Month: September 2008

bookmark_borderBack It Up!

Posted on by PaulaO

Sheesh. I’m gonna chuck the modem.

We have Charter Communications for our cable, internet, and phone. Great price and I like them. We’ve had the internet through them for a long time. They provided a Motorola Surfboard cable modem. I think it is the original one. Anyway, the modem is connected to the two computers via a Linksys wireless router. Lorna’s computer, the Dell laptop, is hardwired. The Toshiba, the one I am using, is wireless. At first I thought it was this Toshiba acting up. Then I checked to see if the Dell could get on line. Like the Toshiba, it does, but it takes fooooorrrrrrever to load a page if it does at all. Some websites load partway then think about loading the rest. Sometimes, I can hit stop/reload and it finishes. Tomorrow (or maybe tonight if I feel like it) I’ll bypass the router and see if that helps any. The reason I am certain it is the modem is that the lights on it keep going off and on. The Surfboard has 4 green lights for connectivity and an orange light showing activity. At times, only the top light and the second is on with either the second one blinking or the third blinking. I did a reboot (simple unplug) which worked for a few hours then I did a reboot and reset. But it keeps doing it and it is very frustrating.

If bypassing the router is no different, then I’ll call their tech support. Sometimes there is a reset or something they do remotely.

Anyway, I’ve been trying for the past several days to post this message about backing up work.

As a writer, my documents can’t be just recreated from data elsewhere. Unlike numbers in a spreadsheet, a lost manuscript will never be the same if re-written because the hard drive crashed. I’ve discussed backing up work before but its been a while. This is your reminder (and mine!). I back up my manuscripts to 3 different places. I have an external hard drive and I have a hidden, password protected directory in one of my websites. And, when I remember to can, I upload files from the external drive to the Dell.

I use Ipswitch’s WS_FTP Pro to upload chunks of files. I use the program’s faster (and lighter) Upload Wizard to upload one or two files, such as images and such. There are other online ways to save files. There’s places that let you upload files to their site and they keep it safe for you. Kinda like a safe deposit box. My webhost, Dreamhost, has a Files Forever option but I’ve not really looked into it yet.

The external hard drive is the old one from the Dell. I wiped it clean, reformatted it, and got an external case. It connects via USB cable and is hot-swappable, which I like. I have a flash drive/memory key but I keep losing the damn thing. Flash drives are getting cheaper with bigger capacity. External hard drives are also getting cheaper with huge honkin’ space on them. Someday I hope to have a networked hard drive system where I can access files from any networked computer in the house. Not sure if I want to do the remote access way, though. For now, when I want to put files on the Dell, I upload them to the ‘net then download to the Dell. Yeah, complicated and why don’t I just plug in the external drive? ‘Cause the poor half-dead Dell won’t recognize it, that’s why. I really ought to shoot it and put it out of my miser.

A lot of people save files on CDs for their backups. I’d do that, too, except I don’t have rewritable ones. I’d just be wasting CDs since I do backups weekly or even daily when I am actually working. Regardless, be sure to mark each CD with the date so you can quickly grab the one you want. I’d suggest putting manuscripts on a CD of their own.

Okay, well, that’s all for now. I’m going to hit ‘publish’ in the hopes it actually gets saved and put on the site. Sigh.

bookmark_borderComputer Stuff

Posted on by PaulaO

I am still having to run a fan to keep the computer cooled. I have a 6″ AC clip-on fan hooked to the cart. In the warmer weeks prior, this was fine. But now that it is cooler (it is currently 55F), my mouse hand is freakin’ freezing! So when I am not playing a game, I turn the fan off.

With the Dell, I went through several different cooling systems, none of them lasting long. Right now the Dell (which is miraculously still alive!) is using one by Vantec. It is cheap plastic and bows in the middle. Sheesh. The one before that isn’t being made anymore. It connected (like most of them do) via a USB cable. The end on the fan itself was on a removable USB hub. Sounds good except that hub had to really be set right before the fan would work. I also have a USB fan by Thermaltake sitting at the back of the Dell directly onto the heatsink.

Now with the Toshiba, the heatsink is on the side so I have to be careful what I put on that side so the thing gets adequate air. I also have a short piece of 2×2 along the back to raise it up off the table. Anyone have any advice on laptop cooling? What works?

***

I also just bought Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 (DNS). I got an email (from a company I have bought stuff from before) announcing they had a great price at about a third of the cost. So I grabbed it. I’ve used voice software before with mixed results. ViaVoice was decent. I’ve had several older versions of DNS. I’ve only had it for a few days and have done limited training with it. But I will say that first impressions are this thing rocks!

First off, when setting up the user profile, I had to select a language. I selected US English (duh). Then, I got to choose SOUTHERN US English. How cool is that?

I’ve used it in several different situations and overall, I’m really impressed with this software. I can talk in a normal voice, without pausing to clarify words, and it keeps up fairly well. I have to get used to saying punctuation, though. I don’t think about it as I use a keyboard, ya know? I figure I’ll work with it during the day then in the afternoons and evenings, when the house is noisier, I’ll use the keyboard to edit and continue.

There’s this “DragonBar” thing that is always on top of whatever. I dislike things that do that. Sure, I can take away the “always on top” check mark, I guess.

Then I found out I could make that go away and still get to almost everything through the tray icon. Right-clicking is the way to go, dudes.

On the other hand, Nuance (who makes/sells DNS now) is heavily attached to Microsoft. Which means it is designed to work with Word and I would assume it does it quite well. But I use OpenOffice.org (OO.o), dammit. So when it scans the My Documents (which isn’t where I keep my manuscript files anyway) to build up the vocabulary and dictionary, it only scanned in the .rtf and .txt. It skipped the .doc because this laptop doesn’t have Word installed. It also offered to scan emails to further learn my writing style but only works with Lotus somethinganother, MS Outlook (every hackers dream), and some other MS based email. Not Thunderbird. Really annoying.

But, it will open OpenOffice.org and any other program that is listed in the Start Menu. I renamed a few things to make it easier to say (“OpenOffice.org Writer” was a bit long). I can dictate into OO.o but I am limited in some things. Not sure what exactly. Mostly I think in controlling macros (which I don’t like) and accessing other MSWord stuff.

A few other bugs I have about it: it came in a DVD. Not a CD, a DVD. Luckily, this Toshiba reads both. But what if it didn’t? Would a CD drive read a text DVD? And, with all that it downloads onto the computer, it does NOT download and install the .pdf extended help files. WTF? I found them (the written itty bitty manual mentions many times where they are) and drag/dropped them onto the desktop. What a silly little thing to not do automatically.

***

I am doing my laptop shopping again. The Toshiba came to me used but in great condition. It has a few weird quirks (don’t we all?) and I knew from the beginning it was only a temporary fix to my laptop problem. Anyone have any recommendations? I like the Lenovo stuff. And Dell for the most part. I abhor HP/Compaq and I want to stay away from no-name brands and cheap brands. I need a “desktop replacement” computer. I use it constantly. 12-16+ hrs a day (I have no life, ya know) I like the bigger screens (my eyes are 43yrs old and not getting any younger). I don’t want lightweight, I want usable. I want one that is easier to keep cooled. I will wait until the next MS OS comes out since Vista is Satan wearing a “Blue Screen of Death” mask.

Speaking of which, am I the only one freakin’ about the idea of MS Sync in cars? They can’t get their OS right and they want to be in my car? I don’t think so!

bookmark_borderAirport Security

Posted on by PaulaO

An article over at WiredNews has me thinking.Let me explain. If you’re caught at airport security with a bomb or a gun, the screeners aren’t just going to take it away from you. They’re going to call the police, and you’re going to be stuck for a few hours answering a lot of awkward questions. You may be arrested, and you’ll almost certainly miss your flight. At best, you’re going to have a very unpleasant day.

Airport Pasta-Sauce Interdiction Considered Harmful

Airport security found a jar of pasta sauce in my luggage last month. It was a 6-ounce jar, above the limit; the official confiscated it, because allowing it on the airplane with me would have been too dangerous. And to demonstrate how dangerous he really thought that jar was, he blithely tossed it in a nearby bin of similar liquid bottles and sent me on my way.

(…)

This is why articles about how screeners don’t catch every — or even a majority — of guns and bombs that go through the checkpoints don’t bother me. The screeners don’t have to be perfect; they just have to be good enough. No terrorist is going to base his plot on getting a gun through airport security if there’s decent chance of getting caught, because the consequences of getting caught are too great.

Contrast that with a terrorist plot that requires a 12-ounce bottle of liquid. There’s no evidence that the London liquid bombers actually had a workable plot, but assume for the moment they did. If some copycat terrorists try to bring their liquid bomb through airport security and the screeners catch them — like they caught me with my bottle of pasta sauce — the terrorists can simply try again. They can try again and again. They can keep trying until they succeed. Because there are no consequences to trying and failing, the screeners have to be 100 percent effective. Even if they slip up one in a hundred times, the plot can succeed.

(link to full article)

What the author of the article is missing is something my brother and I thought of last year when we all flew to Orlando. They flew there from Philly, I came from Charlotte. We met in the Orlando airport. At that point, we’d all already gone through security checkpoints. We’d all been cleared and have the legal amount of allowable liquids.

What Kev and I thought of was this: including the kids, there were 5 of us, each with potentially 3-9oz of liquid. That’s a total of 15-45oz of liquid. All beyond the security check point. All from two different airports standing around in a 3rd airport. What’s to keep someone from collecting the liquids from the others and getting in a plane with enough to do whatever it is they can do with it?

Or are we missing something in this liquid terrorist hoopla? Do they swipe the quart bags for explosives like they do my dangerous CPAP machine and the laptops?

bookmark_borderPolitical Views

Posted on by PaulaO

Here we go. We are on our way to either starting the change back toward normalcy or we will continue down the road we have been on for 8 years. When that countdown meter in the sidebar reaches 0, will we be healing or pouring salt into the wound? Obama may not be the best for the job. Is anyone, really? But the idea of McCain in the Oval Office, at 72 years old, with Sarah Palin as the Vice President, that scares me. It really does.

I was preparing a post in my head, one that I would write here. It was going to be witty but to the point. It would have been full of sarcasm. It definitely would have wandered quite a bit.

Instead, I will spare you that post. I will give you one written by someone else who is much better at words than I am. Eve Ensler wrote an article that had me near tears. The article scared me and made me realize just how much is at risk.

Drill, Drill, Drill by Eve Ensler

I am having Sarah Palin nightmares. I dreamt last night that she was a member of a club where they rode snowmobiles and wore the claws of drowned and starved polar bears around their necks. I have a particular thing for Polar Bears. Maybe it’s their snowy whiteness or their bigness or the fact that they live in the arctic or that I have never seen one in person or touched one. Maybe it is the fact that they live so comfortably on ice. Whatever it is, I need the polar bears.

I don’t like raging at women. I am a Feminist and have spent my life trying to build community, help empower women and stop violence against them. It is hard to write about Sarah Palin. This is why the Sarah Palin choice was all the more insidious and cynical. The people who made this choice count on the goodness and solidarity of Feminists.

But everything Sarah Palin believes in and practices is antithetical to Feminism which for me is part of one story — connected to saving the earth, ending racism, empowering women, giving young girls options, opening our minds, deepening tolerance, and ending violence and war.

I believe that the McCain/Palin ticket is one of the most dangerous choices of my lifetime, and should this country chose those candidates the fall-out may be so great, the destruction so vast in so many areas that America may never recover. But what is equally disturbing is the impact that duo would have on the rest of the world. Unfortunately, this is not a joke. In my lifetime I have seen the clownish, the inept, the bizarre be elected to the presidency with regularity.

Sarah Palin does not believe in evolution. I take this as a metaphor. In her world and the world of Fundamentalists nothing changes or gets better or evolves. She does not believe in global warming. The melting of the arctic, the storms that are destroying our cities, the pollution and rise of cancers, are all part of God’s plan. She is fighting to take the polar bears off the endangered species list. The earth, in Palin’s view, is here to be taken and plundered. The wolves and the bears are here to be shot and plundered. The oil is here to be taken and plundered. Iraq is here to be taken and plundered. As she said herself of the Iraqi war, “It was a task from God.”

Sarah Palin does not believe in abortion. She does not believe women who are raped and incested and ripped open against their will should have a right to determine whether they have their rapist’s baby or not.

She obviously does not believe in sex education or birth control. I imagine her daughter was practicing abstinence and we know how many babies that makes.

Sarah Palin does not much believe in thinking. From what I gather she has tried to ban books from the library, has a tendency to dispense with people who think independently. She cannot tolerate an environment of ambiguity and difference. This is a woman who could and might very well be the next president of the United States. She would govern one of the most diverse populations on the earth.

Sarah believes in guns. She has her own custom Austrian hunting rifle. She has been known to kill 40 caribou at a clip. She has shot hundreds of wolves from the air.

Sarah believes in God. That is of course her right, her private right. But when God and Guns come together in the public sector, when war is declared in God’s name, when the rights of women are denied in his name, that is the end of separation of church and state and the undoing of everything America has ever tried to be.

I write to my sisters. I write because I believe we hold this election in our hands. This vote is a vote that will determine the future not just of the U.S., but of the planet. It will determine whether we create policies to save the earth or make it forever uninhabitable for humans. It will determine whether we move towards dialogue and diplomacy in the world or whether we escalate violence through invasion, undermining and attack. It will determine whether we go for oil, strip mining, coal burning or invest our money in alternatives that will free us from dependency and destruction. It will determine if money gets spent on education and healthcare or whether we build more and more methods of killing. It will determine whether America is a free open tolerant society or a closed place of fear, fundamentalism and aggression.

If the Polar Bears don’t move you to go and do everything in your power to get Obama elected then consider the chant that filled the hall after Palin spoke at the RNC, “Drill Drill Drill.” I think of teeth when I think of drills. I think of rape. I think of destruction. I think of domination. I think of military exercises that force mindless repetition, emptying the brain of analysis, doubt, ambiguity or dissent. I think of pain.

Do we want a future of drilling? More holes in the ozone, in the floor of the sea, more holes in our thinking, in the trust between nations and peoples, more holes in the fabric of this precious thing we call life?

A final note: the book banning incident is not exactly what the media told us.
FactCheck.org – Sliming Palin
Snopes articles on Sarah Palin

bookmark_borderAnother Loss

Posted on by PaulaO

We lost another family member.

Pavarotti, aka Pav, was one of our 3 cats. He was 15 years old. Pav and his sister, Calamity Jane, came to our house in ’93 when they were barely 8 wks old. We went to pick them up from a co-worker who had gone to a relative’s house in TN to get them for us. Anyway, we put the two little waifs in the cat carrier and put the carrier on the back seat. Next to Zeus, our year old dog. Zeus proceeded to freak at the hissing kittens. He jumped into the front seat under Lorna’s legs and refused to come out. Lorna had to move to the back seat with the Mean Cats. Zeus and the two kittens became friends later but he never liked kittens again.

Pav and Callie became ill that winter then got better in the spring. They did the same thing the next winter. But the 3rd winter, they were fine. We finally figured out it was our kerosene heater. They were allergic/sensitive to the petroleum. Both were very healthy throughout their lives. Two years ago, Pav had a bout of bad diarhea and stopped eating. We were about to go out of town so after discussing it for several hours between ourselves and our vet, we decided to leave him at the vet’s where they could give him I.V.s and keep an eye on him. He slowly got better but ate very little. Lorna went to visit him when we got back and he snarfed down the food for her. The vet decided to let Lorna take him home, figuring he’d eat at home rather than with them. His problem was he had hyper-thyroid. He also developed a weird thing where he would “die”. His breathing would slowly stop and his heart would stop. If we picked him up and shook him and/or did mouth-to-nose breathing, it all started back up again. He’d act scared for a few seconds, then would purr like mad! He’d wiggle to get down and go on like nothing was wrong. He did this twice while he was at the vet’s place. It perplexed them as to why it was happening. We only did it once that year but in the past six months, we’ve had to do it three times.

He was on medication for a while for the thyroid but it was a major PITA to get the pill in him. It was too expensive a medication to waste. We stopped the med because of the problems with it. We expected him to get sick again. He didn’t. Then about six months ago, he started losing weight. We gave him several small meals throughout the day and he gained weight again. About two months ago, his weight started down again. But it was hot as heck here and everyone was losing weight. We got canned food, his fave, and he seemed to maintain his weight. Then he started losing weight again. Nothing we did seemed to put it back on. Thursday, we saw he was having trouble breathing. I tried to get an appt. with the vet (figured they could at least give him fluids) but couldn’t get one until Tuesday. But at that point, we realized fluids wouldn’t do anything for him. He died on his own early this morning. I went to the kitchen and found him gone. He was on his side vs in the “sphinx” position. This makes me think his heart had stopped and we weren’t there to get it going again.

At any rate, it was 2:30am. Monday is a heavy mail day at the post office and in this heat, we didn’t want to leave him outside. We decided to wrap him in a towel and put him in the freezer. It was to hot to bury him today (was in the low 90s) so we will do it tomorrow when Lorna gets home. Yeah, it’s weird to take out the ice or ice cream and see that bundle on the bottom shelf.

We thought about all that we have lost. So many critters we have known and loved. Some very briefly. Others for 16yrs.
Zeus, Jake, Sparky, Baskerville, Maggie. Skiz, Bumper, Pav, Lady, Whoopie, Willow, Worried, Stripes. Others that my brain can’t recall right now. We send them all to Zeus who waits for us on a hillside with butterflies.

bookmark_borderChair

Posted on by PaulaO

While at the GCLS con, I was asked several times about why I use a wheelchair. I don’t mind people asking, it just shows me they are comfortable enough with me to ask.

So I came up with a page over on the main site that answers that question. I hope.

If anyone has any questions, feel free to ask!

Why Paula Uses a Wheelchair