Category Archives: Cyberspace & Technology

Argh!

The MD recorder I bought is not, after all, Hi-MD. I thought it was. I must have mixed up all the reviews I read at the same time. This means that I can’t transfer a recording to the computer to burn it to CD.

:headdesk:

This is not the end of the world; it just means I have to find an alternate way of recording a orchestra concert so that my grandmother can finally hear one. (Not that any of you talk to her, but this will eventually part of her birthday surprise, so no spoilers.) ADZO mentioned a method of doing this with equipment he owns a month ago, so I will look into that. In the meantime, sixty dollars for a used minidisc recorder that will help me work out musical lines for songs and practice is pretty darn good, and that was the primary purchase goal, so it’s all still fine; just not as ideal as it could have been.

In other news, HRH and I made an informal list of Liam’s words today and the lexicon is currently clocking in at around fifty, with three to five new ones being added daily (today we thought he said “Liam” but he didn’t repeat it before zooming off to the next event on his to-do list, so we’ll be listening for that one). HRH also made him a playhouse out of boxes today, and the boy dashes in and out of it with much enthusiasm. He closes the door very firmly behind him once he’s in too, in a very “I want to be alone!” sort of way, effect of which is rather ruined by the incessant giggling that comes from inside. This follows the tent we built in his room a couple of days ago by draping a length of fabric (the sea turtle print Ceri picked up over a year ago) over his quilt rack, the bureau, and tied to the doorknob. He sat inside it and giggled, used his keys to “open” the “door”, crawled out, dashed around to the quilt rack and climbed in the “window” over and over. I fit inside that one, but I don’t fit inside the one HRH made today. So after Liam went to bed, HRH built an extension for the box playhouse. It’s really wonderful, and I can’t wait to see Liam’s reaction to it tomorrow.




My parents arrive in town tomorrow, too. Liam will be over the moon, I’m sure.

(I posted the Solstice sunrise photo to the appropriate entry, too.)

Round-Up, Part The Second: The Camera

Hmm, what next. Oh; the camera.

We took the camera in to a local shop to consult with someone about the popped-off lens, and were told that it would cost as much to fix it as to buy a new camera. When I expressed incredulity because the rest of the camera is fine, the clerk said apologetically that the lens was the most expensive part of a camera, and we’d need a new one. It was going to cost us somewhere in the range of $150 to $180, as well as losing our camera for six to eight weeks.

At this time of year? No thanks. So I did my homework and read reviews until I was cross-eyed, and bought a Canon A430 4.0mpx Powershot. It takes lovely pictures, and the lag time between shots is minimal, as all the reviews said — so long as you’re not using the flash. If the flash is being used (which, let’s face it, is most of the time for me because I do a lot of indoor photography and it’s December, for heaven’s sake, which means there’s next to no light anyway), depending on the ambient light it can take up to 15 seconds to recharge. I’m wondering if this has something to do with the level of the rechargeable batteries that I put in the camera, so I’ll be experimenting with other batteries over the next little while to see if that affects the wait time as the troubleshooting section of the manual said that low battery power can slow the flash down.

A marvellous redeeming feature, however, is the continuous shooting option. When set to this function, the camera will take pictures about every half-second for as long as you hold down the shutter (or until you run out of room on your memory card). (The flash still needs to recharge though, damn it.) And the focusing half-step before pressing the shutter down completely is great too.

Overall, I’m very pleased with it. It’s got a lot of terrific settings and modes, equivalent to or greater than our Olympus camera had. In lag time between when the shutter is pressed and the picture taken, it’s faster than the other camera in capturing a moment; but the other camera was quicker at recharging the flash and being ready to take a second photo. Win some, lose some. December light isn’t exactly ideal for photography anyway, so that can only get better.

This Morning’s Miracle

I didn’t lose the music on my hard drive! Or apparently not; when I try to look in the file manually nothing appears, but the player just searched for and found all the media files that were there before, and is playing them. I’m not examining the teeth of this pony too closely; I’m just enjoying the songs.

Today I have been sorting through old CD-ROMs, installing yet more programs as I encounter a need for them, and tweaking yet more things. I have to get used to new versions of certain programs, too, which is taking time.

Is It Me?

Things are basically functional again.

However, in trying to install an ethernet network card into my laptop on Wednesday the Win98 install went mildly wonky, which means I have to hit the enter button a few times in order to get past missing file notifications (the card ended up not working in the end after all, and ye gods but my chunky little 1994 laptop is ssllooww — determined, yes, but it processes with the speed of a tortoise). Also, yesterday the digital camera fell off a shelf as I was trying to pick it up and the lens got whacked and jammed at a bad angle. The good news about that is once HRH got the lens off, everything else functioned perfectly well, so we’ll just need to take it to repair/replace the lens. And soon, because Christmas is coming.

It hasn’t been my week. I’m keeping a low profile and staying out of Fate’s sight because I don’t want to think about what might break next.

Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding are on the menu tonight, to be consumed in good company. Let’s hope the oven doesn’t blow a fuse again.

Are We Live?

I’m moderately back. In the end Blade reinstalled Windows, and the only things I have lost are my email and all of my music. I’m more annoyed about the email, because there was a bunch of messages I was keeping for reference and I’ve lost all my addresses.

Ironically, all the stuff I back up regularly — namely my photos, book document files, web work, and so forth, anything except programs really — were unaffected, as they were isolated beyond a partition for exactly this reason. So yay for my cleverness, and the main lesson I have learned here is that in the future I’ll store my music behind a partition as well. I backed up my Firefox bookmarks not long ago, so I’ll have those once I dig them out. Obviously I’ll start backing up my email regularly too; I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me before. I’ll slowly build up my music again by copying my CDs to the computer when I feel like listening to them as I work. Alas, I have lost half of my Vivaldi playlist, but it’s not as crucial as it was earlier when the majority of Il Maestro (etc) was spilling out of my brain into a file at the rate of five thousand words a day.

Damn. It occurs to me that I lost my fonts as well. Downloading fonts, however, is a lovely way to avoid doing work.

I still have to set up accounts and restore settings, and setting up all my email will take a while too. Thanks for your continued patience.

Woes

Well, the good news is that my editor loves the new version of ESTC, and is sending it along to the next step of the publishing process as well as submitting a delivery payment request.

The bad news is that my computer is dead, thanks to an embedded virus on a CD from a trusted source that initialized as soon as the CD started spinning in the drive . My virus shield caught one virus, I quarantined it, and was accepting the restart command when the shield caught another virus, but too late;the system began its reboot. And now that second virus is hanging the Windows load, and crashing the system between the XP load screen and the login screen.

My in-house tech support talked me through the first couple of options for safe restart before he left on a business trip, but nothing worked; it keeps crashing. He’s now gone and I’m left with a non-functional computer. I have a second hard drive that Jan gave me a while back, which I theoretically can put in the place of the bugged one once it’s reformatted and Windows loaded onto it… except I’ve never done that myself before. In theory I can do this, then set my original hard drive as a slave, run Windows off the new drive, and go in and run my anti-virus program on it manually, but theory and computers rarely seem to co-occupy the same level of reality. I may just wait till he’s home again on Saturday and let him do it.

In the meantime, I have my clunky twelve-year old laptop to write with, and I think the dial-up still works; I haven’t checked it in ages. (Or I could try plugging the router into it, if it even has a slot and the required innards for that.) And I can come downstairs into the basement to use HRH’s computer if necessary, which is where I am now, and I hate this mouse and this keyboard and argh.

I’m thankful I didn’t try to load Dreamweaver onto my computer any earlier than this, because if it killed my system before I’d handed the book in, I think I would have done myself an injury. As it is, this is just really, really annoying. You’ll see much less of me over the next four days, and don’t send me anything vital by email, because I won’t get it.