Thursday — September 22nd, 2016 — 13°C / 55°F — Dark Damp & Cooler in Atlantic Canada @9:23 pm —
— I have no idea why the latest WordPress UpDate decided this blog should default to an italics font— But I did manage to change it – The “Cambria” font looks fantastic in some blogs but not so hot in this one – hmmmm-?
Ganesh – He was here in one update, then disappeared, and now he’s back.
— Yesterday, All I wanted to do was sit down and work on the novel I’m writing. I’ve been ‘on a roll’ – This is something I began in 1987 – after discovering the world of doing things ‘on-line’. I was part of the SFRT – Speculative Fiction Round Table on GEnie – General Electric’s venture into moving to the next step toward what became the internet. General Electric want to make money from this venture. Using that ‘service’ cost something like six dollars an hour after 6 pm and before 8 am on Weekdays. the prime time rate was more like eighteen dollars an hour. weekends and holidays were also six bucks an hour.
— Writers’ Workshops are a great place to get yourself inspired. What I liked was tapping into everybody else’s ideas. What excited and inspired them. Whether they were producing masterpieces or nothing at all. The obvious stuff didn’t matter. Nobody was going to listen to read part of a chapter or your latest poem, or whatever – and tell you exactly what you had to do to make a million dollars with your ‘masterpiece’. They may tell you that they hate the way anybody still writes anything that includes words that end in ‘ing’. They may tell you that what you’re doing sucks because it concentrates on one little area of life that they don’t want to bother with. They may try to tell you that nothing you ever do will be good enough, because somebody’s already told that to them, about whatever they were doing and in their hurt, they want to hurt others. But somewhere in the mix, between the nonsense and non sequiturs – something happens. In the world of imagination, someone lights a spark and someone else gives it a candle and maybe a third person moves that candle to somewhere that shows you something that you might never have thought about, or points your toward something in the realm of imagination and ideas that fires you up for weeks, even months at a time. Think about this – most people who have written a novel, or any other book, have spent at least a year working on that novel, ( or whatever ) might have changed details that drove them to distraction five or six different ways, or more, and stuck with it, finished it, did some editing, rearranged some plot elements, believed in their story line and the finished product enough to bring it somebody who might read the first ten words and laugh in their face. They might send or bring their story to dozens of editors and publishers, received dozens of humiliating rejections, and then found somebody who took a chance – and then, not every book that is finished, gets edited and even published reaches more than a handful of readers. Somebody’s imagined ‘best seller’ might only sell to friends and relatives- or might be way ahead of its time and disappear into oblivion only to be ‘discovered’ decades later, maybe after the writer left this world – temporarily or permanently? Left and come back? Left voluntarily or left kicking and screaming – devastated by disease or fell asleep and never woke up again?
— Yeah, so the story I was writing in 1987 hit a brick wall, I didn’t know where to go with it. But I never gave up on it. Sometime in the middle of this August I found a file on a hard drive I haven’t visited in a while and thought, yeah – this story needs to be finished, but I’m not too crazy about this part, or that part or the way it started going off in that direction, or whatever – So I started re-writing from the beginning. I looked up a bunch of things, Word Processor on one screen, browser in another, looking up movies that were playing in various months during the time the story took place – what kind of cars were new that year? What colours did those cars come in? Did they have cup holders that year or did they come later?
— I was over 102,000 words into the re-write- on page 219 using a 14 point Cambria font. ( it just looked ‘right’ ) & like I said, all I wanted to do is move the story along some. — But — I never did get to that story yesterday.
— & Here’s a bit of yesterday’s time line.
— 7:30 am – Checked email, groaned a bit, shook my head a couple times – followed one link and was just distracted enough so when I got up and left the ‘office’ to see and talk with the love of my life before she left for work, she was already gone. I poured a cup of coffee, made some toast, buttered and jellied it, ate it, went back into the office, sat down, listened to the morning news, which was coming to me through a CBC web site on a mac computer beside the one the bulk of my novel is growing in- /sitting on? The ads coming in to the browser froze that browser, I had to force quit out and start back up again. And then, just after 8:30, in the middle of an interview I was interested in –
— 8:33 am – lost power. no electricity came into the house to power the computer I need to be working if I’m going to write and/or continue writing that story. Now power to the television or radio either. Grrr
— 9:33 – ish am – I called Cathi on a cell phone to tell her we had no electricity. She hinted that she was having a weird day too. Mercury was still retrograding around, proud of itself. I tried resting, lying on the bed. That didn’t work. A while later I needed to get up and go into the washroom.
— 10:00 am -ish – power came back through our electricity lines when I was coming back into the bedroom from the washroom. It was time to feed the pets. and reset a couple clocks, like the one on the microwave, which needed to be set before I could ‘nuke’ a cup of lukewarm coffee. I restarted a couple computers, wanted to take some photos from a digital camera and work on them on the computer that is mostly email and photos, with a little bit of ‘lite’ blogging going on now and then. Then I walked around, let the dog back inside after he wanted to go out and bark at any dogs walking their humans up and down the road he can see from his dog ‘run’ – fenced off area. I think I ‘nuked’ myself some instant oatmeal, then ate it, probably drank some nuked/reheated coffee.
11:00 + something – When I sat down to seriously get with messing around with digital photographs, I discovered the browser was frozen. Then, not just the browser, but the whole computer was frozen. I sighed, pushed the button, turned it off, waited a minute or so and told it to ‘reboot’. The computer took longer than usual to come back to life.
—> 11:30 -ish, am. I discovered the computer did not boot from the large ( 1 terrabyte ) usual external hard drive, it booted from the smaller, interior drive. The external drive did not ‘show up’ on the desktop like it should have. This could either have been a weird part of a routine, it may have been slow to come up online – or it could have been a problem – the blackout might have killed it. So I tested it, moved it over to another computer, plugged it in, turned it on, nothing happened. I’ve had problems with externals drive that have gone to sleep before. When they go to sleep, especially in the past after upgrading the operating system or something like that- updates can be a problem. The trick when they happens is to move the firewire cable to its other ‘home’ connect it with the computer off, turn the external hard drive on, and immediately turn the computer on. When the computer finds the sleeping hard drive it magically wakes it up and everything is fine. It just wanted to see me act like I might scream and throw things or sit down and cry. Okay, tried everything. Nothing worked. It might work in a different enclosure. Maybe something went ‘kerfloowie’ in the enclosure. I plugged in another, similar enclosure that houses two older partitions with Mac OS X 10.4.12 (I think-) for starting up older computers that can’t handle any newer operating systems. Those partitions showed up, no problem, okay, so I opened up both enclosures and swapped the one that was giving me problems into the enclosure that worked fine with the older operating system hard drive w/ partitions. plugged it in, turned it on, turned on a computer, — twiddled my thumbs a bit, and nope- nothing shows up. check inside the ‘About This Mac’ routine, click ‘Get more info’ to check the system profiler select firewire and there’s the problem : “Unknown device” It’s either fried or its connection got scrambled. Okay, time to grit teeth – Back up the 1.5 terrabyte drive with the older system on it. Then erase that drive, make sure it gets the GUID schnarr so it can start a freakin stupid intel mac – install the stinkin operating system, then migrate the stuff that is a year old so none of the wedding photos from two of my cameras and one of Cathi’s, wedding videos from my flip cam and Cathi’s Nikon, And the wedding photos etc are something that takes eight hours to down load, and I don’t know how long it takes to work on them because I was halfway through that and had spent another eight hours doing that grrrrrr-
— Ack! I begin the automated backup the hard drive process, it gets about an hour into that and craps out, says “The file “Moe” is too long and contains characters that are not compatible with this computer-” um — “WHAAAAAAATTTTTT?” So I tried again, “This backup attempt of yours contains backed up and non backed up files- so you can’t back it up-” [ which is utter b.s. ] “WWWHHHHAAAAAAAATTTTTTT?” so I gotta go through the whole process of copying every file onto its nice warm and friendly backup home MANUALLY? one at a time?
—> Time Line for everything that followed:
—> 10:45 pm – Backing up everything manually is finally finished.
——> 10:46 pm Begin erasing, reformatting and installing Mac OS X 10.6 on larger of two partitions.
—> 11:00 (+ something) pm Connect to iMac with good stuff & same operating system – restart iMac holding down the correct key to put it into ‘Terminal Mode’ and select the right hard drive to copy from, begin the migration process:
—> 11:15 -ish pm, Begin!
—> 2:15 am —> “[estimated] 45 minutes remaining”
—> 2:30 am —> “2 hours, 35 minutes remaining” { “AAAaaaaaaa!” }
—> 2:40 am —> “Transferring Applications Folder” —> No estimate of how long this might take —
—> 2:42 am —> “About 3 hours, 15 minutes remaining”
—> 2:45 am —> “About 54 Minutes remaining”
—> 2:50 am —> “… 45 minutes….”
—> 2:53 am —> “… 29 minutes …”
—>2:56 am —> ” … 38 Minutes… ”
—> 3:13 am —> ” … 4 minutes … ”
—> 3:17 am —> ” … Less than 1 Minute … ”
—> 3:18 am —> ” … less than 1 minute … ”
—> 3:19 am —> ” … l/t 1 minute … ”
—> 3:20 am —> ” … l/t 1 Minute …”
——> 3:21 am ——> “Click Here to Restart Computer ” —> Click!
—>3:25 am —> “Checking for New Software Udates…”
—> 3:41 am —> “Restart after updates…” Click!
—> Daylight! —> “September 22nd, 2016 and you still have a pants load of snarr to do before you can think about getting back to the photos – and then maybe you’ll be able to get back to your novel — bwa hahahahahaha! I lied – ” -Alzo Spraque l’ordinatuer – And I’m so tired I don’t a chips if anything’s spelled right.
— “Sleep? What a concept -” — Gary [“Scarf”] Gray —
— I did get some sleep, stumbled around in a trance – sat down at the computer at 7:30 am and discovered that several things were still not right, it’s telling me to reinstall iTunes. It’s told me that ‘Google Chrome does not support this ancient piece of shit – wtf is the matter wit U? – U moron!” The version of iPhoto won’t work. I check for updates and hey, “We have another two hours worth of updates for you, kid!” My brain feels like crying at the thought of playing any silly computer games to pass the time while that computer is updating / getting its act back together.
—> um —? Noon-ish? —> updates worked, but now the iPhoto app is the ‘upgrade’ that makes you go through three extra steps to move what you could have moved with a mouse or track ball and an easy ‘drag and drop’ But W.T.F. – load photos from one camera anyway.
—> 3 pm —> “Oh hell with this, time to install the OS on the smaller, half a terrabyte partition.” Fire up the install disk start up when I’m done, do not migrate anything right off, make sure it works first –
—> 4 pm —> So Speaketh the Computer, “Oops, no iPhoto – Oops iTunes is configured wrong, please re-install —> ooops, iTunes is configured wrong, please Re-Install! —> I SAID! iTunes is fupped up, reload the fupping thing! // to which I replied “I reinstalled the bloody thing 4 times, restarted the fupping computer 4 times and it’s still futched up? —> Moving right along —>
—> 4:30 pm —> Migrating “Renard The Third” and “Z-Schnarr The Second” —> ” … About 17 hours and 38 Minutes Remaining …”
—> 5:10 pm —> ” … 6 hours, 21 minutes remaining … ”
—> 8:10 pm —> 6 hours, 24 minutes remaining —> Walked the dog.
—> 8:45 pm –>- “4 hours 33 minutes remaining” Watched the Black List on PVR
—> 11:15 pm —> “49 minutes remaining”
—> 12:45 am Friday, 23 September, 2016 —> “Restart—”
—> 1:30 am —> updates loaded —> “Restart—>”
—> 1:35 am —> Updates didn’t do anything —> “Restart —>” —> “Oh, you wanted me to actually install those updates? well just who do you think you are to tell a computer what to do?”
—> 1:45 am —> Computer restarted. looks okay, good night.
—> 4:45 am —> visit washroom, check on computer. it’s still there- fire up iPhoto —> load 646 photos from camera (two years worth of saved photos on the SD card) –
—> 5:53 am —> check out iTunes. “iTunes is not configured correctly, please reinstall—>” Reinstalled four times? Nothing works. log out, relog into top User on this partition. Reload iTunes there? doesn’t work. Reload the workhorse user? click on iTunes, = “Oh, you wanted me to start up? Why didn’t you say so?”
—> 6:30 am —> Your system does not support Firefox, you can’t load it. WWHHAAAAAAAATTTT?
—> 6:35 move firefox from top user to workhorse – it works – do search for older versions of firefox using safari – hey, only their latest piece of poo-poo won’t work with this vintage operating system The install OS DVD gave us a version that did work – stick your tongue -out at anybody who worships at the altar of planned obsolescence. Dance around and smile at nearby statue of Ganesh.
—> 7:30 am —> wake up Cathi, “What time do you want to get up for work?” — “But it’s Saturday!” — “No, it’s Friday—” Now that’s gotta be the worst ….”
—> 7:45 am -ish —> Cathi’s out the door. The dog wants to go outside. It’s raining. But he wants to go outside.
—>7:55 am —> The dog says “Boof!” half heartedly, but twice – I open the door. It’s pouring rain, I can’t see the dog anywhere, I call him. A big happy very wet black Lab comes bounding from where he was barking at some small animal way the heck in the back corner of his ‘run’ — I dry him off with an old towel, he is deliriously happy for the rub. And the attention. He gets a small treat.
—> 8:15 am —> I fire up a couple programs. Everything seems to be working fine. software update wants to load a security update and a couple other things. —>yeah, go ahead. It wants to restart —> “Knock yerself out-”
—> 8:45 —> updates loaded & installed, Computer Restarted, Fire up the Mail program. —> Mail wants to use your login keychain. —> What login keychain, there never has been a login keychain. —> Wong answer, Mail wants to use your login keychain, please enter your password now. —> drop dead, get outta here —> instead of disappearing in a cloud of acrid smoke, the mail program pops up and looks around bright eyed and bushy tailed and says, “What’s new?” —> so I load about a dozen email accounts. two of them don’t like their passwords. I go into the living room, tell the laptop it’s December 31st, 2037 @ 11:11 pm and send myself a message. The mail app has a nervous breakdown. The malware program says hey wait, I haven’t had an update in 20 something years! the laptop freezes. —> I push the button, kill the laptop, smile at our very handsome and newly clean dog, then start the computer back up. —> programs that I shut off before the laptop had it’s nervous breakdown pop back up and hog all the desktop RAM. —> I shut them down. —> The mail program springs back to life and sends email message from the year 2037 – after I had told the time and date app to set itself automatically, —just before the laptop’s nervous breakdown.
—> 10:00 am —> the cat goes crazy thinking I’ll never feed him again. —> you keep that up, maybe I won’t —> feed the pets, and not to each other, that would be too messy to clean up before Cathi gets home.
—> Noon-ish —> Okay, most of the important programs I’ve tested work fine. —> a couple of them have anxiety attacks on startup and tell me I need to enter their login keychain passwords. I tell them to eff off and they fall to their knees in tears, beg me for a password. I tell them to eff off again and the programs say, “Oh, you want me to startup? why didn’t you say so?”
—> DreamWeaver CS3 thinks all my html files are in Chinese characters. I will be damned before I’ll click on any of them to see what just might happen.
—> iPhoto the happy correct version is sleepy and complains that it doesn’t want to download no 646 photos, but it goes ahead and downloads them anyway and then smiles and says, “See? Ain’t I amazing?” and I say, stick around, I got another three or four hundred photos to upload from two other cameras, and then there’s the video – but flip-share should handle that-
—> the ftp program whines and complains and wants its login keychain password, but after half a dozen “Cancel” clicks it pops up, yawns and says, “Good morning, what can you do for me today?”
—> Firefox is working fine, thank you. Google Chrome is off in a corner abusing itself. Good, I don’t need no stupid Google Chrome.
—> it’s Friday, September 23rd, 2016 – Mercury stopped retrograding yesterday and is now dancing forward across the sky. Bruce Springsteen’s trying to catch up to me in the age department. But I’ve got two weeks more under my belt than he does, and I still like Born to Run and a couple radio stations are playing happy birfday mini concerts of his stuff and then saying it’s his birfday, so Appah Hoopey Bruce!
—> it’s 11°C / 51°F and “overcast” here in this delirious little corner of Atlantic Canada @ 1:35 pm and if they dropped the bomb on me right now I’d deflate their silly egoes and laugh them to death.
Here’s another view or interpretation of Ganesh, the remover of obstacles. My favourite Ganesh moment was when I was cleaning a haunted building, chanting to myself and realized Ganesh was dancing beside me. Apparently – He liked the chant -(It couldn’t have been my voice – nahhhhhh-)
—> And Ganesh is smiling at me from H.J. d’Aerendel’s last posting – Life is good. for at least the next thirty seconds or so —? Right?
— Schnarr! — 🙂
~~~~~ Jim
