Windows 8 | Susan's Scribblings the Blog

Every year I have tried to participate in National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for short. Every year something has blocked my efforts. Not this year.

The object is to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days, using the month of November as the time clock. Writing begins on the first and ends on the last day of the month at 11:59 PM. Somebody wrote a column noting in error that the event required only 30,000 words. Some veterans would probably consider that child’s play, but for writers like me who work on the fly with no home computer (it’s a long story: longer than 50,000 words), writing at all is a privilege fought for and agonized over at the same time. It does force a writer to focus on getting time to write, though the tradeoff can be pages of garbled snippets of mis-matched ideas. Fortunately participants are encouraged to edit the results in the spring.

So far I have managed to nearly get the required 1,666 words per day down in my difficult Microsoft Word Windows 8 environment, with few typos but lots of dangling idea threads. If I had to pause to structure, nothing would go on the page. I have about 200 left to do today, and I will get them done after I tell you I’m doing so. Bye for now.

For some adults of a certain age, the personal computer has been a form of technology we have been running neck and neck with, rather than at a pace well ahead of its own improvements. I started learning about computers when Wang was an office staple and screens were two shades of green: dark green background, and lots of text in luminous light green. I learned some aspects of DOS and WYSIWYG just to program standard office applications. All that training went obsolete months after I learned them, but fortunately not every office I worked in kept up with technology and I was able to use it until the joys of Windows came along.

With Windows 8, I feel like I’m back in front of that green-screened Wang again.

The newest operating system is designed to work with regular computers and touch screen devices. However, I don’t use it on a touch screen device, and there is a different experience with using a mouse. Clicking on the screen icons does not produce the thing you want right away: there is always a screen with a symbol meaning you have accessed a program, followed by your main screen for that program. Like opening a screen door before the interior door, it’s superfluous. To get the system up and running I had to endure set-up, configuration, identity features up the yoo-hoo, and I still can’t figure out how to set up my photos to present a slide show on the main screen. I did manage to load a picture from the Internet twice by mistake, and that produced a two-photo slide show on a screen tile that I looked at for about two months. I hope nobody else noticed: it makes me look like I only have two photos, and neither of them are of me.

Those of us who like Windows have been deprived in the past of several iconic features. I mourned the demise of “Clippy,” the cute paper clip character in Word applications who sat contentedly in the corner of my screen and performed for me when I saved a document or printed something. Now we have lost the “Start” button, a corner feature that will help even the most casual computer navigator find anything. Since I’ve had Windows 8, the only things I’ve found easily are games. I am now a certified “Tap Tiles” addict, and am fluent in five types of solitaire.

Fortunately a version 8.1 is coming out soon with a reintroduced “Start” button. Maybe it will come in green.

	Eden on Getting the Message
	Eden on The Unasked Questions
	Eden on And Her Shoes Were #9
	Eden on The Poison Field
	Eden on Final Tally

Susan's Scribblings the Blog

Tag: Windows 8

NaNoWriMo Hooks Me Again

Posted at 1:26 am by kayewer, on November 3, 2013

Windows 8 My Start Button!

Posted at 2:21 am by kayewer, on July 7, 2013

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