A Taste Of Endless Time ([info]copperbadge) wrote,
@ 2009-11-27 12:39:00
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I woke up today with a Thangover, which is what happens when you wake up the day after Thanksgiving and come face to face with all the turkey in your fridge. :D But I made bacon and biscuits for breakfast, so that was nice.

Oddly, I really wanted to take today "off", to sit around and do whatever I wanted, but I have been adhering to The To Do List for so long now that I get antsy if I'm not doing something from it. There are things on it that I could be doing, but none of them are urgent or things I really want to do. So I've spent the morning watching movies and playing video games, but I'm a bit tired of that now. I tried writing, but everything looks awkward and stilted, so I gave that a miss.

What I'd actually really like to be doing, weirdly, is typesetting work on two new projects I've been working on in my spare time. But I don't have Word at home, and typesetting in OpenOffice is supremely pointless.

I used to be much better at idleness than I am now.

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[info]midgetgems
2009-11-27 06:45 pm UTC (link)
Have my assignment! I'll be idle for you. I'm fantastic at being idle.

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[info]ihlanya
2009-11-27 07:04 pm UTC (link)
Relaxation is a lost art! I'd like to just sit on my porch, rocking my chair, watching the world go by and spittin' my baccy in teh spittoon

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[info]lavinialavender
2009-11-27 07:36 pm UTC (link)
...You don't have Word at home? *flummoxed* What do you do your writing in?

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[info]lessthanpie
2009-11-27 07:46 pm UTC (link)
I don't have Word at home either. It's expensive for the Mac that is my main computer, and the only Windows machine I have is a bitty netbook that didn't come with it; I'm definitely not paying for two versions of it. I use OpenOffice or Googledocs for opening other people's files/making documents so other people can open them in Word, but I do most of my writing in TextEdit or Notebook.

For some reason I'm always surprised to find that other people do without it, too, though. :)

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[info]lavinialavender
2009-11-27 08:56 pm UTC (link)
Macs don't come with the Word (or some Mac equivalent) software?

I love Googledocs too, but I'd hate to be dependent on the internet to access the files.

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[info]lessthanpie
2009-11-28 01:11 am UTC (link)
Nope. (Well, it does come with trial versions installed of both MS Word and Mac's iWork that has a thing, but I've never used it because I'm cheap. :P) TextEdit does what I need it to to get words on the page, and then I can mess with them elsewhere. (Like Sam, I can use Word at work if I really need to tweak something, but it generally adds so much junk to the formatting I mostly don't bother.)

Googledocs is amazing for backups and working on more than one computer. I love it very much.

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[info]copperbadge
2009-11-27 08:13 pm UTC (link)
Well, I write all my fanfic and original work in notepad. I do anything that needs formatting in OpenOffice, and if it needs to be especially fancy I take it in and put the finishing touches on it in Word at work.

Word is gigantic, and creates considerable slowness on my computer because it has this indexing program that's always running in the background, even when it's not open. Notepad is fast, never crashes, and allows me to copy-paste into Semagic and word processors without any wonky formatting.

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[info]lavinialavender
2009-11-27 08:58 pm UTC (link)
...Huh. Guess I severely underestimated Notepad. I suppose it works well enough - though you can't italicize in it, right?

Yeah, it is true that copy/pasting from Word is a bitch.

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[info]copperbadge
2009-11-27 09:00 pm UTC (link)
You can't italicise in Notepad, but anything I'm writing in notepad will eventually be in html formatting anyway. I just HTML-tag italics.

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[info]aunty_marion
2009-11-27 09:52 pm UTC (link)
You can turn the indexing thingy off, you know. It doesn't *need* to be on.

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[info]copperbadge
2009-11-27 09:54 pm UTC (link)
Eh, it still takes up tons of space on my hard drive and I just don't use it that much. OpenOffice is perfectly adequate for initial formatting, and then I can do the final touches at work.

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[info]tenebris
2009-11-30 01:14 am UTC (link)
I may have said this before--crap memory!--but I am fascinated by how many serious writers I know who don't write in Word. You're another who uses Notepad, and I have friends who use GDocs or ZoHo writer for preference. Notepad's lack of AutoSave gives me fits, so I'm in RoughDraft (RTF files and TABBED DOCUMENTS, whee), but yeah, I can't write fiction for shit in Word. It's just too...Word. I feel like I'm being crushed by its formatting desires.

I sorta wonder how common it is, in fandom and in pro writing?

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[info]copperbadge
2009-11-30 01:22 am UTC (link)
Word's autosave feature was one of the things that drove me to notepad, actually, because while occasionally I do lose stuff (once, maybe twice a year?) I never have to sit through the whole thing freezing during autosave, and notepad never crashes like Word does -- the only time I lose stuff is on the rare occasions when the whole computer crashes.

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[info]kit_maxel
2009-11-27 07:54 pm UTC (link)
This is the first time I'm not working customer service in three years; I work for a school, and I'm in school, so I've had this whole week off. Last Friday was weird. "But what do I do with myself for a week?" ...I've been watching a lot of tv and playing Warcraft III.

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[info]firynze
2009-11-27 08:43 pm UTC (link)
I am awful at idleness. Ask me how being crippled and stuck on the couch for eight months has ended with me creating an internet startup and a publishing company!

*headdesk*

Today and tomorrow were supposed to be my days off - my parents are here and are happily bustling around tidying my house and cooking things and taking care of my leftovers for me. And yet...I find myself trying to do chores and whatnot. I can't just sit and catch up on my magazines and books. I'm not writing, either - while I can't seem to write with my parents around (my mother narrates out loud while doing anything), I can't seem to get in the groove while they're out running errands.

Why is typesetting in OpenOffice pointless? I admit to not having tried it, but I'm always interested in hearing typesetting stories and recommendations, esp as I move towards doing more at home, where I don't have InDesign.

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[info]copperbadge
2009-11-27 08:47 pm UTC (link)
OpenOffice is basically a clone of Word, but they took some of the functionality out. For example, you can't set section breaks to format margins and vertical alignment differently, and the headers and footers are much less flexible. Page size can't be customised as much, and when you open the file in Word, things tend to have shifted around. (My resumes, formatted to fit on one page in OpenOffice, tended to bleed into a second page in Word.)

Word is considered extremely amateur by professional typesetters, but compared to OpenOffice it's practically God. :D

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[info]firynze
2009-11-27 08:52 pm UTC (link)
Yeesh, that's saying something! Right, I guess I try Scribus for open-source formatting!

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[info]onebrightroad
2009-11-27 09:06 pm UTC (link)
As a recovering tech writer, I hate writing long documents in Word. Hate! My typesetting and layout software of choice used to be PageMaker, which rocks like a rocking thing but was sadly discontinued. (I haven't used InDesign enough to have an opinion on whether it's a worthy successor to PageMaker).

I'm not exactly bad at idleness, but there's only so much lolling about I can do before I reach for the knitting or have to get up and chase a cat. I require diversions after a while.

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[info]copperbadge
2009-11-27 09:44 pm UTC (link)
I've not found PageMaker a good substitute for Word for my own personal typesetting, but I'm typesetting novels, no graphics or especially fancy formatting required. Pagemaker does, I've heard, have infinitely superior kerning and justification functions.

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[info]sophie_spence
2009-11-28 05:42 pm UTC (link)
I would medal in Idleness if it were an Olympic sport.

This is what I plan to do with our leftover turkey, assuming someone around here is willing to drive to the store for sour cream.

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[info]copperbadge
2009-11-30 05:47 pm UTC (link)
Ooooooh that looks good.

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[info]bree_black
2009-11-29 10:47 pm UTC (link)
My "day off" activity this weekend was watching Torchwood for the first time. I blame you.

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[info]copperbadge
2009-11-29 10:51 pm UTC (link)
LOL! What did you think of it?

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[info]bree_black
2009-11-29 11:16 pm UTC (link)
I had been warned that it doesn't fit my usual aesthetic and that I would have trouble adjusting... but I fell in love immediately. :)

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[info]copperbadge
2009-11-29 11:32 pm UTC (link)
HOORAY!

How much did you watch?

'Cause if you like Ianto, you might want to skip "season" three.

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[info]bree_black
2009-11-30 01:13 am UTC (link)
Seriously, only two episodes.

But yes, being in the Cafe has prepared me for season 3.

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