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It was hot. It was hot and humid, and the sun glared down with specific, personal hatred for me. That mean old sun aimed to blister my Irish hide. But I used its malevolent power to my benefit and powered my laptop with a solar source I happened to have with me. I whiled away the daytime hours assembling fine-art jigsaw puzzles in BigJig. The variety of piece options kept each puzzle challenging, and I never lost a piece. Also, pockets helped me organize them, and I could turn rotation on or off. I could play BigJig all day, and sometimes I did.
At night I emerged from the bunker I dug out of the clay cliffs, and gathered coconuts. I shimmied up a tree, holding a sharpened rock in my mouth, and harvested these cows of the plant kingdom. Coconut milk kept me hydrated and coconut meat kept me fed. I dried their shells in the sun to make bowls and sassy halter tops. On a similarly practical note, Norton AntiVirus became nearly as important as my precious coconuts. If I had lost the use of my computer to a virus, I honestly don't know what I would've done. Norton ensured I never had to find out.
One of the best things about being stuck on a desert island was I was forced to learn all sorts of new skills. For example, I learned how to weave grasses into bedding and parasols. All attempts at a sarong failed miserably at first, but I learned. Heck, it was easier than mastering the drawing program FreeHand, or the graphics editor Fireworks, or the animation giant Flash. Macromedia Studio MX includes those three programs, as well as Dreamweaver, a Web-development program I already knew. While I was stranded, I figured I might as well work on my professional skills.
Just up the shore from the beach grew a strand of reedy cane plants that resembled bamboo. After soaking the reeds in seawater, I learned how to spin them into a passable rope. Not only did this rope hold up coconut tops and grass skirts, it let me build pulley systems and lassos for roping fruit and climbing trees. Just like my reed ropes, NoteTab Pro offers a blend of practicality and style. Essentially it's a text editor but with libraries of code and incredibly easy macro creation. I used it to cleanly create the Web site I built to share my island adventure with the world.
In the woods near my cliffside bunker were trees that bore mangoes in the right season. Patience is the hallmark of the mango hunter, and it's rewarded with a juicy orange revelation. Like the ripening of a fruit, the downloading of RealArcade seems to take forever. Soon enough, though, I installed the framework for playing an endless supply of new games. Whatever mood I was in, a RealArcade game was there to fit it. Though each game cost me nearly 20 bucks, at least I was saving lots of money on groceries.
Prior to honing her grass-weaving skills in the middle of nowhere, Karen Whitehouse was an associate editor for Download.com in San Francisco.
Episode four: Peter Butler, Alien Prophet | Back to intro
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