In Common with Humans

Okay…now this looks really intense.

News Flash!

“Scott Brown elected to Senate, Mother Goddess shuts down Washington”

I hope all you Dems, progressives, liberals, and other right-thinking people are doing okay! Repubs: enjoy the karma. :-p

*sigh* It’s gotten so I’m avoiding my own LJ f-list. 🙁 It’s worse than right-wing talk radio!

Happy Imbolg/Oimelc/Candlemas to those who celebrate it!

I observe the cross-quarter Sabbats as an integral part of the Solar cycle, rather than as social/cultural events, so I calculate their times astrologically, as the precise mid-point between the Solstice and Equinox on either side. True Imbolg this year occurs today at 5:49 p.m. local time (11:01 p.m. UTC). I just did the Tarot reading for the coming octave, and…wow. Just…wow. I’ll be interested to see what manifests from all this! I’ve found that I usually can’t read too much into the Sabbat Tarot readings, they’re only for a six-week period, but this one is hard to downplay. Meanwhile, although I was grumpy about the apparent obscurity of Yule’s not-so-nice Outcome card, it has become extremely clear what it meant, and it was very accurate indeed (I’m sorry to say–what it predicted was how much trouble I’d have getting back to my dietary disciplines after the holidays and it did not exaggerate. Now that we’re starting a new octave I hope I can get things under control).

Next up is ritual. I’m fasting for it, and I’m starving. 🙁 But I made some delicious lentil soup on Monday that I can have afterwards.

I was saddened to learn today that a friend’s husband just passed away from cancer. It seems that so many people are going through such hard times right now.

Today’s astrological transit is Sun opposing the Midheaven of my natal chart, which tends to make it a good day to stay in bed. Robert Hand writes, “Demoralizing ego defeats are quite likely with this transit.” I haven’t had that so much as just a lot of ups and downs, and little jabs, rather than “defeats,” to my ego. You know the kind of thing–you know that you just need to roll it off, but you feel all self-conscious, and you keep feeling that way even when you forget exactly why.

I was about to make a somewhat feisty comment on someone else’s LJ, and Dad called before I could finish, with a long conversation about a situation he’s tangentially involved with. By the time I finished that call, I’d thought better of posting the comment and deleted the draft, which I’m sure is just as well. I’d also missed sunset attunement–oh, well!

Cat the Vamp got a…not so good review. Ouch. But a lot of it was addressing things that I know are edgy about that book and were bound to offend some people. That’s part of why I wanted to publish it, because it’s not a warm fuzzy P.C. kind of book–it’s not written by a Mormon! But…ouch. I thanked the reviewer for her candor.

I’ve been troubled by the fact that over the past six months or so there have been several “refunds” of the Kindle edition of Mortal Touch and I didn’t know why. No one contacted me or posted a negative user review and I have no way of asking Amazon why the book was “refunded.” Last night I downloaded the html file to see if there was a problem with the formatting. Well…ouch. There was. The Kindle edition of Mortal Touch has been selling well and I guess most people haven’t had a problem with the formatting, but…ouch. I hate to feel that I looked like an amateur! Mortal Touch was my first Kindle book, and now I format and html-code files especially for the Kindle conversion, which I didn’t do the first time.

I spent all of last night hand-editing the html and then re-uploaded the corrected file. But then, it became unavailable while Amazon “reviewed” it. Something about “improving the Kindle experience.” I wanted to lower its price, too, and got a message saying the book would be unavailable for at least 24 hours if I lowered its price! Maybe I just have bad timing, doing this right in the middle of the whole Macmillan kerfluffle. I just hated for Mortal Touch to be offline because it’s selling so well as a Kindle, and now I’d fixed the formatting issues. It’s back up now–and now it’s designated “Live” on my Dashboard, like the Kindle editions of Cat the Vamp and Gideon Redoak. Before, they were “Live” and Mortal Touch was “Ready.” I have no idea what the difference is. They all sold Kindle editions.

I went to the post office and was surprised to see that the ARCs of The Longer the Fall had arrived. They’ll go out tomorrow! I also had a big official-looking envelope from the IRS that made me all nervous until I realized it was the 1099-MISC forms I’d ordered, silly me! Now those have to go out–and I’ll have to write them by hand. They’re multiple carbon forms, and I don’t have a typewriter anymore, or a printer that will print them!

I’m still getting my bearings with the new computer, especially the keyboard and Thunderbird replacing Eudora after so many years using the latter. I’ve also just implemented some drastic changes to my daily schedule and routines, because what I was doing just wasn’t working–but that needs its own post.

I don’t exactly have permission for all the stuff I used, so this is a friends-locked post. But I thought some people might like to see my very first video project. It’s not very polished, and I kind of cobbled it together with material I had, rather than planning it out and shooting footage to specification, like you’re supposed to do.

Here’s the story behind it. In June the Pepperell library hosted a local group of model train enthusiasts who came in and set up a bunch of their miniature dioramas in a big connected loop, with the tracks going all around. They were letting the kids run the train controls and it was very informal and fun. I went to see it, and on impulse, I took out my digital camera and went all the way around the display filming it. So, I had about six minutes of footage of this train display, and since I took it with my digital camera I didn’t have zoom capability or any finesse–but the digital camera takes nice video.

Then, there’s this Arlo Guthrie song about trains that I absolutely adore, “The City of New Orleans,” and I bought an MP3 download of that from Amazon. I needed a class project, and I decided to put the model train footage together with the song, and some stills and titles, and see how it would come out. The trickiest part was the beginning. Arlo Guthrie’s trademark is that he starts his songs with long spoken introductions, telling a story, and I wanted to time the video so the spoken intro had stills and titles, and then the video started when the music did.

I actually thought that I accidentally deleted all my class files when I was changing the backup flash drives around, but then I discovered that I’d copied the class files onto my hard drive after all and forgot about it. This video wouldn’t play on the big Dell laptop, which tells you how maxed out that machine was.

Here’s how it came out.

So, how cold was it? When I went to bed at around 2:30 a.m., the thermometer outside my kitchen window read 3 degrees. I don’t know what Pepperell’s “official” low was.

But more vividly, it was so cold…that my car door froze.

There’s nothing unusual about the frame freezing and sticking–with all the crazy fluctuations in temperature (mild and raining to deep freeze to mild again), that’s been happening all the time. But that’s nothing that a solid body-slam to the door panel won’t shake loose. 🙂

I got up this morning, or rather, peeled myself off the pavement as usual, and decided that I just had time to get to the post office with a package of review books to mail. I should have gone yesterday but I just couldn’t face going out (it’s not the temperature so much as the wind). I packed up the books, did the Click-n-Ship label online, went out, beat up on the car to get the driver’s door open, started the engine (not even a moment’s hesitation, good car!) shut the door, and…

…it wouldn’t stay shut. The latch was frozen! The door lock button wouldn’t move and the door wouldn’t latch!

The authorities frown darkly on you for driving whilst holding your door shut with one hand, even though I always wear a seatbelt. It’s pretty hard to do with a standard transmission, anyway. I had to go inside, unroll the big reel of heavy extension cord and run it out the door, get out the hair dryer (which I never use on my hair but keep handy for just this sort of thing), and blast the car’s door latch until it loosened up.

Sheesh.

I did make it to the post office on time! Had another check from Brodart, too.

No such problems with the new computer. I’ve now tested out the digital camera, the camcorder and the little generic MP3 player and the new computer handshakes with all of them. I’m learning how to use the Bamboo Pen. OMG, that thing is amazing. It’s like magic! I’m darned if I can understand how it works! And I don’t have to disable or unplug the ordinary mouse, either. But using the Bamboo Pen for graphic design is going to take some practice. It’s an incredibly sensitive tool. I’m still installing software apps–Skype and Second Life so far today.

Gods, the Full Moon was stunning last night. I could have read a book outside, except for the minor inconvenience of freezing solid, which makes it hard to turn the pages. 🙂 I did a Full Moon ritual which went very well. Wednesday is true Imbolg, at 5:49 p.m. local time.

The ARCs of The Longer the Fall have shipped. I’ll be sending those out next week.

So…I refuse to have cable. I refuse to use Netflix. I rarely spend money on DVDs. I’m always scrounging for fresh new cycling videos, and that’s how I catch up with stuff because I can’t stand to just sit and watch something, it seems like such a waste of time.

I have yet to see True Blood. BUT…I have a cool new computer with a 22″ high-def monitor and a sound card that could blast the windows out with just slightly better speakers. And I have iTunes.

So last night, I tried it out for the first time. I downloaded the first episode of True Blood from iTunes, tilted the new monitor up a bit and did my cycling to it.

It worked perfectly. Great picture, no problems hearing the audio! I think I’ve got cycling videos for quite a few weeks now! Because iTunes has Vampire Diaries, too. 🙂 (And Moonlight. And Blood Ties. I’ve only seen one episode of each of those.)

My opinion of True Blood…too soon to tell. Cycling is 30 minutes, so I’m just a little more than halfway through the first episode. I’ll watch several episodes to see how it develops before I formulate an opinion. But I’ll watch it all, because I can hardly be the vampire expert without seeing it!

(Note: This is NOT a “rabbit hole post,” although…)

*sigh*

Oh, everything is going quite well. It’s just…change. Even good change. Nasty inconvenient thing, makes you late for dinner. (and workouts. 🙁 )

Eudora got all wanky, and I’m not sure that’s because of Windows 7. It’s an obsolete program, no longer supported, and I’ve been cheating and copying it onto new machines chiefly because I have so much important e-mail in it–going back to around 1996 or so!

But I decided today it was time to say good-bye to creaky old Eudora. So I downloaded Thunderbird and imported my entire Eudora database into it. Holy mackerel. Thunderbird didn’t know what hit it. I think I have e-mail that predates the World Wide Web! *wry smile*

But it’s all in there! Except for the very recent few things from yesterday and today (because of the wankiness, index files weren’t updating)–but I’m going to fudge around and recover those manually.

Thunderbird.
Firefox.
Quicktime Pro [paid for that one–and it’s worth it].
iTunes [it’s like Google–you can’t escape it!].
Sony Vegas Movie Studio.
Audacity.
mIRC [for the second time, used my old registration key and activated a new copy on a new computer].

I still need to do more! Safari. Chrome. Sony ACID, I think. Whatever I turn out to need for the digital camera, camcorder and microphone, if anything. The Bamboo Tablet, I hope. And I may need to buy a couple of really long USB cables. And a mousepad! Right now I’m using the digital camera’s User’s Manual just because it was there. 🙂

On the plus side: so far, I’m not having any problems with Windows 7 and I kind of like it. I really like Office 2007, including Outlook. When I installed InDesign CS4 on this system I finally fixed that problem with the extra fonts that wouldn’t install. I had to install a couple of fonts manually because I used them in the book block of The Longer the Fall and that worked perfectly, InDesign recognized them the second I copied them over. In fact…I’m kind of amazed at how well things are going.

This makes me nervous, heh. I’m guess I’m too (a) pessimistic (b) computer-savvy. *wry smile* But at least I’m a techie, I don’t panic easily, I have three other computers and I do daily backups. If my ass was covered any more than that, I couldn’t sit down!

I’m writing this on my new computer. It’s only taken me four days to stop tip-toeing around it, get it out of the cartons, connect everything and turn it on. I’m worse than the cats with something strange and different, honestly! (Yes, the bunny had started to nibble the cartons.)

I’m about 90% ported over, so far. The major software is installed–InDesign, Paint Shop Pro, both e-mail clients–and I copied all my data files and e-mail files from the back-up flash drives. I still have a lot of little things to catch up with, most of it having to be downloaded. I just installed Quicktime Pro and iTunes. I opted for the best available sound card, and I connected the speakers I bought this summer. Man, can this computer play music! Whoa! And the sound card…it’s the first computer I’ve seen with output jacks for subwoofers!

I’ve only really needed my geek hat once so far, manually configuring the port for the wireless printer server. Windows 7 wouldn’t run its installation CD, but I went to the manufacturer’s support forums and found an entry with step-by-step directions for configuring the port. I owe that poster a big debt of gratitude! Thanks to him, it took me less time to get the wireless printer server on board than it did to find the old installation disk of InDesign CS2 so I could prove to Adobe that I’m eligible for the upgrade. *wry look*

So…a lot of new. New keyboard, new monitor, Windows 7 (I’ve been clinging to Windows XP up to now), Office 2007, serious video and audio editing power (I still have to install that software). Lots of “housekeeping,” redoing filters and settings and auto-logins and all that stuff–when you practically live on your computer, online or otherwise, it’s amazing how much you accumulate. It’s not quite as disruptive as moving to a new home would be, but the dynamics are similar.

Meanwhile I’ve been sending out a lot of review copies of books, as I get positive responses to queries I made. That huge multi-day project in which I collected (or started collecting, more accurately) a database of book review blogs is already paying off.

I haven’t been feeling great physically. Every now and then I feel like I’m fighting off a cold. It never actually develops into a full-blown cold, but my sinuses will be raw and I’ll be on the verge of a headache, and mostly, I’ll just feel exhausted, especially when I first get up. I wake up feeling like road kill, and drag through the whole day. I start perking up at sunset, and then I stay up too late because after midnight, I’m hitting my stride. But it seems like everyone is sick, and whatever is out there, I think I’ve run into it, as well. I’m taking extra Vitamin C.

I got home from running a few errands today and was surprised to see a package on the doorstep (the Ninja UPS driver did another phantom run…I think he waits until I leave the house!). I wasn’t expecting anything. When I opened it up, I found a replacement for the Escali scale I sent to the warranty center just two weeks ago! Wow, that was fast. I wish the scale had been more durable, but I sure can’t fault Escali’s customer service!