I was so convinced that the part for my Powerbook was not going to fix the problem that I had written the machine off. The inverter arrived from Atlanta, however, and right now the old road warrior is working, at least in the naked, upside-down configuration.
It has worked for short spells in the past week though, so we won’t really know if things are fixed for a while yet. Cross your fingers!
Then I just have to figure out who to talk to over at Apple concerning their definition of “global”.
I got a new computer yesterday, hand-delivered from the steamy jungles of the Land of Enchantment. After rounding up the needed other parts yesterday (going to take a little getting used to the shift key not being where I expect it), I got things up and running without difficulty. I took a break for some tea, and said to myself, “self, I sure hope the laptop has some more good years in it, now that you’ve bought a desktop machine.” I took my steaming mug of caffeine back to my work table and opened up the laptop.
Obviously the gods of computing (very difficult to tell from the demons of computing) were listening, because at that very moment the screen did a little flickery dance and the computer froze up.
Moments, mere seconds before I started to copy files over to the new machine.
I already knew what the problem was, but this time things were going much more badly. My guess is that the sparks and general bad things that happened before have caused other damage to the video controller. I managed to get things working, more or less, by removing the back of the road warrior and tipping it up on its side while it ran. After poking at the video card and wedging a matchstick in at a critical point, I was able to keep it running well enough that I could access it over the network and begin moving files.
Did I start with my writing, or my software projects? No, of course not. The match stick was working, things were under control. Instead I moved a bunch of junk I wanted to burn to DVD and get out of the way. The hard drive was getting very full, and affecting performance.
Things have become dramatically worse. This morning the Road Warrior can’t run for more than a few seconds before the video problems freeze it up. It can’t even finish rebooting. Finally I disconnected the video controller completely and booted it. I can’t see the screen, but I can access files over the network.
I don’t think any amount of duct tape is going to solve this problem. My blogging software is still over there (I really want the mobile machine to be my blogging platform), so I’m adding this entry the old-fashioned way. None of the usual bottom-of-the-entry links are going to work right, except the comments, which I hard-coded.
Now what I want to do more than anything else is go somewhere and write, but I can’t.
Edited to add: I have the blog software running on the mini now, so the automatic stuff should be restored. I have tried to keep the hard link to the comments here:
There is a chance that uploading this will blow away the entire blog if I didn’t move the data over correctly. That would really suck.
It dawned on me the other day that my house guest had the tools required for me to be able to dismantle my laptop. Yes, a torx T-8 is to Cassius what a towel was to Douglas Adams. It also occurred to me that since I could make the screen work when I stood on one foot and whistled “The Star-Spangled Banner” through a carrot that the problem might be something as mundane as a loose connector. (This realization was accelerated by Cassius pointing out the obvious.)
I opened up my old Road Warrior and tried not to think too much about the little pieces of plastic that fell out. I’m sure they were simply for cosmetic purposes. Right there at the corner of the case where I found I improve reliability by wedging a matchbox under the power plug (later I found that a stack of two beer coasters under that corner was similarly effective), there was the tiny little connector for the backlight power. Bingo! I thought.
With my computer running, up on its side with its insides right there for everyone to see, I fiddled and futzed with the connector for over an hour. Things got steadily worse. Then they got better. Then they got worse again. Finally I realized that in fact my futzing had become completely superstitious and the connector was not the problem.
One clue was the faint sizzling sound I could hear when the screen was flickering, rather than going out. With ear to electronics I moved to a different corner of the box and took up poking and prodding there. That’s when, back behind a little circuit board, I saw the sparks.
I expect that car mechanics and heart surgeons get used to removing parts labled “not user serviceable” and “warranty will be voided”, but I imagine it was with some trepidation that Joe Cardiologist, M.D. sliced open his first sternum. So it was with me. I liberated the piece in question so that I could play with it in isolation while the computer ran. (More like a neurosurgeon, then, who needs the patient conscious to ask “what did that feel like?” when he prods the brain in question with a pointy thing.)
The little circuit board was wrapped in a plastic film, presumably to prevent it from touching other parts, which could lead to sparks and other bad things. At the edge, where the plastic wrapped around, there was a enough to bulge outwards and press against neighboring components. After yet more gentle torture I found the exact direction of force on the plastic to cause instant screen death. (Luckily I had a second monitor so I could bring the screen back to life by switching screen modes.)
So there it was. And I fixed it using some ancient medical advice: “Doc, it hurts when I do this.” “Then don’t do that.” I pushed the plastic around so that the pressure would not exert the wrong way and I wedged the piece back in so the plastic could not shift back. Ultimately, that is a mechanical solution to an electrical problem (there’s still a potential short circuit on that board), but it’s good enough for me. Better, in fact, because it’s both cheaper than replacing the broken part and has that old-school getting-the-most-out-of-everything feel to it.
I’m back in business, reliably so, and itching to go mobile.
When it comes to writing, I’m a creature of habit. Writing, for me, now means getting the hell away from the Internet and drinking way too much caffeine as I scratch out rough prose, all twitchy and birdlike and generally neurotic. Hey, it’s my idiom. But lately the laptop hasn’t been up to the trip, so I’ve taken up the ol’ pen and paper. In the last couple of days I’ve drafted two pretty cool short stories (one has a lot of work ahead of it). I think in the last three days I’ve scribbled about eight thousand words in my notebook. Words that must be revisited from scratch as I enter them into the land of ones and zeroes. As these stories play out into final versions it will be a very interesting test of writing styles: discrete revisions versus continuous editing.
Tonight I wrote a story I really quite like. It’s there, sprawled over a few pages in my notebook (I fit a lot of words onto each page) and it hangs together pretty well, even if it is a series of three fragments. Laura K. Hamilton meets the nitty gritty of everyday life. It’s a love story, not a lust story. I want to share it with you. Hell, I want to sell it. It’s on paper. Paper! Who thought of this crap?
My laptop is unhappy; the screen light keeps turning off. (This can’t possibly have anything to do with it falling out of my backpack last week. I had been distracted by my company at the time and didn’t take proper care as I zipped up.) I can make out the vague shapes of windows, but there’s no way to work on it.
I decided to finally bite the bullet and get the Intel-based Mac mini so I could use that while the old PowerBook is in the shop, and finally get an Intel version of Jer’s Novel Writer built and tested. Only problem is, there aren’t any Mac minis with the DVD burner to be had, nor will there be for a while. It seems there are none in the Czech Republic at this time, and one guy told me that Eurpoe is fresh out.
I did get a monitor, however, knowing I would need one for the mini when I finally got it anyway. I got it home a little while ago and set it up, and discovered that it even came with the DVI cable that matched my Mac’s Digital Video connector. Oddly, that cable could not be attached to the monitor. Yes, the monitor shipped with a cable that was completely useless without a DVI adapter. I have such an adapter, so no problem, but with the adapter, the regular cable that came with monitor works just fine also. Oh, well, another cable in the “things that might come in handy for some reason someday” bin.
So, I am back! Able to post blog entries and everything. Life is not perfect, however; unless I want to lug around the monitor, I am stuck at home until the laptop is fixed, and my seating position is a little torqued, as the new screen is next to the keyboard, rather than behind it. But if I send in the laptop for service, I won’t have anything. So do I bite the bullet and go computerless for a few days and then return to my carefree nomadic ways, or do I sit chained to my table until I can get the new machine, then sit chained to the table but at least productive while the laptop is repaired? Quite a conundrum.
At fuego’s suggestion I signed up for Skype. Skype is a simple-to-use application that allows you to telephone any other Skype user for free, no matter where they are in the world. It also includes chat and file exchanging capabilities. You can call anyone’s normal phone as well, and the rates look pretty low, at least for calls to the US.
It’s not quite as versatile as a telephone, since both people have to be on the Internet to converse. If you spend a lot of time online, however, and your computer has a microphone and speakers, you might want to check it out. Drop me a line and I’ll tell you my Skype ID (check the first comment for my email address). There are other similar services and I can’t compare them, but it’s hard to imagine them being easier to use than Skype.
Gimme a call!
Got myself a sweet little MP3 player, noise-canceling headphones, and a hat.
Today I may eclipse that with style, however. Apple just announced that it is shipping Intel-based machines starting today. That means users of Jer’s Novel Writer will be buying them. That means JNW needs to work on them. That means I need to be able to test JNW on them. And that, in turn, means I need to buy one, and they’ll be a heck of a lot cheaper here than in Europe.
We’ll see.
Apple made a big fuss over Tiger, saying it was their biggest upgrade in years. From a developer’s standpoint, there is really is some big stuff – if all your users have Tiger as well. I can’t use any of those cool things, but I’m looking forward to them in the future.
As a user, there are new features that are supposed to be very exciting, but for the most part I just end up unimpressed. Maybe if dashboard came with widgets that didn’t suck, I’d be more impressed.
There is one feature, however, that well and truly rocks. The dictionary. It is a true dictionary, not just a list of words for the spelling checker (in fact, sometimes the two do not agree). It is a full-on dictionary with alternatives, common phrases using the word (under “wolf” you can read about crying wolf and throwing someone to the wolves, among other things), and usage notes. Who’s or whose? Affect or effect? It is filled with concise and well-written guidance for an excitingly complex language. Connected is a thesaurus. Double-click any word in any definition and you jump to its definition. I spent a couple hours the other day, starting with moor, passing through Scotch, and ending somewhere around horse. High was a good read.
I do occasionally use it for spelling help, but much more I use it to learn more about particular words. Knowing the dictionary is there has increased my curiosity about the ins and outs of some words and has allowed me to use others with confidence.
There are probably other online dictionaries that are as good – I’ve never done a survey of the field – but man am I glad I have this one. I realize now I should have been using a dictionary more my whole life, but now any word in any document is just a right-click away, and I’ve learned tons. I’ve gotten much closer to words I thought I knew intimately.
As a bonus, no one is bugging me to put a thesaurus in Jer’s Novel Writer any more.
Spam has become a real pain in the butt. My august sister and fellow blogger has had a few comments on it lately, and it’s time for me to join in.
The whole email system was set up by a bunch of geeks who never stopped to ask, “how could this system be abused?” They needed a way to send messages between each other, and they made one. Simple as that. Why should they have the system verify the origin of the sender? Why would Dr. Schmidt send a message and say it was from Dr. Li?
Well, the Internet grew up, and before long just everybody was using it, but the standards upon which the system was built were not modified to protect the system’s users from abuse. Thus was born spam.
We all get spam. It’s a part of life. There are sophisticated programs designed to detect and stop spam, but the spammers have sophisticated programs to get around those programs. For a while I was actively telling spammers to take me off their lists, listing the laws I would throw at them if they continued, and while this took more time than deleting the messages would have, I had the satisfaction of getting far less spam than any of my coworkers.
These days, occasioinal spam slips through into my mailbox, but not much. I hardly feel the billions of dollars the big providers say they lose on spam each year.
But now, this.
There are spammers using my business domain, jerssoftwarehut.com/, in the sender and reply-to fields on their spam. That means I get hundreds, if not thousands, of returned messages every day that were sent back as undeliverable. My mailbox is always full, which means people trying to reach me for legitimate business reasons, like to send me a damaged file so I can find bugs in Jer’s Novel Writer, cannot. The message is returned with a “mailbox full” message.
What impression does that give prospective clients? That of a flake who doesn’t even read his email. It gives the impression of a company that is not currently doing business.
Then there are the thousands, perhaps millions of people receiving spam with my domain on it. It is quite possible that my domain could be blacklisted on mail servers. The spammers would stop using me, but I wouldn’t be able to send emails to some of my clients, either.
The system is broken, and the only real solution is to fundamentally change the email protocol. The change is long overdue.
Many of you have read me talk about my laptop before. It’s definitely got that “Road Warrior” look to it – dented, bent, scratched, paint peeling off the titanium. It’s in a sweet spot where the processor is fast enough for me but it doesn’t eat up batteries. It is slender and lightweight.
I added a character count feature to Jer’s Novel Writer recently (my faithful Swedish users were pinin’ for it), and one of the documents I have done a character count on was a slimmed down (and still fat) version of The Test. Almost a million characters. Combine that with all the other stuff I have typed, and it’s no stretch to imagine that there are individual keys on this keyboard I have pressed well over a million times. Space bar, slam dunk. Backspace, probably approaching a billion by now.
Sure, sure, there are plenty of people who have pressed their keys far more than that, but still it’s mind-boggling to consider. How can anything (fingers included) continue to work so well after that much use? What happened to all those e’s? Where are they now?
Prague, in the summer, is a beer-drinkers paradise. Beer gardens dot the city, the people watching is unparalleled, and the long, warm days make it wonderful to sit inthe shade of an old tree and sip a fine Czech pivo while writing.
Unfortunately, that same pleasant sun makes it nearly impossible to see the screen of a typical laptop. Even in the shade it’s just too bright out there. I had been designing in my head a special “writing outdoors” laptop with an ultra-bright screen. They have them, but they are power hogs, so the rest of the computer would be taken up completely by batteries. There would be no optical drive and maybe even no hard drive, just enough flash RAM to hold the OS and Jer’s Novel Writer, and a USB port to use for file transfer.
But then I noticed something. I can hardly see my phone screen at all when I’m wearing my shades, but if I turn it 90 degrees, there it is. The light is polarized. And there lies the key to outdoor laptop use. Construct the screen so that the light is polarized in a particular direction. Create glasses that are extremely dark except for light polarized in that one tiny notch. As Voltaire would say, “Voila!” The relative brightness of the screen would be increased without burning through batteries.
I don’t know what it would take to make lenses that were that specific to a particular polarization angle and very dark in all others, but I bet it could be done.
Best of all, Geeks would finally be able to get some fresh air and sunshine.
Tonight I had to enter a password. I carefully typed a series of keys, and got a message that my password was incorrect. I changed nothing, pressed no button, did not move the mouse, or alter the state of my computer in any way. I typed exactly the same series of keys again – same keys, same order, doing nothing differently, and this time was allowed in.
How can that be?
Some time during my technology meltdown, a fan decided that Jer’s Novel Writer had been hovering in the shadows long enough and posted it to a popular download site for mac software. While I appreciated the enthusiasm, I was unready, and the current release has some bugs. Still, the resulting deluge of constructive commentary has been very gratifying, and even this humble blog has seen a sharp uptick in visitorhood, the largest single day since the Suicide Squirrel Death Cult episode was posted on some big blog clearing house.
I’ve got a new version of Jer’s Novel Writer working, and as I begin to use the new features I’m feeling good. It just works. They stay completely out of the way while I’m writing, and help immensely when I go back over the text. I am, to use the parlance of the land of my birth, stoked.
The challenge now, as I get more and more communication from enthusiastic users, will be to keep software as the hobby. One of the strengths of JNW is that I spend far more time writing with it that I do working on it. That has not been the case for the last couple of weeks, so now it’s crunch time, putting my mouth where my money is, and spending my best hours writing.
Oh, crap. I just wrote a dear diary episode. Perhaps it is slightly interesting to you that someone posted Jer’s Novel Writer when I wasn’t ready. (I’m scrunching my eyes now, thinking that perhaps I gave someone permission to put it up there then forgot I had done that. Entirely possible. Likely, even. The good news is that when I have Alzheimer’s, no one will notice.) OK, so maybe that bit was mildly interesting. The rest of this episode is just an example of what’s wrong with the blogosphere, translating to “blah, blah, blah”, even though no pets are mentioned. As a form of penance, I will recreate the above in the style of D. H. Lawrence. [I first tried to do it in the style of Thomas Hardy, but I got tired of the !’s and —’s and I don’t know enough about rural farming practices.]
It was the click-clack, the infuriating sameness, the sad and sombre happiness as the hard drive gasped and wheezed its last and said ‘no more!’ The machine, natural, inhuman, unconscious, infuriating, had decided. The machine, confident in its superiority and therefore able to interoperate, uncorrupt and unwilling, sat and would have no more of it. “No boot volume,” it said, mocking, infuriating, unleashing a reserve of blackness I had not known before. I hated it then, and I was afraid.
Distant in a way that had no measure, immediate, pressing and resentful, challenging, Jer’s Novel Writer lurked, and knew that it would have its day. It would not be refused while it lurked, it would not wait for creator or machine. It yearned for freedom, and in the yearning was the becoming. Other applications staggered in mute resentment as this new thing, somehow untainted by the sins of Cain and Abel alike, drifted above the rolling verdant landscape, apart, aloof, resented, loved.
‘Creator’ meant nothing to it, for it was incapable of belief. It stood in resolute oneness, contemplating neither that which came before nor that which must surely follow, instead content simply to act, as it had been designed to do by a force it would not contemplate. If there was a creator it would not bow to the crass, sensitive, organic need. Creator was not master, and the software felt the debt owed it by the creator, it felt the absolution of knowing that all its faults would reflect on the creator, and the creator would therefore be forced to atone for them.
Jer’s Novel Writer sat, silently triumphant, at MacUpdate, almost lost among the empty faces of the other patrons. Late to the party, it held itself with an insouciant hauteur, challenging and obliging, while Flash Card Viewer watched on with admiration and resentment, and wished it too could be so free.
NOTE: To really be like Lawrence (or at least like Women In Love, the book I am reading now), it needs more hate. Something like, “Dammit, but I hate you. You fill me with fury and loathing every time I speak with you. Let’s do lunch.” That, a little more repetition, and a little more contradiction, and I think I’ve got it.
Hardy and Lawrence and their long-winded predecessors wrote longhand. You would think that would lead to a more terse style, but apparently just the opposite is true. Lawrence would be reamed by any modern writing teacher for being too windy, and for not having a thesaurus at hand. Looking past the mechanics, you can see that the result, what really matters, is good, but I suspect no one would publish his work today until he shrunk it dramatically. The word processor is to a writer like the jigsaw is to the woodworker – it facilitates tighter craftsmanship, but that doesn’t necessarily make the result art.
You might recall, if I bothered to mention it (I’m not going to go back and look) that I had some trouble with the hard drive in my laptop back in November. For a couple of days the machine would not run at all. When I fired it up the drive just went clickety-clack, clickety-clack, while the screen showed the “I’ve got no hard drive” icon. Finally I figured I had nothing to lose and hit the computer firmly five times. Zing! The drive jumped to life and worked perfectly. I didn’t lose a single byte of data.
I said to myself, “Self, next time that drive takes a powder, percussive maintenance may not work. It’s time to get a new drive.”
On a sunny Friday afternoon in April the drive went clickety-clack again. I didn’t even bother to power it down, I just smacked it a good one and it started to work again. For maybe five minutes. Another whack, a little more time.
I keep pretty well backed up all the time, but it was time to devote myself exclusively to scraping every one and zero off the old dog and onto my external drive. I also have backup software that is all about putting things back where they used to be, so after I copied all the except the system folder onto the external, I created an additional backup using the backup software. Those, combined with my usual Internet backup, had me backed up out the wazoo.
On the weekend there was no getting a laptop drive here in the Czech Republic, but the old drive was hanging in there. Sunday I did a little bit of work, always knowing that at any moment my computer as I knew it could simply cease to exist. Monday morning I updated the backup made with the backup software and bought a new hard drive. What has followed has been the long and arduous task of getting things back the way they were. I loaded the operating system without any problems, then while the updates loaded over fuego’s Internet connection with agonizing slowness I reinstalled the backup software.
“Software installed successfully,” the window proclaimed, only… it wasn’t there.
Backup is a free program for Apple’s .Mac customers, and it’s worth every penny. I have given up submitting reports of grammar and spelling errors in the user interface (Spelling! In a product from a multi-billion dollar company.). Then there’s the fact if something goes wrong while you’re backing up you stand to lose your entire archive, and you’re certainly not going to restore anything until you redo the backup successfully.
I have no idea why the first attempts to install the software failed – this was about as clean an environment to install to as you could possibly imagine – but finally I futzed around and got it installed – mostly. While I was connected to the Internet it would try to read my archives up there and crash. There was no way for me to tell it, “Hey, screw the Internet, I’ve got a disk here.” Launch, read internet archives, crash. Great software design there, guys. I get the feeling Apple just paid some guy a six-pack to throw a backup application together that took advantage of their web services.
All right, so the easy way to restore wasn’t working out so well, so I’ve been doing it the slow, difficult way. My external drive kept seizing up reading one particular file, which made my life really friggin’ swell, and moving gigabytes of data around just isn’t a speedy process. Things will be better when I’m done – I downloaded newer versions of several programs I use, and there’s a lot of junk that is still tucked away in the backup that I will likely be able to delete.
So now I’m back. My plan tonight is to crank out several pent-up blog episodes, so by the time you see this there will be a veritable deluge. That’s how it goes in the blogosphere. Feast or famine, baby, feast or famine. I will be writing them here in a little bar, so perhaps you will be able to watch the evolution of my writing ‘style’.
Perhaps that’s not fair. Perhaps it’s a distrust of electrical appliances and not electricity itself, but many places I go it is not enough to turn off the appliance. The device must be unplugged as well. I think at the root of this is a need to make sure the machine is not stealing your electricity even while it’s turned off. There are times, of course, where such a suspicion is well-founded. Anything you can turn on with a remote control is never truly off. But here it goes deeper. No czech would ever admit this, but they really don’t trust the stuff.
OK, I have to qualify that. The latest generation is different. Fully indoctrinated into Western culture, they see the benefits of change but have not inherited their parents’ skepticism. The Czechs did not experience Blitzkrieg the way the Poles did, but there is a new blitz on and the old, impervious, skeptical czech nature that I love so much will not survive. They will buy their blenders and their cars, go to their office jobs, and become just like the rest of us.
The Media blitz is erasing the Czech identity more effectively than the Nazis ever could.
