Using the distraction free machine

 

When I did my annual personal technology review at the end of last year, I mentioned that I hadn’t made as much use of the distraction free machine as I’d hoped, in part due to my actually finishing the documentation of Dow’s pharmacy.

Since I had my sclerotherapy last week that’s changed. 

For the first few days I found it difficult to sit for a prolonged period at my desk to write, so when writing, I sat with my leg up on the sofa with the distraction free machine on my lap – hopelessly unergonomic I know – and caught up on my blogging.

And it’s been good.

As I said at the time the machine is nice to type on and it’s of a size to sit comfortably on my lap, making it as an ideal writing machine.

I’ve been using Libre Office as a writing tool rather than a text editor such as kate or gedit to create either simply structured plain text or markdown to feed through a conversion tool such as pandoc.

Once finished I send the text to OneDrive using Emailitin, where I finish it off on my windows 10 desk laptop, and then cut and paste it into a blogging tool such as open live writer for Wordpress, or in the case of blogger simply paste it into the edit window, and tweak the formatting if necessary.

I’ve been being a good little vegemite and making sure I walk my ten thousand steps a day (as counted by my fitbit) with the result that I’m healing nicely and can now sit at my desk for an extended period, but having started seriously using the lightweight machine I’ve kept on using it.

It’s quite a pleasant way to write, with either ABC Classic or Radio National burbling away in the background. As I say it’s unergonomic, but pleasant.

One of the advantages of working this way is that it is truly distraction free.

While the machine is connected to the internet there’s no web browser or email client running unless I actively want to run one, perhaps to check something, which coupled with my withdrawal from social media, it’s a good way to work.

I also make a point of leaving my phone in the study while I’m sitting downstairs writing, or working on something, something which also makes for a distraction free environment.

I’m very tempted, once we’ve cleaned out the old garage which is going to be studio for J with a bit of extra desk space for me to bugger about with film photography, to find a half way decent second hand sofa to allow me to continue working in my lazy distraction free writing ...

Roman ghosts (again)

I'm probably I'm going to get a reputation as some sort of strange crank for going on about this but this time I'm going to blame Mary Beard.

I've been spending the past few hot sticky afternoons rereading her 'Confronting the Classics', which is basically a collection of reviews written for various classical journals and literary magazines.

The first time around I must admit I tended to dismiss it as 'professors arguing with professors', but this time, perhaps because I know more and have thought more, I can see more depth to the collection.

Anyway, in discussing Boudicca she mentions a theory that she was buried on Gop hill in Flintshire and that her ghostly chariot can sometimes be seen careering about (personally I suspect Boudicca's body was lost and thrown into a mass grave at best).

However, I'd never heard of Gop hill, so I looked it up and it turns out to be a substantial prehistoric mound of unknown purpose.

The various sites I looked at didn't mention any legend of Boudicca's burial but one did mention a legend that the ghost of Aurelian (identified as Ambrosius Aurelianus) was sometimes seen on the site, and included a link to an online database of ghost sightings in the UK.

Now, normally I wouldn't bother with such things, but as my post about Roman ghost sightings in the nineteenth century was one of my most popular blog posts in 2023, I thought I'd take a look at the database for mentions of Roman ghosts and I was immediately struck by two things:

(a) where the provenance of a story is known it is from the nineteen twenties at the earliest

(b) many of the stories repeat features from other stories, eg a group of Roman soldiers is seen walking down a street, but are cut off at the knees, presumably because the Roman road surface was lower than today's, suggesting a degree of re-invention.

Which kind of reinforces my view that ghosts of dead Romans were not a nineteenth century thing ...