Blog entry December 2009

After two days of work, I'm finally back to ground zero on the website that I attempted my web project on.  I lost two weeks of data.  I just wish I remembered what I'd done on it in those intervening weeks.  Oh well.  But it's recovered and working fine... I don't think I'm ever going to touch it again.

Beyond that, did a little futzing with the new stuff, but mostly read today.  Taking advantage of the holiday week, because next week is going to be really busy.

I submitted my bug report to Drupal folks at 17:32.

At 18:43, they shifted the report from one group to another group (shifting the blame?), but at the same time they made a suggestion (revert to a version of code from over a month ago) that took me 5 minutes to implement, and it WORKED!!!  YAH!!!

Granted it's stupid that I had to do revert to the previous version, but hey, it worked and I'm happy, and they got me an answer in an hour.  Can't beat that!  :-) 

(Well, yeah, it could have worked the 1st time, but I've been a programmer long enough to just be very happy about the hour turn-around time).

So, now I can keep going on this project.  Which is cool, but everything else is now taking a back-burner... and stacking up.  I hope I get this blasted thing running pretty soon.

There are not words enough to describe "Avatar", especially on a IMAX screen in 3D.  WOW!!!

My eldest who is learning this technology in school is so blown away he's wordless.

And I'm now mom of the millennia.  :-)  Especially since I promised I'd take them back and get there earlier to get better seats.  :-)

After four days of fighting with the website I wanted to get up, which I will grant was extremely complicated... I finally gave up.  Okay... It's done... I can't make it behave enough to do what I want to do.  And to say I was angry was putting it mildly.

So, I was recovering from backup (for the 2nd time, and having lost about 2 weeks worth of work, thankfully I didn't do much in that two weeks)... and the brainstorm hit to try the things I wanted to do on a different website.

And damn if it didn't work just fine.  (Update: found a major bug, but it's reproducable and minor compared to other problems I was having. I have note into the developer)

So, four days worth of angst and pain and agony and fighting... all because there's something wrong with the set-up on the first computer.

I really, Really, REALLY HATE computers.

This title should not come as a surprise to any computer professional.

I spent an entire day upgrading one of my websites, to the latest and greatest backend software.  Then I began this project that I was really excited about.  In the beginning, I ran into little problems that I didn't think too much about because everything seemed to work.  Then by the end of the 2nd day of working on this project, the problems were getting worse and worse, and all the debugging I did claimed I had one problem, when I clearly didn't have that problem.  So I tried to revert, and that didn't work, so I tried to fix that... and the more I did, the worse it got, until the entire site was dead in the water.

Thank goodness I had a backup... so now the site it back to where it was a couple weeks ago.  Which means everything between then and now is gone, but at least it's not starting over from scratch.

I really, really hate computers.

Christmas eve: alone in the house, christmas music playing, christmas tree glittering on the presents underneath, crab and scallops for dinner, and now curled up on the couch with a dog and two cats, bite-sized cream puffs, a bottle of bailey's, and a great book... life doesn't get any better than this.

Tomorrow kids will be back from Ex's house, and we'll do presents and huge dinner, afterwards they will play video games and do noisy kid-stuff, and that will be nice too, in a different way.

But tonight, I'm so alone-time-deprived that this really hits the spot.

I've been playing with Jara's plot, and this morning I finally pinned down the black moment.  I knew it on some level, but today I finally put it into words.  Which is going to help because now I know where I'm going... which is going to make it easier to get there.  :-)

But I'm mostly caught up with last minute Christmas stuff, so I may not have time to do much with this for a while.  We shall see.

There are many things I should have been doing this evening, one of which could have been making some money to help pay the bills this month, but just as I couldn't face that task this morning, I couldn't face it this evening, so I did something else that desperately needed doing... I wrote the first draft of Sarah's synopsis.

The full manuscript has been off to an agent for several months now, without a reply, so it's long past time to send it on to other people, but before I could do that I needed a synopsis.

I'd written a synopsis long ago, for the second draft of the book, but the beginning of the book changed so dramatically that I needed a new synopsis.

I've been putting off this task forever because I have only vague clues about what editors and agents are looking for in a synopsis.  I've asked fellow authors, and they've graciously answered me, but I've yet to be able to translate what they say into terms and actions that I understand. Read more

Today is "do anything but work" day.  I'm mad at myself because I need the money, but I honestly can't face work today.  So, instead, I did a task that has been hovering over my head for a week or more.

I'm teaching a critique class at one of the local community colleges, and last week's lesson was on show-don't-tell.  After I got home, everybody's characters started yammering at me, insisting that I "show" the authors what I was trying to "tell" them with the critique I'd given.  Reluctant to step on people's toes, I finally emailed them, asking if they'd like me to do so.  They all replied "yes", so now I was committed.

All the way down to Texas and back, a couple of their characters yammered at me, but I didn't get a chance to write any of it down.  So today, instead of doing what I should have been doing, I spent all day so far rewriting a couple paragraphs of each their stories. Read more

I slept most of today away, again.  I'm not sure if it's a cold or allergies, but I'm feeling rotten.  This evening I finally found enough energy to crawl out of bed and watch TV with the youngest.

While we did that, I pulled out the white-board and arranged all the sticky-notes I'd made of the various bits and pieces of history for Jara's book. 

When I started they were completely random, but after a considerable amount of arranging, they're in order.

I know I'm not done with the history of the book, but it's a good start.  And the sticky-notes make it easy to rearrange and add things. Read more