Temps are supposed to hit 120° today. We’ll believe that when we see it. But it probably will get fairly warm. Just now it’s almost 9:30 and the backyard thermometer reads 100 degrees, not especially out of the ordinary for this time of year.
A light skiff of high clouds has moved in, and that will cut some of the supposed heat. Monsoon dust on the New Mexico border killed six people yesterday evening; as you can see from the video, some serious clouds were in the offing. If that moisture moves this far west, it will lower temps some, even if it doesn’t come all the way into the Valley.
The pool is spotlessly clean — the scheme to brush it down at least once a day is working. Last night I shock-treated it (part of the scheme is to do the weekly shock-treat that you’re supposed to do and that I’ve managed to avoid for the past several years…) and so this morning backwashed, a PITA that I could do without. Very many more of these weekly backwashes and the filter will have to be taken apart and cleaned again, to the tune of another $125 or $150.
Supposedly you need to clean a pool filter only about once or twice a year. I’ve found that to be hogwash (heh… backwash? back-hogwash?): every time I turn around I have to pay someone to come disassemble the thing, haul the parts into the alley, scrub it out, haul the parts back in, and reassemble it.
Pretty soon I’ll need to replace that old thing, and I’m thinking about making a retrograde move: replace the fancy DE filter with a sand filter. DE does a better job on a pool the size of the one in this yard. However, a sand filter does not need to be cleaned on a regular basis. You backwash and you only backwash. After a number of years, you have somebody come and dump the sand into the alley, then replace the sand…but it’s years, not months or weeks.
The pool water would be a little cloudy — maybe — with a sand filter. But the pool has to be replastered…very soon…and if I were to get a darker color plaster or Pebble-Tek — the height of style — it wouldn’t be noticeable. If I were very clever, I might figure out a way to backwash onto the trees without excavating the landscaping, thereby saving a little on the water bills and no longer having to drag the hose out into the alley.
Leaving the gate open while I’m fiddling with the pool gives me the heebie-jeebies, given the “neighbors” who inhabit the alleys. The dogs have to be locked up during the backwash procedure; otherwise Ruby will take off for Yuma. Wouldn’t make much difference anyway: they’re not big enough to do much more than love the meth-head to death.
Who knows? Maybe that’s what meth-heads need.
Heh! The Corgi Drug Cure. Good, very good.
One-twenty in the shade or no, at this time of year I have to cover up the rose bushes. Otherwise they fry. This does not make for high aesthetics in the garden architecture department.
UGH!! I dislike Apple’s OSX 11.4 .1(cutely named “El Capitan”) more and more and MORE every day I have to use it.
They broke the photo editing program, which wasn’t good to start with but now is just shit. That image up there?…well, when you import an image from a camera, you HAVE to rename it to find it, but then when you try to export it to a file where you store those sorts of images, the goddamn system just flat will NOT do it. You have to export it to the desktop, then find it (if you can), then copy it (cut it at your peril!), then PASTE it into the goddamn file where you want it. This now leaves you with not one, not two, but THREE space-gobbling images on your hard drive.
Thank you SO much, Apple, you idiots.
Yesterday I went through the tortures of the damned with the iMac, thanks to an Apple tech who simply would not listen to what I was trying to say and…of course…because I did not know exactly how to tell him that my computer could not be updated to the Sierra operating system software.
Here’s the problem: Word will not run on any version of Mac OS higher than 11.4.1. This is because Apple is trying to force everyone to buy its Pages program, which sort of processes words, sort of lays out documents. It’s a pushmi-pullyu that’s nice for hobbyists but will not do for power users.
Like editors. F’r example.
So for around six hundred bucks, a guy came over a few weeks ago and upgraded the MacBook and the iMac to El Capitan, and did a few other things.
The new program is a nuisance that takes some getting used to, but by and large I was coping. Except…
On the iMac, DropBox would not appear in the “Finder” sidebar. “Finder” is a file-management system…it’s been so long since I’ve used Windows, I forget what the equivalent is called, but there is one: a direct analog.
Your DB files and folders should appear arrayed in Finder just as all the other files on your computers do. The computer should “perceive” DB as another disk drive. And yea verily, they were on the MacBook, but the only way I could access DropBox on the iMac was to click on an icon at the top of the Firefox screen. But this did not really access DB: it did not present DropBox’s files as part of the array of the computer’s contents, and very probably (I figured) it also was not allowing Time Machine to back up DropBox.
And it presented yet another goddamn Mac-Hoop-Jump. To get a file or an image into DropBox, first you had to save it to the desktop, then you had to find it there, then you had to copy it, then you had to access DB through this stupid icon, then you had to paste it into DB, then you had to get into DB, then you had to move it to the folder where you wanted it. This was especially annoying when you needed to make JPEGs of checks to deposit, upload them to the bank, and then save the copies of the JPEGs.
So finally I called Apple and asked why this was the case on one computer but not on the other machine, of the same vintage. He said well, the program must have corrupted in the download and probably simply needed to be reinstalled. He proposed to walk me through that but then said I should install Sierra instead.
I said I was told not to install Sierra because my system wouldn’t run on it. Distracted, I forget to say to him what won’t run on it: any Office programs. He badgers me until I agree, stupidly, to do this.
And herein, my little chickadees, lies the problem of aging. If you have aging parents of my type, you should be alert to this kind of behavior. At my age two bad things happen to you:
a) You don’t remember things clearly, especially if they’re even slightly outside your ken. b) You’re easily talked into things that you don’t need or even want…as any number of scam artists know.
He guides me through setting up the Sierra OS installation and then gets off the phone.
After about an hour of grinding away, I finally remember why we didn’t want this: Word will not work on the damn thing.
Now I get back on the phone to Apple and get another tech. I explain the problem and say I need to revert to Yosemite.
She now puts on the high pressure, trying to persuade me that I don’t need Word or Excel: that Pages and whateverthef*ck is Apple’s answer to Excel will do just fine.
I explain over and over and over and over again that my clients use Word and that I am NOT going to try to do paying work in Pages, which is — I finally say it explicitly to her — a hobbyist’s program like ALL of Apple’s goddamn software and the reason I am NOT going to move my business over to Pages(!!!!) is that all my clients use Word and LaTex and some of them write in Chinese with Chinese characters and I am not going to open some new can of worms trying to edit copy generated in Word for Asian languages in Apple’s dilettante Pages program and try to convert edited and clean copy back into Wyrd from Pages…and no…
…and no…
…and no…
…and no…
…and NO!!!!!!!…
Seriously, it takes this kind of argument to persuade her that no, I am not going to abandon Word for Pages, although I would love to have the Pages program for my own little book publishing hobby because that is what it IS, a hobby, but NO, no WAY am I going to use it in my business goddamn it and if she doesn’t help me get the other program back I’m tossing this 27-inch monster in the trash right this instant and driving down to Costco to buy a PC.
Ugh. What a horrible prospect. But we didn’t tell her that.
Finally she gave up and explained that the way to revert is simply to go into Time Machine and have it overwrite the hard disk with whatever it saved from yesterday.
And amazingly, this not only WORKED, it installed DropBox correctly in Finder.
How and why, I do not know and do not want to know. But it took hours and hours. My whole day was eaten up with this hassle, and by about 4 p.m. I was actually in tears.
In the meantime, I was trying to edit a tangled mess of documentation a lovely woman sent me to convert into Chicago style — eight pages of it, convincing me that I need to stick with academic authors and not take on trying to edit other kinds of copy, no matter how much the author is willing to pay.
Where the amateurs are concerned, I think if it’s not a novel or maybe a memoir, I’m not reading it. If, in the absence of a Ph.D., peer review approval, and a university press contract, IF it has footnotes, endnotes, or a bibliography, I ain’t reading it. You want me to read your plain-vanilla wannabe novel with the endless strings of “he saids” and the descriptions and the characters rooted deeply in the Western tradition of cliché, fine. But do not think I’m going to read your research project.
Technoboredom: it’s a manifestation of technophobia for the stouter of heart. You know how to use all this stuff. You just don’t want to. Because it’s b-o-o-o-r-ing! Boring boring BORING.
Right now, 35 emails reside on the MacServer, none of them opened and none of them about to be opened soon. The new Mac OS exacerbates this issue: under the old operating system, you could view the name of the sender and at least part of the message without having to open the email. Now, to see what’s in it or to set a preference to direct some nuisance emailer to the trash, you HAVE to open it, and then, to move on, click again to close it. That’s four clicks (if you count a double-click as two) to view with what you should be able to see in one click. It doesn’t seem like much…but it adds up. Multiply that times 35: to view today’s mail, I will have to point and goddamn click a hundred and forty times!
And that alone adds up to “NUISANCE.” B-o-o-o-r-ing Nuisance.
Yesterday I spent half the afternoon reconciling bank accounts online, entering data in Excel, electronically depositing checks, and storing the checks’ JPEGs to Dropbox — yet another task, that latter, made exponentially more difficult by OS 10.11.4.
Yes. For some reason, the new OS on the iMac, which I have to use to operate the scanner with relatively low hassle, will not play with DropBox. Instead of appearing in the Finder sidebar like another disk drive, it’s presented in an icon in the top menu bar. You can NOT save a scanned JPEG direct to Dropbox in this new, unclever iteration. You have to save it to the desktop, then right-click on it and click on the option “move to Dropbox.” THEN, goddamnit, you have to get into Dropbox, find the file, and move it to the folder where you want it.
This issue, I suspect, could be resolved with an inexpensive PC. That, very likely, will be the new computer purchase. Too bad. I like the Mac for a number of reasons. But Apple seems to be working hard to drive customers over to Microsoft.
With an ordinary pocket calculator, I could’ve reconciled my bank accounts in about 30 minutes. But of course the result would not have been enshrined on DropBox for posterity, for my accountant, and for the IRS.
Consider the sheer amount of time wasted with fiddling with the electronic crap. Yesterday I only had two checks to deposit. But sometimes there are five or six checks laying around, begging to go to the bank. With that much hassle factor involved, it might be faster to drive them to the credit union! And it would be only marginally more annoying. To say nothing of significantly less mind-numbing.
How many clicks would it take to deposit six checks? How many steps? Hmmm…
Step 1. Align check on grid to make it straight (credit union will bounce it if it’s not exactly straight); tape down. Step 2. Place grid with check in scanner. Click 1. Open scanner software. Click 2. Click to scan image of front of check. Click 3. Outline image to include check only. Click 4. Crop image. Click 5. Export to desktop under an intelligible filename. Click 6. Click to scan image of back of check. Click 7. Outline image to include check only. Click 8. Crop image. Click 9. Export to desktop under an intelligible filename. Click 10. Get into Finder Click 11. Right-click on image of check front. Click 12. Select “Move to Dropbox.” Click 13. Click on stupid icon in annoying menu at top of screen to open DropBox. Step 4 or 5, God only knows. Search for JPEG of front of check. Click 14. Grab file and drag to the directory (sorry, “Folder”) where it’s supposed to be stored. Click 15. Repeat click 11 for back of check. Click 16. Repeat click 12 for back of check. Click 17. Repeat click 13 for back of check. Step 6 or so. Repeat step 4 or 5, whatever it was, for back of check. Click 18. Open FireFox Click 19. Get into address line. Step 7. Enter credit union’s URL. Step 8. Sign in… Click 20. Enter username. Click 21. Enter password. Click 22. Select “Online Deposit.” Click 23. Select bank account into which to direct check. Click 24. Enter the amount of the check. Click 25. Select “Front.” Click 26. Search for and click on JPEG of check front, which you cannot access on Dropbox now that you have wonderful OS 10.11.4 — you have to find the copy you put on the desktop. Click 27. Tell the bank yes, yes, YES THIS IS THE IMAGE YOU WANT TO UPLOAD. Click 28. Print resulting receipt. Click 29. Search for and click on JPEG of check back. Click 30. Tell the bank yes, yes, YES THIS IS THE IMAGE YOU WANT TO UPLOAD. Click 31. Print resulting receipt. Click 32. Back out of “Online Deposit.” Click 33. Log out of credit union account. Step 9. Retrieve deposit receipts from printer; staple checks to their respective receipts and file in hard-copy folders in file drawer.
So we have 33 clicks and about 9 steps to deposit one check; for half a dozen checks, that would total 54 steps and 198 clicks and some endless amount time spent in this eye-glazing venture.
How, really, does this improve our lives? What could I have been doing instead?
Round-trip to the credit union takes about 40 minutes. However: a Home Depot, a Lowe’s, and a Fry’s Electronics are directly on the way to that credit union. A Costco that serves a more upscale crowd than mine (and so has a richer choice of merchandise) is only slightly out of the way. A Michael’s, a pet store, and an OfficeMax are directly on the way home. Consider the number of errands I could have run in a round trip that would’ve included the CU.
Those errands have to be run willy-nilly, whether the checks are deposited or not. How much more efficient would it be simply to include a side trip over to the credit union as part of a Great Loop to two or three of those other destinations? How much less efficient — and less brain-banging boring — would a book of paper spreadsheets be, by way of enshrining data for posterity?
Did you know an Apple computer can run in a “safe” mode? I didn’t. I thought that was a PC thing.
Yet another fun day of computer-generated time suck. Damn, but I have just about had it with the computer hassles. But one thing you do have to say, in the redeeming feature department, is that even though Apple ‘s in-store service may have jumped on the Skateboard to Hell, their phone support can NOT be beat. Those people who get on the phone with you and listen to your weird story and figure out what you’re talking about and then even figure out how to tell you to fix it: they’re the real Geniuses.
Right. So… (have you noticed that this is the new [Silicon] Valley Talk? Ask someone a question, and they’ll invariably preface their response with “Right. So…”
Wife: Did you have a nice day, dear? Husband: Right. So yes I did. It was a very nice day.)
Okay, right. So this morning I drove to South Phoenix to meet with the PoD dude, trying to figure out why the PDF for the latest Magnum Opus’s cover art will not load. After some fooling around, we realize we can get the new wrap-around image up there, but we need to reformat cover 1 because the byline is dangerously close to the bleed border. So now I have to jump through those hoops: unfortunately, I used the image I’d built for the ebook cover and just dropped it into the template for the print cover, so I couldn’t just grab the byline and move it up.
Two hours later: I’m headed home and stop by the Safeway to grab a couple of small things. It’s now after noon: hungry time. What should I find on the bargain counter but THE most gorgeous rib steak, grass-fed free-range Angus, big enough for three meals, take an extra 30% off the marked-down price! Dang!
Having grabbed this, I streak home, relishing the prospect of a spectacular midday dinner, the steak on the grill, the onion softening and browning sweetly in the skillet, the salad rich with tasty goodies.
And indeed the sliced onion was cooking when I went to shoot off an email to a friend and discovered…No Chance. The MacBook was disconnected from iCloud, which you are now forced to use if you wish to have a MacMail account. Cox, for a change, seemed not to be responsible for this. But whatever the problem was, it afflicted the big iMac, too. Not only could I not fix the email, I couldn’t get online at all!
Since you have to get online to contact Apple and ask them to phone you, this meant I had to carry the Macbook (it contains details you must report on the form you send to Apple to persuade them to call you) AND one of my wireless house phones over to the neighbor’s house. Put in an order using her PC…and realize the phone is out of juice. Its damn battery is dead!
RUN back to my house, clinging tight to the computer. Get in just as the phone starts to ring.
The young woman I spoke to proved to be exceptionally smart. At first she figured it was a connectivity thing. But we were able to prove that Cox was fully online. Both computers were connected. Not a connectivity thing…
Various maneuvers having failed, eventually she said, “Let’s try rebooting in ‘Safe’ mode. Sometimes this will repair any number of problems.”
Well, I know what “Safe” mode is in conjunction with PCs, but had no idea the Mac had such a thing, or that it had much practical use.
Turns out that to acquire “Safe” mode, you reboot but hold down the “Shift” key as soon as the screen turns black, and keep it held down until the machine completely reboots. This causes all sorts of flashy things to occur, until eventually you get the usual desktop, possibly (as with a PC) slightly…disturbed.
While this is going on, she keeps assuring me that the procedure can induce a certain degree of self-repair. If we’re lucky, it’ll work.
If we’re not, she does not volunteer what we will do then.
Incredibly, though, it does work! After a lengthy can-can, the thing comes back online, and lo! MacMail works. Firefox works. It lives!
And strangely, whatever happened on the MacBook also applied to the iMac, as if by magic through the ether[net]. No longer offline, the iMac also found itself suddenly speaking to MacMail and Google. That was a relief.
Hoping against hope, I checked to see if the corrupted font had somehow repaired itself. Well, no: every word that I have ever put into a Friedlander template for the purpose of publishing it as something resembling a book is now useless. Any of those books that ever needs to be revised or edited in even the smallest way will have to be reformatted from title page to author’s bio in a new font.
Oh…I haven’t told you about the Font Corruption Adventure, have I? Well, that will have to form the topic of another post. (Here ‘tis, over at P&S Press!) It is 109.5 out there on the back porch. After engaging not one but TWO computer fights, one of them involving sprinting through 110-degree heat, I am tired. The dogs and I are going to sleep through the heat…and so that tale will have to wait for a new day.
Welp…Now that every Windows machine on the planet is in some megalomaniac hacker’s crosshairs, I sure am glad I have an Apple.
Much as I resented the cost, time, and hassle involved in having to upgrade both computers and change out the hard drive on the MacBook…sure am glad i have Apple.
Apparently something over 100,000 organizations (god knows how many computers that means) were hit by the latest ransomware exploit. From what we’re told, the victims are all Windows users.
That doesn’t mean that Apple users aren’t targets. They surely are. One of the women on the choir reported that she had to cough up $300 to get her Mac unlocked. And she was a little old church lady, not likely to be downloading BitTorrent or cruising porn sites. She probably opened a phishing email and clicked on a link in it.
Spared extreme risk from this current attack, I’ve now arranged a two-pronged back-up system: one that backs up continuously to external drives with TimeMachine (which backs up your work in real time), and one that backs up manually to two external drives that most of the time are disconnected from the computer. Additionally, I’ve copied all my data files to DropBox.
You can use Time Machine to make a one-time back-up. It copies EVERYTHING on your computer, including the programs — not just data files — and stores it neatly on an external drive or other medium. (A few cloud applications are compatible with Time Machine.) So: here’s the strategy…
Time Machine backs up one machine (which also accesses Dropbox) continuously to external drives. Two external drives: if one crashes, the other continues to run. I hope.
With all the crucial data files on DropBox, if the house burns down or the burglar steals both machines, it won’t matter: I’ll still be able to access anything that matters. I now work exclusively on DropBox, so that all updates to data files are done in real time on DB.
Two 2-terabyte external drives back up the MacBook, also using Time Machine. On the first of the month, I plug in drive A and activate Time Machine. Soon as the download is complete, I disconnect the external drive. Then on the 15th of the month, I plug in drive B and repeat. Thus, at any given time the backup on one of the drives is two weeks old.
It takes about three days for a ransomware attack to manifest itself. This means that at least ONE external hard drive will contain uninfected data if malware is installed on my computers.
Since two weeks is a long time when you’re editing brain-banging academic articles ranging in length from 6,000 to 60,000 words — a lot of work that you don’t want to repeat gets done in that period — I also have flash drive large enough to hold the contents of my DropBox files. That, I intend to plug in about every four days, to back up the most recent work. I probably should alternate with two of those, too…but there’s a limit to how much ditz I can tolerate.
So I’m thrashing around here trying to figure out whether to take this busted, brand-new hard drive back to Costco or whether…not. And if not…then what?
The Seagate external drive broke when I dropped it on the tile floor. Neither Mac and “see” it… So does that mean no one can see it?
No. A quick Google search suggests it’s not very hard for someone who knows what he’s doing to retrieve data from a broken external drive. And since Time Machine copied EVERYTHING from the MacBook onto the thing, I think I do not want to rely on a Costco clerk to disable this thing once and for all.
The accepted way to destroy a hard drive, internal or external, is to bash it with a hammer. Apparently even that is not 100% sure-fire. Dropping the busted-up drive into the garbage or the recycling bin doesn’t look like the best of all possible ideas.
I thought of soaking it in a dish of cooking oil, which would gum up the works nicely. But if bashing it isn’t fool-proof, would safflower oil be any better? 😀
How on earth to get rid of it? Finally a thought dawns on me:
This house is sitting on a quarter of an acre of land!
Duh! Bust it up as best as possible with a hammer, and then bury the remains in some random spot in the dirt.
By the time anybody digs up the yard and stumbles across this artifact, I will be dead. So will the artifact: it’ll be so far out of date no existing hardware will read it. And even if some antique computer is still running, by then the inside of the hammered hard drive will be stuffed with so much mud and dirt that no one will want to chance trying to decode it.
How convenient that it’s been raining…
So I bashed the bejayzus out of the thing with a hammer, dug a hole in the ground, dropped the remains in, and neatly covered it up with the landscaping. Within a few days, even I won’t remember where it is. And dollars to donuts, within a couple of months whatever might remain on it will be unreadable even by the NSA.
