Time after time....

We're a week and a half into the summer here.


I'm not sure about anyone else, but part of the reason I freelance is so that when we get to the holidays, I can take some downtime with my kids - so that there's no holiday problems with care for them, and so that I'm not spending every minute in work wondering whether I'll need to leave early and find they've caused riots.


It does mean, however, that all of the work I'd planned on doing is being is being sandwiched in between episodes of Hannah Montana and Tom and Jerry. It's a nice life, but it's hard to measure the value of the work I'm snatching in. It also means that I've been pushing back and pushing pack things like theme designs and my fiction writing. I got up on Sunday morning though and decided that I needed to stop procrastinating and actually take control!

So, I've written a post over at Publishhacks about the best, and worst freelance tools, in my opinion, for monitoring and supporting any freelance career.


I'm always expanding and testing them though, so I thought I'd find out what your favs and time sinks are.


(so far, I've got Xobini, RescueTime, WordPress, the Internet (wikipedia), The Internet (RSS), Zoundry Raven - some good, some bad ;)) What do you have, and come on over to PublishHacks, to find out about the tools I've mentioned.

When tech betrays you...

I'm one of the list techies (in just about every place I go) cause I've got a no nonsense outlook on working with computers, and for some reason, they LIKE me.
So imagine my surprise this week when I met a Windows system that didn't LIKE me!

My parter and I decided, that to operate effectively, as a student, that a desktop that played possum every time we tried something daring (like, I don't know, loading up a new piece of software) and introduced us to its freinds 'blue screen of death", "more blue screen of death", Cousin IT (a blue screen that gave IT details) and Bob (where the cursor just bobbed there), that we really needed to upgrade. Swapping the downstairs computer for the attic server was out of the question cause my PC (in the attic) is a frankenstein of precariously balanced parts, a power supply that hangs out round and sits on top and six drives that I swap based on what I'm booting up and is older than HIS desktop.
SO I went onto ebay.
Aha, I thought - new PC, we'll get a bargian. And we did, too. The University is giving me a grant for my laptop, so we got a really cheap (top of the range) desktop that we went halfers on.
All good so far, right?
Well, sort of. Parcelforce weren't going to deliver it till Monday, when I should have been out at University, so we wheedled and pled with the local depot, and I gave several winning smiles to get it early, only to discover that its not got enough ram to comfortably run Vista AND everything else I wanted to install.
The Ram is on the way, but I've learned a couple of tricks about Windows Vista. Mainly cause its still doing the best impression of a possum I've ever seen, WITHOUT the Blue Screen of death, and we're doing what's called a 'haha rebuild'.
As in 'haha, you forgot to save the install files, didn't you?'.
So I thought over the coming weeks, I'd do some techie posts. A couple on Vista, a couple on Xp - a smattering on Office (2003, and 2007) and the final couple on some its and pieces I personally believe no writing Mama should be without.
Let me know if you've got any questions, won't you?
Now, I have to go back and beat my eight year old at Guitar Hero 3 - honest, its for an article.