Again, the imaginary progress bar showing how the next book is going took another jump towards being filled, although it did stutter, fall back a tiny amount, pause... before moving forward again. The stutter was caused by a logo that we wanted to use that I couldn't open on my old PC because the version of the programme I had was so ancient.
I'm not likely to be updating it any time soon because said programme is part of a suite that was purchased back in the early 2000s; the people who make it have now stopped selling their product and now only allow subscriptions. Since I don't use it for months at a time while I'm writing books, I don't want to subscribe. I'd prefer to buy it outright. Or buy the bits that I use outright.
My old PC is air-gapped, to make sure that it doesn't receive any unwanted updates or viruses. Microsoft stopped sending virus updates for Windows 10 some while back, so it might be vulnerable to attack. As I only use it for design work on my books and nothing else, I'm hoping that it will last for many years to come.
The old PC does have about 20gb of emails on it. And earlier this week I had 10gb of emails on my laptop, half of them unwanted.
The sorry saga began last Wednesday when I went online to read my emails and found one from my email provider which said "7-Day Alert" and told me to "Make sure you're all set for the switch." Well, that was the first I was aware that there was a switch due, and there were all kinds of scary bullet-points:
- Before your migration, please download any folders of documents you want to keep.
- When you open your email client after moving to Professional Email powered by Titan, you may see your email redownload.
Um... I didn't have an "email client". For years I've gone online to read my mail. Online I had all my mails neatly moved to folders so I could track down book orders from people, book orders I had processed and book orders that had been completed; there was various folders of correspondence and payments; there was work related stuff and loads more. There were almost 10,000 messages — 5.1gb of mail.
So on Saturday, a friend came around and put Thunderbird on my laptop. This is actually the same email "client" that I had on my old PC, so at least I knew what to expect and how to use it. We went down the pub and left it downloading a few thousand emails.
It was only the next day that I realised it had only downloaded the inbox and none of the folders, so I spent the next couple of days moving messages in folders on the webmail server to the webmail inbox, so that Thunderbird downloaded them. I then had to go through the downloaded messages and move them into newly created folders. I moved the last of them on Monday — so much for having a day off!
On Tuesday I received a "24-Hour Alert", which told me pretty much the same thing as the earlier message. And on Wednesday a "10-Minute Alert" telling me to close or send any open emails I was working on. "If you're using an email client on your phone or computer, you won't need to reconfigure your settings."
Remember the warning about "you may see your email redownload"? That's precisely what happened. 9,494 messages re-downloaded, landing on the 3,350 messages I had still to move into folders. The 6,000+ messages I had carefully moved into folders were now duplicated in my inbox, leaving me with 13,000 messages that needed to be sorted out.
As you can imagine, I wasn't best pleased. I have managed to get that down to 7,104 messages, so I've about 3,750 more to find and delete. And every time I open Thunderbird, I get four or five random old messages download, not all of which I can immediately trace and delete. Mostly they're from 2022 for some reason.
When I'm not wasting my time, I have been making some small progress with the next set of books, sorting out cover images and thinking about what I can do with the internal pages. While pondering, I've taken the opportunity to clean up a few old book covers that will be used when I do my next book about old paperbacks, although quite when that will be I don't know.
Talking of book covers, here are a few SF books I've picked up in the wild recently. Nothing too exciting, although I was very pleased to find the John Sladek with its Chris Foss cover. This was picked up from a local second-hand bookshop. The final two were Ebay purchases, but the rest I found around town.
