[	Tags	|	rambling writer, random, random: tech, recs: movies	]
[	Current Mood	|	sick	]

Things are steaming full speed ahead again on my personal archive, which has now replaced my very purple temporary pages. Again, it’s hosted on Wordpress, and there aren’t any actual stories in it yet, but hey! Go poke at it, and tell me if things are displaying wonkily for you or whatnot.

It’s been a lot of geeky fun getting things to where they are now, which is great. AND I think I’m getting really close to cracking the navigation nut. I’m doing it mostly with pages and good linking, instead of Wordpress’s annoying category/tagging functions, which just don’t really suit my purpose. So far, all of the heavy navigational lifting will just be done with well-coded/linked Pages, and actual stories and occasional state-of-the-archive updates will be posts. There will only be about three categories or so, and if it all works, anyone visiting my site should be able to vaguely understand what I’m about and get reading within a couple of clicks.

As far as writing goes…ggrh. I’ve decided what I want to do re: the AST universe, but I just don’t know whether to talk about it yet. So far, my decisions have only produced an okayish one-shot from Severus’ pov, lots of outlining and scavenging of the HP Lexicon, and not much else. And I keep tripping over my self-doubt and my preconceptions about writing and what it should be.

But that’s another post.

My third bit of news is that you should all totally rent Eastern Promises right fucking now. It’s not a perfect movie; heck, it’s even annoying quite a few times. And the main female character’s actions are supremely irritating to watch. But Viggo Mortensen, as Nikolai, and some other guy Vincent Cassel as Kirill, steal and save the fucking movie. And my inner language geek pored happily over the very interesting intersection between the London accent and the Russian accent, and was satisfied.

Fourth bit of news: I CAN HAZ KINDLE, GUYS. :D. I just…I spent last weekend reading books on it, and I’m hooked. Just like I knew I would be. The moment I can get back to my fanfic—>ebook project, I’m there again. Just have to wrestle away time from boring school stuff, and I’m gold.

[	Tags	|	random: tech, random: tech: apple	]
[	Current Mood	|	bouncy	]

If you have a Macbook or Macbook Pro, you may or may not have experienced freaky keyboard issues with it after upgrading to Leopard, or perhaps even before then. Apple just released an update specifically to address this problem.

Meanwhile, back in an Ars Technica forum thread specifically created to house complaints about this problem:

To work around the sleepy keyboard (until I could reboot), I would just hold the capslock key down until the LED illuminated, which typically took around five seconds. That seemed better than hammering on keys or doing some of the crazy things that people seem to have suggested (like flexing the battery!!), which are probably just superstitious behavior that make no difference either way. (Mac users seem especially prone to this, I’m always seeing people say things like “My dog wasn’t hungry, and then I zapped the PRAM and repaired permissions on my Mac and his appetite came back, so now I do that every time I feed him, just to be sure.”)
—from this post in the “Official MacBook Pro keyboard/trackpad disappearance bug thread” at the Ars Technica forums, emphasis mine.

*Looks at paragraph again* *LOLs*

Personally, when this bug showed up for me (keyboard just stopped working on its own) nothing helped except rebooting and, in a quasi-superstitious panic, setting my Macbook never to sleep again. Superstition concerning computers— especially among smart people like yours truly *cough*— cannot really be because we are stupid. Superstition arises because you don’t know how exactly something works, and the little you know doesn’t seem connected to how it actually works. That Ars Technica thread is actually what made me finally decide not to reset the PRAM or repair permissions, because on the first page there are some detailed posts where people talk about how neither of those things has anything to do with the bug, and how the common thread that runs through the “it was fixed” stories of the bug all had to do with rebooting.

I can just see, centuries from now, people scoffing at our ignorance (“all they had to do was reboot! Couldn’t they see that??”) and turning right round to kick their nano-assembled gear in the hopes that all those stupid nanobots would wake up and get it working again.

Lots of stuff happened this week, actually. I felt tired and annoyed by school and a little frustrated by work, so nothing much got written— except for on Monday, I think, when the real heart of AFY chapter 3 started knitting together. I won’t be able to publish it next week, mostly because of how much legwork still needs to be done, but the week after that? Sounds like a plan. A good plan. :D

I’m calm now despite the seemingly humongous load of stuff I need to do next week— two essays, lots of chapter readings, a presentation to prepare for, etc etc. But I’m in the home stretch chapter-wise though there’s only about 4000 words written, and most of them words that need to go ;), because I’ve finally added in some details to the plot that make everything I was planning make perfect sense, and :D :D :D, it is going to be awesome.

Other news:

1. Development on pinqury.com took a leap forward this weekend, when I decided on php instead of python for the scripting and including and all that fancy stuff. Php is perfect for what I have in mind, and my work with python drove that home when I realised I really would have to print ALL the html that needed sticking in. And that is not on— I need my syntax highlighting, dammit, and Textmate has such great syntax highlighting! And editing fics would be a horror, too. So I decided to just let python and its pretty face go, and wade into php, which is going quite well for now. The wading, I mean ;)
2. I’m rewriting AST, because I’m reposting it at hp_misfitfics, a new gen community that looks like it would welcome it. This is the first time I’ve seriously posted any fic from the series on LJ, so I thought I’d go through and fix niggling typos while I tightened up the Markdown output Scrivener gave me. And then I thought I’d replace a sentence or two, and that grew into replacing half of the prologue, and suddenly I was eyeing AST chapter 1 as well XD. I’m only going to post it at hp_misfitfics for now, because I’m lazy and don’t want to mess with the FF.net version until it’s quite done.
3. Twitter is kind of boring me right now— likely because I only follow a couple people. I’m thinking of trying out Tumblr in earnest since it is more of a bloggy solution to keeping everyone up to date while not TOO Important Blog Softwareish and all that. If I do switch from using Twitter for quick updates to using Tumblr, why, the whole purpose of this IJ will be threatened. Tumblr is sex on a screen, unabashedly editable and customisable, and will gulp down pretty much any media you throw at it. Jury’s not out yet, so don’t worry, I’ll still be on IJ for a while yet.

And I believe that that concludes my news for the week. See you in a week or so, hopefully with AFY 3 ready to roll ;)