Trials & Tribulations Installing Leopard
<rant>
OK, so with the benefit of hindsight, I am a fool and a sucker for new ’stuff’, but I was excited by the release of Apple’s new operating system, and pre-ordered so that it would be delivered on Friday, release day in the UK. It arrived and I loaded it today. Well, when I say ‘loaded’, I mean that I have spent the entire day trying to get it installed on my beautiful 24″ iMac, and now at 8.30pm, I have finally succeeded.
I was complacent. With all-things-Apple, I am used to opening the box and for it to just work. It always does. Well, Leopard was my wake up call! Judging from the forums, there is a real problem with the Leopard install procedure and Apple should be ashamed of themselves for releasing it with such significant problems. Apple discussion forums have been on fire with problems today and, thank God for people taking the time to post their experiences and solutions.
For me, and most others it seems, the solution is to run an ‘archive and install’ rather than the straightforward update. For sure, this is the last operating system that I buy on release day - I totally advocate waiting a few weeks for it to bed in and inevitable patches to be released. But when you’ve got to have it, you’ve got to have it. Now that it’s running, it is very lovely - but there is a distinctly sour taste in my mouth from the fiasco that I went through to get it working. It just shouldn’t happen with Apple and I hope that they wake up and apologise publicly to their loyal user base for what seems to be a shoddy upgrade procedure.
</rant>
Notes on a Spillage
Tonight I knocked an empty saucepan into the cat’s water bowl and the result was Lake fu*king Windermere in my kitchen. How can one little bowl of water create THAT much water?
Now, some three and half hours later as I sat all mellow and relaxed watching Question Time, sipping a large mug of Darjeeling tea and idly browsing the rather splendid barleyhut.com, I knocked said mug of tea and have spent the last fifteen minutes tending to a mini tsunami in my sitting room. I am relieved to report that no Macbooks were harmed during this disaster and that Darjeeling tea appears to have remarkable cleansing properties for oak floors.
Someone is sending me a sign. Someone is telling me to go to bed and avoid the bath at all costs.
Written Into a Corner
My two main characters have been stuck in the kitchen for almost four months now. I wrote them there and now I can’t write them out. It’s a nice kitchen but you wouldn’t want to spend a whole novel there. Especially since they drank the last of the Jack Daniels the night before and there’s nothing stronger than Darjeeling in the cupboard. I should be writing them out now, but here I am writing this instead. I am a bad person. OK, I’ll have a go.
Wake Up Call
This video is doing the arounds at the moment. Any cat owners will relate immediately, it’s hilarious and well observed:
Twisty Writing
I think it’s fairly safe to say that I’m blocked and no - it’s nothing that Fibrogel can fix (as far as I’m aware). I have writer’s block, this thing we read of in every single book about writing that only people with writers block ever read. However, I am fighting the block - I have new techniques. Technique number 1 is called Twisty Writing - see example below:
The idea, as the more observant of you will have gathered, is to write in a twisty line. Write anything, just keep writing and don’t stop until you reach the end of the line. It’s a variation on freewriting, except you aren’t confronted with the dreaded blank page - your only target is a line, and any fool can fill up a twisty line with random gibberish. Genius!
There is one drawback. It works really, really, really well if you have a swanky DTP application like Adobe Indesign - but I don’t know any other way of doing it on a computer - though I bet there are many. I haven’t tried it on paper, but I imagine it would be pretty cool.
Anyway, this is my first technique in the fight against writer’s block. You saw it here first.