Huh.

The thing about the internet is that really does let anyone publish anything. No, this isn't a new or particularly timely insight - but it struck me anew (I love the word 'anew'!) this morning. I have my homepage set to display links from wikiHow. Here's today's collection:

How to Overcome the Fear of Marriage

How to Make SIM Card Earrings

How to Know if Your Cat Is Sick

I love this! I mean, is there anything else in life you need to know?

I wonder how they pick the links.

Sweet techno-victory

This weekend, I didn't buy a TiVo. Ha!

My guy and I recently had a DVD-player breakdown. This led us to the idea that we should start recording TV on our current hard drive. We don't have TiVo or rent a DVR from Comcast, because we feel about subscription fees the way most people feel about visits to the dentist (besides, back when I taped things onto videotapes, I owned the darn thing I was recording onto. I controlled it. It was mine. Why should I settle for less now that we've gone all digital?).

The obvious solution seemed to be to hack our desktop computer - after all, it's got the storage space, right? The cool part is that I just finished getting it working, it adds to my geek cred, and it was easy. It was also cheap, at least when you compare it to other electronic gadgetry out there. So here's my setup:

• Existing desktop computer: 200Gb hard drive, some kind of Pentium chip, etc.
  
• New Hauppauge 350 TV tuner + PVR card - $133
  
• Splitter to send our incoming cable +internet signal into two separate jacks (the TV tuner + cable internet modem) - $15
  
• GBPVR software - free (tho I'll send the guy a donation once I've run it a little longer)
• Monthly subscription fees - none! Works just beautifully without 'em.
  

The only things I can't do with this setup:

• Watch my recordings on the TV in the living room. If/when I care, I can hook things up using Hauppauge's MediaMVP.
  
• Watch one show while recording another. If/when I care, I can install a second tuner card.
  

Sticky points:

• Rearranging the wild jungle of cables under the desk. It's still wild, but no longer actually prevents me from reaching the printer.
  
• Figuring out which tuner card to buy. Hauppauge seems to be industry standard, but they've got a 150, a 250, a 350, and a 500. I opted for the 350 because it had a bunch of enthusiastic user quotes re: picture quality, and because it has TV-out jacks. If we ever put the real TV in the same room as the computer, I can use those TV-out jacks to hook my computer directly up to the TV.
  
• Figuring out which software to use. Hauppauge's own software is a pain. My options were SageTV (costs $100), BeyondTV (costs something, and the UI got poorer reviews than SageTV's), MythTV (works on Linux, not Windows), and GBPVR. I was sceptical of GBPVR at first since it's free & has no manual, but it got so many user raves that I decided to try it. It turns out to be some of the easiest-to-install-&-use software I've ever run across, and the support Wiki & the user forums had all the info I needed.
  
• Installing Microsoft's dotNet 2.0 framework. Windows told me I already had it, so I didn't realize at first I needed to install it. Grrr. Evil Windows!
  
• Configuring the Mpeg decoder settings on the GBPVR software. This actually wasn't hard, I just forgot I needed to do it.

And there you have it. It's up, it's running, and I'm recording Grey's Anatomy on Thursday.

9/11

I wasn't there. I was in LA. I didn't lose a family member or close friend. I can't write anything intelligent about this. But still. . . .

On the west coast we should be woken early by shrill phone calls. We should wander out into the street, aimlessly, and talk to people we don't know and would normally never speak to. We should remember. We should tie up the phone lines with east coast calls and spend hours watching the news. We should laugh nervously when a little crop-duster plane flies low over a field, doing what it always does, and turn to the person next to us to see if, just for a second, they too imagined it much larger, flaming down from the sky.

Why isn't this a national day of mourning?

The Ironic Doppelganger

A couple of weeks back, my guy & I drove out to Half Moon Bay to go to the beach. On our way through town, we spotted a new bookstore, so we wandered in. While browsing for anything new by Michael Faber (I can't decide if The Crimson Petal & the White is a great book, a decadent guilty pleasure, or just a fun ride), I ran across this book.

Note the author's name.

Note that the author lives in the Bay Area, has hair about the color mine gets when I spend a lot of time in the sun, seems to be about my height, and appears to weigh about what I do.

Note that I didn't write this book.

What the . . . ??!!?

When I first picked it up, my stomach turned over. I think my fingers shook a little bit. I looked over my shoulder to see who - or what - was watching me. All those sci-fi & fantasy books I read as a kid, not to mention the time one of my friends asked why I'd been in San Francisco one weekend and not waved back at her but I hadn't actually been there, came bubbling up from the unused, not-looked-at-too-often recesses of my mind.

I have to admit this feels damn weird.

I'm also pondering a new question: when I send my current story out to magazines in October, what name do I send it under?

It's going to be pretty funny if I wind up taking my guy's last name after all - and do it to maintain my own separate identity, rather than to establish new credentials as part of a couple. Just when I was getting comfy with the dictates of feminism. . . .