{"id":164,"date":"2008-08-18T12:55:46","date_gmt":"2008-08-18T12:55:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/doycetesterman.com\/wp\/?p=164"},"modified":"2008-08-18T12:55:46","modified_gmt":"2008-08-18T12:55:46","slug":"dawning-of-a-new-era","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/doycetesterman.com\/index.php\/2008\/08\/dawning-of-a-new-era\/","title":{"rendered":"Dawning of a new era"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.doycetesterman.com\/img\/diffeng2.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"diffeng2.jpg\" src=\"http:\/\/www.doycetesterman.com\/img\/diffeng2-thumb-150x128.jpg\" width=\"150\" height=\"128\" class=\"mt-image-left\" style=\"float: left; margin: 0 20px 20px 0;\"\/><\/a>This weekend marked Kaylee&#8217;s third birthday.  While she&#8217;s enjoyed the parties of past years, this was clearly the first time she really understood the central concept.<br \/>\n&#8220;This is a special day for me, and everyone is here and eating cake and singing because of <i>me<\/i>.  Also, I get to wear a crown all day. Bonus.&#8221;<br \/>\nAnother upgrade (considerably less significant in the grand scheme of things, but still nice) was that I got a new computer system (see picture, which is entirely accurate).  This new Dell XPS comes in as a replacement for my five and a half year old workhorse (getting quite wheezy and easily overheated in its later years), which has served me very well (easily the best run of any of my previous machines).<br \/>\nI&#8217;ll be completely honest &#8212; this new comp is primarily a gaming rig &#8212; it&#8217;s got a lovely (and huge) video card, obscene amounts of storage space and memory, a quad processor setup, and runs all my current games and entertainment with a kind of flawless perfection that makes me waste fifteen minutes taking screenshots of the intricate stitching on my avatar&#8217;s leather pauldrons.<br \/>\nSo, clearly: gaming.  Which is fine, since I&#8217;d rather do my writing on a laptop most of the time anyway, and I now have a fair number of options in the house for doing just that.<br \/>\nOne other thing that makes writing on my laptop(s) preferable to writing on my PC: Office 2007.  Specifically, my new desktop has Office 2007, my laptops don&#8217;t, and I think Word 2007 should win some kind of not-award for discouraging the actual act of writing in what is (still) rumored to be a word-processing program. I&#8217;d honestly rather write a full novel in Notepad just to avoid the intensely intrusive tool bars at the top of the window &#8211; massive Publishing and Layout buttons that seem to scream &#8216;WHAT YOUR NEW STORY REALLY NEEDS ARE SOME EYE CATCHING FONTS, DONCHA THINK?&#8221;<br \/>\nNo. No, I really don&#8217;t.  For writing, I need a program that:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Spellchecks with some degree of intelligence.\n<li>Allows you to boldface and italicize type.\n<li>Allows you to center the occasional line.\n<li>Saves the file into a format that pretty much anyone on the planet can read.\n<\/ul>\n<p>And that&#8217;s about it.  Everything beyond that is probably a distraction.<br \/>\nFor my money, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.doycetesterman.com\/wid\/RDraft20.exe\">Rough Draft<\/a> (a free, 1.6 megabyte program with both American and British English dictionaries installed) is all I really need,  For that matter, there are a couple good reasons for me to at least consider writing <s>Little Things<\/s> my next story using Google Docs.<br \/>\nHow about you? What&#8217;s your preferred sandbox?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This weekend marked Kaylee&#8217;s third birthday. While she&#8217;s enjoyed the parties of past years, this was clearly the first time she really understood the central concept. &#8220;This is a special day for me, and everyone is here and eating cake and singing because of me. Also, I get to wear a crown all day. Bonus.&#8221; &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/doycetesterman.com\/index.php\/2008\/08\/dawning-of-a-new-era\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Dawning of a new era&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_import_markdown_pro_load_document_selector":0,"_import_markdown_pro_submit_text_textarea":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6,8,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-164","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-musing","category-resources","category-untidy-heap"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/doycetesterman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/doycetesterman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/doycetesterman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/doycetesterman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/doycetesterman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=164"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/doycetesterman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/doycetesterman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/doycetesterman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/doycetesterman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}