The Blackberry remains my first love. But it can learn to share my affections.
Wound up leaving work very late last night, which was entirely devildoll / 
devildoll's fault, for having written a really good story that I wanted to keep reading that I didn't run across till yesterday (and also for not having gotten around to uploading it to AO3 yet, since if it were there I could have downloaded to my Blackberry immediately and walked away with it ready to read anywhere, instead of being tethered to my computer until I was done with it). Anyway. At least before leaving last night I cleared my desk of the last few policies I had in need of inputting, so I'd be able to work immediately today on the last few policies my supervisor can get over to us to try to input before month's-end (and year's-end) are run on the company system tonight. (Which backfired, since I got in this morning late and there still wasn't a new account for me to work on yet, so I picked up a quick task to look busy and as soon as I sat down at my desk got distracted going through AO3 bookmarks downloading some real favorites as MOBI files and still hadn't finished the folder-labelling job when a new account got handed to me.)
And the main reason I was so very, very late to bed last night was that my Kindle arrived in yesterday's mail, and I of course had to pull it out of the box and start playing with it. First came fiddling with settings and learning my way around, then came downloading a selection of titles from my Amazon account and tinkering with the Collections system so I could sort them into categories -- and then came pulling out my netbook to access the stash of non-Amazon e-books that would have to be manually loaded, and the folder of fic e-books that had been loaded to my Blackberry some days or weeks or months previously and were still waiting to be read. (There were a few, a very few, files in there of things I'd read that I knew I'd hang on to for eventual Kindle archive purposes, but I've generally cleared files out of that folder when I deleted the stories from my Blackberry after reading them. One reason for this was to keep the folder from getting too unwieldy -- another was that there were some things I had to learn to tweak properly in Calibre when preparing e-books for loading to my BB, and some of those files weren't in a format I was entirely happily with archiving.) So one of the items on my "to do" list for the next few weeks involves going through my fic files looking for the things I know I love and want to reread, and converting them into a tidy MOBI format. (Frankly, most of that is going to start with checking to see if the story in question has been uploaded to AO3, which saves me one hell of a lot of trouble and plays a lot nicer with my Blackberry app... A saved LJ entry converts to MOBI just fine in Calibre, but the Kindle app found a few layouts impossible to handle legibly (no idea yet if an actual Kindle handles those much better), and that's ignoring the amount of extra room in the file taken up by LJ comments at the end, which take up additional file storage space and make it impossible to judge how close I actually am to the end of the story. Or to the end of the chapter -- another reason to prefer the tidy single-file AO3 version over a stack of chaptered LJ posts.)
Another item is going through the folder of non-Amazon e-books that aren't fanfic -- a fairly small library segment, so a quick task -- and tweaking them in Calibre to make sure they're all displaying the title and author properly in the Kindle display. Most of the books I got from the Baen webscription setup, for example, show title only -- and I prefer to sort by author, so books in the same series wind up sort of clustered. I'm going to have to see if Calibre will let me change the files directly on the Kindle or something, because it's going to be kind of a pain finding each one that has to be changed that's already on the Kindle and deleting it to be replaced by the new copy, unless it lets me overwrite the old copy with the altered one without complaining or duplication.
Also I'm paid today, and after knocking out my bills I want to go ahead and order this Kindle cover, in green. I left the Kindle at home on my desk today instead of bringing it to work with me -- partly because I'm partway through a gripping longassed story on my Blackberry and don't want to have to fiddle with finding my place in it on the Kindle (though, honestly, I've already loaded the story to the Kindle anyway and it's not like the location numbers don't make it easy to jump to even without it auto-synching for me), but mainly because I'm not too keen on carting it around in my backpack until I have a protective cover for it.
Mom BTW is delighted that I bought myself a Kindle with my Xmas money, partly because she was saying that she'd wanted to buy one for me but couldn't quite swing it. She's pleased at the thought that her gift money went partially towards the cost. I'll bet she'll really like the cover I'm getting, too.
So I played with my Kindle last night till past midnight, probably closer to 1am -- and then I started reading again on the story I'd begun at lunch yesterday, and when I finally -- finally -- cut the lights out it was 4:30am, dammit. So yes, I overslept a bit this morning, and I'm very much looking forward to sleeping absolutely as late as I need to tomorrow morning. If I can manage a gym trip tonight, I won't have anything that needs dealing with tomorrow but my laundry. And taking down the Xmas tree with Mom. And playing with my Kindle some more. And knitting, since I still want to finish that second fliptop mitten ASAP and maybe knit at least one more bitsy stocking ornament before the Xmas knitting season is entirely done with, and there's the afghan I'll be casting on for on New Year's Day that I'll need to dig up the cabling chart for and calculate the caston number I should use and find the right needles for and just kind of generally get ready to begin. (Though since I'll be spending Monday visiting my grandfather, that'll be a day involving a fair bit of knitting and not much else. I should be able to make some good progress on things while I'm there. Mitten and afghan, at least.)
And I was hoping that today I'd be able to at least finishing going through the Tumblage I missed out on last week -- I don't think I'm very far at all from where I left off in my last session last week before my netbook power cord got chomped -- but what with having come in late and leaving two or three hours early and having to spend an hour at the front desk -- well, I don't see that as very likely.
But here's the link at the very top of the page I'm on (which I don't remember if I found on Facebook or Twitter or by linkhopping from somewhere): Dear Santa Letter sent 100 years ago found up chimney -- "On Christmas Eve 1911, a brother and sister, who signed their names, “A or H Howard”, penned their personally designed letter to Santa with their requests for gifts and a good luck message at their home in Oaklands Terrace, Terenure (or Terurnure, as the children spelled it) in Dublin. They placed it in the chimney of the fireplace in the front bedroom so that Santa would see it as he made his way into the Howard household in the early hours of the morning. The letter was discovered by the house’s current occupant, John Byrne, when he was installing central heating in 1992."
Okay, crap. I've got about five minutes before I need to be at the front desk, and then I'll need to get my own lunch, and with no idea if I'll be leaving after that or returning to my own desk for another hour, I'm going to go ahead and post this now.
Crossposted from Dreamwidth with
comments made.
devildoll's fault, for having written a really good story that I wanted to keep reading that I didn't run across till yesterday (and also for not having gotten around to uploading it to AO3 yet, since if it were there I could have downloaded to my Blackberry immediately and walked away with it ready to read anywhere, instead of being tethered to my computer until I was done with it). Anyway. At least before leaving last night I cleared my desk of the last few policies I had in need of inputting, so I'd be able to work immediately today on the last few policies my supervisor can get over to us to try to input before month's-end (and year's-end) are run on the company system tonight. (Which backfired, since I got in this morning late and there still wasn't a new account for me to work on yet, so I picked up a quick task to look busy and as soon as I sat down at my desk got distracted going through AO3 bookmarks downloading some real favorites as MOBI files and still hadn't finished the folder-labelling job when a new account got handed to me.)
And the main reason I was so very, very late to bed last night was that my Kindle arrived in yesterday's mail, and I of course had to pull it out of the box and start playing with it. First came fiddling with settings and learning my way around, then came downloading a selection of titles from my Amazon account and tinkering with the Collections system so I could sort them into categories -- and then came pulling out my netbook to access the stash of non-Amazon e-books that would have to be manually loaded, and the folder of fic e-books that had been loaded to my Blackberry some days or weeks or months previously and were still waiting to be read. (There were a few, a very few, files in there of things I'd read that I knew I'd hang on to for eventual Kindle archive purposes, but I've generally cleared files out of that folder when I deleted the stories from my Blackberry after reading them. One reason for this was to keep the folder from getting too unwieldy -- another was that there were some things I had to learn to tweak properly in Calibre when preparing e-books for loading to my BB, and some of those files weren't in a format I was entirely happily with archiving.) So one of the items on my "to do" list for the next few weeks involves going through my fic files looking for the things I know I love and want to reread, and converting them into a tidy MOBI format. (Frankly, most of that is going to start with checking to see if the story in question has been uploaded to AO3, which saves me one hell of a lot of trouble and plays a lot nicer with my Blackberry app... A saved LJ entry converts to MOBI just fine in Calibre, but the Kindle app found a few layouts impossible to handle legibly (no idea yet if an actual Kindle handles those much better), and that's ignoring the amount of extra room in the file taken up by LJ comments at the end, which take up additional file storage space and make it impossible to judge how close I actually am to the end of the story. Or to the end of the chapter -- another reason to prefer the tidy single-file AO3 version over a stack of chaptered LJ posts.)
Another item is going through the folder of non-Amazon e-books that aren't fanfic -- a fairly small library segment, so a quick task -- and tweaking them in Calibre to make sure they're all displaying the title and author properly in the Kindle display. Most of the books I got from the Baen webscription setup, for example, show title only -- and I prefer to sort by author, so books in the same series wind up sort of clustered. I'm going to have to see if Calibre will let me change the files directly on the Kindle or something, because it's going to be kind of a pain finding each one that has to be changed that's already on the Kindle and deleting it to be replaced by the new copy, unless it lets me overwrite the old copy with the altered one without complaining or duplication.
Also I'm paid today, and after knocking out my bills I want to go ahead and order this Kindle cover, in green. I left the Kindle at home on my desk today instead of bringing it to work with me -- partly because I'm partway through a gripping longassed story on my Blackberry and don't want to have to fiddle with finding my place in it on the Kindle (though, honestly, I've already loaded the story to the Kindle anyway and it's not like the location numbers don't make it easy to jump to even without it auto-synching for me), but mainly because I'm not too keen on carting it around in my backpack until I have a protective cover for it.
Mom BTW is delighted that I bought myself a Kindle with my Xmas money, partly because she was saying that she'd wanted to buy one for me but couldn't quite swing it. She's pleased at the thought that her gift money went partially towards the cost. I'll bet she'll really like the cover I'm getting, too.
So I played with my Kindle last night till past midnight, probably closer to 1am -- and then I started reading again on the story I'd begun at lunch yesterday, and when I finally -- finally -- cut the lights out it was 4:30am, dammit. So yes, I overslept a bit this morning, and I'm very much looking forward to sleeping absolutely as late as I need to tomorrow morning. If I can manage a gym trip tonight, I won't have anything that needs dealing with tomorrow but my laundry. And taking down the Xmas tree with Mom. And playing with my Kindle some more. And knitting, since I still want to finish that second fliptop mitten ASAP and maybe knit at least one more bitsy stocking ornament before the Xmas knitting season is entirely done with, and there's the afghan I'll be casting on for on New Year's Day that I'll need to dig up the cabling chart for and calculate the caston number I should use and find the right needles for and just kind of generally get ready to begin. (Though since I'll be spending Monday visiting my grandfather, that'll be a day involving a fair bit of knitting and not much else. I should be able to make some good progress on things while I'm there. Mitten and afghan, at least.)
And I was hoping that today I'd be able to at least finishing going through the Tumblage I missed out on last week -- I don't think I'm very far at all from where I left off in my last session last week before my netbook power cord got chomped -- but what with having come in late and leaving two or three hours early and having to spend an hour at the front desk -- well, I don't see that as very likely.
But here's the link at the very top of the page I'm on (which I don't remember if I found on Facebook or Twitter or by linkhopping from somewhere): Dear Santa Letter sent 100 years ago found up chimney -- "On Christmas Eve 1911, a brother and sister, who signed their names, “A or H Howard”, penned their personally designed letter to Santa with their requests for gifts and a good luck message at their home in Oaklands Terrace, Terenure (or Terurnure, as the children spelled it) in Dublin. They placed it in the chimney of the fireplace in the front bedroom so that Santa would see it as he made his way into the Howard household in the early hours of the morning. The letter was discovered by the house’s current occupant, John Byrne, when he was installing central heating in 1992."
Okay, crap. I've got about five minutes before I need to be at the front desk, and then I'll need to get my own lunch, and with no idea if I'll be leaving after that or returning to my own desk for another hour, I'm going to go ahead and post this now.
Crossposted from Dreamwidth with
comments made.