30 October 2009
Thankfully, the last 2 days didn't suck nearly as much as the five or six before the last two.
The SO got the digital camera working. Battery contact was corroded, somehow, even though none of the NiMH batteries are. Yay the SO!
I didn't set up a base/test system yet. Instead, I found the wee tiny circuit board that is a 2.5"-IDE-to-midsized-tiny-USB adapter. Hours later, I found the midsized-tiny-USB-device-to-USB-hub cable, of which I apparently have one. The camera's tiny-tiny-USB-device-to-USB-hub cable was too large on the device end.
Glad we have all standardized on USB connectors for everything; I'd hate
to have to run around trying to find just the right cable with the right
connectors on both ends, like I used to have to do.
{/sarcasm}
Drive gave the same errors as a USB drive that it did as a IDE drive.
This is GOOD; it suggests that the fault is in the drive rather than
in the rest of the laptop. (it's not impossible that a laptop fault killed
the drive, and therefore both would/will show grievous problems; I know this.)
Meanwhile, two of three other 2.5" IDE gave much worse errors, and the third wasn't all that hot either. I also found a fourth not-in-use 2.5" IDE drive, but haven't tried that.
Bought a used 30Gb 2.5" IDe drive, took it home, plugged it into the USB adapter, and formatted it up and scanned it. No errors.
At this moment, I am attempting a install-over-local-Ethernet of Debian onto a 'new' disk on the previous laptop. A niggling problem; it wouldn't do things with /dev/sda5, for no good reason. I'm gonna try with that later.
I also upgraded my PXEboot installer, which normally would be catastrophically stupid since I was going to use it, but I just moved the old files away and the new files in, which is sufficiently backed up that The Universe isn't bothering fucking with this.
Oh, wait; an error. A disk error. Have I seen this before? I might have.
A while later:
Haven't seen it again... will be very very wary for a while.
Also did some other shopping today, and got things I needed, like a hacksaw, which I need for [DELETED FOR SECURITY] and didn't have; and, stunningly, a SIX-foot garden hose with connectors on both ends, which I couldn't find when I [DELETED FOR SECURITY] but I've got one now.
Also food and vitamins.
Hormones next.
Thinking about: SO's glasses and repair thereof
28 October 2009
It has been a tumultuous 60 hours or so. No writing has been done, but I've been busy...
Monday, 05:30, I am awakened by the power going out. "It's too early for them to be cutting the power off," I thought - as I primed my brain with caffeine, it being a rude and dark awakening indeed - and so I called to report an outage, which had already been reported.
I am poking around with a flashlight (Mini-Maglie which I think is older
than some of my readers) and look at the server for some reason, and
notice a brown crusty bit on a capacitor or two.
Capacitor Plague!
Well, this explains much. Like video work/not-work, spontaneous reboots a few times, BIOS complaining that I'm overclocking when that's the last damned thing I'm gonna do on a server, etc etc.
Power comes back on, I spend time resetting many computers. Video returns to the server, but is terminally ill with Capacitor Plague, so no sigh of relief at this point.
With a 'new' firewall box - salvaged 733MHz Gateway with a 70 watt power supply and thus likely less power-consuming than the current ancient salvaged Dell P-75 - and a new server motherboard required, I may as well reformat that area of the living room. Except it's got cruft all over it. I clean that up. I also bump the power cord on the existing firewall, which dies; restart required. 'New' firewall box has a much firmer power cord plug...
Note: I have plenty of computer pieces at this time; what I don't have is energy, and a place to put all the pieces together and test them before installing them. What I didn't have was a good reason to go "fixin' what ain't broke yet"; however, now it's broke or going to break, so there's the good reason. Still don't have the workbench; gaining energy....
I had weird network problems, which I did not solve yet.
Decide that backups haven't been done recently enough, so make some backups to DVD. Keeping certain partitions around 4480Mb (4590208 1k blocks, actually) makes this a trivial command; I just load the tray, type in the command-line incantation (written on a piece of card taped to the monitor) and wait for the tray to pop open.
SO gets a call from the skin doc, about the last two biopsies. One's scar tissue (not a problem), the other is a basal cell carcinoma and is gonna be cut out in mid-November. Neither of us has been able to keep track of all the skin cancers that have been removed in the last four years; here's another one.
Got money - MANY THINKS TO THOSE WHO DONATED - and paid off both the electric and the phone (which, it turns out, was also due Monday) in time. I also splurged and filled the car's gas tank, which I haven't done in months, and got some food.
Return home, crank up the laptop which has been in powered-down, hibernate-to-hard-drive mode. And thus, shouldn't have been affected at all by the power outage. It will not restore. I restart, and the MBR won't go. Irritated, I try rebooting and go to net-boot, which I find almost works but not enough; it seems to develop and endless wait for some net download. There's no reason for this blockage, because other things can get in and out of the network.
Bang on the network for a while. Think I've got most of it. Firewall's local-side Ethernet slips into Full Duplex for some reason and bungs the network. Unset that; it helps.
Got the laptop to boot normally. Swap partition is bunged. Try re-doing that
with a bad block check, and get dozens of disk errors. Also get disk errors
in the section of the drive that I keep Tuck in. I hope like fuck I did the
usual, habitual, rsync-to-server when I finished writing on the laptop
last time, because whatever's on the laptop disk is gone gone gone.
Luckily, because it IS habitual, because I sort of EXPECT shit like this, I
DO back stuff up whenever I stop writing. All the bits I've written are also
on the server. I checked.
Go to bed. Wake up Tuesday.
Wake up Tuesday with a headache. Feel some nausea. Take some diphenhydramine, my usual remedy for headache+nausea because it's usually sinus/allergy problems. Not this time. I spend 3 hours in abject nauseous misery, huddled under an open window or sitting in the open doorway trying to stave off an epic fit of vomiting. Even the SO noticed I looked bad, when she woke up. I deduce that the 'slightly off' milk from last night was more than slightly off (checked the dates later, it had been eight days past the "sell by" date). I am cold enough to be shivering half the time, but at least I'm not puking my toenails up. Finally take the SO's suggestion and go for some short-loop walks. This helps unbelievably. I can actually make it to the bedroom and lie in bed without worrying about exploding intestinal contents all over the bed and surrounding area.
Wake up a few hours later, feeling bruised and sore.
Decide that I am not being paranoid enough about backups, so recopy Tuck&c to my current non-laptop workstation. rsync is my friend
Also try copying Tuck&c to SO's computer, 'cause she won't notice the extra gig and a half. SO's computer isn't responding via network.
SO's network isn't networking; begin to suspect the motherboard got fritzed in the power outage Monday. Reset her system twice, turn the firewall's full duplex off again - why does this keep getting set on? - and it begins working. Wish I had saved some chicken bones to turn into magical anti-evil-spirit fetishes.
SO's glasses may or may not be restore-to-use-able; the fix I made, using aluminum tubing across the broken centerpiece on Saturday, is no longer working and I'm not sure I can pull off the crimped aluminum tubing without destroying the frames entirely. There ought to be a way to make glasses frames at home, the tech isn't hard... however, the SO is not enthusiastic about DIY glasses frames.
And, as a capper, the SO managed to break a front tooth last night. It doesn't apparently hurt, and as she's not screaming I assume she's telling the truth.
Okay, I dealt with everything else over the last two days, but I'm freaked now.
Manage to calm down enough to sleep.
It is now Wednesday morning. I've a lot to do today, as well.
Either the camera is dead or all three sets of batteries I tried in it are too low a voltage to make it go. Of course, my multimeter disappeared into the rubble two months ago, so I can't check voltages directly.
The laptop had two screw-closed bays underneath. One turned out to be the
CPU and memory and some other big chip screwed into the board (WTF?), but the
other held a hard drive, with a couple of mounting pieces. I pulled out the
existing drive and reseated it, hoping... which did not work; it's worse now
than it was.
Hokay, stack of laptop drives... I have three. One must be 12.5mm high, as
it's thicker and might not fit. Two might fit. First one, doesn't get past
GRUB again. I try netbooting a lenny_rescue, which is befucked since it
seems to want to install Lenny before it tries the rescue stuff. It also
can't handle the IDE-showing-up-as-/dev/sda, apparently. Second one,
starts to boot, starts to hang around the part wherein it looks for the root
filesystem, likely because it was originally _h_da1 and in this laptop is
now _s_da1. However, the second one has a strip of masking tape warning that
/lib is going bad. So I'm thinking that, right now:
...
Next step is to clean off a work area, then take a 400MHz desktop that worked the last time I tried it - I'd say "known good" but my optimism has been stabbed repeatedly in the last week - and the little 2.5"-to-3.5" IDE adapter, and see if the laptop's original drive works well when not in the laptop. If the laptop's original drive works well in another computer, the laptop is fucked. Which is what I expect right this moment.
Need a power strip. Why do we have so many outlets in this house without power strips? We're supposed to have one per plug, but somehow there's always another outlet (or four) that are un-stripped. Since as far as I could find, US code is 15A -> 1625 watts per outlet, it should be okay as long as I don't try to run more than, oh, four computers off the one set.
25 October 2009
Episode #9 is almost finished; I started the proofing cycle early. The electricity gets cut off tomorrow unless I can pay $250, the phone gets cut off sometime this week unless I pay THEM $95, we have about $20 for food until further notice because I turned in the jar of loose change I was keeping, the SO's glasses - the new ones - have broken, server's video went and I don't think can be fixed, I'm about out of hormones and definitely out of B-complex vitamins, (which were sort of helping with the depression until they ran out - I can't afford real psych drugs), and that's the interesting bits. The rest is just boring.
You could donate, I suppose.
I'm torn between saying "Yes, please, a donation will help" and Winston Churchill's black dog, about twelve feet tall, that has grabbed me by the head with its teeth and is shaking me back and forth while growling "Nothing will help, because this is what you DESERVE."
20 September 2009
Egad I suck.
But at least I got an episode out. AND the correction I announced a MONTH ago.
Egad I suck...
Maybe things will look up now that the hot weather has broken, however.
I hope so. I haven't had energy for anything. Much less enthusiasm.
The SO has been in bad shape, with a persistent leg ulceration which is finally healing up, and a broken pair of glasses. How she managed to break them about half an inch from the middle/bridge, the top part that holds the lens, I will never know. JBWeld did not work well the first two times - I used a metal strip to give it some shear strength, but apparently not enough - the third repair lasted a few weeks, and the fourth involved a lot of tools to rough up the residual epoxy and sheet metal. However, an online place Zenni Optical has just-barely-acceptable glasses for pretty cheap. I hate the fucking lens heights nowadays - one inch? are you kidding me? - but they seem to be basically universal, as even the few-hundred-dollar frames didn't seem to be any larger. A couple of pairs of dead glasses in the house measure well over 50mm lens height, which are basically unobtainable in today's market.
If the bloody frames weren't broken - this being why we aren't using them now - I'd see if a lens grinder could make some new ones to that size. But alas... And the SO did not want something I could craft up out of wire. She doesn't seem to like my post-apocalyptic design sense.
17 August 2009
Not dead yet...
Though maybe I ought to be.
Around February of this year, a proofer effectively vomited blood all over what I'd written in regular Tuck. This is discouraging, and I don't have a whole lot of psychological stamina (for the past several years) to just keep going in the face of adversity or even much criticism.
I went to writing on Seasons so's to at least do something while I tried to recover and think of what to do. Plus, that story still wanted to be written, and I had been thinking about it in parts...
In June, _I_ found a significant error in timing in Tucky Seasons; to wit, there was an extra day/night cycle inside a week, and I couldn't just pretent It Didn't Happen, because I don't work that way.
Instead of doing anything remotely useful, of course, I had a very quiet nervous breakdown of sorts. Those that noticed that email response times went to "never" might've noticed this.
Anyway, recently someone said they would commit some cash to me if I wrote just SOMETHING in here.
I THINK I can fix this, with a little more brain-work and a minor rewrite of Tucky Season #7, and I might be able to do that by next week sometime.
If my $200 past-due phone bill is paid. Maybe you could help.
16 May 2009
Tucky Seasons Part 07 is done and released. I hope.
Part 08 is going not-too-bad. I expect that writing this where anyone can see it will cause some catastrophe, real or in-my-head, that will break the writing. We'll see. Human brains are STUPID.
We got the pay-or-disconnect payment in to the phone company, and had some money left over for food and toilet paper; we still haven't paid the rest of the phone bill - so they are still calling, which means the ringer is still off for much of the time - or any of the electric bill.
Don't you want them to get paid before we get cut off? Sure you do.
On the good side, not only is some hardware sitting waiting for me to come get it - though requiring a road trip - but I found out that I'd been screwing with the wrong config file on the server, which is why I couldn't get it to do more text. Now running something like 132x43, which is what I consider 'good' nowadays. Still no X over there, but who needs a GUI?
Oh, right; most of you.
The thing that really rocks is the graphics viewer I use under SVGA: zgv. It allows one (me) to adjust gamma, brightness, and contrast, PER IMAGE. This is really helpful when viewing random pictures, as some of them... suck, and playing with B&C really allows one (me) to get the details that otherwise are buggered by too-dark or too-light. Also it helps me cope with a rather elderly monitor that needs to have the brightness cranked up to maximum values just to get midrange. I've never found this in any other graphics program, including 'xzgv', which makes me think I ought to put the card (or a similar SGVALib compatible video card, which means OLD) in whatever I use as a workstation. Who needs 256Mb video cards with more computational horsepower than my server?
Oh, right; most of you, at least the ones running Vista. Even XP would give you the hairy eyeball and refuse to run, I bet. (1Mb video memory on that S3 Trio64+)
But, having paid the tuition cost of learning long ago; and having spent 30+ years deprogramming myself from consumerist addiction to the newest/best/latest - I remember when the Atari 2600 came out, and we NEVER got one, so I'm well-practiced at having fun with the stuff the rich kids don't want or have thrown away as too old/slow/ugly/boring/unfasionable - I don't need the dubious "help" of modern GUIs, nor the monetary expense of an operating system from a company that assumes I'm a rabid criminal (pointing at YOU, Microsoft, and YOU, Apple).
Bitch bitch bitch. But it does give me a nice feeling, to realize that I can work with recyclables that the Rest Of The World has cast off.
Now if I could just get electricity, phone/Internet, and food this way...
04 May 2009
Tucky Seasons Part 7 is in proofing at this point. Writing continues.
On the other hand, the phone company is calling every three hours to remind us that they're going to cut us off soon.
Help us, Obi-Wan Reader. You're our only hope. Remember: no phones, no Tuck.
For some reason, my firewall/dialer computer went 'erk' yesterday, after fifty-eight days of continuous uptime. Reboot fixed it, so no worries there.
On the lighter side, one of the SO's friends (I have no more friends) gave the SO a disk yesterday, of choice video bits: "The Day After", "Testament", and some clips from various DoD/DoE films, and a video combining Linkin Park's "One Step Closer" with various atomic-related film clips. Fun for the whole family!
The fun really starts at 0:42:00 on my copy of "The Day After", in case you wondered.
22 April 2009
Okay, mostly caught up with email. I've also done work on more Tucky Seasons, though I'm not quite at a stopping place for this episode even at 1300 lines. Damnit. Might need some trimming.
Thanks to everyone who offered to donate computer parts.
What I really need, though, is donations, as we're again two months due on the phone and electric bills, and scrounging in the pantry for food.
Not surprisingly, once I turned the server back on and got it minimally working - enough to remote login and remote-X - work stopped on that side of the house. Also, I haven't found the magic that allowed me to use the S3 Trio64 as a graphics - rather than a text - video card. I know I used to have it, and I have backups from then; I just bunged the video settings before I found them, and while I managed to reset the video, I haven't gone back and worked on it in a couple of days. Been writing instead, to some small degree.
I also did some updating of the bookmarks from my Lynx cache of bookmarks. I got about 400 done, and then pooped. Only 600 or so to go... no, I'm not kidding. THEN I get to check the current Firefox/Iceweasel bookmarks for invalids, weed those, and THEN I should be able to post a revised Links page/section on the website. Ow my eyes.
And in the "Nuh-UH!" category, I had one lackwit send me a multiple-recipient email (which I said in the email rules not to send me) that was rather large with an attached graphic of some kind (which I hate dragging through my modem) and the entire thing was a chain letter ("send to five people within ten minutes and your wish will come true!").
Imagine my pleasure.
I sent the lackwit a warning, and then, remembering someone else's protest a while back, sent them the pertinent chunk of the email rules just in case they were too lame to check the rules themselves.
Said lackwit then argued with me about how they didn't like my email rules and my rules were stupid for some reason or another.
Color me stunned.
Arguing with someone about a rule, after you've broken it, when it's
their rule, when they can enforce it, when it's written down....
I mean, really, does this lackwit argue with cops during traffic stops
about whether it's constitutional to set speed limits? Or with the IRS
in June about how
it's illegal to demand income tax?
hint: does not work
Anyway, it took me a while to remember how to ban someone at the mailserver level, but I banned this lackwit.
For the timid, please note that it wasn't so much the infraction of the rule that put them on the Shit List; it was arguing with me about whether my rule made sense or not, AFTER they'd broken (shattered) it AND been warned.
With any luck, the lackwit will be so offended they will never attempt to communicate with me again. Not like I'll notice, because they're dropped at the mailserver.
15 April 2009
Income Tax Day in the US. Let's hope you didn't forget until now.
Ellen's Mood: LISTEN UP YOU PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS
I have "given up" for the moment on fiddling the server; I stuck the ancient S3 Trio64V+ in, and now I have 80x25 text only. Unlike most of you pathetic wusers, however, I can live and work like this. For weeks. Heck, at least I've got color... that was a luxury I didn't have for years.
*basks for a moment in color*
Yesterday, I did about half the cleanup and rearranging I wanted to do. Then the SO got the shakes and I put the server back online. I've got about half to go, including shutting down everything on this side for a while and moving furniture. Well, that might be two-thirds of the work left.
Today, I'm tired - probably from using my immune system to fight off all the dust I stirred up yesterday - so I'm running some more backups. Rsync is my friend, as it allows me to make copies of my website and anything else I have access to - like the SO's computer. My DVD-writer is my other friend, because I can then write all this out to a non-volatile medium for about USD$0.40/disk, or about USD$0.10/gigabyte.
Did you make backups of your stuff recently? Do you have anything - anything at all - you might want to have again when your current computer dies?
Anyway, at this moment I think I have about seven motherboards of various types in the back room which I consider usable; the minimum requirement nowadays is that it use 168-pin RAM, as the last time I went looking for 72-pin RAM (at the secondhand shop, mind) the clerk laughed at me.
One of them shall work. Then again, this one is working, just with very non-optimal video at the moment.
I can now send email again, though I haven't yet replied to two days' worth.
12 April 2009
Since I couldn't work something out in normal Tuck - emotional failure on my part - I worked on Tucky Seasons instead. Remember that? I sure hope so, since that's what I did the last month.
The last time I posted any Tucky Seasons was 2004. I have about half the next episode reworked. Maybe this will go better.
Of course, donations are needed.
Would you believe I've had one laptop die and another one - entirely separate manufacturer - nearly completely refuse to take DC power, AND had a laptop drive go flaky? Since January?
If I'm lucky, the problem is somehow in the external transformer or cable or plug or something. I do not feel lucky. Astonishingly, the inside-the-laptop part I think I'll need is available, AND replaceable without desoldering something from the motherboard, AND I found a almost-the-same-model disassembly guide. I just have to get a $30 part before they run out; and then take apart a laptop, hope my solution works, and put the damn thing back together again correctly.
I HATE laptops. If I could get a LCD of the correct size - or cannibalize the works-just-fine display from one of the other FIVE nonworking laptops in the house - I'd build a microATX system in a small box and use that instead. "Small" being relative, as I'd then carry and use one of my precious 19.something-inch-wide 2.7kg/6lb IBM 1391401's as a keyboard.
*counts on fingers* Yep, five nonworking laptops with working (last I could tell) displays. One of those is the sort-of-working boots-once-in-90-minutes one. Conversely, I have one that I think the fluorescent light went bad (among other things), which makes, um, six.
The SO is right, I need to get rid of some of these; they're a bad influence on everyone else.
Update:
I said above "Maybe this will go better." No, it won't. Because last night, sometime after I posted the above, my computer/house server spontaneously rebooted. I had a feeling, and made a backup of all 'my' stuff, which primarily means Tuck and associated files, local copy of website, and my bookmarks. Shortly after that, it began spontaneously rebooting lots and lots of times, including during its boot cycle (before it even got to looking at drives for an operating system/MBR). I switched out some RAM, and that sort of helped, but now it's announcing that it failed due to CPU overclocking, which I am not doing. (This motherboard has a lovely synthesized voice to announce things during the POST/BIOS cycling; it's startling if you aren't expecting it, irritating after the third time, didn't always manage to tell me WHAT had failed before it rebooted itself, and doesn't work if you don't have speakers plugged into the line-out plug on the motherboard.) It will come up with my old S3 Trio64 card, but I can't get SVGA to work because I don't remember the dot-clock settings I need to make it work under SVGA. Normal framebuffer doesn't work with this card. If I put in the original video card, it can't find the IDE drives, and I no longer am using SCSI on this machine.
Now, I'd recently taken some pieces some kind fans had donated last year, and built the SO a new machine - which left the old one, which had been working perfectly and was only missing its IDE drives. So no problem, right? Just plug the server drives into that box, right?
Wrong.
The last straw last night was when I tried plugging that one in, and it just barely powered the fans but did nothing else; didn't even video. I ended up screaming myself hoarse, otherwise having enraged hysterics, and after those stopped I went to bed early because I was wiped.
But I did make that backup.
At
this time, I can just barely read but cannot reply to my own email. (Donations still work, should you care) I think I
have this box configured to where I can do some things - like SSH to the
webserver and alter files there - but I am loathe to make a lot of
changes because the only DVD-recorder (for making hard backups) in the
house is on the server.
Plus I'm afraid I'm cursed and if I use this one for too long I'll
kill it.
I have a bunch of pieces around,
but I don't know which ones work (I'm suspecting something on the server
is Gone Real Bad, for instance, but I'm not sure which piece yet). It's
also tempting, in a I-think-this-might-be-a-suicidal-idea sort of way,
to just rip up that portion of the living room and low level format, so
to speak. Then I'd have room to work. Then... Well, hilarity could
ensue, which is what I'm afraid of.
fuck I'm tired. And I've only been up three hours.
27 February 2009
Response has been good; the phones are on again; and so, like I promised, the next episode.
I really, really, really, did not mean to suck this badly.
22 February 2009
Desperate straits indeed.
At this moment, the phone bill is in extreme arrears, and is cut off. I have a Tuck episode needing only final polishing before I post it, and I can't post it.
13 December 2008
Okay, still suck, but lesssuck.
19 days left in the madness.
Oh, and a wee note, prompted by a correspondent; if you happen to be taking "herbal hormone supplements", those ARE drugs. IF you're lucky and there's anything in them at all besides filler. Which you can't tell. You've no idea what chemicals are going into you, or what amounts. And pretending that it's somehow "nicer" on your body than "harsh synthetic chemicals" is deluding yourself and/or the result of too much late-night advertising. Remember, if it says "scientifically proven all natural" it's trying to tell you FRAUD.
30 November 2008
Wow, suck.
Well, this is me with Major Depression on top of Chronic Depression. If you haven't experienced this, try not to. Try real hard.
Tuck #141 is released, without the major continuity error I'd missed and found shortly after the previous Tucknote.
22 September 2008
Happy Autumnal Equinox!
Tuck #141 is almost finished. I'll try to finish it, get it proofread, and out as soon as I can.
I have been quite bad about email lately. I'd apologize if I thought I was going to change; apologies when the person doesn't change, I see as a disgusting lie. I'll try.
30 August 2008
A momentary lapse of suck, if you will. Tuck #140 is finally out.
Thanks to everyone who donated; we paid the utility bills, got food, and got my car legal again. MANY thanks to the donors.
Also thanks to those who donated computer equipment; I now have a working SCSI card again - well, several - and have somewhat recovered the data I couldn't get to. By which I mean I finally BACKED IT UP (first), and have access to it, but I haven't integrated it yet. Next shall be the re-do of the bookmarks; I seem to have accumulated some... like, erm, five hundred more. Er.
I also have a working laptop for me, one for the SO, a SPARE that also works and is loaded - gawd, the hard drives these days! I can remember back when... - and the SO has decided she doesn't like Windows XP and prefers Debian. Nyah hah hah!
And I know how I want Tuck to go for the next week, basically. Hahaha.
13 August 2008
Please note some new fanfiction , this one by Jay Parrish.
One "little" mistake, and I go into a tailspin for a month.
I've changed the name for Tuck #139; please re-download it.
Somehow I suspect that this will have no effect, and furthermore I cannot escape the images of everyone - everyone gleefully howling and laughing at me, pointing fingers, throwing offal, for fucking up. That's why I've been effectively paralyzed for the last five weeks; that image, that I cannot stop sensing every time I think about it.
Also, relatedly, donations have stopped, and we're now down to $20 for next week's food and last month's utility bills.
06 July 2008
'Not Suck' is slightly working. At least on my side; Tuck has little to complain about at the moment.
Hopefully I can pay the bills this week.
I did get most of #140 done, at least to first draft; but I dunno yet. This one may take some banging.
21 June 2008
Trying VERY hard not to suck. I've got about 900 lines of #139, but it's going to be a longer episode, I think. Oh well. I did get some done this week.
Not enough money to pay the bills yet, though it's getting there.
17 June 2008
Tuck #138 is out. Sorry for the delay.
The reason for the delay is depression. I've been very down lately.
One trigger for the depression is lack of money for the usual things like utility bills and food. Not to mention the rent is going up another 10% which we really can't afford - but we couldn't afford to move either. {nuts-in-a-vise.jpg}
Another reason is that the server/my workstation has been ill. I was a fool, and figured, "Well, since all I need is to replace a power supply [to add a disk; the old PSU wouldn't power everything, so we had to get a new PSU or hotwire one I had, and I chickened out], and the SO is bugging me to get the new disk online, I don't need to back the server up."
You can guess where this is going.
What really set me off, though, was that despite the main drives being SCSI, and despite having two controllers, one not even plugged in, BOTH controller cards are now dead (not showing their usual during-boot-sequence BIOS information, or anything). I have also tried another drive that has another connector and uses another cable, on both controller cards; I have also tried both controller cards, with both disks, in another computer entirely. Nada.
And I also found out that my backups were not saving name-begins-with-a-dot files or directories, which mainly means that my GPG keys are now missing as well.
The reason I have not killed myself (yet) is that I had the Tuck and website info also rsync'd onto another computer entirely, which did not die. So, ha ha ha, at least I have that much.
It's entirely possible that the information on the disks is still good; they worked well on a boot the previous week, and everything worked fine up until the PSU switch. But I can't afford a new SCSI controller card either. Or even a used one. Natch, the drives are wide, so the ISA controller cards don't have the right connectors for the cabling.
Anyway, after I found that out, I spent a lot of the day screaming (so hard I hurt my throat) and pounding furniture and my own body, in lieu of throwing things that would break. And I haven't felt real good for quite a while.
Today I got some done on the next episode, though. So maybe I'm not a complete waste of calories and electricity. Maybe.
Life generally sucks and I'm really tired of it, though.
01 June 2008
How time flies...
Tuck #138 is finally first-draft-finished. Expect it to be put up in a week or so, when the CE's finish with it.
I've been fighting with another dental abscess.
Also, summer is approaching, and I really detest heat. I am far far happier with parts of my body going numb from cold, scraping ice off my windshield, and with melting snow oozing into my shoes.
17 May 2008
Progress has been made on Tuck #138, but not enough, never enough. It's not dead, though. I am trying to work more on it, but I have two sticky places. One of them is emotionally Hard, the other requires information I don't have and can only get slowly. I'm trying to work around the latter... and work on the former when I can.
Donations have been good, and the bills got paid. Thank you to everyone who donated. We've greatly enjoyed the things like food, electricity, Internet, car gas... actually, that's been it.
Stil depressed, with anxiety. Not like this is new.
I did, at least, remember to - and was able to - call Mom on Mother's Day. She appreciated the call.
26 April 2008
Tuck #137 is out; some work has been done on #138.
I have been horribly depressed lately. "Why am I eating?" sort of horribly depressed.
Donations would enable us to pay the two-months-due utility bills as well as purchase such items as food and gasoline. We've got maybe two weeks until they cut off the phone. Donations did not pick up after I released two episodes in two weeks; in fact, they dropped. Not good.
Donating money, not to put too fine a point on it, would help my depression moderately. Ten or twenty dollars makes a real difference.
Someone sent me this link, which I have mixed feelings about. The fact that a school is even bothering to acknowledge the issue, at all, is rather stunning. The abuse is... expected. But the other school, mentioned further down... *boggle*
03 April 2008
Happy Tuck's Birthyday!
29 March 2008
I made a bit of progress on Tuck. #137 required more rewriting than I thought.
The problem arose from a special email setting at Hurricane Electric; when your email comes from a different address than your receiving-email address - say, you send from verizon.net but you receive (and I am supposed to send to) email at mydogsings.org. It's called "MX+ Check". An explanation of the concept can be found here, offsite. It dumps a LOT of spam; it also apparently dumps some amount of 'legitimate' emails (since last week, I am aware of three). I didn't know it was doing this, since no one whose email got bounced notified me... for obvious reasons. Alas.
Anyway, now "MX+ Check" is off. And I'm getting spam again. Alas.
I don't have a good way in mind of alternative communication paths; anything a person could use, a bot or zombie could flood so much better. And judging from my experience with email addresses, if there's a way to send spam, some fuckwit is going to do it and sell the method to other people.
16 March 2008
Tuck #136 released.
Tuck #137 has been first-draft-finished, but requires some rewriting, as the few proofers/CEs I have working mentioned that perhaps Tuck is having too much relaxation and fun, and I need to jazz the story up a bit. If you have an opinion, you need to tell me what it is or I won't know it.
The links page was not only updated but recolored and redone a bit. Now I don't need to scream when going from my nice dark and soothing webpages to GLOWINGWHITEBACKGROUNDOhGodMyEYES! Especially in the dark, which is where I do a lot of my computing. I'm still taking links, and adding links, you know...
Donations should pick up after I release two episodes in two weeks, right? Alas, I went and blew all our money on frivolities like gasoline, utility bills, and food... Hormone money is still lacking.
The best-of-a-bad-bunch laptop seems to not deal well with suspend/resume either, locking up and requiring a reboot, which on this'un requires a more-than-an-hour-wait, presumably for something to cool off. This has inhibited me from trying to install either a new version of Debian (it has potato) or the drivers for one of the many PCMCIA Ethernet cards I have; either requires multiple reboots, and I haven't felt like devoting several hours to the project. This is why the ZIP file has not been updated; it's too big for a floppy, and without Ethernet there's no way to get it off the laptop. I could, in theory, either run dosemu+PKZip on this box, or collect all the episodes onto the SO's box and do it there, but I haven't done those either. I'll do something soon, I bet.
09 March 2008
Good news, for once; Tuck #136 is in proofing, #137 is almost done, and I KNOW what I want to do in #138.
'Bout damned time.
Much thanks to everyone who has enabled me to catch up on food, drugs, utilities, and the like.
01 March 2008
Okay, finally. I have theoretically been working towards this all this morning, over the last !eight! hours. Which is why I suck, because I did maybe an hour's worth of work, if that.
The ZIP file has not been updated, because I need to run PKZip rather than the Unix version, which requires DOS, which I don't have set up on this computer, and the boots-once-in-ninety-minutes laptop still doesn't have drivers for any of the PCMCIA Ethernet cards, and the zipfile is waaaaaaaay too big to fit on a floppy.
On the better side, I have #136 ready for the proofers, and I am seriously thinking about putting it out in two weeks.
On the worse side...donations.
On the better side, nothing ELSE has gone spectacularly wrong around here... yet... And I did finish the aforementioned Wednesday. And Friday night is looking kind of amusing...
26 February 2008
On the one hand, Tuck #135 is nearly proofed and should be out this weekend; and I should be able to finish #136 tonight.
On the other, money is critical and I'd like to go grocery shopping RSN. Not to mention hormones, utility bills, etc. Donations would, naturally, make this happen.
An interesting web site you should NOT go to, because TV Tropes will ruin your life. It will. You'll spend days looking through entries, going "Oh GOD I HATE that! But I never knew it had a NAME!" Although I'm doing better than I was when I was ill, it's still a huge time-sucker. This is why I don't write Tuck on an Internet-connected computer; because I end up not writing Tuck on an Internet-connected computer, because I'm looking up Dead Unicorn Tropes or something.
Oddly enough, Tuck showed up on a few pages there; however, whoever did it - and it was not me, and you know I don't lie about these things - needs to remember that I prefer to have external links go to the index.html page rather than the writings.htm page. Also this'un needs to re-read the series, as they made some rather obvious mistakes.
I could write an essay/go off on a rant about CrazyPrepared, but not right now, I want to finish Wednesday.
14 February 2008
Happy Valentine's Day
I had not realized it had been this long since I wrote a Tucknote.
To update:
On the good side I suppose, I am on 'Net again, backed up, computer area completely rearranged and better than it was, CD-RW drive at the ready, laptop working (and "netting" via floppy drive - did I ever mention that I like having floppy drives? This is why), bills paid until March, relatively warm and dry and fed, I don't hurt THAT much, and - most important - I've got a Tuck episode going out for proofing today. Ought to be up in a couple of weeks.
Read Older Tuck Notes.