Letters From Home

photo credit: Nuts Bout Nuttn

The longer this stupid political campaign goes on, the more I realize that while I don’t actually like any of the people running, there are two people I would like to see win. Unfortunately, one is a Republican and one is a Democrat. The Republicans are terrified of letting us nonpartisans vote for their guys in the primary (and given the quality of Republican candidates in the recent past, not an unjustified fear, because we independents would have nothing to do with right-wing losers like that) but I can, if I wish, ask for a Democratic ballot on primary-election day and have at it.

I have been a nonpartisan voter all my life, except for a brief period where I was a registered Republican solely for the purpose of voting for John Anderson in the 1980 Kansas primary. I’ve been voting since 1972, and in that time span there have been four times when I have voted for a candidate instead of against the other guy. I voted for Ford in 1976, Anderson in 1980, and Clinton both times he ran. So that’s one Republican, one Independent and one Democrat. The rest of the time I just held my nose and voted for whoever was least disgusting. Is it worth giving up a lifetime of being firmly nonpartisan to vote for one of the Democrats? I still haven’t decided whether I feel strongly enough to do that. But I do actually want one Democrat to win.

And I didn’t think it would come to that when it all started. And I’ve been relentlessly muting all the political ads and all the talk about the elections on the 10pm news, too. Heaven only knows how I’d feel if I’d been listening.

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In my series about taking a stand against ignorance, I said that reading is the key. And that doesn’t just apply to people trying to take a stand against ignorance–it applies to just about everyone. We all buy new appliances or other electronic devices now and again. And believe me, there is no more important time for reading than when one’s learning how to work something new.

I’ve done tech support for over 20 years now. I’ve also learned a lot of new things and tried, at least, to master a lot of new gizmos that have been invented in that time. Thus, it’s hard for me to understand why so many people just never bother to read the manual.

I’m sure almost everyone has heard the old saw “When all else fails, read the directions.” That would not be so universally applicable, of course, if people actually did read the directions. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen piteous wails from people who took back a messed-up laptop computer to the uncaring big-box store they bought it from, only to have the computer sent who-knows-where by the service department and who-knows-when they’ll get it back. Do the instructions that came with the computer say “Take it back where you bought it”? No, they do not. They say “Take it to an authorized service center.” But almost nobody bothers to read that part. And then they come to an online forum and carry on about how badly they were treated by the store and how long they’ve been without the computer, and if they’re asked if they found the store’s name on the list of authorized service centers… well, the person asking the question might just as well be speaking Martian.

Unhelpful help, and more

Of course, the manufacturers themselves have contributed to the problem by supplying only quickie setup guides in the box and relegating the real user manuals to computer files of some sort–whether a “help” file or a manual in PDF format. Help files are short, and you often have to know exactly what you’re looking for to get the answer you need. The manufacturer may use terminology that the user wouldn’t think of in a million years. When I was writing software manuals by translating programmer-ese into English, I used to joke that a programmer illuminated a room by disabling the light inhibit. I’m a pretty advanced user of Microsoft Word (having dealt with it since version 3 for DOS) but I long ago gave up trying to do any serious looking-up with its help files (even with the cute little cat I’ve got standing in for that idiot paper clip). One good book on the subject, a minute or so browsing the index, and bingo, I’ve got the answer I could have clicked forever to try to find in “help.”

So why don’t people read the directions? There’s usually no faster way to get things going properly, or to fix things that have gone wrong. And, of course, reading the directions makes one self-reliant. How much better it is, to be able to flip a page or two and fix what’s wrong.

The question of self-reliance

When I started out in radio, if something would go flooie (technical term) when the Chief Engineer was not there, and we called for help, the first question we would be asked was “What have you tried already?” In other words, we were expected to know at least a bit about what might be done to try to fix the problem, and to actually try it, before we threw in the towel and bothered the engineer at home. And yet by the time my husband became a Chief Engineer, it seemed as though nobody bothered to try to solve the problem themselves–they’d just call the engineer, even if it was a problem they’d called about a dozen times before.

I’ve found, in teaching people how to use computers, that there seems to be an almost universal fear of “breaking something” or “messing something up.” Wouldn’t it be easier to read the directions and find the solution in writing? But no, people want someone else to tell them what to do.

I don’t have the answers. I just read the directions. I guess I’m one of the few people in the world who actually does RTFM.

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A year or so ago, I read a book called Cat vs. Cat: keeping peace when you have more than one cat by Pam Johnson-Bennett. Up till then, I had not realized that house cats have a “pecking order” too.

In the summer of 1994, we rescued a mama cat and her five kittens. Eventually, three of the kittens were adopted by friends, and we kept two. My daughter likes to give cats names from Shakespeare, so the mama cat became Caliban (because she had a severely distorted spine, a very short tail and a grumpy disposition) and the one male kitten was Tybalt. I put my foot down on naming the calico kitten Antonio, though, and thus she became Calypso.

Time has passed, life has gone on, and Caliban and Calypso are gone. In all his nearly-14-years, Tybalt, despite being larger than many small dogs, has never been the dominant cat. He got his butt kicked by his mother on a regular basis, and after Caliban died, Tybalt and Calypso did some wrangling for position, and what came out of it was that Tybalt wasn’t about to agree that Calypso was now the dominant cat, but he didn’t mind letting her think she was.

After Calypso died, Tybalt was an Only Cat for the first time in his life, and that took some getting used to, for all of us. Still, though, it gave him a bit of breathing room before we felt we were ready to adopt another cat.

Zoe came to us from a home where there were a lot of cats being fostered. It’s clear she’s not used to being the dominant cat, either. So what we have here is two second bananas trying to establish who’s who, and it’s extremely interesting to watch. I’m glad I read that book or I’d have had a lot less insight into what’s going on.

Tybalt’s not accustomed to asserting himself, and he’s such a non-hisser that the first few times he tried to hiss at Zoe, all he did was make himself cough. Zoe is apparently used to standing her ground, so she doesn’t just run away when Mr. Monster Kitty tries to move in on her. We’ve had a few scuffles and spats, and Tybalt seems terribly confused by the notion of asserting himself in the face of female-cat opposition, but I think his few months alone at the top have helped give him a bit more confidence.

So, I guess we will have to see how all this plays out. Zoe’s backed down a couple of times, but she’s also stood her ground a couple of times and has won. It’s kind of nice to have a female cat in the household who’s not cranky and doesn’t just hiss at Tybalt on general principles, I must say.

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Well, I did try out an Amazon banner in a previous message, but my WordPress theme doesn’t seem to like it much.  So the banner’s gone and so is the message.

Serves me right for trying to put ads in commentary. 

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I also upgraded this journal to the latest edition of WordPress, updated all my plugins and removed some of the ones I’m not using.  That, at least, went well.  But if you spot any glitches, please let me know.  I’m definitely getting better at this with practice. 

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I finally got all the computer mayhem straightened out, but it sure did cause me a giant case of the wim-wams there for a while.

And I learned a couple new things, like how to get rid of unwanted passwords, and how to force a reluctant computer to boot from the proper hard drive.  I also learned that a Western Digital hard drive won’t work in an external enclosure but a Seagate drive will.  And I got Acronis TrueImage working, with a little help from their tech support, and it does indeed clone drives perfectly.

Oh, and I learned that the lawnmower noise my computer was making was not the hard drive after all but one of the fans, probably in the power supply.  Can we all say DUH!!! together, now?

So that “resolution” gets things back on more or less an even keel at least for the moment.

The other resolution is that I’m not messing with that stuff EVER again.  My son will get a new computer eventually and transferring his stuff from one to the other is going to be entirely in his hands.

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It all seemed so easy.

I was going to clone the contents of my son’s hard drive to a new, larger hard drive, and then set him up with a newer computer. I have software that will deal with that. Or so I thought.

I got Maxtor MaxBlast with my newest hard drive, and it offered to let me upgrade to Acronis TrueImage at an attractive price. So I took them up on that. Unfortunately, I can’t install TrueImage because it’s an upgrade copy and it keeps asking me for the serial number of the previous version, and MaxBlast has no serial number. I emailed Acronis about this two days ago and have only got their form “we got your email” reply.

I tried using the MaxBlast software on the computer I was trying to refurbish, but it says it won’t run without a Maxtor or Seagate drive present. Um… there were three drives in the computer at the time–a WD, a Maxtor, and a Seagate. *BZZZT!*

It was all moot anyway, because my son’s original hard drive refused to be moved. If I tried it in the other computer it promptly lost its mind and I got all kinds of scary looking “missing boot device” messages on the Blue Screen of Death.

So I gave up and put everything back together in his room… and that’s when the fun started.

All of a sudden Windows 2000 was asking for a logon password when it never had before. My son didn’t remember his password. Logging in as Administrator did no good. So, OK, I’ll try running the Windows 2000 CD and see if I can repair the installation.

Uh…. now the BIOS wants a password too? Aiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeee!!! Sure am glad my son had long since left for work.

In the end, I took my own advice and learned a LOT of new things today. Like how to reset a CMOS password, which is something I already knew how to do in theory but had never tried. Till tonight. And how to get past a Windows password, too, although I haven’t actually done that yet. Oh my, the internet is my friend.

I think, all in all, I’m going to just let things be for the moment and tackle the rest of that project tomorrow. I love fiddling with computers but I’m not about to push my luck.

photo credit: Stoichiometry

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I can never make up my mind about “new year’s resolutions.” While the start of a new year is a logical point to make a new start on all kinds of things, the “geography” of the first day of the year is pretty much wrong for most people. There really isn’t anything to mark it as a special new day, other than usually getting the day off work and watching the Rose Parade.

And I tend to cut myself some slack during that time of year, anyway. I figure the weeks surrounding Christmas and New Year’s Day are just flat-out bad times to start something new.

The week after the week New Year’s Day falls in, however, is fair game.

One of the best ways to make a change is to make the new way of doing things a habit. And the best aid to doing that I’ve yet seen is the Habit List from the Productivity501 blog. It’s far better than a to-do list or a simple resolution, because it helps you keep track of your progress in whatever category you choose.

I’m starting a new Habit List next week. I plan to write more, exercise more, and get a lot more done at work. Should be easy to keep an eye on myself and see how I’m doing.

How about you?

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