50,179 words. All done. I did it.
YEAH!
I want to thank everyone who encouraged me along the way. I couldn’t possibly have succeeded without you. Thank you!

50,179 words. All done. I did it.
YEAH!
I want to thank everyone who encouraged me along the way. I couldn’t possibly have succeeded without you. Thank you!
So here’s the saga of DSL at the Kerezman abode:
The Company discovers that we have trade with our ISP for DSL accounts that aren’t being used. Company says, “Hey Karel! If you pay for the Qwest line, you can use this traded-out DSL account.” Karel says, “Hot damn!” And then Qwest says, “Sorry buddy. You’re too far away and you’ve got some weird voltage on your line so even if you weren’t too far away it almost certainly wouldn’t work.”
Argh. All kinds of folks are lining up for a chance to kick me around. I finally, after five years, convince the company to help me out in the broadband department and I can’t have it anyway.
I’m all out of bright ideas. (No, cable is not a bright idea. It’s freakin’ expensive.) That troublesome 50k modem is going to be with us for quite a while longer, it seems.
Again, argh.
Okay, so that last entry was dark and unhappy and angry and so on. I got it out of my system, so I feel better now. We still have big problems to fix, but presumably we’ll get through them.
So, how to convince my loyal readers that I haven’t flipped what passes for my lid? How about a search-query roundup? Yeah, I haven’t done one of those in a while!
There, all sweetness and light again. See? All better. (Denial? What’s that?)
Because almost everyone else is doing it, I figured I might as well get on the blogrolling bandwagon. Besides, it makes easier the task of adding sites to the Blogs of Note. (I was doing the database entries by hand. Yes. I know. Go ahead and laugh at my puny programming skills.)
So now the Blogs of Note is powered by blogrolling.com. Now only that, but there’s a cute little RecipRoll widget to show some of the sites that have your favorite little grey duck on their blogrolls. Neat, wot?
While I’m here, allow me to point out a couple of new additions to the list. Bears Cave came via Captain Rooba (and the NaNo event), and I found Annessa.net while visiting The People’s Republic of Seabrook.
Last and certainly not least, there’s Ball and Chain. My wife finally couldn’t stand the weight of jealousy she felt at all of the attention I receive via this website, so now she’s got one of her very own. Pay her a visit, make her feel welcome. Maybe we can shift the balance of jealousy in my household… *grin*
In between fiddling with That Damned Laptop and my NaNo project pages and Quatro, The Undead PC… I have managed to churn out 5,000 words or so over the course of three days. This means that I’m actually on track, oddly enough.
The laptop trouble turned out to be entirely the fault of Mandrake 9.0, the KDE portion of which is hopelessly befouled. I installed it onto one of my desktop PCs at home and had even worse performance than I did on the laptop! Desperate to get a Linux-based writing utensil working, I installed (sigh) RedHat 8.0. It’s working, but I’m not as happy as I would have been with a good Mandrake rig. Oh well. Once November ends I can blow it straight to hell and try something else.
A fair portion of my weekend was spent at Java Vivace in NW Portland hanging out with fellow WriMos. An impromptu kick-off party was held Saturday afternoon, while yesterday was our “more regular” semi-impromptu meeting. I got there early yesterday and managed to get most of the day’s quota done between bites of omelette and sips of cocoa.
As an aside, is it just me or do coffee shops have the world’s worst hot chocolate? Bland, lifeless cocoa is the bane of my existence. One of the banes, anyway. It doesn’t get better with whipped cream, I can assure you. Someone, please, point me towards a place that serves really tasty and sweet hot chocolate.
To sum up, not only am I solidly on track but I have a working progress chart, backup copies of my work on almost half a dozen computers, and a new group of friends to chat with both online and in person. And I’m sure we’ll stay in touch for at least a couple of weeks after November has passed…
Well, I won’t be able to “write anywhere” in November like I’d planned. My *cough* wonderful *cough* Dell Inspiron 3800 seems to have given up the proverbial ghost. Oh, it can boot and run programs… very, very slowly. Don’t ask it to read from the CD-ROM drive. Don’t expect it to talk to any other machine over the network. Hmm, doesn’t that render the laptop completely useless? Why yes, it does.
Plan B is to chase everyone out of the computer room during Writing Time so I can use the big happy Internet-enabled machine to write and upload. I was hoping not to have to alienate my family during NaNoWriMo, but you can’t win ’em all.
With just a bit more than three hours to go, having to change the entire game plan does not a happy duckling make.