Plaidophile

I've been slowly training Werner to go on walks.

I'm trying to stick to the protocol in that article, although I'm probably pushing Werner a lot harder than I should. At this point I've managed to take him out twice, once last Sunday and once this morning. Getting him into the back yard is a bit of a challenge but when I get him there he enjoys himself for a little while before he gets freaked out and wants to go back inside. When I do get him back inside he gets really confused by how different floors work; the hallway to the yard is downstairs from me, and he always tries to go into my downstairs neighbor's unit. Carrying him back up the stairs when he's already freaked out is even more difficult than carrying him down them to begin with.

So far he seems to enjoy the yard, though. It's just the getting between there and the apartment that's a problem.

Also, once he's outside he has absolutely no interest in the treats.

So a while ago I posted about wanting a new laptop, and in the comments said I'd ordered a ThinkPad X220 Tablet. It actually took a lot longer than expected (due to multiple screwups on Lenovo's end), but I finally got it today. Actually I got a much better tablet than the one I originally ordered, and for about $200 less. It also came with the gigantic "slice" battery. I can get around 15 hours of battery life total, in theory. (I haven't measured it.)

Anyway, I quickly found that the default Lenovo install of everything was crappy, and I never managed to get a full recovery DVD set burned out and since I was going to upgrade the hard drive to my 256GB SSD (partitioned 128 for Windows, 128 for Linux) anyway, I figured I should just install an OEM copy. Fortunately, Microsoft makes the actual install media for that readily available, and fortunately my OEM key worked without any troubles. (And fortunately Lenovo makes all of the system drivers readily-available too.)

I did find that Wacom's own Tablet PC driver works way better than the one Lenovo provides (Lenovo's tries to calibrate everything by the edge of the screen, where the digitizer is very jittery and unpredictable, whereas Wacom's uses calibration points that are in the actual work area — much more useful).

The keyboard is a bit mushier than I'd like, and I'm getting all sorts of typos. I'm sure I'll get used to it in time though. On the plus side, it's quite a bit lighter than the MacBook this is replacing, and a much better size than the Inspiron Mini 9 that was my alternate for when the MacBook felt way too heavy and big to lug around.

The laptop also came with a docking station, and I'm entertaining the thought of turning my current desktop system (a Mac mini) into an HTPC and just using this laptop for everything. It's certainly powerful enough to. I'll have to weigh my options with software, though. Windows has plenty of drawing apps available but most of them suck; Linux has only a few available and all of them suck. I need to give Paint Tool SAI a fair shake; the UI is gimpy but a lot of artists I follow swear by it, and it's pretty cheap, too. Plus, I like that it actually lets you seamlessly mix raster and vector layers for sketching and inkwork; at least in principle it matches my mental model of how a drawing app should work.

I'm not sure how much time I'll be spending in Windows vs. Linux, also. I'm starting to suspect I'll just run Windows all the time, since Windows 7 actually isn't terribly painful to use for day-to-day stuff. If there were decent drawing programs for Linux the choice would be a lot easier, though.

In other technology news, due to an early-purchase opportunity provided by my employer, I got a PS Vita a couple days ago. My initial impressions: it's much nicer than the PSP, its version of Lumines is wonderful (although I've already played the hell out of it, and it doesn't seem to have the same depth of gameplay as the PS3 version, but it does have a quite nice soundtrack). It's also got the best version of wipEout so far. I haven't tried Modnation Racers (which came with the system). I have run into some stability problems, though, as well as some ridiculous human factors issues when it comes to its power saving "sleep" mode (vs. being actually turned off), and I've had to rebuild the system database several times due to what I guess was filesystem corruption. But given that the system technically isn't even out yet (at least not for most of the world) I'm not surprised that there's firmware issues.

Werner is less-than-pleased, but my home seems to be filling up with robots as of late.

To wit, in addition to the two Keepons, I also now have a Sphero, a Neato Robotic Vacuum (which is so far way better than the Roomba ever was), and a Homedics shiatsu massager. The last one isn't generally considered a robot, but I can't really see anything about it that's any less robotty than, say, the Neato, and it's a labor-saving device that does something automatically and makes loud motor noises and keeps me from playing with Werner so in his mind it's all the same anyway.

I also got a PS Vita and a bunch of games for it and have basically just played a lot of Lumines because what other games do you need, anyway?

Basically my twelve-year-old self is really happy right now.

I have been a lot less stressed ever since making the following changes in my lifestyle:

• Installing Comment Blocker on Firefox (and Shut Up on Chrome, although I'm back to Firefox full-time)
• Turning off all email notifications for general-purpose comment systems (Disqus, TypePad, etc.) that I can
• Sending all emails from comment systems that can't have notifications disabled (YouTube, Blogger, etc.) directly to the trash
• Blocking/ignoring/gagging people on IRC and MUCKs who infuriate me
• Not following blogs, LJs, etc. that have turned into nothing but whining or trolling
• Not following webcomics that have stopped being entertaining
• When something still manages to get me angry, taking a deep breath and thinking about how little it matters

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So I just got a gigantic (thousands of dollars) bill for my CT scan a month ago, with an "uninsured discount." This means that Sutter's billing department has most likely either forgotten to bill my insurance, lost the information outright, or made a stupid data-entry error which has caused them to believe that my insurance isn't valid. Either way, this is going to be another giant headache that takes another fucking year to take care of. All for a test that found nothing.

And this is why I should just stop caring about my health.