Category Archives: Cyberspace & Technology

Hello, Wall

Guess whose desktop computer won’t start up this morning?

*headdesk*

It turns on. No start-up sequence. Not even a system check. Everything was fine when I shut it down last night. No viruses were found in the virus scan I did at dinner yesterday. It must be a hardware failure of some kind.

And did I save the files I need to be working on to my thumb drive? No, I did not. I’ve asked the client to send me the last copy of the first file I returned to them last week and the original copy of the third so that I can pick up where I left off and work on the laptop. Hopefully Blade will be able to do something about the computer tonight, otherwise the second (and complete) file is stuck there unless we take the drive out and plug it into another computer to take it off. The good news is that I work with a partioned drive so that if we have to reinstall Windows (again) I don’t lose any of my important stuff, just programs and time. If the drive is dead, well, I’ll just have to completely redo the second file. And it will serve me right for not making an external backup, but still — argh, I DO NOT need that right now.

Rosy, smack me upside the head for NOT LEARNING.

And I was so optimistic about the day, too.

Needless to say, my access to email is going to be limited today. If you know my work Gmail address, use that instead, or leave me a shout here to contact you; I’ll be checking comments regularly.

Monday

Well, it’s officially a stereotypical Monday. My desktop won’t/can’t connect to the Internet, no matter what I unplug/replug/switch on/switch off/restart; the laptop (connected to the emergency upstairs in-house wireless) conks out every so often with a “no bootable device found” message when I try to restart four times out of five.

A headache should not be this severe, this early in the morning.

The Internet isn’t exactly required for work, it just makes it a heck of a lot easier when I have to check facts for which I have no hard copy references. Also, I can’t check my email for answers to the questions I asked last Friday, or ask new ones via that medium if they arise. I could call, but the questions are kind of niggly and not really worth that.

Much with the grr. And HRH has gone and double-booked himself for the evening, telling the neighbours he’d finish painting their bathroom tonight (as usual it’s taking longer than originally expected, because the people who installed the ceiling vent didn’t properly finish or sand the plastering, so what should have been a two-hour job has already taken four and will take another one). Also, I’m fairly certain he’s forgotten he said he’d create and lead tonight’s coven ritual (if he’s even going to be there), which means it falls into my lap.

I’m not a happy girl at the moment. And I should log off before the laptop decides to crash again.

(I did have an excellent weekend, however, which began Friday night celebrating my birthday with the Preston-LeBlancs at a pub dinner and a (3D IMAX!) showing of Order of the Phoenix, continued through Saturday with a delicious birthday dinner made by my in-laws, and culminating in a nice lazy Sunday. Also? Presents! Hurrah!)

La La La: Free Association Brought To You By Caffeine

I give up. No matter how I try, I can’t get the basic font to change on this template, or get the sidebar to begin below the header space.

Also? Two cappuccinos = bad. Focus? What is focus? La la la!

Have to sort through the basement to find a box to send baby gifts out to new parents, now that I know the baby’s name. And yet I can’t even face that because there’s too much caffeine in my system.

I am very very tired of my doorbell being rung by delivery people asking for the woman downstairs. The conversation always goes something like this:

Today’s Cute Delivery Man: [name of downstairs tenant]?

A: [annoyed sigh] No. She’s downstairs.

TCDM: [checks address on forms] This is [my address]?

A: Yes. But she is at [my address]-A. The bottom doorbell outside.

TCDM: [checks forms again] Oh. She didn’t specify that.

A: She never does.

TCDM: I’m really sorry to have disturbed you.

A: [with sympathy] That’s all right. It’s not your fault. Just please, update your records.

Because I’m sick and tired of being her door attendant, and of the doorbell waking the boy from this nap, or it interrupting my train of thought while working. I’m also tired of being disappointed that I am not getting surprise presents handed to me by mailpersons. I should be getting consolation prizes for being inconvenienced.

HRH and I are heading out to the registration bureau at lunch today, he to do the car thing and I to do the Medicare thing. Because yes, I am an idiot, for when I got both the Medicare renewal form and the driver’s license renewal form in the mail the same week, I looked at the rules on the driver’s license form (“to be done in the ten days before your birthday”) and somehow applied them to the Medicare renewal as well. Except when I looked at that form today, it said DEADLINE = MAY 13, which is not in fact within the next ten days at all but somewhere in the far distant past. So let’s just all hope that nothing happens that would require the use of my Medicare card in the next eight weeks. (I seem to remember this happening to other people and the card actually arriving within three weeks, so my fingers are crossed. I hope I don’t get a snarky teller at the bureau, though, or so help me, all my irritation at the downstairs tenant will burst forth.)

Too hot; too humid. The forecast assures me the general temperature will be dropping within the next two days to about ten degrees cooler.

In the past two days I have read For A Few Demons More (thanks Blade), Fly By Night, and Hat Full of Sky (which you may borrow if you like, Jan, as you enjoyed Wee Free Men so much). I’m not sure how I managed all of it, but I did.

Sigh

One of the problems with writing a character who is a tech/computer whiz is that I have no idea how she does the things she does. And inevitably someone asks her. Usually it’s my protagonist, who should know better by now because all she does is look him in the eye and say, “If I explained it you wouldn’t understand anyhow, so why don’t we just say I did and you’re awed by the magnitude of my talent, and we’ll move on?”

I love Pandora, I really do.

But it doesn’t help that since she started working with tech-focused fae, together they’ve merged computer science and magic and now what she does is even more of a mystery to me. My protagonist and I just take it in stride. We have to. If we think about it too long we grow afraid of the opportunity for world domination, which would sidetrack the story.

Home Again

We’re home, we’re alive, the cats are alive, all must be well.

It wasn’t exactly a relaxing weekend, but it was an important one. Liam slept dreadfully over the weekend, as did we. The drive home was awful thanks to that lack of sleep and the unyielding sun and humidity. We took Liam to the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum on Father’s Day to see the planes fly and taxi around (who are we kidding, it was so we could see the Avro Lanc flying again — and fly it did without incident, unlike the last time I saw it out) which he absolutely adored; much more exciting than walking through the hangar looking at the parked aircraft. He caught ten minutes of sleep in the car then refused lunch and a real nap. Then his fifteen-month-old cousin (a useful catch-all term for the daughter of my own cousin) came over and they played together, providing several opportunities for laughter and photos. It was such a great afternoon, the lack of sleep and food aside. And it meant a lot to all of us for him to finally meet his great-grandmother.

As soon as we got home he was completely back on schedule — food, naps, bedtimes and wake-up times. Yesterday was a quiet snuggly day with books and movies, and today he’s off at daycare so I can get some more writing done before the next contract lands on my desk, as it’s scheduled to sometime before the end of the week.

I’m not feeling terribly communicative these days; it might have something to do with the huge pile of stuff that needs to get done and the lack of time in which to do it (or the computer programs that keep unhelpfully crashing, which are delaying some of the tasks). Nor did the Bell technician accidentally terminating my phone line this morning while fixing the downstairs tenant’s line help (then leaving for another job before coming back to fix it), or the refusal of my computer/modem/router/ISP to get back in harness when the line was restored. It made my scheduled research difficult, to say the least. So I did laundry instead.

Other than that, life in general and things are kind of there. And it’s orchestra tonight; only a week and a half till the concert on July 1.

Working Hard…

(… as you can see:)

I Can Has Cheezburger now has an lolwl!

Also:

Literecy Cat amuseth me.

And my newest installation of Firefox has a nifty dotted red line underlining words that it doesn’t recognise, which means it catches the letter juxtapositions that occur when I type too fast and never seem to see when I skim the text before posting. Of course it also underlines every UK spelling, which is mildly sigh-inducing.

Right. Back to finishing the interview. (It’s been a long day, okay? I needed some LOLcats.)