Old Tech, New Tech and Just Plain Buggy Tech

Because my Dad is sick with a cold, we didn't spend the whole afternoon together. I took him to Quizno's for a meatball sub (which he didn't even almost finish) and then to Robert's Barber Lounge for his monthly pampering - a deluxe shave and trim, complete with hot towels and scalp massage and attention to nose and ear hairs, followed by fingernail trimming. When he got back, they were serving rainbow sherbet in the dining hall, which made for a nice surprise.

After dropping my Dad off, I was able to put in a belated appearance at a wedding reception, bring John some lunch, and take the dogs to St. Michael's for a late afternoon session of playing in the park and working in the office. St. Michael and All Angels is having its 60th Anniversary this year, and we've chosen our patron saint day, Michaelmas, for the celebration, transferred to the last weekend in September. I'm right in the thick of the preparations, updating the church website, coordinating the efforts of others on publicity, editing the 60th Anniversary issue of The Messenger, and posting about the anniversary to social media sites.

One part of the preparations that I consider of particular importance (is that enough "p" words for ya?) is research into the church's history. If we're going to celebrate 60 years, it's good to know and talk about what happened in those years. So parishioners Jo Leeming (of the St. Michael and All Angels Vestry), Ila Abernathy (of the parish's Guatemala Project) and I procured a key to the church's archives, which are stored in the Womble Library. We oohed and ahhed over our discoveries there, pulled out several of the more important notebooks and envelopes, and brought them to my office at church. This afternoon was the first chance I've had since then to take a look.

I only got through half a notebook, but it was mostly really important stuff. There were pictures from the church's construction, dated September, 1953. Two of them were dated September 14, 1953, exactly 60 years before the day I scanned them on my office computer:

 

This is the interior of the church, with a man looking up at the eastern wall. The walls had not yet been plastered, and the floor had not yet been laid. But the place was already rather beautiful.

This appears to be a view from the main entrance, looking north 90 feet to where the sanctuary would be. The white cross seen here was an opening in the original north wall, into which the stained glass cross would be added. The northern end of the church has since been expanded twice, once in 1964 to add the transept (the size sections in front) and apse (a place for the high altar), and again in 1998 to add the organ chamber behind the sanctuary. The glass cross is now in the western wall, near where the choir sits.

There were more photos from later in the month, but it's clear that the building wasn't finished by Michaelmas, 1953. The dedication and first service was held Sunday, November 29th, 1953. There was a newspaper photo of that, along with a few color snapshots. Another small batch of photos showed the church as of the day after Christmas, 1953.

 

I also found an expansion feasibility study from 1959, apparently printed on ditto master or mimeograph. If you're under 40 years old, you probably don't know what those reproduction technologies were like, but I used to struggle with them in my high school days. Even in 1981, when the church printed a little black and white newsletter thingy titled "God Gave Me a Parish With Guts!", the pictures in it were dark and dot matrix-y. The newest thing I saw was a printout of an email from 1999, in which the original rector, Father John Clinton Fowler, wrote about acquiring a used pipe organ for the church, late in his tenure. It only cost $200 plus installation, but appears to have lasted only a few years before it fell apart. The replacement organ, dating from 1959 and originally built for a Cincinnati church, cost many orders of magnitude more than that to buy and install, but it's one of the best organs in this part of the country, so there.

But there you go. Even in 1999, for an important historical document, the way to preserve the data was to print it out. I started retyping the thing as I was scanning the photos, because it's not long enough to fuss with OCR for, even if I had a decent OCR program.

Still, much as I want to laugh at the old snapshots and dittos and other outdated technology found in the church archive, limited as they are in quality and shareability, I'm grateful that people took the trouble to make those physical records and preserve them. Many things from the past aren't around any more at all - or, if they are, they aren't online where I personally can get at them! I've looked at old photos and even silent black and white footage of Stalag Luft 1 where my dad was a prisoner, and at old photos of World War II squadrons and bomb groups; but I've yet to find one (outside of my Dad's small personal collection) that has my Dad in it. Large numbers of Doctor Who episodes from the 1960s and 1970s were wiped by the BBC, along with Apollo 11 footage and other important stuff. The technology of the items in the church archive is outdated, and nobody gets to see it because it consists of fragile bits of paper, locked up in a cabinet so it won't disappear or get destroyed. But the point is that it hasn't been lost or destroyed. It is therefore now available to me, to digitize and share with the world, or at least the parish.

St. Michael and All Angels Church as of December 26, 1953. 

This innocent photo killed my index page tonight.

And it's not as though current technology is so much more reliable than what they had in 1953 or 1959 or 1981. I already told you about my recent malware problems, and I can't get my new Family Tree Maker program to run for than a few seconds before crashing. More to the point, I tried to add a few of the images I found today to the church website, which is hosted on Godaddy. No matter how carefully I typed or copy-pasted the image's URL, no matter how many times I edited files to make them shorter, uploaded them again and gave them less problematic file names, my edited web page refused to display them. I had to let the church blog host the photos. At one point I added one measly photo to the church's main web page and saved it, only for the whole page to have been randomly ruined by my SeaMonkey Composer program. It's not the first time this has happened, either. Tonight, all the < and > marks were replaced with the HTML markup that makes them not be HTML tags any more. Last time, which was only a week or so ago, all the image URLs suddenly pointed to my hard drive instead of the web site, even though they were all previously in there with the full web addresses. Both times, I had to grab a Google cache version of the page, clean it up and repost it. I should know better, and always keep a backup before I edit a page.

 The back of the church, December 1953.

It's going to be worth it, though, right? If I can just get all the best of this old stuff scanned, uploaded and displayed, on web pages and pdfs that are consistently readable and glitch-free, then, THEN, we'll have the best of old and new.

 Karen

Welcome Home, Computer!

I got my computer back tonight, after work, after visiting Dad, but before picking up chicken wings for dinner at 8 PM. So far it seems to be fine. I've spent the evening setting it up, answering some email, updating the church's music page, and tweaking the photos in entries made over the weekend using my iPhone. Smartphones are wonderful things to have, but they are still extremely clunky to use for conventional blogging.

Monday has come and come, a day when a visiting nurse practitioner was supposed to freeze off a growth (a wart?) on my Dad's hand. It's still there. I've repeatedly requested that somebody do something about it, but I suspect that the visiting medical people mostly ignore the notes from the facility's nursing staff, let alone secondhand requests from family members of residents. But I'll keep trying. Also, where are the other seven pairs or so of my dad's pants? Thursday is his laundry day, and half his laundry doesn't seem to have made it back to him room yet. It's hard to check on all this stuff when I don't get there until after 7 PM, when everyone is gone for the night except for the evening caregivers.

Other things I want to discuss with someone there when I can include Wil's suggestion about posting Ruth's obituary, and what and how he is doing with scheduled activities. I have tried to get him involved with drawing things and he isn't interested. I took him into a hobby shop with train stuff and he wasn't interested. A few days ago he apparently was involved in some sort of craft project, but I was completely unable to deduce what it was he was trying to do or make, and what went wrong. Whatever it was, I don't think he finished it. But I'd still like to find something he can do besides watching tv without comprehension, looking over newspapers, going to meals, going out with me and obsessing about his facial hair. That's his world right now.


Karen

Travels With Frank #6: Inanimosity

This morning I got a call from a friend at St. Michael's, who is working with me on preparations for the church's 60th anniversary celebration later this month. We compared notes on how busy we are and how much sleep we're not getting. When I mentioned that Dad appeared not to know who I was last night, she told me not to worry. "That's just sundowning. Your dad is fine." Apparently, being more confused and memory-impaired at bedtime is a known phenomenon for dementia patients. What a relief!

So I carried on with the day, taking my computer and two external hard drives to Staples to get rid of the ransomware and adware. It's going to take 72 hours and $150 to get it done, but the work is guaranteed. John is unhappy. He's sure I must have been careless somewhere along the line. I really don't think so. The only things I can think of are opening apparently real but lesser-known genealogy sites, and a suspicious ad I tried to decline, not open, on a major site that should have been safe. And Norton 360 was running the whole time.

I dropped off the computer and went to work at St. Michael's, where my financial software stopped communicating with the server at one point and I had to reboot. Then I struggled to print some fliers, which looked exactly the same whether set for color or grayscale printing. (It turned out all four ink cartridges were on empty.)

As I prepared to leave for my third job, the Staples tech called, apologetically, to say he forgot to collect the fee in advance, without which they weren't allowed to start work. I went back over and took care of it, so the clock could start running on the 72 hours. Years ago, before iPads and iPhones, giving up my computer for three days would have been a major inconvenience. As it is, I'm writing this blog entry on my phone, which is less than ideal but doable. The thing I really need a computer for, scanning material from the church archives, I would (and will) do on my computer at church in any case. The matter of the computer being missing from my office at home seems strangely unimportant.

But what is it with me and computers today? At St. Matthew's this afternoon, I was about a minute from finishing the data entry on the weekly deposit when QuickBooks crashed with an "unrecoverable error." Really? Et tu, third recalcitrant computer of the day? Years ago, John coined a word, "Inanimosity," to describe the apparently hostile behavior of inanimate objects. That's what I experienced today.

And so did my Dad, as far as I can tell. Tonight he seemed to have no trouble knowing who I was (I got there by 6 PM) and launched into an attempted description of his day. He seems to have almost accidentally joined in on a group activity, some kind of craft project. At first he thought he had what he needed to start putting things together, but later on he felt he needed more of some things but there wasn't any more, or nobody gave him any more, and he decided he wasn't really part of the group activity after all. At least, that is my best guess about what he thinks happened today. It's hard to tell when most of his nouns and adjectives are the wrong ones, descriptions are vague and the gap between reality and his understanding of it is likely to be substantial.

But I do know that months ago he was in a painting activity, and the instructor completely ignored him for most of the class and worked extensively with others instead. Dad didn't know how to proceed to another part of the painting, and as far as I know he hasn't done any drawing or painting since. And this is a man who painted his wife's portrait, and used to build and paint detailed railroad layouts in the tiny N-scale, right down to the faces of the tiny people.

K.

Travels With Frank #5: Is He Kidding?

I had to work late tonight. I was supposed to be off work at 6 PM. Then there would be a half-hour drive across town to see Dad, and then I would have to go buy dinner, and then I would be able to go home and eat dinner. But my boss was still adding to my workload when 6 PM came. I ended up leaving work at 7:30  PM. So I didn't reach Dad's room until after 8 PM. He was in bed. That's the second time in two weeks that work obligations kept me from visiting before he went to bed.

He told me, as best he could given his aphasia, that the caregivers had made him take his clothes off, and given him a shower, and one of the male caregivers a shave. "Then a woman came in. And she wasn't you."

"No, it wasn't me,"

"So I don't know who you are."

*gulp*

"You know who I am. I'm your daughter, Karen."

"Yes, I know who you are."

I tried to pass it off as him teasing me, but I really have no idea. Did he momentarily not recognize me, or did he merely get tangled in his thoughts and words, meaning to say that he didn't know who the female caregiver a few minutes earlier was? I don't know.

This entry is being posted especially late. Wanna know why? I spent a good chunk of the evening trying to remove adware from my computer, the kind that turns words into badly formatted links to advertising. None of the pages I looked at provided an answer that worked, deleting cache and cookies didn't help, and Norton found nothing wrong when I did a scan. I did a registry cleanup, restarted Chrome and gave up. 

But when I started writing this entry, my computer started acting up. Blogger kept telling me that the page wasn't saving or publishing (I wasn't trying to publish yet) and the Internet connection troubleshooter wouldn't launch, but kept flickering as an empty dialog box. I rebooted, and there it was, the very thing I was worried about: a "ransomware" screen, absurdly claiming that the FBI had locked my computer for the crime of looking at child pornography, and to pay $300 to get my computer running again. I first had this screen a week ago, and managed to remove it once (so it seemed) but it's a nasty, persistent Trojan. It takes over the whole startup, and it's gotten even more aggressive so that the clean up methods I looked up on my iPhone browser no longer work.  I can't reach Safe Mode, and F8 does nothing except show me a list of options that don't include F8 or Safe Mode. System Recovery failed to complete, and before it started refusing to go there at all I got to Safe mode briefly, only for it to shut itself down a few seconds later. There is absolutely nothing I can do at this point except take it to Staples, and hope my most recent backup isn't likewise infected.

It's been a bad day.

Karen

Round Robin: Remembrance of Things Past (Part 1 of 2)

This week's Round Robin Photo Challenge topic is The Times They Are a-Changin', and I swear I had nothing in mind in proposing it beyond the general notion of clocks and New Year's Eve. But over the past week I've been rather obsessed with my new toy, the iPad, which has nearly replaced my computer already. It occurred to me today that nothing tells the story of time speeding along for us as a society than the acquisition and discarding of computers and other technology. For example:

Our Commodore 64, purchased circa 1985. Now it's a monitor for an outdated VCR.

My iMac and my first laptop, circa 2004, photographed using our first
digital camera, a Mavica. The camera stored the images on floppy disks.

 

My brand new laptop, March 2005.

John's first two iMacs (c. 1999-2005) await recycling, 2011.

The latest and greatest going into 2012, and it's not even a computer. 

My iPad 2 will soon be obsolete; the iPad 3 has been announced. And I don't care.

Two other pieces of outdated equipment left our home this week, leaving behind memories of times long gone. To avoid overloading aging computers with a picture-heavy entry, I'll tell you about that in a second post.

Meanwhile, let's see how other Robins mark the changing times!

Linking List
as of Midnight MST
Saturday, December 31, 2011

Karen - Posted!
Outpost Mâvarin
http://outmavarin.blogspot.com


Jama
Sweet Memories
http://mummyjam.blogspot.com


Sherrie
Food for Thought
http://100sweets.blogspot.com/


Terri
Ways I See the World
http://teelgeephotos.blogspot.com/

Karen

Weekend Assignment #364: Partly Cloudy

Weekend Assignment #364: Ahead in the Clouds?
Suddenly the marketing departments of Microsoft and other tech giants are all about "the cloud" or "clouds," the practice of storing large files online and streaming them rather than everyone storing them locally on their hard drives. Do you think this is a good idea, a bad idea or both?

Extra Credit: Do you still buy CDs and DVDs?

At this moment, John is watching YouTube videos in the bedroom on his iPad. Walking by there a few minutes ago, I heard the distinctive voice of the Eleventh Doctor, and immediately joined John on the bed to watch the two brief Doctor Who videos from this year's British comedy/charity event Red Nose Day. We compared notes about BabelColour, a particularly good maker of Doctor Who-related videos on YouTube, and then I moved on. We actually do have downloads of the mini-episodes "Space" and "Time," but we watched the streaming versions anyway on John's silly little tablet. He also uses it to stream Netflix.

All in all, though, I'm not that much into using cloud-based streaming and storage in preference to having the file locally, or even a physical object. I don't buy many CDs, but I do buy every Doctor Who CD from composer Murray Gold more or less as soon as it's available in the U.S. A few of them I've bought twice, because I've been known to wear them out.Then I rip them to iTunes at work and at home. If the CD player in my car worked, I'd play the actual CDs on it. And I often raid the CD shelves for Beatles CDs to add to a computer or my outdated iPod Mini.

Videos? Okay, yes, I'll settle for YouTube streaming if the video is short and amusing and I don't really care about it, or if I know I'll eventually have a good commercial copy, or I can't get it any other way and I need to see it right now. Otherwise, I'd rather have a download for stuff I'm going to watch once or twice, or watch about a dozen times in the next few months until the DVD comes out. Mostly, I have the same attitude toward video that I have toward books: if it's something I know I like, I want to own it, and have it instantly available to me at any time, day or night. I suppose I could stream something at 3 AM just as easily, but will that same show be available to watch online at 5 AM on a Wednesday morning three years from now? Maybe, maybe not. I'd rather not take that chance.

Then again, there's a certain Luddite undercurrent to my protestations. I don't know how to stream something from Netflix or iTunes, and I don't especially want to learn. If I really had a good reason to do it, I'd do it, and it probably wouldn't even be hard to figure out. But I'm not there yet.

I do host photos remotely on Picasa and Photobucket and Flickr, but with very few exceptions I have the same exact edit of every image on my hard drive, and probably on my G drive as well. The few files I have on Google Documents instead of my hard drive in Word or Excel format are either things I got from other people or needed to share with Carly for a meme. Really, the only files of mine that exist in a cloud and not on my computer or my emails.

Still, if I had an iPad or even an iPhone, I'd probably start to embrace cloud technology. I saw at the Gallifrey One convention that an iPad not being used to the fullest extent of its capability is hardly worth having, especially for the price. Even so, the more time John spends in the bedroom, streaming Dr. Horrible on his iPad for the fifth time this week, the more I want to get into the act - clouds and all.

Karen

Weekend Assignment #321: Unplanned Obsolescence

Weekend Assignment #321: Where's Your Buggy Whip?

We sometimes hear the expression, "XXX has gone the way of the buggy whip." In other words, technology and society have moved on, and something that was once commonplace barely exists anymore because it's no longer needed. Do you still have something in your home that has become essentially useless? If so, why do you still have it? If not, when did you get rid of it?

Extra Credit: Have you ever worked in an industry that has gone the way of the buggy whip, or is in danger of doing so?

Heh. Yes, and yes!



As I was running around this evening photographing outdated tech for this Assignment, I accidentally came across this issue of National Geographic Magazine from November, 1970, proclaiming, "Behold the Computer Revolution." I'm pretty sure it's something one of the more computer-minded guys in our Doctor Who club found amusing a mere 25 years later, and brought to a meeting. I have no idea how I ended up with it.

I fully expected tonight to laugh at the hopelessly outdated computers shown in the article, those big teletype-style terminals attached to a mainframe, and endless reels of magnetic tape storing the data. Actually, though, my quick perusal of the article left me rather impressed. True, the actual computers pictured in it look unbelievably primitive and clunky; but the functions they predicted for computers in the future - in education, Wall Street, air traffic control, mapping demographics, medicine, law enforcement databases, etc. seem pretty dead-on. The one thing everyone seems to have missed back then was the idea of everyone having desktop, laptop and/or handheld computers, all wirelessly connected up so anybody can communicate with anybody in a variety of ways.



About 15 years after that article was written, John and I joined the computer revolution and bought our first computer, a Commodore 64. I wrote part of a book on that thing, but never finished it, and now there's no easy way to get at that data. As you can see above, the monitor is in our bedroom closet, where it serves as a tiny tv screen with the wrong aspect ratio, hooked up to our sole remaining VCR. (It plays DVDs too.) The computer itself is in a box somewhere.

What else do we have that's gone the way of the buggy whip? John tells me that we no longer own a typewriter. But we do have thousands of records: many crates full of LPs and EPs, a few boxes of 45 RPM singles and even a handful of 78s. After all, we owned a used record store back in the early 1980s, and a lot of that stuff is rare, such as promos, colored vinyl and Beatles picture sleeves. We also have a few dozen laserdiscs, and lots of cassette tapes. No 8-tracks, I'm happy to say!

And outmoded industries? Oh, yes! Certainly there aren't too many "record stores" any more, even when the records are CDs. After my record store career ended, we moved to Arizona, where I worked in video rental stores, two different local Mom and Pop chains. Those were pushed out by Blockbuster and Hollywood Video. Now the Blockbuster and Hollywood chains are themselves closing down, store by store.



After the video rental business, I went to school to become a travel agent. You can see the curriculum binder in the photo above. I was a travel consultant for about four years and then became a bookkeeper, and from there an accountant. That should have protected me when the travel agencies were made virtually obsolete by the Internet and the end of airline commissions, but no, I had to go and work for a mortgage company that specialized in packaging bundles of mortgages and selling them to investors. You know what happened there: the housing bubble burst, First Magnus crashed and burned, and I was out of a job.

My next "permanent" job was in the RV industry. This was right about the time when gas was flirting with the $4.00 a gallon level, and diesel fuel cost even more. And then the recession hit. Nobody could afford to buy RVs, or even fill their tanks and hit the road. So I was out of work again.

Now I'm working part time at my church. The religion "business," like most charities, is hurting a bit due to the recession and unemployment and stuff, but I'm pretty sure it will be around for years to come!

Karen

Weekend Assignment #266 : TV That Mattered

My plans for the day bring last-minute inspiration for this week's topic:

Weekend Assignment #266: The release of the blockbuster Star Trek prequel movie reboots a franchise for a cult tv show that had a huge impact on generations of sf tv viewers. Is there a tv series from your youth that you remember especially fondly?

Extra Credit: Have you bought the aforementioned tv series on DVD? If not, would you if it were readily available at a reasonable price?

Oh, no! I'm a redshirt!

It was probably in 1975 that a report (or rumor) reached my local Star Trek club, STAR Syracuse, that a Star Trek movie was being planned. Problem was, according to our information, that Paramount's plans for it were basically a sacrilege to our way of thinking. They wanted to recast the roles of Kirk, Spock, etc., with younger, prettier, more famous actors. We were furious! We wrote to Paramount in protest, insisting that only Shatner and Nimoy could be Kirk and Spock! Only DeForest Kelley could be Bones McCoy!

Heh. How times change!

My interactions with the Enterprise have been mostly benign.

I probably only saw a few Star Trek episodes on NBC when they first aired in 1966-1969. This wasn't due to a lack of interest. It's just that it was on after my bedtime. I specifically remember sitting quietly in the living room, hoping my dad wouldn't notice and send me to bed as the amnesiac Kirk fell in love with Miramanee. He probably knew exactly wat was going on, but took pity on me because I was clearly desperate to see the rest of the episode, and since it was Friday night I didn't have to get up for school in the morning.

But I don't think I got to see any more Star Trek until Channel 9 started airing the syndicated reruns around 1972 or 1973. I became so thoroughly hooked on that show that I ordered film clips out of the Lincoln Enterprises catalogs, started a Mary Sue story in which Joel R. and I save the Enterprise, bought all the James Blish story adaptations and other, better Star Trek books, and practically got the shakes if I wasn't in front of the tv at 5 PM on a weekday. By 1974 I was in STAR Syracuse, and editing its fanzine, which I'd founded before joining the club. It was called 2-5YM, which stood for "Second Five-Year Mission." We were always trying to come up with ways to convince Paramount and NBC to put the show back on the air.

Even so, I'm not sure I actually ever believed that Star Trek would return to tv. I certainly didn't anticipate multiple spinoffs with other starships (and one space station) and their crews, all the good, bad and ugly films, metric tons of merchandising, and a husband who once spent - well, I probably shouldn't reveal the amount, but it was impressive - on classic Star Trek merchandise in a single day at a Star Trek convention.

I've long since moved on in my video affections, to Doctor Who and Quantum Leap and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but Star Trek still has the power to occasionally fill me with nostalgic joy or even, as today, anticipatory excitement. Yes, we have the series and the animated series on DVD, and a few of them on the old laserdisc format. And I'm really looking forward to seeing the new movie this afternoon, in a digital projection presentation instead of on film, and starring a younger, prettier cast as Kirk and Spock and Bones.

How about you? Were you a Trekkie, or was Masters of the Universe or The Muppet Show your childhood fave? Whether SF, cartoon, cop show or comedy, there is for most of us some show that meant a lot to us as kids. Pick one and tell us about it! Write it up in your blog, and please remember to include a link back to this entry. Then leave a link to your entry in the comments below. I'll be back in a week with the results. Here, meanwhile, is last week's results:

For Weekend Assignment #265: Darn Computer!, I asked you for some computer horror stories, and to consider the Mac vs. Windows issue.

Astaryth said in comments...

That software that comes with your camera (especially point and shoot ones) is hardly ever either good or a necessity. In the 'old days' when you had to plug the camera in... maybe, but now days everything goes on a card which can be removed, stuck in a reader and moved like any other file onto a folder on your computer. ;p It's probably that stuff causing your problem. Good luck getting it all going. Worst case... you -could- just reformat the whole computer...

Julie said...

Karen is right: I'm always battling something. But that's life on the bleeding edge of computing. Someone gets cut, and it's generally me. Why, just this week the enclosure that houses my backup hard drive died. That got replaced today, and I'm doing a backup in preparation for installing the release candidate of Windows 7.

Florinda said...

My worst computer disaster happened at work a few years ago - a fried hard drive. I didn't lose a lot of work, since all of my files are on our network server, but I did lose a lot of time. We didn't have in-house tech support at that time (don't get me started - fortunately, it's no longer true), and it was at least two days before the problem was resolved. I did get an unexpected vacation day, though - I got my boss to agree that there was no point to my coming in to the office if I couldn't DO anything. (That wouldn't happen now, but I would try to get a work-from-home day. At times, those are almost as good as a day off.).

Mike said...

I haven't had any major problems with computers, but I have had my share of issues. The most recent was with our last computer. I won't mention the brand name, but it rhymes with "Bell." We had the computer for just over a year, so the warranty was over, and all of a sudden, I couldn't turn it off. Yes, I said off. It was the weirdest thing. I played around with it for a while, then, of course, I couldn't turn it on. Not good.

I'm still dangerously low on "guest professor" suggestions for these Weekend Assignments, so I ask again: please, please, please, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE email me some new ones. I warn you, I will continue adding another please to the previous sentence each week until someone suggests something. Save us from the invasion of the pleases! (And no, Mike, psychic contributions don't count.)

Karen

Missing Evidence

Well, foo. I took a couple of nice pictures on Sunday of parts of the Aeolian-Skinner organ at St. Michael's, and later in the day grabbed a couple quick and not-so-good shots out the car window for this entry. Tonight, after the second or third reboot when my computer ground to a halt, again, I uninstalled the software that came with my new Canon digital camera, in hope that that was the source of the problem. When I plugged in the camera, I was offered three options, and foolishly chose to transfer files using Windows itself.

Windows promptly transferred the six files to NOWHERE AT ALL, and deleted the originals off my camera's memory card.

Seriously. I had Windows search three hard drives for what would have been the name of the first of the organ shot files, and manually searched all the likely places. The six photos are gone forever. So this entry has no photo, to the relief of slow-loading internet connections everywhere.

But Paul and Jama are correct, as best I can tell. Two blocks or so after I photographed all that mysterious debris in the sky, I passed Thoroughbred Nisson on 22nd St. There were having some kind of event. There was a striped tent, and a largish crowd, and a banner that said something about keeping Tucson children in their homes, whatever that means, something salutory I'm sure. And there were balloons, hundreds of them - but, I imagine, there were hundreds more a few minutes earlier!

Now to me, the junk in the photos in the entry below this one don't look like balloons at all. I see no hint of color, and they look too small. But I must admit that, on the evidence, that is what they must have been!

Oh, and by the way, uninstalling those Canon apps does not appear to have solve my computer problem. Sigh.

Karen

Weekend Assignment #265: Darn Computer!

Okay, I'm postponing the topic I started to write up this morning, and starting over:

Weekend Assignment #265: If you're a blogger, you almost certainly have a computer. If you have a computer, you've had computer problems. Did your monitor go dark? Hard drive get hacked? System go silent? Tell us a computer horror story!

Extra Credit: Which has fewer problems, a PC or a Mac?

This entry is way late for several reasons, but the main one is that I've been having computer problems for several weeks now. Every day the computer has slowed to a crawl, the hard drive loudly chugging away, the dreaded words "Not Responding" appearing intermittently in parentheses next to apps.

Looks so innocent, doesn't it?

It's hard to fix what you can't diagnose, and I have several contenders for the position of troublemaker:

This CD, for a different troublesome device, turned up under the desk last night.

The slowdown seems to have started right about the time I installed the software that came with my new Canon camera, the software the documentation insisted had to be installed before the camera was connected to the computer for data transfer. Really? You need these six programs? I like the photo tagging feature, but I can live without that if the tradeoff is Picasa suddenly being convinced that certain photos should be oriented horizontally when they're actually meant to be vertical, and a PhotoStudio edit can't shake that certainty. And it sure as heck isn't worth the computer endlessly chugging away, unwilling to do much of anything. But do I dare uninstall? What happens if I attach the camera without it? Does it blow up or something, invalidating the warranty in the process? Or, as is more likely, does the computer simply revert to listing the five other protocols available for data transfer, instead of all six? So far, I haven't dared to find out.

One possibility I've already eliminated was a full hard drive. File Manager insisted at one point that it was full, so I pulled off several months' worth of raw photo files. Then I checked the storage info, and it turns our the drive isn't even two thirds full. So much for that. I also had my suspicions about a particular build of Firefox, but it's been updated a couple times since then, and it didn't help.

Maybe it's a conflict between Firefox, Norton and Window, all of which want to protect my computer against the big bad world of hacks and viruses and phishing and worms. If so, I have no idea how to get them to play nicely together.

Or maybe there's some background program running that I should disable, sich as a file indexer. Once I opened the startup program manager, and any possibility of disabling anything is greyed out. Nor does the indexing program seem to offer any options.

Maybe I just need more RAM. But a) I can't afford it, cheap as it probably is now, and b) over having just Firefox open doesn't seem to solve the problem. And I usually need to have at least AIM, Firefox, Word or Excel, and problably PhotoStudio open. Is that excessive? It didn't use to be.

Another possibility is it has something to do with the external hard drives wanting to back up the main one, even though they only actually get to do so when I get tired of the error messages, reboot and do a backup with nothing else running. Why does the computer insist half the time that it can't back up any files at all, and refuse to tell me why?

For now I've done the one thing I knew how to do. I did a defrag on the C: drive and the two external ones. It took nearly seven hours. And now you know why this entry is so late!

John, of course, is still using a Mac, still claiming that Windows is way more problematic than whatever big cat Apple's current system software is named for. He could be right, but I found my last Mac, a second-generation iMac, at least as much of a hassle as the Windows laptop that sat next to it. Somewhere around OS X, Macs became much less intuitive in their organiation, and much more prone to needing security authorizations and arcane settings. Or was that mainly so the Mac and the laptop would talk to each other? They never really did so properly. And the iMac, which wasn't broken or anything, left my desk years ago.

Your turn! I know at least one of you bought a computer recently, and Julie always seems to be battling some bit of software or hardware or some bit of the web. Tell us your travails in your blig, and be sure to include a link back here in your entry. Then come back here and leave a link to your entry in the comments below. I'll be back in a week with the results. Meanwhile...

For Weekend Assignment #264: Environmental Awareness , I asked you to assess your personal environmental efforts. It appears we mostly agree we can do better:

Julie said...

So, yes. We dropped a truckload of money (that we're still paying, but that's another rant) on a more energy efficient A/C and heating system. We have the curly bulbs. We practically burst our curbside recycle bin every two weeks. We don't compost (it's something I have trouble keeping up with), but we make sure our tree and lawn clippings get properly gift wrapped for the city compost. I have allergies, so I'm big on natural cleaning and laundry products.

Florinda said...

I actually like small, fuel-efficient cars, and I may be lucky that my size means that I'm comfortable in them. But that car is nine years old now, and although I try to keep up with the maintenance, age does take its toll on everything, so it's less efficient than it once was - and I drive that car eighty miles every weekday, round-trip, by myself, on some of the most congested highways in this country.

Mike said...

I mean, we have a recycling bin that we put all our paper products in, but we are not so good at putting cans or bottles in there. It is easy for us to stack the papers on a table and bring them all out at once. If we did that with cans or bottles, it would get too messy. What I should do, is find a way to put a bin next to the garbage can under the sink. Then maybe my laziness won't destroy the environment as much as it does now.

I'm still dangerously low on "guest professor" suggestions for these Weekend Assignments, so I ask again: please, please, please, PLEASE PLEASE email me some new ones. I warn you, I will continue adding another please to the previous sentence each week until someone suggests something. Save us from the invasion of the pleases!

And oh, good, here comes another computer slowdown as I plug in the camera.

Round Robin entry to follow in a few hours.

Karen

The Teenager in the Tree

Rani's up a tree again.

I'm sorry, but I had to do it. Again.

After days of trying to reorganize my photo files and clear enough junk off my hard drives to enable the backup to work, I gave this computer its first Windows-based defrag in, well, possibly ever. It took hours and hours. (Norton does an Optimize that takes hardly any time at all.) While I was waiting, I thought about researching agents or starting work on revising and finishing Mages of Mâvarin, but ended up opening Chapter One of Heirs of Mâvarin instead. I figured I'd give my first novel a nice, relaxing read through. I'd double-check that it made sense when read all at once, and catch any lingering typos. Within the first two pages, I found:

• a sentence that ended in a comma,
• a paragraph so choppy that it failed to lead the reader coherently from the previous paragraph to the following one, and
• a paragraph with a really, really long sentence about the view from Rani's tree, followed by a sentence about Rani's view downstream not being nearly as good. Nearly as good as what? The paragraph no longer mentioned that the other view was upstream.

Yuck. And these are the two pages an agent or editor must get past before deciding to give the rest of the book serious consideration? I may as well not send it out, if I'm just going to sabotage my book with a sloppy final edit!

I think I know what the problem is. The last time through, I was working hard at bringing down word count. I frequently revised and combined sentences, trying to make things clearer and less wordy. But in doing so, I apparently failed to notice the occasional artifact left over from the old sentences, or references back to text that no longer existed. Aargh!

Wrong kind of road, wrong kind of trees, wrong kind of river,
and a modern sign in the background; but this is as close
as I can come to visually depicting the scene without ripping
off someone else's photo of a riverside beech tree.

So that last, take-it-from-the-top edit that I had decided not to do on the grounds that it would be just an excuse not to send the thing out, turns out to be necessary after all. So I'm back in Chapter One. Rani is out of the tree and I've fixed the three problems I've listed above, but I still have half the chapter to go through. Maybe the later chapters will be cleaner, but do I really want to take that chance?

As for the backup problem, I've just about decided that it's Picasa's fault, with a little help from me. Picasa shows every folder containing picture files on either my C: drive or my backup I: drive, most of which is from Norton's backup. In working with those files, perhaps even just displaying them, I probably messed up the compression. Now the backup only gets up to 2007 before the backup drive is full.

So I'm going through the pictures on my hard drive, and rearranging them by subject instead of by date. It seems silly to have, for example, a folder nearly every month containing anywhere from two to thirty Doctor Who-related pictures, or to have to search by month for that shot of the pink bison, or to hunt through a zillion folders in a zillion places for that one remembered shot of Tuffy. The new scheme will continue to have a folder for each camera to keep the eras separate, but within each of those will be a master folder for dogs, one for sunsets, etc. And for subjects I tend to obsess on, there will be subfolders sorting the contents by month. I've already crashed Picasa at least once - its cataloging routine was overwhelmed with the changes - but I'll keep going anyway. In the end it should be worth it, both to make things easier to find and because I'll be able to eliminate more dupe files.

Gee, it's a good thing I'm unemployed. It means I have more time for this stuff! (Yeah, right.)

By the way, do any of you live in an area with one or more beech trees beside a river? If so, will you let me use your photo thereof on this blog and the Mâvarin web site? It would be with full credit to you, of course.

Karen

Meanwhile...

As I compiled the two Weekend Assignment entries last night, I considered the possibilities for also reporting the news of the day - my day, that is. I could have added an aside at the end of one of the existing entries, or written a third entry in one day, or put it off until tonight. Guess which option I chose.

Meanwhile...

Blogger was up and down, delaying my collection of quotes from people's Weekend Assignment entries. So I watched a little Doctor Who as I waited. It didn't take long, and soon I was able to resume writing the entry.

Meanwhile...

I worked on Chapter Two of Heirs, and managed to cut about 100 words from the first half of it (which is as far as I got). I have a major decision to make about my lead character Rani, but I'll save that rant for Saturday night.

As I edited and watched Doctor Who and compiled the wrap-up entry, I was also refining my idea for the new Weekend Assignment. When the wrap-up entry was done, I dug through my photo archives for an appropriate photo.

Meanwhile...

my computer was busy downloading something else, but I didn't know that yet.

I finished the entries, washed dishes and went to bed without telling you about my day yesterday (Thursday). But now it can be told. I had my job interview in Oro Valley on Thursday afternoon. I arrived early, which was a good thing, because the address I was looking for did not seem to exist. As I drove up and down the block, I repeatedly passed what looked like a trailhead for Pusch Ridge, and a building with the wrong address. But the name of the company I wanted was on a door of the "wrong" building. When I asked for directions, I was told that the building I had been seeking no longer existed. I was in the right place after all.

I had the job interview, and it seemed to go well. The person who interviewed me even looked up the address of John's nearby place of business, so I could drop in on him there for the first time in the five years or so he's worked for them. What can I say? It's not my part of town. Heck, I'm not sure it's even technically in Tucson.

So I drove over to see John. Had a little trouble finding it, but that's all right. After a brief visit, I decided to treat myself to lunch at a place on Oracle Rd.

Meanwhile...

I was waiting to hear from my recruiter whether the prospective employer - let's call them Interesting Manufacturer (IM) - had called her yet, and if so, what they said. I ordered some food and called the recruiter. She was on the phone, so I left a voicemail.

When she called me back, she had not yet heard anything. I gave her my impression of how it went, and told her where I was eating. She joked about how she'd like to join me there. (Hint: this was not McDonald's.) I told her that if I didn't get the job, the meal was by way of consolation. If I did, it was a celebration. She laughed and hung up, with a promise to call back when she heard.

Meanwhile...

The food arrived. It was very good, except for the vegetables, which were both charred and undercooked.

As I was eating, my recruiter called back. "I suppose you want to know what kind of meal you're eating," she said.

"Yes, please."

"It's a celebration! You got it!"

I don't start until Wednesday, so I will have been out of work nearly 2 1/2 weeks. But that's okay. I needed the time off.

As I drove home, two different people called from the recruiter's office, asking me to stop by about some paperwork, and to get the correct address for IM from me. So I headed over to see them, filled out a new I-9 with my expired passport for ID, and accepted congratulations for several people. There.

It was a good day.

So today I slept in, to make up for the late night. Around 1 PM, which is when I planned to get up anyway, Tuffy started barking at the front door. I looked out the window by the front door, and what I saw led me to grab my camera and go out to the driveway.


For the second time in two years, a neighbor was getting a tree hauled away. The previous time, back in August 2006, it was because a tree had fallen over, and put a big hole in someone's roof. But I initially saw no evidence that that was the case this time.

Meanwhile...


The flatbed truck that was going to do the actual hauling was parked in front of out house. Hence the barking.


I got properly dressed and took pictures intermittently through most of the afternoon. (I also took a number of video clips, but I don't feel like dealing with them tonight/this morning.) At first they were trimming excess fronds off the palm tree.

Then they moved it out of the street.

The truck that had been in front of our house pulled up beside the tree. But before putting the tree onto it, they offloaded four large what bags of something-or-other. Dirt, maybe?

Meanwhile...

Once the tree was moved, the roof of the house behind it became more visible. I didn't notice it until I edited the photos (much) later, but if you doubleclick and look at them, you'll see definite roof damage.


Once the white bags were off the truck, they lifted the tree, maneuvered it around to face the other way, and gently lowered it. By that time, they had tied the palm's remaining fronds together, presumably to keep them from blowing around or falling off when the tree was hauled away. If the neighborhood had to lose a tree, it was good that they were taking good care of it, and not just sawing it to bits. That presumably means it will be replanted somewhere.

The last step was to strap it down. But wait...where was the crane going now? I had a bad feeling about this.


Uh-oh. They were pulling the other, shorter palm out of the ground. I briefly had hopes that it would merely be replanted, perhaps more securely or farther from the houses...

...but soon my fears were confirmed. A second tree, one of my favorites, was also leaving Calle Mumble. It's been featured on my sunset photos for the last time.

I didn't bother filming the tree removal process a second time.

Meanwhile...


Sometime during the tree hauling process, a little notice in the corner of my computer screen told me that Windows wanted to install something it downloaded last night. Windows Vista Service Pack #1 took over an hour to install, and I couldn't use the computer during that time. But that was okay, because (one last time!)

Meanwhile...

I watched Doctor Who, of course!

Karen

Good News, Bad News, No News (As Usual)

It's been a bit of a good news, bad news, no news day. (I seem to get a lot of those.) On the bad news side, I had no phone calls about jobs, and saw no new listings worth pursuing. Also, I discovered that a service I signed up for yesterday accidentally combined two line items and sent an email to a male friend of mine, addressed to "Mary." I tried to apologize in a separate email, but his mailbox is full. Sigh. Also, when I returned to my office after an hour of watching Doctor Who tonight, this was on my computer screen:


I rebooted and so far things seem fine. But I'm not at all convinced that my current versions of Vista, AIM and Firefox are mutually compatible right now, and that I don't have a missing or corrupted file somewhere.

On the good news side, I received my final check from FVD, finished cleaning the kitchen except for scrubbing the stove and fridge, and cleaned up the bathroom a bit. Oh, and I cleared a bunch of messages off the land line, very few of which mattered in the least. My problem with that phone is that almost all the incoming calls are robocalls, and we very seldom dial out on it. So it takes me weeks to notice that there are messages on the thing, and when I do, I don't want to sit through 11 messages of reconfirmations of past appointments, refi or real estate offers, political pitches, and someone wanting me to fill in for someone else in church three weeks ago. I can't fill in for anyone anyway - I'm already needed as crucifer or torch, every single week now. But still, today I got all the messages cleared, again, and I feel good about that.

I also finally went back to Mâvarin - or rather, the writing and editing thereof. Because I've slacked off for so long, I took it from the top: Heirs of Mâvarin, Chapter One, beginning to end. I managed to improve some phrasing and cut 60 words. My word count spreadsheet now gives a total of 159,092 words for that book, down from over 160K, probably as much as 162K or higher. The manuscript page count is 533. The last time I worked on it for any length of time, I got as far as chapter 9, so there probably won't be major cuts until the last four chapters. Still, it's worth going through it again from the beginning, partly to refresh my memory of the current version of everything, and also because it's been long enough that I might actually notice typos and awkward sentences that slip past me when the material is too familiar.

And when I get to the end, I'll do my best to market it to agents and YA publishers. I promise.

Tomorrow is Tuffy's followup with the vet. I'll let you know what the verdict is, if any.

Karen

Outatime

In her proper color.

Okay, look, I've used up the evening and then some, so this will be quick:

*Tonight I shopped for and cooked corned beef and cabbage and carrots, with a little celery and a few formerly frozen chunks of potato. John didn't want that for dinner, so it was all for me. The corned beef was thick-cut sandwich meat from the Safeway deli - and no, that didn't work terribly well. But it was better than searching multiple stores for a $12 slab of way too much corned beef.

*I then spent the evening sitting next to Newdog, watching Doctor Who. She isn't affectionate yet, but she definitely wants me around, preferably scratching her. She also seems much more secure. Oh, and John and I walked the dogs tonight, and she did really well on the leash after the first couple of minutes.

*I've just spent two hours battling OpenOffice and Word and SeaMonkey and Blogger, all to get the Holy Week calendar posted. I prevailed!

*Newdog has a vet appointment on Saturday. Tuffy has an oncology appointment on the 25th.

*John's birthday is on Holy Saturday, the night of the Easter Vigil. Hmm. Tricky.

Karen

When Computers Go Crazy

This photo is unrelated to the topic of this entry.

!---begin rant

I have not been having fun this evening. Belatedly realizing that I never updated the AOL version of my Madeleine L'Engle bibliography after her death in September, I attempted to do so using the mavarin.com version as a starting point, which I'd finally updated, oh, perhaps a week ago. I knew it was likely to be a pain to do (hence the procrastination), but I was not prepared for the variety and severity of the problems I encountered:

• The recent version of the site was not immediately in evidence, having neither a bookmark in Firefox nor a link from the mavarin.com main page. At some point I had apparently replaced the Welcome to Mâvarin page with an older version that didn't have the link.
  
• When I got to the page by typing the URL, I found it was dated April 2006, even though it mentioned L'Engle's death in September 2007. Clearly I had not updated very thoroughly.
• Using a Yahoo online HTML editor to update the page properly, I discovered that many of the headers were now a) small and b) light brown. A small table enclosed nothing. A gif of the word "Contents" was a red x.
  
• When I tried to save my edits in Yahoo (which hosts my domain), I was directed to an AOL Hometown "not found" page. Repeatedly. Even after I deleted lots and lots of AOL adware and branding from the HTML.
• At some point I started using WordPad to edit the HTML I cribbed from the Yahoo "View Source" page. I uploaded that to AOL, updated it again, and finally deleted all my caches because it kept insisting on the 2006 date at the bottom.
  
• One more upload, and the bottom was correct! I pasted the whole WordPad into the Yahoo editor and saved it. After another edit or two, I discovered that WordPad had trucated the document, deleting the entire first half! By now the half page version was online on AOL and Yahoo/Mavarin.com and saved on my hard drive - with no cache to go back to!
• Okay, so I went to my backup copy on my G drive. It was from before her death, but it was a start, right? I pasted it into the WordPad doc and started updating and deleting. There was a lot of old material that didn't need to be there any more. I mean, how many health updates do we need for someone who is dead?
• Wait a sec! I forgot the ultimate cache! Google! Grabbed their cached version of the page. Of course, it wasn't entirely compatible with my new edit of the older page, so I had a lot of tedious work ahead of me, merging and updating and tweaking. For hours.
• Several times after I uploaded updated versions of the page, AOL insisted that it wasn't online. At one point it was right. Instead of updating the page, the clunky old FTP had deleted it.
• My laboriously updated WordPad doc did not show as having been updated in an hour, either on the C drive or the G drive. Where had it saved? Probably it didn't. Fortunately it was on mavarin.com by then. An hour after that, I managed to replace it with a current version by saving from Firefox.

Good grief! But I got it done. Finally.

Now, some of what I went through tonight makes a certain amount of sense. There was human error (mine) involved in outdated text, my cache was probably too full to refresh properly, Yahoo timed out, AOL timed out, and there was weird code on the page from Microsoft and AOL. Still, I have a hard time understanding how Yahoo can redirect to AOL, how AOL could lose the page entirely, where the first half of the page went in WordPad and why the WordPad save didn't save. Nothing this bad ever happened when I still had Netscape Composer! I've tried a number of HTML editors since then (including OpenOffice, which wrecked a couple of pages by replacing valid links with links to my hard drive), and they've all been ugly or glitchy or hard to use, or some combination thereof. Phooey!

And I'm not the only one tonight having online issues. One of the Robins emailed that her browser currently insists on giving her the Blogger comment box in Spanish, and won't let her log in with her AOL ID. Reminds me of a few times over the years when Google decided I was French. Ce nais pas vrai!

Tomorrow, if I can stand the aggravation, I will update the St. Michael's Seasons page, which is currently set on Ordinary Time (summer). If I open all of the seasons pages (Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost, Ordinary Time), I should be able to consolidate them and add info on when they are (somehow; they're highly variable). That way I won't have to switch them every two weeks to six months, depending on the time of year.

Karen

/end rant---!

This photo is also unrelated to the topic of this entry.

(Not Responding)

Just the usual.

Oh, how I'm starting to hate those two words "Not Responding," almost as much as the slow-moving blue circle that says the computer isn't in a hurry to do much of anything. I've had intermittent trouble with this laptop almost since I got it; my favorite glitch was the night it decided that English is typed from right to left, and rendered my text accordingly. But the past week or so, I've hit a whole new level of malfunction and inanimosity.

Some symptoms:

• My AOL Mail tab in Firefox creates a popup that advises me that a script is causing the something or other to respond slowly, and asks whether I want to stop the script. Clicking Yes will occasionally fix the problem temporarily, but more often the words "(Not Responding)" appear at the top of the popup. And when I do manage to get rid of the popup, I get one or two more of them, saying the exact same thing.
• Clicking another tab in Firefox has no effect for a minute or longer. Sometimes the entire application gets whited out for a bit of "Not Responding" time.
• Scroll down? Are you mad? Here, have a rotating blue circle instead.
• An AIM Alert that Scalzi or Chuck or whoever has posted a new AOL-J entry consists of a little blank box.
• AIM and IM windows stop responding, and AIM loses the connection with the cable modem/wireless network.
• ArcSoft PhotoStudio decides in the middle of a tricky photo edit that it isn't going to work any more until I reboot.
• It takes forever (perhaps two minutes, but it seems like forever) for "Import Media Files" to get started when I plug in the camera.
• MS Word stops responding too, but that's standard practice, isn't it?

And so on. And the computer starts doing all this within an hour or so of shutting down completely and then starting up again. It gets old really fast, ya know?

So tonight when I got home and rebooted, Windows volunteered a window that listed a few dozen problems over the last several months and offered to look for solutions. In my experience, such things almost never find solutions, but it was worth a try. In a moment it said it didn't know why I was having the first batch of problems, but it traced a second batch to an Intel graphics accelerator chipset driver (or somesuch) and blamed everything else on Firefox. Well, that last part out I'd worked out already, thanks. The acute difficulties date back to the latest Firefox update. Others seem to date back to the latest AIM update.

Not much I can do about Firefox until they issue a fix, unless it's to break down and use Internet Explorer instead. Am I that desperate? It may come to that. But I went to the Intel site. It told me how to identify the driver I have now, so I duly looked that up, and the version of Vista when it asked for that. It directed me to a certain download, which I saved and then tried to install. That's when it said it was the wrong driver for my computer! Then why did you direct me to that driver, you stupid website? Needless to say, my feedback to Intel about their website was less than enthusiastic.

But I ran Windows Update, and it claimed to give me Service Pack 3, if I read that aright. Maybe that will help.

There it goes again, freezing up for thirty seconds as I try to select the label "Inanimosity."

Sheesh.


Karen

Quick Pics and Then to Bed

Well, what do you expect? It's late! But it's not completely my fault. My computer was horribly sluggish most of last night and all of today, until finally I shut down completely instead of just restarting. I think it may have been the latest Firefox upgrade that did it. In any case, it frequently took a minute or two to scroll up or down or select a tab or close a window, if it worked at all. I couldn't get a defrag to run, Norton didn't find any viruses, and the few windows I had open frequently had the words "Not Responding" next to them. But it's better now, finally. Much better.

On to the annotated photos:



A few days ago in the bathroom I glanced down at a Doctor Who book on the floor, and was quite surprised to see a lizard on it. It took a few tries, but I managed to rescue him and put him on the outside of the window sill.

Can you see the sparkle of water on Tuffy now? This was from Saturday.


John and I went to Barnes & Noble, and despite the upcoming holiday I was highly self-indulgent. All three of these books are brand new.

A big ol' cloud at dusk.

Other things accomplished today, despite everything, included determining that Chapter One of Heirs is a thousand words and three pages shorter than, well, whenever I compiled that particular version of the word count doc. I also edited the first scene of Chapter Two, which is in good shape anyway. And I solved my HTML editing issue, sort of. I found an option to uncheck in Word, and the links on my L'Engle pages appear to have stayed intact. The bad thing is that Word introduced some of the usual Word-specific tags. But it opened okay and looked all right in Firefox, so I can live with it. So my L'Engle pages on mavarin.com finally acknowledge L'Engle's death. Tomorrow I'll update the AOL mirror pages and the St. Michaels' sermons page, with has fussy podcast links. But first I expect I'll be taking a nap after church. Good night!

Karen

In case I don't see you later...

...this will probably have to stand as my blog entry for tonight. See, John has been battling for hours with command prompts, MAC addresses, unhelpfully labeled screens, competing connections and none-of-the-above options. In short, he's been trying to get my computer on the cable modem that his Mac uses. He's finally done it, after hours of frustration. But that's only half the battle.

What we're trying to do is this: there's a Linksys wireless router that I bought at least a year ago, that theoretically should enable us to create a wireless network inside the house, so our computers can talk to each other and, more importantly, the cable modem. This would mean that I would finally be able to dump the excruciatingly slow dial-up connection and its attendant problems, and cancel the paid AOL account while retaining the Mavarin screen name.

Thing is, though, this is proving exceedingly difficult to do. The CD that came with the router had no interest in running on John's Mac, for one thing. For another, the various bits of equipment expect the user to know all about PPP and other protocols, how to find all the settings and configure them with no guidance whatsoever. At one point John crashed my VAIO, ejecting the Linksys CD during an attempted shutdown. The computer refused to turn on again no matter what I did. It eventually turned out that it wasn't quite turned off, and holding down the on/off button for a long time finally got it off. Once it was off, we could turn it back on.

Anyway, he's finally got the cable modem working on the laptop, but not wirelessly. That's the next step, and he probably won't tackle it tonight. So the VAIO stays in his office instead of mine for now, and chances are good that he plans to plug the cable modem back in to the Mac overnight. If I want to work on Return to Mâvarin, I'll have to do it in here after John goes to bed. And John himself advised me to get my blog entry in now, in case I can't do it later.

I'll let you know how it goes from here. Meanwhile, I'm most of the way through Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which means I'm most of the way through my rereading of the saga. And I'm now planning to back through Mages of Mâvarin from the beginning as soon as I get to the end of the current edit, this time for the specific purpose of deciding whether each scene is really necessary. The characters certainly have to think about and talk about what's going on every step of the way; it is their reactions in such situations that determine my plot, not any cleverness on my part. But there's no reason every one of these conversations and soliloquies has to be reported verbatim in the books themselves. Each scene needs to accomplish something that is not covered elsewhere: a bit of character, key info, action, conflict, something. If Rani spends 1100 pages just talking (which he doesn't; I'm exaggerating), then it makes for a dull and redundant story.

Unfortunately I have a bit of the writer's disease called Every Word Is Golden Syndrome. I love these scenes, and I will probably feel that they're all important. Will I be able to get past that, and make a good determination which scenes should go and which must stay? I have no idea - but I expect I'll find out before the autumn is well advanced.

Karen

Always More to Want

It's been a frustrating evening. Other than sleeping in, going to see The Simpsons Movie, a little work on Wikipedia, research on the origin of Mickey Mouse, shopping, reading Doctor Who: World Game and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, watching several Tenth Doctor episodes and downloading updates for my new computer (Oh, is that all? You know, the usual), I've mostly been editing Mages of Mâvarin all day. I've made progress, but it's been a tough slog, mostly because MS Word keeps giving me an endlessly rotating blue circle and a "Not responding" message. This has happened at least four times today. Arrgh!

There are several issues involved, most likely, and I can't really blame the new computer for any of them (she said defensively). For one thing, I've been updating my word count table for Mages, which tracks words and page numbers of each chapter. Reasonable thing to do when editing a novel, right? But this document is a Word file with an Excel spreadsheet embedded in it, and it's always been a troublemaker, going back at least to my first laptop, if not the iMac that predated my return to school. Once I edit that embedded spreadsheet, there's always a good chance that Word is going to soon stop working. I've tried recreating the file, but it doesn't help.

So that's one problem. Another is that I'm working in MS Office 2003, which is only vaguely compatible with Vista. If I can get it working properly, I get out of spending $130 on Office 2007, for a while at least. Meanwhile, I should at least update my copy of Office with any downloads that might help. So I've been to the Microsoft web site, and checked for updates. Now I'm downloading 14 updates, 188.9 MB worth in all. Since I'm on dial-up, it's going to take a while. Overnight, probably.

And that's the third issue, because getting a nice new computer does nothing for the fact that my connection to the Internet is more of a leaky faucet than a firehose. As I download these updates, the modem and phone line struggle to get messages through between America Online and my AOL software, between Microsoft and my copy of Explorer, between Google and my copy of Firefox. There's also an issue with RealPlayer and possibly Windows Media Player, the latter of which I haven't tried yet. The BBC web site has claimed several times, even before I started this big download, that I don't have the software to play their video clips. Is it a firewall issue, or my slow connection, or a missing plug-in? I'll figure it out, but it's clear that the slow connection is the biggest issue right now. Well, that and the unresponsive Word docs!

It's kind of annoying, this dissatisfaction with my Internet connection and Word's unreliability, coming as they do at a time when I've just spent $600+ on a new computer. Can't I be fully satisfied, just for a bit? Apparently not. I suppose even if I got Office 2007 tomorrow, and John hooked me up to the cable modem at last via the wireless network I bought months and months ago, I would find something else I really need. Darn it.

Meanwhile, though, I've gotten Mages edited through Chapter Six, which is where I left off in my previous edit. When I got to the uncompleted scene with Darsuma and Fayubi's spirit, I basically skipped over it. I'll wait until I get to the other scene like it in Chapter Nine, and then decide whether to expand or cut or merge. But I reworked some dialogue between Rani and his grandfather, found some characters whose names weren't on my master list yet and added them, renamed the tributary that flows around the Palace (the Daga, as in Onondaga), and tightened some wording here and there. And my Lopartin glossary is coming along nicely.

There are a number of things I'd like to have done online tonight, including an entry for the fiction blog and checking out Pat's contest on Here, There, and Everywhere, which ends tomorrow. But I'll be lucky to get this entry to post, much less load other people's blogs while that big download is going on. Heck, I've had the AOL Welcome page fail to load numerous times over the last few days! But if I don't get roped into taking another friend to see the current Harry Potter film, I'll try to get to it tomorrow afternoon. And maybe, if both my brain and the computer cooperate, I'll get that letter from Jace to Sandy written tomorrow evening. Meanwhile, good night!

Karen