Well, it’s been a long time since I’ve posted a blog, but I have had an excuse of sorts. Not only have I been terribly busy, but for all practical purposes, I’ve had no Internet for nearly two months.
I’ve been able to get online no more than an hour or so per day, and that in bits and pieces, so meaningful research has been impossible. When I have managed to get online, I’ve used the minutes to post on the WD forum, and send the occasional e-mail.
We used to have extremely good cable Internet here. It came from a local company called Insight, delivered a blazing ten megs per second as standard fare, and was about as close to one hundred percent reliable as you can get.
Then Comcast bought them out. Comcast raised prices on everything, cut the speed by eighty percent, installed all new, incredibly cheap equipment, closed the local office, have no reliability, and trying to get help from them is an exercise in frustration.
We still wouldn’t have Internet if a tech who used to work for Insight hadn’t come out day before yesterday and fiddled a bit, then ran a direct line for the computer. We have just enough headroom now to function, but Comcast, to be polite, sucks dead bunnies.
On the brighter side, I have been getting quite a bit of writing done offline, and I wrote a fair amount of the first draft material with a little bare bones word processor called Q10. http://www.baara.com/q10/
This is something new for me. I prefer to write first drafts in longhand for a number of reasons, one of which is that I believe there’s strong scientific evidence that we all write much better first drafts in longhand.
But too little time, too many deadlines, and the shape of my poor old hands come into play, so I wanted to be able to write at least some first drafts on the computer. Trouble is, while that same evidence shows that a manual typewriter, for unknown reasons, though many assume it’s because of the sound, accesses the creative center of the brain almost as well as does longhand, a computer/word processor flunks miserably.
The obvious answer would be to turn my computer into something more like a manual typewriter. I added typewriter sounds, but all those bells and whistles in Word, WordPerfect, OpenOffice, etc., all of which I have on my computer, kill much of the effect.
So what is Q10? It’s basically a text editor that turns your entire screen black, and has almost no formatting except font choice and color. It does, however, have some really nifty features such as real time word count, a real time percentage of work completed box, and a typing speed feature. This means it should be perfect for those of you who participate in NaNoWriMo.
To be honest, I didn’t like Q10 when it was first available, but now the bugs are gone, and it’s about as perfect a tool for first drafts.
And that’s about enough catchup for this time around.
Sincerely,
James A. Ritchie
8 comments:
That reminds me of Leading Edge Word Processing, a program I used in the late 80’s and early 90’s with a 286 DOS machine and an amber monitor. The black screen and no internet meant no distractions. I think I’ll check out Q10.
Mike
Mike,
someone else I know compared it to Leading Edge. I don't remember ever using that, though my first word processor was WordStar, back in '79.
I wonder if it's still possible to get a look at Leading Edge anywhere?
Hey, glad to see you're alive! I believe you recommended Q10 a long time ago on WD forums, and I use it sometimes myself. It is very nice.
now that I have a Mac, I confess that I mostly use Scrivener, which has a bells and whistles version and a full screen blackout version, which I use when first drafting for the same reasons you mentioned.
God bless you, James.
James:
I have been messing around with Q10 and I love the typing sounds. Takes me back. However, I have this problem where I seem to "lose" what's on my page even thought the text saves. I haven't figured that one out yet.
Good to see you back. Yes, Comcast sucks, even here in California. For cable, other than satelite, it's our only choice for TV. I turned mine off.
Here's a Comcast story for you that happened a few years back when I used to be a renter. I moved into a new apartment and had cable turned on. A few months after, I got this returned check charge on my bill. They accussed me of bouncing a check. I told them to send me a copy of the check. Guess what- the check was from a person who had been renting before!!! I hit the roof- made them reverse the check charge and take note in my cable file that it was their error. Of course, they were apologetic and didn't know how that could have happened, etc. I had them turn off my cable too. I think it was year later when I had it turned back on again.
Good to see you back too.
Q10 looks interesting, but wouldn't work for me since I use a Mac. :/
Still, I might mention it in my blog, if only for the sake of friends I know who use PCs.
Glad to see you're back online. Sorry to hear that Comcast sucks for you. Out here in Maryland, Comcast works pretty well for me... when Verizon isn't cutting Comcast's lines. Verizon managed to cut my Internet connection 3 or 4 times in one month some time ago. Thankfully, once Verizon got their FiOS installation completed in my neighborhood, the cutting stopped. However, their tactic to get some of us to switch didn't work on me. I'm still with Comcast.
Nice to see you blogging again, James.
Gary, Susan,
I've now heard about a bazillion horror stories concerning Comcast, including on on the Dr. Phil show, but they all seem to be the same problem. Comcast is too willing to extend internet and phone service beyond the range where they can easily deliver a strong signal.
If you within inside a given range, Comcast is usually very good. If you live out in the boondocks, it's usually pretty bad.
But I'm still mad at them for cutting out speed by nearly 90%. To get the same speed I got with Insight, I have to pay an extra thirteen bucks per month.
Yeah, I have to admit, we don't live very far at all from the local Comcast office here.
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