Have you ever noticed, when your computer crashes and has to be carted off to the computer hospital, how great dunes of dust accumulate behind and around the place it occupies? Maybe you’ve also noticed the way computer cords reproduce in the secret cubbyholes behind hardware and under desks. Expose them to the light of day and they start to writhe around.
Gross.
With the iMac out of the house, these conditions became alarmingly apparent here. So today I finally bestirred myself to haul out the rags, sort the tangled cables, beat back the ravening, fanged dust bunnies, pay some bills, sort and (mostly) throw away stacks of paper. Now, finally, we can see the top of the desk. Interestingly, it appears to be made of wood!
Out the door at 6:30 in the morning, headed for a breakfast meeting in Scottsdale. Back in front of the computer, wrestling with the hated BlackBoard until around 2:00 p.m. I think things are now mostly under control…it took some time to hammer the grade sheet back into shape, but the last I saw, it was pretty well under control. Thence to bed-changing and laundry and housecleaning and pool cleaning
Needless to say, no real, productive work has gotten done today.
Nor will it this evening: in another 40 minutes it’s off to another event, it being 5:30 already. Feed the dog first, then out the door again.
Dusk came in behind curtains of virga, otherworldly mauve in sunset’s banked furnace. In the distance, thunder, rumbling like bowling balls. Such an ugly day, today: 112 in the shade and muggy, so wet that even inside an air-conditioned box the water condenses on your face, you can’t tell the difference between air, water, and sweat and maybe there isn’t any. Difference, I mean, ou différance. So, so flicking hot.
The morning started with another little disaster. I stuck a piece of bacon in the microwave, set it to 35 seconds. So I thought. God only knows what I really entered in the punch-pad. Set the teakettle over the fire. Funny smell: figured the stove was dirty (damn it, another mess to clean up!), but it would burn off. Smell > stink. What? Where?
Where? In the microwave. Bacon carbonized, paper about to catch fire. Rescue, dump in sink, pour water over it. Stink expands to fill all space available, which happens to be the entire habitation in which I and the dog live.
Seven a.m. and it’s a hundred degrees out there. Shut off the air conditioning. Open all the doors and windows. Turn on every fan in the house as high as it will go.
Clean the microwave. Clean the microwave. Clean the microwave. Pray. Clean the microwave. Clean the microwave. Clean the microwave. Clean the microwave. Pray again. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat…
Get the yellow stuff off the microwave’s interior surface, but figure all that scrubbing’s doing naught to get the stink out of the hidden interior parts.
Remember what happened when My Bartleby set fire to her lunch in the office microwave, ruining the microwave once and for all. Price range for replacement over-the range microwaves: $260 to $940. Tra la la! Who doesn’t have that laying around the house?
Hot literally, hot metaphorically. In this endless day nothing goes right. Blackboard, the electronic infrastructure that’s supposed to enhance and simplify the delivery of our courses, went down the instant classes started. Yes. After all those weeks and months of building extravagant, magnificent, elegant courses for our students, the damn thing is down. And it’s not coming up. So much work, so many hours and days and weeks of toil in the hot, hot summer: down the toilet.
Let’s heat it up some more, at the local level: my iMac’s hard drive crashes. It will take $209 to get the damn thing running again. My students can’t get online, and neither can I.
IT to college community:
Update: 8/24/2010 – 7:30 pm
Dear Faculty and Students:
MCCCD and Blackboard teams met again at 5:00 pm this evening to continue working through the connectivity and performance issues. Although additional changes were made throughout the afternoon, we regret to inform you that nothing significant has changed and the connectivity/performance issues continue.
Blackboard will continue with diagnostics and monitoring throughout the evening with 2 hour updates to MCCCD. MCCCD and Blackboard will again convene, via conference call, at 7:00 am in the morning. We will send another update to you as soon as that call completes.
I hunger. Bowling balls in the sky warn against firing up a barbecue, but I want a steak. I do not want to clean more grease off the stovetop. So instead I fire up the broiler, 112 degrees in the shade notwithstanding. What can it matter if the kitchen is a few degrees hotter?
Cooking a steak under an electric oven’s broiler is not unlike microwaving it. Even if you top it with butter, it still comes out gray all over. Oh well. It tasted pretty good.
Hot, so hot. Decide to risk a lightning bolt and dive into the pool. Haul out, cooled down enough to walk the dog. But nooo….
Like popcorn, drops of rain bounce against the patio roof. Slow popping at first, and then a magical frantic rattle. Rain! Actual desert rain.
The desert smells like rain, dust and creosote perfuming the air. Sweet. Finally, sweet.
I do not think God has a gender. She is not a He and He is not a She, though if forced to choose, I’d lean toward She, that being compatible with my subjective point of view. But what He or She invents hideousparasites to torment Its creations? For that matter, what kind of He or She thinks up a mosquito?
Whatever It is, It’s capable of putting on quite a lovely, scented show at the end of a day, a show that turns the day from hideous to tolerable. More than tolerable.
Yesterday, I managed to get through the various local crises fairly calmly. Three months of work on my courses down the tubes. A $2,000 computer melted down. Oh well!
But by midmorning today, I was showing signs of my own melt-down. Not being able to get the boxed computer onto a luggage dolly (to cart it up five stories to the repairman’s office) without causing the dolly to fall apart…that one just about did me in. Freaking flat broke and looking at $210 to fix the computer, $500± to replace the microwave, three months of work down the tubes, 26 students wondering what to do in the absence of course materials, a concentrated 8-week composition course to rewrite right now for no extra pay, no clue how to sell ad space for the Bach Festival program and a deadline of mid-September, a $500 drawdown from Fidelity reduced to 77 cents this month after I told the dude four times not to cut it until the September payment, and—oh, why not?—a white ring on the Stickley side table after a glass sweated water condensation all over it.
Does anybody know how to get to the cookies thing in Firefox 3.6.8? Somehow all cookies have been disabled on the laptop,and so it won’t let me sign into gmail, and so I can’t get my gmail, and I can’t comment on any Blogger sites.
Tools doesn’t seem to have the option. Here’s what I get on my Tools menu:
In Firefox Tools, I get Web Search, Downloads, Add-ons, Error Console, and Page Info. Stop Private Browsing and Clear Recent History are disabled.
In Edit, no relevant options. In View > Toolbars, no way to get anything up that looks like it might be useful.
I think what’s happened here is that I installed Taco 3.0 with Abine, a souped-up privacy program that sounded like a great idea but evidently is some sort of rogue software. You can uninstall the Taco 3.0 part, but Abine gets its tentacles into the guts of your system and won’t let go. From Google searches I see I’m not the only one with this problem and also that apparently uninstalling FireFox and reinstalling it doesn’t help. Being tired & at the end of my rope, I haven’t tried that.
Has anybody had any experience with this? I’m over in Safari now but much prefer FF for navigation and general security. But now can’t make comments on Blogger sites like Frugal Scholar because I can’t get into Gmail on FF.
If Murphy’s Law can have global warming, that’s what we’ve got here.
First day of class. All my coursework is neatly online. It has, some of you may recall, taken weeks of 16-hour days to mount this stuff on BlackBoard, the courseware that ate Philadelphia.
Today I needed my students to access the site, in class, to download materials, to upload short in-class essays… Wednesday they have two assignments due in this system.
You see where we’re going here… OF COURSE the goddamned BlackBoard system is DOWN! It’s having a FRENZY OF INSTABILITY.
Is it my sweet little college that’s brought this on? Hell, no. It’s the vendor. BlackBoard. Blackboard Freaking Inc. Tina forwarded a memo from the university’s IT people saying they expect it to be nonfunctional for a week or more. GDU is activating its emergency backup system; meanwhile, it’s telling faculty to post materials somewhere else, Google Docs or wherever the hell they can figure out to get online.
Luckily, I knew this was going to happen.
You develop an instinct for these things, after you’ve worked with BlackBoard long enough. So I created a WordPress.com site as my own fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants backup. It’s just a blog and its interactivity is limited to comments. But at least it can hold the most crucial course material, for the nonce, and I can communicate with the little things. The papers they’re doing next week will just have to be printed out. Just what I needed…to have to touch paper. The dratted stuff has acid in it, you know. Burns your fingers.
Ah, but that wasn’t all.
No. Not all. This morning the iMac’s hard drive crashed, once and for all. Down and out. Blue Screen of Death, accompanied by weird Knock of Death. That will be $260, thank you, and say goodbye to all your programs and data.
Luckily, I knew this was going to happen.
One could do without it happening on the first day of class. But thank goodness everything of any import was backed up to an external hard drive, except for a small project I finished about 11:00 last night. Not pleased about having to do that four hours of work over, but it’s a heckuva lot better than having to do four months’ worth of work over.
And boy, am I glad I sprang for the extra coins to get the MacBook! The iMac got cloned onto this handy laptop computer, and so life goes on, with few interruptions. The 87 gerjillion passwords the iMac had memorized have to be looked up and entered into this unit. But otherwise, the system is much the same. And the repair dudes should be able to clone the MacBook back onto the new iMac hard drive.
All that notwithstanding, it’s been one hellish day.
Okay. Can anyone remember when a shave and a haircut actually cost six bits? That would be 75 cents, for those of you born in the latter third of the twentieth century.
Well, the new version is “Shave and a haircut…forty-five bucks!”
No joke, gents. Saturday, in search of a Sur la Table store, M’hijito and I paid a visit to the über-tony Kierland Commons, a fixture serving the ever-more-upscale hordes of north Scottsdale. We parked the car in front of a barber shop—barber salon may be better—whose window proudly advertised a shave and a haircut for $45.
Well, it’s a bargain, I guess: less than I paid, a few hours later, for a haircut alone.
Amazing, isn’t it, what inflation does to a currency? My father told me that when he was a young man delivering milk on a horse-drawn wagon, he earned ten dollars a month. I must have looked startled—at the time this conversation took place, ten dollars would buy a bag of groceries—because he hastened to assure me that $10 a month was a living wage then. He not only lived on it, he said, he lived decently on it.
When he retired, he figured his hard-earned life savings of $100,000 would make him set for life. Then came the double-digit inflation of the 1970s, which reduced its value by…what? two thirds? Today a nest egg of a million dollars feels a little skimpy, considering that most of us can expect to live well into our eighties and some will live into our nineties. I don’t know if the prospect of accruing $100,000 felt as daunting to my parents as a million-dollar target does to me. It never was enough to set them up in affluence, even when he first retired.
I do know that if I still had a job, I’d still be working toward a million-dollar retirement fund. And I wonder if it would be enough to allow me to run the heat in the winter and to cool the house into the comfortable range in the summer.
“Six bits,” by the way, represents inflation, too. The original ditty went
Yesterday, afteran amazingly hectic day during which I fell off the wagon big time (a glass of wine and two beers!!!), I tumbled into the sack around 10:00 p.m. Weary of awaking at 3:00 a.m., as had happened again in the wee hours of yesterday morning, I dropped an antihistamine hoping to drug myself so as to sleep through the night.
It worked. Didn’t wake up until six.
Stumbled outside to wring out the dog in the backyard, there to find…a soggy, soggy landscape.
It must have rained all night long. Eighty degrees and the air was just wet. Thick with humidity.
The dog, no fool, refuses to go out. So I have to walk out into the yard trying to coax her (unsuccessfully) to visit the doggy loo. That’s when I notice that…oh yes…
Last night after I marinated and grilled the pound of awe-inspiring prawns I’d nabbed at Costco, I left the grill lid open so the perforated pan that held the shrimp would cool enough for me to wash it. Then, in my exhaustion (not to say inebriation), I totally spaced that I’d done that.
Even when, right before bedtime, I went to let the dog out and found it sprinkling, I failed to recall that the grill was hanging open to the evening skies.
Well.
You never saw such a mess in your entire put-together! The drip pan under the burners was overflowing with rainwater and grease. The cast-iron grates, highly rustable, were dripping greasy water into the interior of the grill. Formerly burned-on grease had somehow absorbed water and swelled up into blobs, like greasy puffed wheat. The ignition knob was soaked, as was every other part of the $400 grill. You could hear the meat-eating ants singing, a little squeaky ant chorus, as they danced a jig of joy around the perimeter of Ant City, knowing all this grease was spread across the earth for them to carry home. A gift, no doubt, from the Ant Goddess.
Two hours later…sweat was dripping into my eyes and off the end of my nose, I was drenched with sweat from top to bottom, my shoes were ruined from greasy water and detergent splashing on them, my hands were a wreck (the rubber gloves having died in the last fiasco I had to deal with), and yesterday’s $50 hairstyle was a sad memory.
And the pool was still full of leaves and devil pods.
To enhance the joy of that challenge, the pool needed to be backwashed. The filter was so clogged, the pump couldn’t push water fast enough to mound the leaves and seed pods into discrete piles so they could be sucked up by the hose bonnet. No way Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner could manage all those devil pods: they would choke him to death before he could get halfway across the deep end.
And for more joy enhancement: I shock-treated the pool yesterday, turning it into a puddle of Clorox. This meant I couldn’t even dive into the water this morning to cool off from the hard labor.
Backwashed the pool into the alley, hoping the neighbors would imagine the resulting lake came from the rain. Fortunately, most people don’t go out and about in swampy weather like this.
Recharged the filter. Let the pump run while I fed the dog and…and…yes. Cleaned up the little gift she left under the table, since she wouldn’t go outside into the soggy soggy landscape. Fixed and ate breakfast (mostly coffee, annoyingly decaffeinated). Plodded back out to clean the pool.
The hose bonnet is one of the great unsung inventions of humankind. It vacuumed up about a half bushel of leaves and devil pods. Matter of fact, it cleaned the bottom so well, there was no need to put Harvey back into the pool. Which was good, because he’s allergic to hyperchlorination and shouldn’t be crawling around in there until a shock treatment has dissipated.
Jumped in the pool in spite of the no-no levels of carcinogenic chlorine guaranteed to rot away Harvey’s plastic carapace. This left the skin stinging. Stood under the hot shower for god knows how long, soaking and soaping chemicals off.
The barbecue is now so clean it’s almost good as new. The pool pump is running so efficiently it’s almost silent in its operation.
