write.as/jonbeckett

I have decided on a new name for this blog (and theTumblraccount, because I’m a bit insane like that). It only took ooh four hours to come up with!?

After trying out Medium (the darling of the web publishing hipster crowd) for a few days, and trying to like it, I’ve admitted defeat, returned to Wordpress and Tumblr, and changed the name of my blog. I’m not sure if you might call this a “re-invention”, a “re-boot”, or just plain stupid.

I dithered over the name change for a few minutes, and sucked a good friend into the idiocy along the way. She liked the option I didn’t use, which of course questions why I bothered soliciting her opinion in the first place.

Anyway. A name is just a name. The words I write here are ultimately disposable, and I need to remember that. I’m not a journalist, and I’m not writing a journal of record for the ages – I’m emptying my head and prattling on about all manner of rubbish that most people will scroll straight past.

The nights are starting to draw in. While cycling home from work this evening a pervasive blanket of darkness seemed to be readying it’s fall upon the world. Either that, or the bit of earth I was cycling on rotated away from the sun’s irradiating gaze. Take your pick.

I arrived home to discover our eldest had a friend from college visiting. I knew something was afoot when Miss 13 bounced into the kitchen, putting on the larger-than-life show she seems to when a new audience for her unique brand of shouted story telling presents itself.

In the kitchen my other half raced back and forth clattering saucepans and plates from one end of the kitchen to the other.

“What’s for dinner?”

“Roast”

There’s definitely some kind of genetic anomaly in English people related to roast dinner. As the smells of roast potatoes, carrots, chicken, yorkshire puddings, stuffing and gravy wafted through the house, the children appeared one by one to take their place at the table.

After several months taking easy meal options at home, we have cancelled everything for the foreseeable future. Repairing the bathroom ceiling has brought about the end of “Hello Fresh”, the end of “Milk & More”, and even the end of the posh razor blades I have been sent through the post for the last year. We don’tneedany of it. We can’t afford “nice to have” at the moment.

I brought an end to the razor blades last month, grinning at the attempts of the Cornerstone website to make me reconsider. I’ll quite happily use disposable razors from the supermarket, rather than triple bladed chromium plated miniature weapons forged by the Dwarves of Moria.

My vanity domain name has similarly been cast aside. Given that the blog hiding behind it was only visited by a handful of people, it was another needless extravagance. The eventual landing place of my writing is still up in the air. I’ve ruminated enough about it recently. That being said, last night a good friend told me about a rather wonderful service called “Tiny Letters”. I’ll admit to being tempted by it.

I’m sitting in the study at home while a dehumidifier rumbles away in the remains of the bathroom upstairs. I very nearly went into the office today (the plumber returns tomorrow), but thought better of it after fetching my bike from the shed this morning – leaving an industrial dehumidifier rumbling away upstairs with nobody in the house didn’t seem like the best idea in the world.

The cost of the bathroom repair, allied with all sorts of other outgoings recently mean we can’t spend any money on anything spurious for the next few months. It just so happens that this has all coincided with the renewal for the domain my blog sits on at Wordpress. It’s something that can go.

Given that I cross-post to Wordpress and Tumblr, a part of me says “why bother with Wordpress?”. I know – I’ve been here before, but it is a bit mad – posting to several places at once. I should really only bother with one blog, and given the disposable nature of my writing – it’s just a journal, after all – it hardly seems worth having anything too big and clever.

I looked at Medium this morning again, as a potential replacement for Wordpress. Within five minutes it sucked up all my posts this year, and made it all look rather wonderful. I have misgivings about Medium though – not in the platform – in the people that post there. I searched for “Blog”, “Journal”, “Diary”, and “Life” – and found nothing but mansplaining articles written predominantly by men. I couldn’t find a single “day in the life” post no matter how hard I looked. Maybe my arrival there might open a few eyes? Maybe I’ll stand out, publishing my inane detritus. Maybe not.

I really don’t know what I’m going to do yet.

I am working from home this week. I agreed it with myself yesterday after discovering my other half had booked a plumber to come and rip the upstairs bathroom out. While I got a fair amount done, the majority of the day was spent listening to a racist old man complain about foreigners.

After he finished his closing monologue and went home for dinner, I discovered we had no hot water. I’m a logical person I thought, so I ventured upstairs to the cupboard where the hot water tank and pipes meet – I thought I might feel the pipes like some kind of hot water whisperer, and figure out which tap to turn.

This is where you find out the cupboard in the corner of the bedroom containing said pipes looks like it was built by the set designers for the 1960s version of 10,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Captain Nemo would have been delighted with the maze of pipes, junctions, and taps. I took one look, and a voice in my head shouted “NOPE”.

While wandering back downstairs to break the news about my ineptitude to my other half, I heard something odd from the bathroom. One of the many pipes now sticking out in mid-air with nothing plugging it was making gurgling noises. I frowned, and watched it for a minute or two, to make sure nothing was coming out of it.

I called the plumber, got his answer machine, and then informed everybody that we would all smell of deodorant tomorrow, because we had no hot water until the plumber returned.

Fifteen minutes later there was a knock on the door. Our favourite racist was back, and heading straight for the Jules Verne cupboard in the corner of the bedroom. No faster had he twiddled something, there was a curious whistling noise in the bathroom, and the tuneful pipe from earlier was now gently squirting water across the room.

I’ll give him his due – he made sure he had the right tool for the job. Let’s ignore that the pipe kept firing water everywhere while he looked around on the floor for a particular screwdriver (especially as it was right in front of him). After finally locating it, and tightening something up, the water pistol fight stopped and he clambered back through the remains of our bathroom.

“Good job you didn’t figure out how to switch the hot water back on – because that would have brought the ceiling down”.

Roll on tomorrow.

For the first time in recent memory, I have no plans today. No obligations. No expectations. Of course I have still filled the washing machine and dryer, started folding clothes, and will no doubt trudge to the supermarket in a few minutes to buy lunchbox food for the week ahead, but beyond that – nada. Nothing.

Of course there really is no such thing as “nothing” around here – I will get back from the supermarket, and something will have cropped up to fill the void. There will be something to be done.

Changing subject entirely, how on earth is it 1st October already? Where has the year gone? A little voice has already started whispering in the depths of my brain – “30 days until NaNoWriMo”. Could this be the year when I finally complete the fifty thousand words in thirty days challenge?

I love the idea of writing. I’m just not sure I’ve got a novel within me. I change my mind about things far too often – unless of course I just plough my way through November writing about anything and everything as the mood takes me – turn the blog into the book. It would mean writing 1500 words per day though, and on the days where nothing has happened it would become insufferably introspective. I can almost guarantee work will stomp on the attempt as it has every previous time too.

There’s a part of me that says “why wait for November?”. Why should I wait until NaNoWriMo to start writing. If I’m going to write ridiculous stories, why not start writing right now?

While my other half was standing at the side of a rugby pitch in the middle of nowhere this afternoon I took it upon myself to tidy up the junk room at home.

There are a number of drawer units in the junk room – one of which has slowly filled itself with wires, chargers, plugs, connectors, and bits of circuitboard over the last ten years or so. After a spirited fight with an unimaginable mass of tangled wires, two thirds of them have been thrown away, and things can actually be found once more.

Once the drawer unit was cleared, I turned my attention to the spare desk by the window, which has been slowly filling with detritus from the rest of the house (my other half uses the junk room as just that – an extension of the rubbish bin, and a rough equivalent of “Monica’s Cupboard” from the TV show “Friends” – when we have visitors, she throws everything in here to make the rest of the house look better). After re-locating the various bits and pieces that had arrived on the desk, we finally had an empty desk once again.

Hmm… what best to put on an empty desk?

It was around this time that I stopped for a coffee, and wrote a blog post – realising as I did so that it was the 1st October, and November was only a few weeks away. November means NaNoWriMo in a dark corner of my brain – the yearly race to write a 50,000 word novel during November.

Twenty minutes later I had climbed into the attic, and pulled down the iMac we bought several years ago. It was an impulse purchase from eBay, and surprised us all when it arrived in mint condition. Apparently it spent it’s entire working life locked in a store-room at a school, never used. The only thing I have ever done to it is replace the hard-drive (it turns out 15 year old bearings in hard drives don’t work too well).

The 2003 vintage iMac runs OSX Tiger – the first half-decent version of OSX released after Steve Jobs return to Apple. Some might still argue that Tiger was the last really clean, fast version of OSX, and I wouldn’t disagree with them.

Firing it back up today, it chirped the familiar sounds, and booted into a logon screen surprisingly quickly. I got the password right on the third try, and then realised Scrivener was installed on it – I must have installed it years ago while experimenting with it (read: tinkering).

The thought occurred to me – I could use the iMac for NaNoWriMo. Although it has an ethernet port, I don’t have an ethernet cable long enough to reach from it to the network switch – so it won’t be connecting to the internet any time soon. This is a GOOD THING. If I have a computer with Scrivener on it that can’t actually connect to the internet, it stops me jumping down infinitely deep rabbit holes while supposedly getting on with writing.

I tried plugging a USB stick in, to see if I might backup work that way. Yes. Works perfectly. Then I had another idea. After another ten minutes digging around in the attic, I re-appeared with an Iomega ZIP drive. I didn’t think it would work, but tried it anyway – plugging it into the power strip, and into the USB port on the side of the fifteen year old iMac. It lit up, then sat idle. My brow furrowed, then something occurred to me – I slotted a twenty year old USB disk into the drive, which immediately burst into life, whirring, and clunking. A drive icon appeared on the Mac desktop. I nearly fell off my chair.

I wonder if I’ll be the only writer in the world attempting to use a fifteen year old computer, and twenty year old backup drive to write a story in November ?

Our middle girl screamed a great many nasty things at us this morning. She claimed she was sick, and couldn’t possibly go to school. We countered that if she was not well enough to go to school, she wouldn’t be well enough to play football with her team on Saturday, or go to country rugby trials on Sunday.

That’s when the screaming started.

Apparently we are nasty parents, mean parents, she hates us, and and she wishes we were dead. She really wishes we were dead. She repeated these proclamations several times, loud enough that several houses each side of ours probably heard. After half an hour she appeared at the foot of the stairs with her school clothes on, unwashed, with hair looking like she had just survived a car accident. I heard the crash of the front door as she slammed it behind her violently enough to damage the door frame.

My other half wandered into the kitchen looking somewhat weary, and I pointed to a cup of tea and a croissant filled with chocolate spread on the kitchen counter, grinning as I did so.

“Good morning.”

After getting the usual Saturday morning madness of standing on the touchline of football matches out of the way, and tipping colossal quantities of noxious substances down drains to melt clogged hair, we played host to some of my other half’s school friends today.

Of course, being that we hadn’t seen them for some time, we spent a couple of hours cleaning the house like maniacs before their arrival, then relaxed as they arrived, pretending that our house is ALWAYS this tidy (har har).

Seeing them after so many years served as a wonderful reminder that friends never really change – that friendship never really changes. They are still essentially the same people they always were, as are we. Our children are busy growing up – similar ages – and we laughed over very similar stories from the front line.

Along the way today I was also secretly smiling because our eldest made her own way to a nearby town on the train to meet with friends for the afternoon. I’m not sure she realised quite how big a deal this actually was. While washing up this evening, it occurred to me that today may well have been a small step towards losing her. After holding herself back for so long, she’s growing up fast, and I’m not sure I’m ready to think about that yet.

After yesterday’s carpet-bombing of the various social platforms on the internet, I thought I might move on to ripping productivity apps a new one today. It’s no secret that I’m a bit of a luddite when it comes to task lists, and notes – I’ve carried a Filofax round with me for at least the last decade, emptied my head into numerous Moleskine notebooks, and have recently been indoctrinated into the Bullet Journal religion.

Let’s start with an admission. I use Evernote. I’ve used Evernote for a number of years. It’s filled with everything from information on past work projects, to snippets of programming, and unpublished blog posts. I have a love/hate relationship with Evernote though – because while it’s great at sucking content in, it’s terrible at exporting content out. If you add content to Evernote on the web, it gets formatted differently than if you add it via either the desktop or mobile apps. That kind of thing drives me insane.

I’ve toyed with Trello a number of times. If you’ve not seen Trello, it’s a web or app version of a t-card system. If you have no idea what a t-card system is, I now feel like I’m 150 years old. In the same way that you might migrate tasks around in a Bullet Journal, you can just drag them in Trello. Lots of web development teams swear by it. I see it more as a poor man’s Jira. Here’s the thing though – for day to day life, Trello doesn’t really work any better than a paper notebook. In many ways it’s worse, because once something is moved, you cannot see where it once was (but you can read it’s history if you’re really insane, and figure it out).

Before Microsoft acquired it, I tried Wunderlist out for a while, and quite liked it. It’s a traditional task list app, letting you keep track of lists of things you need to get done, tick them off, get reminders, and all the other things that every task list app in the universe has always done. After Microsoft acquired Wunderlist, development ground to a complete and utter halt. It was no surprise at all when Microsoft Tasks appeared a year or so later (and no surprise that it was dreadful either).

I suppose in many ways “Todoist” has taken over the “fashionable task list app” mantle – it’s available on all the major platforms, but stupidly missing obvious functions unless you pay.

At work I often use an online tool called “Basecamp” to manage development projects with clients. It affords shared task lists grouped into projects, where the client can tick things off, add their own tasks, and everybody receives automatically generated notifications that the system sends out from some kind of email gattling gun if you let it. Here’s the thing though – there are several versions of Basecamp. Basecamp 2.0 was (and is) brilliant – it does everything you might need of a project task management website, without really doing anything else. I suppose that’s why Basecamp 3.0 got invented – to redesign it into a massively inferior product that I hate with a passion, and that costs twice as much to use. Thankfully you can carry on using 2.0, so we have.

The same company that make Basecamp used to make an online productivity tool called “Backpack”. In my opinion it is STILL the best tool at what it did, even though it closed to new users perhaps a decade ago. If you imagine Trello, Evernote, Google Calendar, and Twitter munched into one portal for personal use, you just imagined Backpack. If anybody took it upon themselves to re-build it for the modern web, with a mobile app, they would become a billionaire within weeks.

So. I noodle around with all these tools – task lists, portals, note-taking apps, and so on – and I really only use Evernote. Everything else goes in the Bullet Journal at the moment, because it does all the same things, doesn’t go flat, and doesn’t require a monthly payment to unlock features that should have been in the core product.

Oh – I nearly forgot. I also use Dropbox, and Google Drive – but they’re more for keeping copies of files, rather than storing notes. I’ve played with transferring everything from Evernote into Google Docs in the past, but it insists on converting everything to traditional documents with pages – Evernote is far more like a continuous roll of toilet paper (and just as useful, probably).