller keyboards above. This was a big sticking point for me. I wanted to try the MSI Wind because I heard it had the best (and the largest) keyboard, but I couldn’t find a demo model before buying (Locally, the Wind was only available at Microbytes, but I hear that it’s in the latest Business Depot flyer, so that may have changed). I tried the keyboard on the EEE pc, which wouldn’t have been bad, except that the right-hand shift key was on the other side of the pgup key, which meant that every time I wanted to hit shift (I’m a touch typist) I ended up paging back up to the top of a document. That’s aggravating enough to make the computer an absolute no for me. The HP keyboard is really nice and responsive – nicer even than the Acer’s, I think. If keyboard size is important to you, it’s best to check out the models you want at the bigger box stores – they usually have a display model, which your local computer shop might not have. (Microbytes also has display models, but they won’t boot up the notebook for you, which means you can’t open a word processor and see if you’re hitting extra keys)

Price –Prices start at $350 for the Acer, with Linux and an 8Gig flash drive. That’s a Future Shop/Best Buy price. Your local computer store is likely to charge a bit more (I bought from my local computer store. For the extra money, I’d rather not shop at Future Shop, as long-time readers know). The MSI Wind came in at about $575. I don’t remember what the EEEpc goes for. The HP was the most expensive at over $700, which I found a ridiculous price for the value – though if a mini is what you want, and you have the budget for it, the reviews I’ve read say it is the nicest of the lot.

Overall, if you want a laptop, but are going to be using it mostly as a desktop, or are travelling with it but only occasionally, you might want to spend the extra money and get a full-sized laptop. You can get a pretty good one for not too much more than you pay for a mini. The key with the mini is the portability, and you sacrifice on a few things (screen and keyboard size, to name two) to get it.

Myself? I’m very pleased with Siren, and am enjoying the mornings spent typing on the train, and the minutes at lunch hour when I can spend some time typing away to myself.

And if you’re interested, I found this site and its reviews very helpful when making my decision.

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I did record some of Tarasmas this weekend (if you don’t know what that is… well, it would take too long to explain. Just click the link, won’t you? Thanks!) and I’ve had a few questions about it.

Yes, I’m making a documentary on the event. I don’t know how any of the tape has turned out yet — I honestly haven’t had a chance to listen to it. But I will. And then there will be a round of contacting more people for interviews, and figuring out what tape I need and what I will use, and then the cutting and putting the whole thing together. It will take — at the very least — months.

I haven’t even listened to the tape I got yet, so I don’t know if the plays I recorded are in any usable form, even.

I did not record the first play, not because I did not want to, but because I was trying to do both a documentary and enjoy the event (Note to self: It is impossible to do both properly, if you want to do a doc, in the future remember that you sacrifice the experience of the evening) and I honestly forgot to set up my equipment in time. Something I remedied at the second play, and so I have both the Western and the Melodrama on tape.

I won’t be posting the raw tape of the plays, unless something drastic changes. I think part of the spirit of Tarasmas is that we don’t get to go back and do stuff again, and we don’t get to see it again, it’s beautiful and ephemeral. I don’t want people to be intimidated, thinking that their performance will be on the Internet for everybody to listen to at leisure and hear the flaws, because Tarasmas is very much about seeing past all that. I will likely put the finished documentary online, in which the plays will be used as sound, to give a sense of what it’s like to be at the event, and to round out what people said in their interviews.

I’ll post more about the documentary as it progresses, but for now those are the salient points. Thanks to everyone who participated, and I hope you enjoy the final product. Wish me luck putting it together — recording all the tape is the easy part. Putting it together coherently is the difficult part.

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It’s ten minutes before I go home on a Friday. I have finished every task I could conceivably be doing right now. My task list is cleared of bugs. I have actually taken on an extra task or two and seen them through. I can’t play the game enough in the next ten minutes for it to be worth my time to start.

This feels like the first breathing room I’ve had for more than a month now. It’s… a very odd feeling. I’ve been working a bit of overtime, but not much. Mostly my days have just been full of tasks from morning to evening, fixing bugs, playing the game, pointing out more bugs, doing the million little tasks that land in my inbox… I can’t even tell you what I do all day. Just that it’s all individually small, and the time fills up.

There are more posts coming. I have the new laptop, and I have been writing a little bit of fiction. Doing other stuff too. But a long post takes more than a lunch hour to write, and it has to be transferred to an Internet-enabled computer (the new laptop is deliberately lacking in Internet connectivity) and my evenings have been full too.

So. Not much to see here except me relaxing. I’m hoping to settle into a schedule soon enough. It’s happening slowly, but it is happening.

Until then, the ten minutes’ breathing room is really nice to have.

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On Tuesday, my friend Emru had his bone marrow transplant. I’ve been meaning to post this since then.

I’ve blogged about Emru before, and his search for a donor, and how it’s difficult to find a match for anyone, and if you’re a member of an ethnic minority, it’s even more difficult.

Emru found a match – and I was going to write there that he was “lucky to find a match”, but I don’t think luck had anything to do with it. From the minute it was known that he needed a transplant, he and his family sprang into action, starting a nationwide (actually, it probably qualifies as international) effort to get more people into the bone marrow registries where they live. The number of black donors in Quebec, for example, went from less than ten, to more than 60 in a matter of months. Emru and his sister Tamu got the word out, on local news, through blogs, and via the website at HealEmru.com.

My first thought when a donor was found was that it had to be someone who heard about the campaign and had registered because of it. I don’t know if that’s true. That’s the way the story tells itself in my head, and that would wrap it all up nicely, wouldn’t it?

Except that the story doesn’t end there. When Tamu sent out the news, she told us that this is only the first step. Emru still had to get his immune system built up to the point where he could have the transplant, and then get through the critical “first 100 days” after it.

But more than that, Tamu’s message (and Emru’s too) was that we can’t stop fighting, and we can’t stop informing people that they need to get on the bone marrow registry. Emru isn’t the only person who needs to find a match – there are thousands more out there, worldwide, who still haven’t found a donor. They need our help too.

Many people who need a bone marrow transplant don’t get it from someone in their family. Of those who need someone unrelated, if they’re of European ancestry, 75% will find a match. If they’re non-European, the match rate can drop as far as 10 to 20%.

Can you imagine that? It’s not that it’s a maximum three-quarters chance of survival. It’s only a three-quarters chance of finding someone who could save you. To get your foot in the door so you can have the surgery in the first place. And that’s if you fall into the bigger ethnic groups.

It was only after I heard about Emru that I put myself on the bone marrow registry. I assumed, having donated blood before, that I would already be on it, but that’s not true. In Quebec, you have to fill out a form, fax it in to the Hema Quebec office, and then make an appointment to go and give blood.

In the rest of Canada, it’s even easier. They can send you a cheek swab in the mail, you send it back. That’s all it takes.

Despite what you may have seen on television, bone marrow donation is NOT intensely painful. (You do realize that shows like House are works of fiction, right? That they exaggerate medical conditions for the sake of drama?) In fact, bone marrow donation can be done via a blood donation. There’s no risk of contamination or rejection on the donor’s end (since you’re not receiving any bone marrow from the person you’re donating to). It’s three days off of work, covered by medical leave.

And for that, you could save a life. The life of someone no less wonderful or deserving than Emru.

I’ve asked people here before to get on their registry, and this is a note to ask again. Please, go to one of the websites below and find out how to donate. If you can’t donate for whatever reason (there’s no registry in your area, for example), please tell someone who can. Spread the word. The registry gets bigger one person at a time.

Are you a match? Find out how you can help save Emru’s life: http://www.healemru.com

Got Facebook? Please join Help Emru Find a Bone Marrow Donor and if you learn something new, invite your friends.

Got Livejournal, Wordpress or Blogger? Blog it!
Livejournal icons can be found here: http://meallanmouse.livejournal.com/943071.html
Got Youtube? Subscribe to www.youtube.com/healemru
Just find someone you care about and tell them.

Contact info:

Hema Quebec http://www.hema-quebec.qc.ca
Canada Blood Services (Canada, except Quebec) http://onematch.ca/registry
National Marrow Donor Program (US) http://www.marrow.org

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After an afternoon spent in the kitchen, making all of the delicious things I mentioned in my last post…

Me: I love you.
Him: I love you, too.
Me: Actually, I was talking to the house.
Him: That’s okay. I was talking to the pie.

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• Blueberry pie
• Apple Butter
• Sweet Red Pepper Jelly

No, they aren’t made yet. That’s just the plan. Plus some freezing of stuff I bought at the market.

Oh, and research on taffy-making. If anyone knows anything about that or has tried their hand at it, I would be grateful for tips or direction to a book or website that has good infor

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And in fact, it seems the thing I want doesn’t even exist.

After trying a bunch of mini-notebooks, I found that the Acer Aspire One was the best compromise on price and usability. I wanted to get a solid state drive, because it’s going to be carried around a lot and I don’t want to worry about it getting knocked around. I wanted a 6-cell battery, because the standard 3-cell lists battery life as 2.5-3 hours and that’s just not enough. It would have Linux as the OS, which didn’t bother me, and indeed carried a certain amount of geek points, so I was actually kind of pleased by it.

However, I am thwarted. After several attempts to buy this machine, I finally called the company, who informs me they don’t make one like that.

I can get a 6-cell battery only with a Windows system, which means a spin-up drive and extra worry. Or I can take the 3-cell and hope I never have to use the thing for more than 3 hours (though it seems rather counter-intuitive that a flash drive takes more or less exactly the same amount of juice that an HDD would, but those are the company specs).

*drums fingers*

On reflection, I think I will take the 6-cell machine, which will make several things easier. I had planned to get a proper laptop bag for it anyway, so it won’t get bunged around too much. I hope.

Still. Batteries are a *removable part*. It makes no sense to me that I can’t get the thing that I want. Swap out the darn battery, for goodness sake!

Hmph.

Update: It is ordered. My computer guy tells me it should be in tomorrow or, failing that, on Monday.

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I have been making an awful lot of amigurumi toys lately. I’ve been spending a lot of my time on the train crocheting, and some of my time at home (by no means all, since there’s always stuff I want to be doing at home) doing the finishing work that just can’t be done when travelling (like stuffing the dolls, placing eyes, etc.)

Crochet requires yarn, and there are a couple of brands I’ve been hankering to try. Trouble is, there’s no good place around to pick up cheap yarn. So I’m left ordering online.

On Saturday, I ordered some yarn on ebay that I’m very excited about — a kind of cotton that comes highly recommended, but isn’t available anywhere around. I have four balls coming, in the colours I need for one of the projects I haven’t started yet. (Yes, it’s a Christmas gift, so I can’t say more.)

Sunday, I got an e-mail from the seller thanking me for my payment and saying that the package would go in the mail on Monday.

And on Monday evening, as I walked home, my brain said “I wonder if my yarn is here yet.”

And I replied “Silly brain, of course it isn’t here yet. It went into the mail today somewhere in Idaho or something, and it’s not going to arrive all in one day, so shut up.”

“But my yarn. Maybe it will come today?”

“No, it is certain that it will not.”

And yet I couldn’t stop my eyes from scanning for a parcel as I came through the door — which was doubly ridiculous. Because not only could it not have arrived, there is no way a package of four balls of yarn would fit through the mail slot.

And on Tuesday, the scene repeated itself. “Yarn?”, “No, not yet. Not until next week at the earliest. Shut up.” “But yarn? Is it here?”

And again on Wednesday.

I imagine every parent reading this is thinking that it sounds very familiar…

Apparently my brain has the patience of a two-year-old.

Which, now that I think about it, explains rather a lot.

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1. I do not have the new laptop as of yet, but I am ordering it.

2. I harvested some crabapples from the yard on the weekend and made 5 (small, 125 mL) jars of crabapple jelly. It is delicious.

I had to call my grandmother for help with the whole jelling process (should that be gelling?), because apparently I left this until too late in the season, and there wasn’t enough pectin in the fruit. But she instructed me to add some white wine vinegar (1/8 cup) and that would help the process along. Apparently they did this in the war years when pectin wasn’t plentiful. Who knew? It worked, but I wasn’t sure until this morning when I cracked the jars open.

And I did have to crack the jar open — not the glass, of course but I did the whole conserving process with the boiling in the water and the hermetically sealing and listening to the jar lids pop closed, and it worked, so I had to un-stick the lid. It was great fun — I’ve already picked out a few more recipes I want to try my hand at before the season is over. Maybe I’ll even actually have the time to make them!

3. Work continues to be insane, but I’m not working overtime any longer. Just that my days are very full, of many little things. It’s … it’s making me cranky. Everyone on the project is stressed since we’re so close to deadline, and everyone has way too much on their plates (did I mention, project deadline approacheth?) so you start to do one 5-10 minute task, and three people stop by your desk in rapid succession, and suddenly you’ve forgotten what you were doing in the first place, and you start to do it again, and you get three e-mails about all the stuff people asked you to do *yesterday* that you completely forgot because they popped by your desk while you were in the middle of something…

I’m sure you get the drift.

4. I can’t think of a 4. Maybe tomorrow.

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I’ve been working as a video game scriptwriter for just over a year now.

In that time, I’ve done very little writing for myself. I’ve done no fiction writing that I can think of that wasn’t job-related.

Of course, it’s not just the job that’s kept me from writing. It takes time to sit down, and it takes inclination, and when I’m busy I don’t have either. I have other hobbies too – quilting, crochet, video games, reading,  blogging, making radio documentaries. I like reading stuff I find online. I like chatting with friends and family on the phone. But all of that takes time, meaning that if I do one I can’t do others, and writing for myself has been something that’s been falling off the radar. It’s not a horrible thing — I do write for a living, after all. It’s just a natural consequence.

Except just recently, when it’s started becoming an issue for me.

We’re in a bad part of our project right now. It’s not that the game is bad. It’s not that the job is bad. But we’re nearing completion on the game I’m working on, and everything I’m doing is basically fixing bugs and putting out fires. Entering text that’s going to go in menus, stuff that requires little to no creativity. Having people twittering around me because I need to change a text to read “tap” instead of “press”.  And I’m starting to see the game, to see the things that are coming together well, and that look really cool — and the stuff that falls very far short of what I envisioned.

I’m told by people much wiser than me, and with much more experience, that this is always what happens. I’m not surprised by that either. It feels like the end of any major writing project, or going back and looking at your writing after you’ve seen it too much — “God, these lines are all lame. Why did I write it like that? Can you believe that phrasing? Ew, ew, ew.” So it’s normal. But boy is it disheartening.

It came to me the other day, as I was despondently tapping away at some missing text, that I’m not enjoying writing right now. And that would mostly be because I’m not actually doing any writing. Not in my job, and not at home. Once I realized that, I began to feel the lack – a sort of emptiness in my chest — and I knew that if I’m going to continue to be happy with myself, with my job, and with my writing, that I have to find a way to work my own fiction writing into my life again.

The problem is, I don’t have a whole lot of time in which to write. There are my mornings and evenings on the train, there are my lunch hours at work. There are my evening hours, which are few now that we have the longer commute. There are weekends.

Home is difficult because I want to be doing other things (see the discussion of my many hobbies, above). Work hours are difficult, as is the train – I can write in a notebook anywhere, but then I have to find the time to transfer the work to the computer. Taking my laptop is not an option because it’s cumbersome – I have to lug it around, and I don’t take it out on the train because of its size. I can write at my desk at work, but that means staying there during lunch hours and breaks and that leads to several problems — (a) people think I’m slacking off because I’m not doing work-work (even if it’s a legitimate break. (b) I don’t get to walk away from my desk and be somewhere else for a while and most importantly (c) if I’m at my desk, people can bother me about work, and I want to be thinking about something else, in a whole different head space.

So. What to do?

My solution is to buy another laptop. I know, I know, it sounds silly. But there are several ultra-light, ultra-portable systems that are available, and they’re not expensive. Basically, they’re a word processor I can carry around with me that’s not heavy or cumbersome. And I don’t have to transfer the writing afterward. The keyboard will be a bit small, but that’s the trade-off, and I think I can manage with it.

This mini-notebook (as such laptops are called) will come with me on the train. And after I’ve had my sandwich at lunch, I will find a quiet corner in the downstairs, and have half an hour of writing time. It’s not a lot of time. But it will be my time.

I plan to start small. The first thing I’d like to do is get this blog rolling again. I know it’s been sparse, and I’m sorry for that, because I do like writing for the blog. It’s a great exercise, and I like going back and reading what I was doing and when. So there’s that. After that, we’ll see about fiction. It’s been so long since I wrote anything that I’m quite blocked so I’ll have to start slowly – writing exercises (which means more stuff for the blog, yay!), character sketches, plot summaries, and very gradually (or quickly, depending on how it happens) full stories and novels. Half an hour at a time.

It won’t be much, but it will be mine. And it all adds up.

I’m looking forward to it.

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