War of the antiviruses

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

I had a good day on Tuesday, I finished the pdf edits for the proofreading job and sent that back to the client. By return, she asked for my invoice, which I sent, also by return.

The next job should have been editing, but I was distracted. While I was amending the pdf, my computer kept on juddering so that my manual (freehand) “pencil marks”, aka ticks, were wavy at best.

Something was running in the background causing everything to splutter.

Antivirus software

I opened my task manager, and there was AVG Free, hogging all the space. Again. AVG have a fix in place whereby if you “repair” it, this space-hog stops. I think I’ve “repaired” it three times. And three strikes is enough.

This time, I went and grabbed a copy of AVAST Free instead, and when I was certain that was running properly, AVG came off.

But it didn’t go quietly. It kept on asking me if I was sure, and when it ran out of options for that one, it offered to run in passive mode, so I could pick and choose when it worked. It even had the audacity to alert me to the fact there was a different antivirus installed and did I want AVG to remove it?

Nope, sorry. Three strikes. That’s it. Bye-bye. And off it went.

Immediately, AVAST found quite a few “issues” that AVG had missed, and instead of saying I needed to upgrade to premium, as AVG always would, AVAST just went on and fixed it – once I’d given it permission.

And I have to say that since finally ditching AVG, my computer is running a lot more betterer.

Editing

Once all of that was out of the way, I was able to crack on with the articles from Pakistan. Well, I made a start, for I had a few queries and fired off my questions.

However, they didn’t get back to me in time for me to finish any on Tuesday.

Inauguration

Much of the following day, Wednesday, was spent watching the US inauguration on the telly. I was surprised that Biden was sworn in more than 10 minutes early and was waiting for a punchline on that one. But, thankfully, all went smoothly.

And I was back to editing again. I did 2 of the 3 articles that came in on Monday, and I started the 3rd one, but ran out of steam and time.

Ghostwriting

On Thursday morning I was back at the ghostwriting. The plan was to get the queries back to them on the first instalment and then get going on the second instalment. But as with the best-laid plans, it didn’t quite work like that.

There were really only minor suggestions on the first instalment, many of which would not have happened had there been a style sheet. For it was mostly the elevation of job titles that caused the problem. I don’t elevate them unless they’re being used instead of a proper noun. My beta reader, however, wanted to elevate them all.

When I checked with the client, though, it was agreed that the titles, when used as an ordinary noun, would remain all in lower case, but when used as a direct address, then they should be capitalised. That was fine.

However, as I worked my way through, there were also a lot of suggestions there that were down to US English (the beta reader) versus UK English (me). What took the time was me responding to many of the suggestions to say it was correct in the first place.

Anyway, it took longer than I thought it would, and I didn’t actually get around to writing any new material. I did send the revised instalment back to the client, though.

Editing again

And then I was able to finish the third article for Pakistan. But I didn’t finish work until 6pm, so that was that for Thursday.

Tomorrow’s plan is to catch up on some of the ghostwriting.

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