Jaunty Jackalope and Bob Dylan

The installation of Jaunty went off, pretty much, without a hitch.  Install a whole new operating system without problems?  That’s Ubuntu.  The fonts and icons are a bit crisper, the boot time a bit quicker, the menus less cluttered, the installation of new programmes and packages from the repositories quicker, whatever problem with the default movie player which meant it couldn’t play movies is fixed and the default desktop background different, but other than that it’s the same old warhorse. 

I’ll use it for a while and if I have anything else to say about it then, I’ll say it.  I’m a user and not a programmer, so I just look at the pretty colours.  If you’re looking to switch from Windows, there’s never been a better time.  Jaunty is the most user-friendly release yet and only takes half-an-hour to install, tops. 

In other, more important news, Dylan’s new album Together Through Life drops today.  I’m taking a half-day from work, buying an actual physical copy from an actual physical shop, burning it to mp3 so I can X-Fi it through my expensive headphones, lay in bed and experience it.  Then I’ll come back here and rant about how great it is.

Whtiby Goth Weekend--Abridged

I’ll find the time to write a longer post about Whitby at some point in the near future.  (Maybe tonight... maybe tomorrow.  I’m going to be installing Jaunty Jackalope tonight, so it all kind of depends on how that goes.)

In the meantime, here’s a few quick lessons I learned over my three days:

1. Although the sight of streets awash with goths is scary, few sights warm the cockles of my heart as so many of them walking down the streets, enjoying 99 Flakes with strawberry sauce;
2. Cameras should be banned from concerts.  What the hell is the matter with you people?  The band is right there.  Why do you need all your experiences sanitised by a screen?
3. I need to learn how to sew so I can make myself a new costume.  It’s going to be the best costume ever;
4. Socialising is fun!  You would not believe how much that one screws with my head.  It’s like being kicked out an air lock and discovering you can breathe in a vacuum.  I’m a bit terrified and wondering where the real me has gone;
5. Whitby has more fish and chip shops then there is actual retail space.  I swear, the sheer density of fish and chip shops in the town has created sympathetic shifts in the wave function of the town’s quanta to produce quantum fish and chip shops which shift in and out of existence, merge and split apart on a microscopic level;
6. Abney Park are an amazing live band.  Especially for all their reliance on sequences and effects, I’ve not seen such a good show since Colour of Fire;
7. Steampunk should be fun!

Anyway, hopefully more later...

The Second Part

Well, this is my attempt at using ScribeFire at home.  A few noteworthy things happened today, actually:  my colleagues gave me a beautiful watch as a belated birthday present (if you're having sex--you know, proper full-on naked sex--are you supposed to take your watch off?);I spent this evening working in the garden; and I typed the <end> tag on the last story in Bambi's arc.  Thinking back over it, it seems really rather messy and is probably going to need some serious work.  I'll do that over Easter weekend, though:  That's 'Bambi Editing Weekend'.  More on that later, though.  I'm just posting while dinner is cooking.

I'm really hoping this works.

~crosses fingers~

(I must remember to change the font from the default to Arial when posting.  With luck, writing it here will remind me.)

EDIT:  success of a kind, I think.  The fonts are going to need some tweaking, but okay for today.

Success?

Wonderful! Let us judge this a tentative success until I can get home and see how things post from Ubuntu.

Hidden Crap

It's amazing the amount of crap Word puts in documents. All that hidden code. It copy pasta'ed into my ScribeFire, which then refused to publish it. Understandable, really. I don't really want it there, either. I pasted it into Notepad, and then into ScribeFire. That solved that problem.

Now, let us see how this comes out when I push, 'Publish'...

A Matter of Consistency

Those of you who know me probably know how nuts I’ve been driving myself over the last two posts. The spacing between the lines is different. The spacing between the paragraphs is different. The more I look at them, the more I’m convinced that the spacing between the letters is different.

I’m looking for a way to make consistent posts both from work, and from home. Normally using the same program would be a problem, as I use Ubuntu at home and Windows at work. I’m trying out ScribeFire. It’s an add-on for Firefox, a browser I use on both platforms, so I may have a solution.

The only trouble is that it doesn’t come with a spell checker. I need a spell checker--I’m a writer with an English degree. I need it like Steven Hawkins needs a calculator.

Scribefire is supposed to use the spell checker in Firefox, and it works fine at home. Not at work, though. So, I’m at work and typing this post in Word. I’m going to copy pasta it into Scribefire, and post it. I’m then going to type a post straight into Scribefire, and see how that turns out.

The reason for the difference in formatting between the first two entries is that the first one was typed in word, and pasted into Blogger’s editor. The second was typed straight into the editor.

Let us see...