In the spirit of saying something nice...

Okay, the latest Windows update added something that I actually find useful. Now when you hit the numeral lock key an icon appears onscreen saying either "num lock on" or "num lock off." The caps lock key has always had a light that goes on when your caps-locked, but for some reason the num lock didn't. But now it's okay.

The thing is, I never want to have the numeral lock on. I prefer to use those ten buttons on the side for scrolling shortcuts and use the number keys at the top of the keyboard. This is apparently a weird preference, as I'm reminded whenever I work in an office.

Disconnect

Two days in a row the computers at my local library have gone offline. Really it seems to be the network that failed, not the computers themselves. It's all sort of held together with popsicle sticks and scotch tape.

For me it was just a little inconvenience. I can't speak for anyone else. Because the printers are connected to the computers via wi-fi no one could print either.

I feel bad for the reference librarians who run the computer lab on the side. When things like that happen they get hit with questions and complaints well outside of their wheelhouse. Ideally there should be an IT guy onsite, but there's no budget for that. IT is miles away, could just be one guy, only scheduled to work for six hours a week.

...0:49, 0:48, 0:47...

Have trouble being creative and productive? I'm pretty sure that at least one of my valued readers has a good handle on that, but for the rest of you...

One thing I've found works for me is using a timer. If you have an egg timer or something like that, that's cool. If not, there are online resources. I use Online Timer, but there are a bunch of options.

Time constraints reduce stress, paradoxically enough. Having an hour or two to do something general and amorphous can be a crushing amount of pressure. Giving yourself fifteen minutes to do something very specific gives you some comfortable grounding.

Neat thing: I'll run out of time and then reset for another period of about fifteen minutes. Then after that I might have so much momentum that I don't need the timer. But it helped get me started.

Easy for you to say

Hello out there. Meant to post something here last night, only vaguely remember what. Anyway, when I was in the middle of writing an email my wireless adapter started acting up, then conked out completely. Which I didn't know at first so it was more than a little frustrating to talk to my ISP's tech department and have them tell me nothing was wrong with the connection. Anyway, I'm currently looking for a fix - not the William Burroughs/Iggy Pop/et al kind - and using an ethernet cable I shouldn't need but which is probably a good idea to have anyway.

Hope you're doing okay.

Edit: Okay, I posted something in an HP tech forum today. Just before I went out earlier tonight, an update showed when I turned the computer off. Now Wi-Fi is working again. So that's good. Still keeping the ethernet cable handy.

The return of...

Okay, yeah, as you might have guessed, I'm on a different computer now. The short version is that while the problem with the old one might have been simple - seemed simple, anyway - fixing it turned out to be complicated, and the time and money would only maintain it until the next thing went wrong. So this is all right, except I kind of miss Windows Vista.

In the interim I've done a fair amount of reading. There's this coffee table book on modern art that I'm still in the middle of. Interestingly an older gentleman I met on the street last week told me he was an artist and showed me photos of some of his paintings. He was pleased when I was able to guess that he was influenced by the Fauvists. Knew about them before I read the book, but still.

I also read The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters. It's a murder mystery/police procedural set in New Hampshire a few months before an asteroid is due to plough into the Earth, devastating humanity. The fact that there's no apparent hope of survival in the long term might be a barrier to getting into it. That also turns out to be the book's greatest asset, the fact that it's in effect a prolonged Serenity Prayer.

Sleeping beauty

Weird thing with the laptop tonight. I got home and it wouldn't stop hibernating. Not until I shut the power off cold, turned it on again and put up with all the restarting rigamarole. Which is probably not the best thing to do, but then neither is muling opium from Turkey, which I bring up for no particular reason.

No, I've looked this problem up and they suggest updating some drivers. This is worth a try, I just couldn't do it in the moment.

oops

So I spent all of last night and a big chunk of tonight, basically, trying to send a document on my D drive. Not only could I not do it, I couldn't even open it. Then like a flash it hits me that the D drive isn't part of my hard drive, it's a thumb drive. Embarrassing. But at least I know neither I nor my computer has gone crazy(er than usual.)

Can't think of a good header

Saturday Random Ten again this week.  The "Friday Random Ten" tag is becoming a relic.  This week I intended to do it on Friday, but Thursday night I found out that iTunes couldn't import music.  Some kind of driver issue which meant that I'd have to reinstall iTunes which, as they say, became a whole big thing.  I eventually resolved it, though.

In less annoying news, a coworker of mine I like is getting married.  It is, I believe, one of those unions that just became legal in the state.  So you can imagine the excitement.  Anyway, I'll have to get in touch with her Monday to congratulate her, which I didn't get a chance to do today.

Clean bills of health

And we're back.

I've had a bit of a tech crisis here, whcih is the reason I've been out for a couple of days.  A surprisingly unsubtle malware took over my laptop, and I had to find a way to get rid of it.

This interrrupted the telling of my most recent visit to the dental hygienist.  Almost complete lack of pain, which potentially could be a bad thing but wasn't.  My teeth and gums look great , apparently.  And I have above average saliva production, which is good if weired.

So, today. What to say about today? Apparently the polar vortex is still doing its thing, or something. It started snowing sometime in the early morning hours. Had to be after 2AM. I got to work at 8 and found that the day had been cancelled. Oh well. This winter just about every day with more than a flurry of snow has had catastrophic snow, or at least it's been treated as such.

But of course there are good things about having the day off. For one thing if I were at work today I probably wouldn't have found the greatest Tumblr site ever.

Also I finally found out how to use the flash drive I bought quite some time ago. I've had heartbreak in the past with floppies and even CDRs, either of which can just go dead and leave you unable to get your stuff. On the other hand it's good to have someplace to put your documents other than on the hard drive. Yet I don't know. I guess up till tonight I was afraid the flash drive would go crazy and eat everything.

Not Another Service Advisory Movie

To let y'all know, I won't be able to blogg in the evenings for another couple of days, probably.  My laptop is out getting vajazzled.  Okay, not really, because that's a made-up word to entice gullible women into paying extra for bikini waxes.  It's not getting a bikini wax, but it is getting a new keyboard and general tuneup.  The old keyboard had several keys go unresponsive on me, including the space bar.  Whichisokayreallyifyoulikeputtingeverythinginonereallylongword. (Only imagine that with no c's, d's or e's.)

Laptop owner's grouse

Okay, what's the point of a cursor lock, anyway? Especially, what's the point of a cursor lock that you can activate without even knowing about it, then spend 2.5 hours fiddling around trying to find a way to undo it? Looking for information on the Internet is just such a joy when you can't move your cursor, don't you know. Now if you'll excuse me I have to scratch my head. Hopefully I can do so without hitting the button that will make my brain explode.

Technical difficultiezzzz explained

Hello again. It's been a bit.

Okay, last Friday night I noticed that my laptop was inexorably losing power, regardless of how everything was hooked up. At first I thought the surge protector had gone flooey. Then after a little consultation I changed my mind and thought it was the battery, and thus made arrangements. But now I find that it was really the AC adapter. This I didn't suspect because I had just replaced the AC adapter a couple of months ago. So today I bought a Targus cord at Staples which goes with pretty much any PC. Well, "goes with" is a funny term. It stopped the bleeding, but nothing's recharging.

Anyway, I'm back on the scene, blogging-wise. I have to skip Friday Random Ten this week, though. Power's stuck around 9% and I'm afraid what'll happen if I try to charge an iPod off this thing. But I'm ordering another Dell adapter, or cashing in the warranty if I can. Once that's done I should be back on track.

Service advisory (again)

Might need a couple of days away from posting here. I plugged in my laptop tonight and a spark flew from the cord. Not too surprisingly the 'chine isn't charging now. I've sent away for a replacement AC adapter. All should be well then.

Ongoing service advisory

Hi there. I'm having connectivity problems, and have to varying extents for a few days now. Thus the sparse blogging.

Update: Yeah, this was weird. I began having loading problems just after Irene, although I can't say the two things are related. Over the course of a few days it became impossible to watch videos online (they'd play for three seconds then have to buffer for an hour) or listen to radio stations online. The latter is a problem because reception on my actual radio is limited to half a dozen tightly formatted commercial stations. Also it got to the point where any page might get stuck while loading.

I cleaned out my Internet history, which did nothing. I ran Norton antivirus, which turned up four pissant tracking cookies. I downloaded the latest version of Flash, but nothing helped. Until it did, and today the problem seemed to have been solved, somehow.

In deference to the late Mr. Clarke, technology has advanced to become indistinguishable from really annoying magic.

Savings account

On the (mostly fiction) writing front, I've made a couple of changes recently. These seem to be having a positive effect.

First off, I've transitioned from saving documents on floppy to preserving them on CD-R. Yes, up through most of this year I've been using floppy discs. In general it's an okay system. As long as something doesn't go wrong, that is. One thing that can go wrong is for the little metal or black plastic clasp to come off in the external drive. You never really feel safe using it after that, since once they come off they're always loose and jiggly. Even worse, sometimes these discs just up and decide they have to be formatted. Which they already are, or you couldn't have used them in the first place. But never mind that, they demand to be formatted here and now and everything you've saved on them gets lost. Doesn't happen that often, but I'm as glad to stop worrying about it.

The other thing I've started doing is to schedule an hour a day for writing. I figure out when I want to stop, and that tells me when I need to start. Then when I start, I keep going until the hour is up.

On paper, you can get as much done in two days working a half-hour each as one hour altogether in one day. And for some people maybe it does work like that. But for me, once start with under forty-five minutes, self-fulfilling prophecy kicks in and I think, "Ah, can't really get anything done." So you just do a couple of paragraphs. Or a couple of sentences. Or try to sketch the idea in Microsoft Paint. Committing to an hour, or something very close to it, allows me to build up a head of steam.

Or a head of lettuce. Maybe I should get some feedback on that.

Wired Saturday Random Ten

I've figured something out recently. If you have a laptop, computer tech-y people will tell you to keep a lot of twist ties around. But no matter how sturdy they seem, metal fatigue will always do in a twist tie in about a month, give or take. Elasticized hair bands--the kind you put in your hair if that's your thing, not Cinderella or Poison--are better for the job. They're made to be wound and bent a lot. Plain ol' rubber bands? Probably less of a good idea.

1. Blossom Dearie--Put on a Happy Face
2. The Magnetic Fields--The Night You Can't Remember
3. Soul Coughing--True Dreams of Wichita
4. Ladytron--Soft Power
5. Barenaked Ladies--I'll Be That Girl
6. Arcade Fire--We Used to Wait
7. XTC--No Language In Our Lungs
8. The Kinks--Session Man
9. Count Basie & Sarah Vaughan--The Gentleman Is a Dope
10. Battles--Tij

Where am I?

If posts are few and far between/nom-existent, the reason is not too sinister. The charger on my laptop died, after what I should have taken as a warning. This is both a minor problem and a major pain in the ass. Minor because I have an extended warranty (been burned before) so I should be getting a replacement sometime next week. Major because there's only about a half hour left on the battery. So comp use outside of work or a library (where I currently am) is pretty much out.

On the bright side it's a little easier getting decent sleep hours. And this book on vervet monkeys I'm reading is kind of esoteric, but I'm making progress in it.

Retroactive service advisory blues

So where've I been? Right here.

The blog? Collateral damage for the past few days. Monday night, I noticed the screen image was all gimped out. Somewhere along the line something in the monitor broke, leaving my laptop in a Terri Schiavo-like condition. Long story short, I wound up replacing the laptop.

No Friday Random Ten tomorrow. I have to rebuild my iTunes library as well. We'll see about Saturday.

As Samuel L. Jackson said in Black Snake Moan, "I've had it with these motherfuckin' snakes in my motherfuckin' black moan."

Was ist dieses?

On one of my other writing projects I keep running into this glitch. The document I'm working on is saved to disc, and I add some more changes to it. Then I get an error message, and the whole thing is unsaved. I mean, it's no longer on the discette. The document changes names to something with a tilde and a bunch of numbers. I've been dealing with it by copying and pasting to a blank document and resaving. Still, it's more than a little annoying. Anyone else familiar with this/know of a solution?