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Signal boosting for Liz

March 7, 2010 in Me | No comments

It’s come to my attention that userinfodenelian is in dire medical straits, folks, and so friends of hers have set up a community to auction various tasty goodies to help her out. If you’ve got the time and the inclination, go check out comminfosave_liz to see what they’ve got to offer!

An explanation post for what’s going on with Liz is here.

Not dead, despite rumors to contrary

March 7, 2010 in Me | 2 comments

Y’all may have noticed that I haven’t posted in days. This has been because I’ve been sick as a dog with a cold that just will not quit, and have been ever since the day I came back from Vancouver. Woke up this past Monday with a soreness to my throat, and my first though was “oh shit”. I made it to work okay, but by the end of the day I was quite hoarse. And by Monday evening it was official: I was sick.

I stayed home the rest of the week, coughing up a storm, fumbling for the tissues, and ingesting any number of OTC remedies. On Thursday, I saw one of the other doctors at my usual clinic (since my usual doctor wasn’t in that day), and she said that yep, I had a nasty cold. Never had a temperature of note so we were pretty sure this hasn’t been any form of flu. It’s just been a Martian Death Cold.

I got back enough brain by Friday to work from home, and as of today I’m functional enough to be bored silly, but I’m still snorky, coughy, and prone to needing to curl up under the blankets for random bouts of zzzz’s. I have been absolutely useless for getting any writing done or much of anything else. I’ve been consoling my ailing self by rewatching first season Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and userinfosolarbird and I have also taken the opportunity to get caught up on Caprica, which to our pleasure is continuing to fail to suck. And since I’ve also been useless for continuing my previously planned Laurie King readathon, I’ve punted instead to re-reading the J.D. Robbs–since I’ve started exchanging my paperbacks of those for electronic copies.

I’ll be staggering back to work tomorrow, and if Cliff Mass is correct in his last post, it’ll be just in time for the weather to take a turn for the sucky. Joy. I’m sick all week while it’s warm and sunny, and it gets wet and cold just in time for me to go back to work. I’ll be lucky to shake this damn cough before April.

The cats have been quite happy to curl up beside me while I’m making with the zzzz’s, though. I even got a picture of them. Dara says this is particularly good and that I should post it!

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The Nook Report, Part 2

February 14, 2010 in Me | No comments

Now that I’ve had a few days to read on the Nook, here are my thoughts on the experience.

First and foremost, I am sold on the virtue of a one-use reading device for a reason I hadn’t foreseen: if all the device does is show you the books, there’s nothing on it to distract you from actually reading the story. There’s no “oh wait I’ll just check Twitter/Facebook/LJ/my email/the news/etc.” going on. I really like that. It makes reading on the Nook feel a lot more like reading on a real book.

I was pleased to note as well that the screen refresh stopped bothering me. Apparently I’m not the only one this has happened to, so that’s good to know. If you’re thinking of getting an e-ink reader and the initial flash of screen refresh is weird to you, feel free to take this as consolation!

I’m still disappointed with the device’s general lack of book organization, though. The lovely scrollable display of color book covers only works with your Barnes and Noble content; if you’ve got a lot of non-B&N books, like my Fictionwise and Stanza and Drollerie books, then they all get put into your “My Documents” bucket. Which doesn’t have the scrollable cover capability. This is a drag, and I really wish that Barnes and Noble would allow for, at least, treatment of Fictionwise and eReader.com content the same as B&N content, since they do after all own both of those properties.

Really, though, I’d prefer to just see it give you a way to access all your books the same way. One of the reasons I wanted to shift to a reading device was that I found it annoying on the iPhone to have my library spread out through five, count ‘em, five applications. Having the Nook force me to split my library into B&N content and non-B&N content is the same problem, only less severe.

I could do the workaround of just manually sideloading my B&N content to the My Documents directory, sure. But the problem with that is that the display of your content from My Documents is really rudimentary. You get a listing of titles that you can either sort by author or sort by title, and nothing fancier than that; it’s not even visually broken up by first letter or anything.

I did at least discover that the “Reading Now” button on the main screen does take you directly to whatever book you’re currently reading, which is good to know. Before I found that, my only means to get back to whatever book I’m working on reading was to page through the My Documents listing till I found the right file. And since I’ve got 16 pages of files, that’s annoying. The “Reading Now” button is an acceptable workaround until something fancier is implemented, and I really hope something will be. At least, there should be a menu to let you jump to the appropriate letter of the alphabet as I see in several of the reader apps on my iPhone; more elegant would be a little bit of search capability that would let you type in a bit of the pertinent author or title and jump straight to those works.

All in all, despite my issues with the file organization, I’m enjoying the experience of reading on it. It’s very convenient at lunch since I can just lay the Nook on the table in front of me, and it’s bigger and more readable than the iPhone. It’s also easier to manipulate, for me; I find the pinching of the side to turn a page nicer on my hands than having to tap the iPhone’s screen, especially one-handed. (Thumb-tapping on the iPhone one-handedly, I have discovered, weirdly strains the muscles at the base of my left thumb.)

I haven’t yet tried its music playing capability and probably won’t, since the iPhone has that functionality covered nicely and I’m used to having a tiny music player nestled in my pocket. Plus, again, don’t need the distraction from reading! Apparently there are folks who can read and listen to music at the same time, but I’m not one of them.

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Exercise update

February 14, 2010 in Me | No comments

I’m down to 178 pounds as of this morning, which is frankly stunning to me. That’s three pounds for this week, which is twice as much as I was expecting based on earlier performance in this whole endeavor. And it’s down a half a pound from yesterday, even though I had two breadsticks with pizza. And man, those Pagliacci breadsticks? Super-tasty, but expensive calorie-wise.

(This would be the part where a little voice in my brain is going “I REGRET NOTHING!” I’m going to be shutting it up by getting on the treadmill anyway, or at least walking down to the shops.)

Anyway, overall, this is 14 pounds down from where I started in early December. Going by my previous records, the last time I weighed 178 was in November of 2007, so it’s like 2 1/4 years. Not bad. We’ll see where I am after another couple months of doing this LoseIt thing.

Meanwhile, for posterity’s sake, I should also note that I did finally finish the Eowyn Challenge this month. I haven’t been posting updates about that mostly because I decided that those numbers were really mostly interesting to me, but I assure y’all I did keep at it! Ultimately it ran for me just shy of five years; going back and looking, I started it on 2/17/05, and ended on 2/4/10. Lots of miles walked. I didn’t start tracking my weight along with it until August of ‘05, at which point I was 167 pounds.

I was toying with the idea of doing another run through the Challenge, following Frodo’s route rather than Aragorn’s, though right now it seems kind of redundant giving that I’m tracking calorie, weight, and exercise data via LoseIt. Now, if there were an Eowyn’s Challenge iPhone app that also tracked your weight and calorie consumption, that would be AWESOME.

Until somebody codes that, though, I think I’ll stick with LoseIt for the time being. Wish me luck, folks. 14 pounds down, another 28 to go!

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And now, the Nook report!

February 8, 2010 in Me | 4 comments

Nookish goodness arrived at my house today! Therefore, as promised, here’s my overall initial review post.

First and foremost, y’all may have heard that the Nook comes with insanely complicated packaging. This is absolutely true. When you first get into it, there’s a little slip of paper that has–I kid you not–a seven-step procedure for freeing it from the various layers of packaging around it. This all had the advantage, I suppose, of making damn sure that it got to me intact. But when you have to have special instructions for actually unpacking the thing, I think they might have gone just a touch overboard, y’know?

My reaction on getting it out of the first layer or so though was “It’s a Microsoft Ship-It award!” Because it looked like this, you see:

I had to get userinfospazzkat’s help to actually liberate the thing; he’d already done the same with his own nook, and his hands are stronger than mine, so he was able to do the last couple of steps to pry the thing out of its plastic support tray. Once that was done, I was able to do the fun part: powering it up, getting its updates on it, and most importantly, firing up the books.

Overall I like the design and look of it. Once I put it in its cover, it’ll be about the size of a small hardback book, and not so heavy that it’ll be onerous to carry in my backpack. I’m not much of a fan of the way the screen flashes when you turn a page, but other than that, I find the e-ink very readable, at least in direct light. It’s not as useful in low-light conditions, so this may be an issue when reading on the bus after dark. I may have to resort to the iPhone as backup reading device then. I am also amused that its default screensaver is the various pictures of authors that anybody who’s ever been in a B&N store will remember as being the artwork on the walls. I like that enough that I’ll probably keep it, for now.

It downloaded updates on its own, which was nice, and it cheerfully went and got all of the ebooks I’ve already purchased from the Barnes and Noble ebook store. This was I admit a trifle confusing UI-wise, since I’d set some of my books as “archived” because I’d already read them, and got confused because I had to tell the thing to go ahead and download those–but I didn’t have to do that with the rest of them. But it was all good in the end.

Getting all my non-B&N content onto it was super easy. You can plug it into a USB port and have it mount as a drive, which is lovely. You can then dump as many files as you like in whatever directory structure you like onto it, which is also lovely. But there are several organizational issues with how the device actually shows you the files, to wit:

  1. Whatever directory structure you use is entirely irrelevant, because the actual device will just do a flat display of all the files it finds; it doesn’t care about your folder structure.
  2. There is currently no way to organize your titles past “sort by author” or “sort by title”, in the “My Documents” section; in the “My Library” section, where the B&N content resides, it’s a little nicer and you also get “Most Recent” as a sort option. But what I would really want to see here is the ability to mark a book as Read somehow, whether that be by a tag or by moving it into a Read folder or what.
  3. After looking at the lovely lists of titles and cover thumbnails in the iPhone’s various reader apps, the black and white file list is really kind of boring to look at. But this is only a mild objection on my part since the tiny cover thumbnails would lose something on this display and not really be worth displaying.
  4. A lot of my PDF files are coming through with really weird mangled names. I don’t know why that is, if it’s a metadata problem on them or what. I may have to see if I can fix those in Calibre or something.

Tomorrow I’ll give it a good test run with actual reading, and report back on that. So far at least I’m favorably inclined to it, but man, I hope they improve the organization of files on the device in future firmware releases.

And oh yes, I also had to take a picture of this, because Kendis says hi:

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Conflikt was fun

February 3, 2010 in Me, Music | No comments

Several of you who read my journal in whatever iteration already know this since you were actually there, but hey, Conflikt! That was fun.

This was the first year that userinfosolarbird and I got to attend the whole convention, which was nice. We still pulled a commuter con, which was not quite so ideal; next year, I think we’ll be getting a hotel room, just because driving all the way back to Kenmore at 2am or later is crazytalk. Especially when things like the Jury panels happen around 10:30 in the morning!

Dara did of course do more active music playing than I did since she has a CD in progress; me, I mostly hung out and beat on one of the novels in progress. And a nice lady I hadn’t met before even told me she quite liked Faerie Blood, to which I double-taked hugely, and was all ‘wait, a complete stranger actually read my novel? Whoa!’ (Nice Lady Who Read My Novel, if you’re reading this, I have forgotten your name and LJ, but if you drop a comment I shall make sure to note it again properly for the future!)

I did periodically also whip out Rags and do impromptu jamming near the registration table, which was also good fun. Special shout-outs on that are due to userinfodoragoon and Jeri Lynn who was managing the registration table, and whose LJ, if she has one, I do not know! We managed to play a not too bad little pass through “Si Bheag Si Mhor”, a song to which I am partial of course from its connection to Mr. Crowe and the Grunts. (Mmm, “Judas Cart”, I should listen to that again.)

Also participated in the Band Scramble, which let me meet a few nice folks and play music with them; we did “Elf Glade”, which is a standard at the Murkjams, and it was an interesting musical exercise to try to follow somebody else’s version of the guitar line. Also fun to try to invent piccolo twiddles on the fly since I never play flute on this thing at home.

The main attraction of the whole shebang was userinfofilkertom, though! Since my original exposure to filk was in the Midwest and my and Dara’s housemate at the time, userinfoamethyst_dancer, was an old college buddy of Tom’s, I’m real familiar with Tom and fond of his music quite a bit. He’s a superb musician, and I was very pleased to see that he hasn’t missed a step in live performance since I saw him last. His voice and guitar playing are both very strong, still! It was with great glee that I plunked down money for three, count ‘em, three of his albums at the con–and furthermore picked up two more off of iTunes when I got home. Tom’s just that awesome.

Secondary highlight: seeing Alexander James Adams perform. I really want Alec to start writing more new stuff, just because as a long-standing Heather Alexander fan I have the original versions of a lot of his songs stuck in my brain and they don’t really want to be budged out by newer versions. He’s got a quite nice new vampire song though as well as a new one called “The Dance of Hoof and Horn”, and of course his fiddle playing is still sublime. Extra bonus points for Dara and I getting to sit near him in the big Sunday afternoon Jam, too. And I got to remind him of the incident in 1997 when he looked me in the eye at a room party and said “Play something!” and I squeaked and almost melted into the floor. Now? Now I can actually whip out a guitar and do something with it. He told me he was pleased to have inspired via terror. ;)

(Another shoutout to userinfodoragoon as well for whipping out that fiddle of hers and duo’ing with Alec on “Si Bheag Si Mhor”. Lovely and very well done!)

Alec has a work print of his next new album, so although it’s mostly reworked versions of Heather-era songs, I put down for that too since hey, again, awesomeness. And it may amuse userinfodamara as well that I bought a Heather Dale album–one of the CD vendors in the tiny dealer’s room had a whole bunch of her albums, so I got The Hidden Path and in fact listened to it tonight on the way home from work.

All in all a pleasant and relaxing way to spend the weekend. I may have been “hanging out on the periphery” girl for the most part, but it was a lovely periphery to be at. And “surrounded by musicians” is strangely conducive to getting actual writing done, not to mention guitar playing. <3 Looking forward to next year!

And maybe next year, I’ll actually have a proper chord line to “How Many Hugos?”, one of the few filk songs I’ve actually written. Not to mention, maybe I’ll finish that Doctor Who filk still haunting my brain, and also have that shiny green guitar!

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And now, a gratuitous icon post!

February 2, 2010 in GBS, Me | No comments

It occurred to me that if I was going to go around calling my LJ “Ordinary Day”, I should damn well have a default icon that reflects that. So for the benefit of those of you looking at this on my various LJ-flavored sites, check out the Alan and Sean loverliness. That shot is of course from the video for the song. The icon is by userinfoturple_purtle, who was the provider of just about all of the GBS icons I use.

And if you’re looking at this on annathepiper.org, here!

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I was going to do this anyway

February 1, 2010 in Me | No comments

But the Amazon vs. Macmillan brouhaha over the weekend has pretty much bumped up the priority on this: I just dropped my first round of shiny royalties on a Nook. The actual device and a pretty cover to put it in pretty much comes to roughly the amount of royalties I got, and that’s quite fine with me. Barnes and Noble thinks it’ll ship probably around the 12th, so it’ll be a couple of weeks before Nookish goodness actually reaches my house; this too is fine, since it ain’t like I’m lacking for things to read.

(Technically, I am not going to spend those exact moneys on the device, I think–just because it’ll be nice to keep them in the account they’re sitting in, quietly gathering interest. I’m actually paying for the thing out of my primary account. But I figure that as long as I have the money, I don’t really give a flying damn what account it comes out of. The important thing is, shiny candy-like buttons! And ebooks!)

I’m also feeling the need to show Macmillan authors some solidarity, so I think my next round of ebook buying is going to be all Macmillan authors! I need to round out my John Scalzi collection anyway.

Since the cover I wanted isn’t actually available yet (a nice leather green one with an embossed quote about how a good book is the best of friends), I have instead selected the punctuation-themed one with a big ampersand on the front and a question mark on the back. This has the added bonus of being nethack-y, and will likely make me do a double-take the first few times I read something on the thing, thinking “AIGH THERE’S A DEMON ON MY NOOK”. Or, if I look at it from the back, wondering if I’ve actually identified this scroll yet.

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And now, the birthday loot report!

January 24, 2010 in Me | No comments

This being the record of things lovely people gave to me to celebrate my birthday:

  • From userinfospazzkat, the DVD set of season 3 of MacGyver and the recently released Avatar: A Confidential Report on the Biological and Social History of Pandora, mostly because the planet is way more interesting to me than the movie ;)
  • From userinfosolarbird, a physical copy of the album Nomad Soul by Baaba Maal (which I had previously borrowed electronically from userinfosksouth), two CDs by Afro Celt Sound System, and one by Altan which I actually already had and will be exchanging for something else
  • From userinfomamishka, a $20 gift certificate to Amazon
  • From userinfotechnoshaman, a $25 Barnes and Noble gift card
  • And from userinfobrombear, who showed up for Jam this afternoon since he’s in town, a couple of gift certificates to Kinokuniya Bookstore, the bookstore next to Uwajimaya downtown. To wit, awesome!

Many thanks to you all! And me being me, I have of course already blown the Amazon and B&N gift cards on books, as follows:

  • Storm Born, by userinfoblue_succubus. Urban fantasy. Re-buy in ebook form
  • Septimus Heap, Book One, Magyk, by Angie Sage. YA
  • Ragamuffin, by Tobias S. Buckell. SF
  • Deader Still, by userinfoantonstrout. Urban fantasy. Re-buy in ebook form
  • Devil’s Due, by userinforachelcaine. Romance. Buying in ebook form, previously read as library book
  • The Visitor, by Sheri Tepper. SF
  • The Hidden City, by Michelle West. Fantasy

And now the total of books acquired for 2010 is up to 33, and I’m not even done with January yet. Whee!

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41 and feeling good

January 23, 2010 in Me | No comments

I’ve been getting lovely comments dropped on my Facebook wall from folks who saw there what today is, and I’ve gotten the usual lovely email from userinfostickmaker wishing me natal felicitations. What I did not expect however was to get a little email from the folks who run JournalFen, wishing me a happy birthday and inviting me to send in and/or post interesting birthday stories. That was awfully nice of them and makes me glad I’m continuing to maintain an account on their servers. So this is me sending out a shoutout to JF’s staff: thanks, folks! Thanks also to all of you who have already sent me comments. :)

Birthday Weekend 2010 for Anna will be involving a second viewing of Avatar tonight and probable sushi. There will be cake, but it’ll be tomorrow in conjunction with this week’s Jam, since I didn’t want to have cake and pie in the house at the same time and I felt it would be lame to offer partly eaten birthday cake to folks who show up for Jam. I will however have a fancy cupcake tonight as Birthday Cake standin, the thanks for which go of course to my lovely userinfosolarbird!

Also as part of this weekend’s laid-back fun, Dara and I listened to the first CD of one of the Big Finish Doctor Who audios I bought her for Christmas, and that was great! First of all it was fun to hear Paul McGann reprising the role of the Eighth Doctor, but even more fun was hearing a Dalek Supreme actually be–at least by Dalek standards–subtle. It’s not too spoilery to say that the general thrust of this plot is that Eight and his new companion Lucie wind up on the planet Red Rocket Rising, which has just been devastated by an asteroid strike. And oh hey, a passing alien fleet has just offered to rescue the human survivors from the planet–and OHNOEZ they’re Daleks.

What the Daleks are up to, pretending to be compassionate, is part of the great fun of this episode. In particular there’s an awesome bit where the Dalek Supreme first learns from the Acting President of the planet that the Doctor is around–and you can just hear the Dalek forcibly keeping itself from going ballistic. Later it pretty much orders the President to turn over the Doctor in exchange for Dalek assistance, and Dara and I lost it hearing it say “THE DOCTOR IS AN ENEMY OF THE DALEKS! HE MUST BE EX… TRADITED!”

Unrelatedly, more fun was had last night as I did indeed spend the rest of my Amazon gift certificate. Many thanks to you all for your extensive book and music recommendations! The things I wound up purchasing were:

  • The Green Glass Sea, recommended by userinfosutures1. YA.
  • Mark of the Demon, recommended by userinfoalfvaen. Urban fantasy.
  • Graceling, recommended earlier to me on Goodreads by userinforosepurr. YA/fantasy.

This brings the total of books acquired in 2010 up to 25!

Just about all of the rest of the recommended titles have gone onto my Goodreads Recommended shelf, and I’ll get to them as best I can! Some of them aren’t available in digital form so I may wind up checking them out from the library. Yay, books!

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