Okay, if I'm going to get published, I need places to send my work, so I've been reading the writer's guide and cruising the 'net and now I have 31 different writers guidelines for 31 different magazines that might want to publish some new dark fiction (e.g. horror).
I have a spreadsheet in excel that I run in a virtual machine on my macbook pro, but it doesn't want to print to my USB printer. I see the printer, but it no speaky through the little tubes.
My iWork suite is crap when it comes to spreadsheets -- can't make a table wider than the paper, can't nest tables in tables, just not gonna make my life easy there.
So I'm diddling around looking for a format or application or SOMETHING to help me keep track of magazines and stories and stuff.
And then I remembered that Google can do spreadsheets now! A quick jaunt over to spreadsheet.google.com and yup, I can import my XLS file. If I can print it, I could still muck about with data in excel and then print it from Google if I get desperate (or from work, or from my PC, but hey, the google thing is just cool). Or I could manage it in Google, wherever.
When I first heard about network computer, running the application on a server and just log in to it from a terminal, I though it was the most retarded thing I had heard in decades. Why would we want to do that!?!? That's why PCs were invented, to break the chains of the server and the priesthood of sysops!
But now I use Google mail like it were an addictive drug, and this spreadsheet thing looks darned handy. Google Earth, the maps, this, that... they are working on a word processor. They have a database. It alsmost seems reasonable to use this stuff. I find it handy as I move around to be able to work on stuff in a central, public, area.
I use TWiki for the same reason, in that I can fiddle with my website anywhere, any time, from any computer.
So maybe served applications over the web isn't such a bad thing. I could get used to it.
Oh, and I'll be submitting Eternity to magazines soon. Cross your fingers for me! And now to edit the next one...