Well, not quite alone (I still have two housemates plus a dog and a cat) but a heck of a lot quieter. Sara and the kids are in Wyoming and South Dakota visiting family, and I opted to stay home and get some work done. I have a talk this Friday in Jacksonville (Ivan permitting) to prepare for, plus lots of web stuff I've been falling behind on.

Our house saga continues. We are taking a hard look at our finances, which is a little scary, and trying to decide at what level a remodel actually makes sense for us. This sounds like a funny thing to be thinking about when we're actually moved out of our house and with a city permit in hand. But actually it's kind of nice to have some physical (and thus emotional) distance from our house. It helps us be more objective. Anyway, with Sara away it gives us both a chance to think about things and sleep on them for a week or so.

I've been trying hard to get the tablet pc up and running as my primary computer. I've had some successes, but I've tacitly come to the conclusion that Windows Tablet Edition is actually the wrong choice for drawing. The way it reads the pen is just plain different than on regular Windows (it reads every point along a path instead of just sampling) and it interferes with my drawing. Maybe on a much faster computer it wouldn't be a problem, but the Toshiba (with a pretty sprightly 1.5ghz Centrino) isn't keeping up. Some of the other dynamics seem to be subtley off. This morning I drew a strip on the Cintiq connected to the Toshiba and it was like pulling teeth. I'm trying to decide whether it will work out as a drawing computer at all. If not, I have no reason to keep it. I may as well just sell it on eBay and get the Fujitsu P7010D that I really wanted in the first place (the successor unit to the one I tried last December). It's smaller and more portable - better for taking to presentations and wherever. I'll probably decide this before I leave Thursday for Florida. If I'm going to sell the computer I'm not going to risk hurting it by taking it along.