Woe is I

After the amazing high of finishing and using my newly pimped out Neo, I must sadly report that I am without its services for at least a few more hours. It’s not any really awful reason–the electronic insides are still functioning just as well as they ever did.

I am in the process of redoing the keyboard, not totally, but mostly. I realized that the stickers (though nice looking) were just a temporary solution. The real way to ensure longevity and durability would have been to install decal stickers, which lay flush against the keys and don’t really have that raised up feeling that the stickers have. In terms of keyboard mods, they tend to be the preferred method, so I decided to go ahead and redo that part.

Let’s just say that getting the stickers off involved a lot of solvent, the abrasive end of a sponge, and life-saving plastic gloves. And patience… oh, so much patience.

Anyway, the keys look pretty good–I actually primed them this time, so the paint looks better than ever. And the decal stickers look great. I can’t wait to top it all with a glossy clear coat to keep everything from getting faded with use. I did have a few minor mishaps with a sticker or two that wasn’t adequately water-proofed, but I suppose it could have been much worse.

I’m glad that I’m taking the extra effort to ensure that the keys will look better and remain lemony fresh for longer, but it’s still been a really tough two days without the Neo. I can’t stand being chained to the desktop now, so I’ve been writing longhand, which is a pain since I write so much more slowly compared to my typing speed.

So yeah. Woe is I.

Neo-Politan

So here it is. I must say that I’m quite pleased with the color and texture of both the pink and the brown halves. The Plastikote pink on top is much smoother and shinier than the Krylon brown underside, which has a subtle glitter but is definitely matte.

Overall, I’m really digging the results. I’m a huge fan of the pink-white-brown Neapolitan color scheme and it’s so much easier on the eyes than that factory-issued hunter green. The original color did have a scholarly charm about it, but I really wanted to customize my Neo so it would be unique to me. I’m a writer, so naturally I’m big on self-expression, but I’m also a very visual creature. It just makes typing on the Neo a more pleasant experience, like I’m not just using I’m a machine, I’m working with a friend.

Still, I’m not totally done. I’m glad that I went through the whole process–it was a real learning experience–but I’m actually in the process of a semi-re-do on the keyboard. I’m stripping the paint off the keys now so I can turn around and repaint them white and slap some water-soluble decal paper on them. I think that’s going to help with the overall feel of the keys. It’s not so bad now, of course, but being slightly perfectionistic, I would rather the letters feel more or less flat against the keys, rather than slightly raised the way the stickers are.

Still though, I’d say I’m pretty pleased with the way things turned out.

Yucky Pic of the Yummy Neo

We decided to just finish up tonight with the Neo. The longest part was putting all the keys back in place, but putting all the electrical stuff back together again was actually really easy. More observations later–I just wanted you guys to have the first look.

In real life, btw, the pink is a little more bubble gum and not so much that weird Pepto Bismol color.

My Tricked Out Neo… In Progress

So far, customizing my new Neo has been both more fun than I had anticipated and also more effort. It’s also been pretty scary at times, but once you get a feel for how the guts connect together and how simple the setup really is, it’s not so frightening.

My first hurdle was actually finding a screwdriver to get the darn thing open. I had to borrow a special one from my brother-in-law, then another special screwdriver for the teeny-tiny screws holding the circuit boards and LCD screen in. Apologies for the lack of pic–I was too frightened to remember that I wanted to do this. Ditto for taking the keyboard out and disconnecting it from the circuit board. It’s actually quite easy to do, but there’s something very scary about messing around with that little plastic ribbon. And it didn’t help that my brother-in-law kept telling me, in a very calm way, to NOT touch the blue part (apparently that’s where the information gets transmitted… or something).

All the electronic stuff is safely bagged and tucked in a box, ready and waiting for me to return it to its cozy plastic home. Then we started the fun part–painting!

I'm a Barbie girl, in a Barbie world

Here we have the top half, which I did in a bubble gum-y pink from Plastikote. Oddly enough, the spray paint did have a weirdly sweet, candy-type scent. It took a bunch of layers to get a solid pink color on top of the hunter green, but the results are very nice. And there’s something very satisfying about looking down at it and saying, “Haha, you were green but now you’re light pink. Mwahaha!”

Ahem.

This is the bottom half, a nice chocolate brown from Krylon. This was definitely easier to manage than the pink, though I prefer the Plastikote’s smooth finish. I found that the Krylon has a bit of grit to it, a little bit of a sandy texture. But I did like the very subtle sparkle that the chocolate brown gave the formerly-green plastic. It provides a nice contrast to the relative smoothness of Plastikote’s pink.

Ah, the keyboard. It’s the both the bane of my existence and a labor of love. To get them to a more suitable white color, I used Krylon again. I thought that its white just seemed a bit more creamy and less stark than the one from Plastikote. Surprisingly, it covered the keys very well and very quickly.

Now that the keys were a nice white color, it was time to add the markings. I achieved this by getting printable transparency paper (the kind with the adhesive backing) and printing out all of my necessary letters and symbols. I have to say that getting everything looking nice and size-appropriate was a real pain in the tuckus, but checking out the chocolate brown Georgia letters (one of my favorite fonts) on top of those creamy keys made all the cutting and pressing worth the effort. The letters look a little more black than brown in the pic, unfortunately.

And so there we have it. Everything’s been topped with a matte finish clear coat and is drying in the garage. I’m hoping to finish it all up tomorrow. Not sure if I’ll pop the keyboard into the plasic casing and then replace the keys, or vice versa. Either way, I think I’m making pretty good progress on my Neapolitan-inspired Neo.

Neo-politan… Get it?

<insert laughter here>

Edit: The new Neo is painted!!! Check it out here

First Impressions on the Alphasmart Neo

I finally got my Neo. After waiting all weekend and obsessively checking the UPS website all day at work to see just where the hell it was, it now sits before me.

My first impression is that it’s surprisingly thin, but feels very substantial. It has a good heft to it. The keyboard has a pleasing clickiness about it, deep enough to let me really pound on the keys but also loud enough for me to think that it’s being responsive. I’ll need to get used to the shape of the Neo overall, but I could see myself getting used to the keyboard very quickly. And it’s also really fricking light. I read that it clocks in at around two pounds, but you really don’t get a sense of the lightness until you handle it.

Dear Diary, guess who

I’m definitely liking it so far. The ergonimcs are pretty good. I’m sitting Indian-style on the sofa with the Neo on my lap and it’s reasonably comfy, or at least more so than most laptops might be. This thing doesn’t get hot the way that my laptop would get. That’s nice.

The green color isn’t nearly as offensive as I had originally pictured it owould be. I’ve seen some truly awful exposures on the internet, and I have to say that the color is a little more sedated than I had originally guessed. Still, I do plan to trick this baby out. I’m of the iPod generation–I’m used to my electronics looking snazzy as well as working really efficiently.

Actually painting this thing is going to have to wait until tomorrow. As much as I’d like to dive in and start spraying, I’d really rather have the assurance that things might not end with me crying about my ruined Neo, so I have elected to wait until the husband can help me out, which will be tomorrow.
I think that my impressions of the ALphasmart Neo are colored by my extreme, stalker-like anticipation, but also by its genuine friendliness. It’s a keyboard with a tiny screen, what’s not to like? Right now I’m trying to figure out which font setting I like the best. I’ve been trying to do the four-line setting, but even that seems to be too many lines for me. I tried the three-line setting, but the font started to look kind of wacky and too round. I don’t know. So far, the two-line setting has been working for me, but we shall see.

For now, I’m going to be fiddling around with this thing and trying to get used to its quirks and its ergonomics, but I think it’s safe to say that this is going to be a beautiful friendship.

And now the waiting game…

As of Friday, my Alphasmart Neo was here in my city, just waiting to be delivered into my hot little hands. The only problem is that UPS does not deliver on Starudays or Sudnays, leaving me without hope until Monday, when I’ll be at my day job.

Photoshopped simulation

The husband and I went and purchased some paint for the immediate pimping out of said Neo, though. I was originally going to go for a kind of blue and brown color scheme, but when we found a chocolate brown, a pink, and a nice cream, I decided to go for a Neapolitan look and do a brown bottom, a pink top, and a cream colored keyboard. I think the results will be very nice. I plan on printing out my own custom, transparent stickers for the keyboard so the keys can be a yummy cream and chocolate combo.

Not sure yet if I want to just plunge in and start taking the Neo apart, or wait until the husband gets home. He’s done this sort of thing before and he’s much more comfortable dismantling expensive electronics than I am. Still, it can’t be that hard, can it?

Neo on the way…

Tonight I ordered an Alphasmart Neo. Unfortunately, I can’t claim to have made this decision after thinking long and hard–well, I did think hard but I didn’t think about it for very long. Ponying up two hundred bucks isn’t necessarily the easiest thing in the world for me right now, but I figure that it could be a good investment. I do love my iMac, but I might do well just to save it for the editing stage. I’m an obsessive edit-as-you-go writer (which we all know is not conducive to voluminous word count) and I think that the super-simple six-line screen will really help me out in this department.

Hey, pretty...

Plus how cool will it be to be able to have the ease and portability of a notebook, but the ability to type it all in? I thinkit’s really a win-win scenario. Of course, I’ll always have my moleskine tucked into a pocket, but I think that the Neo will be a really good blend between my notebook and my (wished for) laptop.

Even when I purchase the Macbook Air (after winning NaNoWriMo, that is) I think I’ll still want to keep this gorgeous thing around for first drafts. What could be better? I love to type, but I don’t always want to whip out the laptop–especially when I only have a minute or two to rush out a few sentences.

And I can’t wait to mod my new Neo out. I’m already fantasizing about dismantling it and turning that yucky green color into something gorgeous like this:

modded out by Schnozzfest

Oh, I can see it all now… Blue and brown, perhaps, with browned out keys and cool stickers on top? Or maybe I’ll do pink. I like pink. Pink and brown? And what about stickers on the sides and back? It’s all just way too exciting. I’m already counting the days until my Neo’s arrival.

And what will its name be? There’s so much to think about.

The Bag o’ Ideas

Reach into the idea bag, children… The most marvelous wonders await you…

Seriously, though, I think that I might have come up with the basic idea for my NaNoWriMo novel by writing down things that I like on scraps of paper, then dumping them all into a bag and then fishing a few out, lottery style. Not sure where I got the idea. Maybe I made this one up all by myself, which is kind of a change of pace.

Anyway, I wrote a bunch of things down. Examples include: “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “The Office,” “Closet Monsters,” “Witches,” and “Zombies.” Then I set a timer for fifteen minutes and started picking out ideas from the bag, two at a time, totally randomly. For each combination, I wrote down story idea, no matter how stupid it seemed–”X-Men” combined with “Closet Monsters” and “Buffy” with “Closet Monsters” yielded some rather humorous results.

But the combination of “Zombies” and “The Office” did spark my interest.

If anything, it was a nice exercise to force my mind working and creating stories. You may not get anything out of it besides a bunch of strange ideas that probably don’t seem all that interesting, but hey, maybe you’ll stumble upon something cool and that will spark an idea for your NaNoWriMo novel.

Thoughts on the MacBook Air

So, listen, I know I don’t need another laptop. I could just as easily steal my old iBook back from the husband and just use that. And it’s not as if I even need a laptop in the first place–why would I? I haven’t started graduate school yet and I don’t really have the time to write at work, so really, it’s a no-brainer. As much as I would like to spend the astronomical amount of money it would take to invest in this beautiful, sexy piece of hardware, it just isn’t the right time to do that right now.

Damn, you look sexy!

However, that doesn’t stop me from using it as a form of bribery to get my NaNoWriMo novel finished. I’m reading the book, “No Plot, No Problem” and I am being advised that the best ways to get myself to write are to promise myself really decadent treats. I like this approach.

So, this is me promising myself to buy a brand-spankin’ new MacBook Air on December 1st, right after I type, THE END.  I’m not sure what I’m going to figure out how that will work in our budget, but I’m sure something can be done. And, by that time, I’ll know that I’ve gotten into my local Master of Library Science program, so I’ll have a great excuse for buying some awesome tech gear.

I mean, come on… It’s so light. I can’t go giving myself back strain, now can I? I walked around for most of my undergraduate career with an ache in my left shoulder. Never again, I say.

NaNoWriMo + Elisa = BFF?

aka, "Cupcake" Elisa's Internal Editor

So I finally decided to take the plunge this year and participate in NaNoWriMo. Truthfully, I’m scared to death, but I think that this will be good for me. I have a big problem with the Inner Editor (her name is Cupcake and I sort of imagine her as looking like Angela from the Office) and I think that forcing myself to write at an insane, break-neck speed will really help.

Of course, I’ve been doing some exercising before the big day. I’m trying to type with my eyes closed–I’m so preoccupied sometimes with saving myself from typos that it makes it really difficult for me to just focus on moving the story along.

I’ve been writng longhand in my fancy Moleskines (one for the pocket for jotting suff down during work, another for my desk to write down my brilliant stories) but I think that I’ll be switching back to typing for NaNoWriMo. First of all, there’s the issue of word counts. It’s much easier to figure out how many words I’m writing and gt them verified if I’m just typing the damn things in anyway. Plus, I can’t really write longhand with my eyes closed. It’s a little dangerous, I think, considering I use a fountain pen. While I will miss the indulgent joy of writing longhand, perhaps I might still use it for journaling (at least during November).

A part of me really wants to start writing now, but I should wait until November, I think. I’m in the middle of getting my application to grad school together (Master of Library Science, here I come!) and I’d really rather not have to worry about writing a killer admissions essay while getting my 1600 words per day in. I feel like I’d probably end up focusing more on the word count and putting the essay off until the last minute, which is maybe not such a good idea.

So wish me luck! I’m not totally sure what I want to write about. There is that idea I’ve been batting around for a little while, but the NaNoWriMo guy said in his book that it might be best to start fresh with a new idea. And I know that it would be cheating to say, “No, no, I’m starting a new book, it’s just in the same Universe.” Shyeah right. It’s a good universe, but I could certainly pick the idea up later. I really want to play by the rules here. I want to surrender myself to this process. I think it’ll be good for me.

So I know I want to write urban fantasy. It’s just my bag, baby. At the moment, I’m compiling a list of movies, TV shows, and etc. for me to steal ideas from. Yes, that’s right, Steal. I’m not proud–I’m just a writer.