« December 2005 | Main | February 2006 »
January 29, 2006
Normal Service Resuming Shortly
See, if this was a Warner Bros. cartoon of a certain vintage, I'd right now look a lot like Daffy Duck, having just had either a bomb go off in front of his face, or an Elmer Fudd point-blank "Duck Season" shotgun blast. Which is to say, charred, beak on backwards, smoke pouring out everywhere, and blinking in the sunlight, muttering darkly.
You have to understand I'm something of a fiddler. The knowledgeable out there reading this will nod sagely and go, "Yeah, is that right?" because they've known me a long time. Others, perhaps new to this venue, will probably either snicker, use a "L for Loser" gesture on their foreheads at my expense, or otherwise mock me. There are times when I deserve a good mocking, I must say.
On this particular occasion, it went like this: I had a perfectly nice setup on the computer, where I had a nice Linux partition, and a nice Windows XP partition. Life was good. As of, uh, a day or two ago, I now have a computer with nothing but Linux, and Windows XP a passive-aggressive sort of memory that troubles me at night. In between was a great deal of teeth-gnashing, hitting my forehead with the palm of my hand in exasperation, and mighty frustration. I think at one point, over a two-day period, I ended up having to reinstall my current version of Linux (Fedora Core 4) an astonishing three times. On another occasion, while trying to put a version of Windows on a spare hard-drive I also have in this computer, I wound up wiping a shiny, freshly installed version of Fedora, and replaced it inadvertently with WinXP because you don't get a choice about where the bloody thing might go, so it defaults to your main drive.
Suffice to say my family have been gravely concerned, and have at times resorted to snickering at my expense. So far Michelle has refrained from doing the "L for Loser" gesture. This I think must be True Love.
However, I'm not a complete twit. Before I embarked on all of this installation and reinstallation nonsense, I *did* back up all my vital data from Windows onto a CD. Much of it, including all my book-related files, is also on a USB flashdrive. So that's good.
Upshot: the Bedford computer is now all Linux, all the time. And, sheepishness aside, I'm pretty happy with it. I have now, after a couple of further days of fiddling, got it running Just Right. My current novel project, UMBRA, is all safely backed up, along with all my development notes. And, just now, I've got the mail filters on Thunderbird working correctly for the first time in days.
[heavy sigh]
It's almost as stressful and worrying as having to pack up and move to a new house. I've done that a few times, and it certainly is comparable--just with a lot less heavy-lifting.
* * *
Speaking of UMBRA: guess whose novel manuscript, despite all this nonsense going on in the background (and often in the foreground), has by now cracked the psychologically very important 75,000-word mark? It's been a long, long slog, but there are now times when I think I might possibly have something here. Not often, but sometimes. It's starting to head roughly in the right direction. I still don't know if I'll have to rewrite it completely, or if I can "fix it up in post".
* * *
Michelle and I have now booked our LA Con IV hotel rooms, too. We'll be staying in the Anaheim Hilton, the main convention hotel. We had wanted to have a few days either side of the convention to (a) get over jetlag a bit before the convention (because we know too well what it's like if you don't do this), and (b) recover from the convention, sight-see a bit, and take care of any extracurricular, um, activities that might occur. You know, things having vaguely to do with that whole "Project Mimosa" business. Anyway, it turns out the hotel has made it possible for con-goers to have the special convention rate of US$99/room for at least a whole week either side of the convention. This was very pleasing indeed. Next step, sometime soon, will be arranging the flights. *gleep!*
* * *
Am still awaiting word from the Acquisitions Editor at "Sharper Pollens" re, um, book-related stuff. Waiting is driving me--and sadly my whole family--nuts.
* * *
Last, if you've sent me email any time in the last, um, few months, and I haven't answered you yet (on account of being a lazy, slack-arsed bastard), I'd appreciate it if you could send me a fresh note to respond to, perhaps updating what you were saying. I did manage to save a lot of important data from the Windows thing, but unfortunately my email--along with an archive of many thousands of emails dating back several years--was lost. This naturally includes my address book. Thank you.
* * *
PS: You would not believe the vast oceans of cash I've made in the last few months. It seems I have a knack for winning various International and European Lotteries. Sometimes as often as a few times a day an email turns up announcing that I've just made, say, US$1.5 million! This has happened almost every day for ages. I'm just gobsmacked. What to do with all this cash? I'll have to rent one of those personal storage units or something. Michelle wants to know if this means I can help with the mortgage. Oddly, there appears to be a slight problem actually collecting all this loot. Hmm. Suggestions welcome.
Posted by adrian at 02:53 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
January 09, 2006
My Linux Holiday Home
Happy New Year!
I've spent the better part of the past couple of weeks (a) clutching my head in pain because, it turns out, Botox totally sucks as a treatment for my kind of headaches; and (b) playing with various distributions of Linux.
There may be eerie and mysterious connections between these two things.
I started off some weeks back using a very nice, very easy-to-use Linux distribution called Simply MEPIS. It's fabulous. Updating the software is painless, it works just right immediately, and you don't spend all your spare time fighting off viruses and downloading security patches. It's sweeeeeeeeet.
But then I got all curious. This led to a brief dalliance with a distribution called KNOPPIX, which I didn't think much of, but I did like the more recent version of the KDE desktop environment (yes, I know that's a tautology). Then, one fateful Sunday afternoon, while patrolling a newsagent's Linux magazine section (truly, not a very big section), I found a special issue of the British mag, Linux Format, which was all about Fedora Core 4 Linux.
Some years ago I dallied for a while with various flavours of Linux then available. It was a bad time, man. Text-based installation interface that assumed the operator knew a boatload of stuff about Linux already (which I didn't), and knew what to do in the event of a problem (which I certainly didn't). The installation process took forever, involved "compiling the kernel", an arcane process which personally I found extremely frightening because at no point did you really have any idea what was happening. Then, if you got the thing installed (oh yeah, there was also partitioning my hard-drive, which was something that would also do your head right in), you found out that it was fairly nice.
Until you tried to go online, or install new software. The problem I had with going online was that my Windows computer only had a so-called "WinModem" (a stripped back bit of circuitry that would only work in Windows because Windows contained a lot of software voodoo to make it go). WinModems would not work in Linux. This took me over a week of slogging through HOWTO documents, frequent reinstallation of the software with different options in case I'd stupidly missed the bit about "activating internal modem", and much cussing and grunting, etc, before I found it out. Then I tried to install fresh software from a CD. Turns out installing software in Windows makes things look very easy. In Linux at the time, the user was required to take all the countless little bits of files and stuff involved in a typical software package, and put them all in their correct places in the Linux directory tree--manually. If, like me, you didn't know how to do this, you were pretty well screwed.
Flash-forward to now: I've got a new computer, with a proper hardware DSL modem (yay for broadband!), and new versions of Linux make software installation, finally, pretty easy. Not, it must be admitted, as painlessly easy as the Windows InstallShield system, but easy enough for a plodder like me to deal with, anyway. This past weekend I downloaded and installed a whole new updated set of system software, including a revised kernel, a revised version of KDE, and much else. It took ages, but it went very smoothly. I was way-impressed.
I find I'm spending increasing amounts of time hanging out in the Linux partition on this computer. When I go back to the Windows partition, I get harangued to download the latest Microsoft security update, and similar nonsense. It's like coming home after a fabulous holiday. This led me to think of my Linux partition as like a holiday home. And, like a holiday home, I've been gradually moving in more and more of my stuff from the Windows side. Most of my Internet bookmarks are there now, my writing stuff is over there--er, here, and slowly but surely it's all starting to look a lot more permanent, and I'm feeling increasingly reluctant to go back to Windows.
Next computer we get--unless it's a Mac--the first thing I'll do is get rid of Windows and load it up with a shiny new copy of Linux. Phwoar!
Posted by adrian at 07:56 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack