Daughter Ella left for Barcelona this afternoon, to meet up with the Rainbow gathering, currently near the town of Leon. Doesn’t seem like long since she came home from India. Europe will be different for her. During her year in Sicily, she didn’t travel very much – now it’s another phase in her life.
One of her deliberations was whether to take a camera. Eventually she decided on her old Rebel – a film camera. When I first traveled to India, I didn’t take a camera. I wasn’t sure about preserving memories, or maybe it was about preserving them by mechanical means – hard to remember one’s ideologies of thirty years ago.
Lately I’ve been thinking that not taking travel pictures might encourage me to do more writing. I found a couple of writing programs that work under Linux. There’s yWriter 4, by Spacejock. That’s a free program that runs under Wine / Crossover (Windows emulators for Linux). At least it’s supposed to run. I didn’t managed to get it to work properly. You type and nothing appears on the page. Like a mechanically induced writers’ block, or the machine version of those nightmares where you scream but are unable to produce sound. Perhaps now, after reinstalling under Crossover 8 / Wine 1.0 it will work better.
However, the other program I discovered looks good too. This is a multi-platform suite called Writers’ Cafe. It isn’t, unfortunately, a free open source program (though the Mac version is free).
The most convenient computer for writing, of course, is my ageless Psion. Its AA batteries last a month and the thing clips neatly onto my belt. Not so inspiring to type on the small keyboard and grey screen but when the spirit moves me these details are forgotten. Perhaps now, with the emergence of a line of computers like the Ee PC, we are moving back again towards convenient handhelds.