{"id":2238,"date":"2014-05-21T08:19:36","date_gmt":"2014-05-21T14:19:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/?p=2238"},"modified":"2014-05-21T08:19:36","modified_gmt":"2014-05-21T14:19:36","slug":"out-and-about","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/?p=2238","title":{"rendered":"Out and About"},"content":{"rendered":"

For Orbit UK, Rachel Bach and I interviewed each other; my interview of her went up a few weeks ago (I did mention that, didn’t I?\u00a0\u00a0 I hope?)\u00a0\u00a0 and her interview of me is up now at the Orbit blog<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s not specifically about Crown of Renewal<\/em> but it’s a nice general thing.\u00a0 We were asked to pose 4-5 questions for each other–and we both enjoyed the process.<\/p>\n

Next week (Wednesday the 27th)\u00a0 I’ll be Twitter-chatting with Brian Thomas Schmidt on SFF Cha<\/a>t for an hour (no doubt annoying my choir director, because I won’t be at rehearsal.)\u00a0\u00a0 Schmidt,\u00a0 you may recall, is the editor of Shattered Shields<\/em>, the fantasy anthology a new Paksworld story is coming out in.\u00a0\u00a0 Some of you may be too engrossed in Crown<\/em> to join us, but any who want to (whose Crown<\/em> copy didn’t arrive?) are welcome.\u00a0\u00a0 As you can see from the website transcripts, Mr. Schmidt has a wicked sense of humor and I will have to be quick on my mental feet to keep up with him and those who enter the conversation.\u00a0\u00a0 (There will be more reminders about this.\u00a0 That’s how the writer ego works…)<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, I’ll be setting up my new computer system to replace Old Faithful (not her name), the old XP system that has been showing signs of a) internet incompatibility and b) actual age-related disease symptoms ( “what was that noise?” and “is this monitor going to croak like the last one?” and “terminal slowness”)\u00a0 for months and months now.\u00a0\u00a0 Nothing fancy, just a basic box and a monitor that isn’t over a decade old.\u00a0 (My current one, a replacement for the one that had outlived two computers, was used and pulled out of a friend’s barn as a stopgap until I got a new computer.)\u00a0 And a new keyboard because my old one lacks the right kind of plug for modern computers.\u00a0 (I think it’s outlasted three, or maybe four, computers.\u00a0 It’s a PC Concepts ergonomic one that I like a lot.\u00a0 I think the replacement–another ergonomic with an even wider wrist rest–will be fine.)<\/p>\n

The immediate reason for all this was son’s computer diving into oblivion (malware)\u00a0 and needing to replace his before classes started for his summer session.\u00a0\u00a0 Early attempts to repair the dead one (moved from son’s apartment to a friend’s house in the city) by replacing the hard drive and inserting a recovery OS ordered from the computer’s manufacturer failed (editing out long, boring story of three aging computer nerds,\u00a0 son, a house with a Linux box, a Mac, and an old Windows machine that hadn’t been used and was apparently in a snit about that, plus the dead machine, plus a flight of stairs between machines and limited time and it was late and we were all tired…)<\/p>\n

But since I needed a new computer too, and we were at Fry’s, and because I had worn my hardcore nerd shirt (A-Kon Staff)\u00a0 and that meant the fellows staffing the hardware end could see potential in the fat old lady…I walked out with a shopping cart full of the necessary\u00a0 stuff and left behind some very helpful people.\u00a0\u00a0 Back at friends’ house, we assembled son’s new computer with the old monitor, got it set up with Firefox and Thunderbird, then repacked everything to take to his apartment (where the remains of an earlier computer are still sitting dustily beside his desk), hooked everything up, and I drove home, arriving an hour earlier than the previous night (when it was near midnight.)<\/p>\n

Computers that may, in the long run, save a lot of time also waste a lot of the owner’s\/helper’s time in the early stages.\u00a0 Waiting for the machine to swallow and digest the software and emit the right burps of contentment, and then the same for another, and another…is better than getting error message after error message, but still…dull.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It is somewhat frustrating that code expands to fill the space available for it, so though a newer machine always has more RAM, and a bigger drive…the OS and other more advanced software it requires also needs more RAM and more disk space,\u00a0 so there’s not as much more space for the owner to fill with her or his own files as owner might want.\u00a0\u00a0 It doesn’t annoy younger computer-users, who grew up with that situation, but for those of us who started on machines where every precious byte of memory was treasured, conserved, re-used over and over because that’s all there was…we can get testy about “bloated code” and imagine how fast our old, sleek, tight-code programs would run in the vast spaces now available.\u00a0 (Y’all know that COBOL would run in 56K on mainframes that wouldn’t make the grade as laptops now, right?\u00a0 And some of you are as old as mountains, like me, and undoubtedly spent time on your knees on a floor covered with a core-dump printout, trying to find a pesky error in Assembler code.\u00a0 And your template for making flowcharts is still somewhere in the house or office, dusty and now brittle with age.)<\/p>\n

While I was driving home,\u00a0 son had another problem with the new system, but by the time I called him about it (having heard from aging nerd #4, who lives here) he’d fixed it himself with the phone aid of aging nerd #2.<\/p>\n

I need to clear space today to set up NewBox (and think of a name to give it for the local network) and OldBox side by side, so when aging computer nerd #5 shows up on Saturday with his fancy thingie that will transfer stuff effortlessly (?) from box to box it will be easy for him.\u00a0\u00a0 That will not be on my desk.\u00a0\u00a0 I think the kitchen table is required for that phase of the project.\u00a0 Aging computer nerd #5 is a few years older than I am,\u00a0 worked for IBM for a century or so,\u00a0 and it’s his barn my current monitor on OldBox came from. Somewhere (if it survived) there’s a picture of aging computer nerd #6 (#5’s wife)\u00a0 and me and my mother working on one of my earliest PCs, sometime in the 1980s–we had the cover off and were, IIRC, changing out a floppy drive, one of the 5.25 ones.\u00a0\u00a0 My mother said of the picture that we looked like the witches in Macbeth, hunching over a cauldron and looking for the eye of newt.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For Orbit UK, Rachel Bach and I interviewed each other; my interview of her went up a few weeks ago (I did mention that, didn’t I?\u00a0\u00a0 I hope?)\u00a0\u00a0 and her interview of me is up now at the Orbit blog.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s not specifically about Crown of Renewal but it’s a nice general thing.\u00a0 We were […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[100,60,53],"tags":[112,68,31],"class_list":["post-2238","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crown-of-renewal","category-interview","category-life-beyond-writing","tag-life-beyond-writing","tag-online-chat","tag-the-book-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2238"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2238"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2238\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2239,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2238\/revisions\/2239"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}