January 18, 2005

This has ended up a pretty good day. I had difficulty focusing at work, but got a fair amount done. I came home and watched more of Zeta Gundam and Gundam SEED, then incorporated comments on my November short story, “The Old Man.” Now I just need to remember the ending that the writing group hashed out.

Wanted to mention: I’m less than fifty pages from finishing proofing that novel. It’s been a struggle; several recent passages were tirelessly gruesome, and the author continues his tendency to open new chapters with several paragraphs of irrelevant backstory. But I’m so close I can smell the sweet scent of completion.

I’ve actually considered abandoning this proofing job a couple of times, mainly in reaction to those gruesome parts. I’m sorry I read them; they feel like what I’ve read of the exploitation movie I Spit On Your Grave. Let’s watch as a character tortures and kills people in revenge! Yay! Even Quentin Tarantino knew to keep that off-screen in Pulp Fiction.

Getting back on track: I finally had to e-mail the author, who assured me that there are no more violent dismemberments later in the book. With that knowledge, I’ll grit my teeth and finish it.

I should point out that the novel is not bad; it’s quite good. However, as a proofreader, I have to read every single word and weigh the grammar of every sentence. I can’t just read along and enjoy the book; I have to dissect it. It’s a draining experience.

Draining or not, I will finish this.

Okay, this has not been a good weekend for writing journal entries, as I haven’t had my normal ‘puter on which to write them. So, in brief:

Navi (my old laptop) is pretty much dead. It won’t even boot for more than a few seconds any more.

I bought a new, entry-level iBook to replace it, as repairing it would have cost nearly as much as the replacement did. So, $1,300 later, I have a new laptop.

However, not only did the Apple store forget to tell me when my data was transferred to the new laptop—I had to call to find out that it was ready—my primary user account wasn’t transferred. To be fair, this wasn’t completely their fault, as I had that account encrypted with FileVault; it wasn’t supposed to be copied normally. That meant that all my primary data was lost.

Thank goodness for backups. I made a backup of my data on Saturday, so I grabbed that and was pretty much back to normal; the only thing I lost was some of my wallpapers (so I’ve made a note to add that to my backup procedures). If nothing else, this has been an excellent confirmation that my backup procedures work.

Unfortunately, I also discovered that the entry-level iBook has a smaller hard drive than Navi’s. It has just enough space for all my music files and a few games, but I only have 1.38 GB left. Not much space. And that statement should shock me, but I guess I’m used to the massive amounts of storage around these days.

So, I’ve been cleaning out a few unnecessary things, such as album artwork (which is almost useless). I’m thinking of re-ripping a bunch of my CDs as something under 192 kbps, as I doubt I’ll notice the difference except in concert-level performances.

Actually, I think I should rip the same song (or set of songs) multiple times at different qualities and judge for myself. Personal experience is the ultimate teacher.