Personal Blog For September 25th: Phoning It In

So, back in July I got a new phone. It's the same model that Jack has and that was a factor in my choice... I'd been able to handle it and try out the keyboard and heft and stuff. One of the positives I knew about it was that it had a better battery life than my phone, which was only ever meant to be a temporary replacement anyway.

And while I've liked it well enough, I've always been disappointed by the battery life... it just didn't seem to last, even when I wasn't doing anything with it. So I didn't do much with it. It was disappointing because I knew for a fact that Jack's could be left of the charger overnight without dying and mine could barely make it through the day. I didn't have any apps running in the background that he didn't...

Except when I realized that I did. When I first got the thing and was playing around with its capabilities, I had been amused by a live wallpaper that grabbed the satellite view of the area off the internet and turned it into your phone's desktop. I'd never meant to leave it like that, because I can smell a power hog when I see one, but once I started feeling my home screen up with shortcuts I forgot what the background even was supposed to be. It was only when I happened to look at an empty page right when it updated that I went "Oh... right."

So I've got that fixed, and I also turned off the automatic email sync/notification (mostly as an alternative to silencing the phone at night) and now the battery bar barely budges all day. It's pretty awesome.

Tuesday, September 25th

The Daily Report

I sent out a newsletter with the first half of the author commentary yesterday. Among the email responses was one person who bought a block subscription reminding me that it's been more than a year and wondering when they need to buy one.

Well, here's the way I'm looking at it: the newsletter itself is just a bit over a year and a half, and it's taken me a while to get the rhythm of the thing down, figure out how often to aim for in order to have a decent frequency even when I miss and things like that. And recently I've come through some pretty low points where I still managed to put one out in a month.

So basically, I'm looking at this as a kind of extended beta period. You folks are patient when I'm behind, so I figure I can return the favor. Come January, I'm going to go through the list and see if anyone's paid for a block subscription more than a year ago or let their subscription expire and send them a notice. I figure that way, everybody's gotten what they paid for, plus it'll make things a little bit easier for me, record-wise, if I can encourage most of the annual'ers to re-up in January.

And just to make things extra-easy on me, if anybody happens to buy an annual subscription between now and January, the clock (calendar) on the subscription won't start until January. The subscription starts now. But it won't run out until December 2013.

(Hint, hint)

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The State of the Me

Kind of a blah day. Still lying awake more than I like, but not to the point that I have to get up and do things. I'm having a lot more interesting dreams, though... going to have to start making a point of blogging in the morning while I can still remember them.

Plans For The Day

Been plugging away at the commentaries. Got a chapter of Tales of MU brewing towards the posting point.