Not the first, but I'm dealing with them one at a time - hence the absence of the word "conundra" in the title.
So...
"they would then have kept with you until such time as there were cause for you to be confined or, for want of proper cause, an escort were unwarranted"
"they would have" - past, conditional... "until" and then, er, the past subjunctive of "be" to convey the (unreal past) but future looking implied secondary condition?
Is that right, or is there a better way?
I would that English were simpler sometimes!
The Budapest Office - Castro Bisztro, Madach ter
+W400-2.jpg)
Ponder, Scribble, Ponder (Photo Erdotahi Aron)
Wednesday 25 June 2008
Monday 9 June 2008
The Computer Is Dead
Long Live the Computer!
By the way - much to my surprise [the story thus far: dodgy Hungarian electrics, tripped circuit breakers, blown desktop PC power supply, internal fuse replaced, reconnected - 5th Nov 5th/4th July/20th Aug fireworks inside, ergo dead computer] I replaced the power supply in the old desktop and it still works.
Of course the disk drives were both warning of imminent failure so they got replaced too (nothing to do with the electrical mishap however, they were just tired and shagged out after shuffling bits for years). Alas a brand new Seagate 160GB drive is also moaning in an electronic "I'm dying!" sort of way (though what the IDE equivalent of "It is a far, far better thing I do now..." might be I don't know).
Just ungluck or is there something else going on?
Hmmm...
Let's see what they say at the nice PC shop (15m away diagonally down from the window) where I bought them....
Coooeeee!
By the way - much to my surprise [the story thus far: dodgy Hungarian electrics, tripped circuit breakers, blown desktop PC power supply, internal fuse replaced, reconnected - 5th Nov 5th/4th July/20th Aug fireworks inside, ergo dead computer] I replaced the power supply in the old desktop and it still works.
Of course the disk drives were both warning of imminent failure so they got replaced too (nothing to do with the electrical mishap however, they were just tired and shagged out after shuffling bits for years). Alas a brand new Seagate 160GB drive is also moaning in an electronic "I'm dying!" sort of way (though what the IDE equivalent of "It is a far, far better thing I do now..." might be I don't know).
Just ungluck or is there something else going on?
Hmmm...
Let's see what they say at the nice PC shop (15m away diagonally down from the window) where I bought them....
Coooeeee!
Why So Long?
Because if it were any shorter it wouldn't reach the end!
The Book has moved another step forwards: on Friday I finished the complete rip-it-up-and-start-again re-write of Chapter 10, which meant throwing away the 9,155 words already written. The ideas were OK but the prose/poetry was just a little bit purple (think: that horrible magenta highlight colour that makes your eyes water just by looking at it) so it had to go... all of it, unfortunately.
Now it's done - all 26,625 new and improved words later - I discover that it took four and a half months - which is rather a long time for a single chapter. But then 26k words is about a quarter of a standard paperback, so that means if "IT" were an ordinary book of about 100k words it would only... ah, slight difficulty with tenses here - what's the right tense for a hypothetical future conditional relative to a contra-factual prior state, as in "if I were to have been writing an ordinary book (which I'm not), the estimated time to forthcoming completion would have been likely to be..."? - would only be taking about 18 months to write, which isn't that bad.
Anyway, just so you know, including the 10k words lurking in the "Excised for re-use" and the "Under Development" sections, the whole thing is now about 189,234 words (as of Friday). There are still some gaps I know I need to fill in (a couple of back-story characters for The Trial, a bit more political intriguing and skulduggery, the description of the - newly invented - low-tech transparent-but-fair-and-anonymous jury voting system, and a few other bits and pieces) but we are back on the trail of making the corrections and amendments... The end is, if not nigh, then at least speculating on the possibility of nighness - all ~700+pp of it.
So! Onwards and upwards to Chapter 11
Must dash...
...Stuff To Write
The Book has moved another step forwards: on Friday I finished the complete rip-it-up-and-start-again re-write of Chapter 10, which meant throwing away the 9,155 words already written. The ideas were OK but the prose/poetry was just a little bit purple (think: that horrible magenta highlight colour that makes your eyes water just by looking at it) so it had to go... all of it, unfortunately.
Now it's done - all 26,625 new and improved words later - I discover that it took four and a half months - which is rather a long time for a single chapter. But then 26k words is about a quarter of a standard paperback, so that means if "IT" were an ordinary book of about 100k words it would only... ah, slight difficulty with tenses here - what's the right tense for a hypothetical future conditional relative to a contra-factual prior state, as in "if I were to have been writing an ordinary book (which I'm not), the estimated time to forthcoming completion would have been likely to be..."? - would only be taking about 18 months to write, which isn't that bad.
Anyway, just so you know, including the 10k words lurking in the "Excised for re-use" and the "Under Development" sections, the whole thing is now about 189,234 words (as of Friday). There are still some gaps I know I need to fill in (a couple of back-story characters for The Trial, a bit more political intriguing and skulduggery, the description of the - newly invented - low-tech transparent-but-fair-and-anonymous jury voting system, and a few other bits and pieces) but we are back on the trail of making the corrections and amendments... The end is, if not nigh, then at least speculating on the possibility of nighness - all ~700+pp of it.
So! Onwards and upwards to Chapter 11
Must dash...
...Stuff To Write
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