One of the first things I realized this morning was that I'd managed to not post to this blog yesterday, which means I'm out of this month's NaBloPoMo competition. Blah! I was doing so well, too, posting a new bit of "Sundancer's Fairy Tale" every day and occasionally something else. Guess I'm too easily distracted by stuff on the computer sometimes. OK, maybe a lot of the time.
So I was reading the Bad Astronomy blog this morning and today's shuttle launch was mentioned. It was set for 14:28 Eastern time, or 11:28 Pacific time. Great, I thought. I'll watch Klara McDonnell on LiveIreland.com from 10 to noon (6 to 8 p.m. GMT) then tune in an hour and a half later for the launch.
You see the problem, of course. I'd misread 14:28 as 4:28 p.m. so I thought the launch was two hours later than it actually occurred. I never realized it until around 1 p.m. when I went to nasa.gov and saw immediately that I'd missed out. Double blah!
Oh well, at least I got LiveIreland's stereo feed set up on Rhythmbox Music Player on Caristiona, the second computer, so I can listen and see the song titles just by turning my head instead of changing windows to Rhythmbox and back again.
A few days ago I'd moved Caristiona out of the bedroom back to where the computer cart had been for years until I decided to try setting up a computer in the bedroom by running two 50-foot cables, which required taping cable across the rug at the bedroom door and again at the entrance to the two closets that flank the bathroom entrance, along with hiding the cable in a couple of cord covers that gets the cable for TV across both entrances to my little kitchen area.
It was a nice little experiment and it worked, but I realized with a little reorganizing I could put the computer cart back, this time without all the junk it had accumulated, with Caristiona all set up.
In the process of moving the cart around, I did a lot of rearranging. I realized there were a whole lot of things that had sort of accumulated, accreted, grown, etc. on top of and behind my main computer desk. I had power strips all over and had lost track of what was plugged in to where. There were several power transformers still plugged in for stuff I no longer used and two or three computer power cords plugged in to the strips but not into computers. Once I started looking at that, I found so much stuff to unplug that now only two power strips are left. One of the emptied power strips was plugged into an extension cord that has three outlets. Rather than get rid of the cord I plugged my Vonage box and the phone into it.
Sileas, the main computer, used to be on the floor at my feet under the desk next to Caristiona, with enough space for me to put my feet. I moved her up to the top of the desk's hutch and discovered she had accumulated an awful lot of dust while sitting down there. With that cleaned out she should last a bit longer.
I've got a big upholstered chair behind where I sit for using the computer. The idea in putting it there was to have a more comfortable place to sit while watching videos on the monitor. The trouble is, a chair has horizontal surface above floor level, and with me that means junk tends to accumulate. Working through those layers is a little like archeology as I discover stuff unseen for months. I came across some CDs I decided to put in my 300-CD changer. While messing about with that, I realized my dual-cassette tape recorder hadn't been plugged into the stereo receiver for a long time because I rarely play tapes any more. So I plugged it back in and discovered that a 24-year-old tape of the Short Sisters (Kim Wallach, Faye Baird and Kate Seeger) still sounds OK even after sitting in the car for several years. It was nice to hear them again.
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