My new monitor stand arrived on Tuesday morning, bright and early.  By this I mean it was on my doorstep when I got out of the shower at about 8:30.  I dragged it in the house and set to work putting it together.  More accurately, I set about disconnecting my monitors, but not before I looked up how to remove their bases.  Sam got up about the time I was actually looking to start putting the stand together, and she was of great help.

The only problem I have with the stand is one of height.  There are two horizontal arms which attach to a pole.  They have several positions they can attach to.  I attached the bottom arm to the highest position for that arm so the monitors would have some height off the desk.  They still sit a bit low for my preference, and at the same time they are a bit high.  The upper arm is in the highest position possible and has a smaller monitor on it, but the monitor’s bottom overlaps the top of the monitor beneath it.  (I have a total of four monitors at the moment.)  This means I should lower the bottom arm, but this means putting my main monitors even further below my line of sight.

That’s okay, I have a solution.  The stand attaches to the desk using a C clamp.  This clamp can open pretty wide, and I suspect it is designed this way just so what I am going to do can be done.  I am going to get a block of wood and put it on the desk where the stand clamps on.  I figure if I can raise the pole by six inches I can lower the lower arm to eliminate the overlap and still gain a bit of height.  I’ll let you know tomorrow after my weekly poem how well my solution works.

Meanwhile, I did something early this week which was very nerdy and provided a solution to a problem I have had for a long time.  I mentioned I have had trouble writing since changing my Microsoft LiveID password a month ago.  Until I made this change, I had been using SkyDrive to store my documents.  This worked well as I was able to set up a network drive pointed to where I had them.  This works through a protocol called WebDAV, which unfortunately does not work well in Windows 7.  Long story short, it somehow garbles authentication so the mapped drive’s security does not recognize a valid set of credentials.  My problem with SkyDrive went even further, however, as I couldn’t even open a document from it using IE.  No mapped drive or (in theory) WebDAV involved, but something still screwed up the authentication.

Support for SkyDrive has yet to provide me with a fix.  I looked at alternatives to SkyDrive, but in testing them I came across the Windows 7 WebDAV problem.  It just didn’t want to work.  So I looked for another answer, and an idea occurred to me:  Could I set up a VPN (Virtual Private Network) on my PC?  A VPN is just what it sounds like.  You connect to it via the internet and it acts like you are on your regular network.  I searched for an open source VPN server and found OpenVPN.

OpenVPN is something I wish I found years ago.  The software for the server or client end is the same.  You put a configuration file in a place the software monitors.  Based on the configuration found there, OpenVPN acts as either a server or client.  So I set my home PC to act as server and my laptop as client following the example on OpenVPN’s website with minor modifications.  It worked without any hassle.  It’s a very secure connection:  It’s point-to-point, meaning I can have only one server and one client with the configuration I have.  It uses a file with a 2048-bit security key.  That file has to sit on both the client and server, and the key itself is randomly generated.

I started client and server, told them to connect, and they did.  I mapped a drive and accessed the shared folders on my home PC.  I opened, created, saved and updated documents on my home PC from my laptop while at work.  Not just Microsoft documents, but Corel as well.  This is huge because Corel never could work with SkyDrive.  I moved all of my stories and pictures to my home PC and can open any of them.  OpenVPN works and it works smoothly.  I look forward to maybe doing some software development this way, too.

Now that I could work on stories, I started in on one I have not touched for a long time called Marianne’s World.  The title is a bit of a contradiction.  The title character learns of magical worlds accessible from Earth and travels to them.  There is not just one world, as such, but a large number of them.  The story is done from a first person point of view, and that’s the reason for the singularity in the title.  It’s the colloquial or idiomatic meaning of world, which is to say one’s world is the collection of one’s life experiences.

Marianne’s World is a very different story for me.  It is, to date, the only story of significant length I have written from a first person point of view.  I have tried to start other stories this way, but I always go back and change to third person.  I started the story a long time ago with the idea of making an animation from it.  I had not yet written my first webcomic script and was not comfortable with the script format.  I knew I wanted this story to be a serial type thing, but I was unsure how to proceed, so I wrote it novel-style.  I will continue this, but will also create a script version.

In picking up this story, I have made several edit passes at it.  First I read through it and made minor changes.  Then I did a “that” edit, where I eliminate my overuse of the word “that.”  It’s nice in a colloquial sense, but even for a first-person told story is bad to use a lot.  I am now working on a heavier edit which, among other things, involves aging the main character a little.  In my original version, Marianne was a fifteen-year old girl outside of the opening chapter.  I aged her a year, pushing her birthdate back a year, as I felt she needed to be just a little older.  (For those curious, the opening chapter has her as a six-year-old, and for what happens there that’s just fine.)

I am still working on that heavy edit.  Work has been a little busy the last couple of days and I haven’t had the time to work on it I would like to have had.  Once that’s through, I am going to list out the future events of Marianne’s life.  I daydreamed up a significant portion of this once, concluding with a climactic battle.  I have forgotten the details, but will come up with them again with changes.  Marianne will go to a lot more places before that battle, and there will be things to deal with after its done.  I do intend the storyline have a conclusion, but there will be a wealth of material to pass through before that happens.

Okay, I have rambled on long enough for today.  See you tomorrow.