Just over there
I’ve been fiddling with Part 3 of “Gypsy Tales” — it is slowly growing though it is more potential than finished at this point.
I just need to work on something that is different and where I can just write… again. There are so many gaps and issues in this story. You could drive a truck through the plot holes. Especially this part.
Hopefully I’ll have it fixed soon…
I’ve finished a first draft of the next part of “Bond Girls” — that only took a year. I’ll probably post it to “TtH” tomorrow night. Maybe. Definitely not tonight.
Looking at the part after that… what I wrote a year ago doesn’t fit anymore. It’ll have to change a bit (what’s with the dancing around who Bond is? And the outfit the villain puts Buffy in? And the curse? I’m not sure where I was going with that last year… (The curse is one of those ‘you’ll outlive all of your descendants’ kind of things (to explain his age, etc.) Needs some work.))
I’d planned on working on the next part of “The Two”… but I haven’t gotten to it yet.
I’ve been having wi-fi issues in my apartment… my Powerbook (and earlier iBook) have never had any problems anywhere… but my new mini and my Thinkpad have always had a bad connection in the back bedroom…
So I found a Mac OS X 10.4 widget from a company called JiWire – they sell Wifi Hotspot info (or something like that) — it displays signal strength and channel info.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work if you have a case sensitive file system (Like some Adobe and other products). Easy fix — they just need to follow the rules for widget file names (hint – they actually ARE case sensitive on a case sensitive file system!)
So I fixed it – but it is impossible to enter a message/reply into their support discussion forum to tell the person who asked about this specific issue over 6 months ago… so… good thing the widget itself is free…
But it is an interesting widget example… now if only it supported WPA authentication and not just WEP.
Not sure how accurate the strength info is – 10 feet from my access point and it says 70% or so (no actual numbers – just a ‘bar’. There’s a Yahoo widget that says 80-90% (Once I played around with the antennas on the access point. ) But it doesn’t tell me channel info. I wonder where they get their info? I know they use a plugin of some sort but where does IT get the info from?
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Okay… after some experimentation… there are 4 wifi networks in range of my apartment, counting mine. One close and two very faint… I changed the channel on my AP to 1 and now, under Windows XP – my mini thinks it has a low 90% signal (according the the Yahoo Wifi signal widget) while my Powerbook, sitting right next to it thinks it has 50-60%. Either they are measuring things a different way or the mini has a better antenna.
Or the Powerbook is lower because it is running on a battery and not the wall power… Nope. Wall power has no effect.
Hmm… Not sure this little experiment actually tells me anything… even with a lower “signal strength” – my PowerBook has a much better perceived network through-put than the mini running XP.
Apple G4 iBook/Powerbook battery recall
Seems Apple bought a bunch of battery cells from the same place that Dell did. Oops.
Need I say more? Other than… 4-6 weeks to get a replacement battery? Reportedly – Dell was shipping replacement batteries to customers the next day…
Of course, we don’t Know how long they (Dell) sat on this until they had enough batteries to do that. Or how long Apple has been saving up batteries to do this also…
Somewhere… I saw that the return rate on something like this? 25-30% – so they don’t actually NEED to have 1.8 million batteries sitting around…
It’s all about the cynicism… we’ll see how long this takes.
And… I wonder where I can find a battery (that isn’t covered by the recall) for $$ while I wait for it to show up? How many people are going to go out and spend $150 on a battery when all they have to do is wait for one from Apple to show up.
My wireless hub (which is how everything around here connects to the world via my cable modem) had my cable ISP’s DSN servers hardcoded. I haven’t changed those settings since setting it up a couple years ago.
Guess I shouldn’t have done that. Looks like they’ve changed DNS server addresses recently… everything was going really slow… at least for the initial connection. Took me a while to recognize the symptoms…
Now fixed. I hope. No longer hardcoded.
There are people who are only too willing to tell you what is wrong with a story because it doesn’t go in the direction THEY would have taken it and it doesn’t cover the things they think is important..
And there’s never really any easy way to answer their issues. Because, if they have such clear ideas of what YOUR story should say… why aren’t they writing their own story?
Got one of those kinds of reviews today, already, to my “Lady of A” story. One of my perpetual “Problem Reviewers” (yes, I have one of those…) has decided that part two of this story just ruined the whole thing and they no longer like any part of the story… because I was in a hurry to shove Dawn off to Seacover without a whole lot of protest from Willow and Co. (even though I warned everyone right up front at the beginning of that part that I was going to do it…) and why didn’t Joyce come running to Buffy’s rescue?
Such is life. That isn’t the story I’m telling… and I have no plans to change things around…
I posted the next complete part of “Lady of A” to “TtH”
Trying to depict Connor MacLeod accurately wasn’t going anywhere. So I finished that part off with a lot more ‘Dawn-age’ than I’d originally planned, and Joyce will be back in the next part.
There just isn’t much to go on, character-wise, if you watch the original movie (which I did this afternoon), unlike the 6 seasons of Highlander and the main characters in the series. Hope I didn’t mangle him too much, but one more part and he’s basically out of there.
And now let’s go watch “Kill Bill” for a much messier story of people with swords.
If we went by word count… last week wasn’t a bad writing week. Not a lot of words but about average.
I’ve actually spent some time on the next part of “Perci” – even though it won’t make complete sense until I finish the next part of “The Other Girl” (so I can’t actually post it anywhere without causing confusion – assuming anyone even noticed.)
I can’t seem to finish parts 2 and 3 of my Joyce/Highlander fic but part 4 is already coming along. Strange.
That’s the best way to describe Part Two of my fic “A Lady of Aquitaine”
Something is missing… too much exposition? Too much OC-ness for the characters?
Time to put it aside (for a few days) and work on other things?
Hmmm…
I’ve started playing with “Parallels” on my mini.
It has its quirks. Mostly with devices. And how it will occasionally change the screen resolution (or at least it did that when I first started.) of the Windows instance…
The annoying part is really with Windows and how you have to “activate” it. I pay $300 for a piece of software (It has to be a Full licensed copy of Win XP Pro (No Upgrade copies.) to work with Apple’s BootCamp sofware) and AFTER I enter the license key it THEN expects me to “Activate” it? Or it won’t run in 30 days? Phooie… so I have to decide if I want to use Parallels or do a straight boot on the hardware (BootCamp) since I apparently can’t do both.
But in order to experiment… I have to install Windows XP twice!!!!!!
Hmm…
It’s gonna take me a couple days just to set things up to test… to see which does Visual Studio .Net better (which is the whole goal)… Dolphin 6 (Community version) seems to work fine under Parallels (so far… didn’t do much with it yet)
It should work… it’s all a matter of which “feels” better (And which one works best with my favorite keyboard (An LK450 on a USB keyboard adapter…) if at all.)
