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Hi all, My computer behaved itself all last week. That’s nearly two weeks without a problem. Was a clean with canned air all it needed? Or have the lower temperatures meant that it has stopped overheating? Or did a test that said it had repaired something have a positive effect? Who knows. The fact that my computer didn’t play up meant that I had time to do some writing and stop worrying about a computer shutdown losing the sentence that might have begun the paragraph that would have expanded into a Hugo award winning novel. Wrote an article on Universal Remote Controls After doing a lot of research on universal remote controls, including fiddling with one, I wrote my next Divine article. I now just need to polish the article before submitting it, hopefully this week. I also wrote down lots of notes for my next two articles. At the moment, every time I start to worry about running out of ideas I quickly think up two or three. I even did some editing of my...

Death Most Definite by Trent Jamieson My rating: 4 of 5 stars Set in Brisbane (where I lived for five years so I was familiar with much of the settings), it's a horror novel with some wit. The reluctant hero Steve is a "pomp". The souls of the recently departed must pass through a pomp to travel to the afterlife. The trouble is, someone is killing all of Australia's pomps. What is worse, stirrers (angry murderess souls) are jumping into the bodies of anyone who dies and causing havoc. With the aid of the soul of a beautiful recently killed pomp, Steve has to discover who is killing the pomps and why, while preventing the stirrers from causing regional armageddon. The novel is told in the first person, which I found refreshing. It is also full of witty dialogue. The world that the author has created is thoroughly believable. Tension is maintained throughout the novel which rarely has a quiet moment. And the novel reaches a very satisfying conclusion. It is...

Hi all, My Computer Works After numerous tantrums the previous week, my computer behaved. Not once did it shutdown or freeze or beep or flash a blue screen error message. I ran it with the cover off most of the week as I waited to see if the fans weren’t operating when the above problems occurred, but you know what they say about a watched pot. The beeping from the previous week indicated that the computer had a ram problem. So at the start of last week I decided to get some more ram. My computer has 2GB of ram which can be upgraded to 4GB. I placed an order with PC Sanity: one of its computer techs is a friend on facebook. He emailed an invoice to pay before the ram would be sent. But my computer refused to open the invoice. The invoice was in Excel, and my Office XP version could not read it. I sent an email to Jeff at PC Sanity and he said I needed to get my Office updated. Right, all those computer recoveries I had done in the past few months had removed all the...

Hi all, Last week was consumed by computer problems. I finally got to the stage where I rang up a computer repair guy, but he couldn’t visit until this Thursday. I want someone to visit rather than lose the computer to a computer repair shop for months.. The fact that the computer will work for days or months without a problem has made me reluctant to send it for repair too. Sometimes I wish the thing would just go bang. I have found the onscreen manual that came with the computer totally useless as I search for some definitive test that tells me what the problem is. Every test I have put the computer through has said it is fine. An online search said the computer might be overheating due to dirt and faulty fans. I pulled the cover off and blew some dust around. I then turned it on, and it worked perfectly for two days. But on Saturday morning I turned it on and it started beeping at me. By then I had finally located a list of what the beeps meant. The beeps ind...

Hi all, New Article Submitted to Divine. I finally submitted my a new article for Divine online magazine at the beginning of this week. The article was originally going to be about the effects of ebooks on the publishing industry, but I had an awful lot of information that was not going to fit into a 500 word article. So I decided to narrow it down. I figured that most people don’t care about agents or publishers or even booksellers for that matter, but they might care about the author. As well, the effect ebooks will have on the publishing industry as a whole is still very unclear, with many publishers adopting the “she’ll be right” attitude. But the effects ebooks will have on self-publishing are more evident. So the article ended up being about the effect self-publishing ebooks will have on authors. This is the second article about ebooks I have written for Divine. The first article was about how ereaders make it easier for people with a disability to read. Hop...

Datura Highway by Daniel King My rating: 5 of 5 stars Daniel King has written an exciting fantasy/psychological thriller that kept me guessing - and hoping - until the very end. It's a novel with an original plot, which is hard to do these days. It begins with the main character, Daniel, finding himself in a huge warehouse full of symbolic statues, and not quite knowing how he got there. The only information he has is a list of vague unrelated items in one of his coat pockets. In another pocket he finds a alien looking weapon. He vaguely recalls he was investigating a murder. As he starts to search his surroundings he runs into Mimi, a school teacher who doesn't mind smoking cannabis. Perhaps that explains her slightly odd behavior. More through luck than detective work they begin to progress through what appears to be some sort of weird test. I loved the world-building in this novel. The world is totally strange, not in an over the top way, but in a what the hell i...