Musings while in recovery

I'm too tired, after a day of babysitting, and traumatized, from almost 48 hours without an internet connection, to put together a coherent post. The best I can do is a series of wandering thoughts.

1. Because I had to reboot the computer and the modem as part of the attempt at locating the problem (which didn't help, at all; the outage was at the other end) and because the computer was useless, anyway, (Why do they put the help files online these days? When you need them for trouble-shooting, you can't get them. That's akin to the isp staff that e-mailed my dad to tell him that his e-mail was currently not available while they upgraded. Really! So helpful!) I unhooked everything, cleared and moved the desk, and sorted out the wiring. The desk had been in the same position for about 5 years.

It took all day Tuesday to do that, and to return everything to its place and hook it all up again.

It wasn't as dusty behind the desk as I would have expected. I only found one spider, which I carefully shooed into a crack before I vacuumed.

I keep an air filter running behind the computer at all times, to make sure it gets only the cleanest, most dust-free air possible. Tuesday, I vacuumed the computer thoroughly from every angle, and through every vent. Then I put a fresh, new dust bag into the vacuum, reversed the hose, and blew through the rear fan outlet. I should have done this outside; a huge cloud of fine dust spewed out of the intakes and all over the room. So I had to vacuum and dust everything in the room again.

Dust is not good for computers. Moral of the story; must clean computer much more frequently.

2. Travelling around with an almost-3-year-old, I stopped to watch a backhoe at work on a crumbling garden installation. It was picking up rotting beams, stacking them to one side, and levelling a small hill. After we started home, I was treated to the following conversation:

Sophia: "Backhoe bites wood."
Me: "Yes, a backhoe bites wood. And mud."
S: "Not people?"
Me: "No, not people. It doesn't bite people. Just wood and mud."
S: "Not Sophia?"
Me: "No, not Sophia. Just wood and mud."

And then a monologue, all the way home: "Bites wood. Bites mud. Not people. Not Sophia. Not people. Wood. Mud. Bites wood. Bites mud. Not Sophia. Not people. Bites ..."

If repeating a fact 10 times cements it in memory, I'm sure she's got this one down for life.

3. Eileen (Cicero) writes of squirrels being "ever so persistent." They are. So are kids. (Which is why you can't hide Christmas presents from them, and why (I think) some teens are such good hackers.) In the mall, we stopped to look at the loonie grabbers, the brightly-coloured bouncing "airplanes" and bunny rabbits and Noah's Arks. One, a kid-sized ice-cream truck, was still going, after the previous kid had left it. Sophia climbed in and entertained herself pushing all the buttons. ("Yum! Chocolate! My favourite!" the red one elicited.) Another kid, a boy around 5, climbed in, too.

The truck used up its loonie, and stopped. Sophia pushed buttons vainly. But the boy jiggled the coin return lever with one hand, and pushed the Start button with the other. Off they went again, for the full ride.

On the third time round, the trick failed. The kid kept trying, until his mother came over to take him off to pre-school. She told me he'd discovered the trick some weeks before. She's got a hacker in the making there.

4. The Great Backyard Bird Count. We did count, but without too much profit. Juncos, chickadees, crows, and pigeons, of course. Eagles, 10 in one small clump of trees along the Ladner Trunk Road. 4 Northern Harriers in and beside a field, a mass meeting of gulls along the highway to Richmond. Not much else.

Part of the problem was that we were on the go most of the weekend; we made observations from the car as I drove. And I took no photos. These two are from the week before:

A dozen crows. Otherwise known as a murder.


Wally's Woodpecker. This wouldn't have worked for the bird count, would it?

And Laurie did get a close shot at a hawk from the car, as I drove. Unfortunately, the car hit a bump just as he pressed the shutter:

Hawk backside. And, on the lamp, a liberal application of white hawk poop.

5. And tomorrow, I hope, life will return to its normal tempo. (I can dream, can't I?)

.

The better to see you with

I never saw a pug-nose cat before. I met this one in an alley-way in Strathcona yesterday evening.


A baleful glare. Maybe it's the yellow eyes (click on the photo to get the full effect) or the scars on the face. (Is that a recent wound on his nose?) He looks like a scrapper. But he gave no sign of being annoyed by my photography, and sat there calmly while I experimented with flash/no flash and distant shots/close-ups. The light was fading, so I needed the flash, but it did strange things with his eyes:


One yellow eye, one green eye.

We will be house-sitting in Strathcona for the next two weeks. Blogging may be sporadic at first; my daughter's computer keeps adding uncalled-for formatting to this post. (It just needs to learn the rules: I am the boss, not it. I'll be giving it a good lecture tomorrow.)

Now, I'll hit "Publish" and see what happens. Wish me luck!
.

Just what I needed!

How to clean your computer's screen.

And I had just used Windex and a micro-lint cloth! But this method is so much more ... simple? ... labour-saving? ... No; "thorough" would be the right word; an intensive, deep cleaning, cleaning from the inside out.

Sorry, no post today...

... I've been reading the riot act to my computer all day. And saying uncomplimentary things about Bill Gates.

Somehow, my start menu got corrupted. And it's all his fault. I know that. Because I wouldn't delete the wrong thing by mistake, now would I? So there!

It's working now; all I have left to do is clean up the greasy rags and put away the pipe wrench.

See you tomorrow!

Computer history (mine, anyhow)

Been doin' a bit of cogitating, today. And I have a question for you all.

But first, a bit of history. About computers and me.

(Note: if computer talk makes your eyes go out of focus, scroll down to the bottom for the question.)

It was back in the early 1980s that my Mom got me involved with the machines. I had vowed never to have anything to do with these "useless" glorified typewriters, but I went to visit my folks for a week, and here was Mom with this brand-new Kay-Pro II (photo from here). And a noisy, rackety OkiData 9-pin dot matrix printer on a specially-built cabinet beside it, with the continuous-form paper fed through a slot in back. Remember that paper? How tricky it was to feed in just right? How it went crooked as soon as you turned your back? And how you had to rip off the sides afterwards?

Anyhow, Mom had the beast up and running (using Perfect Writer) and had joined a computer club; the only woman, and the only member out of her 20s. She was 67. She was busily transferring all her articles and files to the big floppy disks.

And she wanted help. She gave me a list of commands and set me to work.

I guess pride had a part in what came next. I had to learn that program better than Mom had. Of course. And later, when my son was taking programming in school, I had to learn BASIC, too. Next thing I knew, I had my own second-hand computer, running DOS. I eventually got a modem (1200 baud) and went on-line. S-l-oooooooo-w-l-y!

Still mid-80s. I was writing material for work, and had started a book, using "Electric Desk" on a DOS platform. I bought a printer that used real paper, and ink instead of a ribbon. I joined a few BBSs (Bulletin Board Systems) and made a few friends, mostly young men. There were very few women on at that time; I only remember 3 others. In 1994, one of the sysops came over and set up Netscape for me on my new laptop (Windows 3.1, and a sticker reading "Intel Inside")

Anyone around from that time? Remember how you told the thing to dial, and it went do-di-di-do-di-do-di, then rang, then a long, agonized, noisy squawk/buzz while it went through the hand-shaking procedures? I had to put an upside-down egg carton silencer over the speaker, to avoid waking up the people upstairs.

A long time, and many upgrades ago. Years of dial-up, of Windows trouble-shooting, of blue screens. I built a website and had "fun" tweaking html. And then, Y2K: remember that scare? All that happened to me was that my daughter's Word for Windows went wonky and it took me an hour of January 1st to fix it for her.

And now, here I am, blogging, since last spring.

And that brings me to my question.

In what way, if any, has blogging changed your life? Or has it, at all?

I will answer that, for myself, tomorrow.