Standing On Boxes

I keep an eye on the business press… checking for oil/gas price increases… they’ve been talking about a one or two cent per gallon increase this week – until the refineries affected by the most recent hurricane in the Gulf are back up and running…

The price of gas on the corner ( 0.10 miles from here…)? It went up 40 cents a gallon between 8AM and 6PM today.

You can’t tell me this ISN’T price gouging… but who can we complain to? The president is too busy digging trenches and bunkers to hide out in because of the revelations of corruption rampant cronyism has caused this/last week.

Not happy…

It is coming slowly but I’ve been inching my way through “Out”. Approximately 500 word chunks at a time. I still have the big fight scene at the end, a wrap-up scene, and the usual revisions. And, of course, the action scene is the hardest part… I have other fics that are stalled at that point… at the “Big Action” scene. Hopefully I’ll have it all worked out by this weekend… October is starting to look like a work-only kind of month. I might not have much time to spend of fic writing.

It’s been a quiet week… not much on television… that I want to watch anyway… a little bit of writing but not as much as I’d hoped to accomplish…

And I can’t believe September is almost over… what happened to it?

It was a long day… I fell asleep with the tv on… Emeril doing his thing… No idea what he was cooking… Rachel Ray was doing her thing when I woke up.

I woke up with an idea for a sequel (“The Hunt”) for my fic “The Bandersnatch” floating in my head. A BtVS/HP/Dr. Who crossover. Hadn’t planned on a sequel. Not sure when/if I’ll ever write it… but I should probably write the idea down BEFORE I forget it… maybe.

Need to finish my BtVS/Bond crossover before I can even think about thinking about writing it…

Watching FoodTV… “Al Roker on the Road”… Making a checkerboard cake (at some retro-dessert place in NYC)…

1. Make two round cakes. Vanilla preferred. You want two different colors.
2. Slice them horizontally, approximately 1/2 to 1/4 inches thick.
3. Now make circles from your round sections. Like donuts. Each circle should have a square cross-section. But be smaller than the last. An 8″ diameter cake? Assuming 1/2″ sections. 8 circles ?
4. Now put the circles together, alternating colors/flavors… and gluing them together with frosting (it helps, visually, if the color of the frosting is close to one of the cake colors). (They used a round pan the same diameter as the original round cakes (I think it’s called a ‘spring-form’ pan? Maybe?)… so they built the cake inside the pan.)
5. Frost/decorate the outside.
6. Enjoy.

Got that? Good. Gonna invite me over when you make one? “;->”

Not that there is anything else on tv tonight….

Guess I’m going to spend the weekend watching dvds. Need to catch up on “Firefly” just in case I want to go see the movie…

Is there a purpose behind the programming on “Spike TV”? I’m thinking it’s tv for guys who never grew up… who are still stuck in high school/college mentally when it comes to women…

Okay… I’m a guy… (No surprise… I’m sure my name gave that away)… Let’s be honest here… seeing beautiful women? Not a hardship… scantily clad? (them, not me!) Also not a problem

(I’m sure that offends SOMEONE)

But a show called “Most Irresistible Women”? I must not be in the target audience…
I think there are better looking/more interesting women than the ones they “picked”
for this “entertainment show”.

So… I watched for a few minutes… and eventually turned the sound off…

They must have scripted what they wanted these [poor] women to say… they couldn’t possible be as dumb as they sound… (the ones who actually say something FOR this show) though the guys giving the “color commentary”? That part probably isn’t scripted.

And then I changed the channel… before the pure inanity of the thing rotted my aging brain cells…

Doing some work on “Out“. It’s on my future fic list but I want to get the first part done by the end of the week… I don’t want to leave it unfinished… I probably won’t get back to it before January.

Although it appears here as a single page… I’ve had to split it up into smaller chunks while working on it… resulting in some weirdness… two whole sections were duplicated and I didn’t notice until now… ouch.

I also have less of it done than I thought I had… at the rate it is going… it’ll be over 15K words before I finish it… I hope the other 8 parts aren’t as long as that.

The ‘short’ fic “The Bandersnatch” was supposed to be a quick thing… to get me past some writers block-like issues. It didn’t quite turn out that way. It took me just over 3 weeks to go from idea to first draft (today). Not quick at all. And I don’t think my characters are very much in character…

Which, since this was supposed to be my first attempt at writing something with Luna in it (She appears briefly in the next part of my fic “The Other Girl”)… is a little disappointing. Of course, there isn’t a lot of information about her in the Harry Potter books she appears in. She’s strange, shy (but just a little), smart (she’s in Ravenclaw), empathetic, insightful, and loyal. Kind of reminds me of early Tara. But ‘flaky’

And in the realm of coincidences… two of my favorite crossover writers, Jinni and echo, both posted Luna Lovegood centric fics to “Twisting the Hellmouth” this weekend (A Willow/Luna and a Luna/Spike). Would it be considered tacky to post mine also this weekend? They are much better/talented writers…

I haven’t read echo’s fic yet… Jinni’s was amusing… and not what I expected.

Saw an ad for the Firefly movie – “Serenity”. So… should I get out my Firefly DVD’s and finally watch all of them? I only have 2 weeks before the movie comes out.

Hmmmm… and is that mystery girl a vampire slayer? He wouldn’t do that? Would he?

It would certainly be a lot better than watching Billy Zane as The Phantom… (I think his costume is way too purple…)… and poor Kristy Swanson semi-reprising her role as Buffy — though under the alias “Diana Palmer”…

Or maybe… Buffy is her great-granddaughter?

No way!!!! The Phantom’s horse is keeping up with an airplane and the Phantom and Diana are jumping onto it seperately… 30 seconds apart… fast horse…(Diana – “I can’t believe we just did that” — and neither can I….)

Best line of the movie –> “Don’t smoke in the Skull Cave!”

Okay… so we’re flying 1000 miles in a 1930′s seaplane… with the masked man hanging onto one of the pontoons… and we don’t notice how that affects the plane’s stability in the air?

“Us girls should stick together.” (Having a Buffy-Faith moment? Catherine Zata-Jones (the bad girl) to Kristy Swanson (the Good Girl) when the evil pirates capture them… subtext? In a Hollywood B movie? Inconceivable! )

And the bad (white) guy? Kind of overblown pathetic…

So… I’m the evil head pirate (who looks like the evil guy from the “Mortal Kombat” movie). This guy in a purple suit grabs a rope on the OTHER side of my cave/hideout (several hundred feet away) and swings on it towards me… and I can’t get out of the way in the 30 seconds it takes him to get there? Or maybe just shoot him?

And who designed the pirate’s lair? Certainly not them…

Ooh… duel to the death with little skull-like artifacts… with laser beams coming out of their eyes… powerful enough to destroy the island hideout…

Will he tell Diana his real name? Looks like she guessed all on her own… will she forget
again by the sequel? So we can have lots of mistaken identity bits? Oh wait… there never was a sequel…

Okay… it really is just barely a B movie… the eye candy doesn’t make up for the bad writing and semi-expensive corny special effects. But it has that something special… there is a kind of “heart” to it… and that is something “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow” really lacked – Even though they are set during the same approximate time period.

Well…. I went as long/far as I could… had to finally put gas in the red buggy this afternoon. $2.95.9/gal for premium. Still 20 cents/gal more than I last filled it up but a lot lower than the $3.60+ it was last week at the local pump.

I occasionally get questions about different unfinished fics. Mostly asking me when I’ll get back to one of them. I really haven’t abandoned any of my unfinished fics. I just have too many started. And I seem to go through long periods when I would rather read other people’s fics than work on my own.

And then there’s the length issue… I seem to be writing longer and longer parts to fics… which takes longer… Quantity-wise… I’m writing the same amount as always… but for fewer fics.

The goal for this fall (after I finish a couple short fics this/next week) is to finish one of them:

• My AU Buffy fic – “The Two” (There are 12 parts to go– approx. 48K words – so I don’t know if I’ll make it – but after two years… I think it’s about time I finished it.)

And get a good start on finishing another:

• My Buffy/Bond crossover “The Bond Girls”

And who knows what else will jump out at me and want to be written. I want to start a new one in the spring (“Out” A 9 part prequel to a Stargate crossover I sort of have planned – I actually have the first part of it mostly done.) and finish another. And have a clean slate (except for my “Red Raider” series — which might take forever to finish) for next summer…

I really don’t know how this’ll work out… I prefer to be optimistic… “;->”

Oddly enough…

You can put photos on the iPod nano… but you have to use iTunes to do it… and it isn’t by individual photo… it’s by folder… I put a couple on it to see how it works… but I can’t see keeping them there for long…

No video out (Unless someone figures out how to do that using the docking port…)

Okay… checking the manual (which you have to download from Apple)… I’m using a PC to put stuff on my iPod (until I get a Mac with a faster USB port). On a Mac you can use iSync or several other methods to easily copy stuff to it – contacts, calendar info, to-do’s.

The contact info is easy… it’s whatever is in a vCard file. Just copy it over while the iPod is connected.

Calendar info… the version of Outlook I have doesn’t seem to export in vCal or iCalendar format (that I can tell) so that isn’t an option.

The To-Do list feature… only works with a Mac. Darn…

The Notes feature… other than a note on the ipod telling you how to use it and a short blurb in the manual there isn’t much info available on it… it works on both Mac and PC… but I believe there must be a size limit.

To test it I downloaded a book from Baen’s free library (One of their James H. Schmitz anthologies (the one I haven’t purchased yet))… converted it to text (800+K) and copied it to my iPod… readable… but VERY tiny text… but it didn’t all show up. I’ll have to try some smaller things… not sure what I would want to carry around on an iPod for squinty reading…

I hadn’t realized that Barry Hughart had written a third book with this duo. I found it at McKay’s (the local large used book store).

I also got another Bond book (Goldfinger)… someone in Knoxville is working their way thru the trade paperback reprints… so I’m replacing my much older paperbacks with them as they show up.

Used book stores can be tricky… you can’t always buy books / movies in order. There is no guarantee something will be there the next time you go… so if you are trying to get a whole series of books cheap… it can take a while. (e.g. I’m still missing 4 of the Fleming Bond books with several gaps in the middle.)

Sitting on the box the Nano comes in. It’s the same size as the Shuffle’s box. The outer slip-cover actually has a life-size image of the Nano on it. Embossed front and side views.
(The nano is thinner than the shuffle. You’ll have to check Apple’s website for Shuffle and Nano specs if you want exact dimensions… I don’t have a ruler handy…)

Haven’t quite figured out the prayer/thumb wheel on the Nano…

I don’t use the ‘ear buds’ that come with these things (Or my PSP)… they make my ears hurt… I like my music pain-free… so I bought a pair of cheap ‘clip-on’ headphones. (I have a much better pair of real headphones I use at work with my PC…). Worth the $9 I spent on them.

Not the best picture… my (3 year old) digital camera doesn’t do close-up shots very well… I guess that is next on the replace list (Christmas?)

Is it an iPod or a PDA?

I bought it to play music… (and other audio things)…

I’d heard that you can put contact info on it (Anything you can put in vCard format) and calendar info (though I have no idea how to do that…)…

It looks like you can also put text files on it… kind of a small screen to read eBooks on but… possible.

The real surprise… there are several games… standard simple stuff you used to find on cell phones before they got so smart… some thing Breakout, a solitaire game, music trivia (It plays a part of a song from your iPod and you have to guess the title), and something called ‘Parachute’

I need some kind of case for this…

The “docking port” on the end the the nano doesn’t have a cover. I wonder how long before dirt gets in it and it stops working…

There’s a docking adapter… but no instructions on what to do with it… at least not anything included with the iPod…