Standing On Boxes

So far, I’m actually doing okay with NaNoWriMo. I’ve been able to keep up with the quota required to get it done by November 30th. But… I actually have to get ahead, by at least a week, because there will be a few days this month I won’t have time to write. Not sure if that is possible.

The minimum daily wordage is 1,667 (for 30 days). I’ve split my story into 10 parts – which is 5,000 words, which is approx. one part/chapter every three days.

As far as sharing the story goes — I’ll put it up when it’s finished. Sooner if I can figure out a way to limit access to it (aka password protect it) in a way I like. Of course, given NaNoWriMo’s focus on quantity, not quality, some of it is a bit rough, and only loosely coherent.

Something I could actually write. And slightly tweak to make it fanfic compliant afterward.

Yeah!

But no posting until I’m done. Wouldn’t want to spoil it.

As for that other idea? It goes on the “Someday I’ll be a real writer” pile. For when I win the lottery and have copious free time to spent on real world building/writing.

For NaNoWriMo. Not sure if I’ll use it. Not sure if it is possiible to stretch it out to 50K words in 30 days (actually less, with time out for Thanksgiving.) Or if I can get beyond the idea.

It’s that time of year again. Almost November and NaNoWriMo (aka National Novel Writing Month ) is once more on the horizon. I’ve only ever really tried it one time, back in 2004, and I only made it 1/3 of the distance, approximately. It eventually became my fic “The Apprentice”, completed 5 years later.

Not sure if I’ll attempt it this year.

Of course, my old NaNoWriMo account expired years ago… and I can’t seem to create a new one ATM so it might be a moot point.

So, new show on ABC “Once Upon A Time”. Unhappy evil Queen curses Snow White and Co to live forever in a small town in Maine. The twist? They have no idea who they are.

From the creators of “Lost”

In this new world:

So far –

Fairy Tale characters

Snow White is a grade school teacher.
Prince Charming is in a coma in the hospital
The Evil Queen/witch is mayor of the town (It’s not clear if she knows who she is.)
Jimminy Cricket is a shrink
Rumpelstiltskin owns the town.

Unnamed possible FTC’s
Town sheriff
Two women at the hotel Emma gets a room at.
Drunk at the jail.

Original Characters

Emma Swan – Snow White & Prince Charming’s daughter (except she doesn’t know that. She things she was abandoned as a baby. She chases down bail jumpers.). According to Rumplestiltskin, she’ll break the curse when she turns 28. Guess how old she is in this story.

Henry – Emma’s son. She gave him up for adoption when she was 18(?). The Mayor (evil Queen) adopted him. He seems to be the only person who knows what is going on in town.

Hmmm…. the show is being told with flashbacks to “fairytale land” as backstory and current time when Emma shows up.

A lot of reviewers weren’t too complimentary about the flashback aspect but I don’t think it’s too bad. Certainly better/different than the standard procedurals that litter the tv landscape.

Might have to watch the next episode.

So, I do most of my shopping at the local *Mart I pass on the way home from work. They actually have a decent selection of food. One of the things I buy is salsa. Store brand is usually okay – I mostly use it as a substitute for spaghetti / tomato sauce. But chunkier and spicier. They have several more premium brands and the national brands that sound like they are named after restaurants. Or cities in Texas.

(None of which actually resembles what you get at the local Tex-Mex restaurants.)

They didn’t have my preferred store “mix” the other day so I bought something new. And never again. That brand is off my choice list. It’s not that it tasted bad but… When did salsa consist of puréed tomato with a few chunks of other things in it? It might as well have been spicy spaghetti sauce based on the texture. Like tomato paste. Have to wonder if it was mislabeled.

Approximately once a quarter I go to a local store that sells a large collection of imported foods. Mostly snack foods and treats. And their own labeled store brand. And other sorts of things like furniture. Not the kind of place you would shop every day, unless you’re in that fabled 1% ( except, if you were that rich you’d travel to all these places (India, China, Italy, Japan, etc. ) for the real thing. ). And most of it is expensive because it’s imported and sold to people with a little extra disposable income.

Yup. Back when I was in high school we would have called it “Yuppy food”. now-a-days, I think just going into the store gets you tagged as a Librul sympathizer, at the very least.

There are probably cheaper stores that sell similar things but this one is the easiest for me to get to. And it used to be next to a Borders so I could buy a couple books and then get some nonlocal treats.

The only rule is that I can only buy a shopping basket full of Stuff. And it can’t all be for me.

Apparently, the gang over at Mattel was watching the first episode of season 3 of Glee when they came up with this idea:

Barbie gets a tattoo.

Doesn’t that look like a Barbie version of Quinn? Pink hair. Tattoo ( though a little more extreme than Evil Quinn’s tattoo. Didn’t Quinn’s father run off with a tattoo artist back in season 1? I wonder if that’s the same on Barbie went to? )

Watching “Food Detectives” on CookingChanneltv.com. The “Food Techs” are the interns/guinea pigs who get subjected to all the food experimentation.

Today: Items of note – urban food legends:

• How much “poppy seed” do you have to eat to set off a drug test? — Apparently, 5 poppyseed bagels (with approximately 1 teaspoon of poppy seeds each.) or a piece of poppy seed cake will set off the drug test they used, even though it contains none of the actual “drugs” that the poppy plant produces (aka opium). And we know this because of Food Techs! The unsung heroes of the Foodie Wars.
• How many saltines can you eat in a minute (without drinking anything – like water). Apparently, 6 is the number to beat. It’s supposed to be impossible. And none of the Food Techs were able to do it.
• Cholesterol and eggs. One egg is okay.

Someone decided that 9AM, on a Saturday moring, was the perfect time to re-roof (re-tile?) the apartment building I live in. Very loudly (there are only 3 floors to the building and they were VERY loud.) Until approx. 3:00PM, at which time they left so they could get to their favorite sports bar or home and watch the local university football team lose. Badly. Football is huge around here.

The less said about my 3 1/2 hour iPhone activation ordeal the better. But I think next time I’ll wait and not get an iPhone on Release Day. Even if UPS did an excellent delivery job so I didn’t have to wait in line, I wasn’t able to actually use it until much later.

I’ve been playing with Siri on my new iPhone (Once I figured out how to turn it on. And no, that wasn’t as simple as it appears. I had to power cycle my iPhone before the option even showed up in the Settings menu. I’m assuming that is because I restored from an older iPhone backup. Or for some unknown reason.)

I won’t list any of the humorous results of using Siri. There are a bunch of examples all over the tech blogs. But it is amazing how accurate it is in transcribing (textually) what I say, even if it has no clue (contextually) what I was asking.

Definitely not perfect but a huge leap forward.

The only real problem I saw was network related. Siri complained about network connectivity problems occasionally. So… Got a bad network connection? Siri isn’t going to be happy. And there was a definite lag between speaking and text regurgitation when I used Siri in Pages.

While I wait for my iPhone 4S to show up ( Wait in line? Not me! I’ll just sit back and wait for delivery.)… Some thoughts on iOS 5.

Notifications

Okay, I know the geek squad has been complaining about the way IOS does app notifications but I think Apple went too far in the wrong direction. They went from simple to too complex in my opinion. I had to go in and change the notification settings for over 30 apps this morning. Some to turn off (Who would want THAT app to blast you every time something happened?) and some to turn back on ( Why was OmniFocus suddenly silent?)

And I never want any app – except the actual phone and music app ( and games when I’m playing them; and maybe TomTom when I’m driving) to have sound alerts turned on!

App Syncing

I’m not using iCloud yet. I still use MobileMe for calendar and contacts ( mixed in with the Exchange server at work) and will until you can merge a nonMobileMe Apple ID with it. I want only one. But I want everything in both as they currently exist.. What I really want is automatic syncing between my iWork apps in iOS and OS X and that isn’t there yet. There’s still a disconnect.

App Failure

( Updated as I run into things… )

• Stanza, my favorite ePub reader broke in iOS 5 and since Amazon bought the company that made it I don’t ever expect an update from ePub “hating” Amazon. And iBooks isn’t really an adequate substitute for how I used Stanza (grabbing ePubs of web pages off the Internet for offline reading using dotEpub.). So I went looking for a replacement. MegaReader, which isn’t free, seems to be a reasonable substitute though I don’t quite have it set up to my satisfaction yet.
• Safari -
  • Tabs: okay, I’m not a huge fan of tabs in web browsers. But that’s just me being curmudgeonly ( and stay off of my lawn, Damn it!). I much preferred mobile Safari’s multi window method ( which the iPhone still uses.) but I can live with it. What I don’t like is losing the ability to scroll back to the top in Safari by touching the window border just below the search and location entry boxes. That’s now tab space. And that top of page gesture? Now it’s working only ABOVE the search box and 99% of the time I miss it and hit search. Whose idea was that? ( Oddly enough, it’s easier to do this on the iPhone.). It works best if you “aim” slightly into the window margin.
  • Bookmarks bar – the first entry is directly above the close icon for the first tab. It’s too easy to accidentally hit that instead of the link above it, grumble!
• Reminders – ( new ) ugh. Needs some integration with OmniFocus
• NewsStand – ( new ) Why can’t I put his in a folder to hide it away? I don’t want it!
• Cards – ( new ) Why is this only an iPhone app? Shouldn’t it be iPad’ed?
• iBooks – For some reason, a large number of my books in iBooks lost their illustrated covers during the transition. Ugh! Had to remove the books in question from my iPad, sync, and add them back (and the less said about the crappy iTunes interface for selecting individual books to add/remove from an iDevice the better!)

They started coming in small streams on Monday. By Wednesday, iPhone/iPad app updates were showing up in the App Store in a flood.

And sometime yesterday Apple released updates to iOS and OS X 10.7 (aka Lion)

Thanks to the other bazillion Apple fanatics, it took me all evening to down load the 2GB+ of updates for my iPad, iPhone, Lion and a few other things. Then came the actual update process, which I won’t detail here but it took more than an hour for the iDevices and 30 minutes for my MacBook. I did my iPad last. Plugged it in and went to bed ( yes, it was that late!). Finished tinkering with its settings when I got up 6 hours later.

What kind of tv scheduling is this! Three (Three!) episodes of Glee and then a break for three weeks?

I watched the last two episodes of Glee, Season 3. Not bad, though I’m not a fan of evil Quinn, but I can’t seem to find the enthusiasm for this weeks episode (mainly all the commercials you have to wade thru to watch it “live”), so it’s going straight to the DVR and I’ll watch it this weekend or so. Other than parental appearances, it looks like another diva Rachel vs Diva Mercedes episode. Aka – Nothing Special.

(I’ve also been recording ‘Ringer’ but haven’t decided if I’ll watch it yet.)

So… instead… I’m watching Season 1 episodes of Scooby Doo.

Ooh…looks like the Scoobies found a treasure map. Maybe. Velma says it’s the combination to a safe.

Let’s watch Shaggy practice his safe cracking skills. Once more those kids show their true colors. Hoodlums!