Today I:

• bought a book: Singularity Sky by Charles Stross (which I will ask him to sign tomorrow)
• ordered three t-shirts: one for Nadia, two for me (including the official con t-shirt)
• attended a number great sessions

Sessions Attended on Day 2

These are the sessions I attended:

The Last Airbender: race and Hollywood cinema

• We talked about a lot of stuff, most of which is covered on Racebending.com

Making a living: Professional writing for speculative fiction authors

• Great session and I got to hear both John Scalzi (Wikipedia) and Cory Doctorow (Wikipedia) talk! :)
• Most writers of speculative fiction (or fiction of any kind, really) need to think, work, and act like freelancers, entrepreneurs, and sole traders
• Important things to do/remember:
• have multiple income streams (including fallback streams)
• day jobs can be very useful to have
• save all the money you can
• be good at scheduling your time
• write every day (this is important)

The future of privacy

• This was another great session and, in this, I got to hear Charles Stross (Wikipedia) talk! :)
• Privacy is complicated and our concepts of privacy are changing very quickly
• Technology is moving much faster than the cultural shifts needed to use it well

Eowyn and Sam: underappreciated heroes in The Lord of the Rings

• This is my favourite session of the con so far
• Everyone in the room loved Tolkien, knew a lot about him and his books, and spoke very intelligently about the books and the Peter Jackson movie trilogy
• We talked mostly about Eowyn, Sam, and Faramir

To the stars: the never-ending history of Star Trek

• This was an excellent session as well, especially since it included Melinda Snodgrass (Wikipedia) on the panel :)
• The new Star Trek film was shot using the script’s first draft because it was shot during the Hollywood writer’s strike

Academic Panel: These are not the people you are looking for: race in SFF

• This was a good panel with some brilliant panelists, including China Miéville
• I can’t write all the awesome stuff that was discussed so, instead, I suggest you read the article that this session was inspired by: ‘Racism and Science Fiction’ by Samuel R. Delany in the The New York Review of Science Fiction

Sessions for Day 3

Tomorrow I’m planning to attend these sessions:

• Copyright in the 21st Century
• The best SF novel you have never read or Capes and skirts: the plight of female superheroes or QF (the SF version of Stephen Fry’s quiz show QI) – I’m having a hard time making up my mind!
• The James Bond enigma
• Book signing with Gail Carriger followed by Did the future just arrive? The e-book and the publishing industry
• Cyberpunk and the city or Vote #1 The Thing for President: how cult films are born
• Thinking in trilogies or Micro-audience and the online critic
• Academic Panel: Fantastic females: reworking feminism in women’s fantasy
• The Masquerade Ball

It should be awesome :)

Today was the first day and, so far, it’s been awesome.

Choices, Choices…

The biggest problem with conventions like these are that there are multiple sessions running concurrently (in multiple rooms, of course) so you have to choose which one of those you want to attend.

The organizers do, however, try to make your life a little easier by dividing sessions into topic streams – such as kids, young adults, academic panels, academic papers, writers workshops, film programs, signings, talks from guests, and so on. That way, if you have any special overarching interest in one streams, it makes it a little easier for your to make your choices.

Sessions Attended on Day 1

Today, aside from the opening ceremony, I attended the following sessions during which I learnt the following things (though, of course, this is just a small sample of what was discussed there):

Breaking the fourth wall: Supernatural and its audience

• There are two kinds of ‘fourth walls’:
• one in which the show’s authors are influenced by the fans (e.g. the killing off of Bela in Supernatural season 3) and
• the other in which the show’s characters interact with the audience during/through the show (e.g. the bit after the credits in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off).
• Fan influence can be both to the show’s benefit and detriment. In the case of Supernatural the consensus seems to be that the latter occurred.
• It can sometimes be hard for a show’s authors to figure out whether the feedback they’re getting from their fans is:
• just the loudest people trying to get them to write the show they really want to see (e.g. this must happen in the next season because I think that would be awesome!) or
• a genuine fan pointing out a flaw or blind spot in their story or show choices (e.g. all the show’s characters happen to be Caucasian…wtf?).
• American TV networks seem to be shifting the way in which they source and plan for serialized shows. The original model was, for example, a show that had a 5-year storyline with defined milestones for each season. The newer model seems to be the British one of shows being sold with 1-year plans and, if they do well in that first year, being picked up for subsequent seasons.

Perfectly packaged: designing and marketing science fiction

• A book’s cover image should tell you what it feels like to be reading that book
• Some manuscripts are really easy to pick covers for while for others (such as cross-genre one) it’s a much harder exercise
• ‘Less is more’ in book covers and one of the most effective covers is one with big lettering for both the author’s name and book’s title and with only a small image/illustration
• Publishers try to avoid people’s faces on book covers because it leaves more to the imagination
• Black book covers with a single, coloured high-contrast image in the centre (i.e. the Twilight style) is very last year

Things to do in Melbourne when you’re geek

• There’s lots to do in Melbourne when you’re a geek
• Street art is cool, there are lots of bars, and you really should visit the Queen Victoria Market and State Library of Victoria
• Good geeky places to visit in the CBD include:
• Minotaur (“the pop culture megastore”)
• Outre Gallery
• Of Science & Swords (book shop)
• Sticky (‘zine shop)

Sessions for Day 2

Tomorrow I’m planning to attend the following sessions:

• When history becomes fantasy: artistic license and historical cinema
• The Last Airbender: race and Hollywood cinema
• Rethinking SETI: 50 years on – though this has been rescheduled so I’ll have to change my plans accordingly
• The future of privacy or, if I’m one of the first ten to sign up, a kaffeeklatsch (i.e. small group discussion) with Gail Carriger
• Shaun Tan Guest of Honour Speech
• Eowyn and Sam: underappreciated heroes in The Lord of the Rings
• To the stars: the never-ending history of Star Trek
• Academic Panel: These are not the people you are looking for: race in SFF

I’ll also go check out the dealer’s room and go to the Friday Night Filking session (which should be lots of fun).

Please donate widely and as much you can. The Australian Red Cross is a great place to start.

In ‘Why I Returned my iPad’ Paul Bregman talks about the importance of boredom and unproductive time in his life:

Being bored is a precious thing, a state of mind we should pursue. Once boredom sets in, our minds begin to wander, looking for something exciting, something interesting to land on. And that’s where creativity arises.

My best ideas come to me when I am unproductive. When I am running but not listening to my iPod. When I am sitting, doing nothing, waiting for someone. When I am lying in bed as my mind wanders before falling to sleep. These "wasted" moments, moments not filled with anything in particular, are vital.

They are the moments in which we, often unconsciously, organize our minds, make sense of our lives, and connect the dots. They’re the moments in which we talk to ourselves. And listen.

While in ‘How Do You Process Your Life?’ Tara Sophia Mohr talks about the need for downtime during which she reflects on and process what’s been going on in her life:

I need reflective processing time desperately, I’ve learned. Not because I’ll stop functioning without it. On the contrary, I look more “normal” to others when I don’t have it.

[…]

But to be the woman I want to be – emotionally generous, not cranky or erratic or jaded; to be spacious and open and deep, to have a presence that feels to myself and others to be grounded and alert and graceful; to be someone who brings more sanity into this world instead of contributing to the craziness, then I need downtime. To deal with colleagues and professional partners in a rational and calm way, to manage the challenges of my work effectively, to show up creative and focused everyday, I need to process what comes into the ecosystem of me.

I agree wholeheartedly with both Bregman and Mohr.

I love being alone.

In fact, I need to be alone a lot. That’s how I recharge. That’s how I de-stress. That’s when I truly relax.

A lot of things that people seem to like doing with others, I like doing on my own. Such as watching TV or movies, going to the cinema, eating lunch, cooking, and shopping.

This is not to say that I don’t enjoy socializing or doing all those activities with others. I do. I love to hang out and do stuff with Nadia, my family, my close friends, and all of my colleagues at work. I enjoy those social interactions very much and they, too, recharge me (though in a different way).

Afterwards, however, I need to be alone again. If only for a little while. At work, for example, I make it a point to eat lunch away from my desk, in the break out area, with my earphones on (usually listening to a podcast). There are people around me, of course, but I’m in a little world of my own.

I need to be very alone particularly after hanging out with lots of people in a highly social situation – like at a party or conference. In fact, I need to go hide under a rock for a little while after attending events like those!

Being alone or on my own doesn’t mean everything around me has to be peaceful and quiet or that I have to be lonely. I sometimes like being alone in the middle of a really crowded place. To me, being alone means having my thoughts to myself, or reducing my sensory inputs, or simply letting my brain idle (like, for example, while commuting to and from work every day).

Why do I like being alone so much?

I don’t know. That’s just the way I’m wired or have come to be configured. I enjoy my state of aloneness. It makes my brain happy. I haven’t bothered analysing why. Some day I might.

I do know that I’m not depressed on antisocial, though. So it’s not because of that. And I’m not a loner, either. I have plenty of friends and acquaintances who I love to hang out with and who, in turn, enjoy hanging out with me. I make it a point to say this because, in my experience (which I have subsequently generalized a little), many extroverted people tend to jump to erroneous conclusions – something must be wrong with him, then! – when they find out how much I like being on my own.

I do think that my wanting to be on my own a lot might have to do with the way, or the speed at which, I process things. I’m not the best at thinking on my feet, for example. I like to take my time. I like to plan things slowly. I like seeing the big picture. That’s just a guess, though, and I’m sure it’s only part of the story.

Anyway, I don’t have a point or conclusion to make. This is not some big revelation or something I’ve been dying to tell the world about myself. I just watched that video, enjoyed it very much, and wanted to put my rambling thoughts on the matter out there.

Last year I got that connection from 3. I bought from them a USB mobile broadband modem and signed up for a prepaid month-to-month data plan.

[Source: PC World]

This year I went one better. I bought and got Lenovo to preinstall an internal broadband modem (the Qualcomm Gobi 2000) when I bought my tablet PC.

I did that because I didn’t want to carry around a USB modem that I’d have to plug in every time I was out and about and wanted to connect to the Internet.

My plan was to transfer my existing 3 connection over from the old modem to the new one. I considered going to a 3 store and asking them to do that for me but then realized that, being a technology geek, I could probably do all that (i.e. the SIM installation and network configuration) myself. And I was right :)

So, here’s how you do it…

First, Get a Connection

If you don’t already have a mobile broadband connection it’s pretty easy to get one from one of your local mobile carriers.

If you go with 3 in Australia, for example, you:

• go to one of their stores,
• sign up for an account (in my case, a prepaid one),
• tell them you’ll be using your own modem, and
• pick up the ‘3 Mobile Broadband Prepaid Starter Kit’ (which will include your SIM card).

Do read the BYO Modem page on their website before you go ahead and do that, though.

In my case all I had to do was take the SIM out of my USB modem.

Insert the SIM Card

Inserting the SIM card into your laptop (or tablet PC, as the case may be) is really easy.

In the Lenovo ThinkPad X210 tablet PC – as in other ThinkPad X-Series computers – the slot for the SIM card lies behind the battery bay (click images for larger photos):

Take the card, orient it according to the etching on the metal plate below the slot, and push it all the way in:

Then put the battery back on and you’re done.

Power-On the Modem

Assuming that you actually have a broadband modem installed in your computer and that all your drivers are up-to-date, you now need to turn your modem on.

To turn it on, use Lenovo’s Fn+F5 keystroke to bring up the ‘ThinkPad Wireless Radio’ window and press the ‘Power On’ button for the Wireless WAN Radio:

That should change the colour of the ‘Wireless WAN Radio’ text to green and should also light up (again, in green) the WWAN status indicator light just below the screen:

[Source: Laptop Mag]

If this doesn’t happen you probably don’t have a modem installed (check in Device Manager in Windows) or your modem isn’t configured properly (run Windows Update to get its latest drivers).

Configure the Connection

Next, you need to set up the connection to 3’s mobile network.

Since I use Lenovo’s Access Connections utility to manage my connections that was pretty straightforward to do. All I had to do was create a new Location Profile by clicking on the ‘Location Profiles’ tab:

And then pressing the ‘Create’ button:

Since I already have a Location Profile for my connection – called ‘3 Mobile Broadband WWAN’ – I’ll show you what its configuration is by clicking the ‘Edit’ button instead.

Under the ‘General Settings’ tab I’ve:

• named my profile,
• said that I want to connect using ‘Mobile Broadband’, and
• selected the Gobi 2000 modem (the only option in the list):

Under the ‘Mobile Broadband Settings’ tab I’ve said that this is an HSDPA/GPRS network that requires ‘Custom Settings’:

These ‘Custom Settings’ (which you get to by clicking the ‘Edit Settings’ button) are:

• the ‘Known WAN service providers’ option is ‘Other’,
• the ‘Custom service provider’ name is ‘3MobileBroadband Prepaid’ (this will be ‘3Mobile Broadband Postpaid’ if that’s the connection you signed up for),
• the APN is called ‘3services’:

There’s no need to change any advanced or additional settings. Click all the ‘OK’ buttons and you’re done.

Connect to the Network

Go back to the ‘Connect to the Internet’ tab and you should now have ‘3 Mobile Broadband WWAN’ listed in your Location drop-down list. Select that and click the ‘Connect’ button next to it.

In this screenshot I’ve already clicked ‘Connect’ so that button has changed to ‘Stop’:

It should take about 10-20 seconds to connect…and off you go!

If the connection doesn’t take place then something hasn’t been configured properly or your account with the mobile carrier hasn’t yet been activated. I can’t help you with the former (because I’ve already told you all I know) and the latter you should already have worked out with the salesperson at the mobile carrier’s store.

If further tweaking fails and you can’t find the answer on the Internet then you should take your laptop to the mobile carrier’s store and ask for help (or, alternatively, call them up and get help over the phone).

But if all this has worked then you should now be connected to the Internet via your mobile broadband connection. Yaay!

This was doubly unexpected because others around the world have reported that it’s taken them 3-4 weeks to get their X201 tablets. Mine, luckily, left the factory six days after I placed the order and took only four business days for delivery (since it weighs less than 5kg).

Not that the Lenovo website told me any of this: The package arrived before the website’s order tracking page had even been updated with the DHL tracking number!

System Specifications

Let’s start with the system specs:

• Intel Core i7-620 processor (2.00GHz, 4MB L3, 1066MHz)
• Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
• 12.1” multi-touch display (two finger touch & Wacom pen)
• 4GB RAM (DDR3)
• 500GB hard disk (7,200RPM)
• Intel Centrino Ultimate N-6300 wireless adapter
• Integrated mobile broadband modem (3G WWAN)
• Fingerprint reader, integrated camera (2MP), 5-in-1 media card reader, Bluetooth adapter
• 8 cell battery
• Upgrade to 3 years warranty

This what it looks like:

I’ll post more photos and some video of it over the comings weeks.

So, What do I Think of It?

It’s awesome.

I don’t have the time right now to explain just how awesome it is so here are some quick thoughts:

• It looks really good – simultaneously sleek, sexy, and businesslike – and feels strong and solid to hold and carry around.
• It runs really fast (I did get to spec it out nicely) and the screen is excellent.
• I love the keyboard, though the palm rest area in front of it is a little narrow.
• I like having both the track pad (which is tiny, though usable) and track stick (which is great for scrolling down pages) available. That said, I did also buy a Lenovo Bluetooth mouse for when I’m doing fiddly, precise stuff on the laptop (like image editing) while sitting at my desk. That external mouse is great, but is a little loud with the clicking.
• Both the two-finger touch and pen interfaces are fabulous. They do, however, take a while to get good at since you have calibrate them to your writing and touching styles.
• Using Windows 7 with touch (both finger and pen) is really fun, easy, and intuitive.
• The speakers are tiny, but surprisingly loud and usable at a pinch.
• I’ve found some of Lenovo’s software ‘enhancements’ to be a little irritating because they replace Windows functionality that works just fine and I know really well with something I had to learn, set up, and then get used to. For example, the Windows wireless connections interface has been replaced by Lenovo’s Access Connections software. I could uninstall this, of course, but now that I’ve learnt how to use it and have set it up properly, I can ignore it.
• Finally, as mentioned in various forums, I did have to upgrade the system’s BIOS because, after its first charge-discharge cycle the battery wasn’t charging beyond 45%.

How Are You Using It?

Since the X201t arrived earlier than expected – that, too, in the middle of a really busy week at work – I haven’t had much time to play with it, explore it as thoroughly as I would like, or put it through its paces (like editing HD video on it, for example).

It has already become part of my daily work life, though:

• I take notes on it at meetings
• I use it to work away from my desk (without having to undock my existing work laptop from my dual monitor setup, which is a real pain)
• I annotate documents with it

More broadly, I have started to collect and centralize my work and home lives into OneNote on it.

Before I start using it at it fullest potential, though, I need to do some housekeeping. Specifically:

• I need to install some more software on it. I’ve got the basics done but need to add a few more things.
• I need to upgrade my desktop PC from Windows Vista to Windows 7. That’ll make it easier for me to sync files across the two computers. This I started today (by manually backing-up all my desktop data onto my tablet PC) and will finish tomorrow (by doing a clean install of the desktop’s OS).
• I need to explore Windows 7 properly.
• I need to scan all my paper documents.

All that will happen in good time (particularly the last bit). For now, though, I’m having a blast using it and will keep you updated as it becomes a more central part of my life.

Oh, one thing, though: Using it to read e-mails and check my RSS feed subscriptions (using Gmail and Google Reader, respectively) is brilliant!

[Source: Engadget]

So, yes, more than three years after I first blogged about wanting a tablet PC, I am finally about to get one :)

But Wait…Weren’t You Getting a Fujitsu?

Yes, I was.

I did, however, say in my last tablet PC post that the Lenovo X210t was “still my #1 choice if I could afford it”. And, as it turned out, thanks to a massive sale at the Lenovo Australia website I could.

In fact, I ended up getting a system worth $5,400 for only $3,200! :)

When Will You Get It?

Towards the end of the month.

It was shipped from the Lenovo plant in Shenzhen on the 13th and will take about 10 business days to arrive. I don’t yet have its tracking number – the Lenovo store site takes a frustrating couple of days to get updated – but I’m guessing it’ll get to me on the 28th.

The funny thing is, there were two other items in my order: a Bluetooth mouse and an extended warranty. Both will get to me before my tablet PC does.

I should get the mouse tomorrow, in fact, because it shipped separately a day before the tablet PC and packages under 5kg take only 4 business for shipping. And I already have the extended warranty because I got a confirmation e-mail from Lenovo telling me that it had been processed. 

Oh, and to make it even harder for me to be patient, I even know the computer’s serial number because it was included in the extended warranty e-mail!

Actually, I shouldn’t complain. There’s a global shortage of Intel Core i5 and i7 processors so, when I placed the order about 10 days ago, the website said the tablet PC would ship from the plant “within 4 weeks”. I’m just thrilled that it shipped from the plant 8 days after I placed my order and not 28 days after!

There is one glimmer of hope, though: The tablet PC itself weights under 3kg so, if I’m lucky, the entire shipped package will weigh less than 5kg. If that’s the case then shipping will take 4 business days and I could get it as early as the 18th! I’ll find for sure tomorrow because that’s when the order tracking page on the Lenovo website will most likely get updated.

X201t Reviews and Information

Meanwhile, if you want to know more about the X201t, check out these reviews:

• Lenovo ThinkPad X210 Tablet Review [Engadget]
• Lenovo ThinkPad X201 Review [Notebook Review]
• Lenovo ThinkPad X210 Tablet [Laptop Magazine]
• Lenovo ThinkPad X201 Tablet Video Review [Mobile Tech Review]
• Chris Swan’s reviews: First Impressions and Week 2

I will, of course, post my own review once my tablet PC arrives :)

The photos from that day are on my ‘Sydney April 2010’ Set on Flickr but here are some of my favourites.

Buildings at University of Sydney

The second day of the conference ended around sunset and the sunlight on that overcast day was quite delicious. This is the Law School building:

Sydney Harbour Bridge

The Harbour Bridge is, of course, am imposing structure:

Even when it’s in the background:

It was fun, also, to see people doing the bridge walk on it:

Sydney Tower

I also managed to get a good perspective shot of the Sydney Tower from within the Sydney Explorer tour bus.

Sydney City

Finally, like my photo of Melbourne from Port Philip Bay, here’s a photo of Sydney from its harbour:

All in all, I had a great day wandering around this gorgeous city. I would have liked more time to explore but that’s no fun without Nadia so we’ll check the city out properly when we go there for TAM! Australia 2010.

Oh, I also got to try out my new camera – the Canon IXUS 120 IS – which, as you can see from the photos I took, is quite awesome.

Quick reminder: You can see all the photos from this trip on my ‘Sydney April 2010’ Set on Flickr.

Moving to a Content Management System

This time, though, the plan is to move it on to a Content Management System (CMS). Much as I love getting down and dirty with HTML code (via Dreamweaver, of course) a CMS-based site will be much faster and significantly easier to maintain. At the very least we won’t be stuck managing it from only those computers that have Dreamweaver installed on them.

The question then becomes: Which CMS do I choose? I’ve been using both proprietary and open source systems since 2001 so I know a lot about a lot of them. That means I can use pretty much any one that’s out there quite effectively; though I do plan to use an open source one for this site.

Fortunately, my choice is limited by the ones that my web hosting provider, E-Starr, provides automatic support for (specifically, installation and upgrade support). I’ve used a bunch of these CMSs in the past, too, so I’m already quite comfortable with most of them.

My Needs Have Changed

What’s also good is that my personal website needs aren’t what they used to be three years ago. For example:

• A lot of information about me is now available on my Google Profile
• I now host my photos on Picasaweb (albums) and Flickr (photo stream)
• I do most of my writing on my blogs (this one and my professional one)
• I no longer need to maintain a PDF version of my CV for people to download because most of that information is available on my LinkedIn profile
• A lot of the other content that I host on the site can be moved elsewhere (like Slideshare or Google Docs, for example)

What’s left, then, is mostly text content and a couple of archived websites. Any old CMS can handle the former and latter will remain the way they are so, all told, my CMS requirements are actually quite simple.

So, What Now?

What I think I’ll do now test a bunch of the CMSs available to see which one I like the most. I do have lots of options, including:

• Drupal
• Geeklog
• Joomla 1.5
• PHP-Nuke
• phpWCMS
• phpWebSite
• Siteframe
• TYPO3
• Xoops

Not to mention WordPress, which can be tweaked to make a pretty good CMS itself.

So, if all goes well, I will report back in a few weeks, by which time I hope to have the newest version of insanityWORKS.org up and running.

Wish me luck!