Abhyastamita

A Canadian science fiction writer, Peter Watts, just got beaten up by a US guard at the border with Canada. Then he got pepper-sprayed and arrested and accused of assault against the guard who beat him up. I thought we were supposed to be in a new America where this stuff didn't happen anymore!

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/12/11/dr-peter-watts-canad.html

"May I have your attention please. A fire has been reported in the building. Please proceed to the nearest exist and leave the building. Do not use the elevator, but proceed to the nearest exist and leave the building," followed by about 15 seconds of siren.

It's been doing that for only 12 minutes; I just checked, but it feels a lot longer than that. It went off at 4 AM. I couldn't find my pants that had my keys in them for what felt like a long time. I thought about taking Rooney and Dumpling with me, but decided that it was very unlikely to be real and so they could stay. I did grab my coat and hat and scarf because it's below 30 degrees out.

I got down three flights of steps and then the line of people stopped. There was an argument going on somewhere below. The people who had gotten to the bottom had heard it was a false alarm and were coming back up again. But the alarm can only be turned off by the fire department, and they weren't here yet.

So I followed everyone else up, thinking all the while that it was a dumb thing to do because if they were wrong about the false alarm, there would be no way to tell the people who'd gone back in the building. But I went back up anyway. It's cold out. And if it's real, my cats need to come out with me.

The fire truck just got here, I think about 15 minutes after. And they just turned off the alarm, at about 17 minutes after. So I guess I can go back to sleep now. For an hour. Commuting an hour every day sucks.

Still, nobody at all here seemed mad about it. And nobody yesterday on the bus was mad, even though the two earlier buses hadn't come and the bus I was on was packed to capacity. In China they might have fit more people on, but not a lot more. Hardly anyone grumbled. Lots of people laughed about it. Lots of people took the opportunity to chat with strangers. I like where I live. That doesn't happen everywhere.

The Alexandria Library is keeping track of what I check out so that if I log into my account, it can tell me what my favorite authors and subjects are. So far it's got for subjects:

Operas.
Dorset (England)--Fiction.
Science fiction.
Wiggin, Ender (Fictitious character)--Fiction.

And for authors it's mostly just got people who work for Deutsche Grammophon. Yes, I've been checking out lots of operas.

The computer is going back to Dell on Monday.

Yes, three posts in one day. This* made me feel better: http://papersky.livejournal.com/62847.html My computer problems are timeless. It was the same way back in 2003**.

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*I've been reading Jo Walton's Livejournal all the way from the beginning. I love her books a lot and her journal is consistently interesting. Especially since I've gotten to where she was writing Lifelode, which I just read a few months ago. Reading someone's journal from 2003 is interesting in general because, while I still remember it vividly, there are things that have changed that really surprise me. Like how upset we all were back then about the war and various atrocities going on at the time. The war's still there. The atrocities may or may not have calmed down. But I don't know anyone writing daily antiwar poems (as Jo Walton did for a while) or really decrying it anymore at all. We're just glum about it. I guess becoming jaded to war is not something you ever do consciously, but I hadn't realized till now that it had happened to me.

**Actually, come to think, that's around when XP started. The golden years. When Microsoft finally got it about right. I do really like that operating system.

Also, the rant below is the first time I've referred to myself as a professional software tester. And in an indignant this-is-what-I-do-for-a-living-so-I-have-extra-clout-when-I-tell-you-you-are-incompetent sort of way. Funny. Hadn't expected to do that ever.

Ah, if only Microsoft had to fix bugs whenever a judge requested it...

I'm feeling like I have two choices with my new laptop: either send it back or see whether putting Ubuntu on it improves matters. I'd rather put XP on it, but I'm reading that it's very hard to get the drivers and several features will simply be disabled: XP can't handle either the graphics card or the 4 GB of RAM. Of course, XP doesn't need four gigabytes of RAM...

I wanted to watch a TV show on my computer when I came home from work today. I've had good luck plugging my old computer into my TV and stereo system and the new one has an HDMI slot, so I thought it would work even better. No. As soon as I plugged in the HDMI cable, the sound stopped working on my computer. I looked it up, and this can be fixed with a new video card driver (no, sound being controlled by the video card doesn't make sense to me either), but I was having trouble finding the right one, so I just unplugged it from the TV and decided to watch my show on my computer instead. Only to discover that the sound still didn't work. Even after rebooting. If I open the program to configure the sound, it freezes.

Now, I'm relatively sure that downloading a new video-card driver (maybe a new sound card driver too while I'm at it) would fix everything...but everytime I try to use this computer for anything but the internet, I run into this sort of problem! Every time! And yeah, about half-the-time I can fix it (the other half, I will be able to fix in six months when smarter people have figured out more about Windows 7 and posted it online) but I don't want to be fixing my computer every week. The only reason I have a new computer is that I was tired of having to fix the old one every six months or so. This is not a good trade-off.

So I finally watched my TV show on my old computer which played it beautifully. But I'm really angry at what a piece of junk my new computer is. It's supposed to be a nice computer! And the fact is, I don't even need a nice computer. I just need one that works.

And no, I don't want a Mac, thank you very much. I want the comfort and functionality of XP on my 7 year old Dell, which I can browbeat into doing just about anything I want. But I don't think I can make it run a whole lot longer. The plastic casing itself is near giving out. I just think it's shameful* that it still runs better than a brand new computer.

Okay...that's the most I've written here in three months. Probably longer. Good to get it out of my system before Thanksgiving though.

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*I also think it's shameful that neither Dell nor Microsoft will give me free technical support on included software. (Well, okay, I'm not sure why Dell should need to give me support for Windows bugs, so maybe it's a little less shameful for them). Microsoft would charge me $50 to send them an email. It's in their (short-term) best interest to make buggy products so that people have to pay them to make them work the way they should have worked in the first place. I wonder whether I would be this angry about it if I weren't a professional software tester. I'm really not sure.

Last Saturday I went to see Don McLean (the guy who did the song American Pie) at the Birchmere.

Sunday I went to what was probably the best opera performance I've ever been to: the Washington Opera's production of Götterdämmerung.

It's not just me thinking this: the Post opera reviewer, who is usually extremely snide about the Washington Opera, really gushed about it, calling it "one of those magical evenings when everyone knew they were experiencing something special," and "a triumph".

And then Wednesday night, I went to see Bela Fleck and the Flecktones. Bela is my favorite musician. If I have one. There are lots of other musicians I love too, but if I had to pick, it would be Bela Fleck.

And today, I haven't been to a concert, but I have been listening to WTJU, Charlottesville. Whenever my dad or I drive anywhere near Charlottesville, we always tune the radio to WTJU and I'd say three times out of four, it causes us to buy a CD. I discovered Tin Hat that way as well as a CD by Tangle Eye that's a remix of famous Alan Lomax recordings. Generally that fourth time when we don't buy a CD it's because they're playing death metal. They play just about everything.

Well, WTJU is now streaming online in Ogg Vorbis* format** at www.wtju.net. It sounds way better than I'm accustomed to hearing it on my car stereo driving over Afton Mountain with the signal fading in and out. Especially since I've got a cord to hook my computer to my amplifier now. And if I'm curious what they're playing, I have only to check on their website because they update what they are currently playing and have played in real-time. It's already caused me to decide I want a CD by Rupa and the April Fishes.

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*Maybe you already knew this, and I'm pretty sure I've looked it up more than once, but Ogg is not a Discworld reference, but Vorbis is: it's named after Exquisitor Vorbis in Small Gods. I don't know why.

**Firefox 3.5 will play it, but for some reason it seems to always timeout after twenty minutes. The VLC media player does a much better job.

This is bizarre: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/judy-platt/congress-protect-american_b_362047.html I'm not sure why other countries' laws ought to apply to Americans.

So far in my quest to make my new computer with Windows 7 on it usable I have:

1. Switched from only seeing (very unintuitive) icons in the taskbar to having text with very small icons in the taskbar.

2. Edited the registry to allow for a start menu that expands outwards rather than being confined to a small space that requires scrolling (not easy with a touchpad).

3. Loosened the screws in the bottom of the computer because Dell over-tightened them and the CD drive wouldn't work otherwise. I think it still risks damaging the CD to put stuff in there, but it does work now at least.

4. Installed Office 2002 because not only do I despise Office 2007, but my computer didn't come with Office. It came with Works instead, which I didn't even know still existed. Anyway, I really like Office 2002 and I own it, so that's good.

5. Turned off all the things that were trying to automatically update my computer without asking permission and were causing it to crash (these included Microsoft, Dell, and McAffee.

6. Downloaded Firefox and Pidgin.

It's coming along. It's frustrating though because I know how beautifully XP would run on it with all those resources and Windows 7 does not run beautifully*.

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*It also doesn't make any noise when it's working. Which I find perversely irritating because it takes me longer to realize I need to quit clicking things and leave it alone till it's done.