A Clean Install
My Macbook Pro is not well.
I’d planned on wiping it when I finally upgraded to OS X Lion, but due to a lack of time I did an in place upgrade instead. So the hard drive has a fair amount of old crap still on there that I should really clean up. It’s always something you plan on doing but the reality is you never get around to it because the process of wiping everything, and then having to go through the hassle of a reinstall of all your applications and settings is a massive chore. It looks like the decision to leave the MBP as it is has been taken away from me now though.
The laptop started playing up a little the other day, nothing major, but enough to make me take notice. Applications would take longer to launch, or hang more often. Various file access problems had started to appear briefly before fixing themselves, and depending on what manner I used, the free space on my hard drive was reporting with a 30GB difference. So I correctly assumed there’s a file system problem and ran a repair. It found some problems, and reported back that they were repaired successfully. “Excellent!” I thought. I could get away with leaving the machine as it is for a while longer, and then wipe it later once I’ve tidied everything up, and know where all of my install disks are.
Of course, that would be too easy. There’s still a 30GB difference in available space, and there are still a few issues rearing their ugly head. So, I’m left with little choice but to wipe the damn thing, and start with a clean install. I have my Time Machine backup, and I’m in the process of making sure I’ve copied everything of import from it onto an external drive, but it is a massive inconvenience to have to do this now. Still, I’d rather it is an inconvenience now than a disaster later when the thing finally falls over. Though now that I think about it, the Mac hasn’t had a clean OS install since I bought it almost two years ago, and the fact that it’s taken this long to go mental is quite impressive.
It is going to give me a chance to only have the applications/data that I genuinely use day to day on there. It’s also going to allow me to organise everything from scratch, which I’ve been meaning to do for a long, long time. I know it’s going to be a beneficial process in the long run, but it’s also going to take me an age to do it all, and that’s without thinking about the 4GB OS X Lion download I’m going to have to do.
Luckily, my plans for this evening have been cancelled anyway, so I now have a few hours of free time to complete the reinstall of OS X. The one burning question that remains to me, is do I Bootcamp my hard disk and install Windows 7 so that I can then buy and play SWTOR? Decisions, decisions.
Words as Images
This is a cool little animation where images are created out of words, using only the letters in the word itself.
Deadhouse Gates Limited Edition is almost here
A while ago I mentioned that the cover for the upcoming Subterranean Press, limited edition Deadhouse Gates had been released. It looks as though they’ve gone and changed their minds about the cover artwork, instead of their original piece they are going with the artwork over there –>
The previous cover will instead be one of the several pieces used throughout the book. The new cover is also very fitting for Deadhouse, and I’m really enjoying each new piece of work I see from J.K. Drummond. There are a bunch of other pieces over on the Subterranean Press product page.
I just received an email from Sub Press saying that the book had now gone to the printers, and that means we’re now on a countdown for it being ready, and shipped. It also means that they’ll soon start allowing those of us who have the first two books to pre-order Memories of Ice with the same limited edition number.
It’s been a long wait, and I’m getting very excited to get my hands on it.
Goals for Twenty Twelve
We’re now into the second week of 2012 and I’ve spent a great deal of that time thinking about what I want to achieve this year, and what I achieved, or failed to achieve last year.
2011 had a few high points, it especially started and ended fairly well. Overall though, it wasn’t the best of years. Far too many of my goals were some way from being reached, and a few of them weren’t particularly difficult to achieve with a little time and effort. There are a lot of reasons for that failure, but I’m not going to beat myself up about it, I simply have to make sure that 2012 is much more focused and organised than I was in 2011.
It’s taken me a little longer than normal to come up with a list of goals this year because I found myself falling into my usual trap of writing a huge list of things I want to achieve, and before I know it there are simply too many things to actually do. I tend to write one thing as a self improvement goal, say running a set amount of miles in the year, and then I pile up other self improvement goals on top of that and in trying to complete them all, I complete none of them.
In order to do that I’ve written and re-written my goals for the year, paring them down every time and combining those that are simply pieces of a larger goal. I’ve also tried to stay away from a negative slant on my goals. For example, there was one where I wanted to get out of my day job and get out of the industry altogether. That’s not a worthy goal. Yes, I still want that to happen, but if I go forward with that as a driving force then I’m going to end up making bad decisions to achieve it. It’s better to say that I want to focus on building a new career, and in doing that both goals will be fulfilled except it will be done correctly by building something rather than escaping something.
I’ve streamlined my 2012 goals down to three primary items:
- Build a full time writing career.
- Get back in shape and lose some more weight.
- Build and grow The Sporting Week website.
Let’s look at them in a little more detail.
1) Build a full time writing career
I started doing this last year, but I didn’t achieve half of what I wanted to. I didn’t take the time to write consistently or educate myself to the point where I felt comfortable really marketing myself to clients. This year is all about making a sustained effort in building a freelance writing career, that will in time become my primary income. I also have plans to write a novel and actively attempt to get it published this time.
2) Get back in shape and lose some more weight
I was doing really well with this last year, and then I damaged my hamstring twice in a month which really stunted my progress. After an overly social festive period filled with food and booze I feel like I’ve put a little weight back on which just will not do. I sit on my ass all day in the office, and then come home to write which involves a lot of sitting on my ass. So there needs to be a concentrated effort to get running most nights again, as well as working on my diet. I’m going to start doing the Tim Ferris Slow Carb Diet again. When I was doing it last year before the injury I felt really good, so I’ll be easing back into that this year. There’s a lot of pieces and plans in this goal so I’ll write more about it as the year progresses.
3) Build and grow The Sporting Week website
This goal is pretty self explanatory. My future brother in law and I spend a ridiculous amount of time talking to each other about sport, and I’d hate to think how many combined hours we put into watching sport each week. As well as the enjoyment of watching and talking about sport, we thought we’d share our ramblings with the rest of the world, and so The Sporting Week was born. The site is still very, very new at the moment, but we both intend on building it into something pretty cool.
A few other minor things
These primary goals are going to be a lot of work this year, but there are other little things that I intend on doing this year that don’t really hit that high mark that would make them goals.
- I really want to spend time hanging out with friends playing boardgames, and generally just being the geek that I am.
- I want to read a lot this year. I have an epic fuck-tonne of books I own that I haven’t read yet. I’ll be constantly updating my 2012 Reading List throughout the year, so if there any books you think I should read, leave a comment over there or fire me an email.
- In order to really manage all of my goals effectively I’m going to really need to get a lot more organised. I also plan on de-cluttering, and streamlining my life a much as possible.
- I would like to visit my friends in Madrid, and friend in Brighton as much as possible this year since I failed horribly at that last year.
- As part of the weight loss and getting into shape I’ll need to level up my cooking skills, which at the moment are okay, but could be better.
These last few items are things that either compliment my primary goals, or are things to do in the very little downtime I’m going to have this year. There are probably lots of other little things that I could mention, but won’t. I’ll no doubt be talking about them here as the year progresses. Whatever they may be though, they will play a secondary role to the three primary tasks.
One thing that I failed to mention that will benefit all of the goals I’ve set myself for this year will be my involvement on this site. As a by product of writing nowhere near enough last year, I never really built a habit of writing here. So with every goal, habit, event, and everything else I do throughout the year I plan on writing about it here. The more I write, the better the writer I’ll become, so expect to hear a lot from me. I intend on kicking some serious ass in 2012.
Ira Glass on Storytelling
Banishing consciousness: the mystery of anaesthesia by Linda Geddes
A very interesting article from New Scientist writer Linda Geddes about consciousness and anaesthesia - http://bit.ly/rFS93e
Hosting Upgrade
I upgraded my hosting package with UK2 this morning. I assumed it was going to be a long, horrible process, and that there would be a period of downtime this morning as the upgrade was taking place. It turns out that I couldn’t have been more wrong.
I set the upgrade to happen first thing this morning, and then within a few minutes it was complete. I now have unlimited space and bandwidth on the server. I don’t have the limitation and potential issues of only having one MySQL database, and everything appears to be a lot faster. There are a bunch of other benefits to the new package but I haven’t fully explored them yet.
The hosting package I was on doesn’t even exist as an option to buy anymore, and to be honest I think they decommissioned it a long time ago. It was about time I upgraded to a newer package, and though I’ve doubled the cost of my monthly hosting, it is well worth the cost for all the new benefits I now get.
If you’re looking for a new web host I can recommend UK2.
An Abundance of Topics
My stream of conscious ramble that I posted yesterday helped jar a few things loose. I’ve started up several blogs recently, all with specific topics which would allow me to focus on each of them independently. I have the domains, I’ve setup WordPress on them, and I’ve done nothing with them since. I’ve written drafts of posts and brainstormed ideas for others, but they never seem to get beyond that point and I think I know why. I’ve spread myself a little too thin far too quickly.
While I’m interested in the topics I’ve set up sites for, there’s no way I can write about them all the time at the moment. It would mean juggling too many things at once, while allowing everything to suffer because of it. I don’t want to get to a point where I write one post every month, so instead I’m going to be bringing all but one of those topics back here. It keeps things here varied and interesting, and if at any time I do find I’m talking more about one thing I can fork it off into it’s own site. There is one site I’ll be keeping live and writing on frequently. It’s still in it’s infancy just now, so I don’t want to talk about it too much until I’ve been able to add some content and get into a rhythm with it.
NaNoWriMo starts tomorrow too. Things are about to get manic.
It’s Been Quiet Around Here
It’s been quiet around here recently. There are a few reasons for that but the main one is simply because when I start writing with no specific goal I always end up talking about something I can’t talk about yet… I can’t talk about it, though I will no doubt reference things in a vague manner that no-one understands and unravels the whole coherence of a post. Fun times.
On that note… Part of what I can’t really talk about has to do with what this site is going to be to me. When I killed the old site, and launched this one, I wasn’t sure whether I was going to have somewhere to write without topic, or purpose. I’d thought I’d keep that monologue strictly offline. It turns out that I need somewhere I can just ramble on about any old thing. It turns out that as well as having sites where I write about specific topics, I also need somewhere I can just relax, talk shit, and not feel any sense of obligation. It’s good having sites with specific topics, where I have to focus on what I write, but sometimes I really just want to waffle on about nothing. I like the creativity that can come from stream of consciousness free-writing.
Speaking of no holds barred writing, NaNoWriMo starts up again in a few days. I’ve been developing a story over the last couple of weeks, and for once I’m actually quite excited to get stuck into it. The outline I’ve been developing requires a novel larger than the 50k word requirement of Nano, though I’m going to do my best to finish the entire novel in the 30 day timeline. The idea for the story popped into my head a few weeks ago and I’ve been refining the idea, building a framework for the story, and developing the characters that are going to play a part. If it hadn’t been so close to Nano I would have probably started writing it by now, but I like the idea of the frantic first draft that Nano can bring.
This post really isn’t about anything. It’s more to remind myself that this is a place where I can write to clear my head. Not everything has to be 1000 words and meaningful. It’s a reminder to cut myself some slack and just make sure I write every day, whether there is a distinct point to it or not.
Oh, and that stuff I can’t talk about… hopefully I’ll be talking about it soon. Over the next few weeks I’ll be writing about the madness that is Nano, and a few other things that I’ve been thinking about recently. Until then, ignore this post. It was necessary for me, but pretty pointless otherwise.