I'm reasonably picky when it comes to word processors-slash-text editors; if anything, I'm looking for less features than most offer. I imagine Microsoft Word would be ideal were I trying to put together a presentation for an office meeting, but I really don't need the pages of templates and options for tables and clipart when I'm just typing up a bog-standard article or blog entry, I don't need eighteen pages of settings to tweak. Also, the computers I tend to be using aren't usually on the cutting edge of technology; Word, and its open-source counterpart, OpenOffice, tend to require something capable of launching the Space Shuttle to run smoothly, eating up prodigious amounts of RAM to produce a two-page essay.
(click here for the words that earn me the monies)
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
And because I'm lazy, there's at least a 24 delay on getting these things posted
Getting increasingly difficult to think of something to write about every single day. On the other hand, still very much wanting to, just drawing a blank when it’s coming to thinking of anything suitable.
(On an aside, got my 500 in for yesterday, just haven’t gotten around to uploading it yet as it’s an actual article I need to post to AC.)
That seems to be a problem a lot of the time with me, coming up with ideas as what to do actually do. I’d like to think I’m a pretty creative person, but I have the hardest damned time being creative on demand. I suspect (and hope) that I just need to be a tiny bit more organised and methodical about actually sitting down and writing. This, of course, is the exact reason I’m still making myself do 500 words on an empty tank.
That really seems to be the advice of any modern, successful writer, incidentally. They say, without trying to be too sarcastic, that to be a writer, you actually need to write stuff. Write stuff, and keep writing, and finish what you’re writing.
They also mention that reading voraciously is just as important as writing things. However, I don’t think ‘not reading enough’ is ever going to seriously make it onto my list of character flaws.
Stumbleupon also occasionally brings up random advice articles about writing blogs (usually on someone’s blog, for extra degree of meta), despite my best efforts to ‘train’ it not to. They offer all kinds of advice on how to start and maintain a blog, but I suspect the blogs they’re talking about and the blogs I’m talking about wouldn’t meet on a Venn diagram. Theirs seem to either be carefully crafted tools designed to lure unsuspecting web tourists into a whirpool of Search Engine Optimisation and targeted marketing, or blogs with a singleminded obsession with a particular subject that’s quite terrifying. They’re usually about something most people wouldn’t waste writing a paragraph about, but these folk apparently burn with the fire of a thousand suns for particular method of knitting or countertop refinishing.
I definitely don’t want that. I’m passionate about many things, but not to the point where I want to talk about it online every single bloody day, to the point where I’m paddling in the shallow end of the Asperger’s pool. And I certainly don’t want a blog capable of pulling in thousands of hits but having the personality and creativeness of a knife between the ribs. I would rather have absolutely no-one ever read this, and be happy with what I’ve tapped out here.
That being said, the same doesn’t /quite/ apply to stuff I write up for AC. I crossed the Rubicon of shamelessness for money there some time back, when I was being paid a few bucks for writing articles about things like ‘care of leather upholstery’ and ‘installing a dimmer switch’. In other words subjects which I had absolutely no idea about, and never would, but which Google did... It’s amazing how quickly you can learn enough to sound like an expert on something in 350 words or more. Though it’s less amazing how quickly you can forget this useless, useless, information.
I dunno. I think it’ll come together eventually. At least I’m not tooling about with flash memory cards and interface issues any more.
(On an aside, got my 500 in for yesterday, just haven’t gotten around to uploading it yet as it’s an actual article I need to post to AC.)
That seems to be a problem a lot of the time with me, coming up with ideas as what to do actually do. I’d like to think I’m a pretty creative person, but I have the hardest damned time being creative on demand. I suspect (and hope) that I just need to be a tiny bit more organised and methodical about actually sitting down and writing. This, of course, is the exact reason I’m still making myself do 500 words on an empty tank.
That really seems to be the advice of any modern, successful writer, incidentally. They say, without trying to be too sarcastic, that to be a writer, you actually need to write stuff. Write stuff, and keep writing, and finish what you’re writing.
They also mention that reading voraciously is just as important as writing things. However, I don’t think ‘not reading enough’ is ever going to seriously make it onto my list of character flaws.
Stumbleupon also occasionally brings up random advice articles about writing blogs (usually on someone’s blog, for extra degree of meta), despite my best efforts to ‘train’ it not to. They offer all kinds of advice on how to start and maintain a blog, but I suspect the blogs they’re talking about and the blogs I’m talking about wouldn’t meet on a Venn diagram. Theirs seem to either be carefully crafted tools designed to lure unsuspecting web tourists into a whirpool of Search Engine Optimisation and targeted marketing, or blogs with a singleminded obsession with a particular subject that’s quite terrifying. They’re usually about something most people wouldn’t waste writing a paragraph about, but these folk apparently burn with the fire of a thousand suns for particular method of knitting or countertop refinishing.
I definitely don’t want that. I’m passionate about many things, but not to the point where I want to talk about it online every single bloody day, to the point where I’m paddling in the shallow end of the Asperger’s pool. And I certainly don’t want a blog capable of pulling in thousands of hits but having the personality and creativeness of a knife between the ribs. I would rather have absolutely no-one ever read this, and be happy with what I’ve tapped out here.
That being said, the same doesn’t /quite/ apply to stuff I write up for AC. I crossed the Rubicon of shamelessness for money there some time back, when I was being paid a few bucks for writing articles about things like ‘care of leather upholstery’ and ‘installing a dimmer switch’. In other words subjects which I had absolutely no idea about, and never would, but which Google did... It’s amazing how quickly you can learn enough to sound like an expert on something in 350 words or more. Though it’s less amazing how quickly you can forget this useless, useless, information.
I dunno. I think it’ll come together eventually. At least I’m not tooling about with flash memory cards and interface issues any more.
Sunday, January 2, 2011
2010 and all that
2011 has turned up fairly unobtrusively, and I have the nagging feeling I should be typing up some sort of review for the past year, highlighting my personal ups and downs and generally how things went for me. It is, I suspect, ‘the thing to do’.
Yet I can’t think of anything particularly to say about 2010 that was particularly remarkable. It wasn’t the best of years, and I can think of general times throughout it when we were broke, or miserable, or (more recently) ill, but I also can`t think of anything horrifyingly awful that happened, either. Things carry on, good, bad, and the immigration status, which appears to be a lifelong task.
It doesn’t help that it just doesn’t feel like a new year yet either. I was working last night, I’m working tonight. There’s absolutely no sense of today being a holiday or anything special, beyond the way that the people who are actually calling today are entirely the ones too stupid to realise that everywhere is closed today. I’m not exaggerating when I say that if these people lost just one or two more braincells, they’d be physically incapable of using the phone in the first place. I can totally understand why William Faulkner, on losing his job at the post office, said “I reckon I’ll be at the beck and call of folks with money all my life, but thank God I won’t ever again be at the beck and call of every son of a bitch who’s got two cents to buy a stamp.”
We get the ones who can’t afford a stamp. Or sometimes, have accidentally swallowed their stamp.
An Aside: I just referred to Facebook in conversation as ‘Livejournal’. This is probably the first sign of senile dementia. But then, I suspect anyone that knows me wouldn’t be in the least surprised by that.
Getting back to 2010, I suspect it’s going to be one of those years that, when I am truly old and senile, isn’t going to register as one of the memorable ones. Like most of the 1990s. I barely remember a damned thing about that decade; not the fashions, not the music, not even many events in my life. The events I do remember, I would be hard pressed to tell you what month, or even which year they actually happened.
This of course is another reason it might be worth scribbling in here most days. I used to actually enjoy posting to Livejournal just for the hell of it, and keeping a record of what was going on, even if it was bugger all. There’s a good five years or more I have archived from there which is a significant fraction of my life, including the years when Kit and I got together. These years of course will eventually be a matter of public interest and historical record, but in the unlikely event that they aren’t, it’s nice personally to be able to browse through these.
All this puts me in mind of Michael Palin. I’ve been reading his diaries of late, the ones covering most of the ten year period where Python were doing their most work, the TV series and the movies and whatnot, and it’s fascinating stuff. I’m sure he didn’t expect that so many people would read them eventually either. I’m pretty sure he wrote them without the intention of anyone but himself reading them, ever. But he still wrote them anyway.
Perhaps all that is as good a reason as any to try and stick with the 500 words/day here. Perhaps I don’t even need a good reason. It certainly passes an hour or so at work when it’s fairly quiet, time that would otherwise be consumed with more horrible deaths in Dungeon Crawl. I’m certainly not bored with doing it yet, or frustrated with the technology I have to do it on. I know Kit is following it on an RSS feed (*wave*), and I suspect she’ll get bored with reading it sooner than I do writing. Or perhaps not. The important thing is, I’m writing it for me, not for any bugger else.
And that really strikes me as reason enough.
Yet I can’t think of anything particularly to say about 2010 that was particularly remarkable. It wasn’t the best of years, and I can think of general times throughout it when we were broke, or miserable, or (more recently) ill, but I also can`t think of anything horrifyingly awful that happened, either. Things carry on, good, bad, and the immigration status, which appears to be a lifelong task.
It doesn’t help that it just doesn’t feel like a new year yet either. I was working last night, I’m working tonight. There’s absolutely no sense of today being a holiday or anything special, beyond the way that the people who are actually calling today are entirely the ones too stupid to realise that everywhere is closed today. I’m not exaggerating when I say that if these people lost just one or two more braincells, they’d be physically incapable of using the phone in the first place. I can totally understand why William Faulkner, on losing his job at the post office, said “I reckon I’ll be at the beck and call of folks with money all my life, but thank God I won’t ever again be at the beck and call of every son of a bitch who’s got two cents to buy a stamp.”
We get the ones who can’t afford a stamp. Or sometimes, have accidentally swallowed their stamp.
An Aside: I just referred to Facebook in conversation as ‘Livejournal’. This is probably the first sign of senile dementia. But then, I suspect anyone that knows me wouldn’t be in the least surprised by that.
Getting back to 2010, I suspect it’s going to be one of those years that, when I am truly old and senile, isn’t going to register as one of the memorable ones. Like most of the 1990s. I barely remember a damned thing about that decade; not the fashions, not the music, not even many events in my life. The events I do remember, I would be hard pressed to tell you what month, or even which year they actually happened.
This of course is another reason it might be worth scribbling in here most days. I used to actually enjoy posting to Livejournal just for the hell of it, and keeping a record of what was going on, even if it was bugger all. There’s a good five years or more I have archived from there which is a significant fraction of my life, including the years when Kit and I got together. These years of course will eventually be a matter of public interest and historical record, but in the unlikely event that they aren’t, it’s nice personally to be able to browse through these.
All this puts me in mind of Michael Palin. I’ve been reading his diaries of late, the ones covering most of the ten year period where Python were doing their most work, the TV series and the movies and whatnot, and it’s fascinating stuff. I’m sure he didn’t expect that so many people would read them eventually either. I’m pretty sure he wrote them without the intention of anyone but himself reading them, ever. But he still wrote them anyway.
Perhaps all that is as good a reason as any to try and stick with the 500 words/day here. Perhaps I don’t even need a good reason. It certainly passes an hour or so at work when it’s fairly quiet, time that would otherwise be consumed with more horrible deaths in Dungeon Crawl. I’m certainly not bored with doing it yet, or frustrated with the technology I have to do it on. I know Kit is following it on an RSS feed (*wave*), and I suspect she’ll get bored with reading it sooner than I do writing. Or perhaps not. The important thing is, I’m writing it for me, not for any bugger else.
And that really strikes me as reason enough.
Friday, December 31, 2010
Incoherent ramblings, or, The importance of having something to write about
Well, the new system seems to be working more or less swimmingly; some slight hesitance on Windows’ part to recognise the formatting of the text file, despite me using the supposedly linux-friendly metapad for editing; it still copied and pasted into wordpress just fine, though.
Also figured out how to turn off the typewritery sounds this editor makes while you type. It’s cute and all, but I suspect it’d drive you batshit within a matter of hours if you left it on.
Which just leaves something to write about today, which is where I'm pretty much drawing a blank. Its New Years Eve, of course; no plans for tonight other than getting home before the firing of guns in the air commences. Yep, it’s that kind of neighbourhood we’re in, I’m afraid. Luckily we have a lift home, which means we should be in a goodly while before midnight. Work is impressively random as to the volume of calls coming in. At some points, we have calls queuing in double figures, at others, it’s completely dead. I suspect as the night goes on and we get into the hours where the places we answer for are normally closed, it’ll quiet down entirely. As to what it’ll be like tomorrow, I have no idea. Saturdays are normally hell, and people seem somehow gloriously unaware of national holidays, but if I had to predict anything, I’d say probably marginally quieter than the average weekend shift.
...Somebody has just suggested we might get our asses kicked by our client that has a chain of stores selling overpriced childrens clothing to people with more money than sense (or at least, more credit than sense) might well be starting their new year’s sale tomorrow. If that’s the case, the three of us who are there after 8.30pm are going to be well and truly fucked up the ass by the volume of calls. Again. Frankly, though, this is such a common occurrence on a Saturday that it’s lost any kind of meaning a long, long time ago.
Apparently there were multiple tornado warnings and much storminess this morning, to the point where the emergency sirens were going. I couldn’t honestly say, as I slept through the whole damned thing.
Finally seem to be getting over the horrible chest cold I’ve had for the past week or more. I’m actually able to breathe without wheezing, and coughing doesn’t seem to be a potentially fatal event any more. Kit... seems to be improving, though she started with it all a couple of days before me.
Finally, really, really have to get a little more organised as to what the hell I’m going to be typing here every day. I’m pretty much clutching at straws today for anything to write about. I have a couple of half-assed ideas for articles in the near future, but they’re not something I can just pull out of thin air. Might also have a look on the news and see if anything remotely interesting is going on that I work up a commentary/editorial about on AC.
Also figured out how to turn off the typewritery sounds this editor makes while you type. It’s cute and all, but I suspect it’d drive you batshit within a matter of hours if you left it on.
Which just leaves something to write about today, which is where I'm pretty much drawing a blank. Its New Years Eve, of course; no plans for tonight other than getting home before the firing of guns in the air commences. Yep, it’s that kind of neighbourhood we’re in, I’m afraid. Luckily we have a lift home, which means we should be in a goodly while before midnight. Work is impressively random as to the volume of calls coming in. At some points, we have calls queuing in double figures, at others, it’s completely dead. I suspect as the night goes on and we get into the hours where the places we answer for are normally closed, it’ll quiet down entirely. As to what it’ll be like tomorrow, I have no idea. Saturdays are normally hell, and people seem somehow gloriously unaware of national holidays, but if I had to predict anything, I’d say probably marginally quieter than the average weekend shift.
...Somebody has just suggested we might get our asses kicked by our client that has a chain of stores selling overpriced childrens clothing to people with more money than sense (or at least, more credit than sense) might well be starting their new year’s sale tomorrow. If that’s the case, the three of us who are there after 8.30pm are going to be well and truly fucked up the ass by the volume of calls. Again. Frankly, though, this is such a common occurrence on a Saturday that it’s lost any kind of meaning a long, long time ago.
Apparently there were multiple tornado warnings and much storminess this morning, to the point where the emergency sirens were going. I couldn’t honestly say, as I slept through the whole damned thing.
Finally seem to be getting over the horrible chest cold I’ve had for the past week or more. I’m actually able to breathe without wheezing, and coughing doesn’t seem to be a potentially fatal event any more. Kit... seems to be improving, though she started with it all a couple of days before me.
Finally, really, really have to get a little more organised as to what the hell I’m going to be typing here every day. I’m pretty much clutching at straws today for anything to write about. I have a couple of half-assed ideas for articles in the near future, but they’re not something I can just pull out of thin air. Might also have a look on the news and see if anything remotely interesting is going on that I work up a commentary/editorial about on AC.
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Time to try an entirely new setup for writing my stuff and nonsense.
Prior to about a week ago, my setup for writing stuff on the go was the following: Type it up on the Psion, using either the horrible featureless version of Wordpad it had, or the even more clunky and likely to crash Wordmaker. This done, I would then pick a format likely to succeed in being ported over (usually HTML, oddly), save it, save it again on the oddly difficult to detect SD card, and cross my fingers.
When I got home, more fun would ensue. My PC has no slots for SD cards, which I have never been able to fathom, as Kit has the same model PC from the same place, and it has a plethora, a plethora I say, of slots for every card you could conceive of. Undaunted, I would unplug one or two of the USB devices I have installed to accommodate the rather wide SD card adapter I have, open the file on the card, and cut and paste it into wherever I was posting to.
As systems for writing went, it stank to a fair degree. It was time consuming and awkward, and working on files over a period of days was tedious as hell. In fact, it was enough to actually put me off writing things except on my days off, and frankly, on my days off I’ve either other things to do or other things I’d like to do.
In the last week or so, however, I’ve acquired Kit’s old laptop, the one that really hasn’t been used in at least two years. It’s a brand spanking new little Acer laptop, upon which I’ve dual-partitioned with Ubuntu as well as the Windows XP it had already installed, mainly for aesthetic reasons. I’m typing this up on a program called Focuswriter, which is rather like Q10 for windows or Darkroom (I think it’s called) for the Mac; a basic text editor which fills the screen and does nothing else, a nice plain screen you can put text onto without all the fripperies and editing tools that something like OpenOffice or Word throws at you.
When I’m done typing, I save the file into my dropbox folder, another major innovation I’ve only become aware of lately. When the lappie gets in range of a wifi hotspot it can connect to (i.e. at home), it will upload the file to a remote server. My desktop PC will automatically sync with it, and get a copy of the file, ready to go. In other words, the only thing I need to do to share my files across the computers I use is turn the laptop on at some point when I’m home.
Hopefully, all this should see me posting a great deal more online. IF I can actually get into the habit of writing something. Which is the other reason I’m typing this up right now; I figured I’d get started on a New Year’s resolution a couple of days early, see how it sits with me.
So, my resolution is - On workdays at the very least, possibly even on days off, I will attempt to publish at least 500 words online. These will mostly either be on Associated Content, or in the cases of rambling diatribes even I would blush at publishing to try and winkle pennies out of Yahoo, will appear on this blog. If I deem it capable of earning me a few cents and stick it on AC, I’ll link it on the blog anyhow. I’m a very bad judge of what’s worth anything on there anyhow, painstakingly crafted articles seem to earn fuck all, while piles of crap I typed up in two minutes for Helium have gotten 20,000 pagehits. Go figure.
On paper (well, pixel), it sounds doable. We shall see.
Prior to about a week ago, my setup for writing stuff on the go was the following: Type it up on the Psion, using either the horrible featureless version of Wordpad it had, or the even more clunky and likely to crash Wordmaker. This done, I would then pick a format likely to succeed in being ported over (usually HTML, oddly), save it, save it again on the oddly difficult to detect SD card, and cross my fingers.
When I got home, more fun would ensue. My PC has no slots for SD cards, which I have never been able to fathom, as Kit has the same model PC from the same place, and it has a plethora, a plethora I say, of slots for every card you could conceive of. Undaunted, I would unplug one or two of the USB devices I have installed to accommodate the rather wide SD card adapter I have, open the file on the card, and cut and paste it into wherever I was posting to.
As systems for writing went, it stank to a fair degree. It was time consuming and awkward, and working on files over a period of days was tedious as hell. In fact, it was enough to actually put me off writing things except on my days off, and frankly, on my days off I’ve either other things to do or other things I’d like to do.
In the last week or so, however, I’ve acquired Kit’s old laptop, the one that really hasn’t been used in at least two years. It’s a brand spanking new little Acer laptop, upon which I’ve dual-partitioned with Ubuntu as well as the Windows XP it had already installed, mainly for aesthetic reasons. I’m typing this up on a program called Focuswriter, which is rather like Q10 for windows or Darkroom (I think it’s called) for the Mac; a basic text editor which fills the screen and does nothing else, a nice plain screen you can put text onto without all the fripperies and editing tools that something like OpenOffice or Word throws at you.
When I’m done typing, I save the file into my dropbox folder, another major innovation I’ve only become aware of lately. When the lappie gets in range of a wifi hotspot it can connect to (i.e. at home), it will upload the file to a remote server. My desktop PC will automatically sync with it, and get a copy of the file, ready to go. In other words, the only thing I need to do to share my files across the computers I use is turn the laptop on at some point when I’m home.
Hopefully, all this should see me posting a great deal more online. IF I can actually get into the habit of writing something. Which is the other reason I’m typing this up right now; I figured I’d get started on a New Year’s resolution a couple of days early, see how it sits with me.
So, my resolution is - On workdays at the very least, possibly even on days off, I will attempt to publish at least 500 words online. These will mostly either be on Associated Content, or in the cases of rambling diatribes even I would blush at publishing to try and winkle pennies out of Yahoo, will appear on this blog. If I deem it capable of earning me a few cents and stick it on AC, I’ll link it on the blog anyhow. I’m a very bad judge of what’s worth anything on there anyhow, painstakingly crafted articles seem to earn fuck all, while piles of crap I typed up in two minutes for Helium have gotten 20,000 pagehits. Go figure.
On paper (well, pixel), it sounds doable. We shall see.
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Good lord, is this the first article to get posted on here?
Nope, it's a poorly disguised editorial masquerading as an article, partly because it seemed worth writing about, partly to see what AssociatedContent^H^H^H Yahoo! Contributors will let me get away with being paid for.
(Read more...)
(Read more...)
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
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