State of the Blog Address

The AC jack on the ASUS is finally (almost) broken. There is now no way to lean, wedge, prop, or otherwise jigger the cord so that the computer will charge/run off wall current while I'm using it. All the graphic design software is on that thing, so I've been doing my ad work in 2 hour chunks.

I'm trying to do a pamphlet right now. Take my advice: If you know how to do typesetting and desktop publishing, never ever let anyone know that. Boss Lady's not a picky client, but I have nightmares about doing all this for one of those people who has no idea what they want, except that it's not what I spent six hours laying out in Scribus.

Boss Lady was also kind enough to lend me a spare Macbook (actually, what she did was ask politely if I wanted to borrow it about half a dozen times until I was smart enough to agree) while I got someone to patch the ASUS together long enough for me to get my hands on another indestructible Toshiba. So now I'm sitting on the bed, in my pajamas, surrounded by laptops and a nest of external backup HDDs and jumpdrives, and I've officially run out of places to plug things in. Unless I give up the lamp. With three 400cd/m2 monitors staring at me, I probably don't actually need that.

It will never cease to amaze me that other people keep casually offering to let me wander home with one of their computers. I'm getting a much better grade of jobs out here, where the people I work for assume I'm computer literate by default, and trust that I won't try to clean grime off the keyboard by propping the notebook open on the top rack of the dishwasher.

The Macbook touchpad is slowly driving me insane. You can't tap-click. You have to click-click, and the switch will only throw on the bottom half of the pad. It also has no idea what I'm talking about when I ask it to do multi-finger gestures. This one only recognizes two-finger flick scrolling and it feels like I have to really Hulk-smash to get the clicks to register. This is especially aggravating after having hammered the Wintel and Lintel laptops into acknowledging zoom-pinches and two-finger clicks for omnidirectional scroll lock.

I would like to thank Google once again for keeping my entire life in the cloud. Chrome sync now propagates correctly to Chromium installations as well, which has kept me from stopping every thirty seconds to look for a search macro or a bookmark that isn't there, and saved me from having to remember passwords that the browser has been auto-populating for me for the past three years. Amusingly enough, I realized last night I don't have to be careful about not leaving things in the browser cache on this loaner, either. If I happen across any particularly good fanfic smut, I should probably leave a link on the desktop, for the benefit of the next intern who borrows this thing.

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