Thursday, 16 January 2003

Worked on the new story I'd started a few days ago. I've been thinking about the ending and realized that it needs a slightly different beginning. Since I'd been holding off on writing the first scene, that was easy. Not much needed to be thrown away, but it's holding at about 1300 words.

I have finally dragged myself into the 1990s: I got us cell phones.

We actually had a very old analog cell phone, which was really all we needed for emergencies. But every now and then--when Jackie and I were going to meet someplace for lunch and I had something come up at work that would make me late, for example, but Jackie had already left to house to run errands on the way--it would have been handy to have cell phones. So, now we do.

College students, of course, have all had cell phones for years. For many years colleges used to pick up a lot of extra money by over-charging students in dorms for phone access. So for students the financial case made cell phones a slam-dunk. For someone with a house or an apartment, though, the cell phone was just an extra expense, unless you were going to get rid of the land line, which has other disadvantages.

We may end up getting rid of the land line. We've got data connectivity via the cable modem. We've got the cell phones. But I'll take these things in stages.

I've got two old computers that I've been holding off on getting rid of, because I want to scrub the hard drives. Now the news is full of reports about some guys who bought a bunch of used hard drives and found all kinds of personal information on them, so it seems like a more urgent thing to do.

It turns out to be slightly complicated, though, finding all the cables, finding the install media, etc. So, my first attempt failed. I think I know everything I need, though, so it shouldn't take long now.