Working my tail off; making progress in the profit-making department but going nowhere in the “get a life” department.
To end with (not to say, “to start with,” it’s all so damn effing circular!), the instant I sat down to write this post, the accursed computer hung. That was with a file open that I’d been working on since 7:30 this morning, pretty much nonstop all the way through until 9:00 p.m.
It’s now 20 til ten. Miraculously, I managed to save the two open Wyrd files and one Excel file to DropBox before being forced to shut down with the power-off button, supposedly a very bad thing to do to your Mac. It looks like the files were undamaged and the system is working again.
After 40 minutes of wrestling with the damn computer, my head is throbbing. By 5 p.m. the gut thing was feeling better, but I’m sure I’ll hear about this episode along about 3:30 this morning. Oh well. I’d already set a Zantac and a mug of water by the bed.
Holy sh!t. Wouldn’t you just know this damn thing would try to trash 13½ hours worth of work? I yelled so furiously Ruby tried to jump off the bed, a distance about five times her height. Poor little dog. She thinks it’s her fault every time the computer crashes. Since it goes down about every second or third day (the last emergency rescue of my Excel checkbook record was dated 3/30…), she must be filled with Good Catholic Guilt.
Right. The dog thinks the top of the bed is Purgatory.
Spent a fair amount of the day reading about Purgatory. Anglo-Saxon concepts thereof, that is. I’ve now read, marked up, and drafted index entries for all but two articles in this collection.
Weirdly, this is one of the better books in its category that I’ve read. It has some surprisingly interesting articles.
Take the one on wyrmas. Know what a wyrm is? Beowulf’s dragon was a wyrm. A wyrm can be a dragon, a serpent, or an ordinary invertebrate earthworm. Orrrrr….AN EARTHWORM ON STEROIDS THAT ATTACKS AND DISMEMBERS YOUR DEAD BODY AND TORTURES YOUR SOUL IN HELL!!!! Eeeeeeeeekkkkk! They have teeth of fire and they crawl about in an army under the command of a terrifying character named Gifer.
We are dooomed!
The Anglo-Saxons were pretty amazing. Did you know that a fair amount of their visual imagery was influenced by Near Eastern cultures? That included not just contemporary Arabic cultures, but ancient Egypt. They were redoubtable fighters (despite getting trounced, ultimately, by a bunch of Normans) and they left troves of beautifully worked gold and garnet artefacts.
I hope to be done with this project in a couple of days. It’s worth a grand, so as you can imagine I’m anxious to meet the deadline and also to do a decent job on it.
Thank God there was no choir this morning, after last week’s nonstop frenzy. This allowed an entire, uninterrupted day to devote to the project. Yesterday I took copy to a meeting that soaked up the afternoon…managed to get a little markup done but of course not as much as would’ve happened here in the Silence of the Tomb.
Meanwhile another project is going to pot. Am trying to hire someone to take up the slack; a new person who wants to work with me on editorial was approached; she and her hubby are sick and so that went nowhere. Tomorrow, though, is another day. Two other people are on the string…we’ll see what develops there.
Mean-meanwhile, bills have to be paid; gotta figure out someplace to dig up the money to pay the auto and homeowner’s insurance. After I scraped the paint on my co-religionist’s car, they jacked up not only the car but also the house insurance. So that will bite a couple grand out of this year’s budget.
Ugh.
And so, to bed…
At the risk of sounding like a jerk…..Would a new computer from the Apple Store solve any or many of these troubles? If so….I say let’s do it! Life is too short to wrestle with craziness….every day.
I don’t happen to have that much money. The S-corp lost a lot in the Kindle publishing venture and is still losing, since I’m still flogging the bookoids a little. That’s why I’m working my tail off on decently paying projects.
But whenever I do have the cash, the problem is… MS OFFICE 2008 WON’T RUN UNDER EL CAPITAN UNLESS THE SOFTWARE IS ALREADY INSTALLED BEFORE THE OS IS INSTALLED. That means when the Apple guys transfer all my software over to a new computer, I’m going to lose my Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. And that is a pain, because I really, truly hate the hassles of anti-virus software, wacko updates that completely change your way of working and make things harder and harder and HARDER with every new version of Windows, Outlook (argh!), machines that last all of two years if you’re lucky, and the fact that I’d lose the e-mail I use for my business.
The current MacBook Pro ranges in price from $1300 to $2500.
Probably I’ll buy a cheap PC from Costco, which has the best money-back program around, try to install an old boxed verson of Office (a few are still available on Amazon), and do my editorial work on that. Eventually I’ll be forced to subscribe to Office in the Cloud, which just pisses me off no end. When that happens, I may fold my business and just use Mac’s Pages for my hobby writing. Or change my hobby to stringing beads, which turns out to be considerably more profitable than book publishing. 😀
Sorry to hear of the financial woes on the books….”but nothing ventured … nothing gained”. One of the purchases I do not regret is the purchase of an Apple about 6 years ago for DD2. That thing was about $2K but has carried her thru a lot of travels….a lot of school work…..provided entertainment and communication….AND may have saved her from more serious harm when she was struck by a car while a pedestrian IN a cross walk in California….TRUE STORY. It continues to serve her well and will be her companion in her post grad work. As for the PC’s, I think they’re OK for folks like me BUT you seem to have a more demanding …. need…You do a lot of stuff. As for your old Apple and the challenges, the only experience I have is with my 13 year old desk top that is running….sometimes….on XP. This was a purchase from Circuit City before they went BK…so that should tell ya what I’m dealing with. In dog years this thing is like 91 and more and more stuff is going wrong. Now I can’t go on the internet with it because of some error message. But I have a lot communications on this machine….e-mails….leases….letters…pictures. And I’m pretty sure putting all this info on memory cards would be a real pain. Not in your league but a pain none the less…
Gosh. You should tell that story to the people at Apple. THAT’s an advertising tale…and they might pay you for it, if they used it in an ad.
I’ve only had one PC that’s lasted as long as the MacBook Pro…and an Apple guy told me it should survive quite a while longer. The nice thing about Apple is a feature called Time Machine. This application backs up EVERYTHING on your computer to an external hard drive, including all your programs. So if this thing goes down, I don’t lose Office 2008 — whose value to me is that it doesn’t have the endlessly annoying “ribbon” Microsoft inflicted on us.
The PCs were, by and large, a PITA, too: the required Norton and McAfee virus-catchers made them run through molasses. And like Apple, Microsoft worked to force them to become obsolete — though I’d say MS is worse in that department than Apple. Both companies have absolutely NO consideration for customers…damn! The constant, unnecessary OS updates that complicate your life, waste your time, often knock your software out of commission, and keep you on a constant frustrating learning curve are just ENRAGING.
That’s the specific reason I want my IBM Selectric back. It’s hard to “update” a typewriter.