Green pincushions

I've been having computer problems.  I think — I hope — I've fixed the underlying problem, but in the process, I accidentally deleted all my current photos.

I managed to restore these two: mosses on a wet cliff face beside Upper Campbell Lake.

Two mosses and a bit of Cladonia lichen.

I call this pincushion moss. Unidentified species. 

I love these little, dense mounds that grow on vertical rock faces. Attempts to identify them always turn up dozens of look-alikes. So I'm content just to look and admire.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I have to hurry out to take some photos to fill my empty file folder.

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He estado ocupado tratando de resolver un problema con mi computadora. Creo — espero — que ya anda bien, pero entre todos los arreglos, me equivoqué y perdí todas mis fotos recientes. Logré rescatar estas dos; musgos creciendo sobre la haz de una roca al lado del lago Upper Campbell.

Me encantan estos montoncitos de musgo; parecen almohadillas para alfileres, pero verdes. Tratando de identificarlos, encuentro docenas de musgos casi idénticos. No importa; estoy contenta mirando y admirándolos.

Ahora, a salir con la cámara; hay que llenar ese archivo vacío.

Red and green

 One red dahlia.

Bright sunlight, deepish shade under taller plants.

I'm still here. But my photo processing program in a fit of pique has started crashing at random intervals, taking with it any recent work. Reading it the riot act tomorrow.

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Una dahlia roja, en la sombra, pero con algunos pétalos en pleno sol.

No he abandonado el blog, pero el programa de Photoshop anda de malas y se declara en huelga. Lo peor es que ha borrado trabajo concluido. Pero no me doy por vencida; ya verá quien manda aquí.

Daisies for breakfast

They always remind me of fried eggs.

Sunny side up.

A bit silly tonight, after hours of wrestling with my computer.

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Siempre me hacen pensar en huevos estrellados. Unas margaritas en un terreno baldío.

Estoy un poco loca esta noche, después de horas de luchar con la computadora.

In a crabby mood

 My computer keeps crashing today. So I'm crabby. So is he:

Crab molt, Oyster Bay shore.

Back to work, arguing with a stubborn machine.

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Mi computadora y yo estamos de malas hoy; se me congela la máquina a cada rato.

En inglés se dice, cuando uno está de malas, que está como cangrejo. Así que aquí está un cangrejito que también estuvo de malas. Y ahora dejó su muda en la playa.

Y vuelvo a mi pleito con esta computadora.

Lichen to rocks

I'm back on-line*. Now, where was I?

Oyster Bay: the Misc. file.

Slanting afternoon light on the grasses and logs of the shore/forest interface.

Cladonia lichen on a log end.

Sand dollar test on the sand bar.

Rocks on the breakwater, with gull poop and barnacles.

And on the edge of the park, a ditch full of foxgloves and daisies.

*The problem was simple: a server update, with no warning and new passwords. Complicated by a genius programming kitten, who can, with a few strokes, make changes that take me an hour to fix. She even turned my screen display upside-down, and re-worked a half-edited photo, both actions together, instantly. Bill Gates, watch your back!

Contact

This photo always cheers me up:

"You were saying?"

It's an oldie, from 2009. I ran across it again tonight, sorting photos into some semblance of order. When my storage hard drive crashed, it took with it many of my photos, and corrupted many more. Then, transferring the remainder to a new storage drive, it crashed again, taking the new one with it mid-transfer. Even more photos got lost. Eventually I was able to rescue quite a few, higgledy-piggledy, without their original file folders. I'm even finding name changes, so that a photo of a beaded Mexican gourd was labelled "female scaup".

It's comforting to remember a summer afternoon, feeding a gull on the railing of the White Rock pier, one bite of old bread at a time.

Yay!

I think I've got my computer whipped back into shape. Now I can get back to the good stuff. Like this tiny critter:

Unidentified, as yet. Something to look up on BugGuide. Very small. How small, I've forgotten. They'll know. 

And speaking of critters, here's an interesting article, with video, about how male spiders tie down their mates to avoid becoming supper.

Oh, for an island of mine own!

And back before computers existed, too.

I am fighting a sulking, stubborn, unreasonable hard drive that wants to hog all my yummy photo files for itself and not share. I'm not giving up, but the island is tempting . . .

Somewhere in mid-channel, from the Tsawwassen-Schwartz Bay ferry.

These days, of course they have computers there, too. And internet access. No refuge anywhere!

Blue and white

November and December are slow months on our beaches. The only low tide of the day is scheduled around 3:00 A.M. Walking the shore in the afternoons, only sometimes are we lucky enough to get a couple of feet of intertidal zone. But the clouds make up for it.

Boundary Bay, looking south

I'm having computer problems; spent most of the day today reading the machine the riot act, and it's still misbehaving. Two year old computers are more stubborn than two year old kids.

A Skywatch post

Upgrading, crazily

My problems are over! Or just beginning; one of the two. I gave up on the old computer, and went out and bought a new one, of the same make. So far, so good, except that now I find I can't type. The keys are all in the wrong places, and the delete key is hiding in with all the inoffensive keys like "pg up" and "pg dn". I'm sure I've deleted at least two important files.

You would think that the developers would have realized that they needed to consult me about all the changes they were making. Totally inconsiderate of them!

We saw this set of steps going up the cliff face to a house far above the White Rock beach. It is about as logical as this computer, maybe a bit more so.

Staircase, with periwinkles.

The colours of my photos seems to be a bit "off" on this screen. The grey wood looks purplish-blue; it looked fine on the old computer and the spare monitor. What do the colours look like to you?

Frazzled

My computer is acting up again. I've got it working at the moment, but it keeps crashing, no matter what I do.

The Huichol tribe in Mexico had the same problem, centuries ago. There is no other logical explanation for this traditional design:

Beads embedded in wax, lining a dried gourd. About 9 inches across.

Frazzled nerves

What a day! Last night, Google put a big red warning sign on the blog; it had been infected with malware. I've spent the night and all day today, trying to find and eradicate the source of the problem. I think I must have got it, because Google now says they do not detect any malware. (Big sigh of relief!)

A hawk named Google? (Vacant lot, this summer)

In the process, however, I deleted several widgets, most of my blogroll, most of the blogs I follow, all my followers, and a few links in specific posts. Somewhere in all of it, the deceptive link got removed; I stopped deleting then, but I'd lost most of the blogs I love to read. I'll re-load the blogroll, with the few links I still have.

Could I ask you a favour? If you don't show up on the blogroll, and you know you should, could you please drop me a line here in the comments, or by e-mail (wanderinweeta at gmail dot com)? Thanks!

I've enabled moderation for comments for now. Sorry about that, but I just want to insure against re-infection. I'll figure out how to killfile the offender as soon as I can, and then I can go back to normal.

Sad remains.

I should be thanking Google, too. I would hate to have gone on merrily handing out copies of whatever bug I'd contracted. Thanks for warning me, Google! And thanks to you people for your screen shots and suggestions.

 Now, off to install widgets again ...

Pumpkin lichen and old paint

I found these lichens on the railing of the 101-year-old Westham Island bridge.

Three different lichens here. Look closely for the little brown button just left and a bit below the centre.

There's a little pile of the brown buttons at the lower right.

Lichen, flaking paint, and well-aged wood.

We went to pick up some printed photos of reeds and dried pond scum today, the second trial for that batch. They turned out far too bright, the greens were too yellow, the browns weak. On my screen, they had looked right. I discussed this with the technician on duty, and he told me that my screen colours were calibrated wrong.

To my eyes, the screen looks right; the colours in that photo, on my monitor, were as we saw them in real life. But this is the third time that what I see here is not what we get in a print-out.

Can you help me? Look at the colours above; as I saw them on the bridge, and as they look on my screen, the main lichens are pumpkin-orange, with butternut squash flesh tones in the yellower places. The grey lichen in the first photo is grey, with just a hint of bluish. And the paint is aqua, about the same as one column to the right of 00FFC0 here.

The colours, as I see them, are fairly saturated; only the greys are faded out.

What do you see? How does the colour show up on your screen?

Green water, brown duck.

I'm still wrestling with YouTube. It doesn't like any of my choices for audio. "This will take a couple of minutes," it tells me, then hangs up all day.

My eyes are burning out. This will rest them:

Mallard with stripy speculum, Reifel Island.

I'm giving up for the night. Maybe YouTube will decide to co-operate in the morning.

"night, all!

Recalcitrant computer

I'm having computer problems. Anything to do with photos freezes. I'll be back as soon as I convince my machine that I'm in charge here.

I'm back. Did you miss me?

Yesterday, something went awry, and suddenly, I could no longer access Google, or Google-linked sites. I was reading my e-mail, went to the next one, when, *blink*, the world out there disappeared.

Where's that "Don't Panic" button when you need it?

Of course, I did all the normal things; rebooted, unplugged the modem and set it up again, changed browsers, called the internet uncomplimentary names, ditto for my laptop, did everything again, panicked.

What was strange was that the computer worked fine, and I was connected to my ISP properly, but Google had disappeared. And with it, anything that used Google. Blogger, G-mail, Google Reader, (all you wonderful people out there; gone!) YouTube, Facebook, parts of ScienceBlogs. I couldn't contact my browser people; I'm using Google Chrome. Twitter worked, except that it has deleted a bunch of the people I follow. I could get Wordpress, when I remembered the urls (they're all on Google Reader; inacccessible). BugGuide and Flickr were fine.

I spent half an hour on the phone, trying to get through to my ISP. Hopeless; they were backed up. Other people were panicking, too. That was a relief; it wasn't my problem, maybe.

Two people responded on Twitter to my calls for help. No suggestions that worked, but again, I felt connected. Deep breath.

Finally, at midnight, I got through to the ISP; they were "working on it". Good; it was a SEP. I went to bed.

This morning, everything works.

Long story. There are two things that stand out for me.

1. Half the internet is linked to Google somehow. When Google dies, civilization will follow.
2. I missed all of you, out there. A major part of my world is online. It's awfully lonely here without you.

Hi, y'all!

Intrepid explorer

The computer is back from the shop, with all its links and programs gone, wiped out, the photos and documents piled higgledy-piggledy on the spare hard drive. I've been stuck at the desk all day and night, getting everything back and putting photos and docs in their proper places.

Among those photos I found these, that I missed in the bustle of last week; a very tiny snail that came inside with a dead leaf. A tiny snail with big, curious eyes.

Oh, what a big world I see out there!

Hi, camera person!

Interesting wood! So smooth! Must explore!

Following my shadow, wherever it leads.

It would have led him off the edge of the desk, so I put him back on the leaf and sent him out to play in the rain.

Back to work ...

All tied up in knots.

I've been having a few computer problems, and they're getting worse. Now, the thing shuts down on me every little while, without warning. I'll be getting help in the morning, but for now, I'll have to call it quits.

And Laurie went out for a walk while I fought with the beast on my desk, and came home with another enemy to be tackled:

The Japanese knotweed by the fence has sprouted again. More stuff to do tomorrow; chop the thing down. Again. (Sigh)

For now, I've done enough. I'm going to bed. Goodnight!

Sad state of affairs

My laptop is down. My fault; I tripped and upended a cup of coffee on it. Not much actually hit the computer, but enough to soak a quarter of the keyboard. So it's unplugged, mopped, dried, air-blasted, and up-ended, in case coffee dripped down into the innards.

I hope, hope, hope it survives.

But I don't dare plug it in until I'm sure it's completely Sahara-dry.

I've dragged the old monster out of storage, found its tangle of wires, and hooked it up, re-installed the virus checker, renewed passwords; it took hours. And I remember now why I decided I needed a new one. It freezes, complains about memory loss (all lies - it's almost empty, and running a bare minimum of programs),  twiddles its thumbs for minutes at a time. I click on a web page, and go get coffee. (Not to pour over it, though I'm tempted.) When I'm back, maybe the page is open. Maybe not.

The rest of the trip to Reifel will have to wait until I have a decent machine again. The photo above? A wok we discovered in burnt-out remains of a squatter's domain in a creek bed last spring. A fair representation of the state of my computing equipment at the moment.

'nuff complaining; got it out of my system. Thanks for listening!
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Floratherapy

Sometimes I think computers are conscious and malevolent. Like yesterday; I had to wrestle with one of the beasts all day and evening. Things that worked perfectly the day before were on strike, demanding all sorts of goodies I'd never heard of.

In the afternoon, I took a quick break to sit on a rug in my back yard and play with the new camera:

London Pride in bloom

Rhododendron buds

Dutchman's breeches.

Ahhhhh!

And back to the battleground.

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