I now have a brand new lovely laptop...

It's a Toshiba 2450-201 and it was with £200 off in PCWorld...

Now all i need is to install the braodband at home, since we have all the wireless cards and everything.

SOON I will be back in the fforum in full force... (i have enough of a backlog to read!)

Ooh, excellent! I'm now a little jealous as I'm still stuck on this rather slow old thing. Have fun!



..........................................................................................

That which does not kill us makes us stranger.
(Llewelyn the dragon, Ozy and Millie)

Sarah

it's my 30th birthday present from my parents (well they gave 80% I put in the other 20%)

I got it before my birthday because my wireless network card doens't work in Win95 so i needed to upgrade anyway...

Excellent - what nice parents you've got! Broadband's great - so much faster. Oh and happy birthday!



_ _ _ _ _

If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur.

thanks
it's not till the end of august, but i'll be in the edinburgh festival that week and in the highlands the week after...

wooooo holiday!

oh jealousy - I love the Edinburgh Festival. I'm off up to Perthshire at the end of July for a week which'll be brilliant, but the festival it ain't!



_ _ _ _ _

If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur.

I've just updated the home page of my site. It isn't done quite as thoroughly as I'd like, but it's far too late at night to be doing anything like that at all. Basically I've just removed a reference to a site I had something on that has closed down, and put up a list of excuses for why I haven't done much writing recently.

One excuse is that I've spent far too much time reading the ever-expanding fforum, and I've included a link to Jasper's homepage. It worked when I tried it.

As a reminder, and for newbies since I last mentioned this (probably about 200 of them by now :) ), my website, which is about my writing, is at:

www.gillian-f-taylor.co.uk

and also, I think

www.genre-fiction.co.uk


I'm thinking about adding another section, possibly for photos of things like the costumes I've made, and of the cats and friends, so that folks have some idea of what I'm rambling on about. Sometime, maybe. That and conquering the world.

Carla - hurrah for your parents! They come in useful sometimes don't they?

yeah, when they asked me for suggestions for a birthday pressie i kind of hinted that 30 was a big age and my laptop was getting really old
;-)

I was the money messenger, can I be congratulated too? ;)

And Carla, give me present ideas :D
(not as expensive, please, hehehe)

There are a few DVDs I wouldn't mind...

I will make a list, Lizzy asked me for it as well...

Parents can be great that way. My dad shelled out for my last two desktop computers (I bought the PowerBook by myself), and considering I'm in graphics this was no mean accomplishment. On neither occasion was it my birthday, now I come to think of it... Right now I'm considering 5MP digital cameras, which actually *is* a birthday present (though as I have been mulling the issue for a couple of months now it is going to resemble an early Christmas present more). This does in some way make up for having to move in the span of two weeks.

My parents were forced to shell out for my laptop: the school decided that the Year 5 "laptop pilot" was successful, so they made all the students going into Year 6 the next year buy a laptop! Sadly, for my parents anyway, I've got a twin sister at the same school, so SHE had to get one as well!

BTW humilitas, are powerbooks good? I've got an iBook.

from me :)

PowerBooks are great!—even my first-generation 500 MHz one running OS 9 with only CD-ROM. I don't take it quite everywhere, but it has been invaluable over the last two plus years, bridging the gap between my aging Dell and my new iMac very nicely and enabling me to get things done even when I am away from home. (This is frequent, since my parents travel a lot and I housesit for them.) I network it to my iMac for easy and speedy file transfer. It has the lovely 15" screen, making it possible for me to use (my focal distance is very short and I am very tall, so am forced to lean over it a lot), and because it is a widescreen format I can have quite a large working area in InDesign and still have room for the forest of palettes as well. (This is great, of course, though all the same I am very much looking forward to InDesign 3, because I hear that the palette problem has been addressed to some extent.) I will upgrade it to OS X when Panther comes out this fall, which will be nice because then I can use my iPod with it as well.

I have loved the iBooks since they first appeared. Until they had the 14" screen they were too small for me to see well enough, however, and alas they still run on G3 processors. However, I love that the ports are all on the left side instead of the back, and the hinge for the screen is great. Apple really did it right with the iBook, like the iMac—good, powerful computers for quite reasonable (for Apple) prices. Of course it helps that they are way stylish. :) (Mind you, I am a bit disappointed with the appearance of the new G5 PowerMacs; I hope that by the time I need one they will have improved it somewhat!)

You could be a computer salesman! I don't like the new powerbooks that much either, 17" is pretty ugly I think (could that be an oxymoron? i luurve oxymorons) .

from moi :)



"What I need is a strong drink and a peer-group." -Ford Prefect

Actually I was talking about the new professional desktop line, just announced in June and not yet shipping. However, I agree the 17" PowerBook is a little silly to carry around unless one has no other desktop computer, in which case it might be great. It has the identical screen as the iMac I am now writing this message on, and if it looks this good it might be worth the extra bulk... :)

I admit to being very enthusiastic about Macs, after years in PC land (I was brought up on PCs and am still fond of them for some things), but have the melancholy suspicion that if I ever did try to sell one I'd fail miserably. I can only sell things onstage, it seems.