I have to find an alternative to Blogger; it’s unreachable half the time.  But on the bright side, cookies have suddenly started working for me here, both on Mac and PC.  When I go to Blogger (if I can get there!) I no longer have to log in, and it doesn’t kick me off every few minutes like it was doing before.

Last night almost exactly at 7 p.m. I was working on the computer (as usual); John had stopped off at the grocery store after work and was on his way home.  Suddenly I heard a very loud BAP-BAP-BAP-BAP-BAP and then silence.  I knew it was gunshots, it couldn’t have been anything else, but I wasn’t about to go outside and find out!!  Two minutes later I heard sirens coming from every direction.  I don’t have a direct view of the street corner from any of our windows, but I could see police flashers being reflected off the buildings on all sides.  The whole thing only lasted a few minutes; when John got home around 7:30 I told him what I’d heard, and he said he hadn’t noticed any police vehicles or anything outside.

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Jeez, Blogger’s been acting all screwy today, and my archive links have suddenly disappeared!  Boy, if it ain’t one thing it’s another.  If it ain’t Yahoo Mail it’s Blogger, and if it ain’t Blogger it’s my ISP, and if it ain’t my ISP it’s my hosting service, and if it ain’t my hosting service it’s my computer, etc. etc.  Oh well, I can’t get too upset as long as everything doesn’t break down at once!

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Everything’s working again.  :-) I have nothing else to say, because all I’ve been doing for the past two days is installing and configuring software!!  Put your finger on your lips and go "Bluddle-luddle-luddle"…

Dammit, I screwed up my OS X.  Don’t ask me to explain, but I completely demolished it and can’t boot into it anymore.  It won’t let me reinstall either; something’s completely hosed.  I’m either going to have to resign myself to using OS 9 forever, or frickin’ wipe the drive and start over.  Well, I’m going to wipe the drive. So right now I’m using Stuffit to cram my various data-globs into mega-lumps, and transferring it to my PC (temporarily) using OS 9′s normal file sharing.  Can’t use Sharity ‘cuz that’s an OS X-only app.  HUGE SIGH…

Talked to the folks for Easter.  That was nice.  :-)

Me and John drove around and ran some errands yesterday afternoon.  I had to return that thumb-mouse I bought for the laptop… it broke after only 2 weeks!  One of the rollers inside got broken somehow, so the ball would only move the cursor to the left & right, but not up & down.  I didn’t want to get another crappy one, so I paid five bucks extra and traded up to a mini USB thing.  Not wireless, but optical.  It’s got a scroll-wheel, which is cool, but I can’t get the wheel to work in OS 9, only in OS X.  Maybe I need a special driver or extension for it, but Belkin doesn’t have any Mac stuff on their website.  :-(

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I take back what I said the other day about Mac OS 9.  After playing with it for a few hours I really like it… but then I never met an OS I didn’t like, except maybe WinME!  Now I can’t decide whether I should use OS 9 or OS X as my primary bootable.  OS 9 is real lean and mean, and you seem to have more configuration options.  OS X is so *pretty* though, as a window-manager.  I think what I’ll do is just try and keep all my documents in a folder at the root of the drive where they’ll be accessible to either OS.  But I need to find a way to get the Eudoras in both OS’s to use the same mail folder.  Story of my life!!  I always try to keep at least two bootable OS’s on every computer, just for variety.  But for me home is where the mail is.  If I can only see my mail folders from one OS or partition, then that’s the one I’ll always need to use!  I wonder if Eudora even uses the same mail format between OS 9 and OS X; I’ll have to research that.

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My Yahoo! Mail account has gone completely screwy.  They already told everyone that they’re going to stop letting people use POP access for free, starting April 24th.  So I won’t be able to download my damn mail to Eudora.  But today my password doesn’t seem to work at all!!  I would suspect that my account had been compromised if it weren’t for the fact that over the years they’ve screwed up on me so many times, in so many ways it’s not even funny.  Plus, I’m one of those people that uses really wacky, unique passwords for every account — very secure passwords compared to the ones most people use.  I change the Yahoo one every month or so, and it’s always different and completely weird.  So though of course it’s always possible that somebody could hijack my account, I really doubt they would.  And who would care enough to do that, anyway?  If anybody’s THAT interested in reading my Yahoo, they should just ask me nicely, I’m sure I wouldn’t mind forwarding them all my spam.  (giggle)

Omigod, I figured it out!  ::pant pant::  I got the laptop to connect to the web using only my cellphone!!  Of course it was slow as hell, only a 14.4 connect.  Because you’re not even using a modem at all, as it turns out; it’s just something that happens on Verizon’s end.  It automagically does all the modem-ing for you, right over the line somehow, and you don’t even have to sign up for any extra features!  It’s part of the standard cellphone service and just counts toward your minutes, same as a voice call.  You install their fake-modem script, and set up a remote connection using a standard username/password, selecting the Verizon driver as the modem.  For the port you select your serial-to-USB converter thingy — in my case I’m using that same PalmConnect adaptor I got to sync the Palm on the iBook.  So, it works, albeit slowly.  But I only wanted the connectivity for very light-usage purposes anyhow.  14.4 is good enough for checking and sending e-mail, and emergency surfing, like getting driving directions, looking up phone numbers and suchlike.  So now I can do that.  I AM SO PLEASED WITH MYSELF!!!  tee hee.

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I’ve been doing a lot of last-minute shopping and errand-running and gathering all my crap for the tour.  Went a little crazy buying *even more* Eagle Creek Pack-It accessories — shit, I am the worst addict for that junk.  An Eagle Creek Freak!!  I started buying their stuff maybe five years ago, and now with this new stuff I have probably ten different items.  I use them all constantly, and I love them, and it’s so stupid for me to talk about that here, but oh well.  The first bag-thing I ever bought from them is almost indiscernable from the ones I bought yesterday, other than a new logo and a couple of design tweaks. That’s rugged!!  I mean, don’t you hate shitty bags?  My biggest pet peeve in bags is a crappy zipper that gets stuck, or a strap that comes loose all the time.  Or a bag that takes ten minutes to get open and shut.  Or one that’s always coming open and spilling your tampons all over the floor.  Or a bag that can’t be soaked with beer and then washed with all your clothes, etc. etc.  You know.  Better just to spend the extra few bucks and get something that’ll outlive you.

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John recorded a 3-song demo yesterday with his band, at Greg Norman’s house… I had met Greg before ‘cuz he works at Electrical, Steve Albini’s studio.  (I’m not trying to drop names, just giving you my own reference-points.) It came out sounding great… they just made a rough mix and John will be going back later to mix it and maybe add a few more overdubs.  I did a little backup singing, for what that was worth.  There was a lot going on in the recording so I was just adding to the fray.  It’s always cool to have lots of tracks to choose from, at mixdown time!

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Hey guess what, somebody actually used my PayPal tip-jar button!!!  They left me ten bucks just because they like my music.  God bless America!!!!!!

I’m sort of teaching John’s mom how to run her own website.  John’s parents have a business and they’re paying a web-boutique type place to do their site for them.  I always told her she was being robbed and she should learn to do it herself, and I bugged her so much about it that she finally relented!  She’s pretty smart with computers so it’s not hard to show her new things.  And she’s real excited about learning HTML… it’s always fun to teach somebody who really really wants to learn.  (smile)

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Wow, I am stylin’.  I went to Office Depot — I love those places!! — and got me a new mouse.  It’s nice enough; I don’t need anything special, just something that points and clicks.  I also got a little thumb-mouse that I can use with the iBook, since I’m not too crazy about that trackpad.  It’s shaped like an egg with a hole in it, with trigger-clicking action and a trackball on top.  After taking it home and trying it, it seems like it might turn out to be one of those things that’s very nice in theory but in reality, you don’t use because it’s just one extra object.  Oh well, it was pretty cheap, and it’s always nice to have a tiny trackball around in case you wanna play Centipede or something.  I’ll probably get used to the trackpad eventually… this is the first one I’ve had; all my other laptops have been Toshibas with the little rubber pointer-sticks.

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My poor mouse on my desktop computer has totally lost its clickum due to excessive flogging, blogging and browsing.  I know how to clean mouse balls (LOL!!) but how do you pry apart the clicker-thingy?  And jeez, this mouse is less than a year old — they sure don’t make ‘em like they used to!!  Well, I wanted to get one of those newfangled optical ones anyway, so this is my excuse.

Changed the name of this page from "What’s New" to simply "blog".  I give up on trying to convince everybody that it’s a grody-sounding word.  At least it’s easy to type.

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Testing Bloggar, a little Windows app that lets you post to Blogger without going to their homepage.  The cookies at Blogger’s website never work for me.  It’s a royal pain to have to log in every two minutes.

Please work…