Geekity

I ran across this webcomic in my wanderings… it’s all rather geeky and agnostic, but this one in particular caught my eye.

Do you see why?

I …

worked on fic today.

gasssssp

I think I may get one done…. Maybe it’s all the hiking and thinking.

Probably didn’t even miss me, did you?

The server on which my website was hosted was down and out for two and a half days. When it came back up there was a disturbing 0 megabytes of info on my site. Evidently they restored from backups successfully.

I think there must be some sort of synchronicity to it all - last weekend I downloaded a backup of the site and saved it on my thumb drive. Maybe the server took it as permission to die?

Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Funky Winkerbean

I haven’t read Funky Winkerbean in forever and ever. It seems to me it used to be about… Funky Winkerbean. But the folks over at Comic Curmudgeon have been calling it Funky Cancerbean, and other silly names, and thereafter I sometimes tuned in, only to find one of the characters died of cancer after long and dramatic suffering, and now day after day the husband of Lisa the cancer victim has been laying on a couch talking through his reaction in flashback.

The funny thing about this is, the only people who use the couch in therapy are traditional psychoanalysts, which are horribly expensive and not covered by insurance, and are a dying breed. You might find them on the east coast, and I have heard of one in L.A. over here on the west coast, but you don’t just find them everywhere in the country. Also, in a few strips the analyst is sitting alongside the couch, and traditionally he would be sitting out of the client’s line of sight. ALSO - psychoanalysis done traditionally takes years. You don’t just go until you’re done. The goals are different. A grief group, I could buy into, but the couch thing? not so much.

The public view of therapy is a skewed and incorrect one. This is one of those things that only perpetuates the notion that psychotherapy involves couches and shrinks with a pen and paper to take down what you’re saying.

Yes, this is therapy geekiness - but I’m a big geek. What do you expect?

Much clipping and snipping, followed by four hours of rendering various bits of video, followed by…

“[application] terminated unexpectedly. Reopen?”

NAYYYYAAAAAAAAAAHHHHARRRRRRRGH.

So the vid I was working on will be delayed until next weekend.

I am somewhat proud of myself for clearing out that last pile of old papers and rearranging the office somewhat. Housecleaning can be so cathartic.

I have been experiencing a burning issue.

Oh, don’t worry, no medication issues to whine about. No, this is about the dvd/cd drive on my beloved Powerbook slowly going wonky. It’s been very finicky about brand of disc, and making shiny coasters out of more and more cd’s lately, so I went forth and sought a solution.

It’s a shiny external dvd writer - which also likes dual layer dvds as well, handy if you’re backing up tons of stuff. Sony, if you’re curious. A hundred bucks. And three hours later I have backed up much purchased music that only exists on the hard drive, making it available for enjoyment in the nearest dashboard mounted cd unit.

Whilst at the computer store, I also noticed Kingston memory in the size and speed necessary to upgrade the Powerbook for seventy bucks. You cannot quite imagine my glee at knowing that I will be able to multitask like crazy with my gig and a quarter of memory. (The quarter is on the motherboard.)

SpeakerToManagers - The Star Trek Cycle

Because I like this too.

Making Light: Abi Sutherland, on Catz

Why I continue to lurk in Making Light’s comment threads. OMG. NO WAI! LOTR be Lolcatterized!

Word of the day at work yesterday: assiduous. Using this in group supervision meant giving a definition, which was followed by some rather surprised stares. I do use words in conversation that no one else knows, apparently.

I was quite sad. It’s lonely being a word geek.

I upgraded Wordpress, deleted old files, and found some new themes. This took a while because part of the process is making several backups of things. Losing hours of work makes you paranoid that way.

Of course, my FTP client demanded updating too. And so did the html/php editor. Pretty much everything, in fact. Guess it’s been a while.

You do not see the page o’ mystery. These are not the droids you’re looking for. Move along.

I just got one of those privacy notices from some foundation in another state that I am certain I have nothing to do with. They have the right mailing address with incomplete information on it, but it got to me anyway. All legitamite contacts would have correct info on them.

So I’m scratching my head at the PO Box return address in New York and the return mail address in Texas, and staring at the information they want me to include on the form — my name, address AND social security number? — and decide that I don’t care to tell them how to use my information if they can’t explain to me adequately who they are, how much they know about me, HOW they know about me, and why I should acknowledge to them that I exist. These privacy notices supposedly determine how they use my information. Well, I don’t know what they know. I’m not giving them something they may not know.

There is no phone number on this. I remain dubious. I do not like this, Sam I am, I would not like to be part of a scam. I would not like it in a box, I would not like it wearing socks. I do not like your little scam, Sam.

‘Vista Capable’ Machines May Not Be (TreeHugger)

… are fifty kinds of awesome. I helped a friend install XP via Boot Camp and Parallels. I like both ways, it’s kinda fun to see the whole display spin about and turn into Windows as it has never been before - it runs! Fast! It doesn’t access hardware directly in Parallels, there are issues with USB drives and with cd based copy protection, but if you’re attempting to be compatible with work as my friend is, that’s about the least painless way to do it. It’ll even share a wireless internet connection with OS X so you can run update and patch XP until it’s sorta okay.

Me, I’d dual-boot Linux and learn it, in preparation for the eventual popularization of OS X. The mundanes will no doubt end up with Vista and be mightily stymied by the copy protection that will cripple your PC. Peter Gutmann wrote an analysis of Vista’s true cost that has been blogged and re-blogged, but outlines some of the issues at stake. To quote: In July 2006, Cory Doctorow published an analysis of the anti-competitive nature of Apple’s iTunes copy-restriction system that looked at the benefits of restrictive DRM for the company that controls it. The only reason I can imagine why Microsoft would put its programmers, device vendors, third-party developers, and ultimately its customers, through this much pain is because once this copy protection is entrenched, Microsoft will completely own the distribution channel. In the same way that Apple has managed to acquire a monopolistic lock-in on their music distribution channel (an example being the Motorola ROKR fiasco, which was so crippled by restrictions that a Fortune magazine senior editor reviewed it as the STNKER), so Microsoft will totally control the premium-content distribution channel. In fact examples of this Windows content lock-in are already becoming apparent as people move to Vista and find that their legally-purchased content won’t play any more under Vista (the example given in the link is particularly scary because the content actually includes a self-destruct after which it won’t play any more, so not only do you need to re-purchase your content when you switch from XP to Vista, but you also need to re-purchase it periodically when it expires. In addition since the media rights can’t be backed up, if you experience a disk crash you get another opportunity to re-purchase the content all over again. This is by design: as Jack Valenti, former head of the MPAA, put it, “If you buy a DVD you have a copy. If you want a backup copy you buy another one”). It’s obvious why this type of business model makes the pain of pushing content protection onto consumers so worthwhile for Microsoft since it practically constitutes a license to print money.

Vista itself is reported to require you to re-purchase it, should you ever have a need of installing it more than the 2-3 times they allow. You will never own Vista. You will lease it until your hard drive crashes, until spyware and viriii cripple you and make it more financially feasible to start over with a wiped drive, until some piece of software wrecks up the OS and you end up reinstalling. And then you will lease it again. This is actually nothing new. It’s just now they’re really coding the OS to enforce it strictly. No more calling M$ to beg them to let you have an ungodly-long string of numbers to re-activate XP.

If you read nothing else of Gutmann’s piece, scroll down and read the final comments, and the quotes from people buying thousands of dollars of equipment that won’t work as advertised.

My next computer will be a Macbook, if I can ever find a reason to give up on my Powerbook. You?

How to install Linux on a dead badger

Any script kiddie can install Red Hat on a toaster, but it takes real skill to install into a dead badger.

All fixed. Tech support helpful. Groovy.

This may or may not post.

It isn’t certain what will post and what will not. But tech support is on the job.

Now if only I can get the fic back.

gr. arg.

And here I am doing ten things at once to distract my brain from workplace politics (gah), funny looks from parental units (ARG) who don’t quite believe in therapy but feel they need to drag in the kids to convince other entities they are doing due diligence (OF COURSE they have the best interests of the kid in mind, no question of that, we just sort of disagree what that is…), and the fifteen mistakes I made in pacing myself, overbooking myself and generally underestimating my Superhuman Qualities that led to not eating lunch….

So of course I’m working on the website, watching an episode of SG1, working on a story, and googling myself. Which leads me to discover random bits of what other people are saying about my fic, and also that Google leads me to other people’s link lists that include my handle, my stories, my livejournal…. I don’t remember google being so thorough before. All kinds of those fake link farm pages turned up, too. Also a bazillion posts to ASC echoed through various forums.

I should probably be reading a book instead, but it just isn’t enough at the moment. Maybe after I do some yoga and clear my head a little.

Or maybe take something to kill the head cold. Since there is no official cure, it may take some time to trial-and-error myself something that works. I’m thinking of starting with cheesecake and working my way through the ice cream, chocolate, caffienated beverage, and alcohol food groups. Of course, the cold may be preferable to a diabetic coma, but I’ll take my chances. I have a whole weekend to figure it out. If I exhaust all the options in the alcohol group I bet I can count on sleeping through next week. By then, the head cold should be gone.

CBC Radio | Quirks & Quarks | December 2, 2006

I have deleted Office. Yes, I dragged that folder to the trash, buh bye, no more half-a$$ed grammar checker trying to make meaningless sentences, no more accusations of piracy.

I have new software to do my bidding, and oh the joys of not having Word’s hideous code cluttering my hard drive!

Kiss my asterisk, M$.

No more bloatware!

Tonight I fixed Roommate’s sputtering laptop. Ever since he went through the two days of BSOD (that icky blue screen that causes reboots and crying), the sound in Windows has been stuttering and annoying. Reinstalling drivers didn’t work.

So I reinstalled XP. You have to boot from the cd, hit setup, wait for it to detect the installation you have, and repair the existing installation. (Don’t fall for the Recovery option - that will give you a command prompt.)

It took a long while but it came back up and the sound is fine. I just had to brutalize it into working.

A while back, I posted about Mellel, and the torture of Word deciding it wanted me to stop being a pirate. (Since Office is the only software other than Tiger that I paid money to install on my Mac, I find that funny in a sad, Microsoft-hating sort of way. Everything else came with the Powerbook or was free for downloading.)

Well, now that I have a nominal income, I can actually pay for some software. And I revisit Mellel, and go on a walkabout to look at other OS X friendly possibilities, only to find that it’s still pretty much Mellel, since the others have some not-so-happy-making features.

Pages (comes with iWork, sold by Apple) will save to PDF and a variety of other formats, but I dislike the way it handles documents.

AbiWord is free, runs in X11, but doesn’t seem to import/export doc files and has other limitations I dislike.

NeoOffice and OpenOffice… eh. Hate the interface.

Nisus Writer looks like Mellel, only doesn’t quite do everything and costs more money.

Mariner Write looks almost exactly like Word. Costs more than Mellel. I’d be more inclined to keep Word and pay nothing.

I suppose I could always move to something like LaTeX. At this point, though, I’m too tired to get totally geeked out and into learning something all over again. A word processor suits my time and energy better.

Which brings me back around to Mellel, which does everything including footnotes, bibliographies, outlines - not just in-text outlines, but an actual outline of the document you’re working on, for use in navigation - sections, tables, and all kinds of formatting and style-making and so forth. If I ever wanted to write for publication in the academic, non-fiction way, this would be the bee’s knees. And it would be just peachy for churning out a nice long complicated novel.

Tomorrow’s my supposed day off - I’ll be running errands and visiting my second semi-part-time-almost-job, and probably balancing my checkbook. At which point I’ll make the decision and press the paypal button.

As a member of the Microsplerf Provider Outlet Geekfarm, I note with a certain … bad taste in my mouth the oncoming wave of Vista upgrades in our near(? who knows with M$?) future. Having seen the previews/promo crap, I have thoughts of becoming an unwashed hermit living under a bridge. Or possibly going back to basic clerical and pretending I have no knowledge of this thing called Winblows, excuse me, I need to answer the phone.

Already, the fun begins, in a conversation with Friend Who Moved Away via phone the other night.

FWMA: I hated Macs! I couldn’t figure out the Macs in the labs at school. blah blah blah confusing blah argh splutter.

Me: *thinking about all the ways Vista looks like Tiger* Uh huh.

FWMA: Remember when we took comp exams on them? I was so stressed out already! And then I clicked on something I thought would do blah, and it did bling, and I was all, AAAAH!

Me: *thinking about how I won’t want to answer the phone at Geekfarm ever again* Uh. huh. Tell you what - don’t ever get another computer.

FWMA: Whaaaaat?

Me: Use what you like - what you have right now, just the way it is. Transfer the hard drive to the next computer you get. Burn backups of it and keep them safe. Trust me. You’ll be happier.

Because people don’t like change. Think about how hard it is to give up something you like - soda, chocolate, ice cream - or start something new, like an exercise program. The litany, every time we read about another woman who’s spent a lifetime being abused, is “why doesn’t she leave?” Well, she doesn’t like change. That’s her normal. She’s going back to him because he’s the devil she knows. The next man might drink AND beat her AND beat the kids, not just beat her. We learn patterns of behavior and they stick like super glue. The effort to change eludes us — and in the case of domestic violence, it’s the effort to change, plus the economics of being deprived of money and freedom for so long, plus the realities of learned helplessness, of chronic low self esteem perpetuated by verbal putdowns, and of being convinced beyond the shadow of a doubt that he WILL find her no matter what and kill her/the dog/the kids/her parents, which might actually be a real danger, plus the shame….

I think Windows is abusive. M$ is abusive. They’re the bully in the schoolyard, the fascist government with all the money and power, and the uneducated masses who think reinstalling every few months is normal just can’t find the right path to freedom. The guys at Geekfarm quote off hourly rates and I don’t doubt some people strapped for cash just go buy another $400 computer rather than fix the one they have, out of sheer frustration. The ones that do pony up the money keep right on using the software. There’ll be an update next week, which is the equivalent of flowers and gushing promises that it will never happen again baby, just come home…. And the cycle continues. Tension builds. The little signs begin — the occasional error message, having to ctrl-alt-delete to end a program that won’t respond, that one time the computer “can’t find system disk” and then it starts to happen more often, and before you know it, you hit a key out of desparation and the disk formats, and those six years of files are gone.

At which point you go to the PC shelter for crisis services, and the case manager has to call in a specialist to help you recover. You get the PC back all shiny and working, your data back in place, and it’s as if nothing ever happens. Until the tension builds, and the messages start…. For someone who relies on the computer for their livelihood, this is costly. You’re at the mercy of the whimsy of a capricious, uncaring, unpredictable creature that sometimes appears to like nothing better than torturing –

I really do need to find a job in my field, don’t I? I’m seeing pathology everywhere.

Bleh.

Don’t worry. I have a therapist.

“This laptop needs a new power connector soldered to the motherboard. Take it apart and see what you can do.”

“Okay.”

About a zillion tiny screws in four sizes and two lengths later, pieces of laptop are scattered across the workbench. I have a motherboard. And no soldering skills. My boss gets out his gear. A while later, I’m able to put it back together.

I have one extra screw. Hmm.

Aaaaand, I forgot to put thermal paste on the heatsink. The laptop works for a while and abruptly turns off. System monitor indicates the cpu is too hot.

Disassembly is quicker the second time, and I don’t have to totally break it down - just lift the keyboard, the fan assembly, the heatsink, and then clean with solvent, apply paste, carefully reseat heatsink… eight dinky screws, two not-dinky screws, a pop and a crack later, it’s all back together.

Still overheats and shuts off.

I make a boot floppy off a downloaded bios update, to see if the motherboard is giving the fan wonky instructions that might be fixed with the update.

Floppy drive won’t work.

I make a floppy-emulating boot cd off the bench system (the one with all the nifty software, like Nero). I boot to the cd.

The bios update program says I don’t have the adapter plugged in. Which is true - I’m using a universal adapter, as we discovered the one that went with the laptop was defective. I switch adapters and boot again. This time the bios update goes smoothly from the cd.

Still overheats. Still shuts off.

I left it that way. If you ask me, when the system won’t boot with the battery in, has a burnt out adapter, and randomly shuts off? Mama needs a new laptop. If it were only the battery and the adapter, well, those aren’t cheap but they’re cheaper than a new laptop. The motherboard on top of those things, however, is very likely to cost more than the system’s worth at this point. But it’s up to the boss to do something with it.

And in the second reassembly, I had… a different screw left over. Oy.

As it turns out, it’s possible to burn half a spindle of DVD-R disks before discovering that the Powerbook just doesn’t like that brand. There’s nothing wrong with my laptop that buying different media won’t fix.

I’m about half done with the inventory at Geekfarm. I was pulling out hundreds of tools from a messy pile on a floor-level shelf when my phone rang - my friend, when told what I was doing, said ‘So you’re rearranging a closet?’ When I stopped laughing I told her it was more of a high-ceilinged room full of shelves and boxes from floor to ceiling, and that the boxes on top were actually blocking out the fluorescent lighting. I’ve had to be extra careful as the piles are so disorganized it’s possible to run across a hand saw without realizing it. As I demonstrated today. Luckily it had a sleeve on the blade.

Wednesday, I will be counting IDE ribbon cables. Also CPU fans and heat sinks, and bags and bags and boxes of zip ties and patch cables and BNC cables and connectors. Aren’t you jealous?

Tomorrow, I will be putting the finishing touches on my room - I rearranged the furniture, which was about the only way to get things clean. The back of my desk had an inch of cat hair clinging to it.

I have still not gotten my diploma, nor have I had one phone call to set up an interview. I am enduring lots of questions from well-meaning people - ‘how are you marketing yourself? how are you at interviews?’ I DON’T KNOW, I CAN’T TALK TO ANYONE - ALL I DO IS LEAVE VOICEMAIL. PLEASE STOP NAGGING ME ABOUT THINGS I CAN’T CONTROL. THX. BUH-BYE.

Sore subject, yes. ‘Marketing yourself’ at this point is essentially spamming the world with resumes and eager cover letters. No one has a budget for novice interns.

I will be offline for an undetermined number of hours/days, as the Powerbook is going in to be looked at. The haphazard rejection of blank DVDs and some not-blank ones has me thinking the drive might be doing what so many other Superdrives have done, ie. going bad. With about six months of Apple Care left, I can get this looked at. There’s finally a local authorized service I can use.

In the meantime, I’m leaving you with Far Afield (see above links), a very-first-drafty Captain and Counselor/Voyager crossover, and also a time travel story, and also very likely a J/C story, because watching most of Voyager in a minimal amount of time has me thinking about it again.

See you in a few hours/days.

Today I shipped back a defective video/alarm device. This sounds simple. Box it, label it, call for pickup. It was not simple.

Firstly, it was picked up in the store in the LA area by Boss. He handed it to me and wrote out a list of projects including ’set up DVR for H.’ So I took the DVR, which is a metal case enclosing a removable drive bay and a system board with a couple of cables, and the hard drive, garden-variety 120GB IDE device, and followed the instructions in the manual.

The thing didn’t give me a menu. I swapped the hard drive to the other location with the other setting - no menu. I swapped the whole works to a different monitor. Then I called tech support, who walked me through the whole thing again and said “exchange it for a different/new one.”

Okay, well, that does it for this project for the day. But wait! I don’t know what shipper we use, nor do I have account numbers. A call to Boss reveals that we have an account with !Shipper, and I should call them. Which I do. No, I don’t have a preprinted label. “hmmm. hold please.” *canned music* “I’ll have the driver bring you a label. Write this on it.”

A call to Store, and I have to explain to two different people what’s wrong and why they should exchange it. “We’ll test it when it gets here.” Okay, lady, you’ll see. There’s not much to it — if you plug it in and there’s no menu, something’s wrong. There’s a whole single board in the thing - it’s pretty obvious it’s something to do with that board. I could sit here plugging it in and unplugging it and it would do the same thing each time. I know - I tried it about two dozen times already.

So. With RMA number and shipper arranged, I set about packaging it. So far, it’s taken an hour of fiddling about with swapping parts and doing it over with tech support, and another half hour of horrible hold music and repeated begging to get to this point. Aaaand the box falls apart when I pick it up by the handle. It’s a sort of clamshell thing, and the bottom pulls apart if you do anything too strenuous, like… pick it up. I can’t ship it this way. I need a box big enough to hold it. For an hour I search — through the inventory room where none of the boxes are the right dimensions, through the junk room which is keyboards and monitors and hardly anything boxed, and then to the neighbor’s to beg for something. I wind up cutting and taping and making my own box, which looks like crap and isn’t too stable. I return to the junk room and… wait. There’s an old computer box in the corner I didn’t notice before. Sure enough, the styrafoam wedges that used to cushion an HP Pavilion work just swell in cushioning this fall-apart retail packaging.

Half the day is now gone.

I spend the rest of the day trying to build a computer for another video surveillance project. All I need is a case that works with the parts. I find, in the labyrinth of boxed cases and flotsam and jetsam in the inventory room, a full tower with an appropriate power supply, and I’m prepping it, pulling out drive bays and setting up the risers to put in the main board and organizing all the parts and dusting it out, and hey! there’s a hard drive for it in stock, and we even have cd drives handy. I know we have power cables because I only counted all 78 of them last week. Everything’s spiffy until I realize… the back panel of the mobo doesn’t fit. The small rectangular opening where the outputs are is too small. The motherboard won’t sit right because the panel won’t go in. A WHOLE .5 CENTIMETER ruined this.

ARRRRRRRrrrrrg.

Boss isn’t too upset. I’m the only one bothered by my inefficiency. But, ARRRRg.

Some days, you just want to take a power saw to life.

Cast of Characters:

RM: Roommate
ME: Lori, fixer of computers
LT: Laptop of DOOM
BSOD: BLUE SCREEN OF DEEEEEATH
MS: Microsoft, purveyor of inadequate error messages

Act 1

Enter: BSOD!!!!!! MUHUHAHAHAHA! ::munches loudly::
RM: Oh no! My nice new laptop given to me by my whole nice family for my birthday! Woe! And I didn’t even save the game!
LT: eeeeeeEEEEEEE ::blink:: ::crash::
ME: Well, shoot. ::reboot, insert diagnostic cd::

– a year passes –

ME: ::reads another book as chkdsk ticks slowly through its verification of the hard drive::

– another year passes –

ME: ::watches memory test crawl through its sequence, reads another book::

– another year passes —

ME: Time to reboot.
BSOD: HAHAHAHAHAAAAA! NOT SO FAST! BEHOLD, CRYPTIC ERROR CODES THAT COULD MEAN ANYTHING FROM BAD HARDWARE TO BAD DRIVERS TO BAD SOFTWARE!
ME: Geeze. Where’s the little icon of Windows twirling its mustache?

Act 2

ME: ::inserts XP disk, reboots:: Let’s see if it can repair you.
LT: Oh, hey! watch me boot to the CD! No Problemo!
ME: I’ll go look up the BSOD codes while I wait. On my Powerbook. Well… yes. It could be anything. Still. Guess I need to work on it some more. Finished rebooting?
LT: I want to run chkdsk again!
RM: Oh no! the screen is blue!
ME: That doesn’t mean anything at this point, it’s running chkdsk again. It may be done sometime today.
RM: Guess I didn’t want to get that proposal done today either.
LT: ::thinks really really really hard, increases another percent toward done::
ME: ::takes shower, reads blogs, edits webpage for a while, watches hummingbird family feeding outside, drinks another cup of tea, writes fic for a while, edits another one, returns to check on progress::
LT: Look, another ten percent!
ME: Sigh.

Act 3

RM: AH! BLUE!
ME: That’s the sky. Relax.
LT: Hey, I finally finished and rebooted! I’m working again!
ALL: YAAAAY!
Error message: Boo! I don’t work!
ME: ::removes AOL:: No. You don’t.
RM: Hey, I was getting error messages from that before.
ME: I suspect we may have solved the issue. It would appear not to be hardware, and now that AOL is gone it should speed up the system in general and make the world a better place. Would you like a tombstone for your AOL?
RM: No thanks. Would you like a margarita?
ME: Does Windows crash?
::canned laughter::

THE END

I’m not sure, but it appears to be.

the new fic site?

I think I like the aggregation of everything in one long tree. By category. The link to the image on the archive page appears broken, but it’s a rotating image script with a flaw in it that I’m trying to fix. Every hour there should be a different image from my library, but something in the script goes “boink” every time. I’m doing research into php and textile.

Also, not all the fic is there yet. Also, still figuring out special codes, like italics and so forth - textile does things differently, but it’s a matter of search and replace to fix. But it’s like a blog, only not, and with a few tweaks it will be ready for public consumption.

After many redesign-no-don’t thoughts about my website —

which, y’know, takes my mind off such dire thoughts as “I will never find a job in my field WAAAA!” –

I hit upon an evil scheme. I have yet to discover the hideous consequence embedded in this scheme, but I’m sure there is one. Something along the lines of breaking every link on the site, perhaps. Stranding half the stories in limbo, perhaps. Losing some file or deleting a mysterious directory that hasn’t been changed since 2003 only to find that it was the one critical piece of the whole works.

Anyway, the evil scheme? Install Textpattern and tweak the thing until it looks the way I want and contains all the fic and stuff, then add a few redirects and wait for error messages to pop up, then add more redirects, until people are retrained on how to find the fic. I can update where I know there are recs or links (seriously, there are maybe six of these places, and they show up in my web stats). I don’t have a lot of files, and could probably keep the old static pages up as well, just in case. At least for a while.

Why would I do all this? Why not? I keep threatening to learn more about web design and whatnot. I keep thinking I’ll redesign the static pages. Part of me says ‘what’s wrong with them? they’re portable and they’re uncomplicated.’ But if there’s one thing I’m really good at, it’s complicating things. And anything’s portable.

Today, I decided to migrate my site to some sort of content managing software, thinking it would simplify the whole process if I could a) cut and b) paste and c) click a button that would immediately post the Big Wad of Text to the internet without my having to match all the little code widgets with the little slash that turns ‘em off, miss a squillion, then have to comb through the pages looking for the missing thingie.

I should probably sound more technical than that when discussing my revamp of the Geekfarm’s website, shouldn’t I?

Anyway, when I came back from my reality check (me? revamp? BWA! that would be work!) I then decided to actually do some job searching. Which I do every day without fail, really, what with being underemployed and all. So I hit the major job search sites, signed up for yet another bot that will email me jobs that match my criteria, altered a bot I had set up at Huge HMO’s site so it would stop sending me nursing job ops, and twenty minutes later I’d sent another resume and moved on to a glass of tea and some serious reorganization of my iTunes folder.

And then I read some fic, and totally fell for the author’s site — wow. I could make my site that organized and wonderful and easy to use. So now I’m staring at instructions on how to do that. But I can guarantee that now that the LJ feed is fixed, I will look at the complexities involved and say, uh, Self, y’all’s crazy. And I might have a fic done soon at this rate.

If I can quit playing Civilization IV. Man. It’s great to be queen!

ADHD? Only since I got the internet. Seriously, every five minutes it’s something else. I used to be able to focus well enough to read WHOLE BOOKS in a sitting. I am so jealous of my younger self.

This apartment hosts two laptops, two desktops, four cell phones and a PDA.

I have a Treo and a Pocket PC that Geekfarm signed out to me. I also have my laptop and personal cell and old moldy win98 desktop. The Treo plus a PDA would seem to be overkill, but the PDA was solely for the purpose of bossgeek “beaming” his notes to me from his PDA so I can then invoice people for the hours he spent anti-virusing and updating and installing stuff.

Of course, the Pocket PC and Treo do not speak to my Powerbook. They do speak to my personal cell in Bluetooth, however, and to each other. Roommate’s laptop doesn’t talk to anyone, so far as I can tell, nor does his antiquated desktop.

I’m having to put my head back into geek mode, and also into helpdesk mode — a customer brought in her desktop today saying it wasn’t booting, but was putting horizontal red lines on the screen. Of course, my first thought is, that’s a display problem - and the pc booted fine and displayed fine. And then I thought, I ought to run antivirus — then promptly got involved with three other tasks, and wala! the customer comes back, and I explain, and she says she’s going to pick up a flatscreen LCD and that should fix the problem. And then as an afterthought, she asks about a message that pops up about windows backdoor.

Ooooooh, should have run that antivirus. Because messages don’t pop up about the actual windows backdoor that’s part of windows, and there are trojans with ‘backdoor’ in the name.

It figures that after I spend thousands of dollars on an education in my ideal career, I can’t find work, or even a good volunteer gig, in that field - and then find a decent job in a different career path I’d given up on. AAAARG. I’m so far behind in geekery that I feel pretty dumb listening to the guys talk in shorthand about networking crap.

deviantART: LineTo experimental by ~Volcanic-Penguin

Move your mouse around. Click on the little dials at the bottom. Have a ball.

My Askimet spam barrier has caught more than 10,000 spams since I installed it a couple weeks ago.

Wow.

… isn’t what you think it is. Seriously.

There’s research ongoing into happiness, and it’s not just “what makes you happy” it’s “what are the biological components” and debunking lots of assumptions about what would make us happy. There are studies going on that look at happy people and not-happy people, what helps the not-happy, what doesn’t help, what parts of the brain and/or chemistry are involved….

I’m listening to a program right now about happiness and whether you can manipulate it. You can. Check it out if you have decent bandwidth (you can download and listen, too).

I installed Askimet just a bit ago. It’s a spam catching plugin for Wordpress 2.0. A few seconds after, I refreshed my dashboard. It caught 9 spam in the milliseconds after installation. One click and they were gone for good, submitted to Askimet’s shared database o’ spam and deleted from my blog.

v. impressive. Good bye, texas holdem and party poker!

Much better. Widgets and library are working, I’m ready for business.

Nice Person I Know: I’m so sick of my computer crashing. My brother’s got to come over and do a wipe and reinstall.
Me: I used to do that frequently, too.
NPIK: Really?
Me: Yep. I stopped using Windows and the need to reinstall every week was gone. Also, I don’t fuss with the spyware and the malware and the virii, either.
NPIK: REALLY?
Me: Yep. I got a Macintosh.
NPIK: *o_0* But those are expensive.
Me: Perhaps, but I’ll still be using it in five years. With upgraded operating system. Possibly more memory or a different hard drive, but still. I’m quite happy with it ’cause I’m not a big time game addict.
NPIK: But when I get a laptop I’d rather spend $500.
Me: Okay, but a laptop that cheap will still have more problems than if you spent a couple thou on a Windows based nicer model laptop. In computers you tend to get what you pay for. They’re sort of like cars that way. And if you can’t fix it or upgrade it yourself, you’ll end up paying over the life of the machine as much as if you just sprung for the nice new upscale model with a long warranty.
NPIK: O_O but I don’t want to spend that much money on a laptop….
Me: Suit yourself.
long uncomfortable pause

I think I’ll shift to:

Person: I need to have my brother come fix my computer, it’s all crashing and stuff.
Me: YOU have a BROTHER who fixes COMPUTERS? Is he like single? OMG!!! SO COOL!!1! I totally love computerzzzz!!

I may have found the solution - Mellel, which is less than a hundred bucks and especially spiffy for the academic author. Also, the only software I’ve found that originated in Israel. Am demo-ing a copy now - it opens Word files, and while I’m not certain if Word will go the other way yet, it’s worth playing with. $35 for a student version, 49 for a full version. I must say that it seems to do some things differently, and more appealingly, than Word.

Lately, Word has been throwing up a window alerting me that another installation of MS Office is running and I am not allowed to run two of the same program on the network, so it’s shutting me down. This can be very annoying when you have several long documents open and are editing like a mad thing while trying to polish a resume and finish a homework assignment.

It’s even more annoying that I am NOT in fact running two installations of the same software. I am running ONE, which I PURCHASED with my own MONEY all fair and square. So in spite of this I am being SCREWED by M$’s antipiracy measures. I am also not running it on a network, unless you count the internet - and I know that I did not upload a copy of my key or my software, and therefore no one is using them unless they’re very good guessers, and why bother? There are plenty of hacked versions floating about.

I downloaded OpenOffice the other day and was thoroughly frustrated with it - the word processor refreshes constantly on my system, and I don’t care much for typing in a disco. So I am shopping for an alternative word processor/office package, because I am soon to graduate and no longer need Office to be my primary software choice. It’s not very likely that I’ll require PowerPoint unless, at some point in the far distant future, I will do presentations, at which point I would likely pick up a copy of Apple’s office software, which is totally cheaper than M$’s version with the same functionality.

Roommate asked about the Macbook, as in, would I get one. Well, probably I would - but I wouldn’t put Windows on it. That’s a little like sticking a VW engine in a Hummer. Like, WHY?

There are yarn geeks, fabric geeks, and glue geeks - yea, verily, I have discovered a whole new world.

I had mostly stopped being crafty while in grad school. Then a friend announced a small sprog would henceforth appear, and oy, silly me. First thought I had was “let’s make something for her!”

I’ve visited the Big Chain Store of All Things Craft several times now. I have rediscovered a group of people who have a fandom of wool, cotton and acrylic. And I have been sucked in. Every time I think of Just One More Thing I Could Make Real Quick(tm), I go — and I have not just one skein of soft purple velvet spun, I have 4 oz of baby boucle, and oh my, that would make a nice vest for friend K for Christmas, and look a sale on fun fur! I could make something from fun fur! And decoupage - I did that once! And look, how neat that quilt is turning out! and all the ladies knitting - wow, I should learn to knit! And ZOMG I didn’t know you could do that with cardboard and paint! At which point I have to force myself to run, not walk, toward checkout, lest the next hobby sink its cold fangs into me.

And then when I finish a project, I have leftover yarn. Then it’s “OH if I had just a little more of it I could make — ” and another skein goes on the shopping list, which will no doubt be accompanied by a dozen other colors that just JUMPED INTO MY BASKET HONEST and now I have to make another afghan for someone Christmas-is-coming-soon!

This is how it starts. And soon, whenever someone opens the hall closet, there will be a cry of “oh!” followed by the sounds of suffocating under a pile of fluffy soft yarn.

WSJ.com - Bloggers React to Windows-on-Mac

I have a new drive - better, bigger, stronger, faster. It’s the bionic drive! My backup of everything is taking a lot less time than it did with the LaCie. Viva la data!

Things I learned this week:

If I keep the external HD actively transferring files it won’t lose them. Thus, leaving files moving to and fro saves them. I need a new HD.

If you try to start a group for socially anxious women, no one will show up.

450 out of 600 hours accomplished this week. 150 hours to go. 9 weeks left til graduation. All I need is 17 hours/week. Since that’s my average, I may make it yet. No, not positive enough - I will make it!

High maintenance clients = pain in the ****. Especially when you’re part of a clinic expected to serve the client’s needs.

Yeah, I took a long time to come up with that title, and it’s still lame.

I have an external Firewire drive, bought way back when I had a HORRIBLE CRASH that wiped out a lame draft of some things I was working on, plus some schoolwork, plus some recipes and other collected stuff. Well, I had a complete backup of my laptop on it plus about 20GB of files that I just saved right on there….

…and this morning I opened it and 20GB of stuff had just. disappeared.

Magic. Gone.

Zap.

Like, all the backup stuff was there. But all the extras were gone. And then I did a backup check, and some of the data….

I’m switching back to DVD-RWs, with ongoing current stuff on my thumb drive. There is no way that stuff JUST VANISHES and yet, it did. POOF. I did nothing. The night before, it was there. Eight hours later it was like the folders never existed. I’m not the only one it’s happened to either; google is your friend. So I updated the firmware, repartitioned, ran another backup, and tomorrow I’m running a few DVD-RWs through Toast just for good measure, and ooooo, there’s nothing like the adrenalin rush of an unreliable backup method, wheeee.

If you have a LaCie drive? Have a backup for your backup. I would have been really really really mad if I’d found that out the hard way.

1. leave program running on laptop, go to work
2. Come home to “your startup disk is out of space”
3. PANIC
4. Delete files like a mad… file deleter.
5. Think (finally) “where did that spare 25GB go off to?”
6. Force-Quit hung program, delete mondo file off desktop
7. Watch 25GB plus spare GB appear again.
8. Hug laptop.

Roommate gets tired of waiting for my laptop to watch DivX movies, so he bought a DVD player that plays them.

Now he’s out there watching a DivX disk. The player … isn’t infallible. It skips, halts, skips, stutters… plays for 5-20 minutes and randomly does it again. Can you guess what he’s watching if I post a transcript?

“– ergency power, got to kill it — ”

“– TER-MIN-ATE-EX –”

whiiirrrrrr buzzzzzzzz “Tell them to stop shooting at it!”

“–got to keep that thing ali–”

“It’s coming!” “Look out!”

“The killing stops, you got that? Is that clear?”

“–MIN-ATE–”

I wish I had pictures of Roommate freezing in mimickry of the people on the screen when the player halts.

.. but not without twisting its arm. For some reason my Powerbook, after months of reconnecting and disconnecting and reconnecting with the wireless router, went crackers and wouldn’t do it even after the router reconnected to the internet. I turned Airport off and on a bunch of times, restarted, rebooted, re-rebooted, made faces, begged, offered it chocolate, did a loose interpretation of Dance of Pleading to the Internet Gods, re-re-rebooted, used dialup, and googled for answers.

Finally I wandered off into the nonsensical. I went into network settings and changed the password to the wrong thing. Then tried again. Then changed it back to correct. Still nothing. I ran the “network diagnostic” button from safari — then it finally said, hey, duuuuh, there’s the internet! Which still gives the Mac a leg up on Windows — resorting to the help button in Windows generally gives you all kinds of information you didn’t really need, while apparently Macs make the help function… helpful.

What a concept.

My DSL inexplicably died last night. (Dropping me out of AIM and everything else I had going - sorry, Jemima.)

This morning it was still blinking orange on the router - the DSL signal is there but I’m not able to login to the network, So I’m on dialup trying to pay some bills and unable to open the bank page.

They’re testing the service this morning - hopefully they fix it soon. Gah. Arg.

I take books to read when I go to the clinic, just for days like today when three out of the four people scheduled call to cancel. (Which is a notch above the infamous “just doesn’t show up” — at least I’ve made that much of an impact on some of these folks. I tend to cut most of the clients a lot of slack, because I imagine that if I were hearing voices shouting in my ear that the cops were coming for me and the power strip I’m using to plug in the fan is bugged by THEM, I wouldn’t pay much attention to clocks either. Who knows what kind of voice comes from clocks?)

Usually the books are recent-published “keep up with the latest theory” kinds of tomes — not so thick, not so very steeped in psychodynamic (the latest iteration of Freud’s pet theories) theory. I checked a book out of the library that’s easily three inches thick, by a psychiatrist named Yalom. I’m familiar with him from a textbook for a class - the guy writes these long, lazy, anecdote-laden books about his approach to group therapy or just general therapy, and you could seriously hurt someone with them. Yalom has also written novels, logically involving a therapist in some way or another, and a few smaller books containing case studies or essays. Right now I’m in the middle of “Existential Therapy” which is his synthesis of a lot of the older theorists’ approaches, including Freud, Bandura, and a host of others you might not recognize. Including Helmuth Kaiser. I am now interested in finding Kaiser’s work; he wrote very little, a book and a play, and I am most interested in the play. But. He doesn’t exist at Amazon, or any of the usual places online. He doesn’t exist at the library, college or public. I found only one website with his name, the rest were all referencing Kaiser Wilhelm.

I have a professor who recently found two first edition copies of C.S. Lewis books in his storage unit. He has two sheds and a 10×10 storage full of books — I guess he’s been keeping them since the early 50’s. I asked him about this Kaiser fellow and he knew who it was, just not whether he had anything he wrote.

I’m thinking I’ll email Yalom. He has a website, after all. Maybe he has a copy he can scan? I’m guessing it’s so old that the texts are public domain…. Hmmm.

ETA: Well, that was fast. He emailed me within a couple hours of sending one to him and gave me a head’s-up to the editor of Kaiser’s work. It turns out that I was spelling Helmuth with a single L and amazon has two L’s, otherwise I would have found it without bugging people. Oh well!

Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex

or, if Larry Niven were prone to fanwankery.

The 17″ singing monitor was giving me a headache every time I tried to use it. Since this seemed to indicate a dying CRT, I’ve used it less and less. A gift of $$ on my birthday and a pretty good sale at Costco later, I have a Viewsonic 19″ LCD widescreen that works with laptop and desktop beautifully, and has the added benefit of being big enough that I can start up an episode of something or pop in a DVD and watch while in bed. Which I normally only do while ill, but if I do catch what’s been going around (any one of what’s going around, there seem to be a couple flu strains and various head colds about) I’m prepared.

And, at +- 8 lbs, the LCD doesn’t perpetuate that unsightly bow in the computer desk. Particle board wasn’t meant to carry a zillion pound CRT.

Woot!

Speaking of woot - check out woot.com. I added their RSS feed to Safari on the off chance they have a deal I’d like. Shipping is really reasonable. I wanted the amphibious remote control tank for my nephew, but they sold out in a big hurry….

I have now seen every single episode of the X Files. In order, from season one through season nine. We started via netflix last year and got a dvd every week or so (sometimes skipping due to absence of one or the other of us) and watched the poorly-written-ties-it-all-together-in-five-minutes finale tonight.

And may I say that it was limping along and needed to be put out of its misery.

Geeze.

The second to last episode was the WTF-iest of them all. It wasn’t entirely ludicrous in that there was a psychokinetic maladjust ex-test-subject throwing people through the roof of his house. It was the writing, the actors being directed to smile goonily as Skinner whirled around his office like Tinkerbell, the loss of the snappy dialogue and tight scripting that prior seasons had….

I remember watching the finale back when it aired and not feeling this way about it then; it was just the M/S icing on the cake, I didn’t understand some of the references to super soldiers or Noel shooting into the magnatite ridden cliff because I hadn’t seen many eps since season six. But watching the finale again after slogging through all the mediocrity just killed it for me.

Time for the Next Thing. Hel-loooo, Veronica Mars!

I have some seasons of DS9 in DivX format, a season per DVD - which I like, as all the commercials and the stately opening and end credits have been trimmed off, leaving me with pure episode. I watched some of them on my 12″ powerbook, but now Roommate is making noises like he wants to watch them too. A 12″ screen is fine for one person, but two gets a little less comfy. And my DVD player, of course, cannot handle DivX.

So I think of the s-video connector that came with my laptop — except it didn’t. That connector comes with the 15″ and 17″ powerbook. The 12″ I have has a mini-DVI and will not work with the same connector for the larger models. Which is important to note, as there is not a whole lot else that’s different about them, which means they look exactly the same as all the connectors — Apple has a design and they like it! And, on top of that, there are evidently two versions of 12″ G4 Powerbooks now - one with mini-DVI, one with mini-VGA.

I wish I had known all the nitpicky details when I, on a whim, went into CompUSA after work. Because they now have an Apple store. Corner, really. But ooooooh, the flat panels, and aaaaaaaahhhh, the PowerMac, and ooooooooooh, loooooook, isn’t it NEAT, there’s … Uh. Anyway. Apple doesn’t skimp on teh pretteh, but they make a lot of the little stuff look exactly alike, so when I asked the kid for a s-video connector for my 12″ powerbook he handed me that said that was what it was for, except… mini-VGA. I got home with it and tried to plug it in. Nope. Same size, but it’s an outie, not an innie. And they don’t carry the mini-DVI version.

Apple didn’t help. They don’t list the connector types in the description, it’s just ‘video connector’ and lists the models it’s suited for. Except now there are 12″ PBs with two separate connector sets, and no differentiation between the two, at least on the connector labels.

They had one of these but there was only one problem — they wanted way more than Amazon is asking for it, and the last thing I need is more cables. I have plenty of cables. I just need a connector.

And the kid is all, “D…V…I?” Uh, yeah. Like those connectors you get for HDTV. I even have a mini-DVI to DVI, if I only had an HD television…. It’s become very clear — CompUSA is not willing to pay for actual geeks to be on the sales floor. You have to be a total geek yourself. Me, I’m like, half a geek. Just enough to know what I needed, not enough to know there were powerbooks with other connectors.

Yeesh. I’m tired now.

So there’s this game. It’s a lame-sounding concept, running a tiny digital zoo complete with tiny digital people throwing tiny digital trash on the ground when you forget to hire maintenance men and buy trash cans, except then there’s these two modules where in addition to lions and hyenas and pandas and flamingos, you can have stegosaurs and killer whales and tyrannosaurs and seals and otters and manta rays, and oh yes, the sperm whale. You cannot in reality build a tank large enough for a sperm whale but, in the game, sure! Just make sure you remember to plant lots of seaweed and rocks in the bottom of the tank, and whatever you do, don’t drop the giant squid in there! (I did that, just to see - the game politely shows a cartoonish cloud like you’d see on old school Batman, with squiggly lines, rather than tentacles and blood flying.) And the tyrannosaur! Throw that stegosaur right in that huge electrified enclosure and watch the simulated battle covered over with a cartoon cloud!

And the stegosaurs? Picky. They deserved it. All they do is moooooooaan and wobble around bashing over the trees you just paid $200 per tree to plant, after (no doubt) those labs cloned them up from … tree-sap-sucking bugs? The game is a little fuzzy about where all the cycads and so forth come from. But you plant them to make the beasts happy, and the stegosaurs kick them over, turning them into rubble, and then wander about mooooooaning about the rubble. You have a herd of animals that are unhappy, which affects your game score, and it’s their own stupid fault. So, allosaurs, and tyrannosaurs, they reap much fun from my annoyance.

And as for the trash all over the ground… I found out that the maintenance men, which are supposed to also fix fences, don’t actually fix a fence until it’s in a state of collapse, at which point the dinosaurs, or lions, or bears, or white bengal tigers, are at the gap in the fence ready to eat the dumb jerk who waited till that last second to weld the bars back together. So the styracosaurs were eating all my maintenance men, who then weren’t available to empty the trash, so the zoo lost revenue as the guests were pissed about how filthy the zoo was, while I’m off thinking everything’s fine and building a tyrannosaur pen.

Yes, I am to this day a big giant geek. But I never had this sort of stuff when I was in geek prime, so I gotta get mine now. I could only geek to the sounds of Pong when I was a kid. On a friend’s Atari, since my family didn’t get a Commodore 64 until I was away at college.

I suppose I could blog about grownup stuff, but that’s pretty boring. The clinic is going well enough, aside from people who won’t show up for appointments, and work is… work. Slightly driving me crazy, but that’s what happens when I’m forced to do bookkeeping, which is a little like trying to get a sperm whale to get along with the giant squid. Only without the polite cartoon cloud to obscure the fallout.

It doesn’t matter what trivial thing I do, if I touch mySQL settings of any sort, I end up redoing code and resetting a bunch of passwords. I added a database and pow! both my blog and the Mod Blog went plooey and wouldn’t connect to MySQL. I have no idea why I got the errors I got or why I had to reset passwords willy-nilly…. But it’s fixed.

Whew.

I made a big mistake sitting with some classmates and our adviser the other day. (I just typed ‘adviser’ and ‘advisor’ and they both look wrong this morning. Don’t care.)

The Big A commented on Classmate A’s clinical assessment of a vignette, specifically her reference to ‘psychotropic’ medication. The vignette is about a kid with anger issues, not a psychotic, so her medication suggestion is off base unless the kid starts complaining about the voices or something. And there is no pill for anger or violent impulses, Big A sez, however much we wish there was.

I muttered, “too bad, we could pump it into the White House water supply.” To which Classmate A said, “Only for the previous administration.”

Of course it’s improper to run screaming in the middle of one of these meetings, so I sat quietly and focused on clinical terminology, but I really wanted to check on her reality testing ability. I don’t understand it — how do people develop these worldviews that fly in the face of reality? “Um, were we in a WAR last administration? Yeah, mucking around with an intern was wrong, but y’know, I can think of violent things the current administration has set into motion that, like, actually KILL people that are happening RIGHT NOW…. ”

And of course, all the pat answers die-hard conservatives memorize would pop out of her, and I would be making comparisons between her inability to observe and discern reality in the world at large with her inability to answer the questions about the vignette, but that would be just mean. Because you can’t shake the die-hards — she hasn’t been shaken from her stances on therapy in all the years I’ve progressed through the program with her, she won’t be shaken now by lil’ ol’ me, who believes in letting clients run their own lives and believe whatever about politics and religion. At the heart of it is the conviction that she’s right about these things, no matter what anyone else says.

It’s very selfish of me that when she mentioned needing another placement, I didn’t refer her to a few places I’m hoping to get hours, but I don’t want to work with someone like that on an ongoing basis. I know that eventually there would be Words, and it would be manifestly Unpleasant. Because it’s not just about politics. It’s the underlying stance that I believe would be bad for clients. Absolutism can hurt people. It’s hurt me. People who think their answers are everyone’s answers and should be rammed down throats without regard for free will make me crazy.

Copying hard drive now.

Burning dvd archive of iTunes folder, moving working files to the jump drive. Shuffling files about and deleting unnecessaries.

And while the backup runs, housecleaning! I have until the ‘ping’ notifies me the copying is done to get this place spiffy.

And then, coffee, and bills, and then WIP!

Schizophrenia.com - Schizophrenia Causes and Prevention, cat virus exposure

It’s scary how many things can go wrong and cause horrible symptoms. Some research seems to show a link between toxoplasmosis and schizophrenia. As in, exposure as a fetus may be linked to the eventual development of schizophrenia, or symptoms that mimic it.

I had an argument recently with a classmate about drugs being used to treat things like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. She believes that all psychotropic drugs, antidepressants, antipsychotics and the like, cause more harm than they prevent and that folks with serious symptoms just need therapy. I’m wondering how one manages psychotherapy with someone who’s more interested in talking to the voices in their head, or the pink elephant in the corner, or just wants to cut the demons out of his chest. Because if the person is manic and psychotic or totally delusional, just how well are they going to be able to explore their childhood for the root causes?

I think that it’s too common that people resort to drugs as an answer to problems they could work through, but also, you sometimes find people who just can’t function without those pills. I’d like to hope that eventually we are able to say “here is a list of causes of the symptoms of schizophrenia, and how we need to proceed from here.” I don’t think there is any one cause or any one solution. It seems reasonable to me to assume that any number of things that can be done to a human brain will result in similar symptoms, just the way our bodies respond to infections with shared symptoms — the cold, the flu, and allergies all can give you horrible sinus problems.

If you’ll excuse me, I’m going off to boil the cat box. Not that there are any pregnant people in the vicinity — now I’m squicked by the thought of parasites living in the house.

I’m getting sucked into Roommate’s work madness. He brought home a laptop in dire need of replacement. Windows 2000 on a very old system is faster than the snails in the backyard, but not by much. I’m installing software for him, because I’m a student and can’t turn down an offer of cash (or perhaps free pizza). But it’s only hardened my resolve — once I’m gainfully employed in my career of choice, my standard answer to requests for geeky intervention will be “I don’t do Windows. I hate Windows. If you want my help you will buy yourself a Mac. Otherwise, you’re on your own, good luck.”

If you’re getting messages referring you to websites to tune up the registry? Those popup windows you’re getting with “messenger” in the top bar mean you need to turn off the messenger service before someone gullible uses the system and follows the instructions. Part of what I’m doing today is setting up adaware, trying to update outdated antivirus software, and turn off or block up open ports/backdoors. All at the speed of sludge.

The longer I’m free of this crap, the less tolerance I have for it. I still have a Windows 98 box but it’s not connected to the internet, and never will be again. I expect to retire it at some point when I find Mac software to do the things I need the PC to do — and that may not be far off.

I posted HP comments to my livejournal, to use cut tags. Haven’t figured that out for WordPress.

The laptop is doing well — I’ve installed mostly everything, gotten my financial software to work and restored the data, moved the last working backup into place, and backed everything up to my external drive. My last two most recent backups managed to munge some of the critical stuff. The restore took a while as the tech reinstalled Panther, which of course came with it originally, and I had to do the upgrade all over again.

So, again — there is no such thing as too many backups. If your computer starts acting funny — take extra minutes to boot, take too long to open files, take too long to save — back it up. If you experience a crash from which it seems to recover fine, back it up. If you notice windows take extra seconds to open or close and you aren’t multitasking like crazy, back it up.

Yes, I have now become paranoid. But better paranoid than redoing hours of work. I’ve also lost lots of school work. I’d wanted to keep the articles I’d downloaded, on a cd, for future reference, and of course I’d procrastinated making that disk.

In any case, I made sporadic attempts to sit down to work on WIPs. The one that I lost all but 20 pages of will not look anything like it did before, as my memory is not that good and typically hard drive catastrophes result in better versions of fic than previously existed. I’ve even tried deleting a file to see if the second round would be better, but it’s not a falsifiable phenom.

The box was on my doorstep when I got home. I called midday Saturday, so this is already better service than anything else I’ve warrantied before. I’ve heard the horror stories about AppleCare, but they’ve been good to me so far, so I’ll cross my fingers.

I ran a disk recovery software overnight and confirmed — my user folder is toast. I could have recovered the operating system, and I did recover a couple of apps, but what’s the use? I suspect that the disk damage was in the section containing my data, because on my most recent backup DVD, the files I use most often are corrupted, which tells me that the damage started long before my system started to slow down on saves and hiccup noticeably. Either that or the dvd drive is also suspect — but it works fine on all the older backups, and on other cds and dvds.

My future plans for backups will be:

Every couple of weeks, back up all the data. (I was doing this before but got lax - I went a month and a half without backups, then got back on schedule, and I regret it.) These backups are going on the external drive and every so often burned to dvd.

Make a disk image of the operating system and all associated programs, libraries, etc. from which to boot in case of an emergency.

Install nag software to prod me into backing up.

Clearly label all DVDs. I went through a number of rewritables looking at dates of particular files trying to figure out what was recent. I’m thinking a cycle of four, rewriting the oldest each backup.

Be more religious about disk maintenance. I might’ve spotted something wrong sooner.

Burn all downloaded music recently purchased to cds when making backups of other data.

In any case, I’ve now lost anything I’ve done on the three WIPs I was working on (two of which I have been keeping online in a couple different places, and therefore 99% salvageable — the longest, most active one wasn’t online and 55 pages written in the last three weeks are now scrambled data). I managed to yank my financial stuff onto the thumb drive. My 4 gig of MP3’s and 4’s are all there, except for one album I’d purchased and downloaded, and since I had no chance to deauthorize the prior installation I can’t download it again.

I was counting on having the laptop for Saturday, when I’m proctoring a test. Guess I’ll be reading instead. At least I still have the iPod.

I will be offline for an indeterminate number of days as I attempt to rescue my data from a crashing laptop before it gets a wipe and reinstall. External firewire drive is on order, teeth are worn from all the gnashing, etc. etc.

Note to self: Always read up thoroughly before clicking.

Clicky finger is in big trouble.

Hate life now.

[edit] Ah. Now the hardware is failing, too. So perhaps it is not the clicky finger’s fault entirely…. But now I may still lose my checking account, 60 pages of fic (prolific lately, sad to say, which is why I was backing up), and various other things like, oh, the entire first season of Battlestar Galactica, which was five minutes from being completed when the crash hit. All my keychain passwords etc., my queue of things waiting to be uploaded, my WIPs in various stages of editing, and the spreadsheets upon which I had been planning the rest of my school schedule, my budget, and my slim-pickens-but-adequate diet will disappear.

Suckage. But I will never be caught out like this again. In addition to monthly DVD backups I will now have the firewire drive, upon which weekly backups will be scheduled via Automator.

Cross your fingers, appeal to your deity, and radiate positive energies in FedEx’s general direction so they get the drive here by Friday….

This morning, I woke up, but my Powerbook … was in a coma, since last night. I’d left it merrily downloading but it froze. Here’s what happens when a switcher encounters the very first system ‘boink’:

Freeeeeeeeze. Internal panic errors bounce around in brain. Then gently move mouse, tap keys, hope that it’s just slow.

Nope.

Place ear to keyboard, here whirring and hard-drive ticking noises. Press power button until *click* and the screen goes dark. Press power button again, with knot in stomach. Watch the little circle o’ hash marks for a while, then watch pale gray screen. Press power button. Repeat until logon box appears, sigh. Watch logon hang for a while. Press power button.

Search for disks that came with system. Realize DVD is still in drive and won’t eject. Growl at Roommate. Turn on Roommate’s computer and search for help. Discover that ejecting DVD is as simple as holding down mouse button; castigate self for not learning how to do this stuff before the crisis hit. Put in AppleCare disk. Reboot, watch ticking hash mark circle, get message to reboot. Three times.

Panic subsiding into determined geek mode.

Clunk self on head, find Tiger disk, put it in. Reboot. AH! Open disk utility, kiss repair disk button. Click. Wait. Read book. Wait. Steel self for ultimate failure, just in case, and prep for extended agony of waiting for the laptop to come back from warranty repair, the downloading and reinstalling of all the things I wanted to keep, the recreation of pages of fic and the entire year of transactions in my finance management software, the tweaking and configuring. Watch the repair finish and announce success. Reboot.

Logon takes forever.

Screen arrives.

Backup DVD-RWs come out and get cycled through the process.

The irony is, I sat down at the laptop this morning to do a complete backup. I think I’ll do it Saturday from now on.

Had a blisteringly stupid and frustrating day. But I got home to a confirmation message on the answering machine about the DSL, so cheered up. Plugged in router to its permanent home - roommate’s PC. Ran configuring site and …

would not browse the internet. Would not connect to the “configuration server” whatever that is. Called support. Escalated up the chain of geeks to a router geek. Then roommate got home while we were configging like mad, and told me to put the router under the desk when I was done, which led to me teasing him about not being able to hang it from the ceiling or set it up in the bookcase, at which point I said it would look neat on the Christmas tree next to my winking and blinking Enterprise ornament. The tech support geek snorfled and guffawed, then somehow we got in this conversation about his cats.

To make a long story short, the DSL works now, roommate has his PC back and is happily taking over the world one civilization at a time, and I’m downloading updates, watching vids, and looking for a good radio station.

Which, somehow, makes the blehness better. Yay geeks!

Pay 11.50/month for dialup…

Pay 14.95/month and $70 startup/router cost for DSL.

Hmmmmmm.

[edit: ordered DSL. ]

I am quite agog that I hadn’t discovered the wonders of Quicksilver before now. Just the basic functions blow me away - a few keystrokes and anything’s executable. And there’s plenty of tweaking potential.

hugs Powerbook

I thought of certain Stargate fans in post-update (Tiger = total groovitude). I of course went widget-hunting, and found among other things, hula girls, solitaire games, clocks and calculators, and of course a widget to count down the days until the next Stargate episode. I tried to link to the page for the widget itself, but obviously all the pre-order fen are hitting the page simultaneously…. Can’t get there from here.

Dashboard. So cooooool. It may replace the click wheel in my affections.

I preordered Tiger. Widgets and Safari RSS, here I come!

I rewrote my robots.txt to disallow the ‘bots that sift through my blog - I had it this way before, and since I’ve been lazy in reinstating an appropriate filtering system to keep the net at bay, and I’m in full procrastination mode (yes, the margarita was nice, and there’s no better way to get a roommate to clean than to do it yourself and make roomie feel guilty just watching you scrape charred cheese out of the oven), it seemed to be a good time.

And hey, why not look at some search terms. All in the name of pissing away the rest of the afternoon.

“tarkalian panther” - is that what they make the tea out of?

“how to make a pokerbot” - It’s almost tempting to create a fake procedure that - naw.

“shinzon naked” - O_O

“telepath klingon species” - Uh, nope.

“i’m jean luc picard” - Well, hi! I’m not.

“cher fish” - this and “talking dog fidele” would seem to be actual searches for my site! Wow!

“pictures of me naked” - if you’re serious, you might try using your name instead of a pronoun.

“why men fear commitment phobia” - Heck, I’M afraid of commitment phobia too!

“the riker maneuver in star trek tng” - that would be the famous swagger-smirk.

“stan up spick up” - speel bettr.

“story worf deanna divorce” - News flash: they weren’t married. There’s so little W/T fic to begin with that this got my hopes up. I did this search myself. Didn’t find anything.

“star trek troi swimsuit” - nope.

“vash tamped” - I’m afraid to ask what she’s tamping.

“spock christine or chapel” - Just in case not every fic refers to her consistently, I guess.

“jodie sweeten website” - I wish I understood why my site gets these.

“how much oxygen does a person need to breathe when she s on the moon for a month?” - It depends on where you stay while you’re there. Camping out would be a whole different scenario than Lunar Holiday Inn Express.

“tng tight panties” - I imagine there must have been; I certainly never saw any panty lines on their uniforms.

“romulan anatomy” - What they teach in certain unaccredited colleges along the Neutral Zone.

“her.across.her.lap” - Recursive yoga?

“deanna troi will help you relax” - well, that’s new - usually searchers are looking for her in conjunction with … a certain activity.

“imzadi divorce klingon” - I’m uncertain whether imzadi refers to the divorce or the klingon. Appears to be the same sort of search as above, or it’s looking for the same thing.

“as long as you re going to hang me anyway would you fuck me ? oxygen deprivation” - Oy.

Before I vanish into the depths of the library, where thanks to the awesome multitasking power of my Powerbook I will simultaneously download another Carnivale episode and do the 1,395,348,293 papers I’m behind on (plus the Powerpoint presentation), I’m flying on in to ask how it is you know you’re a geek.

My roommate is a geek because when he hung up the hummingbird feeder, he also tacked up color printouts of different species on the wall next to the window.

What’s your geek about?

A friend lent me Dreamweaver. I opened up my website locally as a project and immediately went agh, why did no one tell me this code was so broken? I have so much superfluous code!

Needless to say I haven’t got any homework done. I can tell I’m starting to get depressed again when I’m able to completely ignore deadlines this way. I came to the library with everything because at home the temptation was too great to curl up and sleep; now I’m twiddling ’round with several things at once, none of them productive in any profitable way. And I still want to curl up and sleep. The laptop would make a nice warm pillow.