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.

Monday Photo Shoot: Multicolorful! Plus Your "New" Photos

As promised, here are the results of last week's Monday Photo Shoot. It was a light turnout, but I have high hopes for this week. What's this week's topic? That will be revealed in this very entry, right after the links for last week.

The topic was "What's New?" and I asked you to show us something new:

Julie celebrated the New Year with her annual "confetti shot."

Whee! Martha and the kids got a new Wii from Santa!

Astaryth got a new book of equine photography - surprisingly new, in fact.

Becky shows us how happy Max is on his new rocking horse.

That's it! As I say, it's a light turnout, what with the holiday and the fact that it was my first attempt to continue this John Scalzi meme. Now, on to this week's topic. At various times Scalzi asked us to shoot something in one specific color or another. This time out, let's mix them up, shall we?

New Monday Photo Shoot #2: Show us something colorful. I don't mean a little colorful, or just one color. Let's see something that has three or more colors in it, something just about guaranteed to provoke the reaction, "Wow! That's really colorful!"

Here's mine:





Yes, I'm subjecting you to yet another Safeway sunset. This one took place tonight, and was the most colorful I've seen in a long time. Yes, I cheated on the saturation on that last shot, but not by much.

Your turn! Post a picture of something multicolored, and then come back here and leave a link in comments so we can all take a look. To keep things simple and consistent, I'll post the results in the early morning hours of Monday the 14th, so you have until Sunday night to post your entry and leave your link. You can use HTML to make a live link, or just paste it in as text. And no, you no longer need a Blogger ID to leave a comment.

Have fun!

Karen

Because Communication is a Good Thing

Wait for it. I'll get to the sunset photos later in the entry.

Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation. --from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

I never actually agreed with this ironic quote from H2G2, but I thought of it tonight as I contemplated tonight's blog entry, and then put it off for a few more hours. In my experience, lack of communication can cause conflicts (but doesn't always), and miscommunication causes conflicts rather a lot. But making it easier for people to communicate? That's a good thing. Isn't that what the Internet is all about?

So I was pleased last night when, while answering an email from a potential Round Robin Photo Challenges participant about how to leave a comment, that I discovered an upgrade in Blogger's comments screen. Under the box in which you type your comment, it says,

Choose an identity
Sign-in using [Blogger/Google]

The Blogger/Google part is a drop box. If you toggle the downward error to the right of it, it offers the following options:

Blogger/Google
AOL/AIM
LiveJournal
TypeKey
WordPress
Any OpenID

What this means, essentially, is that if you're signed up with just about any blogging service, you can use that ID to sign in to Blogger and leave comments. The same is true of Ficlets, by the way, which is where I first saw OpenID. It's a big improvement over AOL-J and Blogger and the rest maintaining their own separate little blogging worlds, where nobody can comment without signing up on their service specifically.

In Blogger's case, there are two more options. One can leave a comment under a nickname (to be typed up in a box), or just go the Anonymous route. Unless there's a glitch, then, anyone who is willing to take a moment to read the screen (and is not so freaked out by technology that they're afraid to try it) should be able to leave comments now, whether they personally blog on AOL, LiveJournal, WordPress, or nowhere at all. And that's as it should be.

Then there's the issue of RSS and alerts and such, so people can easily find out when something new has been posted to each blog they follow. I find that subject a bit more daunting and complicated, so I won't tackle it tonight.

The point is that it's getting easier all the time to stay in touch with other people, their blogs and their memes, their movie preferences and even their minute-to-minute activities. Today (which I define as whatever day it was when I got up and started my day, in this case Saturday), I responded to someone's invitation to join Flixter, a movie-oriented social networking site. What my correspondent didn't realize what that I signed up with Flixter last March. I had a lot of fun on there for a short while, but it ate up too much time and I stopped using it. Another fairly useless Internet communication doodad, Twitter, I use intermittently. And last night on AIM, someone tried to claim I was on his Buddy list and tried to chat me up. Since he was a total stranger who lived in New York City, I was dubious. When he got around to saying his marriage was an unhappy one and asked me about mine, I wished him "Good luck with that!" and blocked him from future IMs with me. Communication is good, yes, but I have my limits!

So now, in our communication-enhanced virtual world, I find myself at a minor nexus at the moment, where Scalzi fans, Weekend Assignment and Monday Photo Shoot participants, Robins and other regular reader to this blog may be reading this entry over the next day or two, despite that fact that the spike in Outpost readership really only lasted about a day. Before this communications mojo deserts me entirely, I'd like to introduce you all to each other, at least vis-a-vis several memes that may interest you. Here's a quick roundup of the ones that matter to me:

Weekend Assignment - This weekly essay topic was invented by John Scalzi. As you probably know, I'm doing it now, with his permission. The assignments are posted on Thursdays, and you have basically a week to leave a link back to your entry. Current topic: how is the Writer's Guild strike affecting your life and tv viewing habits?

Monday Photo Shoot - This was the second of John Scalzi's weekly memes. I'm experimenting with continuing this one as well. My first MPS entry ("What's New?") is here, and you have until Sunday night to participate if interested.

AOL Community Photo Challenge - this one was started over the past day of so by Marie and several other photobloggers, as another successor to Scalzi's Monday Photo Shoot. They're made some interesting innovations in the set-up of it, including letting people vote on their favorite entry. Their first topic is "Beginnings," with a deadline for participation of January 11th. This is already getting a good response, and time will tell whether my direct continuation of the Scalzi meme goes by the wayside in favor of this other one.

Round Robin Photo Challenges - Carly, Steven and I have been doing this one for a few years now, and it's definitely a fun time. It's a little different from the others in that it's biweekly instead of weekly, draws its topics from a pool of suggestions by the various Robins, and announces that topic nearly a week in advance of the date on which people are expected to start posting their photos. The current topic, with a target posting date of Saturday, January 12th, is "Railroads." I'm starting to get a little miffed with the freight train that sometimes goes by near the power station as I drive home from work. Now that I have an extra incentive to photograph the thing, it seems to be hiding from me!

Okay, now on with tonight's sunset/dusk photos, because that's a form of communication, too.


When I left the house for the first and only time today it was well after 5 PM. I'd assumed that I'd already missed sunset, but when I stepped outside, I saw this, only a little darker. Naturally, I rushed back into the house for my camera.

Pointing my camera south, I got this intriguingly blurry shot. I think I like it better than I would if it were sharp and clear.

After that I rushed over to Safeway to see whether I could get any more nice shots, and because I was headed over there anyway. It actually wasn't as dramatic as the shots taken from in front of my house, in park because dusk was pretty well advanced by then.

From there I went to Cato and spent the $50 gift card that John bought a year ago. (Yes, Duane, it was still good for the whole value.) In the interest of communication I will post a correction to a previous entry about it: John pointed out tonight that nearly a year after the gift card slipped down a crack in my dashboard, he managed to retrieve it by opening a panel meant to replacing fuses. Somehow I managed to say "spark plugs" when I wrote about this before.

Ah, well, sometimes the brain doesn't manage to communicate things correctly, no matter what the technology has to offer. That's especially true late at night when I'm tired. And guess what time it is!

Karen

Wow! Welcome, Scalzi Fans!

Normally I don't use Internet and texting slang and abbreviations, but just this once:

OMG! W00t! *squee*

Ahem.

I had a wonderful surprise this morning (Friday), and some of you already know what it was. The first comment on last night's Weekend Assignment (which I misnumbered, incidentally) was from the originator of the Weekend Assignment meme, John Scalzi himself. He not only did the assignment, but also pointed his thousands of readers toward my humble blog, so that they could play along too. Here's why this was a great thing for him to do:

1. It's no secret that I was nervous about whether there would be more than one or two responses to my attempt to keep Scalzi's meme going (and his other one, the Monday Photo Shoot). Most of his By the Way readers probably wouldn't even know it was being attempted. Heck, even the blogplugs entry in Magic Smoke lists the entry as my response to the assignment, not as a new assignment for everyone to do. And the now-scattered community that Scalzi nurtured for four and a half years hasn't always managed a big turnout for him in recent months, let alone for someone else. In introducing his huge Whatever readership to the Weekend Assignments, he's exposing the somewhat insular remnants of the old AOL-JLanders to a whole new group of erudite and enthusiastic bloggers. This should benefit everyone in terms of new readers and new ideas, and pretty much ensure the Weekend Assignment's survival.

2. The other aspect of this a somewhat more personal one, although it also has implications for the success or failure of the meme's revival. It takes a certain amount of chutzpah for a relative nobody with 80 to 100 readers a day to take over, unasked, something originated by a famous, award-winning writer whose personal blog gets 24,703 unique visits a day, and whose somewhat less popular corporate blog was nevertheless the touchstone for a whole community. People might think I was usurping or self-aggrandizing. But the fact is that I love these two memes and don't want to give them up if there's a choice. Scalzi knows this, and furthermore sees that the memes' continuation is a good thing, not just for that fanatic in Tucson but for anyone who enjoys writing or reading the Weekend Assignment entries. For all that to work, it's best that people know I'm doing this with permission; but Scalzi's Whatever entry goes way beyond that, well into endorsement territory. I wasn't expecting that, and I surely appreciate it. (In case you're curious, The Outpost had 239 unique readers on Friday, more than 200% of "normal.")

And now, because I happened to take some interesting photos today, a complete change of subject:

I liked the pattern of clouds this morning as I drove to work, nearly ten minutes late because I was totally distracted by all the blog comments and lost track of the time.


A minute or so later I was presented with this even-more-interesting cloud pattern. It was that tiny cloud in the middle that fascinated me. Neither this shot nor the other cloud photo is edited at all except for resizing and a "sharpen lightly" or two.


Tonight's sunset was much better than the one a week ago, but I can't show you the best of it. The first shot I took featured the ball of the sun between two vehicles at Famous Vehicle Dealer, and I don't want to identify the business to you quite that explicitly. After that I was driving. Every moment either there were buildings or trees in the way, or both; and I proved to myself yet again that it's just about impossible to photograph a sunset at 50 mph. That's the one disadvantage of my route home: there's no good place to pause for a picture. But the color when I got to the Safeway lot was rather nice. I've boosted the saturation a bit here to show it to you.


And here's the same sunset just about two minutes later, as photographed from the actual Safeway part of the Safeway lot.

Karen

Weekend Assignment #197: Missing Words

Ok, we're going to try this. John Scalzi left off with Weekend Assignment #196, so with his permission and encouragement, let's try to keep it going. Here then is Weekend Assignment #197 (numbering corrected Saturday at 4:38 AM):

There's not a lot on tv these days.

Weekend Assignment #197: Now that the WGA strike has had lots of time to affect the prime time television schedules, how is it affecting you as a viewer? What show do you miss most, aside from reruns? Do you miss your weekly appointment with that ill-behaved doctor, or your visits to Wisteria Lane? Does it bother you not to laugh at fresh jokes on your favorite sitcom? Or are you just as happy watching reality shows, or new episodes of shows that have been held back until now? We want to know!

Extra Credit: how are you spending the time instead?

To be honest, I don't watch much broadcast TV myself. Most of the time I watch DVDs instead, if anything. But even I am missing the few shows I normally do watch. Three of them are--or were--on NBC's Monday night sf lineup: Chuck, followed by Heroes, followed by Journeyman. I kind of lost track of Chuck after he fought with his beautiful C.I.A. minder once too often, but I watched the other two every week.

And much as I like Hiro and Peter and Claire, I have to say the show I miss the most that night is Journeyman. I'm a sucker for time travel shows anyway, and this one does it well. Sure, it's essentially a Quantum Leap ripoff, but there are worse things to rip off--much worse. And the character dynamics are interesting, as the wife struggles to cope with her frequently time-lost husband, their young son starts to catch on to what is happening, and the traveler's brother struggles to make sense of what's happening with more mundane explanations. Good stuff!

Then there's Tuesday night. And yes, Julie, I do miss House MD, probably more than Journeyman. I think.

And what do I do on Monday and Tuesday nights? Why, I spend it at the computer, of course, with a DVD running on one laptop and ten tabs of Firefox open on the other!

Your turn: write up what you miss (or don't miss) on tv these days, and come back here and leave a link in comments. If for some reason you have trouble commenting (although it should work for everyone, one way or another), feel free to email your link to mavarin at aol.com. To give time for word to spread and everyone to play, I'll do the roundup of your links in one week, next Thursday night. Got it? Good! Thanks, folks! I know I'm no John Scalzi, but we don't have to lose his legacy, as long as some of us care enough to keep it going!

Edit: I have been taken to task for not explaining what the WGA is and why it matters. I don't want to get into the politics of it (let's just say I'm pro-WGA and leave it at that), but here's what it's about:

WGA is the Writer's Guild of America, the folks who write the TV shows. As has been widely reported over the last few months, they're on strike, so networks and production companies are running out of new episodes of comedies and dramas. Why it matters, aside from inconvenience to the viewer and economic impact on the entertainment industry and the New York and California economies, is that it's a battle over writers being compensated for their work in new media such as Internet downloads. The result will set a precedent in determining the extent to which new tech is made part of the royalty pie.

Karen

When in Doubt, Post a Photo

Post-sunrise effects on my morning commute, 1/2/08

So far, the response to my attempt to keep John Scalzi's Monday Photo Shoot going has been underwhelming. Several things give me hope, however. One: Monday was New Year's Eve, and people had better things to do than read blogs. I therefore can't expect a lot of people to drop everything and take on a meme we all thought was kaput. Two: it's only the first week, and I don't have the readership By the Way had. I should be a little patient. Three, and most encouraging of all: I have John Scalzi's blessing to do this:

No need to worry. I'm not doing them anymore. Someone should. And I think you'd be good at it.
--John Scalzi

So if you've been hanging back out of respect for the Blogfather, or if you were busy and just missed the entry, I encourage you to jump in and show your support for the Monday Photo Shoot continuing, if indeed you want it to continue at all. In deference to the fact that we're necessarily going to be off to a slow start, I'm extending the deadline for the MPS topic "What's New?" until Sunday night, so that I can post your links along with the second Monday Photo Shoot in the wee hours of next Monday morning.

And while we're at at: how do you feel about continuing the Weekend Assignments? If anyone is interested, I'll post one of those tomorrow night. And again, if someone else wants to take over either of these memes, I'll be glad to support your efforts. But I love doing these, and I'd rather post my pale imitation of them than do without entirely.

Oh, and meanwhile, I have just two things to report for today:

Another edit of the same photo

1. Something that looked very much like the rising sun was in the eastern sky as I started toward work this morning. So I photographed it for you. Here it is, and yes I've increased the saturation and played with the tone values. I'm very much a sunset person and a night owl, so I don't normally do sunrises. To me, sunrise is best approached from the other direction, as something to be glanced at as I finally head off to bed. Mind you, that's not something I can get away with on the average weekday!
2. I finished editing Chapter One tonight. And the Weasel hardly said a word.

Karen

Running from the Weasel

So, on the first day of the year, a year in which I've promised to finish my rewrites and edits on Heirs of Mâvarin and the Mages of Mâvarin trilogy and get the books sold, I barely even glanced at the first page of the first chapter of the first book. Instead I spent many hours rewatching a couple of Doctor Who episodes plus deleted scenes, reading blogs and message boards, IMing three different people, tweaking a few Wikipedia articles, searching for my keys (found 'em!) and suffering through a fairly obnoxious BBC Radio One podcast to get to a two minute interview.

Is it laziness? Is it my Doctor Who obsession getting in the way of productivity?

No. It certainly looks that way, but that's not it.

It was avoidant behavior, brought on by fear.

Fear of the Weasel.

I've written about the Inner Weasel before. It's that nasty defeatist voice inside a writer's head, or in anyone, the one that says what you're working on is no good, that it will never be any good, that you may as well give up now. The name comes from a discussion on an AOL sf writing message board about eight years ago. The Inner Weasel, also known as the Inner Critic, is the Superego gone wild. It sees every flaw and sternly points them out. If someone else criticizes your work, it believes every word; but it ignores any incoming praise. The Inner Weasel holds you to a higher standard, all the while claiming that you will never crawl that high.

It's daft of me, I know, but even though I believe in the novels, the characters and my own writing ability, I find it all too easy to listen to the Weasel. This has been especially true since September, when the DAW first reader rejected Heirs and my life got difficult with Tuffy's cancer and the challenges of the new job.

In a way it was the right thing to do, but I actually gave the Weasel more power shortly after that. Discouraged about the rejection letter, I brought in a new beta reader, and asked two of my existing ones to try to read Heirs Chapter One as if the story were new to them. The resulting advice was highly contradictory, and the Weasel absorbed all of it, and read it back to me at every opportunity. I undertook a major overhaul of the chapter, which was already on its 5,047th draft, but nothing I did pleased the Weasel. Every cut and every addition, inspired by the advice of one reader or another, took the chapter farther away from what someone else liked. So I gave it up, made excuses, didn't open the document for weeks at a time, or opened it and didn't look at it. And of course I felt guilty about this. It was like the Weasel kept telling me. I wasn't really a writer, since clearly I wasn't writing. I was just pretending. I would never get it published. "Write something else, something different," John advised me for the 500th time, and didn't understand why I found the advice so depressing and soul-killing.

But this is 2008, a chance to start over. And why should I fear a fictional weasel? This is where that affirmations stuff kinda makes sense to me. If I can dump the fear and believe in myself, I've clearly got a much better chance of accomplishing something than if I let myself hide from the Weasel by hiding from my fiction writing.

Okay, so it took until about 2 AM on January 2nd to actually start work on the chapter.

And it wasn't so bad. I trimmed a phrase here, a sentence there, cut half a paragraph and moved up the bit about Shela. It all worked. It all improved the flow of the thing.

A tengrem. Art by Sherlock

What about the lack of dramatic tension J talked about? the Weasel asked.

Shut up, I said. Clearly the boy in the tree is foreshadowed as being about to come face to face with an insane fire-breathing monster, and does so on page seven. That should be dramatic enough for anyone. I'm not going to invent false tension or fake action before that. It will only get in the way and delay things.

What about the teenagers who should be in the hunting party? the Weasel asked.

There are two seventeen-year-olds with the hunters. They just don't get mentioned 'cause they don't have a line, I said.

What about Suri's sheep? the Weasel asked. You already cut the dialogue of him worrying about them, and now you've cut the fact that the tengrem was seen in the pasture. Nobody will even know about Suri and his sheep now.

That's all right; I know, I said. Suri's sheep aren't important to anyone but Suri.

That's what Bil says, the Weasel pointed out. Isn't that line going to confuse people now?

Oops! You're right, I said, and cut the line.

A decent start. But now I'm late for bed!

Karen