I’m back in a writing “peak” at the moment, after a long time in a trough.

At the weekend I got a new pad from WH Smiths and I have a new story arc I’m rolling out. My confidence is a bit better right now and I’m actually enjoying the writing process for a change.

I reckon that part of that come from the joy of just getting the story on paper and to hell with the mistakes. Starting a story on the computer means I tend to get swamped with formatting and word counts and endless revising even before I finished a few hundred words.

As you might imaging that means that the passion for telling the story gets lost in the madness.

Working on paper may not seem sufficiently advanced for some but it’s good way to get ideas down in a raw, unchecked form. Revisions should always come later, preferably when the work is finished!

This is something I still wrestle with. At least I’m getting the ideas down right now. I’ll leave worrying if it’s any good until its finished.

BigAl

Well, it’s definatly broadband, but at 1 meg it’s hardly killer. Although saying that, it’s faster than what we had in the old flat.

We stumbled along at 512 and then had a brief jolt to 768 before we moved. At 1 meg we should be perfectly happy for a while. Especially as it’s 1 meg for £10 a month for the next year coutesy of those scallywags at NTL.

Their service isn’t exactly brilliant all of the time but it’s good enough for our purposes.

So the wee installation man will be at the flat on Thursday at some point I’ll away to get some kind of wireless router and a PC card for Ruth’s laptop.

Oh, fun with toys.

BigAl

Installed Ubuntu on a laptop that Ruth had brought home from her work.

Windows XP had died spectacularly and we decided that if we could get a simple installation of Linux that wasn’t crowded with loads of stuff that they would never use, that would be great. Bear in mind that the laptop will be used for general office stuff, so all they really need is office software, e-mail and a decent web browser. And that the person who will eventually use the machine has little to no PC experience.

And after the simplest install I’ve ever seen (more so than Win XP) the nice and shiny Ubuntu now sits happily on the laptop.

I’ll spend some time this week tinkering with it but it’s really nice to see a flavour of Linux that is perfectly good straight out of the box.

And if this is a success then we will move all her work laptops over to Linux.

I’ll see what joys the tinkering brings.

BigAl