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The Gremlins are lose

I am at the end of my tether with all things writing-connected. Blogger has deleted my blogs, and this grates enormously. My blogs may not have had many readers, they may not have been particularly interesting or well-written, but they mattered to me and I feel wronged. I had come to rely on the web as a place to write and post comments and thoughts. Google has taken over the old newsgroups and on rasfs I can still read posts dating back to 1991 (which was a fertile year for discussing world building and alien biology). I assumed the internet was a safe place for information exchange.

Apparently not. Five months of blogging has been washed down the data gutter. The guy from Blogger said something about recovering my blogs, but it hasn’t happened yet and in any event would have taken over a week from the time they vanished. I can’t trust Blogger again. Considering that they host the National Novel Writing Month, I wonder who can!

A part of me was not too upset about not having to post to the NBM for a while because I have other things to do. The Hugo ballot is closing soon, I am busy with critters and my own writers group has come up with several fat manuscripts. Most importantly, I need to write an acceptable story with a beginning, middle and end which I can submit to the group before they kick me out. I really want to be a part of it, but I find fiction writing much harder than expected. After a lot of cat-vacuuming, I am slowly getting round to it (now on story 3, version five or six…). But I also have to submit three critiques for critters this week and I need to get that out of the way first. And so the next hurdle has been thrown up.

Maybe this computer has twigged that I have eyed up an iBook last week. It has started to throw wobblers at me, but having to restore bits of the panel doesn’t faze me too much. Then AbiWord started crashing. Yesterday it crashed six times while I was reading simple .txt documents. I crashes when I as much as touch the mouse. Today I thought it was OK again, but it crashed just as I was about to save changes to a file (which is the worst because I never work with .CRASHED files, they are a nuissance. So now I save almost every 30 seconds because I am becoming paranoid and the more I save, the more it crashes.)

I know. Trash AbiWord. It is the worst pile of garbage ever to be inflicted on the Open Source community and makes me think (snidely) you get what you pay for—at least until I remember Microsoft Windows ’95. But it isn’t an excuse.

John maintains that he cannot install another program without upgrading the memory and hard drive, even though he is welcome to throw out Netscape version 2.something, Abiword and whatever passes for a spreadsheet (if necesarry) and I have on my desk a CD with software tested on Red Hat 6.0 (this is Red Hat 7.2). He is a typically thick-skulled geek. Of course he can damn well install another, reliable word processor. I tried to explain (in vain) that AbiWord is a beta test version that should never have been distributed (thanks, Red Hat!). But no, nothing gets changed on this machine without a complete overhaul.

Why? It isn’t as if this computer doesn’t belong on the nearest trash heap. If AbiWords recent copious crashes are in fact a sign that the whole machine is running out of RAM, then it should be trashed doubly quick. What is this, the middle ages?

So, no more writing for the moment (oh, I know I’m writing this, but I mean proper stuff like stories and critiques). If I still had money, I would take the bus to Reading and buy that iBook today. But I don’t have any money and suddenly I really feel that I need a drink.

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