One More Detour on the Writing Road

Spam has been negligible ever since I closed posts to comments after a couple of days. I still get some attaching to photos like ticks to a dog, and I haven’t figured out a way to stop that. But 2 spam messages in a week as opposed to, say, 200 in a day? Not that big an ish. Besides, I don’t want to shut down comments completely. So, we’ll see how it goes.

Moved up retirement to 31 July because I ran the numbers and saw that I could. I wanted to enjoy some summer months. So, I am taking the plunge. 40 more days, give or take a few hours. Not that I’m counting….

Came home to find laptop, an 5yo MacBook, displaying Gray Screen of Death. Second kernel panic in a week and a half. I rebooted with no issues. External hardware is sometimes the reason, and I have a new cable modem that needs to be installed b/c old one is out of date, but I won’t have time to do that for at least a week, so. Activated Dropbox to save wips every ten minutes. Backed up everything after the first panic attack. And I have the 9yo iBook as back-up in case the MacBook fails.

I suspect a new laptop may be in my future, tho damned if I want the expense right now. A new Apple laptop=new countertops/backsplash in kitchen. I may check Small Dog for rebuilts. Not enough of a gadgeteer to care whether I have the latest and greatest or not.

Retiring in 40 days–did I mention?

Time to cut the lawn.

Mirrored from Kristine Smith.

It’s raining. Gonna rain most all the weekend. We do need it. The Lake is down 14″ to the lowest level since the mid-60s while closer to home–as in, my basement–the sump pump well has been so dry so long that it has become quite the spiderarium. But the lawn has thinned enough in spots that the pups track muddy footprints when they return from bathroom breaks, and chilly&soggy is just my least favorite weather condition ever. Which makes one wonder why in hell it’s my dream to move to the PacNorWet.

All I can say is that mountains trump chilly&soggy. Portland&Seattle trump chilly&soggy.

Weekend point to ponder–am I the only person who has absolutely no issues using both Macs and PCs? I switched from PCs to Macs in the early 00′s in order to avoid infestations, and had no difficulty making the OS transition. Used PCs at the day job, and never felt a speedbump. OK, the backspace keyless MacBook keyboard trips me up every so often. When I return to PC-ville, I lose half a sentence before I remember where I am, but I think that the deletion of the MacBook Backspace key was done for space-saving reasons rather than to accommodate differences in language.

Anyway, I know some people have Definite Views–no need to restate them here. Mine have faded over time. In the interest of economy, I would even buy a PC laptop as a back-up system if I decided to return to Word or write purely in rtf or found some other word processing program that worked seamlessly between Mac and PC. I like working in Scrivener, but I’m not 100% committed to it.

Mirrored from Kristine Smith.

Came home from Ravinia–Joshua Bell, wonderful as always–played with pups, did dishes, had a piece of toast. Opened up the laptop. Time Machine kicked in as I was phutzing around…

…and it’s telling me it can’t find the Airport Extreme Base Station. I can go online, and everything–the external HD, the Base Station, the laptop–is functioning.

So I go online and find out that Apple doesn’t support Time Machine with Airport Extreme. People use the set-up, but it isn’t reliable and data can become corrupted and I may not even know it.

Okay.

If that’s the case, I don’t feel comfortable using it anymore. What’s the point? So what’s the best way to save works-in-progress? Save directly to an external HD with a hardwire connection? DropBox? I can’t use iCloud because it doesn’t work with Scrivener.

(A few minutes pass)

Okay, I unplugged the external HD, waited a few seconds, and plugged it back in. External HD woke up, AEBS read it, everything is talking to everything else again. I did see that sometimes TM/AEBS can’t wake up a sleeping HD, and the connection fails. But the fact remains that this is an unsupported, unreliable set-up.

If I use DropBox, does it function as a back-up, or do I save my files directly to DropBox?

See, I miss the old Backup application that worked with Mobile Me. I set up the files I wanted backed up–not the whole damn laptop, but just the writing files–and it backed up on the schedule I set up. Clockwork. Never failed.

Guess I could burn a DVD. Does anyone do that anymore?

Mirrored from Kristine Smith.

Doggy details below. Be warned.

The results of the culture from King’s bladder infection came back today. It’s a stubborn nasty, so he’s been upgraded to the high octane antibiotics. First week in July, we repeat the culture, as well as do a blood test to check the thyroid levels. Depending on the results, we go from there. Best case–the infection was just One Of Those Things, and the thyroid med takes care of the wonky blood test results. Not so best case–we go on to test for Cushings.

I checked the Cushings article over at the Washington State University Vet School page. Damn, but there are too many similarities for comfort. I am hoping for the best, but preparing. At least the damned thing is treatable.

3 1/2 days of antibiotics + levothyroxine do seem to have helped, though. King is livelier in the mornings, and is playing with Gaby again in the evenings. He has become a finicky eater, however. He has gone off his old food completely, including the skin/coat oil and chewable joint meds. That meant I had to switch him to a new food without the usual gradual shift. So far, he seems fine, but it isn’t the preferred way of doing things. At least the new food contains probiotics to help his gut deal with the antibiotics.

In other news. MY ITALIAN TOMATO PLANTS HAVE BUDS!! One of the St Pierre and both Franz-I-Forget-The-Rest are sporting one bud cluster each. The Arkansas Traveler and Black Cherry, not yet, although I do see a promising something or other on the Traveler. The San Marzano is a maybe, but it’s the runt of the litter and still has a ways to go.

As you can see, we have a bit of weirdness going on in the raised bed this year.

A few carryovers from last year’s mesclun mix decided to go nuts. The Swiss chard (left) and the reddish leaf lettuce (center) are over three feet high and ready to flower. The red onion (right) has a couple of seed clusters…

…and the curly lettuce is sporting a few purple blossoms. Assuming none of these things are hybrids, I will have plenty of seeds for next year.

In other other news, I don’t understand Time Machine. It worked like proverbial clockwork for a few days in a row. Then I shut down the MacBook and restarted it, which you are supposed to do every so often to let various clean-up programs work. Reconnected to the backup drive like I was supposed to, and damn but TM didn’t work. Couldn’t find the backup drive. Couldn’t find the sparse bundle. I rebooted twice. Reconnected to the external HD repeatedly. No go. By the next day, I had finally decided to bag it and install the backup software that came with the external HD. Checked on a whim, and found that TM has decided to start working again. It’s been fine ever since.

I know my MacBook is old. It’s a late 2007 model, and it’s a coin toss whether I will be able to upgrade to Mountain Lion. Right now, it’s Not–this MacBook is just on the wrong side of the cut-off. I will have to buy a new laptop eventually, but between King, car maintenance, and some needed house repairs…I was hoping to put it off for a while.

As an aside, the external HD is a Western Digital with SmartWare backup software. Anyone out there use it? I ask because while I am glad Time Machine is up and running, I have heard it isn’t the end all and be all of backup systems. Any recs for better ones appreciated.

In baking news, much chocolate arrived today from King Arthur Flour. Bittersweet. Semisweet. Guittard’s unsweetened, which may find its way into some brownies this weekend. A chance to compare to Ghirardelli.

Hot today, close to 90F. Mosquitoes are back–I had to dig out the OFF! battery-driven repellant thingie. Stayed outside until the bats and the stars came out.

Mirrored from Kristine Smith.

At least 3-4 hours of it, which was the time I spent deciding I needed a new external HD, buying one in haste from the local big box, trying to install it, failing miserably, and driving back to big box to return it.

Yes, Dear Reader, it was a Day of Unintended Tech.

I found the right external HD online and ordered it, so sometime next week I may finally be able to use Time Machine as it was intended. I have an external HD currently, but it’s only 80 GB (only 80 gigs ::shakes head::) and is just about full–I can save individual files and folders, but wholesale backup is no longer possible according to said Time Machine. In addition, the 1 TB unit (1. Terabyte.) I ordered is already formatted for a Mac, which the one I struggled with today wasn’t. Yes, there were instructions for reformatting, but something kept accessing the drive even though I was sure I disabled/turned everything off, and I frankly don’t have the patience + know-how to grapple with something like that at the moment. So back to the store it went and left the store I did, return credit in hand.

What started this little rainbow ball spinning merrily down the mountain was the fact that MobileMe is going away next month and with it my access to Backup, its nifty, straightforward online storage application. I liked Backup. I could configure it to save the files/folders I wanted saved when I wanted them saved. Every night at 730pm, a little brollie appears in my Dock, and all my writing files–PC Word, Works, MacWord, Scrivener–all get backed up within an inch of their little virtual lives.

Starting sometime next month, however, MobileMe will be replaced by iCloud. The issue that served as the first warning pebble in this avalanche of WTF was the fact that iCloud only works with Lion, the new OS which I had yet to download because I kept hearing that there were Issues. Supposedly many of those Issues have been resolved and I was running out of time in any case, so today I took a deep breath and downloaded/installed Lion. I then checked Scrivener to make sure it still worked, which it did. Then I set about setting up my iCloud account.

I did believe at first that I would be able to backup my files as I had before. Not so, Dear Reader. iCloud apparently only works with iWorks and other Mac products, none of which I am using, so backing up my files as before was Right Out. This was when I reevaluated Time Machine, learned that my present external HD was no longer up to the task, and set about finding a replacement. And failing. At least until later in the week, when I SHALL SUCCEED, DAMMIT, AND SPIT IN THE FACES OF ALL THOSE *&^%$#@ WHO REPLACE PROGRAMS THAT MEET MY NEEDS WITH PROGRAMS THAT DON’T.

Don’t mention Dropbox to me. I opened an account today. It doesn’t do what I want, unless I am missing something obvious which is totally possible because I tend to intuit applications instead of reading the instructions. This system usually works reasonably well, to tell the truth, if only because a program that I can intuit is one that I will be able to work with. Like Backup. Which is going away next month, did I mention?

Night is falling. Coffee has been brewed. Some days, there isn’t enough coffee in the world.

At least the brownies came out all right. This recipe, courtesy of the folks at Recchiuti, but without the nuts and marshmallows. My batch actually tasted fairly close to the to-die-for brownies that Recchiuti sells on their website, but there were differences due to, I think, the pan and the butter. I used a glass 8×8 baking pan/dish, and did not remember until too late that you need to bake at a lower temp in glass. As for the butter, I used plain ol’ grocery store unsalted, which I doubt met the 82% butterfat requirement specified in the recipe. So, watery butter and too high a heat meant that the brownies came out slightly overbaked–still moist in the center, but dry around the edges and lacking the flourless chocolate cake density they were intended to have. That said, they’re still the best brownies I have ever made and among the best I have ever eaten. It’s a keeper recipe. I just need to tweak. And get hold of a good metal pan and some boutique butter.

And it’s now dark outside. Chilly day, as it turned out. Rainy morning. Tomorrow, however, we are supposed to set records–I am hearing rumors of triple-digit temps, which would be an almost 40-degree upswing from today. Personally I think those of us north of the city will be cooler, but I guess we’ll see.

Mind’s churning a little bit. Tech has that effect on me. If I were a hard drive, I would be racing.

Backup’s going away next month. Fck.

Mirrored from Kristine Smith.

The latest batch o’ spam includes a Jane Austen fan, apparently.

Keep your breath to cool your porridge.

Mordez-moi aussi, duckie.

§

Busy morning at the day job. Home during lunch to let out the pups, a little later than usual. Color me In A Hurry. Dump purse, keys, etc on kitchen table, grab towel, and go out on deck to wait for pups so’s I could wipe their muddy paws before they went inside. Close door after me, because that’s what you do. Wipe pup paws, then open door to go back inside. Try to open door. Try really, really hard.

Yeah.

You see, back door is problematic. It’s old, which means that all the trimsulation or whatever the hell you call it is old as well. Most of it is cracked or missing, so last year I inserted some lengths of narrow foam stripping to fill in gaps and keep out cold air etc. For some time, this insulation remained puffy enough to keep the door from closing completely–the deadlatch wouldn’t catch and the door would pop open. To keep the door closed, I either had to slam it really hard, or engage the deadbolt. The deadbolt is locked on the inside with a thumbturn and on the outside with a key. The second lock, on the door handle, was never really an issue because the door never shut properly. I usually left it engaged.

Now last summer, I accidentally slammed the door and did manage to lock myself out. But I cranked down on the door handle and pushed with my shoulder and the door opened because the insulation was still thick enough to keep the deadlatch from extending all the way.

The insulation has thinned since then. If the door is closed with force, like when one is rushing out onto the deck with a towel to wipe muddy pup paws, the deadlatch will extend all the way.

Yeah.

I must have spent a good 45 minutes trying to open that door. I cranked on the handle and pushed, cranked and pushed. Cranked and kicked. Kicked many many times. Hunted for anything on the deck or out on the yard that I could use as a pry. Wondered whether I should just give up and drive to the hardware store and call a locksmith. I did have my car keys, but drivers license was in wallet, which was in purse, which was safely secured inside the house, along with two sets of house keys and my phone.

I debated breaking the door glass (French door–lotta glass). Instead, I searched the deck again, and found a short pole behind the wood rack. I braced it against the door handle and levered it down, down, down, cranking the door handle more and more until the screw posts cracked. Pulled the knob apart, and got in the house.

Bought a new handle after work and installed it. It’s not perfect. The deadbolt is dull brass, but the local store didn’t have an entry door handle with the same finish. So I settled for worn bronze, which is black with coppery undertones. And since the handles curve, I need to reverse them at some point–they curve up, and they’re supposed to curve down, which means I need to pop them off the spindle and reverse them. Just don’t feel like dealing with that now. My right shoulder and arm are a little stiff from grappling with the door handle and pushing, and my right foot is a little stiff from kicking. Nothing serious, she said, fingers crossed. I’m just happy that the door closes.

§

Looks like I’m going to have to upgrade to Lion in the near future. MobileMe, the older Backup/iDisk/Mail/calendar service, is going away, to be replaced by iCloud, which requires Lion to run. I haven’t heard great things about Lion, so I will wait as long as I can. But sometime in the next few months, I will have to give up Snow Leopard and move on.

I saw that Mountain Lion will be coming out this summer, which is another hint that Lion wasn’t all that great. Poor kitty. He deserved better.

Mirrored from Kristine Smith.