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Needlessly wearing out my keyboard

I have been asked to write the Linux column for Mexico’s version of PCMagazine - Definitifely not a deep technical publication, but a magazine that reaches thousands of readers every month - And I have a couple of things to tell them. I hope I can make good use of this space they trusted me. Well, I have been struggling a couple of days with my first article. The title? Bringing security to your network with Linux. A simple topic, specially if it is targeted at relatively newbies - But the requirements had baffled me: 7000 words?! Hell, that’s much more than what I expected. I had filled up around 1000 words of senseless, repetititve introduction to the current state of affairs in personal and small-business computer security - Reading my draft only made me cry. It is B-O-R-I-N-G. Then, out of desperation, I re-opened the file where I had taken the notes during my phone interview. 7000 characters. Shit. Scrap it all. Start over. Given the average word length in Spanish, I’ll have to write only about a fifth of what I originally thought. Anyway, I just mercilessly erased a couple of hours of work :-/

Comments

j0rd1 2005-05-20 09:01:18

RE: Needlessly wearing out my keyboard

son 7,000 caracteres Gunnar, no palabras! jajajajajajajajaja 7,000 palabras es demasiado!!! suerte!!!


Jacobo 2005-05-18 16:34:05

RE: Needlessly wearing out my keyboard

Intersperse funny stories. They make good filler and they make the text look "better" ;-)

For example, there was a time in my life when I wrote for Linux magazines (some friends of mine still do), and I was asked for 5 pages of Word text. The problem is that it was late 1999, and we only had StarOffice, and the computer was a bit short on performance for it, so I wrote (on JOE, the text editor) what I thought would fill 5 pages of Word, HTML-formatted it and sent it to a friend of mine who was known by me to use Word. But I didn’t ask me to count the number of pages, no; I asked him to reread it for me, look for awkward sentences, etc. When he returned it to me, he said: "don’t you think that it is a bit too short?" I replied: "do you think so?" "Yes, it’s just 3 pages long". So I thanked him, and rewrote the text to take up between 50% and 60% more.

Well, that wasn’t exactly what happened, but thanks to the story I turned a boring two-sentence comment into an interesting three-paragraph comment ;-)


Jacobo 2005-05-18 16:35:11

RE: Needlessly wearing out my keyboard

Ugh, that strikethrough didn’t appear in the preview.

Anyway… I’m eeeeviiiil… bwahahahaha! (pinky to the mouth).


Jacobo 2005-05-18 16:36:27

RE: Needlessly wearing out my keyboard

And, apparently, I cannot read. You finally had to write 7000 characters, not words.

Keep the comment anyway. It’s a gift.

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