Sometimes the universe hates me. This is not just a perception of mine, nor is it connected to the fact that I definitely got out of bed the wrong side this morning: it is an actual fact. The universe hates me and wants to thwart my every effort. First, the laptop started playing up again and wouldn’t let me do the crossword (except in the sense of being cross about the words I couldn’t fill in.) Then when I needed to edit a story and send it off, I couldn’t. Nope, not one s
Here’s an example: you see the text below? No? No, neither do I because the effing laptop just deleted it! Then before you can say ‘no deal Brexit’ (I’m trying so hard not to think about that) it decided I didn’t need to blog any more and closed the tab. I swear to God…
OK. Deep calming breaths because I may – just may – have learned something here. I’ll get to that in a minute. Meanwhile, pausing only to save this draft at the end of every sentence, I shall continue. Where was I? Oh yes, not one s-
Yes. Not one s-entence, not one word, not a single apostrophe or hair on the head, would it let me change. OK then, I’ll send it off as it is. After a great deal of juggling and cursing I managed to copy and paste the text. Whew. But my ordeal was not over: first I had to confirm that ‘I am not a robot.’ Most sites are content to simply let you tick the box and confirm your humanity, not oh no – not this one. It was one of those captcha things I absolutely dread. You know the ones. You’ve got eight or ten pictures of various indecipherable scenes and it asks you to ‘check’ (ie tick) all the ones with store fronts. How the hell are you supposed to tell whether a bunch of blurry bricks constitute a store front? I tried about six of these (I never get them right and it really annoys me) before finally realising that because it was one of those sites which rejects everything you’ve done until you get one small detail right, the problem was in fact with my ‘website’ address. Most people are happy with lizardyoga.wordpress.com but not this one: they wanted the full complement of https’s and colons and backslashes. Anyway the thing’s sent off now, albeit in very rough form.
But if there’s a silver lining here it’s this: I have a sneaking suspicion that sometimes my first thoughts are my best thoughts. Sometimes I feel that in editing and re-editing I’m actually spoiling the original vision. Certainly the few things I’ve done recently which were just off the top of my head seem to work quite well. So that’s a bit of a puzzler, if it’s true.
Anyway, the thing I sent off today was a 500-word piece based on a cartoon. It’s a prompt I get monthly from Visual Verse:
Kirk out
Sarada Gray 
We’ve bought second hand laptops in the past – condition A++ refurbished – apparently the best that supplier provides (or provider supplies?) and guess what – no you already know – nothing but problems and a crap battery. Concluded it’s better to get cheap new ones. They manage OK with Word and the internet. Only when you want to edit videos, play live internet games or have 6 windows open at the same time do you need the latest i5/6/7/8 and so on.
Interesting. Any recommendations?
I guess most of the common makes are much the same these days . My son needed a new one just before Christmas after his old Acer went completely dead, so we went down to PCWorld and tried different ones to see what they feel like, then went down again a couple of days later and looked again. Eventually he bought a Lenovo from them online. He is earning money and can spend quite a lot but the less expensive ones felt much the same. The HP was a strong contender too. I have a three year old Acer which I like. I’m sure blogger Brian who repairs them is a far better sounding board than me. It’s no good looking in Which? because they seem to think that anything other than a £1,000 Apple is rubbish, which with great restraint I would say isn’t helpful at all.
Thanks, I’ll ask Brian