Shiny, new things

Some fun new things chez Impermanent:

I won a First Reads giveaway from Goodreads! (Ignore the crap from my desk in the photo...I was too lazy to clear it off.) I've entered about a frillion giveaways (because, really, what's better than free books?), but this is my first win. The book is The Painter from Shanghai by Jennifer Cody Epstein. I'm looking forward to reading & reviewing it, but I've got a stack of books from the library to finish first (a handful of screenplay and writing books, The Man Who Loved Jane Austen by Sally Smith O'Rourke, Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra, The Charlemagne Pursuit by Steve Berry). Hopefully it won't take too long to get through everything...I'm plagued by that age-old problem: so many books, so little time.


On the tech front, I just got a new HP Mini 1000 Netbook:

It's adorable. Only about 10.5" x 6.5" and about two pounds, I've had it for all of 24 hours and I already love it. (I threw my first-gen iPod mini in the pictures for scale.) There was a bit of frustration when trying to get online for the first time, but Qwest tech support walked me through the whole thing (I got very decent service with the internet customer service guys; I've heard the phone service reps are impossible, though) and everything is good to go now.

There's no disc drive on the netbook, so I'm trying Open Office's word processor instead of MS Word; I've heard it's totally compatible and some folks even prefer it to Word. We'll see what happens. I'm going to have a hell of a time getting Final Draft on there, though. Aie. Also, it's probably a good thing I'm young and don't need bifocals, since the screen is 8.9" (diagonal) and a 1024x600 resolution means things get pretty small; my mother couldn't read any of the text online and I had to make most images on Flickr full screen before she was happy.

All I need to do now is sew up a padded sleeve for carrying it around and we'll be completely portable. At the moment, I'm chained to my desktop whenever I want to write, which inevitably makes me less inclined to do it. This is going to do wonders for my productivity. (Famous last words...)

We're heading into a cold, rainy weekend in the Twin Cities, so I'll have plenty of opportunity to 1) read and 2) use my netbook while hiding out indoors. Silver lining and all that, right?