Justine's Boxes and Miscellanea

I received two more boxes from Justine. She is cleaning out her closets. I hope that I can convince her to send another box, because there is so much stuff missing.

These latest boxes contained a 4 year old Dell XPS desktop computer. This is the biggest mother of a computer that I've ever seen. It has lot's of bells and whistles, but for all of it's size is not as powerful as the bargain basement version that I use here at work every day. It came with a very large LCD screen that I think Erica should use. At least I get a decent computer for the Fortress of Solitude in the basement. I have been without a desktop since the time when all three of my 'puters failed at once for some unknown reason.

I now have four non-working laptop computers and two very good working ones. Justine failed to provide batteries, power supplies and external CD drives and stuff for the 4 laptops. A power brick is $50 and batteries cost $100 to $150 and these computers go for $100 to $200 with all the parts on eBay. They are all 800mhz or a little more. There is one cute Solis 200mhz with win 95 that I like quite a bit, but I can't upgrade it without the external cd drive. I ordered a "universal" power supply quite cheap from MeritLine.com and I will use that to power these puppies up and see how they do - after that it is "free to a good home" or put them on eBay for parts at $10 with $15 shipping.

Justine also put a Dell Axim X3 in the box that I think she got free with the big XPS computer. The Axim is a cute little thing that is almost impossible to use. Unlike the Palm Treo or Blackberry PDAs, these are useless for anything exect as extensions of a computer. They are difficult to use standalone and they can't connect to the cell phone system. Luckily, I have written several programs for Axims at work and have all of the software and experience to make it semi-useful.

This Axim has a nice wifi connection that eats battery power, but it does allow me to walk around the yard and view my gmail account. I bought a $10 travel charger for it from MeritLine and I will use it as an MP3 player. It is very clunky to use that way because you have to pull out the stylus and tap the screen to control the audio - hard to do when driving. I might write an MP3 player with big finger size touch screen buttons to play and pause the thing. I will also experiment with css media directives. Google products can tell when I am on a PDA so it must be possible to create zine pages that are readable from PDAs. I can then make a site that does things like translates stories to small screen format on the fly for cell phones and PDAs. A neat exercise, but people like to read from paper, not print, and you would only read from a pda or cellphone when stuck somewhere without a book or magazine, something no real reader would ever do.

I found a magazine named Southern Gothic that is paying for weird flash stories. Coincidentally, I have half a dozen weird flash pieces set in New Orleans that I wrote for ScienceFictional last summer. I will perform serial submission to these people until they beg me to stop or I sell one.

I sent a story to Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword and Sorceress #22. This is a long shot as they are a "pro" market and probably swamped. I just happened to have a three year old Sorceress story that I sold to an anthology that went bust. I have not submitted since the Coyote Wild Story and I haven't finished a story in 6 months, even though I write a lot of 1000 word beginnings and 500 word outlines. Programming seems to rock my world more than writing something that requires months of rejections for an unsatisfying sale.

I finished transferring my archives to the 200 gig drive last night. I found lots of half finished stories and a bunch of forgotten outlines. I should spend some time and finish some of these, just to get them out of the way. There is another Sword and Sorceress story there that is done but needs a rewrite. The MZB site accepts multiple submissions until April 24, so I should get to work. Here's an idea for those writing S&S. Editors are sick of stories set in a generic medieval Europe with Norse cultural elements like wizards with long beards. Try recasting the location to 8th century Arabia, 5th century India, Ancient China or 12th century Peru. The magic still works and the stories seem fresh. The wizards still have long beards, but they wear different hats. Ten minutes of googling will get you all the background that you need.

I installed Tax Cut last night. I will be spending the next few evenings doing my taxes. This is always frustrating, even with the computer. Tax Cut makes it very easy, but I hate having to compile all the data. The stocks are so time consuming and this year I'll have expenses associated with teaching which is painful to figure out, but I have to do it. I will also be collecting my web hosting expenses to use them to offset the Google and FreeNameAStar income. This stuff is meticulous and gives you a headache very quickly.