Art feels left out but it's only temporary

What have I been doing for Pete's sake?

Oops, I've been away from this blog for a few weeks as stuff has overtaken me. Precious little art has been going on beyond prepping up a couple more canvases. My head is once again filled with things that need taking care of and none of it is really getting done since so much of the doing involves time consuming prep or it's just at that stage where things slow down until it's clear what needs to be done. It'd be lovely to think art could be a majority of where I spend my time but other life things make it impossible right now

Most of my pre-Xmas time went to the new writing thing, with the third piece expanded to around 23,000 words and so now needs some serious editing and a good amount of thinking on how to structure it. You'd think I'd have this sorted by now but since the original scope of the book has grown, it needs a bit of reworking and a lot of thinking.

Getting modernised

Beyond that, I've had to do some serious updating of tech. My now 15 year old laptop is still going but I took advantage of sales and got a refurbished Lenovo to go with a refurbished Dell monitor plus an external DVD drive since they're not included in laptops anymore. This took a great deal of researching on what current kit is set up for (Windows 10/S?) and to find something with a 16:10/3:2 aspect ratio which is affordable. Everything these days is built for widescreen film viewing which is total crap when you're working on documents side by side. So, success with the monitor but make-do with the laptop since only Microsoft, Huawei and Apple do the right ratios and prices start at £800.

That also means the day has come. I vowed that once I was forced to buy a Windows 10 device I'd be switching to Linux. Spent an hour stuffing a sock in Cortana and turning off everything I could find that slurps my private data for their profit. Shudders. Loath them. More research to find out how various types of Linux work, what 'flavour' would be best and then a lot of aggro trying to get the chosen one on to a USB stick.

Suffice to say that the first program for copying the ISO borked the stick and it took ages for me to figure out what had happened to it then some more time to find an understandable description of how to fix it. Easy peasy when you know how.

Chose a new program to copy but six attempts with a different tweak each time failed to get me Zorin - a Windows 7 lookalike. And Linux fans think more people should ditch Microsoft. The forums I found would be enough to put you off ever contemplating such a thing. The hoo-ha suggested just to check your download's checksum (yeah - a what?) is correct was just ridiculous in my opinion. I ignored it since the YT video how-to didn't bother or even mention such a thing.

Know your limits - call the experts

So I went for Mint MATE instead. Changed the copy program again and got it on the USB first time. Yay. Then a bit more watching/reading convinced me that dual booting with Win 7 isn't a great idea and my old Acer netbook (still has XP) needs an internal CMOS battery replacing (buried in the depths of the electronics of course), so I caved and called a local IT fix place and asked if he could replace the battery on the Acer and install Linux on the new laptop.

Ah, the download I had was for old 32 bit laptops and the new ones are 64 bit. Back to the download again for the correct version. It took three tries but I got it done so now I just have to get the IT guy to be free when I am and I can get those things taken care of. I'm quite happy to mess with the older kit so long as I have one computer that functions. If nothing else I'll learn a lot about how Linux works. Most of it is pretty similar to Windows but there'll be some need to type in commands too and that's where you do your real learning.

Everything feels messy right now!

I do need to sort out all this stuff and get a new schedule going so that I can attend to art as well. I'm wondering if I should alternate two months of solid writing with two of art then it doesn't feel like there's not enough time in the day to do it all. I very much need to get back to some physical training as well. Did I mention that my old bike needs so many parts replacing it's cheaper to buy a new one?? More expense and the rent has gone up too and it looks like we're out of the EU from the end of the month. I have three options to think about regarding that.

The future needs some thinking about but it's all good. Sometimes we need things to change before we can see where we'd rather be and consider new options.