Patti O'Shea's Blog, page 200

Fighting the Dragon

I picked up Dragon Naturally Speaking because I got a great deal on it. I'd guessed it wouldn't be something I'd write my stories in because there's something about the act of typing that spurs my creativity, but I figured it would come in useful on other things. Maybe. Did I mention it was a great deal?

It came with a headset and microphone, lucky for me, so I could immediately use it. The first thing to do was train it. I'd heard from other people who had the program that getting it to ...

Kindle Upgrade Thoughts

I've been waiting and waiting for my Kindle to get the 2.5 update that allows books to be filed/organized. The one thing I haven't loved about my Kindle was the fact I couldn't sort anything. I could look by author or by title or by download date, but that didn't help me find a particular book. This weekend I decided I couldn't wait for Amazon to push the update and I installed it manually.

First off, this was much simpler than I expected it to be. The directions on the website were clear ...

Adventures With Mother Nature

Friday night storms rolled through. It's been raining a lot in Minneapolis--thirteen of the first fifteen days in June had rain and it just hasn't stopped--but we haven't had much severe weather. Until Friday.

It wasn't only one storm either, but three of them converging on the Twin Cities one after another. One of the storms had tornadoes associated with it and it and another one had a history of dropping good-sized hail, some as big a tennis ball. I was not looking forward to having to t...

Please. Stop.

I love to shop online. It's quick, it's convenient, and whatever I buy comes straight to my house. It's nearly perfect.(Except more sites need to offer free shipping. I'm not paying more to ship something than the item costs.) In my internet shopping journey, I've signed up for newsletters and here is where my blog topic begins.

There are etailers out there who send me an email four or five days out of the week. It's ridiculous! These are not sites that tout their daily newsletter. I am...

Secrets

I've bemoaned my characters keeping secrets from me before and it happened again. This time my heroine was the culprit and she had two little bombshells for me.

With my heroes and heroines, I've gotten used to knowing something was in their backgrounds that impacted their lives, but not knowing exactly what it was. That I can work with. I can foreshadow as I write because I know it's there, I'm just in the dark as to what--precisely--the problem is. What I hate is when they don't give me a...

Looking At the Glass Half Full

I'm a glass half empty kind of person by and large. I blame my parents for this because they're glass-half-full people and someone had to point out the pitfalls. They would look at the ocean and say, "it's so pretty." And I'd mention, well, yeah, it's pretty, but remember there are sharks beneath the surface and rocks and don't forget there are storms. Someone had to remind them, right?

Sometimes, though, I need a reminder to see the good things and not only think about the half-empty part...

Windows 7 and Word 2010

It's a good thing yesterday wasn't a blogging day or y'all would have been subjected to another rant about authors who can't handle the simplest computer thing. Come on, people, you'd expect your surgeon to keep up with the tools of his trade and not use a scalpel if he could perform a laser surgery instead, right? So why don't you learn to use the tools that go with your job? Um, stopping here because this is becoming a rant already. Since I don't want to do this, I will review the elemen...

My Email Woes

Answering email has become a huge problem for me. I haven't been good about it in a while. Okay, a long while, but in the last six months it has gotten much, much worse.

What happened? I bought a new laptop.

Here's the thing. Windows 7 does not have Outlook Express (OE), which is what I've always used. Instead, it's Live Mail or something like that. So I decided that I'd use Outlook. I have Outlook 2003 at the Evil Day Job (EDJ) and it's fine. Some features I like better than OE, some f...

Parallel Worlds

I've been listening to audio books on my iPod at work. It's a great way to pass the day and recently I listened to a really awesome book. Parallel Worlds by Michio Kaku.

This book is non-fiction and it's about physics. Yes, I am a total geek. Computers, physics, only moderately functional in social situations. Sigh. Anyway, the book talks about physics, but the really cool part of physics--black holes, wormholes, time travel, multi-dimensional space, string theory, and M theory. My eyes...

It Really Was Crap

So in the last Woot Off I managed to get through and buy a Bag of Crap. For those unfamiliar with Woot and their Woot Offs, every once in a while, Woot.com, which normally does one deal a day, runs item after item until they sell out. The highlight of the Woot Off, though, is the Bag of Crap (abbreviated as BoC). No one who's buying knows what they'll get in the BoC until it arrives, but sometimes it's awesome things like an XBox or a TV. The cost is $8.99 including the shipping.

I've "won...