The re-write and edit of my novel Broken Evolution is over, and has been sent to an agent who requested it. I hope the improvements will work in my favour, and the five week delay in getting to the agent won’t be held against me!
An interesting little irony - on the week that I finished Broken Evolution, the geneticist Steve Jones gave a lecture, saying that human evolution is over. Am I tapping a vein in the zeitgeist here? I suppose the premise of my book is that, while natural selection might be over, we might be embarking on a lateral step in human evolution instead. The theme came through nicely in the re-write, this time via the plot - where all themes should.
There was also the minor matter of a global economic meltdown during the week.
Evolution is over. Capitalism is dead.
Maybe Douglas Adams was right; it was a bad idea coming down from the trees in the first place. Time to go back up.
So my laptop has been acting up for a while. I’ve had at least 3 boot attempts everytime I want to start it up and lately I’ve been getting disk errors too (*shudders*).
I bought it more for its multimedia capabilities and for a bit of programming. Now, when looking for a replacement, I realised I just wanted something for writing on the move and a bit of net surfing, i.e. really portable, lightweight, with no annoying loud fan noises or hard disk clicks this time.
So in searching, I came across the Asus Eee PC 900. It’s really nice. In size, it’s footprint is just a bit larger than a DVD cover - that’ll tell you how portable this thing is. It has a nice lightweight linux installation on it that is both easy to use and highly functional. OpenOffice comes pre-installed for the ‘ol writing. It has a silent solid state disk instead of a winchester hard disk, so can a few knocks without risk of damaging the disk. SSD disk capacities are still fairly small, but a novel doesn’t take much disk space (in fact, I’ve always found it a bit depressing that it takes so much work just to produce about 1 Mb of data!) The screen is large enough to view pages of text or web pages full width. I think kids and students are the main target for it, but I can see why it has so many ‘bigger’ fans too! Some of the more powerful UMPCs are very expensive.
The keyboard has a small footprint, so it takes a bit of getting used to and I needed to slow down my typing speed for a couple of days until I got accustomed to the keys sizes and placement. It will probably need a new larger capacity battery because the one that ships with it will only last less than two hours on a charge.
But overall I’m very impressed with what you can get for 300 euro now. Blink these days and the technology leaps another step.
Well, I’ve upgraded my blogging software to the latest version, as part of the process of moving to a new server.
What a pain that was! Version of this didn’t work with versions of that, etc., etc… And then there was the strange characters appearing in the restored blog text that had to be stripped out manually. Shessh!
