Category Archives: Cyberspace & Technology

Argh

Gryff broke my printer last night. He tried to jump up on my lap, discovered there wasn’t enough room between my legs and the keyboard tray, and fell off onto the printer (which was printing up a large document). It promptly went CLUNK and whirred a bit, then stopped and began displaying a carriage jam error. Forty-five minutes of poking and reseating and turnign it off and on and unplugging cables and troubleshooting and trying all sorts of solutions found via the Internet, HRH and I have declared it Officially Dead. I was livid.

Like I need another expense right now. Well, it can wait until all those Cheques In The Mail come to roost in the mailbox sometime in late July.

While seeking solutions on-line, I discovered a whole slew of people who have encountered the same error message and who have not been able to fix it, or get HP to solve the problem. Great. This is something I never discovered when I did my obsessive research before buying the printer. I mean sure, I encountered the occasional negative review citing problems, but the majority of them were okay and even positive.

On the bright side, I recently received a letter from the Aide financière aux études for Quebec informing me that I might be one of those who could benefit from a recent class action ruling concerning student loans obtained in 1997-98, and sure enough, when I logged into the website yesterday I discovered that I, like many others from that particular time period, had overpaid interest on the loan and was eligible for a refund. So I initiated the process and I’ll be getting a refund of just under two hundred dollars in mid-July. I always feel a grim satisfaction when a government has to send me money, instead of me having to write them a cheque or being told that oops, sorry, those taxes we accepted way back then have been recalculated and you owe us a bunch of money plus interest even though neither you nor we knew, ha ha ha.

And in completely unrelated news, I am devouring Marie Brennan’s Midnight Never Come.

LATER: Huh. I realised that part of what I wanted to do today was print out reference photos for the YA music book, and in a fit of pique tried turning the printer on. It’s working again. Of course, it randomly spews out pages of dots and dashes now and again when I haven’t sent anything to be printed, but it’s printing. I think a night on its own to consider the error of its ways plus me waxing grr about it in a journal entry may have spurred it to attempt cooperation.

EVEN LATER: Nope, dead. Oh well.

LATER STILL: Okay, this is stupid. Maybe if I drop it from about shoulder height it will decide if it will work continually or be conclusively dead. Because this sometimes-yes-sometimes-no is making me very, very cranky.

More 7/8 Nattering, With A Side Of Other Stuff

My principal cellist thinks I should get the 7/8. Of course she’s going to listen to critically in a couple of weeks when I take it home on trial, but she strongly endorses the lateral trade notion. She thinks the size and proportion difference will have a positive impact on my playing and comfort.

I am being enabled on all sides. People, you’re killing me! I can’t afford this for another month, assuming my second hearthcraft cheque arrives around the eight week post-delivery mark (which is not guaranteed). And on top of that I need to do about three hundred dollars’ worth of repairs on the cello I’ve got now. And somewhere along the way we need to do the new computer thing, too, although it’s not critical now that I’ve got the laptop pretty much set up for now. Neither is the cello, of course. I hate being in limbo about so much, work-wise and otherwise.

There is some good news today, however: the publisher with whom I set up the freelance manuscript review gig contacted me this morning and told me they’d pretty much settled after their move and were beginning operations again. So that’s less on hold than it was.

Weekend: Strike

It has been a thoroughly awful six days or so. There’s a lot of stuff flying around that I’m trying to handle, and I’ve lost it a couple of times in the past few days. I don’t like doing that. It makes me even angrier and more discouraged about things in general.

The weekend was a mass of engagements and scheduled events that didn’t give me the time or space I needed to really recompose myself. The cold rainy weather didn’t help at all, especially when there is a three year old screaming to play in the back garden. I did carve three or so hours out of the weekend to spend with t!, something we haven’t done in so long that neither of us can remember the last time we did it. There were copious amounts of tea, theorizing, analysing, and then there was port. Plus there was the very enjoyable bonus of seeing Jan, who came home from her weekend away earlier than expected, so she had a glass of port too and we all talked. I shared a music-related idea with t! that excited him and also interested Jan when I shared it with her later at his request. Knowing that other people think it’s a good idea heartened me immensely. I think it has a lot of potential. I need to chew on it for a while, and t! told me to bring it up with him again early next month. I’ll need to by then, because new associated ideas keep blooming in my head. It will all have to be managed carefully.

I had to replay the third level of the stupid DS game for kids I’m working through right now three times last night. I wasn’t going to go to bed till I’d beaten it. Dumb game. It’s easy, too; I’m just having the same problem I always have, sacrificing speed for precision.

The computer is still dead, and I’ve fed all my peripherals into the laptop and loaded requisite software. I may move the laptop to the writing desk and connect the monitor as well, because I strained my neck and back looking down at the laptop screen last Friday. I did hand in the first assignment for the new project I’m doing with the big unnamed game company though, and now I’m awaiting edits and feedback. The computer situation is a big part of what’s really pushing me to the edge these days. I really, really dislike transitional periods, and I’m stuck in limbo for two weeks. Three, really, because realistically I won’t be able to do anything about it until we come home from visiting my parents over Victoria Day weekend. Blade came down Saturday morning to try slipping the hard drive into an old computer HRH still hasn’t returned to ADZO (someday, someday!) and as I suspected it’s not the drive, which means it must be the motherboard or processor or something else that’s hanging up. I just don’t want to have to copy over all my profiles to a temporary system and then do it again. The laptop is fine for now.

That’s the state of me for the moment. If you’ve tried to email me or have been expecting an answer about something important that I haven’t yet given, try me again. The pre-yesterday email is all stuck on the other computer. And forgive any extended silences and lack of enthusiasm about things in general.

Friday Photos and The State Of The Me

I have had a really horrendously bad past couple of days. There have been good parts, but my patience has been fraying. Much of it has to do with people being oblivious to others around them, or downright stupid. Much of it happens in the car: people don’t understand how to turn into the proper lane at an intersection, what yield means, how to take turns merging, that parking a vehicle in the middle of a street blocks traffic, or what a full stop means. (I had to deal with three separate incidents today alone of people coasting through stop signs and yelling at me when I pulled away from my stop sign. I’m sorry, I was expecting you to, you know, stop.) Phone calls to wrong numbers, and people ringing my doorbell (for me or the wrong address) when I’m trying to get myself into a better headspace or to get things done. All the idiocy on top of the miserableness I’ve been feeling is wearing me down, so things like going to the store today to pick up a DVD to send out as a gift and finding it out of stock garners a much more emotional response than it ought to. The plans to burn mix CDs for people today has also obviously been shot. So what I’m fighting moves closer and closer to rage, which is really not what I want to be feeling, thanks.

As if things aren’t bad enough, it looks like my desktop computer is now officially dead. And of course today was the day I had scheduled backing up the new files I’d added in the past three weeks. Can I afford the new computer right now? No. I’m using the laptop out of necessity and I feel cramped. At least having ninety percent of my music on the external hard drive means I can plug it into the laptop and listen. If I get tired of the tinny sound I can plug the speakers into it as well.

I did have a fabulous rehearsal on Wednesday night. I tried a new bow hold (thank you Christopher Bunting) and it automatically forced me to hold the right arm in that more balletic curve I’d been trying for to affect how I draw the bow. We got the new music for the My Fair Lady and Sound of Music medleys, and after really working the overture and playing through the delightful (and not really Mozart’s) Symphony no. 3, we did most of the SoM and had a blast. I’ve been reading through Position Pieces for Cello by Rick Mooney as well, and the geography quizzes are brilliant. If your second finger is on D on the A string, what note would your fourth finger play? The first? What would the fourth finger play on the D string if you crossed to it? It may be obvious, but it’s just what I need to help positions sink in. I should have bought both volumes.

Liam and I went out to Greene Avenue in Westmount to shop for a birthday gift for a friend of his yesterday and had a lovely time, except for the bits where he wanted to be carried and I couldn’t do it which resulted in whining or crying, but we got past it all. We had custody of the baby squirrels yesterday as well, to allow Scarlet the opportunity to finish her paper (and yay to Scarlet for finishing it!), and he was a tremendous help, holding the white one on his lap after I’d fed her so that I could feed the grey one, then letting both of them curl up in his lap to doze while I refilled their hot water bottle and cleaned out the cage. Both HRH and I feel this is a wonderful experience for him, teaching him about the delicacy of baby animals as well as responsibility and cause and effect. It’s also a valuable opportunity to teach him the difference between wild animals and domestic ones.

It is Friday, so here are your photos. There are others up on the Flickr photostream.

*facepalm*

Now I remember what I did yesterday afternoon. You know, those couple of hours I spent staring at the monitor, but thought I’d just spaced out? I transferred a bunch of web pages to the pro site.

It did not go smoothly. I got it in the end, though. No wonder I wiped it out of my memory.

Today’s web work has also not gone smoothly.

Coding is never as easy as it presents itself to be. According to the instructions I’ve been following, my redirects should all work, and they don’t. The redirection keeps adding a trailing backslash when I am very specifically not typing one in, and everything breaks along the way. And the redirects I’ve taken off/edited show as taken off/edited in my list of redirects, but are still redirecting incorrectly when I actually type the page address in. Wake me up when everything is as it’s supposed to be.

(Why yes, I am avoiding the spread of manuscript pages on the floor of the living room. Why do you ask?)

I wish I had the money to hire someone to do this.

ETA: Well, that will solve things eventually — I just deleted the subdomain. Not on purpose, mind you, but I am not at all fussed about it. And guess what? The non-existent subdomain still redirects. Which means that for whatever reason, the changes I’m making aren’t updating properly. I may or may not recreate the subdomain expressly for the purpose of having a redirection. Not important at the moment; people can default to the second URL on my business cards.

Icon Memeage

Bodhifox threw an icon-themed meme out to readers, and as I need to clear my brain of the first complete run-through of the page proofs before going back to them, but I won’t have the time to get myself into the proper headspace to do something like work on the hearthcraft book, I’m doing this instead to give my brain a break.

The meme:

1) Reply to this post, and I will pick six of your icons. [ED: Not really. You can ask if you like, but it’s not required if you comment.]
2) Make a post in your journal and talk about the icons I chose.
3) Other people can then comment to you and make their own posts.
4) This will create a never-ending cycle of icon squee.

Bodhi said:

Glad to help you avoid work. How about the cello one you used here, the HRH one, the static Random Colour (gods, you people and your superfluous letter useage) icon, argh, the Gould and the muses?

This journal doesn’t have an icon field or an automatic icon assigned to each post as LiveJournal does or other blogging software/sites can have. I began inserting an icon for each post to add some visual interest to the blocks of text, and to provide a sort of instant preview of the subject or emotional tone of the post. I also did it to use the masses of icons I had hoarded, because there are some really lovely ones out there, and my hoard of shinies wasn’t seeing any practical application in a folder on my hard drive.

This is the icon I’m currently using as my default on LiveJournal. (No, I don’t post there, I have an account that enables me to read other journals and make comments.) It’s a crop of a much larger picture of several people, making it a close-up of my hands and the cello from last year’s gig. I like it a lot because it forces the viewer to look at the instrument, rather than my face. The bow hold is dreadful in this photo, but it was the closing song of the set and we’d done some pretty strenuous work leading up to this particular moment so my hand was shot. I also like the light and shadow happening in it. The cord is from a mic, and while I initially wasn’t thrilled it was there I’ve since seen that it adds an interesting movement to the picture. I still don’t have a really good picture of me playing the cello.

This is an HRH original, the story of which I’ll just reproduce here from the text on his portfolio web site (‘cos I wrote it anyway): In the late 1990s I had the fortune to work with a local theatre company as they mounted various productions of Savoy operas. This is a picture of my favourite leading lady as she might have appeared in the 1880s, taking her curtain call after a performance. The original art is approximately 11 x 14 inches, and was done in lead pencil and blue Col-erase pencil on acid-free paper. The final line work was done in black ink. The faint shading was done with light blue Col-erase pencil. The work was never developed further because I liked the sketch quality of it. The original artwork was framed and now hangs in a private home in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Ironically, I have no idea what show I was doing when he sketched this. Possibly The Mikado. I use this icon for some of my thank you posts, and my ‘celebrate/congratulate me!’ posts.

Heh. I so adore this picture. It’s by Karine, an incredibly talented artist and good friend, who also happens to be the lead singer in the band. The series of sketches (one per band member) was done before we actually assembled and began working on music, based solely on the colours each of us had picked as identifiers and amusing alter-ego names. The name I picked was Midnight Sienna, so my icon/outfit was themed in browns and blacks. I am so kick-ass in this picture, and it makes me grin every time I see it. I never got around to making the whole outfit, but I did make the black corset for performance and have the boots, too.

This icon encompasses both my recognition of the mistakes I’ve made, as well as the general “you have got to be kidding”-ness of so many things I see and read. Alice in Wonderland is far from my favourite Disney film — far, far, far from it — and pink’s not one of my favourite colours either, but somehow this icon grabbed me when I saw it. I think it may be the sentiment expressed in the text, which is something that never clearly appears in the original book but that I think must have run through Alice’s mind at some (or many) points: Stupid rabbit. Stupid flowers. This is beyond dealing with. I’m going home. There is so much to “argh” about in life, after all.

Ah, Glenn Gould. I wrote half an MA thesis on him before my thesis advisor vanished into the underworld, taking his promise of a co-heard defense handled by both the music and Eng.Lit. departments with him, and it scarred poor shy agonized little me so badly I couldn’t even consider picking it up again with someone else two years later, even if anyone in the department had been willing to take it on. I love Gould’s quirks, his depth of union with the music he plays, and his clean crisp separation of musical lines. I also deeply enjoy his writings, get a kick out of his wacky sense of humour, and find his personality fascinating.

This is a relatively recent icon, and I love the colours and layout. The text, of course, is absolutely perfect: it’s polite, has that ring of sincerity, and yet encapsulates the stereotypical ‘your call is important to us’ canned recording. All in all, it evokes the feeling of frustration one feels when on hold and also staring at writer’s block. It’s particularly appropriate for me, as I’ve been experiencing a lot of challenges with this current book. Overall, it soothes and amuses, both things I need when I’m growling at writing.

Argh!

A birds has a syrinx, not a larynx. (Just for fun, the plurals are syringes and larynges. Heh.) Good gods, I don’t believe that (a) I wrote that, and (b) three editors missed it.

In other news, apparently I am the Queen of All Commas. All your commas are mine, mine, I tell you! Because after seeing the amount I have liberally sprinkled throughout this book, there cannot possibly be any left for other people to use. I use them for subclauses, but also to mark pauses and establish a rhythm in a sentence. And, er, there are, well, many of them, some in places where I now disagree with their use. Sigh.

Almost done Chapter Four; almost halfway through the 240 pages.

ETA: Done! And I’m at 109 pages or thereabouts. Off to get the boy.