Category Archives: Cyberspace & Technology

Sigh

I have deep affection for the borrowed iBook. It is light; it is silent; it is relatively quick for its age; and it is white. I am surprised that the colour of the casing and keyboard makes such a difference. I seem to work well within the Apple interface, too, which has a nice design.

While I have developed affection for it and a genuine enjoyment of using it, I am not in such deep love that I am going to shell out $1200 + for a new Macbook. No way. There are, however, other notebooks out there that are white and quiet. I will investigate further.

I have done 90% of my freelance project today. I’ll take two hours tomorrow morning to polish the evaluation report and submit it, then ask for another assignment. That’s excellent turnaround time. I am very pleased.

Still sick. No voice. I think coven’s going to be cancelled tonight. No one should have to come into this House of Plague unless absolutely necessary.

Orchestrated Update

Opened a ticket yesterday afternoon with the help desk of my hosting company, and they “restarted the related service”. This was after the blog came back on its own, mind you, so who knows what they started. We’re still going to try to make things more efficient from this end, starting with a reinstall of WP and a new template later this fall.

Enough angst! There was writing yesterday!

Total word count, Orchestrated: 5,193
New words yesterday: 1,143

I remember when a good day was 4K. Now I’m happy if I break a thousand. Sigh.

It will get easier as the story forms and the characters develop. If I can just keep writing it every day, the mind and body will suddenly remember what it’s like to be working on a book, and everything will be happy.

I can hope, can’t I?

I have now made bread, handled some work stuff, checked e-mail, and made plans for tomorrow. One last e-mail to write up and send out, then I get get to writing again.

Technical Difficulty

MySQL is having minor conniptions, and you may have run into a problem loading the Owlyblog earlier today. With the aid of trusty techperson friends we are attempting to locate and fix the problems. We’re back up and running, which leads me to suspect that it may have been a server-based issue, but there’s no telling what might happen next. Please be patient, and keep beaks and wingtips inside the blog at all times, for your own safety.

Usually I can fudge a patch and get the blog running, but this one is beyond me and so I’ve reached out to more knowledgeable persons than myself. Both the MySQL and the WP installation are going to need help, so if you have familiarity with either of these, please let me know.

And now, because I have lost THREE HOURS on this, I have to bury myself in work.

Oops…

I appear to have just successfully installed the USB card without Blade’s supervision. Opened the tower, took out the cover plate, snapped it into the motherboard, screwed it in, closed the box up, plugged everything back in. Turned it on.

Nothing has blown up yet. (He’d be the first to know, really, as my office is right under his bedroom.) Windows even recognized it as new hardware, identified it correctly, found the drivers, and everything.

I plugged the external hard drive into it. The computer sees it as a valid drive and I can move things back and forth. It’s even a 2.0 USB card, so things move faster than before.

Huh.

Maybe I should buy a lottery ticket or something.

(Thanks Jan! You have made my life ever so much easier!)

Hullo, World

First things first: Happy birthday to Sandman7 and Pdaughter!

I just spoke briefly with t!, who says life is very good at the new homestead in southern Ontario. Just to let those who are wondering know, the Coalition Stronghold does not have internet access and will not until early next week.

I am running around like a chicken with my head cut off today, and did not in any way need the New Construction Headache in the middle of town this morning as I tried to get gas and to the bank. Argh.

My computer will not recognize my camera at all, no matter what USB port I use. Tonight I plan to open the box under Blade‘s supervision (which at this point consists mostly of Blade drinking Scotch and tossing me a screwdriver; he’s moral support and the voice of wisdom that suggests I may not actually want to plug/unplug a particular cable inside) to insert the USB expansion card Jan gave me before she left, to up the number of installed USB ports to eight. I have pictures to share, you see, of the new haircut and the new glasses and other things, and not being able to get them off the camera is annoying.

I finished the huge freelance project yesterday, two days after I’d wanted it gone because I realized I had to do one final step. I may do a timed writing thing around noon before I have to head out to the doctor just past one, simply to get some words down. After that it’s to the south shore to drop off postdated cheques with the boy’s preschool, because they were forgotten yesterday which was in fact Wednesday not Tuesday as we all thought it was. And if I’m out there I might as well pick HRH up from work before going to get the boy from his caregiver, who is having a little party today with the kids.

Next week’s work is all mine, because I have to draft the workshop I’m doing at the Hamilton Pagan Pride Day event on September 13. Which is next weekend. We’re leaving a week from tomorrow. Eek.

Right; off I go to do more headless chickeny things. Which reminds me… I need to think of something for dinner.

Good Things

Thanks to some help from Blade, the laptop is up and running and as of some messing about on my own this morning can actually connect to the Internet via ethernet cable. We’ll make sure the wireless works properly when I get the passkey again. (Duh. And this time, we’ll save it.)

Also very exciting: We have a new bed and new dressers/bedside tables! The bed is almost twice as high as our old one. The cats complained, of course, but the boy ran in, peeked over the top (yes, it’s that high) then hauled himself up without hesitation. I have to shift my clothes from the old double dresser to my single dresser today, and then the double dresser is moving downstairs to become storage. HRH has brought home the first half of the boy’s new-to-him bunk beds as well; I suspect we’ll have those complete and up by next week.

There was something else too, but I’ve forgotten it. The fact that we have new fish in the boy’s aquarium? (Six pretty guppies. All alive so far. The bonus feeder guppy died last night; I’m hoping that it will serve as a sacrifice to the Fishtank Gods and the others will be spared.) The fact that I made grape jelly for the first time yesterday? (And poured some of the boiling jelly over my left thumb while filling the very first jar; I credit the use of lavender oil with my ability to use it today, because liquid sugar? A bad thing.)

Nope; it’s gone. I’ll come back when I remember.

ETA: Aha! Walking past a mirror reminded me. I’ve now worn the new glasses almost every moment I’ve been awake for one week, and I can’t believe how light they are; I continually forget that I’ve got them on. Pretty much everyone who has seen me has complimented me (after first cautiously ascertaining that these are indeed the new glasses), and it’s a major sign of how much I like the frames that I’m taking the compliments at face value instead of questioning them or worrying that the complimenter is just being polite. Yay, new glasses! Yay, wearing glasses full-time!

Inbox Amusement and Mailbox Joy

I am always amused when Amazon recommends one of my own books to me.

Today’s mailbox joy: My new glasses! Huzzah! Now I have to stop jumping when I pass a mirror. They’re very different from what I usually wear. Also handed to me by the postman were three secondhand books that I was beginning to suspect had gone astray.

Stupid Microsoft is making me download file conversion thingys so that I can actually open the Excel file that contains my assigned freelance work. Gnarr. I wonder what else it will make me do. (Ssh — there is a Macbook test in my future. Do you think Microsoft heard about it?)

And finally, I am cold. I’ve already put socks and slippers on, and I suspect I’m going to have to put a cardigan on over my long-sleeved t-shirt.