Intestinal Threetitude

It was a day fraught with intestinal discomfort. Was about to be 10 minutes early for my nails appt when I had to turn the car around and spend some quantity time on the throne. Got to the appt 10 minutes late,  had to wait half an hour, used their facilities too.

Not the best nail fill by the silent manicurist, but it'll do. Good haircut from the talkative stylist. Wanted to have lunch at the Amarin next door, but they are not open weekends. IHOP down the block, one more pit stop before waiting for a table.

Home, nap time (which was planned). Domino knew something was up, she went into sphinx position next to my head, and was still there when I woke up at 4.

Spent the rest of the day getting the ASUS up to speed. Windows Easy Transfer lies. It did not transfer my email settings. When I tried to run Outlook, it asked for the product key. I had no idea where that was - looked through my binders of program CDs/DVDs but no Office 2010. Nothing in my download folders either. Installed lots of other stuff, finally remembered that I had the DVD still in its retail box on the bookshelf. Loaded that - had to do a complete re-install - but will have to plug in all my accounts by hand. Boo Hiss.

Two pieces of bad news. The sign-in-with-your-face doesn't work if there is not sufficient light. The camera in this thing is not very light sensitive. And the big WTF is Wi-fi and Bluetooth cannot be used together. Pisses me off because I bought the bluetooth model so I could use a BT mouse. The Toshiba doesn't have this stupid hack. I don't like touchpads, you need three hands sometimes. With only 2 USB ports, and the super-thin architecture, it's pretty stupid to need an RF mouse dongle.

Plans for tomorrow:
play it by ear. The more I think about it, the less Maker Faire sounds like a good idea. I think I need quiet.

  

Gak

Called ASUS support, the rep was doing a good job considering he was not familiar with the machine and was working from an obsolete script. Essentially, the FN+F2 wireless turn on/off is broken, one must use the taskbar widget to enable BT + wi-fi. And the face login doesn't work if one is wearing glasses. It was not a low light issue as much as a too much glare issue.

This morning's fun is to try syncing my Firefox settings from the desktop to the laptop. Never tried that before.
 

Slave Girls

Thanks to a comment made by quadrivium over on the Book of Face, I had loaded onto my Kindle the classic novel Slave Girl of Gor by John Norman. It is, perhaps, the most poorly written romance novel of the 20th century. Or maybe not, since I have not read many of them. Three, I think. It is Not Safe For Work, so I read it before I go to sleep (at home, not at work). To balance this out, for times when I am wearing clothing, I also have on the Kindle Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Written by Herself by Harriet Ann Jacobs. They balance each other in an odd way, the first being fiction about a girl born free, kidnapped into slavery and getting more and more into it, and the second being about a girl born a slave, trying to get out of it.

Reading the latter book was mostly how I spent my evening, outside in the sunny side of the apartment's picnic area waiting for an eclipse. I was stupid and did not go to Fry's as planned to get safety glasses or something similar, and since the cell phone was between my eyes and the sun I was able to take pictures, but without a filter all I got was a bright ball of sun, as if nothing was happening. At about 6:15 it started to get a little darker, but the big clue was when the wind picked up dramatically and the temperature dropped. It never got that dark - maybe 25% darker.

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This morning I slept in, Domino joined me for some of that, and spent most of the morning loading about a hundred updates onto the ASUS laptop. I managed to sync Firefox with my main PC, except they lied about it syncing passwords - I had to do those all over again.

I'm not 100% sure I will be keeping this machine. The Toshiba fingerprint login is much more reliable than ASUS's face image login. ASUS has placed the delete key next to the power button, and they are the same size & shape. And the "home" and "end" keys are function keys so it takes two hands to use them. The touchpad is HUGE and I keep brushing it by mistake.

It is faster than the Toshiba, and has a sharper display, but not by much.

While I was installing, friends in Baltimore Skyped me, and we chatted for about half an hour. My old theater buddy George and his parents (who were visiting from Ashland, Oregon). He and his parents are all long-time friends, we did The Wizard of Oz together in Fremont, CA in 1986. George and I were in at least three other musicals before that. He has given up theater for a wife and two boys. So it goes. Domino jumped up on my lap during the chat. George used to have about 6 cats, but gave that up too when he moved east.

Plans for tomorrow:
work - 10 am meeting
BASFA, probably