Computers

Ugh! What could be worse than waking up at two in the morning with a headache?

Well…waking up at two in the morning with a headache, booting up your Mac, and having Firefox try to redirect to an Amazonaws site.

{sigh} Good morning to you, too!

I think Firefox may have blocked it. FF popped up an “invalid certificate” message. Amazonaws is a redirect virus—from what I can tell, it hijacks your browser to a site that tries to sell you fake antivirus software. I was able to abort the tab before it could load. Cleared the cache, then rebooted Firefox and don’t see anything amiss just now. Started Safari: no problem there…at least, not that’s readily visible.

At any rate, everything I’ve been working on over the past several endless days is backed up to an external drive and to the cloud, so if this antique unit is infected, the world will not come to an end.

Nothing much new here. All work and no play is making Funny a very dull girl. I’m still laboring through the phenomenal amount of work involved in building my summer courses with the new scheme to raise their academic standards. I’ve rewritten the calendars and syllabi, cleaned up and revised the PDF packages, replaced the peer review guidelines with the new modified rubrics, scheduled time in the library and computer commons (I hope…assuming they’ll let my classes in as desired). Remaining to do: write weekly modules for 102 course; finish writing weekly modules for the 101 course; create the 101 website; post and schedule modules on both sites; create grade sheets in Excel and upload to Google Docs; create individual reporting gradesheets; set up organizational labels in gmail accounts for TAs. That should take about three more days.

Then I’ve gotta start all over again for the fall classes. Fall course prep has to be done NOW, because these second-session summer courses bump right up against the start of fall classes. There will be exactly zero break between the end of the 8-week 102 course and the beginning of fall semester. So my fall classes will have to be ready to go before these summer courses begin.

Now that the new Lady Cruella scheme is realized, though, it should be relatively easy to recycle the stuff I’ve written for the summer courses. I’ll have to write fall calendars and syllabi. Plus we have a new textbook for 101, starting in the fall, and so the 101 reading assignments will have to be rewritten.

The new text is much superior to the Longman handbook we’ve been using. Unfortunately for me, that means I’ll have to read the damn thing. There’s exactly a month to go before summer classes start…and I’m afraid every minute of that time is going to be occupied with unpaid labor.

In the money department, I’m afraid to enter all the charges I’ve run up in the past couple of weeks. The receipts are sitting in my wallet waiting to be entered in Excel. Though I’ve managed to stay out of Costco, I did go into the terrifying Pier One and spend something over a hundred bucks on decorator items.

Bad human!

Then to make things worse, I so much liked the tube dress from Whole Foods that I decided to go grab another one. They’re not expensive—under $30—but when things are tight even thirty dollah seems like too much. But where clothing is concerned, I tend to operate on the theory that if it fits, it looks good, and you really like it, you should get two of them because you’ll never see them again.

Didn’t stop there, though: got my hair done. Went back to my lady in Tempe, which was an excuse to go out to lunch with my former associate editor and present subcontractor, whose second layoff from the Great Desert University is being spun out over about a year.

Hair lady only charged $50, which is an amazing bargain considering that she produced a style very much like the amazing Shane’s for a little more than half of what he charges. The S-corp paid for the business lunch, so that at least doesn’t come out of my regular cash flow budget.

But a couple of other restaurant junkets most certainly will. Gotta stay out of restaurants and gourmet grocery stores! 😀

Spent some more money at Home Depot, speaking of places to stay out of. Still want a composter, but am not, not, not going to pay $150 for the privilege. I’d picked up one from Costco for $99 (even that was way too much). Brought it home and realized I couldn’t even begin to put it together: it required two people and power tools. Reviews on the Web were replete with people complaining that it took four or five hours to construct, and the job really needed three, not two people. If I’d had Jack the Handyman do it, he’d have charged as much as I paid for the thing.

So, having returned that contraption a couple of weeks ago, yesterday I picked up a plastic trash bin with a snap-on lid. I’ll punch holes in the bottom and sides, load it with vegetable waste, and voila! Compost bin. Secure the lid with a bungee cord, and you can flop it over on its side and roll it back and forth to turn your compost. Cheaper, but still…not what you’d call “free.”

Moving on, my car has developed an oil leak and it needs a new timing belt. Chuck remarked that sometimes oil leaks on that model spring up around some timing belt thingamajigger whose name I don’t recall at this hour; if that’s the case, he wants to change the belt now, not later. Interestingly, though, I don’t happen to have $350 or $400 laying around, not after the late, great dental adventures.

I hate to put a chunk of money into that old clunk. Really, I should get a new (or at least newer) vehicle. But this is not the time. I missed my chance to take money out of a brokerage account for that purpose; with the market plummeting, I’m not about to cash out now. And if I’m going to buy a car, I’d rather wait till the end of the year, when prices are a little lower.

Water bill came in surprisingly low, under a hundred bucks. It’s getting hot enough now that the potted plants need to be watered every day to keep them alive. So I expect it’ll be up to $125 next month. By then, though, a paycheck will be coming in. Mirabilis!

Welp, the headache is easing and it’s not even dawn yet. I’m goin’ back to bed!

Image: Perseid meteor striking the sky just below the Milky way. Mila. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license.