Dear helpful software bots

[pbray]

*AHEM*

I HAVE LESS THAN FOUR WEEKS LEFT TO FINISH THIS NOVEL. I WILL NOT BE INSTALLING NEW SOFTWARE ON THIS PC. I DON'T CARE HOW MANY TIMES YOU REMIND ME OF THE UPGRADES, NOTHING, I REPEAT, NOTHING WILL CHANGE ON THIS SYSTEM UNTIL THE BOOK HAS BEEN PRINTED AND MAILED.

THANK YOU.

Thus speaks a writer who has suffered two severe crashes during end-book stage. The first time it happened, installing unrelated software caused a computer crash that cost me several days worth of work--I had hardcopies of the relevant chapters that had to be rekeyed in.

The second time, the computer experienced catastrophic hard drive failure the morning I powered it on to input final revisions. In this case luckily everything was backed up, but I wound up buying a whole new system before noon then completing the revisions on that new system later that day.

This time I'm not messing around. I've petted the hard drive, backed up the relevant files, and made offerings to the gods of technology. So please, for the love of Mike, Adobe, AutoSpyware, and all your friends, please stop harassing me, okay? I promise I'll spend hours downloading and installing anything you want, once the book is done.

Love, thanks, bye.

Comments

[libwitch.livejournal.com]

I had a prof (Library Science/Info Studies) who did a study on how humanities folks did research - in her study she ended up tripping over the tendency they had not to upgrade ANYTHING until a project was done. Not even the computer itself. And since sometimes a project could last 10-20 years and run concurrently with other projects, she would often walk into some small little office and fine 2-3 computers, all working, representing a range of computer tech, all with different projects on them.

Thank god novels tend to be quicker to write.

Except of course, the Great American Novel(TM), which is done always in longhand on a series of legal size notepads.

[pbray.livejournal.com]

Longhand, eek!

Of course, change is inherently evil. You should have heard me grumble when I had to switch from my old wordprocessor to Microsoft Word. It was quite the trauma.

Somewhat amusing to realize I'm a programmer by training, and I/T technical professional in the day job :-)

[libwitch.livejournal.com]

To me, it makes sense - the more change and stuff you deal with at work, why want to deal with it at home?

I seldom ever go online at home cuz I am on it all day work....

(and I just use open office at home so that way i dont have to deal with upgrades!)