“The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men / Gang aft agley”
– Robert Burns
Right, where was I? I’m not entirely sure. Work was hectic and I had very little brain space for anything else, then the weekend came and I planned to get back everything back on track. Yeah. Didn’t happen (see quote). I won’t bore you with the details. Oh, yes. I’ve been starting with my computer news lately, haven’t I? Right, then.
- The Desktop
The brand spanking new solid state drive was good for about 5 minutes. It now appears to have taken an extended vacation / become an expensive paper-weight. The good news is, I got fed up with struggling with Windows XP (trying to get the new installation to recognise the old “My Documents” stored data) and I’m Ubuntu-10.04-ed up to the eyeballs. It works and I’m getting used to it. (That wasn’t meant to come out like a crack at Microsoft’s expense but, hey, if the cap fits…) Ubuntu has even magically disappeared the “corruption” from my original system hard drive and been able to read the pictures and music Windows was getting sniffy about – so the system is working better than ever. Complete with new printer. May the
spammingpaper submissions begin. And I’ve now sorted out the genealogy side of things. I’m not promising updates on the grounds that my plans keep getting kicked into touch. - The Laptop
OK, I haven’t done owt with this, yet. Now I have the desktop working and stabilised, though, it’s time to start surgery. I’m probably just going to wipe it and start again, now I know all my data’s secured and backed up on at least two other drives. You will probably never hear anything further about this because I intend to use it solely for browsing the Internet, reading and writing. The problem with having the desktop down was that I had effectively lost access to everything. The laptop is a small luxury (i.e. being able to check Twitter [External Link] without having to get out of bed…).
And now the writing stuff. The latest New Dryas set stories have received another round of polish and are about to start the submission process, although the re-home attempt for Down-Time is still being thought about. 25 Ways to Kill a Werewolf (Alex Jones‘ world) has had a little bit of work but has been on the back-burner while I finished off the desktop work. If I were a pro writer (or even taking part in NaNoWriMo [External Link]), the roughly 1,000 I’ve managed this week would be miserable.
(No, I’m not going to mention the rugby. I don’t think I can cope!)