Old Computers DOing Stupid things

Gaia was sick earlier this week with what her doctor described as a nasty roller-coaster of a virus. She was a little flushed on Sunday when we went to the Pumpkin Farm with her cousins, and so we knew she was getting something.
On Monday, Jeni stayed home with her, preempting the "come get your daughter" call from the daycare. By noon she was throwing up and had a crazy high fever, so to the doctor she went. I stayed with her on tuesday. And that's where it gets interesting.
I didn't want to have to keep Jeni updated on the phone all day long while I sat with the girl. It was hard enough to be with her; she was so upset and sick. Dashing to the phone to update a concerned mommy was going to be frustrating, and I didn't really want to stream video because you can never really be sure who's watching and I wasn't planning on being on a throw up gag reel on the You Tube.
So I set up a spreadsheet and a form on Google Docs and shared it with Jenifer. Then I set the form as my home/startup page on my browsers-- as to facilitate updating the thing. It turned out pretty well, actually. Jeni kept an eye on it throughout the day. She said it was nice to see what was going on at home.
And more importantly, I didn't have to struggle to remember when things happened. I had a place to write down what she ate and when she threw up. I had time-stamped entries of when I gave her medicine. I can never remember that stuff, I would have had to have written it down anyway-- and between Jeni's laptop and mine, I had one near me for any given moment. At my house, it's probably easier to find a laptop than a working pen most of the time anyway.

Have you used Google's Forms features for feeding the spreadsheet? They're pretty basic, but they're fantastically easy to set up, and they do exactly what you're looking for with a minimum of set up.

And as for the girl? She's great. She's finally back at school today (Thursday) and, although her sleep schedule is really broke, she's on the mend and has pretty much talked non stop since about 2 a.m. Tuesday.

The relatively recent phenomena of "kindling" a laptop confuses and frightens me. I mean, yeah, orienting your screen to the portrait mode is a nice way to read a book, and it's a little unusual, but it's not something unique to Amazon's Little eReader That Could. I've been reading ebooks this way since long before the Kindle. I'm that cool.

Regardless, once you've got *buntu running on your laptop, you need only open a PDF in Evince Document Viewer (Ubuntu's default) reader. Then, if the PDF isn't oriented for portrait viewing, simply click the "rotate" button that suits your orientation preference. (Edit --> Rotate Left) Make sure you're in "Best Fit" mode (View --> Best Fit.)

Wala. You are in "Kindle mode." PgUp and PgDN move you Backward and forward in your document respectively. Holding the control key while pressing the page keys moves them 10-pages at a time. (This is contrary to the keyboard shortcutssuggested on the menu. I suspect this has something to do with "Best Fit mode.")

For extra spice, press the f5 button and enjoy full-screen Kindle Mode.