I inherited a Dell Pentium 4 – with barely minimal memory (256MB) and a laughable hard drive (40G) – the other day. It had a corrupted Windows XP Pro running on it, and it was S L O W. I mean really slow. So I unsuccessfully tried to reinstall Windows (in retrospect, why?), clean up the hard drive and test for malware, all without any hint of success.

I took the “radical” decision to uninstall Windows and install the popular Linux OS, Ubuntu. At first it did not want to get past 55% installation before it crashed, but a quick CD clean and disk/hard disk check proved to be just the ticket. I now sit here writing this entry on a new, faster machine. The interface is unusual, but logical and user-friendly.

I almost have a feeling of pride at getting it all to work, whilst rescuing an otherwise damned PC; best of all, I have a non-Windows computer.

I am literally standing here holding one of the first copies of the English text book I co-wrote. Except I am sitting. And the book is on a flat surface approximately one and a half metres away from me. The book arrived a couple of days ago and, since then, has not really given me any sense of achievement or enjoyment.

I suppose I have lived with the texts for up to nine months, and had seen the layout in colour photocopy format months before the final edition. I have checked and rechecked the book for possible errors (both grammatical and aesthetical), spending so much time with it that its actual presence on the market (and, I hope, huge presence in classrooms) does not stir my cup of joy.

Saying that, it IS tremendously cool to have had the experience of writing a book and I have just started the first chapter in the next book. I can say now, while I am in the process, that some texts and ideas flow without problem, while others (the World of Warcraft text in the last book springs to mind) cause me untold frustration. So just before I put pen to paper (as I am soon to do when I write a text about kangaroos) I have a feeling of anticipation and excitement, wondering how the ideas I’m forming will come together to be something comprehensible.

Despite our best editing skills, we have (so far) found three mistakes. A pity really, but that cannot be uncommon, knowing now the amount of work that goes into what appears to be a simple school book.