Only one week to go until Christmas. Here at the school things are a little chaotic as the kids are mostly practising for their concert on Thursday evening. In the mornings we are running classes as normal but in the afternoons it looks like it's all change for this week.

Other than that things are pretty much as they are. Anne, the other Primary School teacher, has put in a letter to ask that her pay be increased (she is being badly underpaid) and the head of the school has basically ignored it and made no effort to talk to her in the week since. As for me I'm pretty much convinced that it would be best to leave at the end of this semester as I have not had anything happen to make me think otherwise. It seems a shame in some ways but I don't have any regrets. I've mostly enjoyed the past year in China but it is time to move on.

Life has been pretty quiet. It's cold but the weather has recently not been too bad except for a heavy fog one day last week. We've been going out for meals but nothing major. Yesterday we went to the gym as we had some free guest passes. The gym was quite nice, modern and well equipped but as it is in the city centre it's not really a good option for regular use. And the sauna doesn't seem to be used at all which is the best thing about going to the gym in the first place. I have lost a lot of my fitness, which is kind of shocking except that I've done little exercise for the past year except for walking around town. I can't even really get into the countryside very easily and there's not much in the way of hills around here anyway. Most are being scoured away to help build roads and buildings. The whole province will probably be completely level in ten years time.

Christmas is here in a small way. The shops are decorated and playing Christmas songs but, unsurprisingly, there's little else to indicate it's coming. We are planning on seeing some friends on the day itself and then probably going to a bar. I have the week off but Zak doesn't so that limits our options. Still, a rest will be nice and it should be a good opportunity to catch up on some writing. I was hoping to go to Beijing to meet Wu Yan, a Chinese science fiction writer, but I am not sure if that will be possible now. I need to check the details and decide. Soon, I guess.

Grrr. One thing with regularly using different computers to access the various sites that I publish to or read or use to (attempt to) manage my life - logging on generally sucks. Most sites you visit and you have a big advert for signing up and a tiny link hidden away somewhere for regular users. In the case of Flickr, because I joined before it was taken over by Yahoo, I have to visit three pages before I can actually log in and see my account. It's moronic. Bloglines, Remember the Milk, Box.net are all the same. What is so bad about letting the people who actually use (and in some cases pay for) your service get access to them quickly and easily?

Every so often I will think about taking another look at Linux. Usually the pattern is that I install it, play with it, and then uninstall it after a week when I need a Windows application or realise that, actually, Linux is kind of ugly and not that nice, or get fed up of having a simple task like sticking a CD into the drive made complicated. It has been a few years since I last tried it and I have been seeing frequent references to a new, easy to use distribution called Ubuntu. This itself still was not really enough to convince me but then I read that Mac users were making the switch. Maybe Linux is finally ready to be a desktop replacement that you can enjoy using instead of putting up with. I wanted to find out.

I downloaded the iso to burn it to a cd. You boot from the cd and the operating system starts so you have an opportunity to try it and see if it works before you commit yourself to installing. It seemed to work fine on my Acer 5500 laptop apart from a lack of correct screen resolutions and I liked the look of it. The default theme is orange which makes it really stand out from pretty much every other operating system out there. I admit I do like it but, if I get bored of it this is Linux and it is a simple job to changed pretty much every aspect of how it looks.

I lacked the courage to actually install it on my laptop as I was concerned about losing XP. Fortunately my work PC, which was pretty much not working due to the number of viruses on the school network, had a couple of very large, empty partitions and I decided to give it a go on that. After playing with it and using it for work pretty much full-time Nanowrimo came along and I needed to use the rather rubbish computer the school provided for my apartment. Because of the difficulty it has with XP I decided to give Ubuntu a try on that too. For the whole month of November, then, I have been almost exclusively using Ubuntu and for the first time I did not miss Windows at all. I decided to take the plunge and install it on my laptop.

All three installations have gone without any major problems. There is some great online documentation for helping fix up some of the little issues with Ubuntu hot off the cd and tools like Easy Ubuntu made the work of getting MP3 working, installing Skype and getting the correct video drivers very easy. I also decided to give Beryl a try. Beryl is a kind of extra layer for the UI which makes windows transparent, or wobble when you move them, and generally look like a very modern, Vista-like operating system. It can be a bit flaky and crash (it is still in development) at times but it does look really good, once some of the more extreme effects have been turned off.

I've also found applications to match everything I need and want to do with my laptop. Amarok is an excellent music player with some really good features, like lyric look-up and a feature that downloads all the missing album covers for you. Picasa is available for Linux too so I get to keep my favourite photo organiser. Stellarium is a really good-looking star map program and Democracy TV looks really interesting, offering easy downloads from various channels, You Tube search and download and the ability to add torrents. Open Office and Abiword are decent replacements for Microsoft Office, although they are not quite as good (and I miss the ribbon) but they do everything that I need them to do. I spend most of my time in Google Docs now anyway - pretty much all of my novel was written in it. The only thing I can't do is play the latest games, but I got out of the habit of doing that a long time ago.

So, is it all it's cracked up to be, a Linux for the masses? Well, not quite. It is very usable once it has been set up. Installing applications is easy, and free, but some things do still require a trip to the console to run commands. There's no mp3 support on a fresh install and, although it's easy to sort things like this out using Easy Ubuntu or a guide it is an extra burden. I would say, though, that once it is all set up then it is easy to use (And, to be honest, how many people can really set up Windows themselves, easily, getting it all right? At least with Ubuntu you also end up with all the software the average user needs already installed. Except for mp3.) I will keep using it and now feel I have pretty much made the switch. Of course I'll still need to use MS Windows for development and the odd thing that I can't do with Linux (update my horribly proprietary Sony mp3 player or play Rome:Total War) but I feel comfortable with Ubuntu now and plan on sticking with it for a while. Hasta la victoria siempre.

Links:
http://www.ubuntu.com/ubuntu
http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Edgy
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/06/26/essentials-2006

Well, I did it. I finished nanowrimo and have written 50,000 words in just under 30 days. The resulting story might be good, it might be terrible; to be honest it's all a bit of a blur. I am certain that it's not readable at the moment, never mind publishable. So why do it?
Well I have 50,000 words of new ideas and writing now. That is a significant thing. I've also learnt a lot, about what I can achieve and how I can go about it. It sounds trite but the only way to actually write is to get words down. Some days those words may be useless and need re-writing but other days things slot into place and just work. And suddenly that strange idea you had to do that has relevance to this and it all, maybe, just works. It was fun to go out there with only a vague idea for a couple of characters, a broad idea of where I wanted to end up and almost nothing in-between.
There have been times when it has been hard. I've fallen behind, felt like I did not want to continue, wondered if it's worth it when I likely have no real inclination to get this story published. Two things generally got me going again. The first was simply the word count. If I sat down and did so many words today and tomorrow (and sometimes the days after too...), then I would catch up. It's the sitting down and doing it that is the hard part - once it's under way it generally keeps itself going, unless it's one of the bad days. As for getting published, well I wrote the story to have fun. In the process I may have created something that, with some extra work, may be publishable. I don't know. But even if not I have played with a lot of ideas and had a good time doing so.
Probably the biggest thing I've learned, though, is to get out of the short story mentality that I've been stuck in. The biggest problem with writing a novel that I've had over the past year is just how to get to the point where you take an idea and write so many words about it. It seemed impossible. Now it seems like something that I can enjoy doing.
So what's next? First, relax for a bit, get on with other things I've been wanting to do, like getting Ubuntu set up on my laptop, and probably do some work writing on some other ideas before taking a look at the story and probably sorting it out.

And suddenly I can access blogger and blogspot again.
Still writing - have changed the image on the right to show you my daily progress, if you're really interested.
It's getting colder here. Lots of rain too. Have bought a thick coat and some jumpers in order to be able to cope. More when I'm done with Nano. In the meantime guess I'll enable email posting, just in case.

Digging through the new Google Docs and Spreadsheets settings I discovered that it can post to Blogger too. So I'm giving it a try.
Last week the school went to a mandarin orange orchard. We picked a lot of oranges and everyone enjoyed themselves.Today I started teaching the kids how to use powerpoint to create a slide on conservation. Tried to kick them out at break time but they wouldn't go.


Editing - I can also edit the post from Docs and Spreadsheets too. An online editor to edit a website? I would have wondered what the point was before...

Blogger access

Blogger access
Originally uploaded by grazulis.

I cannot get to Blogger anymore. Google is also occasionally available. Of course, Wikipedia is back, so it's not all bad news, but not being able to reach some sites is extremely frustrating. Wishing I had thought to enable email posts.
I am doing this through Flickr, which I remembered allows me to post, but it is a bit of a pain because I can't edit or make changes afterwards.
Things are going well, though. I have written over 25000 words for Nanowrimo which means that I am on target. This is after a very shaky start because of a lack of time the first weekend and my being a little ill. Overall I'm really enjoying the process of writing the book in such a short space of time. It has taught me a lot and the book might actually be half-way ok by the end. After a lot of revisions.
I also got word that my story is in the next issue of Interzone. It will be published in January.
Other than that, things have been pretty quiet.

If I'm a bit quiet on the blogging this next month it's because I've decided to do Nanowrimo, a month long challenge to write a novel of 50,000 words. I have a feeling it's going to be touch because I consider it a good day when I get 1000 words written but I guess that's the point. Anyway, if you're interested in giving it a try yourself just click on the icon on the right.