NaNoWriMo 2012

This will (hopefully [which is kind of ironic, no?]) be a short post. Mainly this is just an update, since I've been away for several weeks.

And why is that?

I've been busy writing and editing, busy planning for this years NaNo, and just generally feeling averse to blogging. I actually took the time to write out a post in longhand a few weeks back, on story structure (yes, again), but haven't gotten around to transcribing it. I was going to do a pencast (and will, eventually), using the new laser printer I got, which has a built in scanner. Oh, joy of joys!

Mostly, though, I've been fighting with my OS. I upgraded to Ubuntu 12.04LTS and I've been hating every minute of it. After days of fidgeting, I've finally settled on the Xfce desktop environment, w/ the file manager and text editor (Nautilus and Gedit, respectively) from Unity/Gnome.

Honestly, though, if it weren't for NaNo I'd probably be wiping my system and doing a fresh install of something like Linux Mint. I might still, provided I get enough words done. I can almost guarantee that I'll at least try running a live image (or do a dual-boot install). To put it very, very bluntly: Unity sucks rocks. Massive boulders, even.

It's probably great on new systems that have plenty of RAM and processing power. On my 1.6Gh netbook with 1Gb system memory, it is slow, laggy, unstable, and a battle to do the simplest things, tasks that Ubuntu 10.10 handled with ease.

No thanks. I came to Linux because I was fleeing the evils of microshaft, specifically bloatwear.

Anyway, now NaNo is here and I'm all BIC HOC TAM (butt in chair [actually, in my case I'm mostly standing], fingers on keyboard, typing away madly). Any of you fellow NaNoers—best of luck. I'm pushing for 2.5k a day, over 10k so far, and hoping to have a 75k-ish novel done come Dec. 1st.

And life, irritations of OSes notwithstanding, is grand.