I finished the story previously known as 'Untitled Superhero Story'.  It was going slowly for a couple weeks after my last update, but really fast after I got this netbook.

I named it "The I in Evil" for many reasons that made sense to me at the time.
( Some things remain to be done. )

Hey folks,

After years of looking down on laptops, I've gotten one, and I'm really enjoying it.  I got an Acer Aspire netbook.  It's a teeny thing.  As you can see in the picture, it's roughly to scale for a three year old.

I got it mostly for writing, which I've been doing faster than ever.  It's sturdy as a brick, and I barely notice it in my backpack, and it's really easy to set up in a cafe or restaurant for an hour of two of writing.  It does web surfing pretty well, and it runs OpenOffice well.  I just installed Gimp to resize the picture above, and that also seemed really good.

It's not powerful enough and its screen is too small to effectively code from it or play games, but then I'm pretty glad to have a computer that doesn't offer those distractions at the moment.

Would I recommend it?  On its own merits, definitely.  However, since getting it, I've seen an Eee PC that is the same size, but has more memory and more storage.

I've said this in comments, but I wanted to say it in the journal.  Zane is doing great.  He's been in physical therapy, and he's got a little more, but he can run, climb ladders and clamber over things with the best of them.

He just turned three.  He's been potty training, and that's gone smooth as silk.  He's just as charming as can be.  Yesterday, he was playing with a recorder (the instrument, not the electronic device), and he blew three very long, piercing notes.  Then he threw his arms wide and yelled, "Enjoy!"

You can't hear the timing of it, which had me laughing for months, but it's a very Zane moment.

Leukemia treatments go on for another couple years, and it's a couple years before that before they give the all clear, but so far, he's been a model of recovery.

So, I need to be able to write and do web stuff at a place that is not my work and not my home.  This means I need a laptop.  I'd like something cheap (small hundreds), durable (this should ideally go most everywhere in my backpack), smallish and lightish (see backpack note).  It needs to be able to run ssh, a browser and something that could edit Word documents (Open Office or, in a pinch, Google Docs).

Any suggestions?

So Gizmodo has a contest to Photoshop (or, in my case, Gimp) up a cartoon by mangling Google's chrome cartoon.  I created this entry, which keeps to my usual mix of low satire and bathroom humor.

I have to say that of all the perks I've heard about working at Google, being put into a comic has got to take the cake.  There's only a few professions that normally end up in comics:  superheroes, terrorists, police, cab drivers, popes, prostitutes and reporters (not necessarily in that order).

Software developers are normally out of luck when it comes to appearing in comics they do not themselves draw.  I would leap at the opportunity to end up in a comic explaining $EMPLOYERS_PRODUCT, fully aware as I am that a simple four-step operation can wipe out my talk bubble and replace it with a caption about how I thirst for the taste of human kidneys.

I've got a Facebook App in it's early stages.  It allows you to post photos and write text on them.  You can only see and edit photos that belong to your or one of your Facebook friends.  You can also make editable copies of your photos or your friends' photos.

Right now, it's just text.  I plan to later expand that to clip art and talk bubbles.  Anyway, if you're interested, you can add Scrawlcard to your Facebook Apps.  If you want to see the things I set up, check out my Facebook profile and friend me.

Zane is starting delayed intensification, which is the last big push of chemo before he goes on maintenance, which is 2 1/2 years of merely unpleasant but not terrible chemo.  The next three weeks (and the last one) are pretty rough.

However, the steroids they're giving him have boosted his white blood cells through the roof.  His ANC is over 4,000.  A normal person is around 2,000, and Zane's is generally under 1,000.

Oh, right, I'm not posting about this.  I'm working on a Facebook app called Scrawlcard.  It's a thing that lets you and your friends can annotate photos.  It's a thing I've been working on for years in different forms.  I wrote about SIKI a couple years ago, and that was basically this without Facebook.

I've got a lot of work with integration with Facebook.  If you're interested, be patient.  If you've gotten non-sensical messages from Scrawlcard on your Facebook account, it's still in flux and it's going to make more sense later on.

Oh, and I got a flatscreen monitor (living the high life), and I got a stand that lets me rotate it from portrait to landscape.  I recommend it highly to people who need to do code or page layout.  Lots of software lets you rotate your screen, and the stand was $40.

I had a dual boot system.  Windows sdied.  I tried to reformat windows.  I had to delete its partition, and i made a mistake and deleted the linux partitions instead.  Noo format, just deleted partitions.

Is there any data recovery option?  Zane's photos from the hospital are there, and a few other things not backed up, and the OS is many, many hours I no longer have, not to mention i'm on something with a terrible keyboard.

I should take a break from venting frustration and express some gratitude.  The nurses at Dell Children's Hospital were absolutely amazing.  From finding a vein in Zane's big toe to getting Zane juice when neither of us could move (Zane had fresh stitches and was lying on top of me), they did everything with great care and patience.  It's a frustrating, wearing job with 12-hour shifts, and I couldn't manage it a tenth as well as they did.

After a week of living in a hospital (and it's to their credit that didn't drive me absolutely insane), I'm convinced that 90% of what's important about a hospital is it's nursing staff.

( The Dell Children's Staff, Four North Oncology )

I think it's been ages since I've done a public post.  I'm really busy.  At work, I'm putting together a product called Apricot.  It's an online information manager targeted at small non-profits.  Really, the product is very general.  It's basically a very gui web-based database.  It's a big challenge and it's on a short deadline.  $COMPANY really likes to hire eager young developers with no experience, so I'm doing lots of training.

Zane is starting to talk so it makes some kind of sense.  He's starting to put words together in twos or threes, and he sometimes asks, "Why?"  It sounds more like "Wai".  He might understand my explanations, or he just likes that I give them.

"Don't go into the street."

"Wai."

"Because the cars can't see you, and they'll hurt you."  (Zane stops trying to get into the street).

Professions Zane's early behavior fortells:  Telemarketer (he's still crazy about phones), Basketball player (if he sees a basketball game, I always have to drag him off the court), Drummer (he turns any roughly cylindrical object into a drum).