Big Monitor

A friend of a friend was upgrading their monitor to a TFT flat screen, and had no further use for their owl 21" CRT. The only problem with it was that their new monitor came without a VGA cable, so they'd nicked the one from the old monitor.

The old monitor found its way into my possession, and a quick trip down to a small, independant, computer supply store procured a male-to-male VGA cable costing a grand total of €3.99.

Aside: the monitor has been sitting in the corner of my office for a week waiting for me to acquire a suitable cable. I thought I would have been able to get one at the weekend, but several chain stores including PC World were unable to help. They had plenty of male-to-female "monitor extension cables", but not one male-to-male (are they homophobic?). Also, the cheapest monitor cable I saw in the chain stores cost over €15. Rip-off merchants!

Anyway, I'm now looking at this on a nice, big, clear screen. Some playing with settings and resolutions will surely take place over the weekend.

Novel Update

I'm long overdue for another not-so-weekly novel writing update.

I reached a milestone last week, completing chapter two. Well, when I say "complete", I mean complete apart from all the revisions, corrections, editing and changes I know I'll have to do. That's on top of the revising, correcting, editing, changing and starting over I've already done on this chapter. I started over twice before I found an opening I was happy with (which means I've got two alternative openings saved). The third opening works quite well for me, but I still had to go back a little further into the chapter and move things around a little.

I'm now about 1500 words into chapter three. I have a feeling the opening will have to be trimmed, as there's a lot of action that has to happen in this chapter, and none of it has started yet. One of the main characters has been busy providing Exposition on some of the background (which I hope I can do without making it too boring), while another has been getting herself arrested. She had it coming, though she feels it's totally unjust. I think it's unlikely she'll learn her lesson.

I estimate I have now typed over 20,000 words on the Psion, and it's still going strong (despite being dropped several times). Yet I have still hardly used it for PDA functions at all. I really think it's time someone took the basic Psion design and produced an organiser with a modern OS like Linux, and modern hardware like USB, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

Hopefully once I get into the action of this chapter, it will flow much more quickly. Must listen to inspiring space-battle music like The Planets and The Right of Spring.