• Tag Archives computer

  • Tech Savvy Milbank

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                          Waning Bridgit Moon        Blue Cloud Abbey

    Since I plan to spend most of my time writing, I brought one of my split keyboards which make typing much easier for me.  Only thing.  It had an old fashioned pin style plug-in.  I have a USB exclusive laptop along.  Sigh.

    Got on the web and discovered a Radio Shack in Milbank, only 13 miles back toward Minnesota.  They were redesigning the store tonight, so, though they would have been closed otherwise, tonight they were there.  After supper, I drove to Milbank, had a nice chat with the clerks and the owner, who offered me a beer, bought a new keyboard–they couldn’t find the adapters due to remodeling–and schlepped back to the Abbey.

    When I pulled up in the Abbey parking lot, I opened the truck door and the bells started clanging.  7:30, time for Vigils.  Scared the B…well you know, out of me.

    So here I am, typing on my new keyboard, ready to get up tomorrow and start writing more pages of Missing.  The Abbey is a peaceful place, set high atop a prominent hill in an otherwise flat topography.  As a result, you can see for miles.  At night Milbank twinkles off to the east and farm houses dotted across the prairie are outposts of electricity, television, the modern world.

    What would Per think?

    The meal was in silence tonight and Brother Bennet read while the rest of us ate.  Another Minnesotan is here, a woman, and me.  The monks were all in black robes and cowl tonight.  I don’t know what signifies, but I’ll ask  tomorrow.

    The drive out here is a long one, over 4 hours, and I’m tired.  Early bedtime tonight.


    📂This entry was posted in Commentary on Religion Faith and Spirituality GeekWorld Literature 📎and tagged

  • A No Good Day

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                          Waxing Bridgit Moon

    Some days.  You know.  This was one.  I got the printer cable.  Spent another 2+ hours fiddling with the printer.  Nothing positive.  Still.  I know it’s a breed fault, but I do prefer to be competent.  At everything I do.  Every time.  Not perfectionism.  It’s competencism.  Things don’t have to be perfect, but they have to display my general competence, or else.  Well.  You may have been down that hole, too.  It can get deep.

    Then, I went out to check on the bees.  I suppose I might have missed something, I did last spring, but I don’t think so.  All three dead.  Geez.  I didn’t stop to diagnose the cause.  I just closed the hive boxes up and walked back inside.

    I tried yet one more time on the printer.  Well, actually, several more times, flailing at different solutions suggested by this website and that.  Even went into DOS, foreign territory for me.  I got in and got out of DOS unscathed, but no closer to a solution.

    If I had any hair left, I’d be pulling it out right about now.  Guess I’m gonna have to call Steve again.  See if he say some words over the machines, toss some holy byte water at them.  I don’t know.  An exorcism?

    The good thing is.  Worked out.  Got my endorphins buzzing around the old synapses.  Sweat.

    Now.  I can be philosophical.  Never to fail is never to do.  Never to do is to be dead.  I want to be alive.  I want to try things that challenge me.  Guess failure is part of that.  Gotta be.  Otherwise no forward progress.  So, I’ve got two challenges ahead:  get the packages installed in early April.  Do the due diligence before hand to find out what killed the bees.  Fix what I can fix.  Get the printer installed.  One damn way or another.

    Grrr.


    📂This entry was posted in Bees GeekWorld 📎and tagged

  • Rigel and the Fallen Tree

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                                        New (Back to School) Moon

    The DEW line here has no flaws.  The Distant Early Warning system, also called Rigel, found the tree that fell over the fence during the winds of today.  She walked on and crossed the road.  The Perlich’s brought her home not once, but twice.

    No electric fence is good enough to counter a fallen tree.  I don’t have time (light) enough now to get out and take care of it.  That’ll have to come tomorrow, even ahead of the final bee run before leaving for Georgia.

    Not to mention that all the electrical off and on bungled up the internet again and I spent another couple of hours reestablishing connection. It’s not a trivial matter since Kate’s work life requires internet access while she’s home.  My day finds me in the front of the computer, on the internet several times, and it has become a fixture in my regular routine.  Still, it’s fixed.

    Problem solving on the estate.


    📂This entry was posted in Dogs GeekWorld 📎and tagged

  • Geeking Around

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                    Waxing Artemis Moon

    Yet one more day of running in place, a bit unfocused though things are moving.  The thing I got myself into seems about to work itself out.  How about that.  The honey extractor is stuck in bureaucracy land at Dadant.  They have no record of my order. Maybe not but they have our $915.  We’ll get it resolved.

    Since I got my newest computer, I’ve gone through several semi-geek experiences, so far all of them successful.  I don’t consider myself a full geek since I never learned programming, but I do love fooling around with computers.  It’s a similar fixation to working on cars only one I understand.


    📂This entry was posted in GeekWorld 📎and tagged

  • A New Electronic Companion

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                                   Waxing Grandchildren Moon

    Adding a new computer to what step-son Jon calls my command center.  This is a Gateway, my second, that I bought a couple of months ago, but waited to install until I could afford a new monitor for it.  That came during the grandkids stay so I decided to set the whole thing up yesterday.  It’s up and running though I’ve not downloaded my security software yet and I haven’t got some additional software on it yet either:  Microsoft Office, Photoshop Essentials, and some software and passwords from this (Dell) computer that need to go over to it.

    (reality:  3 desktops.  fantasy:  see picture)

    Soon this computer (the Dell) will function as my weather station and back-up system while the new Gateway will become my primary computer for e-mail, blogging and using the Internet.  This one has begun to have periodic work stoppages, ones I have not been able to resolve in spite of much troubleshooting.  They annoy me, but are not serious enough to abandon the computer  altogether.  Over the course of the last couple of years the price of desktops with fast enough cpus and mega storage have fallen dramatically, far enough that I could afford a new computer dedicated to writing, art history research and Latin (in my study) and now to upgrade my main internet gateway.

    This Dell has been with me ever since Ancientrails began during my achilles tendon repair in February of 2005, so it has given good service and I imagine, with light use, will give many more.  (the first couple of years of Ancientrails were in Frontpage and can now be reached under archives on the links to the right.)

    OK. Enough rationalization.  I really like computers.  Like the bees, they’re part serious, part hobby and I can no longer tell where the line belongs.

    May your clock always run fast, your storage always be enough and may your computer be ever young.


    📂This entry was posted in GeekWorld 📎and tagged

  • Gremlins or Demons or Bugs, oh my

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                    Waxing Summer Moon

    This morning the temperature has fallen back to 65.  Good garden weather for moving mulch and repairing netaphim.

    Electronic gremlins have given me fits for weeks now.  Not strong fits, but sure annoying.  A while ago my computer refused to recognize my disk drives.  On a day to day basis this is not a problem, but on those days when I want to play a CD or reload software or look at photographs saved to disc, on those days it’s a total frustration.

    Then, sometime after returning from the trip to South Carolina, Georgia and Florida my photoshop elements photo organizer seized up.  It opens with a large rectangle in the upper left of the screen and a smaller slice vertically to the far right.  Nothing happens after that.   Again, on a day to day basis, not a big problem, but when I want to manipulate photographs, something I do often, particularly to make them smaller so they’ll fit on this website, I’m shut out completely.

    In all these cases and the one below I try to sort stuff out myself.  I have a pretty good, but not perfect track record at this.  I never could figure out how to set up our wireless router, for example.  Geek Squad.  I may have to take my computer over to best buy.

    The last couple of days, too, I’ve been bothered by a diminished stream.  No, nothing that Flomax could cure.  I’m talking about irrigation system.  I’m very familiar with the amount of water that comes out of a given spray head.  When it comes out in a weak flow, something is wrong.  It happened last week and I called the well guy to check the well reservoir.  Works fine and he did not charge me.  Whoa.  Again, this morning a weak flow.  Hmmm.

    Kate said, “I know why it’s weak.  The front sprinkler is on.” Now that’s just strange.  This should never happen, two zones on at the same time, unless two different programs are scheduled for the same time.  Nope.  I checked that, not the problem.  Zones run in sequence.  1 runs, shuts off, then 2 runs, shuts off, then 3 runs and so on.  Why this should happen, I don’t know, but I hope the folks at Rainbird can explain it to me.


    📂This entry was posted in Garden GeekWorld 📎and tagged

  • Do you linger?

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                     Waxing Dyan Moon

    Lingering, an interesting article from the blog N+1, asks the question, is life richer with the internet?  The author answers in a mild positive, noting that the web satisfies curiosity and provides a platform for otherwise missing voices, but he also bemoans its time wasting nature, the fact that there is no such thing as sending one e-mail because one internet encounter leads to another and another.

    My own experience is similar.  Anyone with curiosity finds this and that, then a bit more with the news and blogs and video clips.  I know the path people take is not the same because friends locate items I would never find, some of them interesting, some of them not, but it does show that others wander the web from time to time.

    Quite a while ago, maybe as long ago as 15 years, I knew a sociologist from Macalester College who had done a study of time wasted on the computer.  This was before the internet was as big a phenomenon as it is now.  His results suggested that computer use in and of itself lured users into acts extraneous to their original purpose, acts such as reading an e-mail from a friend or sending on something interesting, perhaps checking the calendar or writing a brief note about this or that.

    It may be that some web users are like me, my main outlet for manual dexterity is typing.  A secondary outlet is chopsticks.  The opportunity to type, in and of itself, draws me to the computer and sometimes keeps me there.


    📂This entry was posted in GeekWorld 📎and tagged

  • After the New Year, Backup

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    orchard-inwinter300.jpg-3  bar rises 30.00  SW0  windchill -3  Winter

    Waxing Crescent of the Wolf Moon

    The Orchard in Winter

    2009 has well and truly begun.  The new year crept in on snow shoes, covered in a snowmobile suit and holding a cup of hot cocoa.  This was a Minnesota new year.

    We’ve had a cold winter so far and it looks like it’s going to continue for a while.  Somewhere around the end of January most of us begin to have fantasies of being somewhere else.  Many fantasize someplace warm, but I tend to go with just another location.  My escape this year may be to the UP or Ashland, Wisconsin.  Still gathering information for that Lake Superior book.

    Bill Schimdt suggested I back up this website onto my own computer since it hangs out in the cloud most of the time. I did that.  It was an interesting excursion into the bowels of the system.  It comes out in a form determined by mysql, the open source data base used by many servers.  The format is strange, made up of tables with columns of numbers.  They all make sense, once you begin to read carefully.  Anyhow, this is a once a month operation Bill suggests.  After I do it, then the regular backup I do every day will collect it and convey to my external hard disk.  I actually have two, but I still have to configure them the way I want.

    Today I start writing Homecomer.  Look for it to be posted on the Liberal Faith page sometime after January 11th.


    📂This entry was posted in GeekWorld Travel Weather +Climate 📎and tagged

  • 240,000 Miles and Still Happy

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    58  bar falls 29.74  10mph E  dew-point 56  Beltane, cloudy and raining

                             First Quarter of the Flower Moon

    Since this has been and will be a traveling month, I’ve been attentive to weather nation-wide.  It’s amazing to sit here looking outside at my garden where the vegetables are slow to mature because of cool weather while the east, south and southwest have had hot hot hot.  The red looked like a child had decided to color the U.S. by starting down the eastern seaboard and then moving along the bottom of the map, went up a state or two, then went on west.  Red all the way.

    The automobile is my primary mode of transportation.  Train second.  Air a distant third and then only for speed or an impossible distance.  The former is the reason for air to Texas in July, the latter found me in a plane for Hawai’i. 

    When I travel by car, I pay attention to the Weather Channel like a pilot watches the isobars.  It looks like my luck will be good.  The very hot weather system seems ready to break up into more seasonal summer temps.  I’m glad.

    Took the little red car into the dealer today for an oil change (they like me, they really really like me) and discovered that the head gasket seep has become a full fledged leak.  That means a head gasket and head grinding when I return plus I have to check the oil every other gas stop.  Even though I repaired my air conditioning after 5 years without it (kept thinking I’d get rid of the Celica, but it kept working.), the heat still makes travel uncomfortable and it does reduce gas mileage. 

    I  told Scott at Carlson Toyota I don’t begrudge the Celica few repairs at 240,000 miles.  Still a hell of a lot cheaper than a new car and I get 30-32 mpg on the road.

    While we’re on the subject of mechanical devices, my computer now makes a reluctant noise when I boot up, as if it doesn’t want to get up yet.  At first it made me think:  Hard drive!  Bad.  Even though I back-up daily.  Then, on the web I found that it’s probably not the hard drive, but the cooling system.  Time for a little fresh air in the old computer case.  I like this machine.  It’s just right for my needs even though it is now 3 years old.  Like the Celica I feel I may have it a while.


    📂This entry was posted in GeekWorld Travel Weather +Climate 📎and tagged