Once I was a PC snob, I've converted to the dark side, bought myself a MacBook and now I am a confirmed Mac Nerd.

The Machine

What I like about the Mac:

The Leopard operating system is rock solid. I've owned my Macbook for over a month and the system has yet to crash. Boot times for my Dell would take several minutes, for the Mac it runs about 30 seconds and most of the time, I just close it up without turning off the system. It pops right back up the moment I open the lid. When I try that it XP, it system would go into a fatal sleep mode.

My MacBook is half the size of my Dell and the batteries seem to discharge much more slowly. The built-in wireless card connects to my Buffalo wireless network without a hitch. I connected my laptop to my Canon printer and the system recognized the printer and started printing without a hitch. I was nervous about getting just 2 gigs of RAM - that's just barely enough memory to run Vista, but apparently that's more than enough memory for the Mac. So far, it seems to handle everything I've thrown at it.

Programs are seamlessly integrated together. No need to futz around with settings trying to make programs make nice with each other.

Backup using Time Machine is a dream. I purchased an external Passport HD, reformatted it for the Mac and hooked it up to the USB port on my Mac. Time Machine did the rest. Backups are painless and run in the background.

Oh yeah, the all aluminum case is way cool.

What I don't like:

The glass track pad is a moderate pain in the kiester. Apple did issue a software patch for it, but it still glitches from time to time.

Software:

Being cheap, I opted for iWork instead of Microsoft Office. Although iWork Pages saves documents in its own format, it can read Word files. To save in Word, I have to 'export' the file. Most Mac software is thought of as being more 'intuitive' that Windows, but I'm not convinced. There's still a learning curve which system you use. I generally like Pages. My biggest gripe is that it didn't come with a manual - so help is on disk or on-line. Whoever designed it wasn't a writer. Formatting page numbers, especially starting a novel chapter at any page other than page 1, requires plowing through menus. It's much easier with Word.

Safari vs. Firefox I haven't tried Firefox for the Mac, Safari satisfies most of my needs. It doesn't have the Window's version of Firefox's capability to block ads or install a wide variety of plug-ins, but then again, Safari doesn't have the memory leaks that plague Firefox either.

iPhoto seems lightweight in comparison to Photoshop Elements, so I opted to purchase PE. I've installed it, but haven't used it much. To be effective, I'll need to try to hook the laptop up to a monitor.

My biggest gripe on software is the lack of a decent financial management program. I'd been using MS Money on my PC, but that isn't available for the Mac. Reviews for Quicken for Mac are abysmal, so I've been searching for something to manage my money. I tried a turkey called Cha-Ching. It's a dog, don't bother. I recently bought something called Checkbook which is okay, but not as sophisticated as Money. It'll do for now, but there's a market out there for a programmer willing to work on it.

I love my MacBook. So much so, that I'm thinking about replacing my Dell desktop with an iMac. Sigh, how far the mighty PC snob has fallen.

The scary thing about this video isn't some guy tossing his shoe at the President. Hey, more power to him. The scary thing is the sloppy response by the Secret Service. Watch the one agent sitting to Bush's right. He must have his thumb up his ass as he never really responds to the threat. Replace shoes with a weapon and the President is toast.

I've finally succumbed and turned to the dark side. I've given up on Windows and bought a Mac Book. I'd told myself I'd never buy another Apple after they dumped the Apple II line. My first computer was a beauty - an A motherboard Apple IIe with 64 K of ram (that's kilobytes my friend) and dual 128 5 1/4 inch floppy drives. It came with a state of the art 10" green and black screen. That puppy put me back $2500 (that's in 1979 dollars) and I must say it was love at first sight. I eventually added another 64 K of ram: cost $120, a 10 megabyte hard drive that sounded like a vacuum cleaner and was the size of a small suitcase: cost $500 and a Brother clackity-clack dot matrix printer: cost $300. The Apple IIe eventually ended up running a creative writing BBS called The Blue Parrot. The Parrot was up and running for 5 years, an eternity for BBSs in pre-Internet days, then my power supply croaked. Sigh.

Saying no way to Apple products, I drifted from the Atari ST (great machine, no user base) into the IBM world. Microsoft DOS sucked, Windows was even worse, but like most clones, I made do the best I could.

A few months ago, my Dell Inspiration showed ominous signs of pending failure: boot errors, frequent blue screens of death - common enough with Windows, but the frequency was increasing. I looked around - XP was on the way out the door and Vista sounded like hell on earth. I looked at the new Macbook-a little light on ram , but the reviews were good and the operating system seemed solid. I said what the hell and plunked down $1300 and took that puppy home.

I haven't been disappointed.

Next: A review of the computer and software from a long time computer nerd perspective.

Plotting drives me nuts.  I can put a scene together, flesh out a character, and establish suspense, but one constant criticism of my prose is that it tends to be episodic.  I've read various books on plotting and recently stumbled upon one that seems to work.  The Writer's Journey by Christohper Vogler uses Joseph Campbell's concept of the Hero's Journey as a template for writing your novel.  Drawn from Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Vogler dumbs down Campbell's concepts enough that even simplistic writers like myself can use them (a good thing, since reading Campbell is akin to swimming through quickset concrete).

The Hero's Journey is a basic and common theme that runs throughout most human cultures.  The Journey follows a general template or path and has many common archetypes that can be used for your characters.

Archetypes

Hero
Herald
Mentor
Allies
Shapeshifter
Shadow
Trickster
Threshold Guardians

Characters can assume different archetype roles at various points within a story.  Thus, a mentor may in the end turn out to be a shadow (or villian).  (Think of Jeff Bridges' role in Ironman)

Vogler's basic template is as follows:

1. Ordinary World
2. Call to Adventure
3. Refusal of the Call
4. Mentor
5. First Threshold
6. Tests, Allies, Enemies
7. Approach to the Innermost Cave
8. Ordeal
9. Reward (seizing the sword)
10. The Road Back
11. Resurrection
12. Return with the Elixer

Like Archetype roles, templates are fluid, not fixed.  In Dances with Wolves, the Ordeal is in the first act.

Most of the Vogler's examples are drawn from screenplays rather than novels; i.e., Witness, Titanic and The Lion King.  The Hero's Journey has been hot stuff in the movie business for the past several years (George Lucas modeled his Star Wars series on Campbell) and is a popular method for preparing scripts (see Save the Cat by Blake Snyder), but it transfers well to novel writing.  Short stories may be too brief for the full Hero treatment, but we can incorporate some of the elements within that form.

If plotting is a nemisis for you, take a gander at Vogler's book and see if it helps.

Redneck jerkwaters accuse Rachel Ray of being a terrorist.  The crime?  In a Dunkin Doughnut ad, the scarf she is wearing looks like an Arabian headpiece.  Dunkin Doughnuts ignores the fact that thousands of American women wear similar scarfs believing they are fashionable.  Instead, DD shows their complete lack of spine and pulls the ad. 

Apparently, to those on the right, freedom of speech doesn't extend to clothing choice.  Thomas Jefferson rolls over in his grave and asks, "What has gotten into my country?"

Life was up and down last week.  I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, not the greatest development, but at least I'm getting some meds now for the pain.  My doc put me on prednisome.  She told me one side effect is personality shifts - land of paranoia here I come!

Last Thursday, my novel was rejected by an agent I had hoped would be interested.  I spent the rest of the day feeling sorry for my self, thought about giving up writing. The next day I received a letter from another agent asking to see a partial, so of course everything is hunky-dory again.

Good news:  The Ducks won.  Yahoo!  And the weather in Portland has been stunning for the past few days.  Oregonians always tell out-of-staters that life here is dreary, gray and full of rain.  The real scoop is that summers here are pretty near perfect: 75-85 degrees and sunny almost all the time, no thunderstorms, moderate humidity.  Of course, February is dark and wet and miserable.

Anybody out there going to the Surrey Writer's Conference in B.C. next month? 

Hot day, grumpy child, great experience.


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Now playing: The Bangles - Hazy Shade of Winter
via FoxyTunes   

Brick - a movie
High School noir starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt.  Yup, the kid from The Third Rock from the Sun has grown into quite an actor.  Brick is noir, through and through, femme fatale, the hero getting the bejesus kicked out of him and lots of dead bodies. One of the best movies I've seen in the last year.

The Princess and the Warrior - a movie
A psychological thriller starring Franke Potente and directed by Tom Twyker, both of Run Lola Run fame.  Deep, twisting, complex.  Highly recommended

The Road - a novel by Cormac McCarthy.  Simply written, yet totally engrossing story of a father and son trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic land.  Winner of the Pulitzer prize and a stunning piece of fiction.

My mother moved into an assisted living facility this past June.  Since then, I've been sorting through decades of stuff that she and my father and I had accumulated in our house.  Stuck behind a pile of boxes in the back storeroom, I discovered an empty Thunderbird wine bottle.  My dad was a drunk.  He quit drinking when I was twelve, just shortly after we had moved into that house.  From then on, he was a dry drunk until the day he died.  That bottle must have been stashed there in his last, arduous days as a wet drunk.  He always said he hated wine.  How far he must have fallen just before hitting bottom, and had been force to quit,  taking secretive slugs of Thunderbird all alone in the storeroom, hoping we wouldn't discover his secret.

Our home was filled with secrets.  Some I uncover as I toss my family's junk into the dumpster, saving the good pieces for the estate sale, and allowing myself to turn loose of my toys and books and keepsakes, the things that had been so important to me as a child.  I feel as if part of me will be lost forever.

Some secrets are still hidden and I know there's a story in that house somewhere.  I'm just not sure I want to fucking write it.

Last weekend was my high school reunion (I'm not saying which year).

Observations:  None of the popular boys showed up.  Curious, eh?
  

Comment I heard most:  My, you grew taller after high school.  The reality is that I was about the same height then as now.  People's perceptions of me are different.