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Print, fill out and deliver to your local comics shop:

... Let's just not pretend, as some healthcare reformers would have us do, that we can easily get more equality without paying the price in efficiency.

Put simply, the healthcare reform bill would make the United States more like western Europe. That may mean more security about healthcare, but it also means that future generations of Americans will likely spend more time enjoying leisure.

Testing Zoundry Raven, a desktop blogging client. Using an image by Emma Vieceli to do so. You can find the print for sale here. Post2Blog never did drag and drop very well. I’d like a desktop client that was as smooth and easy as Tumblweed for Tumblr, to be honest, but there doesn’t seem to be one that clever and slick for Wordpress.

If the bumf is to believed, then swiping this image of Emma doing a bookstore PA should just paste in here:

(Sorry, Em, I’m using you as an experimental animal, but I had to google the link for your print shop and this was right underneath in the search results.)

Tumblweed is a clever app because it matches the intent of Tumblr: fast, easy scrapbooking for the internet. Wordpress clients tend to match the intent of Wordpress, as a place to write long blogposts. No matter how the theme of your Wordpress site actually changes that supposed intent. This site has gone through its tumblelog phases, but it’s hard to tumblelog in a big complex client, and bookmarklet apps don’t seem to work so well any more.

Anyway. Let’s see if this actually works.

EDIT: the Flickr image broke within moments, and on a subsequent post with four images in, it only posted one of them. Windows Live Writer, which has also been suggested to me, is currently refusing to post any entry containing an image, using any of three different methods.

I don’t normally do this, because it usually turns into a clusterfuck. But the fine little Thinkpad X61 that Avatar Press picked up for me when my main computer died horribly last year… well, it’s been worked very hard, and is starting to cough a little blood. It’s also buzzing intermittently, after the last wave of Windows over-the-air updates made it do a fainting goat impression and then turn itself off.

I have, however, quite quickly gotten used to working on a laptop rather than the big desktop machines I’ve been using since the 90s.

(And I have to say, for a tiny machine, the Thinkpad is a terrific device. Its single real drawback has been that its recovery system will steal the entire hard drive if you let it.)

So I’m looking at new laptops, speculatively. I’m not going to have the spare money for one until next year. But, as much as I also need a new phone (the Nokia N95 8GB keeps randomly shutting itself off, which is not useful in a mobile device), a work computer is going to have to take precedence.

Being in the UK, I don’t have the selection of cheap and lovely things available to my US readers. But I would appreciate some suggestions for a big, powerful laptop that is unlikely to start jetting blood and asking for mummy in eighteen months’ time.

No Macs, no Linux: I have a lot of Windows-specific software and function that I need to maintain. Don’t even talk to me about partitions and Windows emulators and whatever, I’m a working writer who can’t programme a VCR and I Do Not Have The Time.

No, really. This isn’t serious, right?

I mean, the book got cancelled.

Your home shopping list, by Ariana, which saves me having to type out pretty much the same list.  Did you see Wil Wheaton’s new mug idea?  Right here.

Fighting Fridays since 2008.