Editors Corner
Aaron Timbrell's own bit of the magazine.
Welcome to the start of Volume 5 of RISCWorld. Just like last issue I am writing the editorial bit of RISCWorld a bit early, well 3 weeks early if you want the truth. Why am I doing this? Well this time I have a decent excuse. The Wakefield show is coming and I have quite a bit of work to do on the new versions of VirtualRPC that we are going to release. So In true time honoured editor style I am writing this at 3:30 in the morning having decided that I need to pull an all nighter to get RISCWorld hammered into shape before the show.
I could wait till after the show, but that would only give me a week or so to get RISCWorld finished, and that simply isn't enough time. After long days of practice I think I have finally cracked how to do an issue. I collate stuff for around a month (articles, ideas, fluff, rusty vehicles etc), then sit down one afternoon and see what fits into the flatplan I worked out whilst doing the previous issue. I then ignore this totally and start putting bits and bobs together. It helps that we have a team of writers who deliver articles early, in fact (and tempting providence) would you believe that 8 articles have already been written and submitted for this issue 2 weeks ahead of the copy deadline? This is the 2nd issue running where this has happened, surely it can't continue, but I would be delighted if it did.
So I start assembling what has already been written, then I start altering stuff, then I start writing my own articles, and since it's one that requires no real research I can start with the editorial, which is where I came in. It's now 3:37 in the morning and what can I find to rant about.
Editors Rant of the month
Last month I had a good whinge about insurance. It's now 3:49 and I have so far been unable to find anything to moan about. I have checked to see if I have a temperature, and indeed I do, regretfully it's normal, so why can't I find a single thing to get my teeth into? Well I suppose it's because almost nothing has gone properly wrong over the last 6 weeks or so. The Shogun (Oh look he's talking about cars again - HJ) managed to break its wiper motor, but I found a replacement for £30 including VAT and carriage, and it didn't really rain very much while the new motor was speeding through the night(s) on a highly powered Parcel Farce ox drawn cart. Fitting the new motor took 10 minutes, and it worked fine, so that isn't a very exciting story.
I did buy a new 19" LCD monitor, but again it wasn't any fun, I went to the shop, bought it, came home with it, plugged it in, it worked....which is really annoying. I have extended the drive outside our house to provide an extra parking place, which did entail digging out a couple of tons of earth by hand, but it was only 3 weekends work, and all the earth went to the tip in rubble sacks. I did hope for a bit of excitement when ordering the concrete to fill the hole. Would the driver turn up, would the mix dry too soon? Well the driver turned up early, my helpers had already turned up even earlier, and we had a light drizzle all day so the concrete didn't start setting. So again I had nothing to whinge about.
I had to buy some new toner for my colour laser printer, which did cause a big pain in the wallet, but on checking my records I see that the cartridge lasted almost exactly its quoted page count, so I can't really complain and it's only 3:55, why don't I look out the window and see if the sun has come up? No it hasn't, oh well, it's never very dark outside anyway because of the street lamps, which does make using my telescope a near pointless exercise, but I only have to drive 4 minutes and I am out in the country...
So to sum up nothing seems to have gone wrong and I am bloody furious about it, I mean how am I supposed to fill up editorial articles if I can't find anything to complain about...oh.....
Printing RISC World
The new look of RISC World means that you will no longer get the yellow background when printing articles from RISCWorld. However you will still get the blue border on the left unless you turn off the printing of background images. The example below shows the print dialogue box from Fresco.
As you can see the option "No Background" is ticked. If you want to print out any of the RISCWorld pages and don't want to waste ink on a blue border then make sure you have clicked a similar option in your browser.
Aaron Timbrell