My own personal keyboard twitch appears to be transposing the ‘o’ and ‘n’ in words ending ‘ion’. I have to watch for it when proofing myself, but it’s a typo that keeps on giving; always calling to mind a smaller, more Italian form of whatever I’m writing about: train statino, BIOS configuratino, administratino passwords.

A less frequent transpositino comes with words ending ‘ine’; most frequently when I substitute ‘machien’ for ‘machine’. On some days, using some computers, it’s more apt.

Although I went part-time in March, I was still missing deadlines, and still working too many weekend days. That either meant I was over-committed, or just plain shit at managing my time.

So deciding to quit and do nothing other than work under my own management was scary.

Self-organisational skills aside, there’s a surprising number of unknowns when you take the leap:

- Will friends come through on promises to pass work my way?
- How much time should I schedule for each job?
- How many jobs will it take to see me through the month?
- If I’m charging for my time, how much is it worth?
- How many days do I set aside for contingency, planning and admin?

It’s gone surprisingly well so far. Here’s what I’ve found:

- Yes. Without fail. Thanks.
- Be conservative.
- Do the sums. Don’t forget to save money for tax.
- Pick what you can earn on a good day of being paid by the word.
- A day a week seems wise.

I’m wary of giving out freelance advice because, as mentioned above, I suspect I might be a bit shit.

That said, if I’m late with copy now I’ve got no-one else to blame. I’d better start listening to myself.

I’ve whinged about regional settings before, but it turns out I’m bilingual. Who knew?

Recently, as I’ve gradually found the options that make Word act like a grown-up word processor, this had started to get annoying again: if you’ve got a netbook or anything else with a smallish trackpad, it’s easy to place the cursor at the beginning of your selection before accidentally flicking it the wrong way – at which point Word will include the word before the one you wanted to start at and you’ll need to begin the selection again.

Narg.

Anyway, after some self-editing made more tedious by the problem I was inspired to look for an option. To be fair, it’s an easy one to find:

-Click Word’s nameless round button
-At the bottom of the menu that appears click Word Options
-Click Advanced in the left-hand pane
-Un-tick the second option: When selecting, automatically select entire word
-Click OK to save the change

You can do the same thing for Outlook 2007 by following the above instructions from an email you’re reading or composing, but choose ‘Editor Options’ rather than ‘Word Options’.

Selection shortcuts

The downside of making this change is that you have to be slightly more accurate when marking the start of your selection. The upside, however, is that the application won’t fuck it up for you when you do get it right.

No doubt many users prefer this to be the default behaviour, but there are other keyboard shortcuts for selections that are easier to use in practice, particularly where it’s hard to give accurate mouse inputs. Moreover, these should work in all Windows applications:

Shift and cursor keys – select text
Control, Shift and left/right cursor key – select text one word at a time
Shift and page up/down – select text in big fat lumps
Control and ‘a’ – select entire document/dialogue/element (depending where the cursor is)

Yes, it turns out that Word’s separation of words with seemingly random amounts of fresh air is all about readability. As assessed by the Andrex puppy, I can only assume.

If you’re in the unlikely position of, you know, having a professional interest in copy with the correct number of spaces, it turns out there is a way to fix it:

-Click Word’s nameless round button
-At the bottom of the menu that appears click Word Options
-Click Advanced in the left-hand pane
-Scroll down to the Display settings
-Tick Optimize character positioning for layout rather than readability
-Click OK to save the change

Incidentally, I discovered this when setting up a new netbook. With only 600 pixels of vertical resolution I was looking for ways to free up screen space, and particularly found myself wondering whether the huge Office Ribbon was strictly necessary.

If you’ve been using Office 2007 for a while, though, you probably know which of the ribbon views the various functions you use are on. Right-click the base of the ribbon, select Minimize the Ribbon, and revel in your liberated screen space.

If its default behaviour – which is to insert two line breaks each time you hit Enter – bothers you, here’s how you turn it off:

1 Make sure you’re on the Home tab of the Office ribbon.
2 Click the unimaginably tiny arrow in the bottom right corner to open the Paragraph dialogue box.

3 Under Spacing, change the After value from 10pt to 0pt.
4 Check Don’t add space between paragraphs of the same style.
5 Click Default… to apply these settings to all new documents.
6 Click OK.
7 Now choke back the rage as you have to repeat steps 1-4, then click OK again to apply the changes to the document you’re actually working on.

Perhaps somebody knows of a reason why they changed it? If I’m honest, it’s so long since I installed my creaking, ancient copy of Office that I can’t be sure it wasn’t always like that.

I forgot to disable the grammar checker, but fortunately it’s set to nag you by being no bloody use whatsoever. In this case, by taking exception to a perfectly legitimate comma.

Unless you doubt your mastery of English against a set of rules put together by Microsoft, you’ll probably want to turn it off, too. Here’s how in Word 2007:

1 Click the stupid, round, nameless button in the top left of Word.
2 Click Word Options, hidden irritatingly in the last place you’d expect to find it; at the bottom of the drop down menu that appears.
3 Click Proofing in the left-hand pane of the pointlessly over-styled and graphics-heavy window that appears.
4 Under When correcting spelling and grammar in Word uncheck Mark grammar errors as you type and Check grammar with spelling.
5 Click OK to get back to Word.

I’m not sure what it is, but it’s a joy. Like smells, old songs can evoke the strongest memories. I can tell you exactly where I was the first time I heard Nick Drake’s Cello Song, or Joni Mitchell’s A Case of You (sung by my brother), or Japan’s Visions of China, for example.

Music evokes emotions, or conjures up vivid imaginings in me: listen to Anouar Brahem’s Le Voyage de Sahar and try not to be bouncing along a sun-bleached, dusty desert road. Play Rage Against the Machine’s Killing in the Name without getting angry. Don’t even think about listening to Guillemot’s Redwings after a break up – but stick on Florence and the Machine’s Dog Days are Over and find yourself lifted.

I like music when I travel and when I unwind, and often while I work – although I’m normally forced into listening anyway to drown out all the noise in the office.

Which is why it sucks that, every few months, it stops working.

I’ve got boxes full of CDs and hard drives full of songs, and I don’t want to listen to them. I can’t be bothered with the albums I like, and hearing an album I love is like so much lift music. The lyrics go over my head, the tune doesn’t get under my skin, the orchestration won’t lift – or sink – my heart. It’s like I’ve suddenly lost my capacity to understand a passionate language: I hear the sounds, but not their meaning.

So that’s where I am. It shouldn’t last more than a few days. On Monday, perhaps an album will come out that snaps me out of it. Perhaps I’ll watch and enjoy more of these (thanks Jason).

Perhaps, good residents of Hove permitting, I’ll just enjoy some quiet for a bit while I tap away at some freelance.

A couple of weeks back I wrote a post about the state of the economy, but when I re-read it I realised I really didn’t know what I was talking about. It was easy not to worry about it back when it was the credit crunch. It sounded like breakfast.

I’ve been having something of an involuntary holiday from journalism of late. My mojo’s fucked off again for a start, but I’m less comfortable than I have been with work. An ex-colleague’s leaving do at the Dennis local stirred up a host of memories: I’ve come a long way in the last couple of years. It hasn’t all been the right direction.

So, normal Hackbashing will be resumed at some point. In the meantime, talking of Dennis, the man himself is in Brighton tomorrow night to read from his latest book of poetry. I’ll be there if I can get a ticket.

But there are words that Americans simply spell wrongly, which is why it’s so irritating to see the English spellings underlined by Microsoft Word’s spellchecker.

The problem starts with whoever installs or first configures the computer. Windows has regional settings that tell it the format to use for dates, currency and so-on. Crucially, they’re also used to localise the programs you subsequently install, most notably those that – like office suites – handle text. If whoever installs Windows doesn’t bother to localise it properly (and if you don’t do it yourself – see below), Word and the other apps will be configured with a US English dictionary.

I used to set up machines for a living – it’s lazy to not bother correcting their localisation. I’m hereby submitting a new support incident to every single helpdesk in the UK, asking that you each please make your monkeys set up computers for the correct country.

Thank you. If you need to update me, please send tickets to ‘reiterativeprocessmaturitymodel@hackbash.com’*

Wordplay

Now I write and edit for a living, praise be, it winds me up to receive documents where correctly-spelled words are queried. This is an(other) annoying feature of Word’s: even if your machine is set up correctly, documents are displayed with the language settings used by their author. If they’re written with a US English dictionary, you’ll need to select the entire text and manually set the language to British English before you’re editing them with the right dictionary. Even then, as I recently discovered, footnotes still need to be localised separately from the body copy.

On one level it’s simply an irritation. On another, given the prevalence of Word, I wonder if it’s also a bit more significant. If everyone’s writing with a US English dictionary, perhaps everyone will start using American spelling.

Then again, given the ubiquity of the internet and the amount of written English shared on it, that’s probably going to happen anyway. For how long will it matter?

Correcting your PC’s localisation

No professional writer should be creating wrongly-localised documents.

You can check your PC’s localisation by clicking the Start button, clicking Settings and then Control Panel. Double-click the Regional and Language Options icon. You’ll see a different applet depending whether you have XP or Vista, but you should work your way through all the tabs making sure that the British English options are selected, and that you click Apply each time before you change between tabs. You might need your Windows install disc at some point.

Next you’ll need to sort Word out. In Word 2003, select Language from the Tools menu and click Set Language. Make sure English (U.K.) is selected and click the Default… button. It’s much the same in Word 2007, but you get to the Set Language option on the ribbon’s Review tab.

*this is a private joke. If you want me to explain it, please send a self-addressed envelope.