Following the muse

When I can tear myself away from listening to "Weekend" by Curve over and over and over again, and I can get myself out of this study, I'll be able to make some progress. An important development in the past week, is that I got a new laptop (one that has a keyboard that works ALL THE TIME, unlike my HP Omnibook, which has a sticky keyboard and necessitates using a full-sized keyboard that I plug into the back. It's actually easier on my hands, than this IBM Thinkpad, but it's also clunky. And it's a lot less portable (being heavier and clunkier and all). Having a laptop that can do everything I need it to do, is critical in this PEAPOD process. Bottom line is, I have to have all the tools I need at my fingertips, and I don't want to have to go from machine to machine to get my work done. I want it all in one package -- my audio recorder and editor and encoder to be integrated into one application... my print creation and formatting to be possible with the same app... my blog text recorded into the same place as my podcasts... my virtual book tour files resident on the same machine as the manuscript and the promotional materials... graphics editors and text editors all in the same bundle. It's one thing, if you're at a company where they have all the high-end stuff and each application needs its own box to function... and they have a PC for each and every app that you use. But when you're doing indie publishing and podcasting and blogging, it all needs to be in the same place.

The one thing I do NOT want integrated, however, is web access to this machine. I'm deliberately NOT online on the machine I do all my work on, because I'm using Windows XP Pro, and what people usually don't realize, is just how unsecure WinXP is -- there's a pretty much wide-open back door built into it, for software updates and such, and all the bad people out there can easily figure out how to get in. They have, and they do. And it's bad, bad news. So, I don't go online with this machine. It's chaste. Virgin. Unsullied by the gang-bang that is the web, these days.