teeth? yes!
I have teeth again. :D
In the previous installment of dental woe, they'd carved down two of my molars, put some temporary crowns on them, and sent me home. Then one of the temps fell off, and I went back to get it glued back on. It fell off again, and I went back again. Third time was apparently the charm -- it stayed put.
I had an appointment to go in to get the permanent crowns put on, but they called me the day before the appointment and told me that the crowns had yet to arrive. So my appointment was cancelled; they were to phone me when they had the crowns in hand.
Over a week later, I called them to say, "Hey?" So I was told they'd call me back. Later that afternoon, they phoned to tell me the crowns would be there the next day -- could I come in that night to have them put on?
I could. Even though I had this ominous feeling that some slacker somewhere had quickly whipped up a set on the spot 'cause they'd called up and complained.
So I went in the next night. They put one in, I bit down, and the top of it instantly broke off. The other one didn't fit. Dentist guy came in and frothed a bit ("This is not acceptable work. Look at this. It's not acceptable."), and he decided I was going to be upgraded to some more expensive crowns at no cost to me. ("Because this is just not acceptable!") Ummm. OK?
So new temp crowns were put on. They were incredibly uncomfortable, but by that point I'd been there several hours with my mouth hanging open, and I just wanted to go home. One began to wobble on the way home, and I tried various things to keep it in place ('cause I did NOT want to go back), but by the next day it was toast. I called and made an appointment for the next week to get it glued back on.
The next week, a temp crown was put back on; I bit down and broke it in half on the spot. So a solution to this ongoing problem was devised: rather than making a new temp crown and gluing it on, she just globbed the material directly over the tooth stump in my mouth and hardened it in place.
It felt bizarre, but stayed put. I could eat something that wasn't soup again. I had another appointment in a few more weeks to get the permanent crowns.
So today I went over to get the permanent crowns. After a lot of chipping and pulling (and ow ow owwww!), she got the globby covering off my tooth. Then some fussing, and calling in the dentist,* and bite this, bite this, bite this, and open up, and hot, smelly stuff . . . and they're in? Bite down some more. Now let's whittle!
So whittling was done, and . . . okay, I guess these are them.
The weirdest part was how Dentist Dude cooed over these crowns. I am not joking. It was alarming.
He: [cradles them lovingly in his palm] Now these are so much better than the others. This is such wonderful technology.
Me: Uhh?
He: Haven't you seen them yet?
Me: Unh unh.
He: Here, look at this. Isn't it wonderful?
Me: Uh. O_o;
He: And here's the other one! There's no metal at all in these, you know. [coo:] They look so natural.
Me: Uh. -_-;
I'm thinking, in the back of my mouth, who'd even care? But I did not say this -- I may be a guinea pig, but I am not a ruiner. This is clearly his new fandom.
But the problem here is that I honestly cannot remember what my old molars felt like or how my upper and lower jaw fit together. I mean, it's been a fair while, and I've been through numerous iterations of temporaries, some which were freaking uncomfortable. So I have NO CLUE whether this is a reasonable approximation of what I had before. I guess I'll wait and find out if my jaw starts to hurt? I don't know.
If these don't fall off or crack in two or otherwise secede from the union, my mom has promised to buy me a hamburger and fries to celebrate my graduation from the Soft And Nonsticky And Noncrunchy Foods Only Brigade. I also have a box of muesli that's been sitting on the counter for MONTHS. I am excite.
I've got some maintenance software I run on the machine periodically, and it informed me a bit back that there was an update available for my video doohickey (a technical term).
Backstory: This laptop originally came with Windows Vista OS. I didn't want Vista, but the company wouldn't provide XP when I asked. (They don't provide any OS install disks at all. Boo, HP.) So I bought an OEM copy of XP, reformatted the harddrive, and installed that puppy. Then I had to scour the Internet for XP drivers for the hardware -- and download them by dialup, grumble bitch. (The ethernet modem's driver took a while to find...) But the display driver was the most obscure of them all -- it took days of poking through forums until I fell over a post from someone else who had the same issue, and an HP support employee had evidently covertly uploaded the old XP driver to a file-share site for this dude. Yay. That upload had long since expired. Boo. But when I searched on the file name, I located another copy on Megaupload that was still alive.
It took awhile to score, but that's the driver I've been using all this time. So did I want to try this update? Hmmmmm. What the hey, I gave it a shot. <-- a creature not known for its intelligence
A few days later, a weird thing happened: my screen shut down spontaneously right in the middle of an article I was working on. The laptop itself was still running, but the screen was black. I had to force a reboot with the power button to get the display back.
That was . . . odd. Huh. So then I pull up the Southland episode and start watching it and . . . black screen. O noes, John Cooper, has your angst crashed my machine? Then it happened again a few hours later. And again a few hours after that. The side panel on the machine felt a little hotter than normal as well. HMMM.
Worse, none of my recovery stuff in my software functioned when this happened, so apparently ye laptop wasn't viewing this a full-on crash. As a result, I was losing stuff right and left. So I tried to roll back the driver; it didn't work. I tried again; it didn't work again. GRAH. So finally I gave up and asked my brother for help, and he said, "It's just your power settings. Let's change them."
So then the machine shut off again . . . but this time it was because I'd forgotten to plug in the fan underneath. Duh. So I thought, hey, I'm cured!
Nope. Not long after, the blackouts started all over. I went back to trying to roll back the driver, and on the other side of the reboot I'd check and . . . same version as before. *tears hair* Windows, why do you hate me?
So I went to Google and whined, "How to roll back video driver? XP? Display driver? NVIDIA? HELP HELP HELP." And I started reading forum posts of advice, and carefully wrote down all the suggestions and directions, and gave it another shot. Ha. This time, Windows lodged a protest screen: "Hey! Wait! What are you doing?! That funky driver is not approved OMG!" STUFF IT DO IT ANYWAY FOOL. /slap
Windows does say it's using the old driver now.
So far, so good. I've been waiting for another big shutdown of doom, but . . . it hasn't happened. Yet. The side casing also isn't heating up like it has been doing all week. Maybe it worked this time?
In the meantime, while dodging laptop misbehavior, I finished a book on national health care and economics plus some articles. I'd gotten into the habit of hopping off to find other things to occupy me whenever the laptop went berserk as a means to preserve my zen, so I missed an email yesterday asking whether I wanted another book.
Today, right in the midst of discussing whether I wanted this book, I had to jet off to the dentist. So I still don't know whether I've got the book.
I may not want it? I've been warned that it is converted from LaTeX and is chock full o' equations. Bleh. That means a) the files are probably a mess, and b) I will have to tag everything for the typesetter. Granted, I used to code ALL books myself (STM tagging guru!), but I have become VERY SPOILED by all these university press books. Most of them take care of their own file clean up. They use Word styles instead of tagging. It's nice. Restful.
Yesterday over lunch with my mom, I was complaining about my computer (as usual), and she made a joke about how she'd owned one of the first computers in town (which is true -- they had one before I did), and somehow, remembering my own first PC triggered all these resentful software memories.
At that time, I had a copy of MS Word for DOS, a copy on a stack of floppies that I'd scored from the first publisher I edited for; they ran it off under their license umbrella so that I could work on their books. Which was a godsend because there was no way in hell I could have afforded it myself. But I saved up to buy WordPerfect because everyone was certain it was going to win the publishing war. (I figured the other contender, XyWrite, was toast. At least I was right about something... :P)
Blackwell et al. would always ship me their untouched authors' disks, complete with viruses; depending on the authors, some of these would be Macintosh disks.
So I was an antivirus software early adopter (McAfee for MS-DOS :); I'd run every single disk through McAfee, then dutifully inform the publisher what I'd found. (And they were never concerned because they had no idea what I was talking about. LOL.) But the Mac problem was pretty intractable. I couldn't open Mac disks on a PC, and I didn't know anyone who had a Mac to open them for me.
Initially, I'd just mail those disks back and ask them to take them to their art department, convert them to something IBM compatible. This wasn't a great solution. The general rule of thumb back in the day was that publishers hired freelancers to do their computer editing because the freelancers were supposed to know about computers. No one who worked for the publishers' editing departments did. Most of them didn't even own their own PCs. Every single time I'd point out that MACINTOSH IS NOT COMPATIBLE WITH IBM CLONES it was like explaining this to the neighbor's dog. No one on the other end of the phone understood what the hell I was talking about. After all, all they dealt with was the manuscript printout I made them when I was done; the disks I made went straight to the typesetter.
In the end, I wound up buying this unghodly expensive conversion software so that I could open stupid Mac disks and convert the files myself. The software would also convert some rather obscure word processing programs into plain text format, but that wasn't the main reason I bought it. And I really resented this because if they'd just made me IBM-compatible disks in-house on their Macs, I wouldn't have HAD this problem.
I also had to come up with various ways to edit files on the computer because no one in-house ever had a clue what they wanted me to do. I started off with a tagging system based on HTML. (Later, when I was trawling one publisher's first set of Guidelines for Authors online, I noticed that they incorporated most of the stuff I'd developed into their house guidelines.) When I ditched them and sidled over to Elsevier, I picked up SGML.
I was not paid extra for editing on the computer rather than on paper. In hindsight . . . yeah. So very stupid, me. Should have taken them to the cleaners. :P
Anyway. Things have changed a lot. But this is the reason why, when people these days ask me whether I know how to code a manuscript file, my brain stutters to a stop. That's . . . such a bizarre thing to ask. O_o;
Which was why the email exchange over the book ran smack into my dental appointment, because she DID ask me that. And the hamster upstairs on the mental wheel went into overdrive. (She isn't seriously asking me if I knew how to code a manuscript? No, she can't be. So that means she really means something else. But what? I don't know!) I asked her what she meant, and then I had to leave, and by the time I got back she'd left for the day. Email tag. :P
Anyway, the whole point of the nutty lunch tangent on software was me appreciating how it is soooo much better now. . . . And yet publishers are still shelling out the same rates as back then. /scratches head
At this point my lengthy lunch rant about software got totally derailed by Kris and Pat wailing mournfully about their breakup on the piped in radio, as I'd mentioned. So I cooed in a dentist-like fashion, and, as a result, had to explain why.
Me: So then, uh, you remember me telling you about Singapore Woman going to that concert.
She: That's the one?
Me: Yup! Uh. See, uh, anyway. Uh, one was very tall, and the other was very small, and they'd hang off each other, and it was all really adorable. See. Very cute.
She: Uh huh.
And I could SEE the wheels turning, and her thinking, Is This What You You Write Porn On The Internet About?, but she did not ask. This is what happens when one's family is aware of one's louche habits.
The other thing was that my sister and I had this long-running discussion about getting my mom an ebook reader. This started after wrestling with her pile of library hardcovers while she was in the hospital last winter, and continued as much time was killed in doctor's waiting rooms. So after my reading a lot of blogs -- and my sister saying, "Whatever! I don't care!" repeatedly -- we wound up getting her a Kindle when the newer, cheaper ones came out.
I was not aware that she and my mother had been plotting to get me one as well at the same time. Uh. So, uh, a Kindle. What on earth do I do with it? I did poke at it a bit to be polite, but I didn't have wireless at my place -- and the single neighbor who had had an unsecured connection had dealt with that little oversight a few months before. (Dang.) Putting a book on the laptop, then hooking up the Kindle, then moving the book onto the Kindle, then unhooking the Kindle . . . it all seemed kind of a pain in the ass when I could just, y'know, read the file on the damn laptop or whatever.
THEN I tagged along on a roadtrip my mom was making to Muncie. In Muncie, they have a BestBuy, and I happen have an elderly gift-card for that store courtesy some past birthday. There aren't any of those stores in this vicinity, so it had never gotten used. But I had this notion. I've tried different wireless routers with my laptop, and none of them have worked out. But my mom's router has been working fine with my machine when I've been hanging out at her place, why not cash in the gift-card to get one that's like hers? Let's do it!
HOLY COW IT WORKS. I can stop swearing at my wobbly ethernet cable now, which falls out whenever I sneeze. Woot.
A week or so later it occurred to me that I ought to find out if that Kindle could talk to the Internet over here, too. IT ALSO WORKS. So I decided to try getting a book for it. And I read the book. Then I got another book. And I read that book, too. And I read a few more. And I grabbed a bunch of free, public domain titles and started on them.
I haven't read this many non-work-related books in years. I, I . . . I like this thing? I can change the font. I can make the text so much bigger. Yet it is very small and light, and I can carry it around like a paperback.
It is awesome. I am living in a crazy scifi world. ;_;
Later I spent a whole afternoon poking buttons and finally figured out how to make directories and stuff, then I installed Calibre on my laptop and messed around with that for a while. I figured out how to get other publishers to send things to the Kindle, too. Woot.
While this was going on and I was pushing around files, I smacked into the wall of DRM. So irritating. Boo. Hiss.
SO THEN, over on flist, lucitania is saying, "Woo, a book!" So I scooped up that one, and then I logged in as my mom so SHE got that one. We were both reading the same book at the same time, which has never happened before in the history of the world. :D
BUT. The thing with ebooks is that a lot of them . . . the editing and proofing are not always up to my standards. This has been GNAWING at me. ("Rats! Rats in the walls!" Like that.) So. I sat down with Google and said, "Teach me what to do, O Internet." I have since learned how to strip the DRM off ebooks, and how to convert them to formats that I can edit, and now I can fix what is WRONG with them.
So. Much. Better.
In the previous installment of dental woe, they'd carved down two of my molars, put some temporary crowns on them, and sent me home. Then one of the temps fell off, and I went back to get it glued back on. It fell off again, and I went back again. Third time was apparently the charm -- it stayed put.
I had an appointment to go in to get the permanent crowns put on, but they called me the day before the appointment and told me that the crowns had yet to arrive. So my appointment was cancelled; they were to phone me when they had the crowns in hand.
Over a week later, I called them to say, "Hey?" So I was told they'd call me back. Later that afternoon, they phoned to tell me the crowns would be there the next day -- could I come in that night to have them put on?
I could. Even though I had this ominous feeling that some slacker somewhere had quickly whipped up a set on the spot 'cause they'd called up and complained.
So I went in the next night. They put one in, I bit down, and the top of it instantly broke off. The other one didn't fit. Dentist guy came in and frothed a bit ("This is not acceptable work. Look at this. It's not acceptable."), and he decided I was going to be upgraded to some more expensive crowns at no cost to me. ("Because this is just not acceptable!") Ummm. OK?
So new temp crowns were put on. They were incredibly uncomfortable, but by that point I'd been there several hours with my mouth hanging open, and I just wanted to go home. One began to wobble on the way home, and I tried various things to keep it in place ('cause I did NOT want to go back), but by the next day it was toast. I called and made an appointment for the next week to get it glued back on.
The next week, a temp crown was put back on; I bit down and broke it in half on the spot. So a solution to this ongoing problem was devised: rather than making a new temp crown and gluing it on, she just globbed the material directly over the tooth stump in my mouth and hardened it in place.
It felt bizarre, but stayed put. I could eat something that wasn't soup again. I had another appointment in a few more weeks to get the permanent crowns.
So today I went over to get the permanent crowns. After a lot of chipping and pulling (and ow ow owwww!), she got the globby covering off my tooth. Then some fussing, and calling in the dentist,* and bite this, bite this, bite this, and open up, and hot, smelly stuff . . . and they're in? Bite down some more. Now let's whittle!
So whittling was done, and . . . okay, I guess these are them.
The weirdest part was how Dentist Dude cooed over these crowns. I am not joking. It was alarming.
He: [cradles them lovingly in his palm] Now these are so much better than the others. This is such wonderful technology.
Me: Uhh?
He: Haven't you seen them yet?
Me: Unh unh.
He: Here, look at this. Isn't it wonderful?
Me: Uh. O_o;
He: And here's the other one! There's no metal at all in these, you know. [coo:] They look so natural.
Me: Uh. -_-;
I'm thinking, in the back of my mouth, who'd even care? But I did not say this -- I may be a guinea pig, but I am not a ruiner. This is clearly his new fandom.
But the problem here is that I honestly cannot remember what my old molars felt like or how my upper and lower jaw fit together. I mean, it's been a fair while, and I've been through numerous iterations of temporaries, some which were freaking uncomfortable. So I have NO CLUE whether this is a reasonable approximation of what I had before. I guess I'll wait and find out if my jaw starts to hurt? I don't know.
If these don't fall off or crack in two or otherwise secede from the union, my mom has promised to buy me a hamburger and fries to celebrate my graduation from the Soft And Nonsticky And Noncrunchy Foods Only Brigade. I also have a box of muesli that's been sitting on the counter for MONTHS. I am excite.
I've got some maintenance software I run on the machine periodically, and it informed me a bit back that there was an update available for my video doohickey (a technical term).
Backstory: This laptop originally came with Windows Vista OS. I didn't want Vista, but the company wouldn't provide XP when I asked. (They don't provide any OS install disks at all. Boo, HP.) So I bought an OEM copy of XP, reformatted the harddrive, and installed that puppy. Then I had to scour the Internet for XP drivers for the hardware -- and download them by dialup, grumble bitch. (The ethernet modem's driver took a while to find...) But the display driver was the most obscure of them all -- it took days of poking through forums until I fell over a post from someone else who had the same issue, and an HP support employee had evidently covertly uploaded the old XP driver to a file-share site for this dude. Yay. That upload had long since expired. Boo. But when I searched on the file name, I located another copy on Megaupload that was still alive.
It took awhile to score, but that's the driver I've been using all this time. So did I want to try this update? Hmmmmm. What the hey, I gave it a shot. <-- a creature not known for its intelligence
A few days later, a weird thing happened: my screen shut down spontaneously right in the middle of an article I was working on. The laptop itself was still running, but the screen was black. I had to force a reboot with the power button to get the display back.
That was . . . odd. Huh. So then I pull up the Southland episode and start watching it and . . . black screen. O noes, John Cooper, has your angst crashed my machine? Then it happened again a few hours later. And again a few hours after that. The side panel on the machine felt a little hotter than normal as well. HMMM.
Worse, none of my recovery stuff in my software functioned when this happened, so apparently ye laptop wasn't viewing this a full-on crash. As a result, I was losing stuff right and left. So I tried to roll back the driver; it didn't work. I tried again; it didn't work again. GRAH. So finally I gave up and asked my brother for help, and he said, "It's just your power settings. Let's change them."
So then the machine shut off again . . . but this time it was because I'd forgotten to plug in the fan underneath. Duh. So I thought, hey, I'm cured!
Nope. Not long after, the blackouts started all over. I went back to trying to roll back the driver, and on the other side of the reboot I'd check and . . . same version as before. *tears hair* Windows, why do you hate me?
So I went to Google and whined, "How to roll back video driver? XP? Display driver? NVIDIA? HELP HELP HELP." And I started reading forum posts of advice, and carefully wrote down all the suggestions and directions, and gave it another shot. Ha. This time, Windows lodged a protest screen: "Hey! Wait! What are you doing?! That funky driver is not approved OMG!" STUFF IT DO IT ANYWAY FOOL. /slap
Windows does say it's using the old driver now.
So far, so good. I've been waiting for another big shutdown of doom, but . . . it hasn't happened. Yet. The side casing also isn't heating up like it has been doing all week. Maybe it worked this time?
In the meantime, while dodging laptop misbehavior, I finished a book on national health care and economics plus some articles. I'd gotten into the habit of hopping off to find other things to occupy me whenever the laptop went berserk as a means to preserve my zen, so I missed an email yesterday asking whether I wanted another book.
Today, right in the midst of discussing whether I wanted this book, I had to jet off to the dentist. So I still don't know whether I've got the book.
I may not want it? I've been warned that it is converted from LaTeX and is chock full o' equations. Bleh. That means a) the files are probably a mess, and b) I will have to tag everything for the typesetter. Granted, I used to code ALL books myself (STM tagging guru!), but I have become VERY SPOILED by all these university press books. Most of them take care of their own file clean up. They use Word styles instead of tagging. It's nice. Restful.
Yesterday over lunch with my mom, I was complaining about my computer (as usual), and she made a joke about how she'd owned one of the first computers in town (which is true -- they had one before I did), and somehow, remembering my own first PC triggered all these resentful software memories.
At that time, I had a copy of MS Word for DOS, a copy on a stack of floppies that I'd scored from the first publisher I edited for; they ran it off under their license umbrella so that I could work on their books. Which was a godsend because there was no way in hell I could have afforded it myself. But I saved up to buy WordPerfect because everyone was certain it was going to win the publishing war. (I figured the other contender, XyWrite, was toast. At least I was right about something... :P)
Blackwell et al. would always ship me their untouched authors' disks, complete with viruses; depending on the authors, some of these would be Macintosh disks.
So I was an antivirus software early adopter (McAfee for MS-DOS :); I'd run every single disk through McAfee, then dutifully inform the publisher what I'd found. (And they were never concerned because they had no idea what I was talking about. LOL.) But the Mac problem was pretty intractable. I couldn't open Mac disks on a PC, and I didn't know anyone who had a Mac to open them for me.
Initially, I'd just mail those disks back and ask them to take them to their art department, convert them to something IBM compatible. This wasn't a great solution. The general rule of thumb back in the day was that publishers hired freelancers to do their computer editing because the freelancers were supposed to know about computers. No one who worked for the publishers' editing departments did. Most of them didn't even own their own PCs. Every single time I'd point out that MACINTOSH IS NOT COMPATIBLE WITH IBM CLONES it was like explaining this to the neighbor's dog. No one on the other end of the phone understood what the hell I was talking about. After all, all they dealt with was the manuscript printout I made them when I was done; the disks I made went straight to the typesetter.
In the end, I wound up buying this unghodly expensive conversion software so that I could open stupid Mac disks and convert the files myself. The software would also convert some rather obscure word processing programs into plain text format, but that wasn't the main reason I bought it. And I really resented this because if they'd just made me IBM-compatible disks in-house on their Macs, I wouldn't have HAD this problem.
I also had to come up with various ways to edit files on the computer because no one in-house ever had a clue what they wanted me to do. I started off with a tagging system based on HTML. (Later, when I was trawling one publisher's first set of Guidelines for Authors online, I noticed that they incorporated most of the stuff I'd developed into their house guidelines.) When I ditched them and sidled over to Elsevier, I picked up SGML.
I was not paid extra for editing on the computer rather than on paper. In hindsight . . . yeah. So very stupid, me. Should have taken them to the cleaners. :P
Anyway. Things have changed a lot. But this is the reason why, when people these days ask me whether I know how to code a manuscript file, my brain stutters to a stop. That's . . . such a bizarre thing to ask. O_o;
Which was why the email exchange over the book ran smack into my dental appointment, because she DID ask me that. And the hamster upstairs on the mental wheel went into overdrive. (She isn't seriously asking me if I knew how to code a manuscript? No, she can't be. So that means she really means something else. But what? I don't know!) I asked her what she meant, and then I had to leave, and by the time I got back she'd left for the day. Email tag. :P
Anyway, the whole point of the nutty lunch tangent on software was me appreciating how it is soooo much better now. . . . And yet publishers are still shelling out the same rates as back then. /scratches head
At this point my lengthy lunch rant about software got totally derailed by Kris and Pat wailing mournfully about their breakup on the piped in radio, as I'd mentioned. So I cooed in a dentist-like fashion, and, as a result, had to explain why.
Me: So then, uh, you remember me telling you about Singapore Woman going to that concert.
She: That's the one?
Me: Yup! Uh. See, uh, anyway. Uh, one was very tall, and the other was very small, and they'd hang off each other, and it was all really adorable. See. Very cute.
She: Uh huh.
And I could SEE the wheels turning, and her thinking, Is This What You You Write Porn On The Internet About?, but she did not ask. This is what happens when one's family is aware of one's louche habits.
The other thing was that my sister and I had this long-running discussion about getting my mom an ebook reader. This started after wrestling with her pile of library hardcovers while she was in the hospital last winter, and continued as much time was killed in doctor's waiting rooms. So after my reading a lot of blogs -- and my sister saying, "Whatever! I don't care!" repeatedly -- we wound up getting her a Kindle when the newer, cheaper ones came out.
I was not aware that she and my mother had been plotting to get me one as well at the same time. Uh. So, uh, a Kindle. What on earth do I do with it? I did poke at it a bit to be polite, but I didn't have wireless at my place -- and the single neighbor who had had an unsecured connection had dealt with that little oversight a few months before. (Dang.) Putting a book on the laptop, then hooking up the Kindle, then moving the book onto the Kindle, then unhooking the Kindle . . . it all seemed kind of a pain in the ass when I could just, y'know, read the file on the damn laptop or whatever.
THEN I tagged along on a roadtrip my mom was making to Muncie. In Muncie, they have a BestBuy, and I happen have an elderly gift-card for that store courtesy some past birthday. There aren't any of those stores in this vicinity, so it had never gotten used. But I had this notion. I've tried different wireless routers with my laptop, and none of them have worked out. But my mom's router has been working fine with my machine when I've been hanging out at her place, why not cash in the gift-card to get one that's like hers? Let's do it!
HOLY COW IT WORKS. I can stop swearing at my wobbly ethernet cable now, which falls out whenever I sneeze. Woot.
A week or so later it occurred to me that I ought to find out if that Kindle could talk to the Internet over here, too. IT ALSO WORKS. So I decided to try getting a book for it. And I read the book. Then I got another book. And I read that book, too. And I read a few more. And I grabbed a bunch of free, public domain titles and started on them.
I haven't read this many non-work-related books in years. I, I . . . I like this thing? I can change the font. I can make the text so much bigger. Yet it is very small and light, and I can carry it around like a paperback.
It is awesome. I am living in a crazy scifi world. ;_;
Later I spent a whole afternoon poking buttons and finally figured out how to make directories and stuff, then I installed Calibre on my laptop and messed around with that for a while. I figured out how to get other publishers to send things to the Kindle, too. Woot.
While this was going on and I was pushing around files, I smacked into the wall of DRM. So irritating. Boo. Hiss.
SO THEN, over on flist, lucitania is saying, "Woo, a book!" So I scooped up that one, and then I logged in as my mom so SHE got that one. We were both reading the same book at the same time, which has never happened before in the history of the world. :D
BUT. The thing with ebooks is that a lot of them . . . the editing and proofing are not always up to my standards. This has been GNAWING at me. ("Rats! Rats in the walls!" Like that.) So. I sat down with Google and said, "Teach me what to do, O Internet." I have since learned how to strip the DRM off ebooks, and how to convert them to formats that I can edit, and now I can fix what is WRONG with them.
So. Much. Better.