Next time I have to perform Ctrl-C – Alt-Tab – Tab – Ctrl-V – Alt-Tab ten thousand times in order to feed ezPublish a database it isn’t willing to import in a more civilized way (because that crap isn’t as bad as SPIP but is still far from perfection: importing isn’t only terribly documented, it seems to be all but impossible when your site is configured for a foreign locale), I’ll try and think right from the start of using my ShuttlePro’s configurable shortcut keys before my hand hurts so bad I can’t press Ctrl and V at the same time.

But my literary career shouldn’t be in danger: after a little rest and leaving the most hazardous key combos alone, I don’t seem to have a real problem typing.

Ah, merde. Et une heure d’été dans la gueule, une.

Argh! The German bastards strike again.

— coucou

— Coucou

— ya robert hossen à côté de moi

— Frimeur :)

— j’espère qu’il ne va pas se pencher pour voir comment j’écorne son nom

Sur les dix mille manuscrits envoyés spontanément aux éditeurs par des inconnus chaque année (à diviser, peut-être, par le nombre moyen d’exemplaires envoyés par un auteur désespéré à tous les éditeurs du pays ?), un seul est publié, paraît-il. Va falloir assurer.

Pff. Il fait grand soleil, vingt-deux degrés, et je suis obèse.

Or how about an old iBook/PowerBook? I definitely enjoy typing on a laptop keyboard, so I’ll necessarily be disappointed with a normal Apple keyboard (unless I buy a Logitech diNovo set, but it’s expensive, it’s black, it’s wireless, and it’s not Apple anyway). Does anyone here have an old G4 laptop for sale? I don’t want to buy from a stranger, can’t trust them, and the company I bought my G3/300 with a three-month warranty from only deals with prehistoric stuff — they don’t even have any clamshells in stock anymore, only a bunch of black G3/266s à la Carrie Bradshaw.

Which reminds me — the other night I was thinking that Bradshaw would be a more appropriate name for my new Mac than Dalloway, considering I’m finally not buying a top-of-the-line $2000 iMac; yet if I were to name a machine Bradshaw it would make so much more sense for it to be a laptop. So who’s got a *Book G4 to sell me for less than $1000 with a 30-day money-back guarantee?

Why do domain names always expire just when you’re broke?

I would have left the lights out for a while, just for the fun of blogging in the dark, but it bothered me to leave my email address unplugged as well — not that I expect any messages, though.

But then if I’m set on having a 17-inch monitor, a basic iMac (with 1 GB of RAM) isn’t that much more expensive than a Mac mini (with 1 GB of RAM) plus an Apple keyboard and an LCD screen — and possibly an USB or Firewire audio box, and maybe other stuff I haven’t thought of. And it would be a whole different world of performance.

I’d like to invest as little as I can in Apple hardware (I don’t trust them when it comes to quality control and customer service, particularly regarding an LCD screen that I could have exchanged as often as I want if I bought it through the family store instead), but their lineup is so damn consistent that you always want to move up a step.

In the end, the Mac mini may not be a reasonable purchase in any other configuration than the most basic — which is obviously quite insufficient, memory-wise, for a desktop workstation.

Anyway. A question, while I’m there, to those who know: why does the French Apple Store offer OS X either in French or English? Is it just a matter of default settings you can change as you like in System Preferences, and maybe the language of printed manuals, or does the choice have more serious, definitive, consequences?

As I was making a selection to fill up my Flickr account (so I could try it out, and so I could comment on other people’s pictures), I realize that, no, my best pictures aren’t portraits, but those of Paris and other landscapes and still natures.

Which means it’s due time for me to take my mother’s car and drive around — starting with the Mont Saint-Michel, for instance.

But I’m so not in the mood for scouting.

Small adjustments: the mediocrity of individual pages was beginning to bug me, so they now have the same layout as the home page (and thumbnails got a bit bigger, while I was at it).

P.S. And the snaplog now accepts comments.

Right now I’m in one of those periods when I’m very hardly confident in my future as a successful writer, or even a self-supporting one, especially in the short or medium term. And, at the same time, my account balance is so vertiginously flirting with zero despite the euros I get from my mother by the hundreds, that I find myself remembering how quickly money can fly by.

So maybe I’ll just be super reasonable (well, as much as I can be, at least), save as much money as I can, and just be content with an iMac mini and a 17-inch LCD. Not only do I not really need a G5, I don’t need a high-end 20-incher that much, either, for what I’ll be doing with the Mac.

“If you are careful, if you use good ingredients, and you don’t take any shortcuts, then you can usually cook something very good. Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day: what you make to eat. With writing, I find, you can have all the right ingredients, give plenty of time and care, and still get nothing. Also true of love. Cooking, therefore, can keep a person who tries hard sane.”

John Irving, The World According to Garp (which is good, but damn long).