Yonaguni Research

Okay, while I let Capriciousness' New PaN sit a bit (it's always best to set a piece aside for a few days so that you can look at it with fresh eyes during editing and rewriting), I'm doing a bit of research for another piece.  There's an anthology with an open call for submissions through the end of October called "Dark Tales of Lost Civilizations".  I'd be willing to bet that no one will think of doing anything with Yonaguni (an underwater site off the coast of Yonaguni Island in Okinawa Prefecture, Japan), so I'm researching away.  I don't know if I can come up with anything Stephen King-esque in 4k words (if at all) but it should be a good exercise nonetheless.

In other, happy news, my new netbook should be here tomorrow.  It was an ebay steal at $75 with shipping and a 16gb sd card.  The netbook is only a 7" model with 2gb solid state hd, but it's just for writing when I'm not home.  I'm going to chuck the nasty Windows CE that is incompatible with anything at all useful and replace it with Ubuntu.  I use OpenOffice.org for my word-processing, but the built in writing program on that lean little os is compatible it and Windows.  Of course OpenOffice works with pretty much everything except Mac's Pages program.  (I miss my Mac.)  ;_;  Ubuntu only takes up a little under 700mb of room on the hd, where my Windows (Vista) folder on my laptop takes up nearly 20 gigs!  The recovery disc (which takes everything back to factory settings) has 9 gigs on it.  Sheesh.

Did I mention that it's bright green?  Purple would be better, but hey, it was cheap, and with Ubuntu One's 5 free gigs of cloud storage and every other way I'll be backing up my work, if it gets stolen out of my locker at work, I'm not going to be out that much $$ or work.  Maybe I'll find some paint that'll work on plastic and write "dreamer" on it in kanji.  That would look awesome. : )

(Hmm, the smilies look odd in this typeface, I'm going to either have to stop using them, change fonts, or accept their lopsidedness.)

Anyway, the fact that it's not going to have room for games (and that there's no internet for me to tap at work) means that I'll be writing on it and not playing.  ^-^  I'll just back it up to the cloud (and my TimeCapsule and my laptop) when I get home each day.  I've been burned by accidental deletion recently, so I plan on complete and total overkill in my backing up from now on.  Anything else can be replaced, but my writing can (for now) only be found in one place, so I'm not taking any more chances.

As soon as I have a little more money, I'll be putting a bigger hd in my laptop (I'm becoming techier by the day ^^), then splitting it down the middle so I can dual boot Windows and Ubuntu.  There are still a lot of things I've bought and paid for that can only be used with Windows (mostly games ^^) but I'm really digging Ubuntu (which is Linux based, very fast loading, and gorgeous for those who didn't click the link).  I've found a 1TB hd for $119, and should be able to scrape that much together in a month or two.  In the mean time, I'm going to be making room (by way of archiving to DVD) on my TimeCapsule against the day I make the switch out.  Fortunately DVDs are relatively cheap and my current hd is only 160gb (half of it music and the rest things I need, so it's always maxed out), so I don't need to make all that much room.  (My TimeCapsule is 1TB, but half is taken up with the backups from my dead Mac . . . which includes tons of pics from Japan and Mexico and music . . . *sniff*)  One day I'll be able to afford a new one (or simply get the old one fixed) and recover all that.  One day.  Oh, for the days of all the overtime I could handle.  How I miss those paychecks.