"I have been but little in," said Ninian hastily...

Thanks to peatsmoke, ticktockmary, Kirstin, and everyone else who helped out with advice or information. I can now type "newly knighted newts are a nuisance" at speed. Not nice to be N-less; now not necessary to noodle out a reword. Instead of several weeks and $50+ through the useless ATSI, I am now re-N-ed for less than $10, included insured and registered mail.

One small victory!

Points to anyone who recognizes that reference. :-)

I'm back to blogging on LJ, but my posting may take a while or look very odd, as my N key is playing Hob. And, in trying to fix it, I broke it even more. So I need a new keyboard, which will take several days, and until that I'm dealing with a very jury-jigged typing methos (or using the iPhone or iPad, which are not ideal for long typing. My but English has a lot of Ns in it!

In other news, I think once the government reopens, I need to talk to the folks at the National Weather Service. I think that the shutdown prevented them from booting up October; we seem to be having a rerun of either August or September.

Never mind, a big package came from GMT today, the Greece and Eastern Kingdoms extension for Commands and Colors. And I still have, unpunched, the two new COIN titles, Cuba Libre and A Distant Plain, that I'm itching to try out.  If only I had someone to play it with...

To hell with this damn touchpad and thank god for Carbonite.

My laptop's touchpad has been getting more and more sensitive lately, "responding" to commands that I didn't try to give it.

Today I've spent all morning organizing my photo cache on my laptop, about 6-7 years of photos.

When I'd gotten about half the job done, my finger slipped as I was moving something, and a message popped up telling me that something was being deleted.

Every time I delete something, a message comes up asking if I want to be sure. For some reason, not this time (or the same finger slip automatically approved it, who knows?)

I thought, "What could it be deleting?" I flip back to the main window--it's deleting ALL MY PHOTOS. I cancelled as fast as I could, but about half of them were already gone.

I tried restoring from the Recycling bin immediately, but it seemed that only things I had specifically and intentionally deleted myself were in the Recycling--none of what had just been deleted. But I tried restoring those anyway. It said it would take 45 minutes, so I was hopeful that perhaps this would somehow be everything, and I left it alone.

I came back just now, and it had finished restoring--only those things I had intentionally deleted.

I checked my Carbonite backup--but it was showing only what was in my folder NOW. I quickly suspended backup, realizing that it had already started saving the current state of my drive as if that were what I wanted to preserve. Fortunately, I was able to find an older version of backup on Carbonite, one from before this morning. I've lost four hours of work, but at least (I think) I have not lost 7 years of photos.

ASAP, once I've gotten everything back, I'm backup up all the photos and music to a second, physical drive. Just to be sure.

And I'm getting a new laptop--one with more reliable controls.

I don't often feel lucky. I don't mean fortunate--there are many reasons to feel that. No, I mean that most of my days are a string of events, mostly tiresome but not drastic, that suggest the nearby presence of an Improbability Drive starship. The backpack, quickly grabbed from the car seat winds a stray, swinging strap twice around the parking brake handle. Three lights in succession turn amber *just* that second or two before I can safely squeak through them. The pen that I'm holding slips free of my hand and doesn't just roll under the desk but jams solidly into the interstices between two cube panels in some position that, defying logic, can't be reached from my cube *or* any of the adjoining ones.

So, I feel that it really calls for remarking when something remarkable happens the other way.

The "enter" key (only one of the most critical) on my laptop had jammed, so I tried to *gently * prise it up to see if I could fix the problem. It flew into the air with what sounded distinctly like a plastic-snapping sound. Heart sinks. I looked at the position and there's a plunger (that actually operates the circuit), a wire that snaps into the key (to hold one side and let the other move up and down), and several indentations or clips on the back of the key that connect it to the wire and to a contraption of sliding plastic frames around the plunger.

So, what actually broke? Nothing, by some miracle. The jam was a tiny bit of pine-based cat litter that had gotten into the sliding frames and which I could abstract with my fingernail. The wire clips into the key and slides into clips on the board. The frames also attach with sliding tabs to the key. But here's the trick--the frame has to slide into the keypad at the same time the wire (snapped into the key) slides under the clips on the board. If I had a loud-hailer and a team of 2mm helpers, I might be able to do that. With my fingers... no way.

I snap the wire back onto the key. Slide the ends under the clips. Rest it on the plunger and see that, yes, that's how it sits, but without being able to slide the tabs of the frame onto the clips on the back of the key, it's just going to cant forward at an odd angle. I try typing "enter" a few times to see how odd that would be--could I live with it? It's kludgey, but it could work in a pinch. Grrr. I hit the key a little harder, in annoyance. Why did this have to happen.

There's a click. Apparently I hit the key just hard enough to bend the tabs around the clips and slide them into place without hitting it so hard they just snapped off. Truly amazing.

So, I'm ready for the coffee lid that isn't as tight as it should be. Or the tiny patch of ice that somehow survived the last couple of days. Or even the door that closes faster than I expect it to and catches the tips of my fingers. Because I've had my little moment of computer maintenance satori. And nothing can touch me now. :-)

One of my friends has been posting snippets from http://damnyouautocorrect.com/.



I have to stop reading it now because people are starting to wander around the cube farm looking for the source of the loud sniggering. :-)

I realise that, after joining the i-tech revolution when I bought my iPod Touch, I haven't really embraced app madness. I've downloaded probably less than a dozen apps (one for birding--the main reason I got the iTouch--one for football news, one for Metro maps and another for National Park maps, a couple for reading, one or two games). What are my readers' favourite apps? What else should I get?

Also, on the subject of things electronic, I have some music on my iThing, but anything there has to be bought from iTunes (which I try not to do, because I like having the CD itself to fall back on) or first burned to my laptop from CD and then transferred, the first of which is a big chore. That made me wonder; I gather from the popular press that actually buying recorded media is a concept swiftly going out of style. But to me it just makes sense. If I buy everything online and then have a drive crash, it's lost forever! At first I thought one could just go back to iTunes and reload it, but one of my friends who had that experience came in for a nasty shock--he had to pay for everything all over again! As far as Apple was concerned, they might have a record of what he had purchased before, but if he wanted to make use of it again, he had to buy it again. Do people really download all or most of their music? Do they spend their entire lives backing up drives? That seems like an awful lot of effort. Also, another of my friends found that a song she purchased could only be stored on a limited number of drives before it could no longer be copied. I can see that making sense from a copyright point of view, but it seems tough in this world where people are constantly changing machines, i-devices, etc.

is the floppy drive on my PC coming on every now and then? It's not done this before, and I have *never* in the years I have had this computer actually *used* this drive.

But now every ten minutes or so it runs and the drive light comes on, even though there's no disc in it.

This suggests to me that something is...wrong.

I just bookmarked a page, and Firefox, as it will do, offered me a choice of most frequently used selections instead of laboriously selecting a specific folder.

The choices it offered me?

Pizza
Wargames & Military History
Erotica
Smut
[wargame] Terrain

Yes, I am a bachelor...

Since I moved from Dreamhost to Easyspace, pretty much no more than a day or two has gone by that something hasn't gone wrong.

They have excellent uptime. I have yet to have a problem of the sort that constantly plagued me with DH.

But their webmail is, in a word, atrocious, and it's eating my correspondence.

It randomly moves messages (incoming or read) to the spam folder. It does *not* move actual spam there, and it has no "learning" process, no filters (other than address-based, which is of course useless since spammers--who frequently use exactly the same subject line over and over, rarely use the same address twice), no way to tell it what is spam (or, more importantly, what isn't).

And you can't move mail from one folder to another (well, you can move mail to trah or spam, but that's ALL). If it sticks mail in spam, there's no way to move it back to the in box. I thought you could move it to a separate folder that you create (from which you would never be able to download it, of course, but at least you could still read it). But no. I just tried that, and the messages disappeared. They disappeared from the spam folder, but they didn't show up in the new folder. Just gone. Not in the trash, nowhere.

I'm close to giving up on having a domain-based email altogether and just using Gmail, with all its flaws.

If you need email, do not go to Easyspace.

I'm still trying to hook up a new domain host, and DH has sent me the Auth Code for the transfer, but now my website and email suddenly work again. WTF?