Words are inadequate

A month or more ago Jimmy Maher did a write-up of Zork Nemesis and Zork Grand Inquisitor, the last two official Zork games. Those were some excellent games: Grand Inquisitor in particular was a lot of fun, but even Nemesis was an enjoyable and atmospheric puzzle-romp. They're among the games for which I'm still lugging the CD-ROMs around, despite not having owned a machine that can run them for at least a decade now.

Except it then occurred to me that that hasn't been true for at least a year. I've got this new laptop, and Windows is famously backwards-compatible. Maybe, I thought when I read the article, I'd take some time this summer and play through them again.

Cut to today. Today I have been out of sorts for a number of reasons I don't want to go into, so I have decided that today will be the day Actaeon the Windows laptop earns its keep. (Yes yes, it's been a fine workhorse for classwork, but its REAL virtue is in allowing me to relive my college gaming years.) So I dug out the three-disc jewelcase for Zork Nemesis and started the installation process. (First convincing the Windows laptop that it wanted to talk to the Apple CD/DVD drive.)

Except: foiled! Turns out the upgrade to a 64-bit OS has finally broken some amount of backwards compatibility. I can't actually just install the game directly from the CD-ROM and party like it's 1996. Or, more likely, 1998-1999. I certainly didn't get Nemesis immediately upon release; more likely I picked it up from the bargain bin a few years later.

Which means that I have installed an emulator on, not my Windows laptop, but my Macbook, and am now in the slow process of copying most of three CD-ROMs onto my hard drive, where they will take up less than one percent of its storage capacity.

I'm looking forward to this.

Let's see. Last workday is this Friday. I am not looking forward to newjob, simply because I don't know enough about it to look forward to it. It's just the next thing on the list. I am looking forward to not having to deal with currentjob. We got acquired (again) back in November and the last several months have been an unending stream of nonfunctional tech integration, pronouncements from On High that make no mention of any of the products I've been working on, and the expected "your benefits will be a little worse this year". On Friday a message came in about yet another stupid trick the developers have pulled, and instead of getting annoyed I just said "in seven days this will no longer be my problem."

Current major stress source is moving. The moving coordinator I worked with to get up here last time, who was communicative and efficient and effective, is currently batting .333. It's an open question whether he'll find anyone at all, and if he does it sounds like they'll charge me double because I'm starting in an out-of-the-way location. The other option is to load up Erin's trailer and go south with that. I would much prefer to just throw money at someone else to deal with the moving logistics, and also the kitchen packing, and also the physical labor of carrying everything out and safely stacking it in a truck. Bah. Bright side, if I do end up using the trailer then once I get myself to the other end I can probably (probably) call Tranquility, the guys who moved me half a dozen times in three years, and say "hey, come unload this truck, it's half the work you usually do but you'll still get paid your full minimum."

Books. Reread This Is How You Lose The Time War, which has quickly become a Comfort Read. The slowly deepening relationship, the varied backgrounds, the way they play with words ("whacked seal"), the lovely lovely prose. It's just wonderful. Still halfway through a first reread of Fonda Lee's Jade War, the middle volume of her Green Bone Saga, which does not feel middle-volume-y at all, I'm just lacking in reading brain.

I've also picked up a game controller for the new laptop. Turns out that, as expected, I hate wireless controllers because I hate things that run out of battery when I'm using them, but other than that it's pretty decent. Unfortunately Apple's decision to ditch normal USB ports means I can't use it as a wired controller. Bah.

O yes: I'm generally pretty happy with ye new laptop ("Patrise," after the fellow in The Last Hot Time: dark, and powerful despite its stature). My main gripes are a lack of normal USB ports, an oversized touchpad that makes it harder to type than necessary, and a lack of a proper Delete key. Given time I can probably train myself into Fn+Delete but I shouldn't have to. Oh well. This has been a gripe for over a decade, and an insoluble one since 2017. The screen's lovely, as are the speakers, and the battery life and general system coolth make me quite happy.

I suppose five things make a post.

Today I learned that "0%" is an amount of battery life that my computer will display.

(I plugged it in as soon as I noticed, and it's all the way back to 1% now.)

On Wednesday I finally got the home office area set up. Now I can work from home with an actual monitor and keyboard and trackball and standing-desk, rather than laptop on couch/bed.

It's all in acceptable shape, but only just. I'll need to drag in another mat or two to stand on, to get the desk to the right height. My Mac keyboard has lost the use of the S key and spacebar, but I've got a Windows keyboard which works well enough for now. The real problem is that Microsoft hasn't updated the Mac software for my trackball in several years, and it won't talk to the latest version of macOS. So the trackball works, but the buttons are ALL WRONG. I've found a couple of potential workarounds but they looked more involved than I wanted to get on Wednesday afternoon. Sometime next week, I expect.

The office is actually the back of the second bedroom. It's got yellow walls that desperately need some art hung, the (two? three?) TUCKER'S OFFICE boxen need to be unpacked onto desk / bookcase, and there's some other miscellaneous /stuff/ that needs sorted or scooted or something. But the window's nice (though glare is problematic in the afternoon) and it's good to start to feel like there's a space that's mine again. The 'office' in the New West place was that, more or less, but it was dim and stuffy and caught a lot of dust from the dryer vent. This room is substantially nicer, if more cramped.

There are things about this apartment that frustrate and irritate me: the laundromat-style laundry, the dining room being a little narrower than we'd thought, the kitchen in general. Overall, though, it's not so bad. It'll do for now.

---

I am also now the proud owner of a bass guitar (Freeway 4) and an amp. My friend Chani's partner had been talking about selling his bass and amp for, o, months now, and it's sort of been at the back of my mind since then.

I think I have this idea that it'll be faster to pick up bass than it has been for viola, or that I'll be more readily able to find places/people to play bass with than viola, or something. This of course all depends on me finding my way to the alternate universe where I have enough time to learn not one but two instruments.

I'm also looking into an ear-training app for the phone, for commutes and such. And perhaps some actual formalised music theory learning, instead of the ad-hoc bits Tegen's been teaching me.

I'm not sure why music's becoming more of a focus than fiction-writing. Maybe it's that I understand how to get better at music, or that I'm more comfortable with not being very good. There's something in there about smashing awful pots, too. With music I'm learning a skill; writing feels more like creating a work. And yes, I do know that there's a hell of a lot of skill inherent in writing, skill that improves with practice, but I've not figured out how to feel comfortable practicing my skills in fiction.

Or maybe it's as simple as music being what's pulling me right now. Being more interested in accessing a space without words.

It's not like I can make rent (well, "mortgage payment," which sounds even worse despite being a smaller number) on either of those activities in any case. So in that sense it doesn't really matter which it is, as long as I'm having fun with it.

As always, we shall see.

0) ... and still insists he reads of ghosts.

1) One amusing in retrospect bit I didn't mention earlier: when I arrived at the train station in Toronto (after an unpleasant redeye flight featuring loud drunk bachelor-partiers, and a wholly pleasant ride on the new no-longer-$38 train from the airport to the train station) I attempted to present my passport so I could pick up my ticket and ... opened to a picture of uilos. Apparently our passports got switched for the wrong wallets the last time we travelled (down to the used bookstores with Steph in December). Luckily I had my own Nexus card and my own PR card, and the train folks were happy enough to take the Nexus card, but it made for a somewhat tense ride down.

E FedExed me my passport so I could get on a plane to go home. I could *probably* have worked it out with just the Nexus card, but I had used the passport to buy the ticket, and better safe than stranded in Buffalo.

2) Speaking of, home from the Gathering as of eleven-thirty last night. Still tired, still heavily overpeopled. I didn't take care of myself as well as I could have this year; the weather was miserable for the first half of the week and for whatever reason once it nicened up I still didn't go outside and wander. Something to bear in mind for next year.

3) More on this later, but: consider this another plug for Graydon Saunders's Commonweal novels (available in ebook from the Google Play store). Reread the first (The March North) and read the first third or so of the second (A Succession of Bad Days) over the week. Comparisons with the work of Mr Ford are not inapt. The bone-deep understanding of trauma and healing and loneliness and identity is still there in Graydon's work, it's just even further down than in The Dragon Waiting. Or maybe I just haven't reread these enough times for it to be obvious to me.

4) It seems I have a strong predilection for flawed characters in difficult situations who are trying their damnedest. I have no further use for stories about terrible people being terrible, and I think this means I should let the Joe Abercrombie books go.

4a) Losing people you’re responsible for hurts. If it didn’t, the Line wouldn’t give you a warrant of commission.

If it stops, they take the warrant away.

--Graydon Saunders, "The March North"

5) I am returning the nameless new laptop. A week with Taranis has convinced me that I don't need to spend an exorbitant sum of money on a new machine, not yet and likely not for another couple of years. I *do* need a battery replacement and could do with a clean reinstall, but that can wait for the weekend.

Let's see. Still writing (mostly just on Wednesdays with Steph), still playing the viola and starting to sometimes feel like I'm beginning to get the hang of it. Still less than thrilled by job but hey, they pay me. Still looking for a better (closer to downtown, less frustrating) apartment. Settling into getting used to the idea of having a stable living situation, and being able to think and plan about what happens next.

Finally got the cats on all wet food all the time. They've been on dry food for long enough that wet food has been "okay this is a nice treat but where is my REAL dinner?" It's taken a couple of brands to get to some that they'll consistently eat most of. I say "some" because we had one that we thought would work but after a week that turned into "aww, the humans bought a case of our favorite food, now we can't like that kind anymore." Mixing it up seems to be sufficient.

Apple has deigned to offer new normal-sized phones, so we'd intended to go pick those up this weekend. In addition they now give you some amount of credit for your old phones, which seems like a win-win proposition. Unfortunately the local stores are sold out of new normal-sized phones for the next couple of weeks. And the easiest way to get credit from the old phones is to exchange them at the time of purchase, which precludes ordering online. So, new phones once I get back from Niagara.

I did go ahead and pull the trigger on a new laptop, though. I may go to my grave defending the hardware setup of Taranis, my current laptop, as The Best Ever. It's got a CD drive, a Magsafe power connector that detaches safely when you accidentally kick the cord rather than yanking the laptop off the table, and it's got a software Eject key that is intensely stupid but can be remapped to be a proper Delete. Sadly newer models of Macbook have removed the optical drive and replaced the useless Eject key with what I think is a Power key that I can't remap. And all indications are that Apple is getting serious about moving to USB3 for power ports with the new models that ought to be out this fall. I figured, I may as well get while the getting is no worse, and if the new laptop lasts me five years like this one did then it's a fine investment.

And this Friday I fly out to Niagara for a week of gaming. I'm not really feeling the get-up-and-go urge, which seems ... odd. I suspect I'm pulling in on myself again. Eh. Will sort that out once I'm back from Niagara.

---

( 101 in 1001 update )

No motivation this morning. Up til midnight trying to fix my stupid computer. For reasons that are not entirely clear to me it has forgotten how to tell the phone where to sync photos (clicking the [Sync] Photos tab results in endless spinning, and syncing gets a complaint that it can't find the folder to sync photos and then an endless "Waiting for sync to finish" message), on top of its couple-months-old tendency to crash the System Preferences when I try to open either Desktop/Screensaver or Spotlight prefs.

Been needing to get a new battery anyway; this one only holds about two hours of charge. Maybe I can get the genuises to take a look at the system when I bring it in.

I suspect the answer is gonna be "full system restore to old Time Machine backup" again, at best. Don't wanna.

Meanwhile I sit here with a stuffed-up nose and no interest in doing much of anything.

Today I will:

• Stop beating myself up for not managing to fix my stupid computer
  
• Get up off this couch WIKTORY
  
• Exercise while rewatching two episodes of Better Off Ted
  
• Practice the viola for at least an hour (two sessions)
  
• Knock at least one thing off the "things to revise in story" list, either by doing or by saying "nope not gonna do that"
  
• Email Jenn, cripes how did it get to be Friday already, I blame the stupid not-quite-sick
  
• Meet uilos downtown for fishes and Holst

Looks like a full day for no motivation.

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( 101 in 1001 update )

The latest OSX update (Mavericks[1]) was free, and I've been running an OS that's three years behind, and I have a vague recollection that there was software that was only available for more recent versions of OSX. So I went ahead and updated.

[1] "To install OSX Mavericks, say 'Siri, I feel the need for speed.'"

Good things: the update went smoothly. Nominally better battery life. I can finally disable Spellcheck on a system-wide level. I guess iBooks on the laptop is a good thing.

Not so much irritating as mildly baffling: whenever I close an app, rather than popping up whatever app was next in the task-switcher, as you'd expect, Finder opens. I got nothing. Seems to have fixed itself, probably when I updated the keyboard hack.

Decidedly non-minor: trackpad scrolling is less responsive than it used to be and my hacked Delete key (formerly the worthless Eject key) doesn't work about half the time. [Fixed that one by updating the hack.] Also Firefox will frequently decide to stop loading web pages altogether, necessitating a close-and-restart.

Verdict: eh, shouldn't have upgraded. Oh well. Since I've already decided against a new laptop in the next year or two, I guess I should go ahead and buy more RAM.

My deliciously clicky Unicomp keyboard and Henge Dock both came in yesterday, so I spent the evening setting up a desktop workspace to test everything out.

24" is a heck of a lot of monitor. It is overpowering in its monitorness. On the other hand, I appreciate the ability to read text without squinting, and Portal looks pretty good at that size.

The display adapter for the Henge Dock is being finicky. The speaker and USB and power connectors all click into place perfectly but something about the display connector is just Not Fitting. I can still plug it in from the underside of the dock, so it works and is usable. It just defeats the drop-in-and-use nature of the dock. I'll mess with it more over the weekend, I guess. Other than that the dock is amazingly easy to use, and looks classy too. My only real complaint is that it really wants a dedicated charger. The power connector, like all the other connectors, has to be screwed into place. It's easy enough to unscrew, it just adds to the time and effort and makes it slightly less awesome. (Now, if I had convinced uilos to get a Macbook Air, there would be an extra charger lying around...)

It's the keyboard that's really wowed me. Unicomp has done a fantastic job with this thing: not too surprising, since I think they bought all the old IBM designs and manufacturing equipment. It is gorgeous and heavy-duty ("can stun a burglar in the dark, which is my definition of great art" --NG). Also, it just feels right to type on. It even came with extra keycaps to replace the Windows and Alt keys with Command and Option (no symbols, sadly; just the words). Now I just need to figure out if there's a way to map the worthless right-hand meta key to something useful. Fn, maybe.

It's most definitely Loud, though. We're talking machine-gun levels of Loud, here. As someone or other said, it's like a gigantic tailpipe for geeks. It is, in fact, so much louder than my previous Model M (from 1995) that I went ahead and pried a key off the old one to see what was going on. Turns out all this time I've been typing on a standard dome-switch keyboard: better than most, but still not the same. (I'd take it to work to replace the keyboard I have here, but I'm worried it would break the cheap keyboard tray they gave me.)

Also of some interest: it's fairly easy for me to adapt to the Mac keyboard shortcuts on the laptop, but I keep using Windows muscle memory on the new keyboard. I guess it's embedded on a deeper level than I'd thought.

So now I have most of what I need for a good desktop setup (still lacking: desk, also chair). The question now becomes, when I get settled in Vancouver, do I use the same desk setup for work and for fun, or do I need to put together a whole different desk for work?

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Coda: This, incidentally, is the first keyboard I ever used. We had it for, mm, not quite nine years, Christmas 1982 to late August 1991. For context, this was two revisions earlier than the one true keyboard, of which all others, including our own 104-key, are but shadows. (Edit: fixt links)

Looking at that picture, it's the little things that come back to me. The ridiculously oversized meta keys with their normal-sized key caps. The random PrintScreen key under the vertical ENTER, and the backslash next to Z. The gigantic PLUS next to the number pad. What the heck were the designers thinking? (Of course they probably weren't, they were more interested in getting all those weird new keys on the keyboard than in putting them someplace usable.)

Because I am a) a crazy person who b) wants to become more acquainted with his new computer in a trial by fire and is c) in desperate need of something to distract his brain, I'm doing NaNoWriMo this year for the first time.

This is madness for any number of reasons, but mostly because the only time I've ever written more than 1,667 words of fiction in a day, it wiped me out for several hours. 50,000 words is an order of magnitude longer than anything I've ever written. It may be more words than all the fiction I've written so far put together. Honestly, the only reason I think this is even possible is that I had several thousand-plus wordcount days in a row the last time I was writing anything, back in July.

(Also, I figure that if I get something else written, that'll give me the distance I need to go back and revise the space story.)

I've taken a couple days off from work in the middle of the month, and a couple more at the end, so in theory I'll have a chance to catch up when (not if) I fall behind on word count.

I have no intention of posting daily word counts here, no worries. I'll probably gripe about it here once a week or so, and give the same vague story info you've come to know and love from other things I've been working on. If you're actually interested I'll be keeping a running wordcount at the NaNo website. I'm jazzfish over there as well.

I fully expect to crash and burn with this but it'll be interesting to see how far I get at least. And yes, I do have a personal bribe waiting for me at the end of it, beyond just bragging rights.

(I'm using the special NaNo edition of Scrivener to write this thing, plus of course Neo for writing on my lunch break etc.)