Happy Memorial Day

I'm going to make this post short and sweet, since I've seen so many other posts in a similar vein, but here's a big warm salute to all veterans, past and present, who have sacrificed their time, their energy, their abilities, and unfortunately, their lives, for the safety of all Americans. I give thanks not only to you, but to your families as well. My father was in the Air Force (got out just in time to avoid going to Vietnam) and several of my uncles were in other branches of the service. My former partner is a veteran, and if he was any other kind of linguist besides Russian, he might have been called back into service at any point.

I remember when Desert Storm began, and I was working retail at Levitz Furniture. The day of the first airstrike, I was manning the sales counter, and an older couple came up to pay for their purchase. The man looked at me closely and said, "Son, you'd better get ready. You may be called up to go over there." I'm sure my eyes got huge at that, since I hadn't really thought that much about it, but if a draft was called up, I would have had to go. I hope that I could have made that same sacrifice with the same grace and courage as so many others have. 

Transitions

I've been in a wistful mood today. I've met someone whom I think is a serious dating contender, and he's definitely interested. When I got home from my second date with him, I spoke briefly with Jeff and discovered that he had a date for tonight. It made me pause a moment and reflect on how our lives have changed and how we're both moving on, even though we're still temporarily tied together financially. I found myself remembering the early days of my relationship with Jeff, and the time when he first captured my heart. And I guess because I'm going through this process again with another man, it has made me wistful and, yes, a bit sentimental. In September, we'll both go our separate ways, but I know that I will always fondly look back on my time with Jeff, and I learned a lot from him. He probably does not have nearly the same view of me, but maybe that will come with time. Or maybe not. In September, I'm sure I'll be wistful again as we take that final step and split up our possessions for real (right now, it's all essentially a theory, since everything is still in the apartment). I'm moving in with a friend in September (not with a boyfriend) and I think that is a wonderful thing. We can help each other heal and be strong, and I can truly rediscover who I am and get back to the things I love to do.

It's Not the Swine Flu!

I woke up Friday feeling under the weather, yet I really don't think it's the Swine Flu. I don't think it's any kind of flu, really. It's a minor chest cold with the unwelcome side effect of conjunctivitis (better known as pink eye). I've been using antibiotic drops and I'm starting to see the white of my left eye again. I'm actually feeling pretty good now. I'll be going out to the Settlement tomorrow to see Mums and Daddums.

I started feeling some cold symptoms several days ago and started swabbing my nose with Zicam. I think that's why this cold has taken on such a bizarre form and has lasted such a short amount of time. I heartily recommend Zicam swabs and always keep them on hand. They're so easy to use -- just break them open and gently swab the inside of each nostril with them. If you're like me and loathe the taste of Cold-Eeze, then Zicam is the way to go. Zicam, orange juice, and rest are the holy trinity for my cold treatments.

But some wiseacres (you know who you are) have been suggesting I might have the Swine Flu. But I haven't had any flu symptoms. No fever. No aches. Just minor cold symptoms -- and this farkakta pinkeye.

Loving the Netbook!

I felt compelled to part with some money. About $350 worth. I'm not sure why, but I felt like I needed to sink that much into an electronic gadget. I had narrowed it down to a choice between Amazon's Kindle 2 and a netbook. Since I felt that I would get more overall usage out of a netbook, that's the one I went with, and I'm glad I did. At first glance, I wondered how I would use the thing, since I already had a perfectly good laptop. But it's not a tiny laptop. It has a 17" screen and while it can be moved around without too much difficulty, it can get rather bulky.

I had set $350 as my limit, and I did some research, but ultimately decided to support my company and buy an Acer Aspire One at the Shack. Now they are carrying them in red, which would be totally cool, but sapphire blue isn't too shabby either. It has a 10" screen and weighs about 3 pounds with the battery attached. Netbooks are not designed as performance powerhouses. Most of them use a slower Intel Atom processor that is tuned more for longer battery life than number- and graphic-crunching blazing performance. It came with 1 GB of RAM and a 160 GB hard drive, and it had Windows XP preinstalled. I had forgotten how well Windows XP actually worked, since I've been working on a Vista notebook for almost a year now. Netbooks really can't run Vista too well, since Vista is really a memory hog. Windows XP runs just fine on 1 - 1.5 GB of RAM, and you can make up the difference by using a flash drive and using the Windows ReadyBoost feature. And the power-saving processor doesn't disappoint on the netbook; I've been getting about 6-7 hours on a full charge, while my laptop could probably give me about three hours.

So, I'm using the netbook as my email/quick web browsing/IM chatting device while I do the heavier stuff on the laptop. Thus far, the netbook seems to be working well. The keyboard isn't all that small, and the screen quality is terrific. It's quick to power up and easy to carry around with me. I can lie in bed with the netbook propped up against my legs, and I can clearly make out what's on screen. I had plans of taking it to meetings with me at work, but it's difficult to get on the wireless network at work, so I've given up trying. If I travel again at some point and want to take a computer with me, I'll drop this little beauty in my bag. The only thing that is a slight inconvenience is that it has no optical drive, and I haven't felt strongly enough about it to justify spending another $100 on an external DVD/CD drive. It has 3 USB ports and a memory card reader, and I can connect it to a larger monitor if I wish.

I don't know how comfortable I would be using a netbook as my sole computer, but it's certainly a good supplement if you have a desktop or a larger laptop that you don't want to carry around with you. I reach for the netbook first, generally, since I can power it up more quickly and check my work email & schedule before I make the drive to Fort Worth. I can also take it with me to Starbucks, Border's, and other places with Wi-Fi hotspots.

But if you're looking for a second computer and you don't want to spend $500+ on one, I'd recommend one of these little babies. It really is such a growing niche in computers right now and there is such a wide variety of them out there. You can get one for about $79 (smaller netbook with 8.9" screen) if you sign up for an AT&T data plan, but those plans can quickly become expensive, especially if you go over the 5 GB per month data limit.

On a similar note, I'd recommend checking out FotoFlexer as an online photo editor. It doesn't have all of the bells and whistles of something like Photoshop, but most of us don't need all of those bells and whistles. We just need to be able to crop, resize, sharpen, or remove red-eye. FotoFlexer does all this and also has some neat special effects. I used it to add the border around the photo at the bottom of this post. By the way, that's a photo of my desk with the netbook and the laptop side by side.