Programming note

It occurred to me that Jer’s Software Hut is a pretty big part of my life, and Jer’s Novel Writer is slowly developing into a piece of software that will long be remembered for all the ideas that all the other word processors eventually copied. As such, I have created a new category here at MR&HBI devoted to all the advancements going on in the hut’s secret bunker, chilly and drippy, buried deep beneath the impassible mountain range that passes through this quiet Prague neighborhood. Security measures are extremely tight here (had to boot Dick Cheny a while back; the dude could could not keep his big yap shut), but every once in a while we allow carefully calculated information to leak to what we euphamistically call the ‘outside world’.

I went back and found some episodes that belong in this category, and along the way I was continuously surprised by the close proximity of events that in retrospect seem far apart, and the distantness of things that seem like yesterday. Most of all, I feel the time. It was a long time ago now that I was exploring the small roads of North America. It was a long time ago that I flirted with bartenders in Montana, and watched a thunderstorm on my cousin’s patio on the Fourth of July.

Whoops! Almost did a retrospective episode, there! This is about the future. ‘Rumblings from the Secret Labs’ will be the outlet for carefully controlled propagana concerning all that is good about Hut products. That is all you need to know.

We have the technology…

I got the Mini back from the shop yesterday, and now everything is rainbows and unicorns once again. Colorful butterflies flit from flower to flower while the birds sing in four-part harmony. The bunnies are tap-dancing, the foxes are doing the rhumba (you would have expected the fox-trot, but they’re crafty that way), and the squirrels have decided to live another day. Why this great joy among the creatures of the forest? Because future releases of Jer’s Novel Writer will run natively on Intel-based Macs, that’s why. Among mac users, forest creatures were some of the first to adopt the new technology.

Because I’m in a jolly sort of mood, I’ve prepared this exclusive peek into the secret labs high atop Hut Tower, perched on its windswept crag, clad in a permanent cloak of storm clouds while lightning crashes all around it, in a quiet Prague neighborhood.

The Secret Labs high atop Hut Tower

The laptop pictured is, of course, my old one, now serving as a very large hard drive enclosure. The captions are thanks to a program called Cartoon Life that came with the Mini, and makes the layout and typesetting of comic book pages extremely simple.

It will take a bit of getting used to having different machines for different jobs (photos on mini, blog on PowerBook), but I am ready for the challenge. The one fly in the ointment (flies, it seems, do not share the joy of the rest of their fellow creatures), is the uneasy fear that the external hard drive which holds all my music somehow caused the earlier demise of my computer. The drive has a chip set that has been branded “not very good at all”, but I’ve never heard of a firewire device damaging a computer. Still, I most certainly do not want to take the machine in for yet another logic board.

Now, of course, it’s time to move on, to persevere, to take up the mantle once more and leave no thesaurus unplundered. Code must be writ, words must be script, and although the clock in Hut Tower has not had the teremity to tick in an unknown amount of time, elsewhere the laws of space and time reign uncontested, sweeping opportunity along with them in a mad rush to oblivion. I sure don’t want to miss that bus!