Writing Progress Update for Monday

Last week I realized the reason why I kept on losing my writing work.  I’m a big fan of running libre software on my desktop.  While I can’t do so comfortably at work, but at home I run Linux desktop exclusively.  (Except to play the occasional Windows-only video game.)  So I use OpenOffice for my word processing and hence writing.  And I’m a big fan of using Open Document Formats.  However working on ODTs (essentially ZIP archives with ODF XML files inside) from a USB flash drive is not the way to go.  I guess the amount of saving and writing to disk, doesn’t help with prolonging the life of the flash memory.  So I had to change my workflow to use Dropbox instead.  I don’t want to wrangle with corrupt ODT files.  To make a long story short, I had to do some lengthy rewrites which didn’t help with moving forward in my novel.  However that has all been resolved, and I can say that I’m making good progress on the first chapter.

Recovery and 15 Minutes Writing Sprints

As I sat down to do some writing I couldn’t have expected it to happen.  I had 15 minutes to kill, and so I thought that I would just fire up the current chapter I was working on.  The rain ended my plans for a walk.  But this I didn’t imagine.  I didn’t imagine all my writing work disappearing… instead being replaced by a logged chat.  Totally weird.  Fortunately I managed to unzip the ODT, and recover the content by extracting bits of text out of an XML file.  Well instead of working on the next part of the chapter, I had recover my work.  Bummer.  Anyways, after doing so I uploaded a copy of my work to Google Docs for safe keeping.  So remember kids, backup, backup and mirror!

Anyways I’m experiementing with writing my novel in short 15-20 minute bursts.  I’m hoping this lead to more output, in a short period of time.  We’ll see how it goes.

Slight Delay in Review

I regret to inform you, that the second part of the review of the Kubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon” beta release will be delayed until Monday. I had a great deal of work today, and I will away tomorrow.

I started writing up the review. But I need some more time to thoroughly look at the new Amarok 1.4.7, and OpenOffice.org 2.3. Also I have not started to play around with the remote control. Finally, I need to polish the article. Heck, I’m a perfectionist.

So again, I am very sorry for the delay. I will post the article Monday evening.