Wednesday's Putterings (Well, actually, this is in reference to Tuesday.)

[moderately_mad]

Topics contained herein:
Sleepy thunder, sandy salamanders, brave & stoic children and an increasingly insistant yen for some real writing time.

Comments

[moderately_mad]

Are you loving open office? I'm getting used to it and R-- has switched over entirely. I'm just so damn familiar with Microsoft Office's quirks that it's taking me some extra time.

I'm FINALLY getting somewhere with my novel -- when I steal the time away from dealing with R--, Ch--'s education, my mom's move and my swap-labor-for-a-car barter. (Oh, and the hail damage!) I've working with a VERY structured plotting formula. I don't think it would be good in the early, spilling words on the page stage, but it's helped immeasurably since I bogged down at about 100 clean manuscript pages. We'll see how it goes when I'm using it to generate new text rather than clean up old text.

No. We haven't touched the tally for some time. I set it aside for much of the summer -- I think I overdosed on self-criticism/awareness. (Hell, I took a pretty significant break from even jut lj-ing!)

I imagine I'll be picking it back up sometime this month -- hopefully with a more self-caring attitude.

Did you say at one point that you used another programming language that might work for creating a tally? I know that I'm a little concerned about the relative slowness of many of the java programs I've seen. (I'm stretching a ways in trying to even ask that question -- I'm such a technical neophyte!)

[woggie]

I had less of an investment in MS Office than I suspect you did, so OpenOffice has been much easier on me. It's more stable and more dependable so far. Then again, my demands are also pretty simplistic. I'm not trying to do anything terribly complicated. I just want a pretty interface I can type words into. This process has been made a little easier by the introduction of the external usb keyboard I've plugged into the laptop.

Hail damage? Structured plot formula? Please, say on... :)

I feel like a technical neophyte with Linux on the desktop machine. I've recently come to understand how to install some kinds of software packages (still no decent 3D games, though), but I'm not yet sure how to uninstall anything as yet.

I've done a little work with BASIC and C++, and I might be able to guess my way through Python at this point. BASIC and C++ are programming languages. With them I could turn out a program that would run the tally, although it's been a while with either of them, so it might take some time and look really ugly afterward.

Python is a script language I've heard has a structure similar to C++, so I might be able to cope with it. Python has the added bonus (like C++) of being platform independent, so I could make a script that'd run on any machine, which might be extra good in this case.

I was just hoping there was some sort of code I could adapt instead of having to create wholecloth, but if I gotta then I suppose I gotta. Who knows, it might even be a good exercise for me.