Now it's working, now it's not

I'm starting to think the netbook is cursed or something.  I've discovered, first, that despite being listed as 11.6" it doesn't fit in 11.6" cases...and 12" cases are about three inches too big. 

More infuriatingly, my own screwing around has caused a deeply strange wifi problem.  I was annoyed at having to try repeatedly to bring wifi up, and updated NetworkManager...which promptly placed a block on wlan0 that I can't lift in Linux.  Of course the block doesn't appear to exist in Windows.

So far, I've tried booting other/older distros via USB to see if their NetworkManager/Wicd could control it (nope), then installed & asked rfkill to "unblock" it.  I now know from experimenting that the Fn+F3 combo controls a hard block on phy0, but that acer-wireless has a soft block that won't go the eff away.

Edit: evidently OpenSuSE 11.3 will lift it. That makes even less sense, but if it works, I'm installing it: I want to explore Linux when I feel like it, not when major components fucking break.

LibreOffice won't recognize the existence of its dictionary (I've tried more things than I can keep track of to fix THAT problem) and I can't get OpenOffice of any version to install.  Since that's not enough, while typing in hand-edited changes to my writing, I've noticed the computer copies don't match the printouts, plus a good quarter of them have inexplicably lost all text formatting.

Research what you care about -- before writing it!

One of the interesting writing blogs I read, Writerly Life, has a routine feature called the Mailbag, where the author quotes some of the responses that were left in an article's comments section.  I missed the original piece Write About What You Care About, but I did catch the follow-up for it.  Most of the advice people referred to (or offered) sounded spot-on right, but there was one little issue that left me uncomfortable, so I felt compelled to offer a response...

I agree with all of that, with an added bold-faced addition about others' perspectives: ensure that your research centers around what people in that situation have written & said about their lives. That especially applies if the character has a disability, as "experts" and parents can only describe their conclusions based on what they see from the outside or what we tell them, and can't actually give you the internal viewpoint one of us has.

To get back to the point of the article/letters, I was passionate enough when writing about being autistic firsthand to read everything I could find by others on the spectrum. Their perspectives significantly improved the quality of my work, based on the feedback I was getting, as they had quite different ways of describing (and sometimes percieving) things, which let me see some of my own assumptions about the topic.

One favorite I recall, which I've used to help my writing in general, was the idea of distinguishing between how a person/we sees their/our traits, and where they/we have internalized others' opinions. Simple concept, but it's interesting and useful to go over one's characters (or self-perceptions) that way and see what pops up. (For example, offhand: does Suse hate her lingering accent on her own, or perhaps that boy that's overly friendly in chapter 6 was vicious about it when they were little, until...)

Ink, ink, ink

I just found a useful little BlogThis bookmarklet, so hopefully I'll be kicking my butt into gear about actually posting things... Scary thought.

Anyway, today I drove down to Target (which, despite being in Marin County, is closer than the one in my county) and while wandering around, came very close to buying a printer for myself. Since my laptop refuses to acknowledge its own screen, the large volume of writing and editing I do away from my desk requires paper -- just like the old days, which is roughly the last time I was this heavily into creative writing.

The problem with that, of course, is that even working in draft mode, it eventually requires a heck of a lot of ink. I can't help wondering whether I'll save more over time if I stick with my current printer at $35 for a large black cartridge -- or if I'll get better mileage by dumping my HP in favor of a $65 Canon or Epson. It doesn't help that I need to replace my old scanner and have noticed that the only affordable ones are printer-scanner combos. Darn.

In any event, while I try to find out enough to make a decision, I've run across an interesting little experiment somebody did. Using ballpoint pens, they hand-drew large copies of several popular fonts at the same size in order to get a good comparison on how much ink each used up. Here it is: Save pens. Use Garamond

Creative descriptions, mocp, teaching...

Well, I still haven't quite managed to set up an alternative to this as I basically crashed last night, but did get an interesting little console-based music player called MOC running.  Well, mostly running... Here is the original "creative" explanation I wrote to the blogger that recommended mocp:

I just tried mocp, and I'm encountering skipping with frequent 40-90% CPU use for 5 to 60 seconds. At one point it turned into a little epic battle... mocp locked up while seizing 98% of the CPU and valiantly fended off all of htop's attempts to kill it -- it only died when I shot the terminal app out from underneath it instead.

The above sense of humor, incidentally, is how I used to entertain myself while writing computer tutorials in the 90s for family members. It didn't take long for me to figure out that making the material amusing made learning a bit easier for them, and that using their favorite real-world objects/places as metaphors made an even bigger difference.
For example, I remember having to explain the concept of multi-tasking with the Program Manager in Windows 3.11 to my then-43-year-old mother after we got our first PC (an IBM DX2/50), as she couldn't comprehend any of it. After a few failed attempts, I succeeded by describing it entirely in terms of her favorite place, Disneyland, complete with a little hand-drawn diagram. She took Main Street (booted up) to reach Central Plaza (Program Manager), which she had to use to visit different Lands (programs); just as Central Plaza kept existing even when she was in Fantasyland, and Fantasyland was still there even if she went to Tomorrowland, the Program Manager & different applications stuck around regardless of which one was active.
I think that's enough for the moment; I had more to say, but I'm starting to feel hungry and remarkably distracted. Bye!