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Initial impressions of Yosemite

Yosemite, OS X 10.10, finally dropped, so I’ve gone ahead and updated my laptop Aroree with it. So far my initial impressions of it are favorable. They’ve changed the overall design of it somewhat to make it better fit with the look of iOS 7 and iOS 8, which doesn’t surprise me. And performance-wise, my laptop now seems zippier, and I’m all for that.

iTunes

As part of this update, I also pulled down iTunes 12, and I’ve got to admit that that’s the thing that made me go ‘buh?’ first–not because of the changed layout of the program per se, but because now there’s a red icon for iTunes on the dock. Which is a distinct change from the years of blue iTunes icons we’ve had, and I’m not sure I approve of changing the color like that. I keep thinking something’s gone wrong every time I look at the dock and see that red icon there–or otherwise that something needs my attention, since “red circle” in Apple’s visual language has for so long meant “there’s a notification here that needs you to do something”.

Inside iTunes itself though I think I’m good with the new layout. It’s a bit less cluttered, and while I’m going to have to get used to changing icons on the toolbar along the top to see what I want to see, that’s not difficult. It’s similar to clicking things on my web browser, so that’s all good. And I particularly like the prettier layout for podcasts. Still to determine: how well this flavor of iTunes keeps things synced with my phone, particularly the recurring issue I’ve had with iTunes periodically deciding to duplicate some of my podcast feeds for no apparent reason.

Handoff

It’s pretty neat that I can message Dara via the Messages app on the computer and have it ping her on her phone. For that matter, the same conversation shows up on my phone and iPad, too. I haven’t tried to use the computer to make a call yet, but I think it’s pretty neat that that’s doable too.

I’m also going to want to try composing mail on the computer and seeing if I can pick it up again one of the devices, or vice versa. I don’t know how often I’ll use that feature, but it’ll be neat to try it out.

Mail

And speaking of mail, no huge functionality changes here as near as I can tell, other than Handoff. I’m seeing that a prior behavior that was irritating me still happens, but Dara’s theory is that this behavior is actually on purpose.

Specifically, it’s a behavior wherein if you have multiple mailboxes, let’s say A and B… and you get mail at Mailbox A but then move it over into Mailbox B, but then try to reply to the mail… it automatically defaults to replying from your B address. This is fine except when I’m trying to answer mail that goes to mailing lists. I keep forgetting which address I’m pointing at, and keep having to resend mailing list mail. Since this behavior has persisted through Mountain Lion, Mavericks, and now Yosemite, I’m clearly just going to have to make some tweaks to how I organize my mail.

I’m having to finally pull a lot of mail off my Gmail account anyway, since I’ve gotten tired of Mail.app choking when dealing with my Gmail accounts. I’ve seen ongoing problems with Mail refusing to download new mail from Gmail if I have a number of messages above a certain threshold. So before I updated to Yosemite, I’d already pulled a lot of mail off my Gmail accounts to try to reduce the amount of data that the program had to deal with. Thus, I don’t know if the problem persists in Yosemite or not. I’ll have to keep an eye out.

Printing

I do note with pleasure though that another long-standing bug does appear to have gotten fixed with printing of certain PDFs. One of our local utilities that we pay was doing something with its PDFs every time I tried to download the monthly bills, something that caused the files to get garbled whenever I tried to print them. So I’d have to mail them to Dara to let HER print them, since she was still on Snow Leopard for the longest time. Once she upgraded to Mavericks, though, the problem happened on her box too.

Now though, with Yosemite, the problem seems to have finally gone away. So I can print these bills again. Yay!

Weird computer name problems

I did see a new weird thing happen, though. My computer was mysteriously renaming itself from Aroree to Aroree-2, and I couldn’t figure out why. I’m apparently not the only person who was having this problem, according to my searches.

Renaming the box back to Aroree didn’t help, since the name would revert after a few minutes. What I finally had to do to fix this was to reboot into Repair mode, do a Disk Utility disk repair, and then reboot back into the OS. After having done that, the name change back to Aroree appears to have finally stuck. But any of y’all out there who’ve updated to Yosemite, you might keep an eye out for this.

iCloud Drive

I have this finally available, yay! Another thing I haven’t yet tried anything with, but it’s nice to see it there. It finally makes Pages potentially actually useful to me. And the reasons I care about this are a) Pages doesn’t talk to Dropbox, and b) as an iPad app, Pages has a somewhat friendlier experience than what I’m currently using to write on my iPad, which is DocsToGo.

For my next full book, I may try to use Pages instead of Word + DocsToGo, and see how that goes. I’ll report on that as it happens!

That’s everything I can think of to comment on right now. How about the rest of you out there? Who’s installed Yosemite and what do you think of it?

October 18, 2014 by
Main

General reminder and FAQ: Still not a romance writer

Actual thing said to me in email today: “I notice you do a fair amount of romance writing…”

To which I’d now like to issue the general reminder that no, actually, not a romance writer.

I am a romance reader, which is why I pay attention to the genre and often post about developments in it, such as my posts on the Ellora’s Cave v. Dear Author case. And also because hey, Carina is a Harlequin imprint and so I’m in contact with a lot of people who do write romance for Carina, and Carina authors are prone to showing up on Boosting the Signal. I love me some romance of assorted genres (historical, paranormal, Gothic, and romantic suspense), and I do believe strongly and proudly in owning my reading tastes.

(Also because Smart Bitches Trashy Books and Dear Author are bastions of awesomeness, and are responsible for helping me find the narrow band of romance I actually like to read, and for the aforementioned proud ownership of my reading tastes. Thank you, DBSA Podcast!)

And science fiction romance IS a thing, a hybrid of the genres. But despite my Carina covers, I’m not even writing SFR, really. I do write love stories, but the level of love story I write is comparable to what you’ll find in a lot of fantasy written by men.

Which is to say: I do have characters fall in love, but this is tangential to the plot and is not the primary driver of the plot. And I very, very rarely write sex scenes. When I do, most likely they will cut a fade to black before anything explicit happens. A romantic relationship by me, on camera, is mostly going to be some intense feelings (and by intense feelings I do NOT mean ‘spending several paragraphs talking about the character’s sudden case of lustypants’, because I find that boring), occasional smooching, and outbursts of daring and heroic activity on behalf of the party to whom a character is romantically inclined.

And yet, I still get mistaken for a romance writer. It’s an easy mistake to make, since I do read and follow the genre, and I post about it a lot. And because of my covers.

But I daresay that some of this is also how a lot of folks out there will all too often see “written by a woman” and automatically assume “must be a romance novel”. Women in SF/F get this all the damn time, and it’s tiresome. If you’ve seen my posts over the last couple years about assorted SFWA controversies, you should have a real good idea of how tiresome I find that attitude.

So in conclusion: not a romance writer, even though I’m a proud romance reader. If you’ve enjoyed reading Valor of the Healer and Vengeance of the Hunter, the favor I’d like to ask of you is this: tell folks about my work, especially people who might be looking at my covers and automatically assuming “romance novel”. Tell ’em “no, actually, she’s writing fantasy!”

I may write actual romance eventually. But I’m not yet. And if I do write something that actually qualifies as romance, believe me, I’ll be making that clear too. Who knows? Maybe I’ll be the first to write a romance with a folk musician as the hero or heroine. Because a well-played fiddle is sexy, yo. 😀

October 7, 2014 by
Main

Initial impressions of iOS 8

I installed iOS 8 on both of my iThings this week, so here’s a quick roundup of things I’ve noticed so far. In general, iOS 8 looks a LOT like iOS 7, and the stuff that interests me the most won’t really kick into play until Yosemite drops and I can update my Mac. But that said, there are some points of interest.

The Good:

The new Health app has a tab in it where you can fill in medical data about yourself that might be critical in an emergency–allergies, important conditions of note, meds you’re on, that kind of thing. This strikes me as super-helpful, and certainly in both my and Dara’s case, there are important things that medical personnel might need to know if we’re in an emergency situation. This data is accessible from the phone’s emergency screen, the same screen from which you can dial 911. Excellent idea, Apple.

I am pleased to note that not only have the recurring Smart Playlists bugs that have plagued me through the last several iOS releases not returned this time, but a few other bugs new to iOS 7 appear to have been fixed as well. Notably, I’m not seeing weirdly missing album art anymore. And I don’t have to restart the Music app after syncing now to un-stick the Not Recently Played smartlist as I play stuff on it. AND, they fixed the bug where my Not Recently Played playlist wasn’t showing me brand new stuff. So now that playlist is behaving like I originally expected it to. Good.

Playlists in the Music app are now showing a count of songs and a run time in minutes. This is helpful to have, particularly for my smart playlists like Not Recently Played, where I can see at a glance how big the playlist currently is.

The bug with setting wallpapers appears to have been fixed–this bug being the one wherein you were unable to actually zoom a photo to the size you wanted when setting a wallpaper. This was annoying and I’m glad it’s fixed. Let’s hope it stays that way as this rev of the OS gets minor updates.

On my iPhone, battery life seems like it’s better. I haven’t burned through the battery nearly as fast the last couple of days, even if I play music through a good chunk of the day.

The Not Bad Per Se But Not of Interest to Me:

Two things got added that I immediately turned off when I discovered them.

One is predictive text, where they show you example possible words in a bar above the keyboard as you type to try to anticipate what you’re actually about to say. I found this visually distracting. Fortunately it was easy to turn off in Settings > General > Keyboards > Predictive.

The other is that in the app switcher that they put in with iOS 7, when you double-tap the Home button, they’ve added a list of your recently accessed Contacts. I found this visually distracting as well, and turned that off too. You can find the setting in Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Show in App Switcher.

The Bad:

I’ve had apps hang unexpectedly a couple of times since the upgrade, requiring me to kill them in the App Switcher. This isn’t happening often, but it IS new behavior, and it’ll be something I’ll have to keep an eye on. The apps I’ve noticed this on so far have been Plants Vs. Zombies 2 and Friendly+, my Facebook app. I don’t know if this is a fault of the OS or of the apps not quite having been updated correctly for the new OS, though.

The Stuff I’m Still Investigating:

Apple’s handling of podcasts has been a mess in the last couple of revs of iOS, ever since they split podcasts out of the main Music app and off into their own Podcasts app. I’ve had recurring issues with certain podcasts duplicating themselves in my listing, and podcasts I’ve listened to still showing up in my list even though they’re supposed to have been deleted.

Still investigating whether handling of this has improved. A new version of the Podcasts app just dropped last night.

The Stuff I Will Play With More When Yosemite Drops:

You’re supposed to be able to share files across iCloud now, and have an accessible drive to put them on, similar to Dropbox, Google, OneDrive, and other such services. It’s about damn time Apple implemented that, and I’ll look forward to checking it out–since it’ll make Pages finally actually useful to me. Pages doesn’t talk to Dropbox, which has been a source of frustration to me.

Continuity will be interesting as well–the ability to answer messages across devices, such as answering a phone call on the Mac. Or starting a mail on the phone and picking it up again on the computer when I get home.

Should You Install It?:

If you have a recent device like an iPhone 5 or one of the newer iPads, yes, go for it. So far this seems like it’s a better than average iOS update.

However, if you have an iPhone 4S, you should read this. According to that article, the 4S suffers noticeable performance hits with iOS 8 on it.

September 19, 2014 by
Main

Are musicians better language learners?

I got into an interesting online discussion with Dara and our friend Rod, pertaining to recent research indicating that early musical instruction in childhood contributes to one’s language skills, by improving one’s ability to recognize meaningful sounds and reject noise.

As I am both a language geek and a music geek, you can imagine that this subject is of interest to me! So I went googling and found this article from back in February of this year, which talks a bit about this. According to this article, people who have early musical instruction have a better shot at learning languages even in adulthood.

Now me, I don’t know how well I match up to this, but it’s very interesting to consider nonetheless. I started playing flute in fourth grade, which would have been the year I turned ten. By age 12, I was in middle school band and I pretty quickly took over the first chair of the flute section, holding onto it until my eighth grade year when I was trumped by the girl who could play oboe.

I didn’t get to take language classes until high school, though. By then I’d had six years of school band, and it’s a very interesting question as to whether that musical instruction helped me out learning German. I had interest in German regardless–but it’s worth noting that I chose German partly because a) my dad had been stationed in Germany when he was in the Marines, and b) Elvis had been in Germany. He even had a bridge in one of his songs in German, and that was a not inconsiderable part of why I chose to take German instead of, say, Spanish. Even then, my language interest had a musical connection.

The language interest stayed with me into my adulthood and has certainly formed a significant part of my computer experience, since I do a lot of testing of stuff localized into other languages. A big part of that is pattern recognition, especially if the thing I’m testing is in Japanese–I have to rely on visual pattern matching just because Japanese characters don’t parse as ‘letters’ to me. So it’s a different kind of pattern matching than, say, on our German or French sites, where I know enough of the words that I can actually understand a good bit of what I see.

But that’s also visual pattern recognition. Part of what Dara and Rod and I talked about had to do with how this plays against aural pattern recognition in music–and whether the ability to learn patterns aurally in music affects your ability to match patterns visually, and vice versa. Does ability to read sheet music help you when you’re trying to learn to read a new language? Does ability to pick up on the structure of a song, or on a smaller scale certain repeated patterns of notes, help you identify recognizable patterns in spoken language? Do they all play well together in your brain?

I’m no researcher. But I can say this. It does all feel connected to me–I’ve absolutely noticed it all seeming to tie together as I’ve been studying French the last couple of years, as I’ve posted about before. Listening to a lot of Quebec trad improves my ability to aurally pattern-match words, and at the same time it’s got the song structure of the genre working in there too. Not only is Quebec trad heavily call-and-response driven, there are also distinct structures to songs, like the ones where you sing the last line of a verse and have that same line roll over to become the first line of the next verse.

And I’ve absolutely noticed that words or phrases I learn as part of a song have a much better chance at staying with me, too. They’re the ones most likely to pop out at me when I’m slowly stepping my way through reading something in French, or when I’m listening to a brand new song as well. Or if I’m reading the lyrics to a song, too.

Plus, I’ve been trying to use pattern recognition to learn to pick up tunes by ear in a session environment, too. It feels like a very similar skill to matching words–because there’s a definite grammar of how note patterns work in trad tunes, and I find myself slowly trying to learn that grammar and match it up with what I need to do on my flutes to make the correct noises. It feels exactly like trying to pick words that make sense out of spoken or sung French.

And I love the lot of it! Anybody else out there have similar experience?

September 11, 2014 by
Main

A few things make a Sunday post

John Scalzi has a good post up addressing the question of whether self-publishing has rendered Yog’s Law obsolete. Good commentary in the comments about this, and the importance of distinguishing between oneself as “writer” and as “publisher” when one self-publishes.

I saw this come up in the last backer update that went out to all of us who supported the Long Hidden anthology: an issue of whether it’s an expression of privilege when you dismiss the use of dialect in fiction. There’s a Storify link of the Twitter discussion here, and Insatiable Book Sluts has a thoughtful post up about it here. A lot of food for thought at both of these links, for both readers and writers.

Sad to hear that Angry Robot is closing a couple of its imprints. Scalzi has cogent commentary on this here, and I know this impacts several authors whose works I’m interested in. Notably, userinfomarthawells.

***

For tumblr users, Dara’s started a couple of extra tumblr blogs in addition to her main one. One is called Oldphemera and is for pics of old oddities that she finds. The other is Seattle–July 20, 1971, where she’s posting scans of a bunch of old bits of newspaper she found being used as packing material. It’s a fun glimpse of Seattle from that year, as seen in the newspaper.

Check ’em out!

***

Next weekend I’m going to have the pleasure of attending a house concert starring Claude Méthé, Mario Loiselle, and Pascal Gemme. Pascal is of course one of the three members of Genticorum, one of the contenders in the pitched three-way fight for Anna’s Favorite Quebec Trad Band! He’s recently released an album with Mario, and meanwhile, M. Méthé is another excellent Quebecois fiddler. They’re all on the way to Fiddle Tunes, and they’re stopping in Seattle to do their house concert.

VERY excited for another chance to hear Pascal play! And also excited about hearing M. Méthé–I’ve got a couple of recordings that feature him, and this’ll be the first time I get to see him in person.

I will report on the concert in depth. Stand by for that to come!

***

And one more music-related thing, this time on filk! This is an excellent little academic study on filk, which is NOT a sequence of words I’d normally think of putting together. The study identifies the various kinds of filk, and explores how male vs. female filkers deal with using material by others, and whether there are any differences between genders. Fun reading. I was particularly interested that this story got picked up by io9!

***

Last but not least, off to go see How to Train Your Dragon 2 this afternoon. All signs indicate it’ll be stupendous great fun. Hoping I’ll stay awake during it, since I’ve been recovering from dental surgery for the whole past week and I have to take antibiotics and painkillers right now. But for Hiccup and Toothless, I’ll do my best to stay awake!

June 22, 2014 by
Main

In memory of Phillip Weigner

I learned this morning from my family that my young cousin Phillip, who’d been spending the last three years fighting stage 4 cancer, has passed away. His father relayed the news as well to the page on CaringBridge.org as well as to the Superheroes for Phillip community on Facebook.

Cancer has attacked my family multiple times, including myself, my mother, another of my uncles (not Phillip’s father), and Phillip himself. Phillip has been the second cancer death in my family that I personally know about–the first being my mother–and Phillip’s is hard. He was 21 when he got diagnosed with what’s usually a childhood cancer, but which presented all kinds of nasty challenges for him because he’d just made it into adulthood. I could only read about it on the CaringBridge site, since that branch of the family is on the opposite side of the country from me. He had a nasty neuroblastoma, which kept coming back for more no matter how many times they put that boy through chemo and radiation.

The family had tried to put the best of faces on it by nicknaming his cancer ‘Bill’, with the obligatory ‘Kill Bill’ jokes, and more recently they’d set up the Superheroes for Phillip page on Facebook since Phillip drew a lot of inspiration from Superman. I didn’t have a Supes shirt but I did borrow Paul’s Green Lantern shirt and posted there to him, with a pic of me in that shirt.

And now… goddammit.

There are times I regret being on the opposite side of the country from my family, and this is one of those times. I never knew Phillip, really. But I do know what it’s like to fight cancer, fortunate though I’ve been in my own relatively easy battles–I’ve never made it past stage 0. And I do know his parents, and my heart is aching for them now.

RIP Phillip. I hope that wherever you are now, you can fly just like Superman.

ETA: Here, because Appropriate Song is Appropriate–I’ll be singing this for Phillip today.

May 12, 2014 by
Main

SF/F genre drama, May 2014 edition

So there have been a couple more rounds of SF/F genre drama going around, which I’ve mostly missed due to the recent round of medical annoyance that I have, at this point, mostly fought off. I am therefore coming in late to this round, but will note in passing nonetheless that:

One, the drama surrounding this year’s slate of Hugo nominations, and how certain infamous personages got into the list of nominations. I’ve basically seen two overall camps of response to this: 1) OHNOEZ THEY MUST HAVE RIGGED THE NOMINATIONS (mostly from the left-leaning SF/F genre crowd), and 2) HOW DARE PEOPLE SAY THEY WILL VOTE ‘NO AWARD’ RATHER THAN GIVE THE WORKS A FAIR SHAKE (mostly from the right-leaning SF/F genre crowd).

Two, a particular individual has recently flounced his way out of SFWA, with attendant cane-shakery about the “lunatic left” and “thoughtpolice”. And, apparently, a lot of attempt at revisionism about prior rounds of drama, thoroughly debunked over on Radish Reviews and also by Foz Meadows.

Three, as a corollary to these two particular rounds of drama, I’ve seen a resurgence in people insisting that if you don’t adore the works of Robert Heinlein, you cannot possibly be a true science fiction fan.

I’ve been too wearied by the aforementioned medical annoyance to give more than a token facepalm to either of these rounds of drama. But I think it’s worth saying yet again that:

One, if it bothers you when people call you a bigot, there’s an easy solution to this problem. Which is, don’t be a bigot. I.e., don’t spew bigoted bullshit, and don’t do screamingly bigoted things. This is not rocket science, but it is apparently difficult for some folks who love them some rocket science in their fiction.

Two, you are not being censored or oppressed if you spew bigoted bullshit and other people then call you a bigot. If you insist you are being censored or oppressed, and you cannot in fact provide proof that your civil rights are being impinged upon, you’re not only being a bigot, you’re also being an asshole.

Three, if you’re going around claiming that “only people who like the same exact stuff I like are true science fiction fans” or “only people who write a narrow and specific set of stories that happen to line up exactly with my personal political and/or religious beliefs are true science fiction writers”–really, in general, if you’re yelling about how “these other people over here are DOING THEIR FANDOM WRONG”–you know what you’re being? If you said “an asshole”, then DING DING DING WINNAH.

There’s been way too much divisiveness like this in SF/Fdom lately, and I’m really, really sick of it. The whole Fake Geek Girl thing, for example. Or “my subgenre is better than your subgenre”. Or the ongoing LALALALALA WE CAN’T HEAR YOU every time women, or people of color, or queer people of any stripe, or people of non-Christian religions or lack thereof, etc., etc., etc.,–every time anyone in those groups tries to say “Hey! We’d like to join in, too!” And they keep getting shut down.

And then as a bonus, now we get told that if you don’t adore one specific Dead White Male Author you’re not a real SF/F fan? Seriously?

Nope. Sorry. You don’t get to tell me which authors I get to adore and which ones I don’t. You don’t get to appoint yourselves the gatekeepers of my SF/F fandom, and you don’t get to judge the validity of my affection for the genre.

Though I’m tellin’ ya, Internets, with how this kind of drama keeps going around and around and around and around ad infinitum, it makes me want to go read a good mystery novel instead.

May 8, 2014 by