Sunday morning getting up

[robotech_master]

Woke up about six thirty this morning after about five and a half hours of sleep, and no amount of tossing and turning would get me back into the arms of Morpheus...so I took advantage of the early rising to go to the 8:30 a.m. service at my church and get it out of the way early. Now I'm sitting out on the porch in the shrinking shade of the morning, listening to mp3s played over my desktop box's sound system through my open windows and screen door (and occasionally hearing a train whistle hoot from the railroad tracks that are fairly close). The screen is a little hard to see in the brightness, but it's a nice day out while the morning lasts, so I figure it's worth taking a few minutes.

Some of the neighbors in the apartment house opposite mine (the ones with the occasionally-annoying little kid who doesn't seem to understand that it's not nice to play with other peoples' water hoses) are moving out; they've got a pickup truck with a big horse trailer (the kind that mounts in the bed of the pickup instead of on the trailer hitch) pulled up to their door. Considering that my folks used a horse trailer to move me into this apartment, I find it a bit amusing to see the neighbors using the same means to move out. Maybe I'll start calling horse trailers "Ozark moving vans."

I was saddened to hear that one of my LJ friends (I'd best not say who, as I don't want to impinge on his privacy) has had to go into the hospital for a relapse of an ongoing stomach ailment. A mutual friend called and spoke with him this morning, and I plan to do the same a bit later on. I hope he gets better soon.

Yesterday I managed to do some of my first real writing on this laptop, using a variant of Emacs that runs in graphical mode on the OS X desktop. It worked really well, and the keyboard on this laptop has proven surprisingly easy to use—much more so than I'd expected. I can type nearly as fast on the Wallstreet as I can on the old IBM PS/2 keyboard that attaches to the desktop box. And I get to enjoy the novelty of being able to control my "tunez" from anywhere in or outside of the apartment.

Just had the kid from the apartment that's moving out come over to say hi, to watch me type for a bit, then get bored and wander off again. Cute kid, but I can't say I'm terribly sorry to see him moving away.

In another desktop on this Mac (I've installed a virtual desktop program to give me one of the few Linux-like abilities OS X didn't have already), I'm reading the Palm Digital Media "special edition" of A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge—the version that includes all of Vinge's annotations and footnotes. I actually already had this book on a copy of a Hugo/Nebula CDROM from way back, but since the CDROM predated HTML, the book was in either the Windows Help File format or Hypercard, neither one of which I could easily read. And though I also had the plain version of the book from Palm Digital Media (then known as Peanut Press)—the first ebook I ever bought for my Visor, in fact—I figured it was worth the money to buy it again.

It's good having the annotated book in Palm Reader format at long last, where viewing the notes is as simple as clicking on a link. It's sort of like reading a book with director commentary. Of course, most of the notes are the author telling himself "Check this later" or words to that effect, but there is also some fascinating discourse on things like how far away from a planet its moon should be to achieve the desired effects of lighting, monthly period, and travel time. It costs twice as much as the plain book does, but it's worth it. After I finish, perhaps I'll write a review for Slashdot.

Comments

[arrima-amor.livejournal.com]

I hate to be rude and ask this..

but do you happen to have any invite codes?


Ah, I'm sorry to bother you. *hides*
Yay for movies!
<3