Step away from the blog, ppl!

Did the title catch your eye?

Update: The giveaway event at Paper, Pens & Lipgloss scheduled for this weekend has been postponed til next weekend (6th - 8th August).

The good news? You're not too late to get a free copy of The Jeremy - Snaps of the Dragon. Click the link to Sa Toya's blog to keep up to date.

_{Powered by Zoundry Raven}

It's Book Giveaway Time at PPL!

PPL? That's Sa Toya's booky blog, otherwise known as Paper, Pens & Lipgloss. Hop on over and take a look (the link's at the bottom of this post).

She'll be running a giveaway of The Jeremy - Snaps of the Dragon this coming weekend. Not only that, she'll be publishing her interview questions and the answers I gave. Exciting init!

Wanna get your hands on a free copy of The Jeremy? Follow Sa Toya's blog...click here.

_{Powered by Zoundry Raven}

The Perils of a One-Track-Mind

"You've got a one-track-mind!"

It's often said derogatorily, directed towards a male person and delivered with a high innuendo factor. Just another hackneyed cliché*, it's always eager to be rolled out, sitting at the ready on the tip of many a friendly wag's tongue.

Thing is, there is no other sort of mind. At least not when it comes to using the 'thinking part' of one's brain. Sure, there's a plethora of tasks going on in the old grey matter, all at the same time. You could be eating a bar of chocolate while climbing the stairs while reading a text message while thinking about the witty reply you'll send. You might switch your thoughts to how tasty the chocolate is, or how sexy the person in front of you looks from this angle, or how much more sexy they'd be if covered in melted milk chocolate (a token nod to the standard 'one-track-mind' accusers) but I'll bet you will only actively think about one of those things at any one time.

Multi-task! That's what we need to do. Even us men. The modern world demands it. But multi-tasking doesn't mean you're applying your brainpower to more than one thing at the same time. It requires you to switch your attention from one thing to the next and then the next and so on until you switch back to the first thing and start all over again.

And often, starting all over again is exactly what we do. It's hard to pick up where you left off without a recap of where you were in the particular process of each task in the chain, and the more tasks in the chain the greater the amount of time spent recapping at each task-switch. "It don't seem very 'fficient to me, mum!"

It was, perhaps, logic of this sort that led me to apply myself solely to the task of organising all the files on my hard drive after the Big Crash, I've-started-so-I'll-finish style, rather than switch between that and regaling my multitudinous blog readers, writing my next novel and attending to my correspondence. The upside is that my hard drive is now lean and clean, which gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside, me being a bit of a geek and all that.

Downsides? I'll just pretend there aren't any - got to protect the warm fuzzy feeling dontcha know!

_{* 'hackneyed cliché' - now there's a cliché for you!}

_{Powered by Zoundry Raven}

Roll up! Roll up! 75% Off at Smashwords

The Jeremy - Snaps of the Dragon is just one of many eBooks available in the Smashwords Summer/Winter Sale until 31st July. Get it here.

_{Powered by Zoundry Raven}

Did You Miss Me?

CRASH! Well, perhaps not quite that dramatic but the end result was that my PC would not boot after it hung.

Ironic really, considering I was installing software to emulate a PC so that I could try out new software in the emulation without the risk of it crashing my real machine. Just as well I'm not phased by having to reinstall Windows. I've done it enough times that I've got used to it as a normal part of PC-using life. It's the price you pay for allowing your TechoNerdGeek-self the freedom he craves to fiddle (I mean 'make things work better', of course).

If you're not TechoNerdGeeky then your eyes have no doubt started to glaze over already, and I'll warn you now there's more to come, so if you prefer to listen to some music there's an appropriate song at the bottom of the post.

One of the real pains of reinstalling an OS is that all the tweaks you implemented since the last time it crashed have to be set up again and invariably you can't recall exactly how you did this or that. Grrrr!

Just as well I'd found the marvelous Dropbox, which does such a good job of backing up stuff without making a big deal out of it, so my data was safe.

Of course, my applications needed reinstalling and setting up, a very time consuming and tedious business. It's a good thing that I'd started using some 'portable' applications, ones that store their configuration info in their own folder rather than the eggs-all-in-one-basket Windows Registry. I was checking for updates for those applications when I came across LiberKey.

It really is the dog's bollo ... errm ... the bee's knees. Managed, portable apps that can run either from a USB stick or, and this is the good part as far as I'm concerned, from any folder on your hard drive. The 'managed' bit simply means you are automatically notified of updates which can be downloaded and installed automatically. Dare I think that I've found a crash defying solution that will have me up and running in no time after the next crash? I've no doubt I'll have the opportunity to find out at some point.

In the meantime, it's good to be back.

Everything But The Girl 'Missing'

_{Powered by Zoundry Raven}