There’s a strange stigma attached to being a writer, one I don’t know that I’ll ever get used to. I suspect it’s a bit like telling people you’re a mortician or a professional sewer spelunker. People just don’t seem to quite know how to react.
I’m faced with a dilemma I would never have expected to deal on the matter of a smart phone. I don’t want one, I can’t really afford one, and yet, the pressure is mounting for me to get one of the damnable things.
Lately my best friend and I have been on a bit of a tea kick. This weekend we learned something new, something dangerous, something that led to blender drinks and a very strange night’s sleep, (or lack thereof).
It’s been my experience that some things get easier with time and practice, riding a bike, walking in high heels, even public speaking. There are some things though, that I am beginning to suspect are always going to cause me to break out in a cold sweat and lapse into temporary insanity. Given my dislike of crowds, one of those will always be going into a shopping mall during the Christmas season, but climbing the charts rapidly is submitting a manuscript to the deep dark pits of the publisher’s slush pile.
For those of you who missed it, I made the dangerous decision to upgrade my blogs coding to something from this decade today, and well...I broke things. This isn't a surprise given that I am a mostly self trained "push buttons until it works again" sort of techie.
What is surprising is that I got it working again. And even more surprising is that it wasn't actually my fault that it got broken in the first place. Well, not completely anyway. Out of the four thousand some on files that I had to upload, it would seem that fate deemed it necessary that I skip about 47 of them. Murphy's law being what it is, those 47 files just had to be ones that if not updated, would conflict with the new coding and lead me to stare at the screen in horror at a long list of semi-nonsensical error messages referencing php conflicts in various lines of code. It was nearly enough to make angels weep and me suddenly decide to jump ship. Nearly enough, but not quite.
Instead I grabbed a seriously full mug of coffee and settled down to start monkeying with things, figuring that if I broke it worse, there wasn't going to be much difference. As it turns out, it only took me an hour to locate the errant files and get them wiped and replaced with fresh new files and voila! My corner of the web has been upgraded, spit polished and returned.
Technology is a funny thing. It's intimidating to work with at first, with more than its share of technobabble and unfriendly error messages. But in reality it's just like every other machine. It needs to be tweaked, poked, prodded and occasionally given a swift kick to the processors. You just have to be brave enough to tinker with it.
It’s been a loyal member of our office for nearly four years, providing a wide variety of hot, tasty and mostly caffeinated beverages for the carbon based life forms that work here. Lately though, he’s been struggling. Nothing you could put your finger on at first, just a general sense of malaise. Occasionally it seemed to misunderstand the order and produced a small instead of a medium sized drink and it grumbled from time to time, whirring and grinding instead of its usually chipper refilling noises.
Ghostbusters? Well no, I don’t think we’re actually in need of a paranormal investigation team or anyone sporting a proton pack, but there’s mounting evidence that our new office space is home to more than just a few property managers and a pair of Jack Russells.
It took 4 movers, 150 boxes, one phone line snafu and a dead network server, but we made it to our new offices yesterday. If anyone needs me? I’ll be under my new desk, napping.
Or, “Now I remember why I stopped online dating.”
Yes, yes, I know. I swore off online dating a year ago and vowed to the sun the moon and the stars above I was never going back; I’m a terribly flawed human being. But that’s beside the point.
I had such plans…
I was going to have banished the dust bunnies, worked on tweaking a novel for submission, organized my life and possibly created world peace if I could squeeze it in. And yet somehow, none of the above actually got completed in the last seven days.
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