Here you'll find the rantings of a blogging fool and sometimes writer. My more personal posts, including progress reports on my various writing projects, are Friends Only. General posts on writing are Public. Please see my user profile for my other LJs and my friending policy, and browse through the sidebar for nifty goodies and useful info.

---oOo---
Writing only leads to more writing. (Colette)

---oOo---

Visitors from 1/30/05:

---

These spammer names piled up quickly this time.

• Volodya Demar
• Tomos Bickett
• Surmises K. Tantalus
• Rosie Kariotta
• Ariadne McWhirt
• Petrina Mihelich

Meanwhile, it still feels odd working on the laptop. And I keep looking over to the PC, to the dead montior and now, to the empty space where the dead monitor once dwelled. Did get the outlet replaced today. It was a bit loose.

And since I was stuck in waiting for the maintenance guy to show up -- and he did come in the morning -- I continued with my sporadic decluttering project. Today I tossed some movie reference books that are hopelessly out of date. IMDB will suffice. So nice that so much of what I might need to look up in online now. Still, there are some old textbooks and beloved reference books I don't think I'll ever be able to part with,

*sigh*

Was having problems with the monitor -- trouble getting it on -- so we got a new monitor. Which won't go on. So we think it's the video card causing the problem. So we're getting a new one. The new monitor is very nice and has USB ports which I've been wanting, so I hope we can get it to work. I've managed to get my laptop working and online, which is always a hit or miss endeavor. I might be blogging a bit sporadically until we've got Moya, my PC, back up and running at full cylinders.

And with a nuclear stress test scheduled for tomorrow and not being allowed chocolate (among other things like coffee and tea which I don't drink, anyway) since this morning and nothing after a light breakfast tomorrow, I don't need this aggravation.

*sigh*

Okay, just day 2 for the current run of computer hijinks and lo-jinks. It just feels like infinity. Yup, server problems continue. Might be a problem with the new server for our circ system upgrade that's going live in 2 weeks, but there's also a problem logging into the regular library server. Aside from not being able to get any work done other than open snail mail, distribute snail mail, and reboot my computer a half a dozen times, I haven't been able to check LJ due to extreme slowness, especially when trying to open the comment form page. I usually check LJ before work begins in the morning and during lunch, but for the last 2 days, I had to wait til after work, and boy, has my fl been busy, busy, busy. I just spent a couple of hours catching up with just the day's worth of posts.

To make my day even more frustrating, Blogger's still under the weather, though today is the first time their hardware and database woes have affected my posting to my blogs.

It's gotta be some sort of cruel conspiracy to hook us on these f'in computers and all the addicting software and websites, then screw with us by not having them work. Maybe it's a grand social experiment being run by aliens. Whatever it is, I am so not amused. Sometimes, I despair of ever getting caught up, at work and at home.

Beyond SNAFU is FUBAR: Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition amd fubar is the closest word I can come up with to describe the state of our computers at work these days. I lost count of how many times I rebooted (via shutdown and restart) my work PC today in what was mostly vain attempts to get everything to load. I usually check LJ on my lunch hour, but that was not happening today. I was lucky to get online. Most of us had no access for at least part of the day to the shared drives where our database/circulation system and timesheets and some files are located. Some of us believe it's either a LAN problem or a connectivity issue with the server uptown, or a server problem, but our IT department thinks it's our PCs. Actually, I'm not sure what they think the problem is. We have mostly brand new PCs. And from just before they were installed to now, we've endured days like this. Needless to say, I didn't get much work done.

So it was nice to come home and see more userpics for paid members, as per the news page that greeted me when I signed in tonight. And I found my fl was very busy. I have been reading, but I don't know that I'll have time to answer much. I'm pooped. Amazing how doing not much yet getting increasingly frustrated can be exhausting.

Well, The Write Stuff will be red for more than a day. Since Moya the PC is currently working (New mother board hasn't arrived, tech guy did come and solved a little problem left over from our fiddling with the memory cards as per the Gateway Service Guy's instructions; seems we didn't get one memory card snapped fully back in, so Moya was reading only one of them, making things really, really slow, and he did suggest replacing the mother board anyway when it does arrive.), I thought I'd get the new look up now for the week. Then I'll go back to the minimalist look in Flexible Squares that I like, or I'll make something new. Meanwhile, the scanner seems to be connecting again, so I'm going to go back to trying to scan in my film photos.

I still have a ms to beta read, too. Was going to do that when I thought my PC was dead. Ah, the lure of a functioning computer.

I have what Mark, the nice young man at Gateway, diagnosed as a dead mother board. Blogging here and on my other blogs will be sporadic at best for the next week or so while I wait for the part to come in and a tech to come install it. Ah, the joys of a special extended warranty that hasn't expired yet. This won't cost us any money, just the time and inconvenience. However, I have only the laptop on dial-up and quick checks while on my work PC, so I won't be reading much LJ and probably not commenting much if at all. Dial-up sucks.