05/19/12: So a couple months ago I got a new phone for work. I had been using a
Blackberry, and while it was a pretty good phone and was great for getting my work e-mail, it was awful for occasional web browsing. So much so that I ultimately only used it for checking the
Weather Underground site, which for some reason popped up almost instantaneously, when even the plain
Google home page would take forever. I wasn't necessarily looking to change, but they want to get rid of the Blackberry infrastructure that the company had to maintain for the dwindling number of Blackberry users, so they suggested I upgrade.
So I was given a choice. I could get an iPhone or an Android. I know the press just fawns over the iPhone, but I didn't want to have to install iTunes, and I'm not a fan of a lot of how Apple operates, so I went with an Android phone, specifically a
Motorola Photon. It was one of the only Android phones offered by
Sprint which would work overseas, in case work ever sent me there, and it had more positive reviews than the others on the Sprint site, so I got one, and so far I love it. It's great as a phone, e-mail is good, the web is usable, and battery life is good.
But it got me thinking. It doesn't have a hardware keyboard like the Blackberry did, but I've gotten pretty comfortable typing on the on-screen keyboard, so I figured it might be good for some of the fiction writing I've been trying. It's too small for editing anything longer than a sentence or two, but if I could, for instance, capture a few paragraphs on the train going to work, I could just clean it up when I'm at an actual computer. Stephie bought me a
Netbook for my birthday last year so I could write on the veranda or sitting in the yard, but this would be even more convenient for jotting down ideas when they hit me.
So I tried
Google Docs. I'd heard good things about that for a while, it's free to use, and it's integrated in Android, so I write something in Docs on the phone, and I can retrieve it from any web browser. Turns out there are two problems with that. First, if you're in a dead zone with no Internet access, like when I took Stephie to DeKalb for her art demo last month, you can't access your documents. I sort of knew that, being that everything is in "the cloud." But I found that I could not even start working on a blank document without Internet access. Even worse that that, though, was when I was typing something on the train and my connection dropped for a couple minutes. It actually stopped me from typing, with a message that I could not work on that document any more because I had no Internet connection. I think I even lost a little of what I was working in. Not cool.
One of the things I really used on the Blackberry was the Notes feature. It automatically synced with the Notes section of Outlook at work, so if I typed something on the phone, it would automatically be in Outlook. That integration does not exist in the Android world, but there is
Evernote. My buddy Dan has
raved about Evernote, and I tried it on the Blackberry but quickly discarded it because of the atrocious Internet capability that it had. I once tried to create a note, but canceled it after it spun on the screen for five minutes. Now on Android I see what Dan was talking about. Creating a note was instantaneous, I could type what I want and it would be accesible from any web browser. Even better, if I was not connected to the Internet at the time, it would wait and make my updates when the connection was restored. And it was free to use. I even tried the Windows client, and it worked really well. Or so I thought.
Last week I was working on the latest story for the Tamale Hut Reading Series that Stephie and I have been attending for the last year or so, and I was working on it on the Netbook. I finished for the night and shot down, but when I went to look at it on the train the next day, my last changes were not there. The only thing I could think is that there was some problem and it didn't sync with the server. It was only a couple paragraphs, and it was probably my own fault for not noticing, but I need something that works without me thinking about it. I'm spending too much time fooling around with the programs, when I should be writing.
So now I'm trying
DropBox. It's also free to use, I've heard good things over the years, and a guy at work swears by it, so I'm giving it a go. There's a folder on my hard drive and on my phone (and on my work machine, since my company says it's OK to install), and anything I put in one magically appears on the other. (Incidentally, if you want to try DropBox,
use this link to sign up. You will get an extra 500MB added to the 2GB space they give you for free, and I'll have the same added to my account.) It's only been a couple days, but it seems like it might be just what I need to integrate all my writing environments.
Well, almost. A while back, I decided to save all my documents in an RTF file format. Since I happily use
LibreOffice at home and reluctantly use MS Word at work (and Chris used Quark to lay out
Casco Cove), I thought RTF would be the best because it was cross-platform, and didn't have the security problems that the Word DOC format has. Unfortunately,
QuickOffice, the default Android document editor, doesn't understand RTF, and it doesn't look like any of the other popular editors on Android do either. Rats!
04/30/12: I had a great time last weekend at the
Windy City Pulp and Paperback convention at the Westin in Lombard. I've attended this annual show several years in a row now, and I seem to enjoy it more every year. It's big enough that it attracts vendors, publishers and writers from all over the country, but it's small enough that it's not too crowded. You can take your time browsing, or engage one of the vendors in a conversation and not feel hurried. I had nice conversations with people I've met in previous years, like Ron Fortier and Rob Davis of
Airship 27, Wayne Reinagel of
Knightraven Studios, and Ed Hulse from
Blood 'n' Thunder magazine. I also met and had nice conversations with
William Patrick Maynard, who was introduced to me as the new Sax Rohmer, and Gene Christie from
Black Dog Books, among others.
This years show featured Edgar Rice Burroughs and two of his most famous creations:
Tarzan, and
John Carter of Mars, and the film room at the con featured one Tarzan movie after another. I never really cared for Tarzan films when I was a kid, even though they were on TV most weekends back then, but I caught a few while there, and kind of enjoyed them. I'll have to look into them a little more.
But the big revelation was on Thursday night, when the con organizers booked the theater next door for a private showing of the recent
Disney John Carter film for con attendees. Many of my fellow attendees read the series when they were very young and have strong opinions of how the characters should look and act. I only read the first two books in the series for the first time a couple years ago, so it was somewhat easy for me to watch the movie without comparing it to what I remember of the story, and doing so, I had a great time. I thought the actors did a good job, the CG was realistic, the action was good. Like everyone, I had read the disappointing reviews when it first came out, and I now wonder what movie they saw because I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was no Citizen Kane, but it was a great popcorn movie, and I'd highly recommend it. I will probably buy it on DVD when it comes out, which, considering the reception it got at the box office in the US, will probably be soon.
03/30/12: I know I've been neglecting this site lately, but I couldn't let today pass without posting a new picture of Kisu. Nine years ago today, she walked out of the shelter we found her at and walked right into our hearts. We celebrated by going to get her traditional adoption day meal: a small hamburger and some fries. We chopped it up and mixed it with some of her dry food, and she expertly picked all the people-food bits out of the bowl, leaving most of the dry food. Just like she does every year. Happy Adoption Day, pumpkin.
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