Category: Technology

Write-a-thon Week 4: BLARG

By:  TempestWrite-a-thon
Write-a-thon Week 4: BLARG

So, the Write-a-thon is chugging along and all and I completed my revision of What Fairy-Like Music Steals Over The Sea and will send it out to Weird Tales shortly. But MAN, this last week was hard!

I don’t remember if I blogged this (I know I Tweeted and FaceBooked it) but I got a call about a month ago from my old job, Laptop, asking if I wanted to return, but in a different capacity: editorial instead of web. I’m now an associate editor whose job includes fact-checking and testing, which is different than what I’m used to but also very exciting.

Luckily, returning to a place I’ve already worked meant that the first week was less about getting to know people and settling in. But I’m learning the fact-checking process for the first time, so it’s been a very full and busy week. Plus, there was the special Clarion West KGB reading and preparing for my salon and… yeah.

But I got the writing done when I could and didn’t burn myself out completely.

Another cool thing that happened last week was an interview I did with Jeff Vandermeer about the WaT went up on Amazon’s Omnivoracious blog. I was thrilled when Jeff asked me to do this and very happy with the way it turned out. Plus, OMG I am on an Amazon blog being interviewed!

In essence, last week was a very good week. Plus, the weekend before I got to see many of my peeps at ReaderCon, which was equally wonderful. My life? Is good.

Yes, I Am Really On Twitter

By:  TempestTechnology

I created the account as an April Fools Gag and intended to delete it the next day. But then I found a post somewhere on these here interwebs about HootSuite, a service that has a bunch of functions for managing Twitter accounts. One of those services is RSS to Twitter. That made me go hmmm.

If you’ve actually been to my blog and not just read on LJ, you may have noticed the “In A Teapot” links on the sidebar. Those are Delicious bookmarks served to the sidebar which I use for linkblogging/microblogging. I found this to be extremely useful on ABW — can’t post about everything I find that angers me, but I can put it on the sidebar — and have been using it a bit here and on my tech blog. It’s a specific Delicious tag, so you won’t see everything I bookmark there.

Every Delicious tag has it’s own RSS feed.  So, Delicious Microblog RSS -> HootSuite -> Twitter.

I don’t intend to have my tweets auto-posted to LJ or FaceBook or anything like that. If you’re interested in seeing my tweets, you know where to find them. I also don’t intend to follow a bunch of people on Twitter or do anything more than broadcast my links to it, so feel free to ignore it and just look at the sidebar.  There may come a time when I have to be more active on Twitter and, if that happens, I shall be.

Messing With Linux

By:  TempestTechnology
Messing With Linux

Have I mentioned lately how my job is so great?  It is so great.  Please don’t ever stop being awesome, job.  Same goes for the people I work with.

This week I’ve been trying out different flavors of Linux in order that I might write a review of them for a print issue.  At first I was thinking of installing them all on laptops we have lying around, but then while researching another story (about how to live without an optical drive) I discovered the beauty of booting and installing from USB thumb drives.  So now I’ve been trying to put all 5 distros on different keys to see if I can run them like that.

As I type this, I am running Ubuntu.  No wonder people are all excited about this thing.  Damn, it’s pretty awesome.  Also, I am more than thrilled that I can take this USB key and stick it in another computer and have the same OS and programs and settings because it’s all stored on the drive.  Score!

Still having some issues with the others: Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, Mint and Fedora.  Stupid complicated systems!  Make it easy!