Apocalypse Girl

... you go looking to talk about sex with someone at 9:15am in the morning and it's not for lascivious reasons.

... you frequently kill off your friends in stories because you know it amuses them and you.

... you get up at 9am on a workday and don't feel guilty about it.

... you work over the weekend - voluntarily.

... your office is your laptop.

... the hardest part of your job is getting out of the house to go to the gym.

... you forget that there are Federal holidays.

... you distract yourself with LJ while your mind chews over a plot point in the current writing project.

This lovely thing, Portege R-400, is what I had been working on when I worked at MS in the Hardware Innovations group! In specific, the Active Notification portion. I was the Test Lead that tried real hard to make Toshiba, MS, Moto and Novatel play well together.

Here's a closer look at the Protégé R-400 laptop with the Edge Display hardware for the Active Notifications.

Here is a review from orgismo.com.

Here is a review from M-Dollar.

Here is a review by Engadget.com.

By the way, it is supposed to be "Portege" and not "Protégé." A bunch of reviewers got this wrong. I worked my butt off on that thing. I'm glad it's finally out to the public.

So, you know that I said that lovely phrase: "You know you're a stay at home author when your laptop is your office."? This has good and bad sides to it.

Yeah. When I came home from visiting the people at the Nexus, my laptop was displaying the lovely message, "Primary Hard Drive 0 not found."

Ok. I've had this happen before. Unplug. Remove battery. Remove Hard Drive. Hard reset. Put everything back together. It fixes whatever is wrong. Nope. "Primary Hard Drive 0 not found."

Great. Diagnostics. Drives not found. Ok. Great. Call some people. Yeah. Nothing doing tonight. Choices: See if it reboots in the morning (it has done this before). Call Dell in the morning. Data recovery at Rory's tomorrow night.

This will be the second Dell laptop drive to completely fail on me in less than three years. I am less than pleased. The only good thing is that I'm under a good warranty. Last time, they just sent me a new hard drive, free of charge but I had to re-install everything.

The only reason I'm not COMPLETELY freaking out right now is the fact that I did a thumb drive back up a couple days ago. The important stuff I've done since then mostly ended up in my Gmail account. Though, I will lose about 2500 words on the new novel. Also, I have my "secondary" laptop, my MacBook, Susannah. I'm still able to write and connect to the internet.

I'm seriously pondering buying a new desktop. This Dell laptop has been for the birds. The Dell desktop I had lasted for 5 years without a problem.

...SNOW ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM 4 AM TO 10 AM PST TUESDAY...

SNOW WILL DEVELOP LATE TONIGHT AND CONTINUE TUESDAY MORNING. BY LATE MORNING THE PRECIPITATION WILL CHANGE TO SCATTERED SHOWERS OF MOSTLY RAIN.

ACCUMULATIONS WILL RANGE FROM AROUND AN INCH IN URBAN HEAT ISLANDS LIKE DOWNTOWN SEATTLE...TO 2 OR 3 INCHES IN OUTLYING AREAS. THE HEAVIEST ACCUMULATIONS IN THE ADVISORY AREA WILL PROBABLY OCCUR IN THE NORTHWEST INTERIOR...WHERE ISOLATED SPOTS COULD GET UP TO 4 INCHES OF SNOW.

TEMPERATURES WILL RISE TO NEAR 40 DEGREES TUESDAY AFTERNOON. OVERNIGHT LOWS WILL BE BELOW FREEZING TUESDAY NIGHT THOUGH ...AND WET ROADS WILL BECOME ICY AND HAZARDOUS BY WEDNESDAY MORNING.

A SNOW ADVISORY MEANS THAT PERIODS OF SNOW WILL CAUSE MAINLY TRAVEL DIFFICULTIES. BE PREPARED FOR SNOW COVERED ROADS AND LIMITED VISIBILITIES...AND USE CAUTION WHILE DRIVING.