opportunities | Karavansara

No, not the minor hit for Scottish band Danny Wilson.
I was reading an article on the plight of the poor fiction writer, relentless purveyor of narratives for the entertainment and the edification of the hoi polloi. You see, not only your garden variety fiction writer is locked up in their house, with the stress and anxiety of seeing the system slowly trying to cope with a change that was expected but ignored, and often failing in the attempt. Not only the writer has to deal with insomnia, increasing alienation, the pneumatic void of most social media contents and the bills that keep piling up as the bank account dwindles. No, the fiction writer has to deal with the fact that our world and our society are changing, and what the writer writes is no longer relevant and connected with our present.

No, but… really?

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And so this morning my PC refused to start. It took about half an hour to get it going with an emergency disk, and it turned out my Ubuntu system was completely crippled.
It was possible to save the data, but everything else was gone – time to re-install the operating system.

Now, this is not a tragedy, actually, it’s more of an opportunity – I have been postponing the necessary updates to my OS for weeks now, and really, had I waited for the right moment – a free afternoon, no urgent work to do, no pending projects, I would have never done it.
But necessity pushes everything out of the way – I need my PC to work.

And this is also a great opportunity to move away from Ubuntu, that I love dearly but has become bloated and slow, and to try a different distro of Linux, to wit, Linux Mint.

And here I am, six hours later, exploring this different-but-familiar environment. Everything seems to work fine, my PC is faster and so far the only problem is getting Scrivener to work properly.
But I’ll work on it.
A minor catastrophe turned into a nice opportunity.