I'm on the blogroll at NaBloPoMo, aka National Blog Posting Month, for November.
Now all I have to do is be sure to post here at least once a day. I tried that in October but managed to miss two or three days. Still, it was good practice for this month. Originally NaBloPoMo was intended to be for November only, but some folks who'd joined wanted to keep things going, so it is now possible to sign up for any month. November is the month for which prizes are awarded. Each month there's usually a theme. For October it was "Haunted." According to the site's home page, "The theme for November is there is no theme for November."
I'll be posting my second Sundancer story "Sundancer's Fairy Tale." While "Sundancer" was told in first person from tavernkeeper Brewer's point of view, the second story is told from the POV of Sundancer. Originally I thought it would just be about Sundancer's trip halfway around Dahroona in her sailboat Wind Dancer and possibly some events after that, but early on the story took a turn when someone showed up.
In Open Office Writer, the story takes up 46 pages. I'll be breaking the story up into approximately two-page chunks depending on how it looks for breaking up the story. Overall it's about the same length as "Sundancer" or maybe a bit longer. "Sundancer's Fairy Tale" will start tomorrow.
In other news, after trying various different ways to get computer #4 back in operation, it looks like it's not going to happen. Although I know the CD drive works (discovered by switching the ribbon cables of the hard drive and CD drive and seeing the machine boot the Super Grub Disk) it appears the machine simply won't see there's a keyboard attached. I may attempt reseating the CPU, which is in a strange vertical holder that for some strange reason was a little too small for the socket, but I was able to keep it in by jamming some pieces of toothpick in the sides. Sounds odd, but the machine did run for several years without problems. If that doesn't work, I'll just put the 120 GB drive into Caristiona for extra storage.
I had another bit of strangeness occur on Sileas, the main computer a few days ago. When I use the keyboard/monitor/mouse switch to go from one computer to the other, the mouse often does crazy things and stuff gets opened without my input. At one point when I tried to access messages in Delphi Forums all I got was a mostly blank screen with the forum title bar in the middle. I could get into forums using Caristiona, so I knew it had to be something affecting Sileas only. I posted about it in the Firefox forum and got no response initially.
Then I added a bit more detail after I tried deleting cookies with no change and also discovered I could get to messages by changing part of the URL from "delphiforums.com" to "prospero.com." Then someone asked if maybe I had AdBlock Plus installed, saying it's possible the mouse craziness might've added a filter. Since the time I'd switched computers was a time when Delphi Forums was open on Sileas, that sounded logical. I checked filters on AdBlock Plus. That took a while because I block a lot of big signature graphics on Delphi through it, but eventually a filter blocking the forums showed up. It died a quick death upon discovery. Now I can read forums on Delphi again.
Be sure to tune in again tomorrow for the start of "Sundancer's Fairy Tale."
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Friday, October 30, 2009
Halloween on LiveIreland.com
There was a special show on LiveIreland.com today with Klara McDonnell, who usually does a show from 6 to 8 p.m. Dublin time on Mondays. As you can see, she was in costume and had a good time.I had fun playing with the screenshot app in Linux Mint, which makes it easy to take shots not only of the whole screen but also of selected areas of it. That's how I managed to take these shots. It's not the easies
t thing because for each shot I had to go to the Mint menu, choose the screenshot app, then chose to take a selected area, click on "Take Screenshot" and define the area, then hold the mouse button down with the area defined and wait for a good moment to release it. It's releasing the mouse button that determines when the screenshot is made. It took a couple of tries before I realized that.
She had her friend Linda in the studio with her and at one point they did a little Irish dancing. I did get a shot of it, but webcams don't have very fast shutter speeds, so that shot came out pretty blurry. A couple of times she showed off the vampire bite marks on her neck, but that happened too quickly for me to go through the steps to catch that in a screenshot.
The studio has undergone some renovations lately and it's looking good. Daithi, who does all the techie stuff, says there's more to come. He's upgraded the main computer in the studio and there either are or will be more webcams.From the VID Blaster logo in the upper right corner of these shots, it looks like they're trying out something new in software as well. Before Klara came into the studio today there was a screen showing four different views including one of Crow Street and a couple of different studio shots. After Klara's show the view went back to the more usual shot of the street.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
And Another Thing...
It was only a few weeks ago that I learned there was going to be a sixth book in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. Before he died unexpectedly in 2001 at 49, Douglas Adams had talked about doing a sixth book. The 30th anniversary of Hitchhikers is this month, and in August of 2008, Adams' estate contacted Eoin Colfer, author of the Artemis Fowl series about a teenage criminal mastermind. It's Die Hard with fairies, according to the author. People are always asking Colfer (whose first name is pronounced "Owen," by the way) why he was chosen to write the book. He says it's because Douglas Adams' widow and daughter thought he was funny.
I'd decided I'd get the book, And Another Thing... in the near future, then I learned he would be appearing this evening at Powell's Books over in Beaverton where I'd seen Sarah Vowell a couple of weeks ago. I didn't feel like paying full price for the book, so I made a trip to the nearest Barnes and Noble, where it was 20% off and started reading. Then I drove over to Powell's, leaving early enough so if traffic was heavy I'd still be there in plenty of time. That left me plenty of time to continue reading, and by the time the event started I was up to page 99.
All the regulars are back: Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Trillian and Zaphod Beeblebrox. Marvin the Paranoid Android may not be in this book; so far I haven't seen him. It's a bit into the future and while everyone's still going, they've had some help, since it's mentioned at one point that Trillian, who has had a successful career as a galactic reporter, is 105 years old. Even so, she has a child, Random Frequent Flyer Dent who is a teenager in this book. She was introduced in Mostly Harmless. Trillian had gone to a galactic sperm bank and since Arthur was the only donor of the same species, he's the father. From what I've read so far, And Another Thing... is worthy of being the sixth book in the series. There are frequent references to characters, species and events from the previous books, and the humor is just as offbeat and crazy as anything Douglas Adams ever wrote. If you liked the first five books of the series, you'll like this one.
Colfer didn't do a reading, choosing instead to talk about how he came to be the one to write it, which including talking about how he and a group of friends read the original Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy back around 1979 and loved it. When And Another Thing... was launched earlier this month all of the group of friends and their families were at the launch event. He also took questions, but I couldn't think of anything intelligent to ask, so I didn't.
This event was a bit different. You needed a free ticket for the signing and people were called up in groups of ten according to the ticket number. They also had a raffle. There was a $10 gift certificate, a large poster on foam board that stood in front of the podium, 20 small black towels with the book title and "Don't Panic!" on them, and about the same number of small books containing reviews of each of the six books in the series. People filled out slips of paper with their names and emails which then went into a box. I almost never win anything in these raffles, and tonight was no exception.
Normally I'd have a picture, but I managed to leave the apartment and get almost to where I get on I-84 before I realized I'd never even thought about the camera and by then I didn't want to turn around.
I'd decided I'd get the book, And Another Thing... in the near future, then I learned he would be appearing this evening at Powell's Books over in Beaverton where I'd seen Sarah Vowell a couple of weeks ago. I didn't feel like paying full price for the book, so I made a trip to the nearest Barnes and Noble, where it was 20% off and started reading. Then I drove over to Powell's, leaving early enough so if traffic was heavy I'd still be there in plenty of time. That left me plenty of time to continue reading, and by the time the event started I was up to page 99.
All the regulars are back: Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Trillian and Zaphod Beeblebrox. Marvin the Paranoid Android may not be in this book; so far I haven't seen him. It's a bit into the future and while everyone's still going, they've had some help, since it's mentioned at one point that Trillian, who has had a successful career as a galactic reporter, is 105 years old. Even so, she has a child, Random Frequent Flyer Dent who is a teenager in this book. She was introduced in Mostly Harmless. Trillian had gone to a galactic sperm bank and since Arthur was the only donor of the same species, he's the father. From what I've read so far, And Another Thing... is worthy of being the sixth book in the series. There are frequent references to characters, species and events from the previous books, and the humor is just as offbeat and crazy as anything Douglas Adams ever wrote. If you liked the first five books of the series, you'll like this one.
Colfer didn't do a reading, choosing instead to talk about how he came to be the one to write it, which including talking about how he and a group of friends read the original Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy back around 1979 and loved it. When And Another Thing... was launched earlier this month all of the group of friends and their families were at the launch event. He also took questions, but I couldn't think of anything intelligent to ask, so I didn't.
This event was a bit different. You needed a free ticket for the signing and people were called up in groups of ten according to the ticket number. They also had a raffle. There was a $10 gift certificate, a large poster on foam board that stood in front of the podium, 20 small black towels with the book title and "Don't Panic!" on them, and about the same number of small books containing reviews of each of the six books in the series. People filled out slips of paper with their names and emails which then went into a box. I almost never win anything in these raffles, and tonight was no exception.
Normally I'd have a picture, but I managed to leave the apartment and get almost to where I get on I-84 before I realized I'd never even thought about the camera and by then I didn't want to turn around.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Nice Try, But...
I've had a three older computers sitting around not doing anything, so I thought one or more of them could be set up to run Linux. Things did not go well, unfortunately.
I started with the least old one. I'd previously installed Ubuntu on it but never really used it much. An attempt to try again by installing Mint instead did not get far thanks to a loud SNAP! which may just mean the power supply went out.
The next oldest one would not boot from the disk like it's supposedly set up to do. Booting into Windows got me to the screen where a password is required, but it wouldn't take any password I tried. After trying to find ways around that, nothing was working, so I decided to take the C: drive out and put it into my second machine.
Once it was in the second machine, I put in the Mint install disk and installed Mint on the drive. Then I moved the drive back to it's original place, where it promptly failed to boot. I messed around some more, even pulling out an older HP machine I hadn't run in a long time to see if I could install Linux on that, but that hard drive made ominous clicking noises and never booted. Putting the hard drive with Mint on it in that machine didn't work either. So now I appear to have only two working desktop machines, although I will see about that power supply. If that's the problem with #3, that'll be good, especially if I can switch the power supply from #4 into #3.
Most of that messing around took place last night and this morning. Then I discovered another problem. When I'd installed Mint onto the disk from #4, I'd messed up the boot file on Caristiona, the second machine. That's how I found out about GRUB, which is somewhat like the Master Boot Record on Windows machines. I did some looking around the internet on Sileas. I found one site that gave simple instructions for fixing GRUB, but it didn't work.
Fortunately, in my looking around I found references to something called Super GRUB Disk. So I downloaded it, burned it to a CD and stuck it in the CD drive on Caristiona. At first, I just chose to boot, and found out I could get into Linux and everything was still there and working. But when I took the disk out and rebooted, I got the error again.
The next try was to put the SGD back in and look around a bit. From reading help files, and trying a few things (carefully) I eventually managed to select the right options and got a message that SGD had succeeded in putting things right. I restarted, popped the disk out, and Caristiona booted into Linux just like before. Just to be sure, I rebooted and confirmed everything's OK.
While I did eventually find out what I needed by reading some Linux forums found in Google search, I had to read through a lot of verbiage. Many people, instead of just presenting a solution, seem to have a need to berate people for things like not giving enough info or for being dumb enough to mess things up in the first place, and then threads tend to digress. So it took a fair amount of searching around.
With all that messing around, I'm essentially back where I started except #4 no longer has Windows on it. That's not a big deal because Windows is not in my future. Linux is the way to go and the price is right. Also, I do now have Super Grub Disk in case I have any future problems.
I started with the least old one. I'd previously installed Ubuntu on it but never really used it much. An attempt to try again by installing Mint instead did not get far thanks to a loud SNAP! which may just mean the power supply went out.
The next oldest one would not boot from the disk like it's supposedly set up to do. Booting into Windows got me to the screen where a password is required, but it wouldn't take any password I tried. After trying to find ways around that, nothing was working, so I decided to take the C: drive out and put it into my second machine.
Once it was in the second machine, I put in the Mint install disk and installed Mint on the drive. Then I moved the drive back to it's original place, where it promptly failed to boot. I messed around some more, even pulling out an older HP machine I hadn't run in a long time to see if I could install Linux on that, but that hard drive made ominous clicking noises and never booted. Putting the hard drive with Mint on it in that machine didn't work either. So now I appear to have only two working desktop machines, although I will see about that power supply. If that's the problem with #3, that'll be good, especially if I can switch the power supply from #4 into #3.
Most of that messing around took place last night and this morning. Then I discovered another problem. When I'd installed Mint onto the disk from #4, I'd messed up the boot file on Caristiona, the second machine. That's how I found out about GRUB, which is somewhat like the Master Boot Record on Windows machines. I did some looking around the internet on Sileas. I found one site that gave simple instructions for fixing GRUB, but it didn't work.
Fortunately, in my looking around I found references to something called Super GRUB Disk. So I downloaded it, burned it to a CD and stuck it in the CD drive on Caristiona. At first, I just chose to boot, and found out I could get into Linux and everything was still there and working. But when I took the disk out and rebooted, I got the error again.
The next try was to put the SGD back in and look around a bit. From reading help files, and trying a few things (carefully) I eventually managed to select the right options and got a message that SGD had succeeded in putting things right. I restarted, popped the disk out, and Caristiona booted into Linux just like before. Just to be sure, I rebooted and confirmed everything's OK.
While I did eventually find out what I needed by reading some Linux forums found in Google search, I had to read through a lot of verbiage. Many people, instead of just presenting a solution, seem to have a need to berate people for things like not giving enough info or for being dumb enough to mess things up in the first place, and then threads tend to digress. So it took a fair amount of searching around.
With all that messing around, I'm essentially back where I started except #4 no longer has Windows on it. That's not a big deal because Windows is not in my future. Linux is the way to go and the price is right. Also, I do now have Super Grub Disk in case I have any future problems.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Sundancer - Page 13
Sorry, but I've deleted this post because I'm interested in publishing this story electronically and offering it for sale.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Sundancer - Page 12
Sorry, but I've deleted this post because I'm interested in publishing this story electronically and offering it for sale.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Sundancer - Page 11B
Sorry, but I've deleted this post because I'm interested in publishing this story electronically and offering it for sale.
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