Stupid Computer Tricks

On Friday afternoon, I installed VPN software on my work laptop.

On Monday evening, I realized that that laptop was no longer sharing files properly on my home network. It could see the other two machines fine, but they couldn't even ping it. This was particularly annoying, as the latest version of the new story was on that machine. (When I'm home, it mostly stays in the living room, while the deskbound machine, formerly known as Real Laptop, is in the slightly chillier study away from the TV.)

This evening, I uninstalled the VPN, and now I can pull files back and forth again. Sigh. I don't really need the VPN thing at present, but there may come a time when I can't work remotely without it, in which case this incompatibility could become a real pain.

Also?

510 words, after all the computer nonsense. About half a scene, but I skipped a couple in the middle. And the words on the page are still nothing like the words in my head. One day I'll get used to that again.

Sometimes I miss my old (1989) Amstrad PCW. It took a couple of minutes to do search-and-replace on a 2kword document, the screen was green-on-green, and it was incompatible with everything else in the known universe, but when I sat down in front of that thing there was pretty much nothing to do but write.