Archive for February 2010

Okay, I’m back playing on the laptop again. I have the feeling that I will either need to get new glasses or a new monitor soon — squinting at my desktop’s tiny monitor was making my eyes hurt. It will probably be a new monitor, as the kind of glasses I have to use cost a fortune, way more than a monitor, of which you can get a decent model for around $100. Also, my back hurts, and I can use the laptop while sitting on my sofa. My cat just jumped up here next to me — I have all these black clothes (black jeans, black fuzzy jacket, black shirt — I was all in black yesterday for some reason) piled up in the space next to me where she usually likes to lie down. Oh, but she loves the fuzzy jacket — she’s kneading it right now.

Things I did today: since I was in a fooling-around-with-computer-stuff mood, I dragged out my old laptop (not this one, the ancient Thinkpad) to see if it would start up after not being turned on for about a year. But it still did the same sad thing that made me stop using it: it refused to boot, and all I could hear was the fan making this busted whirring sound. So I packed it away again. I searched around for some info on dead Thinkpads of that vintage, and found that a lot of them had a thing where this tiny part in the motherboard would break and have to be soldered back on. Well there’s another thing that’s beyond me. It would be nice if I could get it fixed and have a third backup, or at least get the stuff off the hard drive.

Then I unpacked my little HP Jornada handheld. It’s got Windows CE on it, but it’s an ancient, obsolete model. Still, it does work, and I even had a backup battery to replace the one that a warning message kept telling me had died. What I don’t have, though, is the cable that connects it to a computer serial port, so I can’t sync it with my desktop. (The Dell doesn’t have a serial port or a parallel port, but the desktop has both.) This kind of makes doing anything on the handheld sort of pointless. However, some searching around did reveal that there are places where I could still buy one of the special HP cables — for around forty bucks. Yikes. So it’s not a priority. I used to take notes with the handheld when I was going to college a few years ago. Then I put it away in my graveyard bag of obsolete computer gadgetry.

So anyway, that was my day.

Okay, now I read an old (well, about a year old — my desktop isn’t exactly new) forum entry over on the AOpen site that seems to indicate that my type of motherboard can only accomodate 1 GB of RAM. So maybe that was the problem. But the paperwork that came with the thing says it can be upped to 2 GB. The AOpen website support area seems to be staffed by people for whom English is a second — or third or fourth — language, so I could be reading it wrong. Anyway, what I read is here.

So far the computer seems to be doing well on 1 GB of RAM though. It’s definitely responding much faster, and any slowdowns are probably due to the fact that I really need to wipe the hard drive and reinstall Windows. That will take quite a few hours if I recall the last time I had to do that to a computer, so I may put that off for another day.

And hey! I’ve put my Paypal logo back up in the sidebar. The woman I was temporarily replacing at my current job is back part-time, so they’ve cut back my hours, and I get the feeling I’ll soon be looking for another job. So any help you can give would be much appreciated.

Well, I finally managed to upgrade my plugins and my Wordpress install to the latest version. That’s that for this blog for now. In other news… yay, I finally managed to find a cheap corded keyboard for my desktop — the Walmart in Waynesboro had a pile of them on a lower shelf in their electronics department — all the boxes were damaged in some way; they looked like they’d fallen off the back of the proverbial truck. But they were only ten bucks what the hell. Anyway, I plugged it in, it seems to work just fine, so now I won’t have to worry that my battery will die when I’m in the middle of typing something.

But I’m not typing this on the desktop, but my laptop — I’m in the middle of backing up files off the desktop to my tiny flash drive, preparatory to the upgrading of my memory. Yes, the memory chips came in yesterday via Amazon. I can’t wait to open up the desktop and load its nice new brain. Then I’m going to do a total wipe and reinstall of Windows XP and those programs I want to use. And… one of these days I’m going to invest in a new monitor, if I can keep myself employed. You can get a nice widescreen monitor these days for under two hundred dollars. The little one I have works fine, but it is little (smaller than my laptop’s — I think it’s a fourteen incher or less) and my eyesight isn’t what it used to be. But that’s for the future, assuming I don’t break the computer when I install the new memory.

In other news, I’m getting my teeth fixed, finally! As in, I’m getting all the horrid cavities drilled and filled, so maybe I will be able to go out in public without a bag over my head. It’s a bitch to drive in those things… I also need bridges and things but that’s for the future — right now I have to keep the teeth I do have in my head. I have an appointment in less than two weeks for a cleaning, and then one a week later for the worst of the front teeth. And so on. I can’t wait. (That should show you how badly I need this done; normally I hate going to the dentist, but am paying for that irrational hatred now. So now I love the dentist.)

Um… there was more, but I can’t remember what it was. I’ll update later if I feel like it.

Update: argh. I installed the memory — or rather, attempted to do so. Only to find out that either something is wrong with 1) the second memory slot, 2) the second 1 GB chip, or 3) me. I did have trouble getting the chip to stay in the slot — and when I finally did, turning on the computer resulted in that appalling sustained beep computers make when you do something wrong to their innards. So I removed the second chip, turned the computer back on, and it worked fine, albeit with only 1 GB of RAM not 2 like I wanted. The offending slot, by the way, is the one that wasn’t used — there was only one memory chip (a 256 KB one) in the other slot that works. So I’m thinking either that slot has something wrong with it — like it’s dead — or else it needs a jumper switched somewhere on the motherboard and that’s beyond me at the moment. (Well, like ever — if motherboard manipulation is needed I’m calling in an expert.) I suppose I could have switched out the other chip just to make sure the second new one works and I haven’t destroyed it by touching it all over (“only hold it by the ends,” shyeah, right), but I’m too tired. Still on the laptop — though the desktop does work and 1 GB is pretty fast for Windows XP. But I want 2 GB! Frown.

This is awesome — a blogger takes down an oh-so-genteel sneering book review in the Wall Street Journal, the writer of which is simply shocked that someone who was in (gasp!) computer science has been allowed to write his own version of The Odyssey. Note to the staff at the WSJ: only insecure, shallow people make culture into a matter of cliques and status marking. Anyway, read the whole thing. (Via Photon Courier.)

Update: I’m back on the laptop, as the cheap batteries in my desktop’s wireless keyboard just died, and I don’t have any more that size (AAA — not counting the one that rolled under my sofa, and I think when I finally get it out from under there I’ll throw it out). I think I’ll be purchasing a regular plug-in keyboard for the desktop for situations just such as this.

You’ll all be glad to know I’ve decided to keep the comments. I might up the reply depth to two or three more. What I am going to dispense with: categories, tags.

I’m doing laundry right now. My life hasn’t been very exciting lately and nothing has irritated me enough for me to want to post about it. I’ve still got the part-time job, so I’m not as broke as I was. (I will be putting the Paypal link up just in case though.) The weather has improved over the past few days — it got up into the high forties today, which feels almost like summer now that I’ve acclimated. Still, there are just huge piles of snow everywhere, and it will probably be on the ground until Easter. Well, now I can say I have experienced snow. One of the few new experiences I actually wanted to have has been checked off. (Not on the list: skydiving, mountain-climbing — I find mountain driving scary enough thanks — bungee jumping, any of that nonsense.)

I’m disappointed in Glenn Beck. I don’t listen to/watch him, but I was still expecting better of him than “I’m tired of feeling like a freak in America.” Feeling like a freak has been my armor and strength my whole life — I’m tired of hearing that the be-all and end-all of existence is total acceptance by society. (Which is one of the many reasons I can’t get behind the whole gay marriage thing. Yearning to be “married” — how mundane and bourgeois can you get! I expect gays to be at the forefront of all that is different and interesting and eccentric, not whining and clawing at Middle America for love and acceptance. Gather ’round, children, and I’ll tell you about how in my day the very idea of being thought of as just another bunch of squares would have made any proud gay man or woman spit in disgust. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to rinse my dentures.) Anyway, I used to hear that Beck’s shtick was being a big crybaby, but he seemed to have moved away from that when it was made clear to him that it pissed off the manlier elements in conservative groups. Looks like he’s gone back into whine mode. It’s fitting that he did it in front of an audience of beta males at CPAC. Include me out. If I wanted to be “accepted” by the powers that be in the US today I’d slap an Obama sticker on my car and swear I loved Big Unicorn. That’s what it’s going to take to not be treated like a “freak” these days, at least in the big cities, so you might as well get used to it. (And living in semi-rural Virginia isn’t necessarily an escape — there are a lot of college towns in the Shenandoah Valley, and Staunton where I live is Obama central.)

In other news: I’m currently on my Windows computer. It’s slow, but the laptop was starting to piss me off. Even after completely wiping and reinstalling the operating system it still gets logy and overheats and so on. I don’t think it’s the operating system (it’s currently Kubuntu, which seems to have good memory management), I think it’s the brand. Dells just seem to have problems. Anyway, I’m giving it a rest. Oh — and I finally broke down and ordered two new memory chips (1 GB each) for the desktop, which right now is limping along at 256 KB of RAM. This will bring it up to its top speed (yes, I checked). Then I’m going to do a complete wipe and reinstall of everything. This will happen this coming weekend, as the RAM is due to be delivered on Friday (barring things like snowstorms, knock on wood…), and then I may be able to post a bit more frequently since, hopefully, I won’t spend most of my time swearing at the computer for being so slow.

That’s all for now. Later, mes amis. If you want to read the nonsense that I find even too ridiculous for this site, see me at my Tumblr blog. (I will not call it a “Tumblog.” Good grief.)

Things I am thinking of dispensing with on this blog:

• Categories (I don’t like the ones I came up with this time around, and seriously, does anyone care about what category someone’s blog posts are in? And my posts tend to wander all over the place, so they are hard to categorize.)
• My page listings — that’s where I have my essays (well, where I was going to put them), my short stories and novel chapters, my about page, etc., but I don’t think I’ve gotten more than a handful of visits to any of them. I may keep an “about” page, or just put a couple of lines of descriptive text in the sidebar, or nothing at all. You all know me, and for those who don’t, my posts should give the world enough information. Anyway, I am thinking of moving my non-blog writing stuff to another domain entirely.
• Tags. I don’t see the point of them, though on the Tumblr site I’ve had a bit of fun with them, but Tumblr is not to be taken seriously. Well, this blog isn’t exactly serious, but you see what I mean.
• Comments. I get hardly any comments these days, and every single problem my site has ever had seems to be due to spammers attacking whatever comment scripts my various blog installs have loaded. I have a Disqus account — I might add that to the site instead.
• A blogroll. I don’t usually go to blogs just to use their blogrolls. And I’m always changing my blog favorites — I’ll read one site for a while, get bored, and move onto another. It just takes up space on the sidebar.

Those are the exciting things I’ve been thinking about this weekend. As you can see the goal is to strip down this blog to its essential blogness, without all of that extra stuff that just gets in the way and distract. And you may notice that I’ve already removed the page, category, and tag listings. I’ll also be trying out various minimalistic themes and setups until I get everything the way I want it.

Update: okay, I added a plugin that removed extra things from the admin screen (things like the Wordpress logo and such), which helped, but the admin area is still very slow to load. I think Firefox just does not like rendering the Wordpress dashboard. The images that make up the side menu and the formatting buttons all take some time to come up. I’ve got 1.5 gigabytes of RAM on this machine and that’s as far as I can take it, so I don’t know what to do. Stupid Firefox I don’t want to use Konqeror — Gmail and all other Google sites hate it and say “it’s not standard.” Feh.

…So shrieks the headline on the Daily Mail site. Journalists! Where would we be without them to tell us stuff we’ve already known for years? In any case, this “scary plot” the article is going on about apparently happened during the Seventh Doctor era, when Sylvester McCoy was (miscast as, some said) the Doctor, and the scripts and production values were basically shit — which is saying something considering “classic” Who was always a ramshackle affair. But I think by that time — the late 80s — viewership of the show had gone down to about forty very dedicated fans who had not been out of their basements since Patrick Troughton played the Doctor. In any case, the scheme was a big old fail, as we all know, and the only thing to get deposed was the show itself, which was put “on hiatus” for over fifteen years (except for that movie in 1996, which I suppose does count).

But don’t think that the NuWho people didn’t play that game too. The rise and fall of Prime Minister Harriet Brown (yesweknowwhoyouare) had elements of Thatcher-slamming wish fulfilment, and I’m pretty sure there was an open snark against Thatcher in one of the episodes, though I can’t remember which. I’ll leave the misogynistic undertone that permeated the Russell T. Davies least as regards middle-aged women unremarked upon and just say that Margaret Thatcher seems to have become Britain’s Richard M. Nixon, at least as far as its artistic community is concerned. I certainly hope that they drop this theme for the upcoming series. Matt Smith is surely too young to even remember Thatcher; and the constant Nixon-fear was something that made The X-Files so tiresome.

(Link via.)

Do not adjust your set — I am changing the theme — yes, again. The goal is as always readability, and cutting down on clutter, along with trying to avoid ugliness. I’m still on the fence regarding Wordpress itself — it’s great to use, but the admin screens have gotten cluttered, though I’ve removed as much as possible via the screen options. I’m looking into plugins that will simplify the admin screen further, though adding stuff to remove stuff isn’t really what I had in mind. I also still have to research other blogging software.

On the other hand, Wordpress has become very stable in terms of spam-deflecting, or so my hosting service informs me. It turns out some of my older blogs that are set up under an old install of Movable Type (version 2.661, which you can’t even upgrade any more) came under spam attack and it was affected other servers. I wondered why my site has been experiencing slowdowns recently. They emailed me about it but I either never got the email or deleted it by mistake. Anyway, that blog setup will probably have to be ported into a Wordpress install. I won’t be updating it to Movable Type — that program has become such a pain to install the last time I used it was in 2007.

Anyway that’s what’s been going on here. Oh, and I’m still fighting off this cold (I’m at the coughing/scratchy throat/incessant post nasal drip stage) and staying indoors. And it’s going to snow more tomorrow. Oy.

You know that bracelet with her deployed son’s name on it that Sarah Palin was wearing at that speech (the one with The Hand) that was a totally shocking disgusting inappropriate oh my goddess she wants her son dead that’s for POWs MIAs KIAs she’s so stupid for wearing it is she an idiot thing to wear? Well…

…turns out it’s a “Soldier’s Deployment Bracelet,” and was sent to her by the company that makes them. They sent one to Joe Biden too. (His son is also in the military.)

Well, well, but — she wrote on her hand!

(Crossposted here.)