Hypocrisy is a wonderful thing, and thanks to the medium of social networking, it is a much easier thing to achieve. Every time Facebook chisels away at the privacy settings of the least private private network in the world, or Google adds another prohibitively anti privacy line to its terms and conditions, I do the little shudder that will be familiar to most users of the internet, then I open my Gmail anyway and post a YouTube clip to Facebook. I might also grumpily link to an article on some well meaning blog bemoaning the gradual slide into the dystopian future we are all party to, or grumble on Twitter a bit. Maybe sign a petition. Down with this sort of thing.

But, having bemoaned my personal information going to places not of my choosing I them completely undercut my own indignation by taking all of my information and spitting it at the internet like an excitable toddler might a particularly tasty pudding. Not only do I have not one but two blogs dedicated to churning my every waking thought into something vaguely readable, and I’ve spent the last three years on Twitter, where I have posted a quite alarming 12,000 tweets, most of which were probably revealing of myself either in their tedium or otherwise. I joined Last.fm, which takes note of every single song I listen to and turns them into spiffy charts, which it then spews out onto Twitter, as though anyone has the remotest interest in what the three bands I most listened to were over a seven day period. () I’m not alone in doing this, and I actually love to look at other people’s charts and compare their ‘musical compatibility’ with my own, even though it often leaves me feeling oddly voyeuristic even though they too have blurted their own taste out to the world, just like me.

It doesn’t stop their either. About six months back I joined a service called Miso, which you can use to log every single thing you watch and leave a little comment. It also then asks you if you would like to post it just to your friends on Miso, or your Twitter feed, or Facebook, or all three. It then gives you points based on who you tell. I gave up using it for a while based on the fact that I found it a step too far, but then I decided it would be a good idea at the beginning of the year to see just how many films I watch in a year. Because, well, why not. It’s the sort of thing someone as geekily anal retentive as myself might want to know at the end of the year. ‘Oh look Ethel this year I have watched 174 films, wasting an average of 350 hours of my life, roughly meaning I could have spend an entire fortnight doing something more productive. Isn’t that interesting? Ethel?’

But then I instantly fell back into the trap of broadcasting my every episode of Sherlock, or Desperate Housewives, or Coppers, blurting to the world like some kind of broken foghorn, spluttering meaningless titles at the void and hoping people will look at my viewing habits and somehow decide that I am so utterly and comprehensively amazing that they should give me a research grant. Or a medal of some kind. Quite disappointingly, it turns out that in the whole of January so far, I’ve only watched 6 films as well. Gutted.

Then, yesterday, this happened:

I need more! More ways to rivet you all with my every move. Well actually, I thought it would also be interesting to see how many books I actually manage to read in a year, but nonetheless, this needs to stop! Well actually, more than one person pointed me in the direction of GoodReads.com, and having signed up and listed my first books of the year maybe I won’t stop, thank you very much. And I love my last.fm, it listens to me far more than most human beings do and has a lovely recommendations page that isn’t a ‘You like metal?’ Have you heard of Metallica?’ exercise in obviousness. Every month I take heed of its recommendations and find at least two or three new bands that turn out to be pretty good. Also, my charts are too in depth, too complex, too massive to abandon now.

So if you follow me on Twitter or Facebook and find my constant need to transmit objectionable then I apologise. But not all that much. Your choice. I’m not going to change. Next month I’ll probably find something that broadcasts my every idle thought and I’ll sign up for that too, and link it to my Facebook feed and my Tumblr, just for kicks. But the next time you see me crying over privacy settings on the internet, please do give me a virtual punch on the ear, and tell me to stop being an idiot. I’ve lost all right to do that.

Oh, and if you are a fellow obsessive, you can find me on Twitter, Last.fm, Miso, Goodreads and Tumblr.

You see that sentence there? That’s why I will never be a journalist, you know, a proper paid one. But who would want to be a journalist really these days? Declining sales, declining newspaper revenues, increased competition from web outlets both professional and amateur. Massive increase in pressure over a sustained period to make sure you are out ahead. Corrupt practices all around, and public outrage at every turn. I used to think that journalism was my future, now it seems that it is nobody’s.

The strange thing is that this whole scandal about the news of the world has been massively driven by both the new media worlds of Twitter, where every twist and turn is examined and inspected and exposed in minutes, and the old media. The exposure of phone hacking at the News of the World was driven over a two year period by one newspaper, the Guardian, doggedly refusing to give up the story. It is a staggering achievement for them, and I imagine that when all the dust settles this investigation will become a beacon of investigative journalism for aspiring writers on the scale of Woodward and Bernstein before them. (Before you remark that Watergate unseated a sitting President, I wouldn’t be so quick to presume this scandal doesn’t still have that scope within it.)

As a dedicated news hound, I find myself utterly glued to the unfolding events. I’ve been following the phone hacking scandal for a long time, not generally out of some moral outrage (that came later) but out of a general curiosity at how the world of ‘proper’ journalism works, and out of an enjoyment at seeing the utterly rotten empire of the House of Murdoch in trouble. Then came this week’s revelations, and like most who have followed the story for a while, I found myself not even remotely surprised by the unfolding events. Disgusted, but not surprised.

Over the past few days it has also been fun to see how much harder those trying to set the agenda have found it to do so, thanks to the relentless interest of Twitter and other social media. Like probably everyone I rejoiced at the initial announcement of the closing of the News of the World. It smelt so much of victory! But then you start to think about it, and something doesn’t seem right. In the bad old days this bait and switch move by the Murdoch Overlords may have worked, the sacrifice of 300 or so staff at the paper might have worked, but by the time I had finished watching the report on the 6 o’ clock news yesterday, I had opened up Twitter and found reams of links and analysis by both journalists I follow and normal people, talking about the planned merger of the Sun and the NotW, and talking about the staff of a newspaper who suddenly found themselves out of a job, and what’s more, stuck in an office with their internet switched off, and Rebekah Brooks still free to carry on her duties. As always with twitter, this analysis was driven mostly alongside the heavy tract of exceptionally funny commentary.

Today I am continuing to follow avidly, on the radio, through the Guardian, through the BBC, through Twitter, through a hundred different outlets. One thing seems certain, this is not even close to being the end of this story, because we the people won’t let it be. We are not going to drop it, and as long as that is the case, neither will the press, or the government. I for one want to know who else has been hacking, speculation about other papers seems rife. This story will move beyond the Murdochs (hopefully not before it claims a few high profile scalps) and I’m sure it will have many more shocks.

We’re all news junkies now, and we’re starting to see how much of a good thing that can be.

For some reason I find the weekend to be the hardest time to keep up with the blog a day ethic, which surprises me since I thought they would be the easiest. I think it is the lure of Total Wipeout in the hour that is my normal blogging time, or the fact that I have been running around after a particularly manic three year old. But once again I find myself about to sit down for the evening on a Saturday and thinking ‘oh bloody bollocks I’ve got to write a blog post, what the bloody hell am I going to write about at this time of the day, I just want to watch a film when will it ever stop?’  The I cry a little bit, then I come into the kitchen and write the paragraph you’ve just read.

Anyway, today was a good day, because something mildly interesting happened while I was cooking a delicious mushroom and bacon risotto. I know, I know, you’re all leaning into your screens in anticipation with that kind of build up. But for a few minutes I felt famous on the internet.

‘How so?’ I hear you cry. Well, last week I discovered a relatively new podcast with a terrible title, Footballistically Arsenal. Terrible title, but the podcast itself is pretty good. No Arseblog admittedly, but not too shabby, and made more interesting by the fact that it is run by three properly Arsenal obsessed celebrities, to whit  Mr Dermot O Leary, Boyd Hilton from Heat magazine (and more importantly excellent Radio 5Live tv pundit) and some telly producer who married Holly Willoughby. Ok, maybe the term celebrity might be stretching it on 2/3rds of the cast, but it’s good.

They have a Facebook page, obviously, and after the Barca match I left a witty message on their wall, and forgot all about it. Then, as I ladled in my fifth ladle of chicken stock and listened back to the podcast nearly half a week later I heard Boyd Hilton reading out the self same comment, the only one he mentioned in the whole podcast, then read my name out My comment even got a laugh from all the cast, and the production people. Quite a small moment of triumph in the grand scheme of things, maybe, but still, most pleasantly unexpected. If you want to hear my moment of triumph it comes right at the end of the podcast, which you can find here. Having said that, I should hopefully be appearing on an actual podcast in a guest capacity soon, so that’s rather exciting.

Anyway, that’s enough for me, I want a beer and a film. Incidentally, I just watched the ‘Let’s Dance for Comic Relief opener and found it to be really tedious, except for Ed Byrne’s effort, which of course meant he was the first eliminated from the competition. I do think the organisers missed a trick though, Thom Yorke has proved this week that he should be a shoe in for the next series with Radiohead’s new video. And yes, it is Radiohead week here on Blog OTM. Get used to it. But Thom Yorke = dancing superstar.

Sorry, I’ve been listening to Wu Tang all day and I think it’s having an effect. Anyway, bit busy, so I’m going to just point you in the direction of something I found lying down the back of YouTube, which is funnier than pretty much anything else, ever. Honestly I found this last night and it’s just amazing. I will warn you it’s a bit NSFW but I cannot stop watching it.

Enjoy, back with a proper post tomorrow.

Back to work today, so at the very least I have left the Chapelfields estate, which is nice, seeing as it is a pit of desperation. And possibly cholera. My day has also been brightened immensely by the news that I have won a copy of the Zomblogalypse DVD on Twitter, so that can get added to the pile of many things to watch on my shiny new TV. I have spoken previously of my joy at discovering their shiny gem of a web series, so these are glad tidings indeed.

Apparently last night there was an earthquake in York which was felt by loads of people, and it hit right around the time I posted my blog post last night. So I think the only inference we can take from that is the sheer weight of importance that was held in my words nearly broke the world. Obviously. I didn’t actually feel the earthquake myself, but that may have had something to do with the three year old thundering across the floor over my head as she refused to stay in bed for longer than five minutes. If the house had started to fall down around me I would still have attributed it to her. As well as this I was listening to Agoraphobic Nosebleed at quite a volume at the time, so again it is unlikely that the earthquake was fighting a losing battle for my attention, and obviously it’s main intention would be to distract me.

Today I have spent a rather large amount of time listening to the Averagedudes podcast, which is created by my good friend Fozz, who also has a blog with a much more well conceived central premise than this one, the To Watch Pile. Over the last year I’ve seen him join Twitter (along with his lovely wife Becky) and quickly become very involved in this old Internet life, and now his blog is required reading and after only a few episodes in I now actively look forward to the arrival of his podcast because of its content and not just because it’s a mate who is doing it, which is as much as you can ask really. It dawned on me that I haven’t given him a good pimping here, so I shall do so for you now. Basically it’s a film review show done with an American called Lance who has a deliriously laconic voice, and it’s very funny and informative, even if Fozz’s anti Pixar rantings mark his as at best emotionally stunted, and at worst a psychopath in waiting.. It also looks like I might be securing a guest spot on some future podcast, which is quite exciting. I have the perfect face for radio after all.

Now that the holiday season is all but over and I have reclaimed my house back from the parental units that have been squatting in it for the last week I find myself sitting not in front of my fantastic new telly (cheers Mum and Dad) watching my extended Lord of the Rings DVD box set (cheers Ellen) but instead sat at my desk alone in the office, with nothing to do. So I have no reason not to make one last post of 2010. Saying that I am also in work tomorrow so there may be another post tomorrow.

I’ve been looking over the stats for both this site and Demon Pigeon, and considering that neither site really got the lavish treatment their readers deserve, both did pretty well in terms of visitor numbers, so I think next year I need to make sure to bring a bit more focus to blogging. At this early pre-new years eve point I am tempted to say that I’m going to attempt to do a Richard Herring-style blog post every day for the whole year, but you and I know there’s no way I’ll be able to keep up those sorts of productivity levels, especially seeing as I will also be working on the second draft of Europa and doing Blood On The Motorway. But I may try and keep up as long as I can. For other reasons next year is going to be a pretty hectic affair as it stands but we shall see what we can manage. It never hurts to go into a new year with a head full of aspirations, after all.

The festive season went rather splendidly, and I am particularly proud of my Christmas Dinner, which went swimmingly. When you are doing as complex a meal as I attempted and the worst you can say is that the devilled red cabbage had a touch too much cinnamon in it then you are not really doing too badly. I have to say that any success is down to not just myself by the recipes provided by the BBC food website and Ellen’s last minute intervention to make the very lovely gravy. I think that I may have overdosed on food for the rest of the week, however, and I am pretty sure that I end the year heavier than I started it, so I guess the good intentions for 2011 will have to extend to working out and dieting and all that palaver as well.

I am looking forward to reclaiming my bed tonight, I feel like I have spent the last week sleeping on an airport car park ticket machine. Having visitors is lovely, but having your house to yourselves again afterwards is every bit as good.

For the most part I’ve been taking December as a ‘month off the Internet’, save for the occasional pop round the door of Twitter or Facebook to say hello, or tell crap jokes which then get ignored or scorned upon. It’s been refreshing, and I’m not really sure how much I’ve really missed it, but that has as much to do with still being burned out by Nanowrimo as it does with the Internet itself, I suspect. Nonetheless, given that it is the end of the year I feel somewhat compelled to come back and pester you with some half formed thoughts about the year that has gone by.

First of all, I’ve decided not to burden you all with the standard top ten lists malarkey this year. Unless you are really very good at them and your opinion carries some weight then let’s face it they are by and large a big heap of Gillian McKeith. Either you list a load of stuff that everyone’s already heard or seen and come off as being too mainstream and boring, in which case why bother. On the other hand if you try and go for more obscure things then you end up looking like a shallow scene wanker trying to point out how cool he is by listing a load of stuff you’re not cool enough to have heard. Over at Demon Pigeon Dan and the others lampooned this pretty effectively, so I’m just going to say there are a few albums this year which have blown me away, if you’ll spare me a moment’s indulgence I will tell you what they are.

Firstly the new Dillinger Escape Plan album, Option Paralysis, blew me away in March and has rarely been off my stereo since. It manages to be both the melodically adventurous and poppy metal album I’ve ever heard, and conversely the most brutal as well. There’s only one word for it, and that’s bewildering. Other metal albums I’ve really enjoyed this year have been the new Knut album, Wonder, and the excellently named Tony Danza Tapdance Extravaganza’s third album. I reviewed all three for Demon Pigeon so if you want more on them by all means click on them there links. I quite liked the new Misery Index album as well, even if it is a bit generic it’s a good laugh.

As for non-metal I’ve loved the Joanna Newsome triple album Have One On Me and the new Sufjan Stevens album Age of Adz. The latter especially is a lovely bold move by Stevens, incorporating digital effects and even auto-tune and vocoder without ever sounding generic or bland. These are by no means the only albums I have enjoyed, but they are the ones that stand out. As for gigs, well it’s been a bit sparse but the excellent Damnation Festival was a great day out, and Richard Herring’s Hitler Moustache was probably the best stand up I’ve ever seen.

I’ve only been to the cinema a handful of times so I feel ill-qualified to talk much about this year’s film crop, but rather predictably I loved Inception and HP7a. I’m sure Social Network would have made me very happy with its mix of being geeky/being written by my favourite writer/being directed by David Fincher, but I never got to see it, so I am now left to wait impatiently for the DVD release. Not being able to see many new films has not stopped me from getting addicted to the Kermode and Mayo podcast however, and hello to Jason Isaacs if you are readong. Which of course you aren’t. I’ve been watching far more television this year, and it’s been a bumper bonanza of goodness in that regard. I was mentioning to Ellen the other night how it’s felt that this year British Sci Fi has taken over again from its glossier American counterparts. Consider the quality of the second series of Being Human or Misfits, or most strikingly the new Stephen Moffatt helmed Doctor Who and contrast that with the rather stale reimagining of V, or flashforward, or any of the other Heroes clones wheeled out to fill the void left by Lost and Battlestar. Long may it continue, although the news that the new American based Torchwood is being mainly done by ex Buffy writers may mean American Sci Fi goodness returns next year. In non sci fi I think Any Human Heart was about as perfect as TV drama gets, just a sumptuous feast of excellence.

At the end of the most turrbulent year in politics that I have experienced in my adult life, I now strangely feel I have nothing to add. This may be because i think everyone is now so much more engaged with what is going on around them that I have nothing to add to the reams of available information or commentary, or it could just be because I couldn’t possibly put anything better than my favourite blog of the year Enemies of Reason, which has grown month by month into the most authoriative and correct voice in my feed reader. If you don’t already read every single word that Anton Vowl puts out, then I highly recommend you do so. But please don’t judge me for having the same wordpress theme as him. All I will say is that having supported the Liberal Democrats for all of my adult life on the grounds that they were a little less interested in power and more interested in their values it’s quite staggering the extent to which they have sold those values out for a modicum of power. 

On a personal level, I think I can call 2010 a good year overall, although financially it’s been an absolute nightmare. But Ellen and Rosie and I moved into a proper family house in May, I am close to passing my driving test, I launched Demon Pigeon which has turned out to be reasonably popular, although I am not under any illusions as to my own responsibility for this success given the excellent assembly of writers that are now doing the words. On top of DP I wrote a lot for Blood on the Motorway (still hope to launch soon) and wrote the first draft of another novel. On the flip side after a very successful first six months the Year of Health experiment turned out to be a pretty catastrophic failure and I am back up to the weight I was at the beginning of the year, and that’s before even the indulgence of the next few weeks to go on top of that. I have managed to give up smoking however, so that one goes firmly in the win column. As for the weight I am going to try again in January, but one suspects this will be a battle I will be having with myself for most of the rest of my life. I say most, because I plan on not caring when I get to pensioner age. I have taken the YOH site down now since it was being spammed to a ridiculous level, but all the posts are now floating around in here, so if you missed any of it feel free to try and work out where they are.

As for next year, well I have other news that I cannot share at the moment but I think it’s fair to say that 2011 is going to be a brilliant one. I will share more when I can, but that might be a few months away yet. As for you lovely readers, if you’ve managed to make it through this most sparse of years, where my average post count has never crept above one a week then I must say a hearty thank you, and I wish you all a lovely Xmas and a Happy New Year. I leave you with a video from my favourite album of the year, because nothing says Christmas like a buff man shouting over tech metal.

Merry Xmas you beautiful bastards.

As my seven year anniversary of spewing my mind onto the internet (or blogging) approaches (October 8th, fact-fans) I’ve been re-reading some of my really early posts from my old Livejournal. Very surreal experience, a bit like revisiting the old diary you used to keep when an angst-and-spot-ridden adolescent. One thing that struck me was how ‘into’ blogging I got very very quickly. Almost every day I blogged something, although that probably had a fair amount to do with the job I was in not actually requiring me to do much work. The second thing that struck me was how much I seemed to hate the job I was doing. Looking back on it now, working for a laid back media company doing fun little projects and spending my lunch hours playing pool on the company table with my good friend Jonic, it seemed like a glorious time, but back then I felt trapped in a hellish and restrictive work environment.

Is this just my revisionist memory papering over the cracks of the past and leaving me with a highlights reel like I have just left the Big Brother house? Or is it more the case that I am somehow genetically predisposed to not enjoy my work. I don’t know if it’s a generational thing, but the notion of actually enjoying work, of reaching retirement age with anything other than sheer bloody relief seems utterly alien to me. Perhaps it the type of work that I do, although given that I’ve failed to enjoy working even when I was doing what I wanted to do. Either way, I look at the job I am doing now in this context and maybe it’s not that bad after all. Perhaps I should stop being so misanthropic and try to enjoy my weekday daytimes.

The other thing that has been quite good fun from reading over those first posts has been revisiting my first attempt at Nanowrimo, just in time for my third attempt seven years on. I actually did really enjoy that first novel, and thought that it had a fair amount of potential if I could polish up a second draft, but unfortunately it fell into data corruption hell, never to be salvaged. 50,000 words and a month’s hard slog all consigned to the dustbin of half-remembered plot lines and nostalgia. It was on a laptop that died a death, and when we recovered it the file was interminably corrupted. Which meant I was a novelist without proof. When I wrote my second novel, however, I perhaps went into it a little cocksure after my first success and ended up with a lame and half-finished piece of garbage that was so directionless and convoluted as to be utterly without merit, aside from giving me a rough knowledge of the pitfalls to avoid while subsequently writing Blood On The Motorway.

Now I am shaping up to start my third, which I can exclusively reveal (I can only imagine the world of publishing will be quaking in their boots) will be called (drum roll if you please) Europa. I’ve got a loose plot hammered out, have done a bit of research for the technical side of things, but have yet to think about the characters much. If there are any readers out there who know experts in the field of water All in all I am now quite looking forward to November the 1st and getting down to the actual business of writing the damn thing.

As for Blood on the Motorway, can also confirm that Jonic the magnificent bastard is hard at work on getting the site designed and we should (hopefully) be launching before the start of Nano. From our discussions I think it will be a really innovative approach to online publishing, and I have more than enough written and ready to go to give me a month’s buffer and hope to have even more by the time we launch. The decision to focus on my creative writing has so far really worked out, and I’m quite proud of what I have so far. I will be counting on all you fine readers of this here blog to go and tell the world about it, or at the very least not tell anyone if you think it’s rubbish.

Oh, and if you haven’t listened to the new Sufjan Stevens album, which is streaming here, then you haven’t lived. Breathtaking stuff.

I’ve a couple of mega busy weeks at work that have left me too knackered to do much, so I haven’t done much in accordance with my knackeration. But now, I feel compelled to write and tell you all that I am in mourning, albeit a temporary state of bereavement. Yesterday I had to go and see my friend Laurie at T-Mobile and hand him my shiny lovely HTC phone. In return all he gave me was a dull and lifeless battered brick of a Motorola, which has clearly been a courtesy phone to so many people that I’ll be utterly shocked if I don’t contract the Hanta virus just by holding it up to my ear.

It’s been less than a day and already I fell like I’ve lost a limb. I know that to the vast majority (i.e. all) of you this will sound very silly, but I’ve become very dependant on my phone, although I rarely use it as such. It is my RSS reader, my portal to Twitter and Facebook, my music player and my podcast reader. It is a portable search engine, my bus timetable, my reader count, my calorie counter, my exercise tracker and more besides. Even though I sit and write this at a computer which has the internet, without my phone I still feel a little bit adrift, cut off from the wider world. This is due to continue for another two weeks. Hence, sadface.

But let us not dwell too much on such hardships, let’s face it in the grand scheme of things this barely even registers as a problem, so I shall move on, albeit whilst simultaneously glaring at my replacement phone like it might bite me at any moment. Last time I spoke to you I was about to install Ubuntu and it was a staggering success. It’s a lovely operating system, although it has taken me a few weeks to recover all my old files from the old Windows set up. The best thing about it is that it now has Chrome browser which is staggeringly fast, the applications do everything that’s been asked of them so far (which is not a lot, admittedly) and the move from Word to Open Office has been very easy. But the best thing of all is the speed. Switching on my PC with Vista was the sort of thing you used to have to do in stages. Turn it on, go and make a cup of tea, come back, log on, go and do something else for five minutes, come back, hit the browser, go and make a Sunday roast and hey presto the computer is ready. All told the whole process could take up to 15 minutes. I timed it with Ubuntu the other day and from hitting the power button to having a web page open and fully loaded took 32 seconds. And my computer is so much happier, no longer roaring at me liked a wounded bull staggering on its death march, but more like a happy cat, purring lightly. I love it. If you are having problems with Windows (ie if you have Windows) I heartily recommend making the change. It’s really easy too.

Other than that the big thing that has happened is the wedding of my two good friends Laurie and Clara. It was an absolute belter of a day, and Rosie managed to make it (almost) to the end without any problems, although we paid for it for the next few days with her sleep routine being shattered. And it seems as though weddings are the ‘in’ thing this year, as my oldest internet friend (and phenomenally talented writer) Lis got married to the also excellent (and prodigiously talented writer) Jay, which I was very moved to get an invite to but very disappointed not to be able to attend. Also, my old friend Emma and her fella Laurence managed to elope in some style and get a Vegas Wedding, replete with Elvis impersonator. Very pleased for all concerned.

Other than that I don’t want you to think that I’ve been completely lazy, as I have been working on BOTM (stop sniggering at the back) as I got about 9000 words in and then decided that I need to have a rethink, and have decided to move away from a single 1st person narrative to a more traditional 3rd person narrative. Obviously this is daunting and somewhat irritating to do this far in, but which is definitely the right move, not least of all because it allows me to move to multiple story arcs. I was starting to worry about what I have but this has really resparked the fire. In truth I was basically working with stuff I wrote over a year ago, and it felt a little stale, and I was struggling with the story. Traditionally I am more of a suck-it-and-see writer, which is all well and good for a first draft but when you are serialising online you have to realise that your first draft is going to be a final draft. I really need to plan the whole thing out, or at least come up with a general plotline.

This is definitely new territory for me. One of the things I most enjoy about writing fiction is that part when you are writing and what you write surprises you. It’s great fun and that is to me when you know that your characters are taking on a life of their own, when they start to make decisions that you wouldn’t take. But I’m also aware that this method of writing is very hit and miss and considering this is going to be pretty much the first time my writing has ever really been read, I don’t want to find myself building up a readership only to box myself into a corner plotwise, which is always a real risk. I’m never going to be the kind of writer to plan things out in meticulous detail plot wise, I still want to go on the journey with my characters, but more structure is definitely going to be the way to go with this. I’m not sure how I am going to implement it, and I still need to sort out a time to sit with Jonic and talk about the design but things are most definitely progressing. Incidentally if there are any writers out there who know of any good support software for detailing all your thought processes, plots, characters etc, I’d love to know. At the moment everything is spread about in various Open Office documents, and it would be nice to play around with a new toy.

Anyway, it’s nice to be back, and here’s hoping the good people at the HTC factory send me my phone back ASAP.

A while back I flirted with the idea of completely junking Windows from my computer and replacing it with Ubuntu, the freeware Linux system, on the sage-like advice of Mr Jonic. I got pretty close to doing it too, even bought a magazine with the boot disk, but then it didn’t work and I got frustrated and the whole idea fell by the wayside. But recently the old computron has become more and more laboured and tired from having to run Vista, and I have to say I can’t blame it, it must be like being a paper-boy with arthritis, having to labour on when the kit you’ve got just doesn’t cut the mustard any more.

Last night was especially bad, and trying to do more than one thing at a time has become night on impossible, and so I downloaded the Ubuntu software and burnt it to disk and thought I would give it a go. And my dear Creamy Jesus is it nice. Firstly, it looks so pretty. It shares a fair bit of both Mac and Windows sensibilities, so basically it looks really nice but doesn’t have the navigation issues that I always seemed to have on Macs (to be fair I haven’t used a Mac in years so this is probably not the case any more) that prevented me from ever buying into the cult of Steve Jobs. Not only that but the responsiveness of the computer improved exponentially, and that was just from using the CD to boot. I gather it will improve even more once I install it to my hard drive. I love it. It is a bit alien still, and I seem to get requests to download software every time I want to do anything, but I imagine that’ll calm down pretty quickly.*

So tonight I’m going to take the plunge and install it, probably only on partition for now in case I change my mind and go back to windows, but I’m quite excited. Before I do I still have a few things I want to test, like playing movies (can’t see any issues there) playing with the word processor, and make sure I can still stick music on my phone without any issues, but if it passes these tests then by the end of the weekend I will hopefully be free from the shackles of Windows.

It does feel strange though, to be saying goodbye to it (not completely, work computers will apparently soon be upgrading from XP to Vista, deep joy) as it’s the only operating system I’ve ever known. I still remember using a computer for the first time in a classroom back in about 1991, and getting told off for moving the mouse before I was told to. Since then my world, like pretty much everyone else, has become more and more reliant on the world of computers, and although I haven’t always been on the Internet, I’ve consistently owned a PC of some kind since about 1995, and seen them grown from glorified calculators with basic word processors, into the super-whizz computrons we have today. And all of them, run on Windows.

And while we’re looking back, I was reminded today by Joe in the comment thread of my last post that come October of this year I will have been blogging for seven years, since my first ever post on Livejournal (again, at the instigation of Mr Jonic, I really should buy him a beer at some point to say thanks) started with some vague grumbling of my then job. Madness. Also, in the same comment thread, it has been pointed out to me that my favoured shortened name for Blood On The Motorway is liable to cause giggles. So from now on I shall try to refrain from using it again. Cheers Jen.

*I actually wrote all of this earlier on, but the install has gone ahead and this is coming to you live from Ubuntu-land. I’ll post more on this later, but by golly-gosh it is marvellous, so much quicker, more responsive.