Typing on the Go

Last time, I wrote about using Bluetooth fold-up keyboards with my internet tablet to get some writing done in transit. I've used two keyboards so far: an iGo keyboard that my brother Steve lent me (iGo doesn't have a product page for it; go figure), and the Nokia one. I bought the Nokia because I thought it would play better with my Nokia tablet, and it does (although I can't figure out how to do accents on it — the instructions in the manual don't work).

Here's a (mostly photographic — people with slow connections have been warned!) comparison of the two keyboards.

This is what the iGo looks like folded up:


And here's the Nokia. They're almost identical in size.


The keys are almost identical in size, too. At first I thought that the Nokia's keys were smaller, but I did some rough measuring and they're the same (both about 90% of regular-size computer keys). On both keyboards I had to make some adjustments to how I did reaches in the centre area of the keyboard — you know, the keys that your index fingers type on. Both keyboards require special key combinations to put in numbers and some punctuation marks because they're both only four rows high — the top row does triple or even quadruple duty. Unless you're planning on using a lot of numbers in your typing, that's not a drawback at all.

The iGo has a built-in stand for your PDA:



So does the Nokia. It's off-centre, but it takes up less room than the iGo and has a little wire rest for the bottom of the PDA.



The tablet has its own stand, so often I just let it stand up by itself and don't unfold the keyboard's stand. Note that the iGo stand can't tuck away like the Nokia stand can.



The Nokia only has one latch, and a loose hinge that lets it partly fold if it's not on a hard surface when you're using it (you can see that a bit in the above photo). The iGo keyboard locks in place, but is slightly more complicated to fold up because of that.

According to my kitchen scale, the Nokia keyboard plus tablet come to 434g, which is nicely lighter than the 920g of the Eee PC (although of course the Eee PC is very portable and has its own advantages). Plus, the Eee PC has replaced toasters and iPods as a promotional incentive to consumers:

The bottom line is, we're no longer chained to a single machine to work on a particular document, or even a single platform. It's as easy as anything to start a draft on the tablet in transit, throw the SD card I saved it on into my laptop, copy it to the hard drive and finish writing it up. The focus (thankfully) has shifted away from brand loyalty and more towards finding the best tool for the job. These posts have been about hardware choices; maybe after I've blogged about other things for a bit I'll write about software choices.

Writing on the Go

The conflict between having a day job and wanting to write (assuming that isn't your day job) doesn't come from being a "frustrated writer" as often as people might think. It comes more from wanting to squeeze in the day job, the writing, and "having a life" into one lifetime. A common solution is to just get up an hour earlier, but then there are people like me who have a day job, have writing they want to do, and want to have a life, plus they're night-owls who already get up at a stupidly early time because it takes them so long to stumble around in the morning. I take about ninety minutes to shower, eat breakfast, get dressed, and pack my lunch every morning. By the time time I'm at work I'm awake enough to chair a conference call, but I only get to that point about halfway through my commute. Did I mention that I'm allergic to coffee and avoid caffeine as much as possible for health reasons? Right.

Since writing early in the morning isn't a good idea for the likes of me, I've invested a lot of problem-solving energy into figuring out how to write during my commute to work on the streetcar. I used to use a regular notebook and pen. This was economical but illegible — one story I wrote this way had to have entire sections entirely rewritten, because not only could I not make out what the words were in some places, I couldn't make out what entire sentences and paragraphs were. So much for "getting it all down."

I thought about bringing my laptop with me, but sometimes I need to bring my work laptop home, and having all that computing power can be a pain in the neck to lug around — literally. Laptops aren't necessarily that easy to use in public transit, either — most people I see doing it are either reading or watching a video, as opposed to trying to type something.

I found something that works for me. It may not work for you, but hopefully if you're looking for a solution this will help you think about what you need to work in transit. There are other gadgets out there that will fit, and I'd love to highlight other ones here if people tell me about them (hint, hint).

I got a Nokia N-800 internet tablet, a folding Bluetooth keyboard, and a plastic mini cutting board. They fit into my tote bag nicely (the tablet and keyboard by themselves fit in my purse), they're light, and they're fine for first-draft level word processing.

The N-800 does a lot of other computer-ish things too, but you can read about them on the Nokia site. The important part for me is that it comes with a notepad application that accepts basic HTML: you can bold/italicise/underline, make bulleted lists, change the font to sans/serif/monospace, change the font size and colour, and that's about it. That's enough to get me through a first draft. For editing and polishing I transfer the file to my laptop and a proper word processor, or upload it to Google Docs.

If I can't use the keyboard (if I'm standing up for instance), I can use the handwriting recognition to write with the stylus. Some days I use the on-screen keyboard, but usually I use the handwriting recognition.

It's not as fast as typing on a proper keyboard — size has its drawbacks. I haven't tried writing any novel chapters on it, but I've been comfortable with short stories and some blog posts.

I've installed some applications to help out: a task manager, an off-line blog editor, and a spreadsheet. Everything's a free download (the operating system is Linux-based, so lots of freeware available), it's easy to transfer files and back up, and the battery lasts about six hours — say a day's worth of use. The screen is nice and sharp, and although I wouldn't recommend dropping it, I have dropped it a few times and it still works.

But the best part for me is that I can get to second draft stage and actually read my first draft.

Neverwhere and back again

Monday. A lesson on why reading Neverwhere in an emergency room waiting area is significant, at least in Toronto, Canada.

8:00pm: The patient has a dull but intense pain directly beneath her lower ribs on the right side, plus a lighter but sharper pain on her back, level with the pain at the front. The pain started at 3:00pm and has intensified throughout the afternoon. Two extra-strength Tylenol were taken an hour ago, and have had no discernible effect. No fever present.

Recommendation: go to emergency for examination and treatment. This report will be faxed to the hospital the patient said she would visit. The patient is advised not to drive herself to the hospital, and not to eat or drink anything until a doctor confirms it's all right for her to do so.

9:00pm: The patient disembarks from a cab and queues to talk to the triage nurse. The triage nurse data enters the patient's name, health card number, contact information. She takes a list of symptoms and records the patient's pulse rate, blood pressure, and temperature. She gives no indication of whether the patient is normal or abnormal in these measurements. She tells the patient to see the registering nurse.

9:15pm: The registering nurse takes more detailed contact information and notes an emergency contact. She tells the patient to wait in the waiting room. The patient takes a seat and tries to estimate how many people are in the queue in front of her by trying to deduce who in the waiting room are patients and who are simply accompanying patients. Ironically, House is on the television. Dr. House claims that a patient's general niceness is a sign of brain infection or head trauma.

12:00am: The patient has been at the hospital for three hours. An episode of The Simpsons has just finished playing on the television, and the time of infomercials has begun. The pain has subsided to below the "scary" threshold, but is still present and worrisome. Some of the other people in the waiting room are wearing surgical masks, supposedly to reduce the risk of spreading germs. Most of them have pulled the mask down to their chin so they can talk and breathe more easily.

The waiting room population doesn't change very quickly. Once every hour or hour and a quarter a nurse comes to the entrance of the waiting room and calls out a name. Sometimes someone gets up and follows her to the examination area. More often the person is no longer there. If that happens, the nurse leaves alone, not to return for another hour.

The patient and a woman who arrived shortly before her decide to ask how much longer the wait will be, since they've both been there for three hours and it's getting very late. The nurse gets annoyed with them, but finally says that they are only seeing people who arrived at 6:00pm now. All right,, thinks the patient, on a geometric scale that's three more hours to wait. 3:00am. The patient and the woman sit down again. The patient sits closer to the waiting room entrance and pulls out her copy of Neverwhere. Richard Mayhew, the hero, is well-embroiled in the affairs of London Below, and the patient realises, as she shifts into a position that hurts less, that the waiting room is a kind of Toronto Below. Only the nurse who calls out names acknowledges those waiting at all.

1:30am The woman who checked on waiting times with the patient leaves, still unsure if it was food poisoning, an allergic reaction, or just bad luck that she had. The patient decides to wait until the deadline she set.

A jovial elderly man with a badly scraped shin sways over to the Coke machine and gets help from a young mother waiting with her husband and baby as to how to buy a drink from it. "Doesn't it sell whiskey?" he asks. She shakes her head no. "Are you sure?" he says, and checks all of the buttons himself. "It should sell whiskey," he says as he sits down with his soft drink. The patient agrees silently and continues reading.

3:00am The young woman who helped the elderly man buy a soft drink has been called to the examination area with her family.

The patient has finished Neverwhere — 250 pages of paperback read in one sitting. Richard Mayhew returns to London Above and his old, non-fantastical life, only to choose to return to the society of London Below. The patient decides to mirror his decisions. She goes to the registration desk and announces she is leaving.

"You need to see the triage nurse," the registration nurse says. "You're next."

Just then, the triage nurse walks in with a sandwich packed in a bag. The patient waits for her to get settled behind her desk and then explains she is leaving. The triage nurse says, "Okay, let's take your blood pressure and temperature again."

She also takes the patient's pulse, then extracts four vials of blood from the patient's left arm. "We should get a urine sample from you too," she says. "Here," and she hands the patient a urine jar.

The patient goes to the ladies' room and does the needful, which is pretty impressive considering she hasn't had anything to eat or drink in over seven hours. She returns to the triage desk and hands the urine jar to the triage nurse.

"Well, you've got my contact information," the patient says. "Goodnight."

"Where are you going?" the triage nurse says, surprised.

The patient takes a deep breath, mindful of the signs posted everywhere that say verbal abuse will not be tolerated. "Like I said, I'm going home. I've been here for six and a half hours, I need to get up to go to work at six AM because I get paid by the hour and my projects are in crunch mode, and the pain has subsided. Not to mention I've been up for twenty-three hours, which alone can't be good for my health."

"Then why did you let me take all this?" says the triage nurse, gesturing to the collected bodily fluids.

"You didn't say what it was for," says the patient. "And I'd already said I was leaving."

"But you're next," the registration nurse pipes up.

"And how long will I have to wait once I get admitted to examination?" says the patient.

"That depends on what's wrong with whoever's ahead of you," says the triage nurse.

"Exactly," says the patient. "Thank you. Good night."

3:30am The patient finally gets into the cab she called. She has spent the fifteen minutes' wait pacing up and down the sidewalk outside the emergency room entrance, talking into her internet tablet's microphone, making memos about all the things that went wrong with the health care system tonight. She also spends several minutes watching the hospital's automatic sprinkler system water a lawn half the size of her living room. Most of the water runs off the lawn onto the hospital's driveway, and down the drain in front of the emergency room entrance.

The cab comes and takes her home. She sleeps for ninety minutes, then wakes up to go to work, once more a citizen of Toronto Above.

Diagnosis:
For the patient, still pending; an appointment with the GP has been made.

For the hospital; dementia, possibly accompanied by catatonia.

Physicians, heal thyselves.

Back in the saddle

Last November, after three years of trying to get in the game, I participated and successfully completed my first NaNoWriMo. I admit I cheated a little — you're supposed to start a brand new novel on 1 November, and I continued work on one I had about 7,000 words done already. However, I really did finish just over 50,000 words during the month, bringing my total up to around 57,000 words.

Since then, things have been not so happening on the novel front. I've been getting short stories done regularly, and submitting, and I started these blogs, and, and, and... somehow, whenever novel-writing is involved, listing all the other accomplishments you've made, even within the same craft, just don't matter. You could have ended world hunger, created real and lasting global peace, and found a safe and inexpensive way to reverse global warming, but you know what? Your novel is still on the same chapter it was three months ago, and it's all your fault.

During my morning commute, it's too awkward to write on anything bigger than a paper notebook or my Nokia tablet (hence all the short story-writing that's getting done), but it gives me a chance to think, and what I've been thinking is that if I give myself a NaNoWriMo-style word count and deadline, I will probably be further ahead than if I just keep trying to wing it. One thing about the day job: it makes me very comfortable with project-driven work and with deadlines. Weirdly, in the past six months my most effective writing tool has been a spreadsheet.

I've decided to give myself until 30 June to get the second half of the novel done. I'm at 58,000 words or so, and I figure the first draft will come in around 120,000. That means an average of just under 1,000 words per day to keep on track. Heck, at the end of NaNoWriMo, I could run that off in an hour. I've known approximately what's going to happen for ages; I just need to bloody write it down.

1,000 words a day on average should be pretty good. It's less than NaNoWriMo, but I know that there will be other things happening (like my brother's wedding in June), so I'm bound to miss a few days and need to catch up.

There. I've told the world.

Stay tuned and watch the footer of this blog if you want to see how it goes.

April's West End Stories

I love films, but one thing I don't like about how films are publicised is the focus on how much they cost to make and how much money they made once they were released. I know that if you're in the industry it's terribly important, but what does it really matter to the viewer? Citizen Kane used all sorts of tricks to save money, wrapped under budget, and still gets picked regularly for those Top 10 lists.

There's another impact, though, one I worry about more - the idea that only things that cost money and are done by paid professionals are any good. Because every month, events like West End Stories prove that just isn't so.

The April West End Stories was held at Poor John's Café, same as every month, presided over as always by the ever-magnificent Howard. It's always free, although of course it's only polite to buy something from the café, and anyone is free to go up and tell a story. The first time I went, only a few people wanted to tell, so the ever-brilliant Ariel told a story from 1,001 Arabian Nights that lasted the entire second hour, even though it only felt like twenty minutes.

This time there was no shortage of tellers, so each person kept it short. Because everyone was a listener, and each teller was mindful of the listening experience, the stories dovetailed to each other with recurring themes, recurring central conflicts. It was a spoken word mass DJ mix.

Some people came prepared, even with props and, if not costumes exactly, dressed for the occasion (like the woman who wore the waistcoat with images of African animals on it and told a Masai story). Other people just thought of something while they were there that went with the stories just heard and asked Howard if they could go up next.

The first half was traditional(ish) tales from all over the world, but the second half was all contemporary or personal stories. It was in the second half that I made my telling debut. I am happy to report that nothing got thrown at me, and it was a vast improvement over the story-telling assignments that I did for my senior drama class ('cos, um, I failed that unit)! I was surprised - it really wasn't any harder than doing a reading.

By the end of the evening, our collective brains had been stuffed with far more good stories than we could ever remember (okay, I'm sure people of Ariel's or Howard's calibre could, but not mere mortals), and the satisfied feeling that only a very excellent film can provide.

Go if you can. If you can't, organise your own.

Talking to fish and other tall tales

Last Sunday I went to the last day of the story-telling festival at Harbourfront. I attended three sessions altogether, all with the ever-cool Tara, and wound up hearing three very different types of story-telling.

The Uppity Women session was the first and, unfortunately, the most disappointing. Although the stories were well-delivered, they had a “scripted” feel to them. The “uppity women” featured in the stories were problematic, too. Sure Greta rescued Kay from the Snow Queen, but what about the Snow Queen as a feminine stereotype? And sure the ordinary woman got away from her annoying family, but what about her teenage daughter, who doesn´t get so much as a description?

The next session were a trio of story-tellers from Germany. This was the session I enjoyed the most, largely because this was the session where the stories were meant to be enjoyed the most. They were still discussion-worthy if you wanted to go by Sir Phillip Sidney´s dictum that the purpose of poetry is “to teach and delight”, but the emphasis was on delighting, with the teaching added quietly. At the end, there were two stories told in dual-language tandem, with the leader telling the story in German, and the follower translating to English and re-telling as they went along.

The third session we heard had stories about disability, told by people with disabilities. This could have been awful (flashback to well-meaning but pedantic auditorium sessions in elementary school), but was saved because the story-tellers were very good at what they did and put the emphasis on the story. Again, the message came in all by itself. I got a little squirmy about the very personal nature of the stories (reading about someone's sex life is one thing; having them sit on a stage and tell you about it is something else again), but I suppose that was also the point.

Listening to all of these different stories and styles of telling them made me think about writing. The most “literary” stories presented the worst; the most fun ones were the ones where I knew or could guess the ending (like when one of the German tellers did "The Fisherman and His Wife" -- the repetition of the fisherman talking to the enchanted fish was great, even though you knew it was coming). Something to think about for readings.

How this blog got set up (and why I suggest you think about doing it too)

To set this up, you need:

• About two hours for the initial work (you can do little bits at a time -- it took me a week to get to the layout present when this post was written, working in half-hour sessions).


• A blog site. Everyone I know uses either:
• Blogger or


• WordPress

I chose Blogger because I have a Google account, and it's owned by Google. I checked out WordPress as well, and it looks great, but I decided to go with the interface I already knew.

At first, I changed the settings so that the blog was only visible to its author (me). Then I invited a small group of friends that I knew would go and look and give me feedback, which in fact they did (thank you!). Finally, I made it public. I'm still tweaking here, adding links to the lists there, but it's pretty stable, and now that it's the way I like it, there's virtually nothing to maintain except the content.

I also added:

• a Twitter feed so I could do status updates, just like on F-------, except with more ways to do the updates. Twitter has a widget in its settings that lets you add it as a feed to any blog. Note that you have to make your Twitter stream public, so don't give any statuses you don't want the whole world to know. Besides, do you really want to get deeply personal in 140 characters or less?


• a photo feed from Picasa so I could show off my favourite photos. I don't consider myself a great photographer, but every once in a while something turns out, and I like to be able to share. Flickr is also a good choice for this, and there are lots of other options available on the web. Blogger has a widget that lets you make an on-line album a photo stream (the photo stream has to be made public, so don't include anything you don't want the whole world to see.


• Links to other information about myself, including my Google calendar. I've set up my calendar so you can only see it if I personally invite you to, so I feel okay about putting the link on a public blog. This one isn't terribly exciting (I mean, even my best friends don't really care how I spend most of my time, and that's only one reason why I like them) unless a group of us who like to hang out together do it, and then it's a great planning tool. You can also share events, so you can use it for invitations.


• My Orkut profile is the closest thing I have to F--------. I have to say, though, I like the internationalism and tone a lot better.


• Scrabulous is just to show that there are fun widgets around outside of F-------. That's fun as in "fun", not "annoying."

Last but not least, if you want to set up something like a group page (like, say, for scooter enthusiasts, right Glenda?), check out Google groups. I've been using it since last October for a collaborative writing project and it's been very handy. You could use a blog page for public announcements and group contact information and the group for private information. There are other ways to do it, of course.

There's also the issue of finding people, but you know what? People will find you if you go looking for them. That sounds backwards, but what I mean is, the more you network, the more people network with you. So long as you're not being annoying, of course, or a stalker.

And that's the nice thing about getting out of F-------. There's a whole world's worth of choices in how to do things out there. It's refreshing.

Even more (more!) options are listed on Wired's how-to "Replace F------- Using Open Social Tools". The article that got me from feeling uncomfortable about F------- to actually doing something about it is the one that spawned the how-to wiki; check it out here.

By the bye, if you are in the midst of setting up your own space and want to talk shop, feel free to start a comment tree from this post. There are lots of different ways to get things the way you want, and it would be fun to compare notes.

Intro: A Better Mousetrap

Note: If you can't access my stuff from the Web Toolbox on the right, and you want to, and you think you know me well enough you should be able to, send me a comment or an e-mail and I'll change my privacy settings to let you in. Like anything on the web, there's going to be a bit of awkwardness during the initial construction until things get streamlined.

Welcome to The Eyrea. That's pronounced "area", and if you're wondering why I picked such a punny name, from a nineteenth-century novel I somehow dodged even during my English degree... you'll have to wait, although I'm sure I'll blog about it sooner or later. Let's start with the basics for now. Here's a little FAQ for you:

What is this place?

This is my own space, where I have gathered all the social and sharing tools I want to use, how I want to use them. I got a bit (okay, more than a bit) frustrated with the "social networking" sites out there -- social pigeon-holing, more like. This organisation, once I get it going, will let the people whom I want looking at my info see it easily. Everybody else is out of luck. If you're here, please consider it a compliment.

So you're going to post here all the time?

I don't know about "all the time", but when I do post, it will be here. You can contact me, keep track of me, play Scrabulous with me, and see my photos, all from here. If you want, you can even use Bloglines so you don't have to check here unless there's an update. (Thanks to the ever-fabulous Lisa for recommending Bloglines. It rocks.) The uber-cool-yet-approachable Carla recommended Google Reader for the same job. Isn't it great to be out on the interweb where you can choose and customise?


Think you're special?

Hey, everything here is the same as some, ah, other social networking sites. But now it's my way. If you want, you can just as easily set up something similar to be your way (some of you already have). It's all about taking back control.

Why don't you just update your F------- profile?

Because I never liked that site. It's ugly, it's limited, it's inconsistent in its interface, and even though there are privacy controls, they're confusing and it's hard to tell who can see what. With this setup I know what's going on, and even the default template is prettier than the other option.

What's up for the future?

You can use any of the links in the toolbox to RSS or check up on that particular aspect. I promise to always tag my posts, so that those of you only interested in knitting or fiction-writing or whatever will know what to read and what to skip. Eventually, I would like the main blog part to be mostly public (some posts will be exclusive to vous), while the links will have varying degrees of privacy on them. So, for instance, some of my photo galleries may be public, but not all of them.

Hope you stick around for the experiment. Comments will always be on so that I can get feedback on the new mousetrap!