Apparently I didn't put the previous Tucknote up. This was undoubtedly because of the assorted problems I've been having.
As of now, we're about $1200 in the hole, with penalties accumulating rapidly. Please help.
I will try to edit and post #24, if I can stop screaming in terror.
As for problems.... the latest is that the SO's computer lost its main
partition, probably due to a 'momentary' power failure; but by grace of
Linux (Debian) and the fact that I have routinely put Debian on every
hard drive it'll fit on, it has only taken a couple of days to recover.
Badblocks (or its
invocation in the disk checker 'fsck.ext2') found 426 bad blocks.
This is Really Bad. Also, with five to six retries per block, and
the cycle taking at least 36 seconds (I got this number from somewhere, I
don't remember where) it took... several hours. During which nothing
else could be done, of course, since hardware errors seem to occupy
the kernel's complete attention.
Anyway, once that was done, switch booting to the 2nd drive - strangely,
all the GRUB stuff survives on 1st (error-istic) disk - and up it went.
I still can't mount /dev/sda1 to change the which-thing-to-boot
listings, but the SO is somewhat trainable. And, a (very very large)
update out of the pool I keep of Debian packages via the LAN - well,
some of them; the rest crawled through the modem - and voila! Working
computer with all software again.
Next step is to reformat that partition, and see if that wipes the bad blocks or at least keeps the OS from erroring continually. If not, if I can't fix it at all, I just don't use that partition again.
Of course, while waiting, I did some checking on other drives, and one on the server (different computer) is reporting imminent failure...
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE [...] 10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0013 001 001 060 Pre-fail Always FAILING_NOW 1114129via smartctl. *sigh* And of course, it's one of the larger drives in the house, and I can't replace it. This might (if I was lucky, which I'm not) be related to the network hub's exhaust blowing on that drive and cable, as it was having problems before but twisting the hub to point away seemed to fix them. I haven't seen an increase in the raw_value since I started looking, anyway.
Anyway, I think I've decided not to murder the SO; however, suicide still seems like a clever fuck-you to all the bills. And the SO.
20 August 2012
Oh FUCK I hate moving.
Move is completed, sort of; we've got packed and moved, but as I expected, the unpacking may take a while. Like, months. Possibly years. Should I even bother?
Part 24 is waiting until I can stop twitching enough to do some editing. I haven't done any fresh writing; I've been moving (plus packing, unpacking, and lately despairing).
Anyway, send money if you can; we're several hundred dollars in debt that I didn't expect, and there's more that we need too.
The move went, IMO, quite poorly. We had to unexpectedly hire movers and a truck - I couldn't generate the sortie rate I expected, and the SO was damned near useless. If it wasn't the arthritis, it was the leg wound(s) acting up, or the can she dropped on her toe and 'breaking' (so she assured me) it, or it was the sprained or something (so she assured me) wrist, or... something else. I lost track.
We - by which I mean 'I' - had to hire $450 worth of movers (all we could afford) on short notice, which got about half the stuff transferred in half a day. The SO, of course, couldn't possibly supervise or anything, at either end. Nor did she pack up her area of the bedroom like I'd been begging, literally, her to do for literal months.
I was beginning to consider murder, as a sure way to reduce my household goods and take care of my living arrangements for several years.
Then I had to fight with the goddamned phone company, who I think managed to lie to me about once per phone call. No they do not allow one number to ring two places at once (like they said they would do in the first phone call). No we did not have service, at either place, for a week after they said we'd have service at the new place. No we did not have Internet service to report the goddamned problem(s) because if we did, we wouldn't have been fucking calling (on other peoples' phones!). No they can't call us back because OUR FUCKING PHONE IS BROKEN. (why in FUCK does the goddamned landline phone company assume that everyone has a goddamned cellphone?!?!?) And of COURSE, no they did not show up during the day they swore they would come out and fix the problem (called Thursday, appointment Saturday, nothing happened). Of course not.
And that's not even counting the front-room phone (and modem) jack. It
didn't work for a week; then, when the bedroom jack did, the front room
still didn't. I thought it was that the jackasses had painted it, like
the last time I moved; and like a fool I'd put my homemade server
shelving over the fucking wall plate already. (I'd have tested it before
I put the shelf there, if they'd allowed it to ring in both places, like
they could do the last time I moved, like they said they could...) But
hey, I did make it so I could get to the plate (it was just harder), so
I took the plate off and... swallowed my tongue.
Because it wasn't paint that was the problem. There were four cables (of
four wires each) coming out of the wall into the inset box, instead of
the one I expected, and two had a pair (red and green, standard for the
first line) crimped together. What was connected to the wall jack? Why,
nothing at all; it was cut off about 1cm (less than 0.5 inch) on
the inside of the plate, so all those pretty wires you could see on the
faceplate were connected to NOTHING. I did put my tools where I could
get them (before the shelfocalypse - keep reading) and got the wire
strippers, which could strip phone wire, and connected all four wires of
both connected bundles to a jackplate, so now we have phone - and modem
- service in the front room. I still have no fucking idea what the other
two bundles go to, or come from; and I don't think anyone else has any
idea either.
Nearly the entire move has been like that, with the SO going limp except when she feels like doing something for herself - rarely for 'us', just her - and me having to pull her.
She did pack up a lot of the gaming books and etc., which is good; but those also cost us about $100 in boxes.
We lost some stuff I just could not get out that last day - mostly do-we-really-want-this stuff, because I DID prioritize packing and moving once I could. Mostly old (as in IBM Personal Computer AT) computers, bits of wood, not-quite-working chairs, the things you don't pick up until the very last sweep, and the like. It was likely hauled off to the dump, for which I hate the SO; and you can also hate the SO if you like or want(ed) vintage computers. Also, they got the U-Haul boxes we didn't use (about a dozen, which I thought was a pretty good call on my part), which otherwise could have been taken back for a refund.
Anyway, it's done. I dislike the new place for a number of reasons I really should have expected - like, the furniture doesn't really fit yet - and a few I didn't. Apparently, instead of using something resembling latex paint, they painted all the woodwork like cabinets and drawers and doors and door frames and etc with something that resembles latex glue. With the cabinets and drawers not having handles, this gets 'amusing' very fast. Also, if you put something down on a 'painted' surface, like a shelf? It sticks there. It's more sticky than Post-It adhesive, I'd judge.
They also have water saver faucet nozzles everywhere, which is really green right up until you need more water/second than the goddamned thing gives you. This happens when washing, when trying to get drinking water when thirsty, when rinsing (me, plates, toothpaste out of sink...). I kind of want my bathroom faucet to be able to produce more water/second than I can produce urine/second, for instance. However, this problem is amenable to a wrench. Also, I managed to remember to switch the showerheads, so the old place got the 'new' mandated-by-US-law-since-2003-or-so dribble showerhead (no more than 2 or 2.5 US gallons per minute), and the new place (and us) got the old hose-in-your-face showerhead. Ha ha ha, take that you bastards. There's no medicine cabinet, or soap or toothbrush holders, or paper towel holders... I mentioned no handles on cabinets or drawers.
And somehow the floor isn't entirely level. Not to mention, things that were quite level before, like bookshelves, now tilt fore-and-aft precariously. I don't think that's entirely me, or the shelves I built. I already lost a fully loaded temporary shelf - it avalanched while I was in the place but out of the room, and now it's basically made inaccessible most of everything I didn't specifically put someplace else (like makeup into the bathroom).
The closet clothing rods are bent in the middle and unsupported, the ceiling fan is unbalanced and starts making noise at any speed above 'trickle'/slow (management's best idea was to switch that fan with another in the apartment), there is or was a urine smell in a closet (which curiously the maintenance guy couldn't smell), and on and on.
The new place is on the second floor, which is proving more of a pain - literal, left knee - than I'd expected. Going UP doesn't hurt nearly as much as going DOWN, even when carrying a zillion-pound box of books. Also I lost some skin on the wall when trying to get to the laundry room and my foot slipped, and this particular exterior wall gets so hot in the afternoons I got a burn which hurt for five hours afterward. It's also hot enough that if we don't have a ceiling fan running in the afternoon, turning it on produces that old familiar hot-attic smell as it blows the heated air downward.
Anyway, we're running out of food money, and we never did get the car registered when it was due (June), and now the car A/C is out (which might, or might not, respond to a recharge of R134a) as well. So if you have a few bucks, they'd go really nice.
19 July 2012
Seasons #23 is released.
But keep reading for why we need some cash.
I may be offline for a while - not like you could tell a difference - because we're in the endgame of moving our house. Yesterday we signed leasing papers, which is really goddamned annoying since they wanted a deposit check TWO FUCKING MONTHS AGO and yet never bothered to write anything telling us we had the place. 'Cause, you know they don't believe in anything except signed and dated paper; so I don't know why they think I would believe them without paper.
So that was really damned depressing, and then I have to uproot everything we own and move it out of here. This includes such essentials as the 10foot x 8foot x large-book shelving (which is NOT all the printed media we have of that size), and the 155 linear feet of paperbacks (not all of them either), four running computers (and five non-running) plus networking, power tools, wood (enough for those more shelves I ought to be building); and the trivial stuff like plates, food, clothing, makeup, and furniture.
Natürlich the SO is amazingly beset with arthritis in multiple joints, the hand weakness is acting up, the antipsychotics aren't quite working, etc etc. So physically it's going to be mostly me, humping boxes and boxes and boxes. Admittedly, most of the stuff is 'mine' in some sense; the computer pieces (and we've dumped a couple carloads into the recycling center, including NINE monitors - but I really don't think I need to keep CGA stuff any more, or 8MHz CPU boards, or a dozen internal ISA modems, or ...), the wood, the power tools, the 1990-1999 magazines, etc.
She may be surprised at just how much she's going to be moving herself, though.
[Update, August: no she wasn't, I was; and very unhappily surprised I
was indeed]
And one thing I wanted to do was try to do it better than last time. I'm finding stuff I haven't seen since the last move, and it's stuff I'd have liked to have (and possibly remember), like the car battery charger when we wiped our battery two or three times this year (cause unknown). I also want to sort of organize what we've got BEFORE it goes into the boxes. And LABEL the damned boxes this time.
Conversely, I'm recycling (as in, gone) my old Omni, Discover, Scientific American, Popular Science, etc., from the 1990 era. Yep, I was still carting those around. Not this time.
Anyway, we've been packing, and I've been sorting, and like the Ninety-Ninety Rule says, I think we've gotten the first ninety percent done in the house - which just leaves the other ninety percent. And the actual take-boxes-out and take-boxes-in part.
I did clear out the Mildew Pit, though, which reminded me what it's like to have really bad asthma. Note to everyone: when clearing out or cleaning a large mildewed area, wear a respirator or dust mask. It was interesting to be able to breathe (ventilate) less than a liter at a time, at a rate I think was over 30 per minute; but I really don't recommend it as recreational.
So far, I've avoided the respiratory infections I got the last few times we moved.
The touches of good news are:
22 March 2012
Well, I hadn't thought how worse I could get. This is pretty worse.
Anyway, two episodes, since you've waited so long.
Finances are pretty worse too; you can help. It'd be nice if I could pay for food, electricity, phone, Internet, the transmission control computer for the car, or the coolant temperature sensor and thermostat for the car.
21 September 2011
Not doing Tucknotes seems to be connected with not writing, which is y'all's definition of 'suck'. So I should write Tucknotes.
Plus I'm pissed off.
I put up two episodes on Friday (yay). Saturday we had a friend visit.
Sunday and Monday...
They sucked.
The good part: The parents somehow acquired a Linksys WRT54G v2.0 wireless router they didn't need and weren't using. Which meant that I later acquired it; I now plugged it in and looked at it. For those that aren't in the know, this model is flashable to another internal operating system (with utilities), such as DD-WRT or Tomato. This is useful because most manufacturers of consumer-grade equipment concentrate on appearance and pretties rather than options and performance. I got DD-WRT v24 'mini' on there, and it seems to work, and pick up about 12 to 16 other wireless stations in the area (jeez). Still haven't tried anything like connecting via local computer to it.
The bad parts:
Anyway, phone's going to be cut off RSN, and while I managed to borrow $20 from a friend, this is a LOAN not a gift, I have to pay it back soon. I've got a little trickling in, but waaaaaay under what we need.
Okay, so I did a little revision work this morning. Need to do some more actual writing in here. And check the bank again. The SO has started moving, so that's good.
*sighs* What I haven't been doing is email. I just have NOT been able to face doing it yet. The-mother-inside-my-head is slapping me repeatedly complaining "What's yer damn problem?!" and I have no answer.
Still, a Tucknote is (just barely) better than nothing. I guess.
16 September 2011
Well, that sucked. Rather, I sucked.
Anyway, #19, and #20 are up. Sorry for the wait.
The only useful thing I did in the last two months was go visit the folks for computer work, and get a couple of 'heirloom' chairs (from my parents, they have had these two chairs literally as far back as my memory goes).
Networking is fun when it works. I got the folks' network - mostly 802.11g wireless - working and cross-working, so that they can print from one computer to another, blah blah. Welcome to the 1990s, my parents!
I also got virtual Windows working on Mom's 'new' I-built-it-for-her desktop computer, and that seemed to go really nicely. I also achieved some integration of her Nook (Barnes & Noble e-book reader and Kindle clone).
Anyway, it'd be nice to get some food soon. Your help would be appreciated.
12 July 2011
As of 20:00 Zulu, the forum nameserver is still down. This means the forum is still basically inaccessible.
On the good side, I did 300+ lines today.
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
3rd-9th 0 0 1 1 1 0 0
10th-17th 0 1 3
It took me roughly six hours, along with the usual SO-has-a-computer-problem,
brain breaks, elimination breaks, tidbits of food, and of course petting
the local loaner kitty. I don't know if this is a good rate or not, compared
to a 'real' author. I do know it's good compared to nothing.
11 July 2011
Problem with Tuckerspawn: it's not resolving at the moment.
The reason, according to Erin Halfelven, is: >[name redacted] died. The DNS servers for Tuckerspawn were in his house. > I hope to have this straightened out in a day or so. Sorry. Apparently > his family turned off the power to the servers. > >-- Joyce
Wow, a real BSOD.
This explains the weird errors I'm getting, in both more directed DNS lookups:
# ping tuckerspawn.fictioneer.org PING tuckerspawn.fictioneer.org (67.215.66.132) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from hit-servfail.opendns.com (67.215.66.132): icmp_req=1 ttl=55 time=18.7 ms 64 bytes from hit-servfail.opendns.com (67.215.66.132): icmp_req=2 ttl=55 time=18.3 ms 64 bytes from hit-servfail.opendns.com (67.215.66.132): icmp_req=3 ttl=55 time=27.5 msand in web browsers (not even gonna try to copy those).
Theoretically, it's somewhere out there... but I've no idea what IP address to use to get to it, if that would even work. But I suspect that this means the data isn't gone, which means as soon as things are unborked, it should be back up just like it used to be.
Okay, you know what used to work, a little? Posting weekly (or more often) progress strips. So I'll do that.
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
3rd-9th 0 0 1 1 1 0 0
10th-17th 0 1
Actually on Sunday I did fifty lines, but that doesn't count.
04 July 2011
I didn't even realize it was Explosives Night until just now.
Anyway, since it's been too long, #17 and #18 are posted simultaneously.
I've no idea what's wrong with me. I shouldn't be so damned afraid of...
everything.
I keep flashing to ye auld Charlie Brown Christmas, and Lucy saying "Pantophobia"
and Charlie shouting "THAT'S IT!!" It was a lot funnier when I was younger
and wasn't afraid of everything.
Donations would be very helpful.
In other news:
SO's computer did its smoke test and burn-in for a month - not like it needed
to go that long; that was how long it took me to get up the 'nads to do
the next steps - which revealed a couple other problems, like a dead
laptop battery. I'd booted the newly-put-together system two or three
times after I put it in the case that morning JUST to make sure it would
boot - which it would, eventually; I had to reseat some RAM and do
something else - before removing the laptop and adding the old case with
the new motherboard/CPU. I just about cried when it wouldn't boot up
after the move and just froze.
It's the non-repeatable, non-linear sorts of problems that mess me up the
worst. I can understand things like 'dead', it's when it's intermittent
that I go crazy(er).
Turned out that a friend's USB drive (that the SO was borrowing) was
also plugged in, and removing that made it all work fine.
Either the switch to Squeeze or her switch to the music player
'mp3blaster' rather than 'audacious' seems to have cured the
crashing-several-times-a-day that showed up both on her old system AND
on the totally-different-hardware laptop. Now we have the new problem
that switching out of VT7 logs her out of X, and when switching back she
has to log in again. *sighs*
Also I think we both hate KDE4. I don't give a rat's rotted ass how
advanced it is and how much work they put into it; it's different in all
sorts of WTF?! ways, especially a seemingly gratuitous renaming of every
major application to something that has no sense at all (the theme manager
is now called Oxygen for gods' sakes), and it spends vast amounts
of resources doing things like animating windows moving and making
semi-transparent overlays of windows that are over other windows and all
sorts of artistic high-CPU crap. This is one of the things I detest about
Microsoft Windoze, and I don't think that KDE is doing me any favors by
doing what MS does. However, this being Debian, which is a subset of
Linux, we have LOTS of other choices. We're exploring them.
B'bye KDE, it was nice knowing you, back when you didn't try to dress
like Vista or 7.
Also, due to the really nifty MSI "D-Bracket" which shows you what the
system is doing, I found at least two errors when encasing the hardware.
Unfortunately, if I set her computer up just like it had been last time,
I'd never be able to see the LEDs without turning into a snake or
something and slithering back there - and
turning into a snake never helps. (#34)
So what I ended up doing was getting a box, for elevation, and then
turning the entire case upside down on top of the box (and remounting
the removable-media drives so that they were right side up). Now the
D-Bracket LEDs are right on top, where I can see them, as are all the
cables and connectors. No more sprained wrists trying to plug in the
stupid broken-tab Ethernet one foot and two right-angles away after the
elves pulled it out 2mm. Yay me.
The microwave oven died. The microwave died. I thought those things
were basically immortal... and I'd been using the same one since about my
2nd apartment. Also, cooking via stove is not something either of us like
doing, especially not in the summer heat; so, our food purchases were
predicated on having a microwave. Luckily, one of the SO's friends claimed
to be replacing theirs the same week, and we got their old one a few days
later. I'm a little suspicious about the timing, but since I'm not adverse
to picking up charity, we've now got the 'new' microwave.
The old microwave will get recycled to the place in town that takes such
things, as soon as I can get up the ____ to go there.
I had jury duty, which happened two days after the microwave went out. That was nerve-wracking to go into - likely because I'm mentally ill - but turned out okay. It was a guy fighting a ran-a-stop-sign ticket, and the guy won, because 'we' didn't think the city proved its case. I sometimes wonder if I'm somehow unduly influencing people, as in they'll agree to anything I suggest in order to get away from me... but that does sound rather paranoid. Note that "paranoia" doesn't just mean you think there are people out to get you - because there ARE people out to get you, they're called 'the marketing department' - but that you have special powers or knowledge or something.
Figuring that since I was going to be parking my car around the courthouse, which has got to have one of the highest densities of Cop in the whole town, I went a few days before to pay the $$ to get my auto re-registered (yearly fee). Then I spent ten minutes scraping off the wrong sticker; so I had to go get it inspected again. And new wiper blades. So that turned into $$$, total.
That was not a fun weekend.
28 May 2011
Return of the suck!
I don't know what happened, really; I know what failed to happen, which was "anything useful."
Anyway, part 16 is finally up.
Car took $350 for a heater hose, distributor gasket, and valve-cover gasket; supposedly the leaks of oil through the latter two is what caused the first to deteriorate. OTOH, $350 for a coolant system repair is pretty non-suck, comparatively; they also replaced all the icky chlorinated tap water I'd poured into the radiator with 50/50, and it smells right. And it took about 24 hours. Good.
Very good, actually, since the psych appointment to get the SO's medications renewed fell on the day we didn't have the car. I pleaded with the SO to arrange with a friend to go to the appointment, but somehow she & friend fucked it up; I got the car back literally just in time to take her to the appointment, to drive like a maniac (thankfully, I learned to drive in Houston AND survived the process) to make it literally within two minutes. VERY good.
Bad: SO's computer kept crashing and crashing and crashing... an attempted
upgrade - to possibly fix the crashing - ran afoul of the crashing, and rebooting in the middle seemed to trash
the hardware utterly. Which I can say because I pulled the drives (with the
OS and software) and put them on another computer, and the SO's hardware wouldn't
get through a boot cycle.
(so it wasn't actually that the upgrade fouled the hardware; it just looked that way.
Nonetheless, it's definitely the hardware that is borked.)
The PSU we 'borrowed' for testing from a friend seemed to do the trick with one
of the SATA-capable motherboards I'd had in stock; it booted fine with the bigger
capacity (3.3v and 5v; I needed a LOT of amps on those rails) PSU.
Except I didn't have a spare drive with a working OS. I thought I had, oh, six
or eight of them, but none of them would boot.
The replacement motherboard had a built-in Ethernet, and it proved capable of booting
over the network (PXE boot).
And my ever-so-clever PXE server setup worked fine, right up until the Debian Lenny installer
decided that the files on my system didn't match with the signatures of the stuff
it was downloading, and it stopped dead in a snit.
I almost got the biggest-CPU-in-the-house laptop hooked into the SO's workstation,
but it has a widescreen display, and the CRT she uses otherwise is 'normal' aspect
(16:9 and 4:3 respectively I think) and the two do NOT play nice with the
same signal. Trying to get X to drive two different displays, on a laptop (a no-name
laptop at that) was more hilarity than I could stand without tranquilizers.
Much much screaming later:
The SO had two SATA drives; both of them now have Debian Squeeze/6.0/stable on
them. There were six other drives in the pile, of various sizes; four of them (20Gb, 40Gb, 80Gb, 120Gb)
have very very basic Debian Squeeze/6.0/stable OS's on them. The PXE boot-over-the-network
now works, and can deliver either Debian Squeeze net-based install or Memtest86+.
The SO has the 'lame' working laptop, er, working, with all the crapola plugged
in at her workstation.
All I need now is some energy to actually get up and put the working motherboard/CPU, existing RAM, various drives, borrowed PSU (that we need to pay money to the friend for), and was there something else? into the SO's case. That's been where I've sat on my fat non-productive ass for about a week or so.
Oh, and our rent went up, and - I am not kidding - the rental place said we'd been
here too long, that we were going to have to move out of here next year. Though they'd
be happy to switch us to another place (at +10% rent) and, oh, a new deposit since our
old one cannot transfer and we have to wait 30 days for the billing cycle to get it back (hah!), and let's
just politely not mention the transfer fees for the utilities, and that's not even
counting the damage charges.
The non-suck part of this is that we get a year's notice
before we actually have to move; which is good, because it may well take a year to pack.
Okay... I think I'm not getting anything done because I'm depressed, and I get depressed every time I think about the real world.
07 May 2011
Constant vigilance against suckitude must be employed. Wow, can I bureaucratize or what? Notice the passive voice there, which subtly hints that no one actually does anything, it just happens. Like magic space fairies are the ones that actually DO.
But, really, I need to do better than the last week-and-a-half. So I'm trying today.
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1st-7th 0 2 0% 2 0% 1+ 2
% - headache, nausea, and antihistamines make Ellen a very dull girl
What is annoying is, yesterday I got to 188 written, and then realized
that I was depressed, most likely from antihistamines (again) and that
I shouldn't write any more until my mood improved. Then we went to the
grocery store, and got a new radiator cap ($10+) which we'll see, and
then I ate, and then I collapsed into a protein coma for ten hours.
04 May 2011
Suckitude has crept up on me.
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
24th-30th 0 0 1 0 0 0 0
1st-7th 0 2 0 1yet
I seem to have lost the last week, somehow. I KNOW I lost yesterday in
another antihistamine haze.
The one thing I have done, today, is switched to a separate page for the Seasons picture gallery. This should make it easier - somewhat - to copy files from my sources to the webpage. Unfortunately, I have to hand-write HTML to put the pictures in; fortunately, I've been doing this for longer than many of you have had a computer.
No car repairs yet; the radiator water level hasn't gone down in the last
two (VERY SHORT) trips we've taken.
So, this is: A) 'automatic' transmission goes wonky, sometimes, and must
be shifted manually - but only offers two gears - but only happens SOMETIMES;
B) battery died completely (9.7v resting), replaced in January;
C) new battery died (down to 3.8v), once, not repeated; D)
radiator coolant on ground, twice, up to a gallon of water added, not
repeated since 2nd time, I think.
Maybe I should take the damned thing to a priest and have it exorcised instead.
24 April 2011
Part 15 is released.
In other news, the radiator on the car is definitely leaking. Though I don't think I've overheated the engine (and warped the aluminum heads) yet. The SO insisted we try today...
In other news, grocery stores are often closed on Easter. Not like I remembered this, or think that a single religion should get to pull this crap in the US. I mean, can you imagine the outcry if someone suggested that commerce shut down during daylight for Ramadan? Or even Passover?
Writing has not been that great, production-wise:
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
17th-23rd 0 0 0 4 1 1 1
24th-30th 0^1
Note 1: but you get a new episode to read
Anyway, looks like I can either spend the day writing and editing, or Other.
And frankly, I'd rather be writing at this point. Which means that Other,
like the phone bill being paid before they cut off long distance, or
shopping on days of the week which are not closed in commemoration of
nailing some antigovernment revolutionary to a tree, do not get done.
The one bright light is, Qemu installed very nicely on a laptop. And, once I figured out: that the disk image for the guest OS had to be the permission of the person running it; and then realized you can't apparently run WinXX on console; it went well. Now the laptop has a lil' window in KDE 4 which is running Win2000. This is halfway what Mom wants - but, because I love my mother, I'm not going to let her run Windows by itself. I do need to do more, like networking, setting up non-image drives for data, and similar, but at least it's running.
And that, and Part 15, are the good things that happened in the last week.
Donate for the radiator and my hormones.
20 April 2011
I'm glad I haven't killed many of my neighbors, because one of them
informed me that my car was hemorrhaging coolant earlier this week.
This would explain the coolant smell we both detected Monday afternoon.
I really should investigate, diagnose, plan... but fuck it, I'm writing.
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
10th-16th 0 0 2 1 1 2 0
17th-23rd 0^1 0^2 0^2 3
Note 1: antihistamine haze
Note 2: nothing new, but lots of editing and rewrites
The server is doing well, where it is, although it is 10degC (18degF)
warmer; this is due to the air around the shelf, which is noticeably
warmer than the air in the rest of the house, or even in that corner.
This workstation, on the other hand, spontaneously rebooted Monday, and I do NOT know why. Hasn't done it since, but...
15 April 2011
Whups! I didn't think it had been this long... And today is (USA) Tax Day as well. Good luck with that...
The writing has been going, sort of...
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
3rd-9th 1 1 1 1 3 2 0
10th-16th 0 0 2 1 1 2
Though with the peculiar way I do my counting, yesterday was about
150 lines, and the day before was about 150 lines, so today I've got about
500 on that episode (so far). I've also been doing occasional proofing;
today, for example, I made another run through 15 and 16. Tweaking and
twisting and pounding here and there...
Saturday, I finally moved my cobbled-together server to its shelf, so it's not sitting on the floor. Also, I got a Linux script called inxi and found out the silly server is an Athlon 1500 running at 13xx MHz. Wow. Still no idea why it keeps dropping to sleep and requiring a keyboard nudge to wake it, though. Ah well.
Sunday and Monday, I just sucked. I can't quite claim I've made up for it, but there's a lot more in the proofing pipe than usual, so I'm feeling not entirely hopeless. (not to be jinxing self...)
In the "why me?" section, the SO has discovered the television series "Gossip Girl". I think this is sort of "90210 EAST", but I'm not sure, since I never watched the original. I have watched perhaps twenty minutes of the series myself, standing behind the SO's computer, and... and I see no reason to reverse my long-standing distaste for video. Thank ghu she has headphones. I don't have to look, and television isn't nearly the screaming rage-maker if I don't hear it.
If I get some more donations I ought to be able to pay the phone bill before they get bitchy and cut us off again.
07 April 2011
Well, feeling better at the moment than I did on the last Tucknote.
Not that anything else has been accomplished, besides a last-minute dash to pay the electric bill before we got cut off - an unwelcome and too-familiar motif in my life lately.
I have kept up, a little, with the writing, though.
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
27th-2nd 4 0 2 2 3 0 2
3rd-9th 1 1 1 1 1*
'*' - still going this morning
So that's good. Not as good as I want, and not as fast as I was doing,
but I sort of think that if I just keep steady, it'll go better.
Proofing seems to take a lot out of my writing enthusiasm, though; seemingly, if I start with proofing modifications early in the day, it's hard to write more first-draft stuff later.
Also we got cat food, so the slut kitty - that we don't "own" but comes around and charms us into giving it petting, food, and sleeping places - is happy with us again.
The alternator on the car SEEMS to be working... but the battery drain that one time is therefore unexplained. And I don't think problems get BETTER.
3 April 2011
Happy Tuck's Birthyday!
Now with Part 14 of Tucky Seasons!
Okay, that's exhausted my cheer for the moment. It's late, I didn't get a lot done today, I still don't have my minimal hundred lines for tonight, nothing else has been done, we forgot cat food the last two times at the store so the (slut) cat is pissed, et cetera et cetera.
But, hey, an episode.
31 March 2011
Extremely early in the morning, time for bed...
Writing has continued. This is Good.
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
20th-26th 0 4
27th-2nd 4 0 2 2 *
'*' - not any yet today, but it's early
Not as good this last period, but not entirely suck either.
Also, it seems as though I have resurrected two Contributing Editors/proofers out of their comas. This is what I did Monday, though I should have written as well.
It seems like I can sometimes wake up with a headache, and on those days very little gets done (writing or life). Going back to bed is a good idea, as the headache never seems to go away until I do. Maybe I need new pillows.
Or something. On Friday, I ended up sleeping SIXTEEN hours out of the 24 in that day. Admittedly, I went to bed about 23:00 on Thursday, and woke up about 00:30 Saturday, but I should be able to stay up eight hours without requiring eight hours sleep immediately thereafter.
"New" server is working, pretty much; it's doing something weird with its power-saving, and eventually refusing to come on for net requests - but hitting ANY key on its keyboard makes it wake up and work again. It's also a 500MHz Athlon, which is slower than what it replaced, and I can notice the speed difference. Squeeze (Debian 6.0) is working okay otherwise.
Still have not stopped/disassembled/moved to shelf the 'new' server. The
SO has co-opted the fucking DVD burner to get rid of write
out to disk some old anime so she can get new anime. I should, however,
be able to dump my own stuff for backup purposes to it while she sleeps.
The local Debian repository is now going again as well; I'm very happy to only download the mess of packages one time.
I'm also grabbing pictures of various things associated with Tucky Seasons. These are amusing. I plan to put them up, somewhere, so you can see them as well. But that's for a later day... though maybe not much later.
25 March 2011
Bloody computers.
At least I did a little writing yesterday, before I started working on computers - which is a good thing, 'cause I don't write well when I'm so frustrated I could cry. Also I did some more on Wednesday, after writing the previous Tucknote.
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
20th-26th 8! 3 2 6 2 -* -
'*' - not any yet today
Too bad only one of the proofers has checked in yet. I may need to ping
them again.
I spent about nine hours yesterday (not full-gonzo continuous, but pretty
steady) working on rebuilding the server. I think the two 'better'
CPU+motherboard sets I have need a bigger-wattage PSU; the 450w (claimed)
is working on the one motherboard it will fit upon, the 500MHz Athlon one.
This is something of a downgrade, unfortunately.
But I couldn't get one (Athlon64) to do more than spin the fans for a
few seconds; and the other (Athlon64 on MSI motherboard) booted exactly
once and thereafter would only spin the fans for a few seconds.
I was about in tears - literally; non-repeatable anything makes me upset - yesterday before I tried the biggest PSU on the wimpiest of the three motherboards. That worked, and has worked for about 12 hours so far.
Also I am low on working 184-pin DIMMs; I've got five not in other computers (one which came from the old server), and there's only one which seems to work consistently (the one which came from the old server). Grrrr.
Anyway, the 'new' server is still in pieces on the floor, whilst I make it run for a while.
Also, since I'm apparently stupid, I decided to upgrade the server's OS from Debian Lenny (5.0) to Squeeze (6.0). One of the really awesome things about Linux is that you can have multiple OS's on the same computer, and unlike (at least earlier versions of) Windows, it won't throw a tantrum and commit suicide if you have two (or more) OS's on the system.
Having two largish (when I bought them) IDE/PATA drives on the server, naturally I put
Debian on both. Now, I can upgrade one 'side' to Squeeze whilst leaving
the other alone, and see how the mess works before committing. I've
already found out that I Don't Like the new KDE, but it's not like I
have to use a
GUI.
Which I don't.
Which is a damned good thing, with only 0.5Gb RAM. But I remember days when 500Mb
was a $500 hard drive...
And, if I bungle things, I can copy B-to-A and restore the other drive & OS.
Ha ha ha.
But if this works - or if it doesn't and I give up on it for a while - I'll need to shut it off, disassemble everything, and move it to its special shelf. Probably tomorrow. Today, I need to write, and we need to hit a grocery store; I hope the car starts.
23 March 2011, three days after the vernal equinox
Server is still down... Actually, it's been taken apart, leaving three hard drive, two optical drives, one power supply, one S3 Trio64 video card (which is likely older than your being on the Internet), and a few bits and pieces. The amount of dust in and around it was just gross, and this is without a case either.
Alas, I couldn't find the thermal paste we had in the house until this morning, so nothing has been done yet on setting up a new server. So no email. Which means no proofing yet.
Part 14 is done, first draft-ish (no proofing because no email).
Part 15 is done, first draft-ish (no proofing because no email).
Part 16 is about 2/3 done.
Something has changed, and I know what, but I don't know why; and this pisses me off because if I don't know why, I can't repeat it or keep it from unhappening.
As trivia, I don't measure my output in words, because I always have notes that I carry over from episode to episode, and subtracting those words from the episode's words is just too annoying. So I count by lines. Actually, I count by one hundred line increments; 254 lines counts as two hundred-line pieces, 288 lines tends to make me write just a bit more so I can claim three hundred-line increments.
For the last couple of weeks, I've been doing this:
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
6th-12th 0 0 1 0 0 1 2
13th-19th 1 1 2 3 0* 1 1
20th-26th 8! 3 2 1& - - -
'*' - Thursday the 18th was the 'dogshit day' mentioned in the previous Tucknote.
'&' - the sun has not yet risen as I write this, but I have 1 increment.
I shan't claim anything, because I don't want to jinx myself.
With luck, either the single spare SATA-capable motherboard will actually work, or another iffy one will be correctable (thinking about trying a re-paste of the heat sink) and work. SATA PCI cards are at least $30 and I can't spare that right now.
Also, the
car's
alternator
might be going bad. It was dead as a doornail
on Friday. (and, goddamned automatic transmission, can't push-start it)
My trusty multimeter said the battery voltage, post to post,
was around THREE volts. Chalk off one deep-discharge cycle... And I
don't think I left the lights on or anything. Jump-started it and ran it
for an hour. Started it again Monday; post-to-post voltage was 13.8v (as
opposed to an expected 14.something volts) when running, and the last
time I checked the battery BEFORE using it, it was 12.2v (as opposed to
expected 12.6v). Checking the battery after shutoff showed it starting
at 13v and dropping 0.01v every few seconds, which sort of hints it was
being charged... I think. The battery is two MONTHS old, so I don't
think it's that... and if it's not the battery, it may well be the
damned alternator. That thing looks like a bitch to get to in my car;
maybe the alternator itself isn't too bad, but the belt (V-belt) just
disappears into the murk, and there are big metal pieces above it I'd
have to remove to get my fingers on the belt.
If my multimeter could read over 0.25A I'd try wiring it into the system
to see if there was something draining it (besides clock and radio
keepalive), but even 500 milli-amps would pop the multimeter's fuse.
*sigh*
Anyway, I think I'll go back to writing for a bit.
Update:
Four (4) increments finished today so far. Part 16 first draft is now
done. And it is not yet noon.
Still no email (and therefore no proofing).... but this is the exciting
part! I don't want to stop now!
Except I had to, because of an unfortunate roll on the Random Wandering
Christer Table, combined with my opened windows.
But they left, eventually... so back to writing. I guess the server can wait a bit longer...
18 March 2011
My local server (music, books, gaming books, local knowledge base, Debian packages, backups, email) is down, likely due to the capacitor plague it's had for several years. Now, trying to fsck ("Scandisk" for you lameass wusers out there) a large partition, it spontaneously reboots about 93% of the way through, then on reboot it finds the partition hasn't been fsck'd, starts to do that, and 93% of the way through...
Looks like I have exactly one motherboard 'in stock' that will handle the 300Gb SATA drive I have stuck in the server. Not counting the in-use-already SO's computer, which is filled like a septic tank with anime and so requires about 1.5Tb of SATA in two disks. *sigh* *hate*
Anyway, if the one SATA-capable motherboard doesn't work, I shall cry, then go to one of maybe six non-SATA motherboards I have stuck in a dish drainer so's I can plug in the IDE drives at least. Then I put the SATA drive in the SO's computer and consider killing her.
Thank Ghu I don't run Windows, because the OS wouldn't transfer to a different motherboard; and fuckifIknow an Apple might require me to bring the thing in for servicing at a bloody REPAIR SHOP. Actually REPAIR $$$HOP.
I also took the opportunity to shift firewalls from the ancient Dell ~40Mhz thing to the counter-dumpster'd 733MHz Gateway. And some power cords and outlets and strips and things. I removed the IPS (Interrupted Power Supply) which a friend gave me (and I spent $20 on a replacement lead-acid battery for) and it worked exactly one time. I'm also trying the bizarre and radical, might even be terroristic child-molesting, tactic of labeling cords, outlets, powerstrips, and the like with ratings and where they go and wherefrom they came.
Yesterday I was just dogshit; I developed a massive headache, tried to lie back down, and the SO was twitching and coughing about every time I got anywhere near sleep. SO has been sick the last week, but I already had this so I'm not getting it again.
Part #15 is half finished. This is acceptable, if I can keep it up, if I don't jinx myself... I did write (PAST tense, cannot be changed, immune to jinx) 6 of 7 days in the last week (not counting today).
Email is also on the (dead) server, so unless I want to rewire things a whole lot - which I don't - it'll have to wait until I can get something working in there. Which haha shouldn't be hard... hahahaha.
13 March 2011
I can always get worse, I guess.
I thought I was doing well at the beginning of January, and then... things just went to shit. I've been able to take the SO to the grocery - but not go in myself - and I've done laundry a couple of times. That has basically been it. In two months.
Okay, so...
Last week ...
I'll just say that the first draft of Part 14 is done.
I'm scared of jinxing myself. I'm also tired of saying "Well, things look better now!" and then getting worse. Especially when it's the ME that gets worse.
If you wrote me email since December... I have it, I've probably read it, and I haven't been psychologically able to respond. Yes, that includes the "Are you alive?" emails too. I'm trying to work on the emails.
I apologize to everyone.
08 November 2010
Okay, Part 13 is out. Not too surprising, but hopefully useful.
Managed to not get the electricity cut off, twice; and while the phone got cut off once, we managed to get it restored (at an additional $50 fuckyousoverymuch). It would be very nice indeed if I can keep ahead of the utility bills enough to deny the bloody phone bandits the pleasure of screwing me via additional fees. Strange how they can claim it costs them $25 in work to restore the phone, but when you call they claim it's all computerized and humans can't possibly intervene.
Still pissed at them. Probably will be pissed at them forever.
On bedbugs: sometime within about two months of my posting, the bites
stopped happening (which was the primary diagnostic sign - definitely not
mosquito bites). This should not have happened, according to approximately
everyone... but I'm not getting bit any more, and I could probably start
sleeping without gloves on - something I started doing when I got three
welts on my wrist and the swelling made it feel like I'd sprained it. It's
just possible it was the insecticide - something named Phantom, available
from the finer pro-level poison shops - but I am not sure. I AM tolerably
sure they're gone... or possibly still bagged in clothing. I had most of
my clothing loose, and bagged it all prior to insecticide; and haven't
managed to wash and dry most of it since. It's time I had more to wear,
I think; and it's getting colder, and guess where all the sweaters are.
One load of wash/dry laundry, of course, costs $2.25 where I do it; and I've
turned into something of a neophobe lately, at least when it comes to new
RL places and things. *sighs*
On to #14, which might actually be a little sweet.
07 September 2010
I didn't think I could get an episode out this fast. But, the phone is going to be cut off RSN - I'm surprised it still works - because I had to spend all the money on the electric bill Friday before they cut THAT off. And car insurance is also nominally due tomorrow. And, one donatrix said if I put it out, she'd send some money...
So, okay, I'm putting #12 out. I think it doesn't suck. Need to work on #13, but hopefully the SO will get off HER fat lazy ass and help kick me off MY fat lazy ass...
So, please, if you would, send something along because we really need to get these bills paid before we get food.
27 August 2010
Seasons #11 is finally finished. Part 12 is first-draft-finished, and I have a decent start on #13.
Bedbugs: I haven't apparently been bitten in over a month. I say 'apparently' because it's really hard to catch the wee fuckers in the act; I differentiated them from mosquito bites due to the much longer and more intense itching, and the welt that lasted days rather than hours. I've had none of those lately.
Car brake lights came on and wouldn't go out, even with the car off. Not
good; I live in an urban area, and all the other drivers are psychopaths
just waiting for me to give them an excuse to ram me... or at least I've
found that to be a useful working model.
Pulling the fuse diabled the brake lights (and horn and possibly the
transmission shifter) which saved my battery. I did some Googling, and I
thought it was the brake light switch (part that turns pedal position
into on/off electrical), at first; but luckily I found my multimeter and
tested it before I bought a new one. Turns out there's a little contact
pad or button the switch bumps into, which was (after some search) lying
in little shredded pieces on the floor (along with the rubber heel tip
of a shoe of mine...) and the contact point of the actual switch was now
going right through the button's mounting hole.
Labor cost at usual shop: $90/hr, half hour minimum.
Cost of brake light switch: $30+tax.
Cost of button: $3.50+tax.
Phone's about to be cut off. (I think this happened last month as well) Donations would be useful.
21 July 2010
Oooh, look, two Tucknotes in a month!
I'm actually writing more in the last week. Currently, #11 is done and percolating for proofing, and #12 is at least half written. If Things will stop Happening, I might be able to keep this up.
Last thing was, the SO's free medical care was threatened to be cut off because, the letter said, she hadn't turned in the proper we-have-no-money form on time. Which REALLY upset both of us, because I have a visual memory of the SO turning that form in, about the beginning of June. That sort of took us out for a weekend - of course, we checked the mail and found the letter on a Saturday - but Monday it seems to have been cleared up. Seems.
Anyway, phone is about to be cut off due to nonpayment. If you'd like to prevent this, you know what to do. We'd also like to eat; greedy us.
05 July 2010
Tucky Seasons #10 is up. #11 is mostly done. There's an extra piece containing notes on the code system Mike used, listed as 10a. Hand formatting that was a pain.
Money situation is very bad. Make a donation and help remedy this.
SO's psych situation: resolved. The SO's normal therapist graciously went in to the appointment and talked to the psych, and everything was resolved. We then had the equivalent of the shakes for a week. Not to mention the screaming shits for the two weeks before. I didn't go in, because A) it's a small office, and B) I was afraid I'd beat the psych to death for the upset she caused me already.
I did one of the annual pilgrimages to the folks, to do computer stuff there. Since very little had gone wrong since the last one, this one was relatively easy. I've devoured the dozen or so books I could pry loose already.
Bedbugs: no worse, but no better. Insecticide
Phantom is a slow killer, unfortunately; what I'd like is something that
makes the fuckers scream in terror and pain and then hiss as they melt and evaporate.
The reason to use it is, no one has reported resistance to this chemical, and it's not a
repellent - since I don't want to scare them away, I want them to die die die.
Since I didn't think one treatment was going to work, I got
the concentrate, since I am better-than-consumer at reading directions and doing
dilutions, apparently. We need to respray about bi-weekly, which is today, actually.
With proper dilution, I think we have enough to last us a long time.
The repellant+killer stuff
Bedlam
is only going to be used as a barrier, hopefully locking any bedbugs inside the ring
with us - because, like I said, I want them to die, not run away into the walls or
someplace to hide and hibernate.
On the other hand, the SO has been her usual boat-anchor self, and so it's really
hard for me to find motivation enough to move two of us, when I can barely move
one (me) at all. So, much that could be done, has not been done. I've spent
fifteen years pushing the SO, and I cannot push any longer; I feel permamently
burned out. I could see the contrast while visiting my parents; they DO things,
and while I was there I didn't have to push continually to make anything happen,
and I wasn't nearly as depressed (sometimes in physical pain, because of the
sleeping quarters, but that's not related).
Well, I'll see if I can work some more on Tuck today.
23 May 2010
Well, the good news is that it's been less than three weeks since the last Tucknote. And I got a little writing done. And some house stuff done.
Here's the bad news.
#1: About two weeks ago now, the SO - who had not seen a psych for about nine
months, due to the old one leaving and a new one not arriving - ran out of
antipsychotic.
Note: if someone is taking an anti-psychotic, even an atypical antipsychotic
like Seroquel, DO NOT let them run out.
So we called and talked to the new psych. She approved a 1 month extension,
which took about six more days to get than it should have because she did the
one thing ordering-wise we asked, begged, and pleaded with her not to do (see
Note above).
In talking with the SO, she also reportedly said that the SO was taking too
many drugs and needed to be taken off some of them. The SO is on a stable
drug mix and has been for at least three years, and she's been getting Much
Better on this mix.
This made the SO absolutely batshit.
Guess who gets to deal with Everything when the SO is absolutely batshit?
We have a meeting with this psych on 04 June, and... I am not looking forward to it, except we do have the SO's therapist coming to this meeting and hopefully we can get things worked out in such a fashion that I don't end up killing someone.
#2: We seem to have developed an infestation of
bedbugs (offsite link).
I desperately hate to be trendy, but even more do I hate being trendy when it
comes to 'the latest' disease or parasite. And bedbugs are so trendy, they're
finding them in Manhattan high-end hotels. Being this trendy shames me.
I just dropped $120 on pesticide (2 kinds) and an 'insect growth regulator' or
IGR
(from
Do My Own Pest Control (offsite link))
which I'm hoping will do the trick, along with half a dozen other things
like caulking every goddamned seam and crack in the furniture AND walls
(and I currently have no caulk or caulking gun), vacuuming and
immediately dumping the bag as often as possible (uses lots of bags),
washing nearly every piece of clothing and bedding that hasn't been
sealed up since January (at the laundromat, $2.25 per load washed/dried
not counting soap and bleach), dryer-ing what can't be washed
($1.00/load), decontaminating (or, depending on your point of view,
productively contaminating) most of the furniture (isopropyl alcohol 91%
or better, spot killer; and pesticides when they arrive), and pulling up
most or all of the carpet and dumping THAT (I do have a carpet knife,
and no great liking for carpet anyway).
Setting fire to the house has been considered, as has been thermonuclear cleansing and suicide. We're saving those for last resorts.
If you haven't been keeping up with the newest macroparasitic trend, it's a fuckload of work to get rid of them, because they can hide in damned near any gap or crevice, and can go dormant for up to five hundred and fifty (550) days before restarting their life cycle. Which is, biting you while you are deeply asleep, for maybe five minutes a day (each), and leaving (on me) welts that LATER swell and itch for several days. The SO, because this is the way my life works, doesn't seem to react to the damned bites at all (which is about 50% of the population). The range of travel I might expect is 5-20 feet, which basically covers everywhere in the house - because the one place I've found live ones (1 corpse recovered and bagged, the 2nd just disappeared when I whacked it, though it left a bloody splot about 1cm in diameter) is the futon/couch, which is about diametrically opposite to the bed in the house. And I don't think I could get bites on the hand (~10 or so) without noticing, while I was awake.
The one good thing that I did, or didn't do, long ago, is when we got a new bed, we did not allow the mover to rip off the shipping plastic. It does have a hole where I was five seconds too slow in reminding them I wanted it to stay wrapped, but Ye Auld Duct Tape shut the hole. I think. And I'll be reinspecting the hole and duct tape. I doubt anything is going to get through that plastic.
One other help may be the hair dryer - I checked it with my handy-dandy semi-calibrated
meat thermometer, and on Medium it exhausts at well over 140 degrees F. Bedbugs and
eggs, I am informed, die 'quickly' at 115 degrees.
If I was still in Texas and it was two months later, it's at least theoretically
possible to hot-wire the central heater's thermostat to produce 'forty degrees above ambient'
which would bring the entire house well into the kill zone (130-140 degrees during the
afternoon).
And, very little proofer/CE response to #10.
And an important hard drive is producing an audible 'click' about every two days.
I'd have to say that in general It Hasn't Been A Good Month.
6 May 2010
Any time I think I'm getting better, I seem to just sort of go into 'Pause' for a month.
Still, some stuff has happened. Like, some writing. Some reformatting of the front room, to take better advantage of the equipment we have.
Unfortunately, I seem to have spent all the donations we received, on silly things like food and the electric bill. I could definitely use some more...
Still, the future is looking perhaps less than completely black pain-filled pointlessness. That's gotta be good, right? It's as close to optimism as I've gotten in nine months, anyway.
By the way, did you check out the gallery with the pictures of Pauline and Trish?
Later:
I just realized there's another factor in the increased typing - I'm back to using
the ol' reliable 1391401 keyboard. Previously I'd been using a laptop; and laptops,
as wondrous as they are, universally have shit keyboards. At least by my standards.
On eyeballs/mine, my sentence has been reduced to about four months, and the new glasses
came in. I hate them, of course; they aren't contacts, which I was VERY used to.
Fisheye, chromatic aberration, small field of view on modern frames, the
way they get body spooge all over them...
and, no lie, the 'custom made
for your eye glasses' sunshades for one pair are polarized in different
planes. Reflections from cars (as well as a lot of other objects) are
polarized - so I see different amounts of reflected light in each eye.
These are the round pair, and I can understand how it would be difficult
to figure out which way they go, especially if you drop a piece during
assembly... but I wonder if they cared.
Actually, this is nearly a bonus, so I guess I can't complain.
3 April 2010
Tuck's birthyday once again. I shudder to think how old he is NOW... and I'd bet he and Mike are now (2010) nuclear-capable.
Writing is progressing slowly, but progressing. That's an improvement.
I haven't yet sold any of the SO's kidneys, but if anyone would like to make a bid...
Or just a donation.
Went to an eye doctor for the first time in seven years, last week. To summarize, I have sinned most greviously, and I must do penance. Being forced to listen to the SO's anime music soundtracks - she has headphones, and keeps them at such a volume I can hear it from more than ten feet away - does not count. I shall be wearing glasses for at least the next six months. Damnit. And the only glasses I possess in working order are at least eight years old, more like ten. I think the plastic lenses have yellowed slightly, which is a real trick considering they've been kept indoors all this time. And with tolerably severe myopia (nearsighted or shortsighted), my eyes look like pinheads when I wear them. And the SO thinks they are UGLY.
So, new (and cheap) glasses on the way from Zenni Optical, but be warned; I think they sell email addresses (required for an order) to spammers. Use a disposable address, a fake one, or be prepared for the trickle increasing to a flood.
I am greatly annoyed by the fact that most glasses are less than 35mm high. That is about 1.5 inches. Apparently, it's no longer fashionable to have a field of vision bigger than a finger. Some are less than 1 inch. Am I supposed to see through these, DRIVE with these, avoid thrown objects, etc etc? This isn't just a cheap-glasses problem either, says my Googly research.
26 March 2010
Stunning amounts of self-suck have not yet killed me, though it's been close.
I damned near forgot all the steps I have to go through to post an episode, but I finally got it, and Part 9 of Tucky Seasons is now posted. Along with pictures of Trish and Pauline. They aren't wearing those clothes yet in the story, BTW.
Money is excruciatingly absent, and the SO would like me to make a special plea to you, my readers: "Please send her some money so she doesn't sell one of my kidneys!" Whine whine whine...
Anyway, if you'd like to have the SO keep both kidneys - or if you'd like to purchase a tissue sample (for matching purposes) - send some money to the usual place.
Not much of interest otherwise. I made it through the holidays without death. Computers haven't had major failures (yet) though there have been some really irritating minor, and intermittent, ones.
I learned an unfortunate amount about iptables (Linux firewalling); the important thing I want to pass on is that packets go through EITHER the IN and OUT chains in the filter table, OR through the FORWARD chain; not both. IN and OUT are for things going to or from the firewall-running computer's address(es) ONLY. FORWARD is for things going through the firewall, say before and after NAT/masquerading, and don't go through the IN or OUT chains. This is not mentioned anywhere in the regular docs I could find.
And, not to get anyone's hopes up (does anyone even have hope any more?) but I finally resolved the blockage in regular Tuck - which should've taken me about a week, not a year - and so I might be able to go onward.
Now to chew through the backlog of email...
30 October 2009
Thankfully, the last 2 days didn't suck nearly as much as the five or six before the last two.
The SO got the digital camera working. Battery contact was corroded, somehow, even though none of the NiMH batteries are. Yay the SO!
I didn't set up a base/test system yet. Instead, I found the wee tiny circuit board that is a 2.5"-IDE-to-midsized-tiny-USB adapter. Hours later, I found the midsized-tiny-USB-device-to-USB-hub cable, of which I apparently have one. The camera's tiny-tiny-USB-device-to-USB-hub cable was too large on the device end.
Glad we have all standardized on USB connectors for everything; I'd hate
to have to run around trying to find just the right cable with the right
connectors on both ends, like I used to have to do.
{/sarcasm}
Drive gave the same errors as a USB drive that it did as a IDE drive.
This is GOOD; it suggests that the fault is in the drive rather than
in the rest of the laptop. (it's not impossible that a laptop fault killed
the drive, and therefore both would/will show grievous problems; I know this.)
Meanwhile, two of three other 2.5" IDE gave much worse errors, and the third wasn't all that hot either. I also found a fourth not-in-use 2.5" IDE drive, but haven't tried that.
Bought a used 30Gb 2.5" IDe drive, took it home, plugged it into the USB adapter, and formatted it up and scanned it. No errors.
At this moment, I am attempting a install-over-local-Ethernet of Debian onto a 'new' disk on the previous laptop. A niggling problem; it wouldn't do things with /dev/sda5, for no good reason. I'm gonna try with that later.
I also upgraded my PXEboot installer, which normally would be catastrophically stupid since I was going to use it, but I just moved the old files away and the new files in, which is sufficiently backed up that The Universe isn't bothering fucking with this.
Oh, wait; an error. A disk error. Have I seen this before? I might have.
A while later:
Haven't seen it again... will be very very wary for a while.
Also did some other shopping today, and got things I needed, like a hacksaw, which I need for [DELETED FOR SECURITY] and didn't have; and, stunningly, a SIX-foot garden hose with connectors on both ends, which I couldn't find when I [DELETED FOR SECURITY] but I've got one now.
Also food and vitamins.
Hormones next.
Thinking about: SO's glasses and repair thereof
28 October 2009
It has been a tumultuous 60 hours or so. No writing has been done, but I've been busy...
Monday, 05:30, I am awakened by the power going out. "It's too early for them to be cutting the power off," I thought - as I primed my brain with caffeine, it being a rude and dark awakening indeed - and so I called to report an outage, which had already been reported.
I am poking around with a flashlight (Mini-Maglie which I think is older
than some of my readers) and look at the server for some reason, and
notice a brown crusty bit on a capacitor or two.
Capacitor Plague!
Well, this explains much. Like video work/not-work, spontaneous reboots a few times, BIOS complaining that I'm overclocking when that's the last damned thing I'm gonna do on a server, etc etc.
Power comes back on, I spend time resetting many computers. Video returns to the server, but is terminally ill with Capacitor Plague, so no sigh of relief at this point.
With a 'new' firewall box - salvaged 733MHz Gateway with a 70 watt power supply and thus likely less power-consuming than the current ancient salvaged Dell P-75 - and a new server motherboard required, I may as well reformat that area of the living room. Except it's got cruft all over it. I clean that up. I also bump the power cord on the existing firewall, which dies; restart required. 'New' firewall box has a much firmer power cord plug...
Note: I have plenty of computer pieces at this time; what I don't have is energy, and a place to put all the pieces together and test them before installing them. What I didn't have was a good reason to go "fixin' what ain't broke yet"; however, now it's broke or going to break, so there's the good reason. Still don't have the workbench; gaining energy....
I had weird network problems, which I did not solve yet.
Decide that backups haven't been done recently enough, so make some backups to DVD. Keeping certain partitions around 4480Mb (4590208 1k blocks, actually) makes this a trivial command; I just load the tray, type in the command-line incantation (written on a piece of card taped to the monitor) and wait for the tray to pop open.
SO gets a call from the skin doc, about the last two biopsies. One's scar tissue (not a problem), the other is a basal cell carcinoma and is gonna be cut out in mid-November. Neither of us has been able to keep track of all the skin cancers that have been removed in the last four years; here's another one.
Got money - MANY THINKS TO THOSE WHO DONATED - and paid off both the electric and the phone (which, it turns out, was also due Monday) in time. I also splurged and filled the car's gas tank, which I haven't done in months, and got some food.
Return home, crank up the laptop which has been in powered-down, hibernate-to-hard-drive mode. And thus, shouldn't have been affected at all by the power outage. It will not restore. I restart, and the MBR won't go. Irritated, I try rebooting and go to net-boot, which I find almost works but not enough; it seems to develop and endless wait for some net download. There's no reason for this blockage, because other things can get in and out of the network.
Bang on the network for a while. Think I've got most of it. Firewall's local-side Ethernet slips into Full Duplex for some reason and bungs the network. Unset that; it helps.
Got the laptop to boot normally. Swap partition is bunged. Try re-doing that
with a bad block check, and get dozens of disk errors. Also get disk errors
in the section of the drive that I keep Tuck in. I hope like fuck I did the
usual, habitual, rsync-to-server when I finished writing on the laptop
last time, because whatever's on the laptop disk is gone gone gone.
Luckily, because it IS habitual, because I sort of EXPECT shit like this, I
DO back stuff up whenever I stop writing. All the bits I've written are also
on the server. I checked.
Go to bed. Wake up Tuesday.
Wake up Tuesday with a headache. Feel some nausea. Take some diphenhydramine, my usual remedy for headache+nausea because it's usually sinus/allergy problems. Not this time. I spend 3 hours in abject nauseous misery, huddled under an open window or sitting in the open doorway trying to stave off an epic fit of vomiting. Even the SO noticed I looked bad, when she woke up. I deduce that the 'slightly off' milk from last night was more than slightly off (checked the dates later, it had been eight days past the "sell by" date). I am cold enough to be shivering half the time, but at least I'm not puking my toenails up. Finally take the SO's suggestion and go for some short-loop walks. This helps unbelievably. I can actually make it to the bedroom and lie in bed without worrying about exploding intestinal contents all over the bed and surrounding area.
Wake up a few hours later, feeling bruised and sore.
Decide that I am not being paranoid enough about backups, so recopy Tuck&c to my current non-laptop workstation. rsync is my friend
Also try copying Tuck&c to SO's computer, 'cause she won't notice the extra gig and a half. SO's computer isn't responding via network.
SO's network isn't networking; begin to suspect the motherboard got fritzed in the power outage Monday. Reset her system twice, turn the firewall's full duplex off again - why does this keep getting set on? - and it begins working. Wish I had saved some chicken bones to turn into magical anti-evil-spirit fetishes.
SO's glasses may or may not be restore-to-use-able; the fix I made, using aluminum tubing across the broken centerpiece on Saturday, is no longer working and I'm not sure I can pull off the crimped aluminum tubing without destroying the frames entirely. There ought to be a way to make glasses frames at home, the tech isn't hard... however, the SO is not enthusiastic about DIY glasses frames.
And, as a capper, the SO managed to break a front tooth last night. It doesn't apparently hurt, and as she's not screaming I assume she's telling the truth.
Okay, I dealt with everything else over the last two days, but I'm freaked now.
Manage to calm down enough to sleep.
It is now Wednesday morning. I've a lot to do today, as well.
Either the camera is dead or all three sets of batteries I tried in it are too low a voltage to make it go. Of course, my multimeter disappeared into the rubble two months ago, so I can't check voltages directly.
The laptop had two screw-closed bays underneath. One turned out to be the
CPU and memory and some other big chip screwed into the board (WTF?), but the
other held a hard drive, with a couple of mounting pieces. I pulled out the
existing drive and reseated it, hoping... which did not work; it's worse now
than it was.
Hokay, stack of laptop drives... I have three. One must be 12.5mm high, as
it's thicker and might not fit. Two might fit. First one, doesn't get past
GRUB again. I try netbooting a lenny_rescue, which is befucked since it
seems to want to install Lenny before it tries the rescue stuff. It also
can't handle the IDE-showing-up-as-/dev/sda, apparently. Second one,
starts to boot, starts to hang around the part wherein it looks for the root
filesystem, likely because it was originally _h_da1 and in this laptop is
now _s_da1. However, the second one has a strip of masking tape warning that
/lib is going bad. So I'm thinking that, right now:
...
Next step is to clean off a work area, then take a 400MHz desktop that worked the last time I tried it - I'd say "known good" but my optimism has been stabbed repeatedly in the last week - and the little 2.5"-to-3.5" IDE adapter, and see if the laptop's original drive works well when not in the laptop. If the laptop's original drive works well in another computer, the laptop is fucked. Which is what I expect right this moment.
Need a power strip. Why do we have so many outlets in this house without power strips? We're supposed to have one per plug, but somehow there's always another outlet (or four) that are un-stripped. Since as far as I could find, US code is 15A -> 1625 watts per outlet, it should be okay as long as I don't try to run more than, oh, four computers off the one set.
25 October 2009
Episode #9 is almost finished; I started the proofing cycle early. The electricity gets cut off tomorrow unless I can pay $250, the phone gets cut off sometime this week unless I pay THEM $95, we have about $20 for food until further notice because I turned in the jar of loose change I was keeping, the SO's glasses - the new ones - have broken, server's video went and I don't think can be fixed, I'm about out of hormones and definitely out of B-complex vitamins, (which were sort of helping with the depression until they ran out - I can't afford real psych drugs), and that's the interesting bits. The rest is just boring.
You could donate, I suppose.
I'm torn between saying "Yes, please, a donation will help" and Winston Churchill's black dog, about twelve feet tall, that has grabbed me by the head with its teeth and is shaking me back and forth while growling "Nothing will help, because this is what you DESERVE."
20 September 2009
Egad I suck.
But at least I got an episode out. AND the correction I announced a MONTH ago.
Egad I suck...
Maybe things will look up now that the hot weather has broken, however.
I hope so. I haven't had energy for anything. Much less enthusiasm.
The SO has been in bad shape, with a persistent leg ulceration which is finally healing up, and a broken pair of glasses. How she managed to break them about half an inch from the middle/bridge, the top part that holds the lens, I will never know. JBWeld did not work well the first two times - I used a metal strip to give it some shear strength, but apparently not enough - the third repair lasted a few weeks, and the fourth involved a lot of tools to rough up the residual epoxy and sheet metal. However, an online place Zenni Optical has just-barely-acceptable glasses for pretty cheap. I hate the fucking lens heights nowadays - one inch? are you kidding me? - but they seem to be basically universal, as even the few-hundred-dollar frames didn't seem to be any larger. A couple of pairs of dead glasses in the house measure well over 50mm lens height, which are basically unobtainable in today's market.
If the bloody frames weren't broken - this being why we aren't using them now - I'd see if a lens grinder could make some new ones to that size. But alas... And the SO did not want something I could craft up out of wire. She doesn't seem to like my post-apocalyptic design sense.
17 August 2009
Not dead yet...
Though maybe I ought to be.
Around February of this year, a proofer effectively vomited blood all over what I'd written in regular Tuck. This is discouraging, and I don't have a whole lot of psychological stamina (for the past several years) to just keep going in the face of adversity or even much criticism.
I went to writing on Seasons so's to at least do something while I tried to recover and think of what to do. Plus, that story still wanted to be written, and I had been thinking about it in parts...
In June, _I_ found a significant error in timing in Tucky Seasons; to wit, there was an extra day/night cycle inside a week, and I couldn't just pretent It Didn't Happen, because I don't work that way.
Instead of doing anything remotely useful, of course, I had a very quiet nervous breakdown of sorts. Those that noticed that email response times went to "never" might've noticed this.
Anyway, recently someone said they would commit some cash to me if I wrote just SOMETHING in here.
I THINK I can fix this, with a little more brain-work and a minor rewrite of Tucky Season #7, and I might be able to do that by next week sometime.
If my $200 past-due phone bill is paid. Maybe you could help.
16 May 2009
Tucky Seasons Part 07 is done and released. I hope.
Part 08 is going not-too-bad. I expect that writing this where anyone can see it will cause some catastrophe, real or in-my-head, that will break the writing. We'll see. Human brains are STUPID.
We got the pay-or-disconnect payment in to the phone company, and had some money left over for food and toilet paper; we still haven't paid the rest of the phone bill - so they are still calling, which means the ringer is still off for much of the time - or any of the electric bill.
Don't you want them to get paid before we get cut off? Sure you do.
On the good side, not only is some hardware sitting waiting for me to come get it - though requiring a road trip - but I found out that I'd been screwing with the wrong config file on the server, which is why I couldn't get it to do more text. Now running something like 132x43, which is what I consider 'good' nowadays. Still no X over there, but who needs a GUI?
Oh, right; most of you.
The thing that really rocks is the graphics viewer I use under SVGA: zgv. It allows one (me) to adjust gamma, brightness, and contrast, PER IMAGE. This is really helpful when viewing random pictures, as some of them... suck, and playing with B&C really allows one (me) to get the details that otherwise are buggered by too-dark or too-light. Also it helps me cope with a rather elderly monitor that needs to have the brightness cranked up to maximum values just to get midrange. I've never found this in any other graphics program, including 'xzgv', which makes me think I ought to put the card (or a similar SGVALib compatible video card, which means OLD) in whatever I use as a workstation. Who needs 256Mb video cards with more computational horsepower than my server?
Oh, right; most of you, at least the ones running Vista. Even XP would give you the hairy eyeball and refuse to run, I bet. (1Mb video memory on that S3 Trio64+)
But, having paid the tuition cost of learning long ago; and having spent 30+ years deprogramming myself from consumerist addiction to the newest/best/latest - I remember when the Atari 2600 came out, and we NEVER got one, so I'm well-practiced at having fun with the stuff the rich kids don't want or have thrown away as too old/slow/ugly/boring/unfasionable - I don't need the dubious "help" of modern GUIs, nor the monetary expense of an operating system from a company that assumes I'm a rabid criminal (pointing at YOU, Microsoft, and YOU, Apple).
Bitch bitch bitch. But it does give me a nice feeling, to realize that I can work with recyclables that the Rest Of The World has cast off.
Now if I could just get electricity, phone/Internet, and food this way...
04 May 2009
Tucky Seasons Part 7 is in proofing at this point. Writing continues.
On the other hand, the phone company is calling every three hours to remind us that they're going to cut us off soon.
Help us, Obi-Wan Reader. You're our only hope. Remember: no phones, no Tuck.
For some reason, my firewall/dialer computer went 'erk' yesterday, after fifty-eight days of continuous uptime. Reboot fixed it, so no worries there.
On the lighter side, one of the SO's friends (I have no more friends) gave the SO a disk yesterday, of choice video bits: "The Day After", "Testament", and some clips from various DoD/DoE films, and a video combining Linkin Park's "One Step Closer" with various atomic-related film clips. Fun for the whole family!
The fun really starts at 0:42:00 on my copy of "The Day After", in case you wondered.
22 April 2009
Okay, mostly caught up with email. I've also done work on more Tucky Seasons, though I'm not quite at a stopping place for this episode even at 1300 lines. Damnit. Might need some trimming.
Thanks to everyone who offered to donate computer parts.
What I really need, though, is donations, as we're again two months due on the phone and electric bills, and scrounging in the pantry for food.
Not surprisingly, once I turned the server back on and got it minimally working - enough to remote login and remote-X - work stopped on that side of the house. Also, I haven't found the magic that allowed me to use the S3 Trio64 as a graphics - rather than a text - video card. I know I used to have it, and I have backups from then; I just bunged the video settings before I found them, and while I managed to reset the video, I haven't gone back and worked on it in a couple of days. Been writing instead, to some small degree.
I also did some updating of the bookmarks from my Lynx cache of bookmarks. I got about 400 done, and then pooped. Only 600 or so to go... no, I'm not kidding. THEN I get to check the current Firefox/Iceweasel bookmarks for invalids, weed those, and THEN I should be able to post a revised Links page/section on the website. Ow my eyes.
And in the "Nuh-UH!" category, I had one lackwit send me a multiple-recipient email (which I said in the email rules not to send me) that was rather large with an attached graphic of some kind (which I hate dragging through my modem) and the entire thing was a chain letter ("send to five people within ten minutes and your wish will come true!").
Imagine my pleasure.
I sent the lackwit a warning, and then, remembering someone else's protest a while back, sent them the pertinent chunk of the email rules just in case they were too lame to check the rules themselves.
Said lackwit then argued with me about how they didn't like my email rules and my rules were stupid for some reason or another.
Color me stunned.
Arguing with someone about a rule, after you've broken it, when it's
their rule, when they can enforce it, when it's written down....
I mean, really, does this lackwit argue with cops during traffic stops
about whether it's constitutional to set speed limits? Or with the IRS
in June about how
it's illegal to demand income tax?
hint: does not work
Anyway, it took me a while to remember how to ban someone at the mailserver level, but I banned this lackwit.
For the timid, please note that it wasn't so much the infraction of the rule that put them on the Shit List; it was arguing with me about whether my rule made sense or not, AFTER they'd broken (shattered) it AND been warned.
With any luck, the lackwit will be so offended they will never attempt to communicate with me again. Not like I'll notice, because they're dropped at the mailserver.
15 April 2009
Income Tax Day in the US. Let's hope you didn't forget until now.
Ellen's Mood: LISTEN UP YOU PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS
I have "given up" for the moment on fiddling the server; I stuck the ancient S3 Trio64V+ in, and now I have 80x25 text only. Unlike most of you pathetic wusers, however, I can live and work like this. For weeks. Heck, at least I've got color... that was a luxury I didn't have for years.
*basks for a moment in color*
Yesterday, I did about half the cleanup and rearranging I wanted to do. Then the SO got the shakes and I put the server back online. I've got about half to go, including shutting down everything on this side for a while and moving furniture. Well, that might be two-thirds of the work left.
Today, I'm tired - probably from using my immune system to fight off all the dust I stirred up yesterday - so I'm running some more backups. Rsync is my friend, as it allows me to make copies of my website and anything else I have access to - like the SO's computer. My DVD-writer is my other friend, because I can then write all this out to a non-volatile medium for about USD$0.40/disk, or about USD$0.10/gigabyte.
Did you make backups of your stuff recently? Do you have anything - anything at all - you might want to have again when your current computer dies?
Anyway, at this moment I think I have about seven motherboards of various types in the back room which I consider usable; the minimum requirement nowadays is that it use 168-pin RAM, as the last time I went looking for 72-pin RAM (at the secondhand shop, mind) the clerk laughed at me.
One of them shall work. Then again, this one is working, just with very non-optimal video at the moment.
I can now send email again, though I haven't yet replied to two days' worth.
12 April 2009
Since I couldn't work something out in normal Tuck - emotional failure on my part - I worked on Tucky Seasons instead. Remember that? I sure hope so, since that's what I did the last month.
The last time I posted any Tucky Seasons was 2004. I have about half the next episode reworked. Maybe this will go better.
Of course, donations are needed.
Would you believe I've had one laptop die and another one - entirely separate manufacturer - nearly completely refuse to take DC power, AND had a laptop drive go flaky? Since January?
If I'm lucky, the problem is somehow in the external transformer or cable or plug or something. I do not feel lucky. Astonishingly, the inside-the-laptop part I think I'll need is available, AND replaceable without desoldering something from the motherboard, AND I found a almost-the-same-model disassembly guide. I just have to get a $30 part before they run out; and then take apart a laptop, hope my solution works, and put the damn thing back together again correctly.
I HATE laptops. If I could get a LCD of the correct size - or cannibalize the works-just-fine display from one of the other FIVE nonworking laptops in the house - I'd build a microATX system in a small box and use that instead. "Small" being relative, as I'd then carry and use one of my precious 19.something-inch-wide 2.7kg/6lb IBM 1391401's as a keyboard.
*counts on fingers* Yep, five nonworking laptops with working (last I could tell) displays. One of those is the sort-of-working boots-once-in-90-minutes one. Conversely, I have one that I think the fluorescent light went bad (among other things), which makes, um, six.
The SO is right, I need to get rid of some of these; they're a bad influence on everyone else.
Update:
I said above "Maybe this will go better." No, it won't. Because last night, sometime after I posted the above, my computer/house server spontaneously rebooted. I had a feeling, and made a backup of all 'my' stuff, which primarily means Tuck and associated files, local copy of website, and my bookmarks. Shortly after that, it began spontaneously rebooting lots and lots of times, including during its boot cycle (before it even got to looking at drives for an operating system/MBR). I switched out some RAM, and that sort of helped, but now it's announcing that it failed due to CPU overclocking, which I am not doing. (This motherboard has a lovely synthesized voice to announce things during the POST/BIOS cycling; it's startling if you aren't expecting it, irritating after the third time, didn't always manage to tell me WHAT had failed before it rebooted itself, and doesn't work if you don't have speakers plugged into the line-out plug on the motherboard.) It will come up with my old S3 Trio64 card, but I can't get SVGA to work because I don't remember the dot-clock settings I need to make it work under SVGA. Normal framebuffer doesn't work with this card. If I put in the original video card, it can't find the IDE drives, and I no longer am using SCSI on this machine.
Now, I'd recently taken some pieces some kind fans had donated last year, and built the SO a new machine - which left the old one, which had been working perfectly and was only missing its IDE drives. So no problem, right? Just plug the server drives into that box, right?
Wrong.
The last straw last night was when I tried plugging that one in, and it just barely powered the fans but did nothing else; didn't even video. I ended up screaming myself hoarse, otherwise having enraged hysterics, and after those stopped I went to bed early because I was wiped.
But I did make that backup.
At
this time, I can just barely read but cannot reply to my own email. (Donations still work, should you care) I think I
have this box configured to where I can do some things - like SSH to the
webserver and alter files there - but I am loathe to make a lot of
changes because the only DVD-recorder (for making hard backups) in the
house is on the server.
Plus I'm afraid I'm cursed and if I use this one for too long I'll
kill it.
I have a bunch of pieces around,
but I don't know which ones work (I'm suspecting something on the server
is Gone Real Bad, for instance, but I'm not sure which piece yet). It's
also tempting, in a I-think-this-might-be-a-suicidal-idea sort of way,
to just rip up that portion of the living room and low level format, so
to speak. Then I'd have room to work. Then... Well, hilarity could
ensue, which is what I'm afraid of.
fuck I'm tired. And I've only been up three hours.
27 February 2009
Response has been good; the phones are on again; and so, like I promised, the next episode.
I really, really, really, did not mean to suck this badly.
22 February 2009
Desperate straits indeed.
At this moment, the phone bill is in extreme arrears, and is cut off. I have a Tuck episode needing only final polishing before I post it, and I can't post it.
13 December 2008
Okay, still suck, but lesssuck.
19 days left in the madness.
Oh, and a wee note, prompted by a correspondent; if you happen to be taking "herbal hormone supplements", those ARE drugs. IF you're lucky and there's anything in them at all besides filler. Which you can't tell. You've no idea what chemicals are going into you, or what amounts. And pretending that it's somehow "nicer" on your body than "harsh synthetic chemicals" is deluding yourself and/or the result of too much late-night advertising. Remember, if it says "scientifically proven all natural" it's trying to tell you FRAUD.
30 November 2008
Wow, suck.
Well, this is me with Major Depression on top of Chronic Depression. If you haven't experienced this, try not to. Try real hard.
Tuck #141 is released, without the major continuity error I'd missed and found shortly after the previous Tucknote.
22 September 2008
Happy Autumnal Equinox!
Tuck #141 is almost finished. I'll try to finish it, get it proofread, and out as soon as I can.
I have been quite bad about email lately. I'd apologize if I thought I was going to change; apologies when the person doesn't change, I see as a disgusting lie. I'll try.
30 August 2008
A momentary lapse of suck, if you will. Tuck #140 is finally out.
Thanks to everyone who donated; we paid the utility bills, got food, and got my car legal again. MANY thanks to the donors.
Also thanks to those who donated computer equipment; I now have a working SCSI card again - well, several - and have somewhat recovered the data I couldn't get to. By which I mean I finally BACKED IT UP (first), and have access to it, but I haven't integrated it yet. Next shall be the re-do of the bookmarks; I seem to have accumulated some... like, erm, five hundred more. Er.
I also have a working laptop for me, one for the SO, a SPARE that also works and is loaded - gawd, the hard drives these days! I can remember back when... - and the SO has decided she doesn't like Windows XP and prefers Debian. Nyah hah hah!
And I know how I want Tuck to go for the next week, basically. Hahaha.
13 August 2008
Please note some new fanfiction , this one by Jay Parrish.
One "little" mistake, and I go into a tailspin for a month.
I've changed the name for Tuck #139; please re-download it.
Somehow I suspect that this will have no effect, and furthermore I cannot escape the images of everyone - everyone gleefully howling and laughing at me, pointing fingers, throwing offal, for fucking up. That's why I've been effectively paralyzed for the last five weeks; that image, that I cannot stop sensing every time I think about it.
Also, relatedly, donations have stopped, and we're now down to $20 for next week's food and last month's utility bills.
06 July 2008
'Not Suck' is slightly working. At least on my side; Tuck has little to complain about at the moment.
Hopefully I can pay the bills this week.
I did get most of #140 done, at least to first draft; but I dunno yet. This one may take some banging.
21 June 2008
Trying VERY hard not to suck. I've got about 900 lines of #139, but it's going to be a longer episode, I think. Oh well. I did get some done this week.
Not enough money to pay the bills yet, though it's getting there.
17 June 2008
Tuck #138 is out. Sorry for the delay.
The reason for the delay is depression. I've been very down lately.
One trigger for the depression is lack of money for the usual things like utility bills and food. Not to mention the rent is going up another 10% which we really can't afford - but we couldn't afford to move either. {nuts-in-a-vise.jpg}
Another reason is that the server/my workstation has been ill. I was a fool, and figured, "Well, since all I need is to replace a power supply [to add a disk; the old PSU wouldn't power everything, so we had to get a new PSU or hotwire one I had, and I chickened out], and the SO is bugging me to get the new disk online, I don't need to back the server up."
You can guess where this is going.
What really set me off, though, was that despite the main drives being SCSI, and despite having two controllers, one not even plugged in, BOTH controller cards are now dead (not showing their usual during-boot-sequence BIOS information, or anything). I have also tried another drive that has another connector and uses another cable, on both controller cards; I have also tried both controller cards, with both disks, in another computer entirely. Nada.
And I also found out that my backups were not saving name-begins-with-a-dot files or directories, which mainly means that my GPG keys are now missing as well.
The reason I have not killed myself (yet) is that I had the Tuck and website info also rsync'd onto another computer entirely, which did not die. So, ha ha ha, at least I have that much.
It's entirely possible that the information on the disks is still good; they worked well on a boot the previous week, and everything worked fine up until the PSU switch. But I can't afford a new SCSI controller card either. Or even a used one. Natch, the drives are wide, so the ISA controller cards don't have the right connectors for the cabling.
Anyway, after I found that out, I spent a lot of the day screaming (so hard I hurt my throat) and pounding furniture and my own body, in lieu of throwing things that would break. And I haven't felt real good for quite a while.
Today I got some done on the next episode, though. So maybe I'm not a complete waste of calories and electricity. Maybe.
Life generally sucks and I'm really tired of it, though.
01 June 2008
How time flies...
Tuck #138 is finally first-draft-finished. Expect it to be put up in a week or so, when the CE's finish with it.
I've been fighting with another dental abscess.
Also, summer is approaching, and I really detest heat. I am far far happier with parts of my body going numb from cold, scraping ice off my windshield, and with melting snow oozing into my shoes.
17 May 2008
Progress has been made on Tuck #138, but not enough, never enough. It's not dead, though. I am trying to work more on it, but I have two sticky places. One of them is emotionally Hard, the other requires information I don't have and can only get slowly. I'm trying to work around the latter... and work on the former when I can.
Donations have been good, and the bills got paid. Thank you to everyone who donated. We've greatly enjoyed the things like food, electricity, Internet, car gas... actually, that's been it.
Stil depressed, with anxiety. Not like this is new.
I did, at least, remember to - and was able to - call Mom on Mother's Day. She appreciated the call.
26 April 2008
Tuck #137 is out; some work has been done on #138.
I have been horribly depressed lately. "Why am I eating?" sort of horribly depressed.
Donations would enable us to pay the two-months-due utility bills as well as purchase such items as food and gasoline. We've got maybe two weeks until they cut off the phone. Donations did not pick up after I released two episodes in two weeks; in fact, they dropped. Not good.
Donating money, not to put too fine a point on it, would help my depression moderately. Ten or twenty dollars makes a real difference.
Someone sent me this link, which I have mixed feelings about. The fact that a school is even bothering to acknowledge the issue, at all, is rather stunning. The abuse is... expected. But the other school, mentioned further down... *boggle*
03 April 2008
Happy Tuck's Birthyday!
29 March 2008
I made a bit of progress on Tuck. #137 required more rewriting than I thought.
The problem arose from a special email setting at Hurricane Electric; when your email comes from a different address than your receiving-email address - say, you send from verizon.net but you receive (and I am supposed to send to) email at mydogsings.org. It's called "MX+ Check". An explanation of the concept can be found here, offsite. It dumps a LOT of spam; it also apparently dumps some amount of 'legitimate' emails (since last week, I am aware of three). I didn't know it was doing this, since no one whose email got bounced notified me... for obvious reasons. Alas.
Anyway, now "MX+ Check" is off. And I'm getting spam again. Alas.
I don't have a good way in mind of alternative communication paths; anything a person could use, a bot or zombie could flood so much better. And judging from my experience with email addresses, if there's a way to send spam, some fuckwit is going to do it and sell the method to other people.
16 March 2008
Tuck #136 released.
Tuck #137 has been first-draft-finished, but requires some rewriting, as the few proofers/CEs I have working mentioned that perhaps Tuck is having too much relaxation and fun, and I need to jazz the story up a bit. If you have an opinion, you need to tell me what it is or I won't know it.
The links page was not only updated but recolored and redone a bit. Now I don't need to scream when going from my nice dark and soothing webpages to GLOWINGWHITEBACKGROUNDOhGodMyEYES! Especially in the dark, which is where I do a lot of my computing. I'm still taking links, and adding links, you know...
Donations should pick up after I release two episodes in two weeks, right? Alas, I went and blew all our money on frivolities like gasoline, utility bills, and food... Hormone money is still lacking.
The best-of-a-bad-bunch laptop seems to not deal well with suspend/resume either, locking up and requiring a reboot, which on this'un requires a more-than-an-hour-wait, presumably for something to cool off. This has inhibited me from trying to install either a new version of Debian (it has potato) or the drivers for one of the many PCMCIA Ethernet cards I have; either requires multiple reboots, and I haven't felt like devoting several hours to the project. This is why the ZIP file has not been updated; it's too big for a floppy, and without Ethernet there's no way to get it off the laptop. I could, in theory, either run dosemu+PKZip on this box, or collect all the episodes onto the SO's box and do it there, but I haven't done those either. I'll do something soon, I bet.
09 March 2008
Good news, for once; Tuck #136 is in proofing, #137 is almost done, and I KNOW what I want to do in #138.
'Bout damned time.
Much thanks to everyone who has enabled me to catch up on food, drugs, utilities, and the like.
01 March 2008
Okay, finally. I have theoretically been working towards this all this morning, over the last !eight! hours. Which is why I suck, because I did maybe an hour's worth of work, if that.
The ZIP file has not been updated, because I need to run PKZip rather than the Unix version, which requires DOS, which I don't have set up on this computer, and the boots-once-in-ninety-minutes laptop still doesn't have drivers for any of the PCMCIA Ethernet cards, and the zipfile is waaaaaaaay too big to fit on a floppy.
On the better side, I have #136 ready for the proofers, and I am seriously thinking about putting it out in two weeks.
On the worse side...donations.
On the better side, nothing ELSE has gone spectacularly wrong around here... yet... And I did finish the aforementioned Wednesday. And Friday night is looking kind of amusing...
26 February 2008
On the one hand, Tuck #135 is nearly proofed and should be out this weekend; and I should be able to finish #136 tonight.
On the other, money is critical and I'd like to go grocery shopping RSN. Not to mention hormones, utility bills, etc. Donations would, naturally, make this happen.
An interesting web site you should NOT go to, because TV Tropes will ruin your life. It will. You'll spend days looking through entries, going "Oh GOD I HATE that! But I never knew it had a NAME!" Although I'm doing better than I was when I was ill, it's still a huge time-sucker. This is why I don't write Tuck on an Internet-connected computer; because I end up not writing Tuck on an Internet-connected computer, because I'm looking up Dead Unicorn Tropes or something.
Oddly enough, Tuck showed up on a few pages there; however, whoever did it - and it was not me, and you know I don't lie about these things - needs to remember that I prefer to have external links go to the index.html page rather than the writings.htm page. Also this'un needs to re-read the series, as they made some rather obvious mistakes.
I could write an essay/go off on a rant about CrazyPrepared, but not right now, I want to finish Wednesday.
14 February 2008
Happy Valentine's Day
I had not realized it had been this long since I wrote a Tucknote.
To update:
On the good side I suppose, I am on 'Net again, backed up, computer area completely rearranged and better than it was, CD-RW drive at the ready, laptop working (and "netting" via floppy drive - did I ever mention that I like having floppy drives? This is why), bills paid until March, relatively warm and dry and fed, I don't hurt THAT much, and - most important - I've got a Tuck episode going out for proofing today. Ought to be up in a couple of weeks.
30 December 2007
Three days left in the madness...
Donations have been coming in steadily; thank you all. The bills have been paid up completely, and the larder is nearly full - like laundry, you usually can't get it completely full because you're using the stuff out of it immediately.
Tuck writing has occurred; yay.
Check this out:
DM Of The Rings
This is likely funniest only to roleplaying gamers - by which I do not mean you
computer MUD/MUCK/MU* wankers. But if you did the paper-and-dice kind for a few years,
or a few decades, you will enjoy this. FOOD&DRINK WARNING: Do not go to a new page
without clearing your mouth, or you will choke.
Also note that it is all true. All of it.
Since yesterday I've felt something heavy growing in my chest. This morning,
I coughed a few times, and brought something up, and now...
I find it vaguely disgusting, in an abstract way,
that I can tell what respiratory disease I've got based on the
taste.
The SO seems to have gotten it at the same time too. This is annoying.
Another annoyance, is that my throat tends to hurt, either from the infection or the mouth-breathing; which makes me drink more fluids; which eventually have to come out. It's hard enough sleeping in between cough syrup doses, as Tuck mentioned; harder still when adding the aftereffects of gallons of liquid.
Yet another: I try to stockpile cough syrup and other OTC meds and things, so that I don't have to go to the grocery when I'm sick. However, being sick depletes the stockpile...
I suppose I should be thankful that nobody has been at the window lately. I'd really hate to have to deal with cops when I feel like this.
If you sent an email in the last few days and are wondering why I haven't replied, I haven't felt like doing it yet. Now I know why I haven't felt like doing it.
2.5 hours until the next dose...
23 December 2007
Eleven Days Left In The Madness...
Remember last year, actually about 18-19 months ago, when I mentioned someone was fucking around our ground-floor bedroom window about midnight, and they stole the window screen? And the scariest part was that they came back in five minutes after I ripped the window open and cursed them? (not the mark of a sane burglar - the cops didn't like that part at ALL, and neither did I...)
Well, tonight about 0400, scrabbling noises around our ground-floor bedroom window woke me up...
Really, this is not the approved method for belated Christmas shopping.
This time, I called the cops the first time, and there wasn't a second.
A weird thing was, one of the cops was the same one that was here 18-19 months ago. I recognized his face; I'm not sure he recognized me until I mentioned it, because he does this sort of thing a lot - as if it's his job or something? - but I don't, so it's sort of highlighted in my memory.
Anyway, I'm real fucking alert at the moment, but not quite focused enough to do Tuck writing. And since I moved the bedroom furniture around the last time - at least this time it didn't happen right next to my head - I don't need to do that again.
The SO and I are also going to have some more discussions on tactics.
Anyway... it would have been real nice if we had some sort of plan that we all knew, and remembered, and had practiced, and could trust the other person to do when awakened out of a sound sleep. Kind of like the Tuckers do.
Eleven Days Left In The Madness... and @$*@*&^!&@$ I can't wait for it to be over.
22 December 2007
Happy Winter Solstice!
And, Twelve Days Left In The Madness (counting to 02 Jan)
Meanwhile, I did finally get Tuck #134 done. Hardly worth the wait, I know. #135 is coming along, and shouldn't be delayed like this one was.
Utility bills have not been paid in two months. A donation or two would be appreciated, but I expect that once again releasing an episode will cause them to stop entirely.
Bookmarks have once again been checked, and some new ones added; it hasn't been prettified yet though. I am, of course, still taking links if anyone would send some to me.
I also found out that I am the sole 'live' website hosting GURPS High Heels, if you can believe that. So I managed to scrape up the original pictures and stick them in, and now the page is available in all its original glory. Hoo-ray. Note the picture showing relative heel heights.
14 December 2007
Right now, #134 is waiting on editing/proofing. I am writing #135, sometimes; but I also redid the links page(s) like I said I was going to. Go take a look.
Donations would actually allow us to pay the utility bills. They are overdue.
One week or so until the Winter Solstice... not quite three until the insanity is over.
01 December 2007
No, it's not out yet. Yes, I suck.
The SO had one day of Acute Gastroenteritis, and one is-this-a-stroke-or-what incident the day after (it wasn't; but it wasn't fun either). My nerves are a little frazzled.
Slightly on the plus side, as a part of the convert-the-links project, I updated the Links page as it currently exists. Note that I don't have a lot of links there at the moment, and some of the categories are very sparse. This is your fault; if you'd send me more links, I could put them in. However, I also have to add the current bookmarks from the browsers, which I mentioned should be in the thousand-plus range (though you won't get all of them).
The anti-spam measures I took seem to be working; I haven't gotten a single one yet since I activated them. Yay... Note, however, that this probably merely puts the change-the-email-address off for a time. I'm certain that someone manually added me to a spammer's list, and I'm sure that it will happen again and again until I'm getting the few hundred a day that other people report. Most of those will be filtered out, but not all...and my tolerance for spam is really low, since I can remember years of my life in which there was no spam at all, anywhere.
25 November 2007
We hope you had a nice American Gastronomic Overindulgence Day. We spent Too Much Money on grocery goodies, which we've been eating for the past four or five days. No turkey, though, just to be iconoclastic. Plus the SO wanted ham, not turkey.
Having spent basically all of our money on food last week, we'd really like some donations to come our way.
I've been spectacularly unmotivated to write lately. Bad bad BAD Ellen! I have, however, been somewhat proofing the next episode, so it should be out next weekend. It's the one after that...
I have done some useful things, though.
Pacchi got in contact with me, and is producing Tuck related art. Some new items are now located here. Feedback is doubly appreciated, by Pacchi and me both. I'm awaiting word on what email address to use; until then, email me and I'll forward it. Anything at all is better than nothing, yah? Yah.
Backups have been done, twice. Backups are good.
The spam has increased dramatically (again) to about 10-20 per day. *sighs* You know, I was on the Internet before this kind of shit even existed... Anyway, I might end up changing my email address again, but before that I'm going to try changing my local email setup to include Naive Bayesian filtering (I have been saving all the spam to its own file for precisely this contingency). This sort of suggests changing the local MTA from Exim to Postfix. This is the sort of configuration change I find scary, because it WILL break things until I get the new configuration right. Also I need to back things up again. But if it works, I shan't be changing the email address. Also other things may be possible. Exim supposedly has wonderful documentation, but I find it suckful because there's so much and it seems not-well-cross-referenced. An O'Reilly book would do the trick, I'm sure; but I refuse to spend $50 on a single book for a single program.
I've been very very lax on the local Links page (bookmarks), yet I've
also been eagerly collecting bookmarks in various browsers.
Transferring them from their various file to the Links page is a severe
pain in the ass, which is why I haven't been doing it. I am now
looking at a variety of free ways to convert bookmarks into other file
types. Debian packages "xbel-utils" and "bk2site" are the main
contenders at the moment; neither does quite what I want, though.
I may end up putting up different ones and asking you which I should
use.
Also I have well over a thousand bookmarks to integrate, sort, edit,
and so on. This is taking a while. Hopefully, though, when it's done
there will be a very quick transfer-to-website option so you can be up
to date; and links
checking (see below) will also be so quick and painless I can do this
weekly or whenever, instead of the previous semiannual.
The local GUI, Debian + X + Blackbox (the smallest) is working well; though I still use commandline for about two-thirds of my browsing (Lynx no habla Javascipt, Java, Flash, tables, or inline images, which means pages load in seconds even through dialup) and 80% of my other computer work. Also working well is Iceweasel the Firefox-under-a-different-name-for-finicky-licensing-reasons browser. If you are using Firefox (or Iceweasel), may I suggest the following addons?
21 October 2007
Eh, whoops, my bad; haven't been doing notes.
But I did some writing, and I have something to do next weekend, so I got this one out "early". Be thou yayness, verily.
Enjoy episode. Donate.
29 September 2007
Tuck 132 is up. I'm tired; I did a long set of proofer-merges last night and then two passes myself this morning. And I have a major rewrite or two on 133 to do, plus first-drafting on 134...
23 September 2007
Well, response has been somewhat underwhelming, both in the donation category and in the opinions-about-print category. In fact, I would go so far as to say they've both sucked.
Ah well. I've been working on either fresh Tuck or figuring out how to use new software - I hate new software; I very much hate MS-style software, and bloody OpenOffice is very much MS-style - to get Tuck into print with the least amount of other-company-suckitude.
Wouldn't you like to know what Tuck's wearing to the ballet? And what happens afterwards?
19 September 2007
This is sort of an odd mid-week update; normally I don't write a Tucknote except around the weekend. But Things Have Been Happening.
On the bad side, donations have slowed to a trickle. We do not have food money at this time, much less utility bill money for the upcoming first of the month. Send some money!
On the good side, I've done a lot on computers this half-week.
First, I did a major backup of the server (which is also my
computer) on Saturday, five DVD's worth.
Have you backed up your computer recently?
Best way to do this IMO is to just take your favorite CD/DVD mastering
program - Nero and Roxio's EasyCD are common - and just copy over/write
selected chunks of your filesystem hierarchy to a disk (and then, on the next disk, do
the parts you couldn't fit the first time). That way, you can load the
data to any other computer (that has the appropriate drive) and you're
okay. The problem with any backup software I've ever seen, including
Unix tape backups, is that you need both the specialized hardware, AND
the special software, to be running on another computer, to get your data
back. CD-ROM drives are ubiquitous nowadays, and DVD-ROM drives nearly
so; if you write them in Joliet format and close the disk, they are
usable in nearly every computer.
Second, I mounted another 9Gb hard drive and copied over the previously- installed 9Gb (the one that holds the OS and program files, and my person data) directly. I do not think this is really possible in Windoze; I don't ever recall getting it to work. But it makes recovery from a disk error - hardware or software - trivial - just switch some cables.
Third, and the reason for the first and second, I performed a major version upgrade, from Debian Sarge to Etch (for the Debian pedants: yes, I know the names of Debian releases are not capitalized). That went well, though slowly - there were something like four or five hundred packages to upgrade, and dragging all that through the modem was not pretty. But it got done, and I've gotten everything working again (the upgrade ate the sound capability - that took another "upgrade" to ALSA).
Fourth, I installed X. I also subsequently got dosemu working, for the
first time; now I can use my favorite editor in Linux as well as
DOS.
(for future reference, you need: xserver-xorg; xdm or another
display manager; and a window manager such as blackbox. xfs font
server is nice but not required. xdm is the little bastard that
installs itself in rcX.d and autoruns the bloody GUI during boot.
Remove the link in /etc/rc2.D and it won't)
Fifth, I installed OpenOffice 2.whatever's-in-Debian-stable.
Sixth (though chronologically this happened before the weekend) I requested (and got) a set of altered Tuck files, that had all the hard-coded CR/LF pairs removed. They happen to be CSS-based HTML. This could be important.
About two weeks ago I signed up a user account on Lulu.com, and did some investigating.
All this adds up to
The path looks like:
Note: The one software thing I need to do, is to either: check that the SO's OpenOffice 1.x.x can read the 2.x files I can write over here; or somehow install 2.x on her system (it barfed on installation, complaining about the lack of a new installer).
None of these things are "finished"; the first two-thirds are going to be concurrent, like the write-code/compile/link/test/debug cycle of making software.
What I don't know, entirely, is how I want the book to look. Since Pacchi (see the artwork) has disappeared in the last couple of years, I can't get Pacchi covers. Damnit. I'd REALLY LIKE them, but I'm not going to do two or three and then have to do the rest of the series in a different cover style. Pacchi, if you're reading this...
I'm also not sure about fonts, what to do with the cute end quotes, and similar mechanical stuff dealing with printing.
I DO know the basic structure of a volume (and yes, there will be a lot more than one volume - the idea of printing it in 6-point type and nearly no margins in a seven hundred page anchor was, erm, discouraged by fans on Tuckerspawn). It will have:
If you have opinions on any of these matters, then I'd like to read them. Please DO NOT say "Well everyone does
it this way"; this is a stupidity. "Everyone" also uses Microsoft,
which I don't. "Everyone" stays in the gender they were born into and
raised in, which I didn't. If you have a real reason, use that
instead.
Also, don't claim you have such-and-such experience in the Real World
with books unless you're willing to point me to sources I could use to
independently verify your claims; like a phone number at the company you
claim to have done publishing work for, and the name you worked under at
that time. Otherwise, I won't believe it, and it's a waste of my time
to claim such a thing without providing verification.
However, "I saw {one particular thing} in a certain book, and I really
liked it" is perfectly valid, if you can actually describe or show me
what it looks like. Or "What about {...}?" I don't require that you
be a professional to contribute.
There should be a big discussion over on the Tuckerspawn forum shortly, as soon as I set it up. If you're registered, or want to register, do so and throw your hat into the ring.
14 September 2007
Currently I am not sucking too bad. Amazing. And hopefully Tuck #132 will be out by the end of the month (and not waiting past that for me to get off my ass). Maybe it's the end of summer - we could open the windows today, in the morning, for the first time in months. I did some Googling, and more than a handful of people have also come up with the concept of "reverse SAD". Comes from growing up in the South, methinks.
In case you wondered, donations have been low. We have all the bills current - for the next fortnight - but buying food would be nice... *sighs wistfully*
02 September 2007
Well, something to read on Labor Day; Tuck #131 is released.
My mind has been scattered this last week. I have also found two more kitty whiskers, and carefully saved them along with the others.
A bit IN the kitty would be helpful, assuming I can get out of the house to spend it. I haven't managed until today, and that went poorly.
On the brighter side, I found an odd site: Iusedtobelieve.com [EXTERNAL LINK]
A choice one:
I had a strange fear that if I closed my eyes in the bathtub, William Shakespeare would come up through
the drain and kill me. I knew his name, but I had no idea who he was, so I just naturally assumed he was
some sort of bathtub vampire.
Have any good, odd ones of your own?
27 August 2007
Writing has been slow, and will be stopped for a few days.
(please don't send sympathy letters - they'll only hurt me worse)
In addition, someone's put my email address on a spammer's list. I'd really suggest you don't click on anything in an email that purports to go to YouTube; the emails I'm getting SAY 'YouTube' as the link, but that's not the address of the link. Those of you who read your email in HTML, won't be able to see this; with Mutt, it's blindingly obvious. The spamming has been small so far, but I expect it will increase tremendously. I may end up changing email addresses again before Christmas.
I've been abominable lately. I'm not exactly depressed - or I wasn't - but I've had no energy for anything for the last month. Getting groceries has been Very Hard, much less anything else.
I found this piece, I dunno where, on my Web roamings a while back, and saved it for here....
Posted by Ellie, 27: It is disgusting how we live and I'm a British Citizen, the Americans have been a greedy nation and now THEY must make changes which OUR politicians must make sure of. [emphasis added; rest of post deleted] Saturday, February 3rd 2007 @ 3:36 AM
Ellie, she said as if this poster could hear her, this is what
we Americans call "an invasion". We revolted - and made it stick -
once, and the last time you tried this invasion thing we eventually
beat you out of our country again. Once we noticed you. Now we have
thermonuclear weapons that can vaporize large sections of your
population and your historical artifacts and set much of the rest on
fire. Yes, we Americans invade other countries and do the same thing to
them, that you are (effectively but not directly) suggesting
England/Britain do to us; but we've never felt a strong ideological need
to be consistent that I can tell.
Besides, you're just jealous that we can still throw our weight around
like an Empire - like you USED to do, back when you could.
Oy.
28 July 2007
Tuck #130 is out, #131 is finished, #132 is coming along nicely...
And, the electric bill is paid.
Though I had a spazz the morning after I paid it, when the electricity went off. As I've mentioned a few times, I cannot sleep without fan noise; right now, I have a 120v 120mm computer-case-type fan plugged in near the bed. I woke out of a sound sleep and was in the front room before it spun down to a stop. Luckily, it was not us; unluckily I suppose, it took two hours for them to "restore service" - which often means replacing what the suicide squirrels targeted. If you want to know what sort of disruption actual terrorism can cause, look for squirrel + electrical transformer incidents.
The squirrels, as far as I know, did not release a statement claiming responsibility, nor stating their demands. Oh well.
22 July 2007
Ow! Crap! I didn't realize it had been a month...
Okay. On the bad side, I've been depressed, and not writing; also the electric bill is overdue, now with a cutoff notice, because we haven't had the money to spare after food and gas. (Donations would, of course, fix this) The SO's computer dying one day a couple weeks ago did not help; I have old issues from when she used to freak out over computer problems, and I keep expecting her to do that now - which she doesn't, because she's drugged cross-eyed, under medical supervision - which makes it hard to concentrate on technical concepts. She did not freak out, and I did eventually get the disk transplanted into another computer - Windows does NOT like this, BTW, but older versions can be forced into adapting - but the stress I was under was not something you'd believe if I told you about it.
On the good side, I am full of writing tonight, and got some proofing done, as well as work on the next episode, plus a nearly complete plan to finish it and go into the next one. Maybe two. So Tuck #130 should be out next weekend, and possibly one after in three weeks.
If the electricity continues. Hint hint.
22 June 2007
Tuck #129 is finished; #130 is in proofing, a bit early; and #131 is about half done. I want to write more.
Bills still haven't been paid yet, though. Donations get them paid.
16 June 2007
The reread of the last ten chapters took me longer than I expected; Tuck #129 revision is finished, and it should be out next weekend; #130 first draft is completed, and will be going out to the proofers later today, after I make another editing pass myself. #131 is... interesting.
On the other hand, bills haven't been paid yet.
10 June 2007
Well, I am in the middle of revising #129; I have what I remember as a large number of small chunks to rewrite, and I should probably re-read the last five episodes or so, just to make sure. That shouldn't take long... I'd guess it's no more than two weeks away at this point.
Donations, you know.
I also got one unit of caseless computer done, the new shelf for housing them, and my computer area a little cleaned up. Total cost for the 7'6" unit is around $15 in "new" materials plus stuff I had on hand from before. Excuse me while I feel clever about being a packrat...
With some luck, and some more work, I should be able to reduce the clutter around the computer area down from "three computers on various floor or furniture plus a tangled mess of cables" to "one shelf plus a pair of speakers". This has to be a good thing. I'm still mentally juggling where to put some pieces, but that will continue until I physically move them and find out what works and what doesn't.
If you are very nice, I shall not only put up pictures but also directions. Most of you will hate the idea, and that's fine; if I wanted to be like everyone else I would be.
I now have a decent idea for a television-containing box, and where to put it. The sort of 360 degree swivel bearing one finds under a "lazy susan" is available from www.woodcraft.com for around $1, with a 200lb capacity. That ought to work for anything I can lift... And, amazingly, the television is a lot less annoying than I thought it would be, even when I permanently disconnected the speaker. I haven't gone into a frothing rage over some stupidity more than once a day, and I think less... which is about the same rate as the SO's habit of reading Internet news ignites me.
The last few Tucknotes have been longer than they were a few months previous... I guess it's been too long since someone made me regret putting personal information here. I'm sure it'll happen soon, so don't worry; the Tucknotes will shorten right up to the bare minimum of information on Tuck when it happens.
27 May 2007
I have just sucked lately. I apologize. Hopefully the episode won't suck, though CE/proofers have said this one is kind of slow. It's not slow, it's just... calmer. Despite the noise.
Locally, the SO's therapist recommended a fucking TELEVISION. And gave us one. Which had exactly one 75-ohm connection. This is probably why she was getting rid of it. It now also sports a 1/8" mono jack in the front, which is the only way I'd keep the fucking thing in the house; the speaker - and while the case has room for two there's only one - is now totally disconnected and she can only listen via earphones. No we are not getting cable; it sucks just as much but on more channels than broadcast television and, last I saw, had MORE commercials per half hour than broadcast, in addition to costing money.
Also more furniture must be built to handle this inconvenient box, plus the associated other-source feeds she wants, like VHS and DVD players.
Fleas seem to be gone; it is, however, about time to run some more insecticide over where the cat has been sleeping, juuuuust in case. I shall, however, wait until the cat is not actually sleeping on those spots. The virtual fleas have also disappeared, thankfully.
16 April 2007
Well, I can't say the stress has gotten better. But I did finally get episode #127 finished.
The house has developed a raging case of fleas. The cat has gone insane; she's been acting like a normal cat, going places she shouldn't and knocking stuff over, yowling at odd hours, and generally being a pain in the ass. Today, finally, the Advantage antiflea topical came in, and I also hit a pro pest-control shop for something to spray the house with. Naturally they also happen to sell the other antiflea topical (and the one comparative review I found said they worked about the same for fleas).
*sighs*
Also, the real fleas biting me are bad enough; the virtual fleas, when I can feel something biting me but I look and there's nothing there, are worse. But I didn't have the virtual ones until the real ones. Hopefully liberal amounts of poison will exorcise both.
I would suggest, if anyone has a similar problem, don't even bother with a grocery store solution; they seem to be an utter waste of money. It's worth it to get some professional level permethrin or similar, FleaFix or other IGR, and so on.
Many many thanks to everyone who has donated in the last few weeks. I did get the car window fixed; now I have to go back and try and get the door lock fixed (which worked fine before the window glass got into the mechanism; and fool me didn't specify "Make sure the door mechanisms work" when I had the window replaced).
I'm still very tired and unoptimistic, though.
31 March 2007
Life has been utterly suckful and stressful this week. First a radiator leak in the car - wide enough that I could hear it dripping but couldn't see the source - and the only auto mechanics I know in town I do not trust. Naturally I discovered this by the car overheating while out and about in the rain while dressed nicely. I feel vaguely clever for having a recycled 3L of water in the car (milk jug type bottles leak far far too easily during normal trunk use); I feel unclever about not having a pair of flats for similar circumstances.
Located a mechanic via Internet research, tried it, got rained on during the day whilst traveling back and forth; spent $300, got it fixed.
Next day, I find my driver's side window smashed, so hard in fact that there is glass inside the car, on the windshield, on the roof of the car, on the trunk lid nearly around to the passenger side, and on the ground in a 0.5x2.5m smear. Nothing stolen, and nothing disturbed either; apparently "just" vandalism. No one, of course, saw or heard anything. Window repair will be $200 at the one place I called; I haven't had the heart yet to try pricing other places.
I also called the auto mechanic to get him to verify the windows had been intact when I left his place Thursday afternoon. I have a hard time believing this myself.
Of course it rained last night. I did manage to catch this info before it actually rained, and got a patch up which might hold and might not strip the paint off when removed, but I am not very hopeful.
So I have done nothing on Tuck this week. I'd like to do something today, but haven't gotten to it yet; I've been trying to sleep.
Donations would be very helpful at this time. Bills are not paid this month either.
Altogether I would not call this a good week.
25 March 2007
Tuck is coming along; slower on the rewrite than on the first-draft, but coming along nicely. Many surprises... =)
18 March 2007
I really do not want to stop writing at the moment; #128 is coming along in fits and starts, as my back can stand the pain of sitting (badly). I think the excruciating agony from my lower back at times like this is god's way of saying "Stop $&*&ing around and set up a proper work environment. Stupid!" with a cuff to the head.
Lemme get back to writing Tuck.
Update: Episode is now over the minimum length, but there's some more needed... today has been going tolerably well writing-wise. Maybe god was saying "Get up and walk around occasionally, and burn some of that fat off your ass." Hard to say; I do better with email than Omens, Portents, and Signs.
10 March 2007
Hopefully banged the error out without introducing new ones. Tuck #126 out.
04 March 2007
Tuck writing continues. So does editing; #126 has an error in it I have to bang at for a while. Which is why it will be out next week.
17 February 2007
Tuck writing continues. There will likely be a new episode up at the beginning of March.
Bills are current, though I didn't get the phone bill paid in time and they sent me this month's bill showing last month's unpaid... *sighs* I hate that. But many thanks to everyone who donated this month.
Meanwhile, did you know that Daylight Savings in the US has now changed
the start/end dates? Yep.
Read about
it at the US Naval Observatory website.
Suggesting that Congress is the opposite of progress...
On a totally unrelated note, there is an item of physiological interest, Named 2nd to 4th digit ratio which is "merely" whichever of your fingers is SECOND longest, the index or the ring finger. Oddly enough, it seems to be (probability disclaimer disclaimer) sex-differentiated, with males having a longer 4th digit (ring finger) and females having a longer 2nd digit (index finger). Oddities...
04 February 2007
Well, I haven't had the money to pay any of the utility bills this month, and I need hormones Real Soon Now... and I'm sure that as in the last three or four times, donations will stop immediately and not resume for two or three weeks, but here's another episode of Tuck anyway.
Enjoy.
27 January 2007
Once again, I put out an episode, and once again, donations almost completely stopped. This is very discouraging.
Very discouraging.
I also lost my server's uptime, at 165 days; apparently the UPS works for momentary flickers but not for a few minutes. Damn. At least it rebooted; sometimes I wonder about that one's hardware.
Next one should be out in early February, I hope.
07 January 2007
Tuck #124 is out.
So is something with my local network; I seem to have buggered some setting or another, and now the laptop won't transfer files easily to the server. This means I can't easily back up the laptop (which is ten years old at this point) Damn; I smell a learning experience coming. And quickly.
Don't forget, I changed my email address. But not the address for donations, if that's what you were worried about. =)
31 December 2006
My email address is changing. To the email address that is at the bottom of this page. Immediately. Within twelve hours, I shall be shutting off the 'ehayes' email-box, which will then bounce anything sent to it.
I have gotten tired of the ever-increasing spam to the 'ehayes' box, and the last four trojans that showed up kicked it.
You should go and read this information if you run Windows. If you run Windows AND Outlook of any sort, you should get another email program. There are free ones out there, and they don't do the computer equivalent of holding you down while some nasty biker-mass murderer rapes you anally.
I wouldn't be so, uhm, 'pungent' in my language if Outlook hadn't been so fucked up from design. However, note that - having warned you and advised you - you will get the complete antithesis of sympathy if you complain to me about what happened via Outlook, Windows, and some malific email. I'll call you names and laugh at you.
Why not use 'ellen' like you used to?
I was going to, but dearly-bought caution suggested I activate that
mailbox and let it sit for a while first, just to check. It collected
four spams within 24 hours; I have not used this account in years, and
it's been bouncing everything that went to it. So the spammers have been
getting at least 4 bounces a day every day from that account and it
hasn't stopped them in YEARS.
Fuck. This is vaguely scary... until you realize that nowadays, the "thing to do" is to hijack other peoples' computers and send the spam through them, through their accounts if possible... and, hey, guess what? Spyware and email trojans are a great way to take over peoples' computers to turn them into spam-spewing zombies.
Are you still running Outlook or Outlook Express? What are you, stupid?
Writing continues, donations have been sparse... luckily I laid in supplies before the bedamned Week/Fortnight Of Madness. So the kitty has somewhat-fresh litter...
Oh, and we've almost survived The Madness... and remember to eat some blackeyed peas tomorrow to ensure your prosperity in the coming year.
23 December 2006
Happy (belated) Solstice!
The tuck.zip file which was not updated last week, due to an ld10t error, has been updated.
I've written a bit, but I've been very low-energy lately. I'm not so much still sick, it's the "after-sick" in which I am still guzzling cough syrup - $20 worth of the cheap stuff, well over a quart - and sleeping no more than five hours at a time, waking up and having an immediate unproductive coughing fit, and coughing little tiny bits up the rest of the day. Eugh. And this might last as much as a fortnight more. *tired sigh*
Still, writing is going, and editing/proofing shall be going as soon as I emit some source.
15 December 2006
Tuck 123 is finally up. Do your part...
I was fully intending to have this episode out last week, but Wednesday I fell ill, and I've felt like $*** since then. I pretty much ate slept eliminated took drugs and read, much like Tuck being restricted to shell programming. Respiratory, as a betting man would have predicted; I am finally at the stage where I merely wake up and have sixty seconds to do anything before I overbreathe and explode in a paroxysm of coughing for at least a minute. This is the part I hate most, more than the Nose That Drips Like A Faucet or the chunky cream-of-chicken soup taste in my mouth for days from Unspeakable Foulness. But my energy levels are climbing, to the point I can actually think about doing stuff like writing, instead of ... sitting there.
I probably won't have another episode up before the end of the holidays... might have one around the first week or so of January.
Luckily, fevers are conducive to 'executive planning' of the sort that can only be committed by the unemployed and the hideously overpaid strategic planning sorts; I got a few situations in Tuck worked out much better than I'd managed before. *chortles*
Unfortunately, I no longer have a fever. Just snot, in all its endless varieties...
Front room reformat went sort of okay; I didn't have to disconnect anything, which preserves the 120+ day uptime on the server, and I got another computer up; however, the furniture is not conducive to how I want everything arranged, and I still need to re-shove a lot of cables, once I figure out where to put them.
On the SO, all path reports except one report benign whatevers. I found out how to remove stitches, and that I can do a better job than the last yahoo, with stuff I have in my purse (which I am not allowed to carry into the facility; now I know why, because I might show them up). Less pain, less bleeding, faster. *sighs*
01 December 2006
Oy, been a while...
Tuck is roughly on track; I might put one out next weekend, if the editing keeps going well. (Can't have enough editing passes...)
Donations have been better; much thanks to everyone who sent some money, as everyone seems to like it when I pay bills on time. At this point, I actually have the electric up to date, and the phone is as-soon-as-I-get-out-and-run-errands. The kitty has fresh litter, too, for which she REALLY thanks all of you.
However, I may be offline for a day or three, as I need to reformat the front room again (wherein the server and my workstation sit). This involves disconnecting things, and I've noticed a regrettable tendency for disconnected things to not work when reconnected; this applies to anything, but especially the server's powerup. Not sure if/when I'll actually have to unplug it, but it might happen, and then I might be out for a while. At this point, I have enough crap computer stuff - which is the local tech level - to rebuild the system a couple times over, but doing so would take me a while...
Luckily, this isn't where I write Tuck. Tuck, in fact, can be written with the use of any Intel-type computer that has a 3.5" floppy drive, as my favorite editor can live on one such disk (if "high" density, 1440kb) along with system files, CD-ROM DOS driver, and nearly a meg of Tuck (which is at least the last twenty episodes).
19 November 2006
Since Tuck #122 went up, I have received zero donations. When I put Tuck #121 up, it was two weeks and a rather sharp message here before I got any donations. (then those donations paid the overdue phone and electric, and bought two weeks of groceries and sundries. I am quite grateful!)
This is not encouraging. It seems, to my overly-pattern-seeking neural net brain, that IF I put up an episode THEN donations stop.
Is this the pattern you want me to find? Is this the pattern you want me to base future actions upon?
Prove me wrong. Please.
SO had more things removed, this time bilateral arm and a couple from the torso. (no I didn't get to keep any of them) The torso items were benign; we don't have pathology reports on the arm ones yet. She's got two sets of stitches, and they want us to come back in two weeks to remove them. I'm inclined to save the $15 gas money it takes to get there and back, and the two hours minimum travel; it's not that hard to remove stitches.
As for Tuck, which seems to be the least of anyone's concerns, Halloween night seems to be dragging a lot; or maybe that's just because of all the things that are happening that day. It's going to be a Halloween to remember... if Tuck takes notes promptly.
11 November 2006
Thanks to those who donated, Tuck episode 122 is now up.
Writing has progressed... Halloween is getting realllllly interesting. If I keep getting money enough to pay the bills, you will get to read this; perhaps sooner than usual, as I have been thinking I could almost go to a fortnight-and-a-half release schedule, if I keep the writing up.
There has been some Real Life in my life lately, which I hate; and next week is yet another trip to get yet more skin thingies removed from the SO. I'm starting to wish we had kept the first ones; we could make a little kitsch-looking rack and keep the cut-off bits in formaldehyde. Ah well.
28 October 2006
Donations in the last fortnight have been very poor... so poor, in fact, that I may get cut off from the 'Net as the phone is disconnected. It's over two months due at this point, because I haven't had the money to spare after food.
But if you think this will stop me writing Tuck, you're wrong. It'll just stop me POSTING Tuck (as well as editing). So even if I can't access the Internet, I'll just keep writing on, past Halloween - which I have achieved already in draft, BTW - and you'll just have to wonder what has been happening to Tuck and his friends and associates...
14 October 2006
Tuck 121 is up. I have been exceedingly lax this week, in all things, but I feel some writing coming on... or maybe a chest cold. No, it's writing...
Hopefully also some chores will occur tomorrow, when I have done some writing.
On the good side... ah, hell, I don't want to jinx it. I just seem to be doing better at both writing and getting episodes up than I was a year or two ago, and I hope the seeming upward long-term trend continues. I'm TRYING to improve...
I can still use some costume ideas, though now more for background color than important characters.
Did you donate this month?
08 October 2006
Half done with #124, though I could REALLY USE some ideas for costumes for the kids at school. I have Tuck, Debbie, Mike, George, Kim, and Jill... and James, of course; the rest need YOUR HELP in finding decent costumes so they won't be laughed at.
Proofing drags, but I think I can get 121 up next weekend.
01 October 2006
First-draft of *counts on fingers* 123 is done, and proofing begins. 121 and 122 are already in proofing... which is not going fast. Sadly, the writing seems to be going faster.
A few links have been added as well.
Donations are nearly up to last month's bills. Which ain't this month, natch.
24 September 2006
Writing continues, despite all sorts of nastiness, including a heart- stopping dropped-the-laptop incident. It may be time to upgrade to something that isn't held together with duct tape... luckily, the floppy drive still worked, so I was able to save the Tuck writings thereupon.
Donations pay the bills so we can continue to eat and have electricity and a phone. And buy fresh kitty litter.
10 September 2006
Tuck 120 is out. This may be the LAST episode for a while, unless I get some bill money. That requires donations, folks.
And a hearty "Still got my shooting fingers you bloody wogs!" to those who scorned my insistence on having floppy drives on all computers; you wouldn't have an episode today if it wasn't for floppies.
02 September 2006
Tuck 120 is within a week or so of publication; 121 is in proofing; I've been slow in writing 122 because Real Life Is Full Of Shit, and a couple of RL people decided to fuck me over.
Donations would be very helpful; not only have they raised the phone bill 25% but they want it earlier in the month. Plus my expenses have gone up due to fuckation.
20 August 2006
Tuck 119 is out. Proofing continues (slowly, always slowly) on 120 and 121; I'm still writing 122.
Send money! The kitty is running low on food... *picture of very sad kitty with cheeks sucked in* See? Hungry kitty! *picture of kitty flopped over on her side* Too weak to stand up!
Mom showed up, with several cubic meters of Stuff, which I now have to cram into some sort of order within the walls. This is the reason for the extra two-day delay; I had a lot less "free" time than I thought. We're decent friends, I think...
I now have a sewing machine - Kenmore 1640, I think - in good working order (two shop visits to two repair shops in two towns saw to that) and so I now have something to do in my copious free time... and with my copious free space. Haha.
Comments and emails always welcome... but read The Rules first.
12 August 2006
Proofers have been in relatively short supply lately, but the next episode should be out next week. Hopefully Friday. I had to do a couple of extensive rewrites.
The usual plea for Donations. Electric bill still hasn't been paid...
Luckily, I have been going on, and the next episode is also in proofing at the same time; I have yet another rewrite & finish to do tonight on, um, *counts on fingers* episode 121. But I think this is going to be an all-nighter, so I've plenty of time.
Mom has somewhat derailed her schedule, so I don't know what day she'll be showing up, but sometime next week and/or weekend.
31 July 2006
Whups, a couple days late... I wanted to start doing these on Saturdays. Apologies.
Donations keep us in food, electricity, and connectivity, and the cat in kitty litter and larks' tongues sauteed in Guernsey butter. [that's a joke. Anyone ever read The Silent Miaow?] Seriously, it's starting to look grim again...
I've slacked off a little in writing compared to the previous fortnight; the episode count is up to 2 & 1/2. Proofing is still the major stumbling block, unfortunately; but I'm working on that.
The SO is now relatively staple-less, which she definitely appreciates. The docs pulled a switch on me the last time, so once again I didn't actually get to talk to them. Cowards!
My mother is coming to visit in a couple of weeks. I haven't seen them in a few years, and it's been a lot more than that since she came here, rather than me there. Don't think this is an especial thawing of relationships, though; the relationship isn't bad, and she's bringing a sewing machine for me - making room for which has been a major time- and calorie-sink lately - and I think she wants me to build her another computer.
23 July 2006
Two episodes in proofing, a third has begun... Yep, no kidding.
Bills are also starting to come up again. Not helped by the last trip to the moron-I-mean-surgeon, who looked at the staples on the SO's arm and went, "Nope! Come back next week!" Thanks for nothing you fuckwit... now give me the gas money I spent back! (the three hours spent are irrevocably gone...)
So Donations are appropriate. The less I worry, the more I write.
Speaking of worried, which I am not; one of the bits-removed on the SO's arm was benign, the other was a melanoma, caught before it got greater than 1cm and less than a year old and presumed removed-entirely. Hardly the first skin cancer, doubtful it's the last...
Mostly recovered from cold/whatever. I hate snot. I especially hate eating snot for a week, which didn't quite happen this time, but has in the past.
16 July 2006
Work continues, though slower; I read "The Coming Plague" by Laurie Garrett in a couple of days, and either by coincidence or perversity I also seem to have picked up a cold/URI. I don't think this is a case of MSS (Medical School Syndrome) since I noted the pre-sickness feelings IN WRITING before I picked up the book; however, I'm perverse enough to have an interest in things like Ebola while feeling ill, so maybe it worked in reverse.
You'll be happy (I hope) to note that I am currently showing no signs of Ebola such as massive hemorrhaging, high fever, or dementia.
The SO has a dozen or more staples in her arm after a skin cancer removal Friday. She's bearing up well despite the fact that the cutter who did it apparently doesn't believe in pain medication. Nice. She didn't tell me this until we were on our way home, most likely because I am a great believer in pain medication, and might have attempted to convert the doctor in my own inimitable way. He also skipped the cancers on the other arm, for no apparent reason. I truly appreciate his thoughtfulness in condemning us to another three hours of driving plus Ghu knows what in waiting time and other bullshit to get those taken off at a later time.
So I haven't been writing very fast this last half of the week. I have been writing some, however. I may end up delaying release of the next episode a bit, until more proofing accumulates - one of them actually managed to convince the parole board she wasn't a threat to society, can you imagine? - and this would be good as it allows me to knit that episode together with the subsequent one(s) better.
More specifically, I thought I was finished with #119 but I missed an obvious thing that required a substantial alteration; the rewrite is half done. #120 is I think more than half done, and I know where it's going so all I have to do is sit down and write about it. #121 is not plotted but I know what's going on, for the most part... and so on and so on.
09 July 2006
Been a busy week. It being Independence Day (American), I decided to get off my a$$ and re-setup the crypto stuff I had before. So, you now get the weird-looking footer at the end of every email, which is a GnuPG digital signature. Key is here.
I also finished #118 - now going up on the site - and finished the first draft of #119.
Donations help keep us ALL free, in some nebulous but definite way I can explain to you if you have a couple of hours and a credulous nature. More seriously, donations pay for our (me, the SO, and the cat) food, utilities, and kitty litter.
02 July 2006
Time flies... but Tuck is moving along. #118 is in proofing, and should be up next week. #119 is half finished, and I expect to get more done today.
Donations are always good; they buy things like electricity (runs computers), phone (allows my computers to talk to the Internet), and food (lack of which keeps me away from computers as I attempt to catch small wildlife and dogs).
25 June 2006
Tuck #118 is first-draft-finished, and is now in proofing. This is going to take a while, I think; the proofing phase is slower than it used to be. Tuck #119 has begun - well, I've begun writing it - and it may be written a touch faster. Or not. I hope so.
Donations are definitely appreciated, and well-used. We're almost caught up to the point we can afford food without slighting some other obligation.
18 June 2006
Good news: the first draft of Tuck 118 is half finished.
Bad news: we're running out of money. Donations are where the food money, bills money, etc., come from. Having electrical power (bill not paid in two months) truly promotes writing via computer. Yes, I could stand to lose a few pounds by not eating for a fortnight, but instinct WILL propel me out the door to hit the local dumpsters quite quickly; and I shan't take a laptop.
11 June 2006
Tuck 117 is out. Next one is "back to usual" if you can remember that far back.
Donations would be very helpful...
04 June 2006
I apologize for the long delay and non-info. I am aiming Tuck #117 to be released next weekend.
Donations pay the bills, which are mounting again to critical levels.
What follows is a touch of explanation for some of the delay; I really don't want sympathy, and in fact I debated not putting this up at all, because of the likelihood of getting stupid "sympathy" letters and "suggestions". I don't need them; I am quite certain I shall get them anyway.
Delay was caused by a recurrence of black depression (2 weeks) and the curious incident in the nighttime last weekend.
To summarize, me and the SO were going to sleep when a perp started
fiddling with the window screen on the bedroom window (which window was
within inches of my head); I barked at him and he took off. Before I
calmed down, he came back - I say within five minutes, SO says ten - and
yanked the screen off and ran (taking the screen). I did not shoot him
because: A) all the guns in the house were removed due to suicide risk
some years ago; B) I didn't trust my instincts (which said "Get a
weapon") over my 'reason' (which said "Too late now, you're being
silly").
The only reason I'm glad I didn't shoot him is that I'd be
embroiled in legal crap for the next six months, at best.
What creeped everyone, cops included, was that he came back within 5 or
10 minutes to a place that he knew was alerted. This strikes me as
similar to rabies; a derangement of mental state so profound that even
basic cunning is gone. Cop's opinion was that he was intent on
harm-to-persons rather than theft-of-property.
I did go after him the second time, but I should've gone through the window, not the door, because he was vanished when I got outside.
In case you've wondered why I advocate guns, this is why; the cops got there within a few minutes, after I called, which was loooooooong after he disappeared, and long after anything had happened. If he'd been intent on mayhem - and the way the furniture was arranged, he could have punched through the window and instantly grabbed me by the hair - then that few minutes is long enough for a great deal of pain and suffering.
The bedroom furniture has been rearranged and other hardening measures have been put in place; I have recovered the 'family' firearms, and have re-placed my favorite by my bed; I'm still having trouble getting to sleep, though no nightmares (rearranging the furniture that night seems to have given me enough conscious time to process things; or, it's simpler than what I usually worry about).
I will now pay more attention to my instincts when I am disturbed.
But the good news is, Tuck #117 is almost out.
10 May 2006
I'm up to Monday night on #117, which may indicate to the sharper of you that I am moving faster than I have been story-wise. Still have some writing to go to get where I want, but not that far.
I've also done a few things to the site; I'm reorganizing the links section a bit, plus I found some old art which should have been up long ago. I also found where I had not included some information on the donations page, about what email address to use in case the link didn't work. Sorry about this; it's a simple thing, but one I just didn't realize was necessary until about now. My stupid, I guess.
I also solved the trivial problem of where-do-I-SMTP-to-get-my-mail-out, which had caused me problems in the past. I think it's fixed, and if you ever sent mail to me and NEVER got a reply, now would be the time to try again.
Still haven't fixed the guestbook, but I can work on that today as well.
30 April 2006
Tuck 116 is out. 117 is speeding things up, which I'm sure you'll all be grateful for; I know I am.
Donations are what keep me, the SO, & the kitty in food and kitty litter. Thanks to those who donated last week; the phone got 'saved' before the cutoff.
20 April 2006
Episode 116 is finished, and I'm sort of proofing it. Probably going out either this weekend or next. #117 is about 60% done, and we're getting someplace and tying up loose ends. I hope that I can go back to Tuck POV about #118, and I am definitely looking forward to it. #117 may be a bit long, therefore...
And, the phone's about to be cut off... You know what to do.
In addition, the guestbook is still fucked - thanks for not telling me - and I can't figure out how; and the person who did finally send me an email about it, I can't write back because my own dialup ISP is being blocked so many places. D, I tried to write back... So I have to revise my mail setup.
This is very frustrating and depressing.
Update:
I think - I THINK - I have the email routed in a way that goes around
the blocklists. No, I'm not spamming; one of my to-do's if I ever
acquire time travel is to kill messily (look up "blood eagle") the first
several spammers like Cantor & Siegel, in hopes that this would
propagate through net.culture ("Dude, you don't want to do that; they
only found thirty percent of the body of the last sucker who did it...")
In a not-really-related rant, why do people do this in email?
> *hugs* > > [signature]Would you actually do this to a person upon meeting them? I did not remember this person; even if they have sent me email before, I don't recognize them. This can also happen in Real Life; I might meet someone who remembers me six months later, whilst I don't remember them at ALL in six months. Or two months.
2 April 2005
Tuck 116 trickles onward; proofing has been slowed tremendously, not surprisingly.
Suggestions to implement a Canary Trap have risen to thirteen. C'mon, folks; I got the concept...
21 March 2006
Well, I've now gotten eight suggestions to use a Canary Trap, named in a Clancy novel and used at least two other places I know of ("Oath Of Fealty" by Larry Niven, and "Day Of The Cheetah" by Dale Brown). Thanks, I got it. So stop suggesting it.
Also, I found out today that I had buggered the guestbook; one person assumed that I had disconnected it. Not intentionally, I assure you. I changed the name and mentally missed the difference between 'oo' and '00'. Duh. Nor did I check for functionality after I'd made my changes. Take the lesson, kids... always test after a change. It's now working again.
19 March 2006
Tuck 115 is finally up. I had anticipated putting it up rather a while ago, but lack of work on my part caused some of that - but I have been writing more in the previous fortnight; I have another episode first-draft'd - proofers' objections and subsequent rewrites caused some of that, and then there was this week...
Some of you may have noticed two posts on the discussion board about someone violating my licensing requirements. They stemmed from an email... There's several emails here, or the text within, actually; I've removed names out of consideration for privacy...
Anyway, the first email told me of the problem.
(A) A link from [C] over on Erin's site has most of your tuck series included on the page that it is linked too, however a majority of the files posted there are in an html format without your digital signature and there is also an apparent advanced beta copy of chapter 115 that is in a Zip of all of the main tuck chapters. Also there are the files of the old Tuck seasons storyline that you had pulled for rewrite. Just thought that you may want to be aware of this distribution of your work that may not be legal as you have established your wishes of how your stories are released to the public.Pretty damned irritating; I have very a liberal use policy, and yet some people can't even be bothered to read it, much less adhere to it. I've gotten far more assholish about misuse since I started, but ever since the first episode went up, I knew people would fuck with it if they got the chance... it's happened more than once.
Anyway. I asked some questions, and got this:
(A) Let me clarify. I followed the link below to that site from a message posted on Erin's site and it appears that others may have an issue or two about copyrights and authorship.The 'message posted on Erin's site' had another complaint, about removing one of two co-author's names from a reposted story. Many of the links on that site wouldn't resolve either; I think IE ignores spaces in URLs whereas every other browser in the world pays attention to them, so that a followable URL in IE like "xxxxx/Ellen Hayes/" (note the space) is considered the same as "xxxxx/EllenHayes/", whereas everyone else needs a '%20' as in "xxxxx/Ellen%20Hayes/" to find the actual link instead of a 404 page. Or maybe it's MS's sucky server software, because I recall the 404's were MS standard (though I might be misremembering this).
Luckily, I am smarter than the average, so I could 'decode' the bad links and pull them up. Indeed, perfidiousness! The individual had taken each PGP signed episode and altered them, putting them into HTML format and specifying a font. If you don't know why this is bad, check this link to the PGP International FAQ, dealing with digital signatures and hash functions. Any alteration to the file will of course change the hashed value, and therefore the signature will no longer match the file - the very condition that I require in my license.
I pitched a bitch, and demanded that it be removed, and demanded help in doing so since no email address was available.
I got this from the apparent site controller:
(B) Hi Ellen they have been pulled per request.within a few hours. Good.
I got this from the... person who was responsible.
(C) I'm am sorry that I got you mad, I didn't mean to. But I did leave the copywite information (PGP signatures) in your stories (honest) all I am doing is changing the format from text. to html. and the font type. I was and still are correcting all the stories that I have removed your PGP tags from.As you may be able to guess, this person had not read the PGP Internation FAQ and thus had absolutely no idea what those funny scrambly bits were for.
The email continues:
As for the Yim contact. I didn't do that and (my mistake) I hadden't gotten around to changing it to my email address. (I just did!) but I borrowed your idea and set it up so one has to type it in. Please, please, Oh please let me post your great stories! (grovel, grovel beg, beg,) If not the I'll feel verry sad, mite cry some, may even get over it "in time, ""YIM" is Yahoo Instant Messenger for anyone who was confused like I was.
I'm still irritated at this person, for the same reason I sometimes wish computers required licenses to operate just like cars. "Just because you don't know what you are doing, doesn't mean you should do it." I am grateful for the prompt response and compliance.
Then I got this:
(A) In a side note the chapter file that is not supposed to be floating about, it is entitled "tuck115v1.htm" and is time stamped by [D's] computer supposedly as being created on 1/28/2006 at 10:03 PM. I do not know if this will help as far as tracking down why it is out and about illegally.I hadn't especially paid attention previously - or at least I hadn't panicked, that I recall - but this file, with that name and that date is instantly recognizable: it's the format in which I put up proofing copies, for proofers - NOT THE GENERAL PUBLIC - to download and comment upon.
Proofers are under NO circumstances to share the prerelease copies with anyone, ever. I blew a friend over this back in 1998 or thereabouts.
Naturally, I started asking pointed questions.
(C) I don't remember where I got it from and that is not a lie, if I dd that my wife would kill me. I suffer from short term and long term memory loss due to the medications I'm on. I'm permanently disabled because of this, ( its scary when you wake up and don't remember your own name ) [two lines deleted by me] As far as I know the original was wiped from the old computer when it was reformatted to become the kids computer (I'm sending you what I have but this is modified some). I lost more stuff then when that was done. I wish I could help you more. All I remember was that it blew my mind out that I had it and it wasn't posted in your site SO I didn't make it public .The fact that it was in the zip was most likely from my [identifer and several sentences deleted by me] I wish I was more help and I feel really bad (stupid) about this. Now I think I'm gonna be sick because I might have screwed up big time. I don't know if it is one of your stories or a fanfic. I'll send you a copy I stored it in my new computer. Shoot I wish I could be more help.I checked, and the file I got was exactly that which I had posted on 28 January, being the first revision of the episode I've put up today. (I'm now on, oh, sixth revision or so).
At this point I am extremely, shall we say, alert. I ask some more questions from the person who put the file up.
(C) I know I got it in a email from somewhere but I don't have that local server anymore. Not after they closed and wouldn't give a refund. I even had my in-law "geek" hook up the old hard drive and nothing was on that.And again:
(C) [I asked: Do you keep old emails? ] all old email information other then address has been wiped out, I am using a new computer thats only 5 day old. My old internet service provider is no more. Fools over extended themselves and are now out of bussness.Maybe I am just being paranoid at this point - I do have a tendency in that direction - but this person has claimed that they have mental problems, a wiped drive, AND a gone-into-bankruptcy ISP, when asked to provide information about where he got that file from.
I'm kind of suspicious.
So I remove all files from proofing, and tell people "either someone cracked it or one of you leaked it; I'm not doing anything until I fix things so this won't happen again."
Then I get this, from a proofer:
(D) Did a little asking around, and in fairly short order had a name. I've got a bit of a moral dilemma, though, since to get the name I had to promise to not say who it was. I will go so far as to say, though, that it's one of your proofers who (intentionally) made it available to the person who spread it around. (No, not me. I value my life.) :\If I wasn't paranoid before, I became so when I read this.
So many possibilities occurred to me that I wrote them down; they form a lot of combinations. I can't even tell if this supposed culprit is real - maybe the email-writer is just saying they know who it is to torture me. I've had people torture me psychologically before, just for the amusement value I presented, so this would be nothing new, just unusual (most of that sort of torture stopped when I got out of mandatory schooling).
I think it unlikely, but I have so little objective evidence that I really don't have any idea what is true and what is false, because all I'm getting is bare text words.
See, I'm paraplegic, which happened after my husband got into a car wreck and died himself; it ruined my modeling career, which was just starting to take off, and I spent months in rehab, which is where I learned to use a computer. I'm also lying, just as easily as any or all of these email writers COULD be; and if I hadn't said I was, you'd have NO way of telling for sure.
I saw the proofer-copy file, though, and checked it, and it was a proofer's copy, not to be released to anyone else. I'm sure of that.
I ask this'un some more questions, and get this:
(D) I just chatted with my source (who, btw, is a third party, not the leaker or direct leakee), passed on your message, and asked again for permission to rat the leaker out. Denied. Shit.Shit's a good word. "Shit" is how I feel about my trust being violated. "Shit" is where my mood went. "Shit" is where my enthusiasm for writing went. "Shit" is about the level of trust I now hold for every single one of the proofers... and that, dear readers, has always been the prime requisite for being a proofer, that I (thought I) could trust them.
I've gotten four denials from four proofers, in email. *snorts* I'd like to think they are true, I really would.
So this has been occupying my brain for the last several days, in addition to deaths happening (separately) to two RL friends and the SO having recently 'achieved' a memory which sickens me (and her) and the therapist taking a vacation.
I have a tendency to "blow" things and people that betray me like this - think scuttling charges. They hurt, and I don't like to keep something around that hurts every time I think of it. I decided I wouldn't do that. I do like writing, I re-found that recently; other people do like my writing (thanks for all the fans that have written nice letters in the last week, they REALLY helped); I think very few of you are involved in this.
So you're not being punished; as soon as I could get my brain and soul up to it, I posted the episode I had ready, today.
I don't know what I am going to do, though. I want to keep writing Tuck, and proofers/CE's help with that tremendously. I am unsure as to what to do next and how to prevent this from happening again, and I have to do something different or I shan't do anything at all and Tuck will stop right here because I can't bear to face betrayal again.
So, the next episode may be somewhat delayed... it might not. It may have lots of proofers, or none. I don't know yet.
I'd like to ask for donations again, because I AM going to find a solution to keep Tuck coming, and I already have another episode ready for proofing.... except I can't trust anyone to do it, especially not someone who writes me out of the blue offering. But I'll figure something out. Also the fresh litter from nearly two months ago has run out. =) (play cat_scraping_repeatedly_in_litterbox.wav)
27 January 2006
Tuck 115 is now over the minimum length, and has entered proofing. While I don't consider it finished, I think it's well on its way.
Donations are what keep us alive, and I'd really like some more in the inbox. The kitty would like fresh litter, too...
22 January 2006
Tuck 114 is out. Would have been here sooner, but something occurred to me last weekend, and then I had a critical rewrite to do. Damnit.
Donations keep me and the SO alive; thanks to everyone who donated over the Holidaze.
Luckily, 115 is going alright, and I hope to have it up in three weeks. But no promises. Yet.
The Tuck-in-print concept has been revived again; if you have any thoughts, I'd like to hear them. It does not look, however, like it would be feasible to put them into standard-paperback format; cost would be about the same for other POD (Publish On Demand) books, that being around $20 each. Yikes!
My general preference for books is minimal margins, small print, reduced page count, and as much information as can be packed in. Do you disagree?
Have any of you bought anything direct from one of the POD publishers out there? Any review or comment upon of the quality of the POD work (as differentiated from the authorial or editorial work) would also be helpful. When I do this, I'd really like to have a $20 book that doesn't fall apart in two weeks...
08 January 2006
I seem to have picked up a virus since the End Of All The Crap, but despite that, work on #114 continues; I hope to put it out sooner than I thought, though I need to work on the next one as well. Keeping working on multiple episodes at one time allows me to adjust continuity issues and weave threads better.
Donations are of course always appreciated and helpful...
02 January 2006
Holidays are over! Yay!
I hope you all survived with not-too-much stress. I did... didn't do a damned thing for "the holidays" except hide and snicker at the rest of the world, and this usually-stressful season mostly passed without incident.
I may be sort-of-finished with the first draft of #114; writing continues. I haven't been as diligent as I want, but it would be hard to write several hours a day every day. I'm sort of working up to that. Still, it's more than "last year" for the most part.
24 December 2005
Tuck #113 released. #114 continues. Doors locked, guns loaded, sign "NO CHRISTMAS PAST THIS POINT. DANGER: USE OF DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED." mounted... I think I'm ready for the holidays.
Good luck, everyone. And remember; just because someone says you shouldn't have boundaries, or object to things, doesn't mean you actually shouldn't.
22 December 2005
Tuck #113 is STILL in proofing; I was adding bits last night before my brain melted. It's long. It may yet get longer.
I feel vaguely bad about putting this one out at a time when everyone is likely to be busy and unable to spend time on the computer un- interrupted. Not that bad, however; just a twinge of guilt.
Writing on #114 paused for a few days as I contemplated a major change, and then I hit upon what I think will be a better solution. And I have plenty of time to write today... as well as the rest of the week, because unlike YOU saps I have managed to burn the "Christmas meme" out for the most part, and now all I have to worry about is not going into certain stores. We're not celebrating SHIT, and I for one like it that way. The SO may be of mixed feelings, but she is so boggled by her own psyche at the moment I think that no-stress is the way to go.
Donations are not only keeping us going but are in part allowing me to unfuck our lives. Weird feelings...
Oh, and Happy Solstice!
16 December 2005
Tuck #113 is still in proofing; I'm not going to say I think I've finished, since I insinuated that last entry and then had to add about a hundred lines because I'd forgotten something. Duh.
Tuck #114 is half or more done; my usual minimum standard is a thousand lines (before header and footer and quote and so on), but the recent episodes have had a lot going on, and thus have been longer on average. Still, even by recent standards, it's half done, with notes and so on for more.
Donations are what keep me and the SO alive, and me writing instead of spazzing in terror at economic collapse. Thanks to all who have contributed in the last couple of weeks.
12 December 2005
Hope you liked the last one. The next one, #113, is in proofing, and I think I've got most of the major alterations made. Episode #114 is half done as of today; I'm going to write more on it tomorrow.
Due to a reader suggestion, I am trivially changing the main page to show new Tucknotes.
04 December 2005
Tuck 112 is out. You may not like it... but it needs to be there.
#113 is in proofing; work continues much too slowly on #114, but faster than September and October (couldn't be slower...).
Donations are still delicious. Thanks to those who allowed me to purchase some much-needed bits and pieces of computer stuff.
26 November 2005
Writing has been going 'okay', which is a tremendous improvement over the previous two or three months. It's quite hard to write in the house; probably because there are zillions of other things I could be doing. I seem to be susceptible to some sort of task-selection lockup. Would that I could reformat the brain and reinstall a better OS...
Donations have been delicious. Food is yummy. So is the $50 worth of hardware which has allowed me to get two computers up and running, which will lead to the firewall computer working, which... Plans and things.
14 November 2005
Due to mostly psychological problems, I have not been writing lately... until this week.
I believe I shall officially blame all this on hurricanes.
In any case, the proofers (those that have not died due to Tuck-starvation) are now working on 112, and I have just barely started work on 113.
I realize that if I have not been writing, I can hardly expect much in the way of donations, but I am hoping to change both of these. And the SO's income just about pays for house and the water bill, leaving other things like electric, phone, and food to my "income". Remember that without electric and phone, I can't do anything on the computer or Internet, and without food I get all cranky and have to spend all my time dumpster-diving around restaurants (and fighting the other web-site designers for the choice bits).
22 September 2005
I have an excuse from my therapist about not writing lately, so there.
However, I would REALLY RECOMMEND that anyone with either a home or a web hosting service in the southeast Texas or southwest Louisiana areas, should BACK UP your systems and website(s) immediately. Rita is expected to be BIGGER than Katrina, and I'd bet money that a lot of telecommunications lines in that area route through Houston.
Wish I could be in Houston to watch... this is gonna be AWESOME.
4 September 2005
#112 has been delayed; I spent close to a fortnight in a depressive ball. Naturally, no writing happened during this time. However, a lot got done before then. The plot progresses...
A belated Links check is now in progress; we are now done with A-L. I still take links to add, even if you sent them before and I didn't put them up. What do you think my links page could use?
Those of you not in America can now laugh at our rising gasoline prices; we deserve it. It's rather a shock to us... and I suspect that the reason for the 20% jump is not 'need' or 'anticipated shortfall' but 'plausible excuse'.
Donations have almost caught up with bills and goodies like hormones for me. Thank you all very much.
18 August 2005
Writing on #112 continues. I keep thinking 'slowly', but it's faster than it was at the beginning of the year. Let us hope it goes faster still.
15 August 2005
Tuck 112 is "half done" in first draft; as I did last time, I'm putting this one up early in the hopes of catching problems early.
In a completely unrelated item, apparently I've been adding links to the links page, without changing the "last changed" date. My bad. And, of course, if you have any links you think ought to be added, feel free to suggest them - an idea of what the link is, is quite helpful.
07 August 2005
Tuck #111 is up. I have a dental abscess, which is why it wasn't up yesterday; I was dopey enough from drugs and lack of sleep that I didn't think I could do a final proofreading.
Donations are helping a great deal.
31 July 2005
Tuck #111 is even more finished. I keep saying that, and I keep adding
stuff to it... we're on the third 'finished' version, after I added one
this morning two hours after putting the second 'finished' version
up.
Nnnng.
Still, it's really chock full of Stuff. I am now going to concentrate on #112... I think. I hope.
No, really, I will; it's exciting stuff.
Some have complained that it's taking a while; yeah, I noticed. There's a lot going on, and if I don't mention a person, I get bugged about it. ("Where's Amy?" "Where's Travis?" "Where's Lisa?" "Where's Paul Grant?" "Where's Bob?")
It's coming along, as fast as I can get it to go; has anyone noticed that the episodes are somewhat - like 20% - longer than normal? I'm not doing this to increase my word count.
Fingers crossed for this week, please; we are hoping to get several drugs for the SO from various governmental agencies, including something to replace the Zyprexa samples she's been using. Zyprexa Considered Harmful (go look it up) and it's not working well either. Seroquel has been recommended.
28 July 2005
Tuck #111 is 'finished' and one proofer has loved it. I think another week of proofing. And so on to #112...
There's a discussion going on about McAllen's team name and school colors over on the Tuckerspawn forum; if you have a (several) suggestion(s) for the team's name and/or colors, let me know.
And hey, I'm working harder; don't you think that should be rewarded?
23 July 2005
Tuck #111 comes along, though I had an immensely shitty week - as one item, someone stole a chair off my front porch.
Anyway, things go. Two weeks until the big set of appointments to hit the various social services in hopes of finding cheap drugs for the SO... cross your fingers for us.
I also added a couple to the Ellen's Select list... and I'm willing to add more, if I think they're worthy.
17 July 2005
Tuck #110 released. Tuck #111 continues... but it's actually GOING. So be happy.
14 July 2005
The person with Hotmail wrote back - in a NORMAL letter - and said something like "Thanks for explaining it to a non-technical person." I think that's my good deed for the week. =)
Tuck continues, and - depending on how the proofing goes - #110 might go up this weekend. Certainly by the end of the month, unless I end up in jail or something. #111 needs more work; gee, and I have nothing to do for most of the day...
12 July 2005
Why do I hate Hotmail? Because I get things like this.
<html><div style='background-color:'>
> <DIV class=RTE>Hi Ellen;</DIV>
> <DIV class=RTE> </DIV>
> <DIV class=RTE>Saw on your website that your So is having some health issues. I just wanted to add my thoughts and prayers for her speedy recovery.</DIV>
> <DIV class=RTE> </DIV>
> <DIV class=RTE>Just a quick note though - your last reply just came through as code, so I was unfortunately unable to read it.</DIV>
> <DIV class=RTE> </DIV>
> <DIV class=RTE>Yes, I am one of those technologically challenged who is using a PC with XP pro, and Internet Explorer. </DIV>
> <DIV class=RTE> </DIV>
> <DIV class=RTE>Take care;</DIV>
> <DIV class=RTE> </DIV>
> <DIV class=RTE>[NAME DELETED]</DIV>
</div><br clear=all><hr>Share a single photo or an entire slide show right inside your e-mail with <a href="http://g.msn.com/8HMBENCA/2743??PS=47575" target="_top">MSN Premium: </a> Join now and get the first two months FREE*</html>
this has been 'slightly' modified so that it appears EXACTLY as it does
within my email program.
If you look closely, you'll notice that the person is complaining that
they couldn't read my last reply. That's because in my last reply, I
set it so that the < that is used to set off HTML code, was
replaced with something that'll show up in an HTML reader like the
original shows up in my text reader.
They're complaining that they can't read my email. "Yeah, I KNOW what you mean!" is my unsympathetic thought.
Like all people, I make assumptions about a person based on the
information I have. My assumption about people who send me mail like
this is normally one of two things:
I tried something different today, though; I tried assuming that this person is merely completely clueless about what things like Hotmail actually do, behind their back; and I did some looking to find an explanation I could send this person. I found two links:
These are good. I learned a few things I didn't know. I imagine that the person who sent me the above email could learn a LOT, including how to prevent their Hotmail account from sending me crap like I got.
If they look. If they don't look, or don't change... I'll go back to previous assumptions.
Due to new medications, the SO's blood pressure is now 150/90 or thereabouts. This cost $90 in medication, and there's another one she's supposed to be on. We also have to pay to see this doctor. The money to do this comes from donations. Do I seem to be pushing this? I am. My own depression is hard enough to deal with, without having to ask myself "Do I buy pharmaceuticals for the SO's high blood pressure, OR pay the phone bill, OR buy food this week?"
In between Decision Making Time, I am writing (and proofing/editing) Tuck. #111 progresses; #110 (next) is requiring some additions. I am going to spend today writing as much as I can...
10 July 2005
Tuck writing and editing continues. So does writing on the next episode (#111). It's been hard, though; last week we had five medical or psychological appointments for the SO, and a nasty surprise about her blood pressure (220/130 is Very Bad). I am reluctant to take the laptop into an unknown situation, since I am vulnerable if it's unpacked, and if it's packed it does me no good at all; so no writing gets done.
3 July 2005
Donations are keeping me and the SO alive.
In other more important-to-you news, Tuck #110 is in proofing. Also, I think I have altered the guestbook stuff enough that I can actually turn it back on. We'll see how that goes. If I start getting spammed again, it's going off until I find a better solution.
19 April 2005
Guestbook turned off temporarily; see the What'Snew file for more info.
3 April 2005
Tuck 109 is up. America has Daylight Savings Time shift.
Donations are still helpful.
I have nothing else to say. Life sickens me today.
1 April 2005
I am tempted not to say anything, because of the special nature of the holiday... but check the site Sunday, which is NOT April Fool's Day.
18 March 2005
Rachel Greenham has released the prologue to another of her superlative fanfictions. You may enjoy reading it; you may wish to re-read Tuck Squared before you do, however, as... it's not quite regular Tuck.
She's working on more; so am I, but she's working harder.
And, for the two or three of you that worry, about whether the impending rewrite of Tucky Seasons by me will somehow 'break' Rachel's work... it won't. I'm being conspiratorial... er, I mean collaborative. Either way, Not Breaking Things is one of my goals.
Work continues on my end. Thanks greatly for the donations this month.
14 March 2005
109 is in proofing, and will probably be up in a week. I'm also working on Tucky Seasons again, as a break from regular storyline that actually involves getting some writing done; the first draft of #6 is up for proofers as well.
Donations are still accepted and still very needed.
07 February 2005
http://www.medschoolchat.com/medical_book_0385121229.html
This is a link to William McNeill's Plagues And Peoples which IMO should be required reading for junior high school students, before the little fuckers get loose and start spreading disease themselves... but it's the site that really attracted my attention. Go check it out.
If you wish, you can now amuse yourself by wondering what relevance a book on epidemics and plagues has to Tuck in my mind...
06 February 2005
Tuck 108 is up. Backup hardware is up. Software is not. Working...
Update: made one backup, think it's readable. Yay! Linux RULEZ d00d!
01 February 2005
Looks like the next Tuck will be coming out soon. Depression has been heavy lately, and other things as well. No progress on job; psych inability to look. It's rare that I don't want to die, just so I can stop struggling, at least once in a given day lately. Whatever.
Tuck is going better than it was for some of last year. I spent yesterday goofing off, but the day before was pretty good, and I've been working more on it than I have at some points last year. I'm sure this isn't any consolation, yet... but I'm trying.
I think I've mostly caught up to the last hardware crash I had... though right now I'm running without backups, which makes me nervous. It should make you nervous as well. Have you backed up your own system lately?
Time to stop babbling and start writing for the day, I guess.
08 January 2005
Tuck writing continues. So does file shuffling, which is why the present note.
I've found a few (and recently gotten a few more) Tuck fan-fictions, which I have now emplaced in the usual spot. If you have written one of them, and wish to have emails forwarded to you, let me know. Due to spamming, I shall not put in a "mailto" link for anyone; too dangerous.
Tuck #108 will be out as soon as I run it through a few more proofers. However, the proofers are not doing well... and are possibly going to be purged again if they don't come up with something in the next week or so. STRONG HINT
Depression continues, sometimes with brighter spots.
23 December 2004
Internet is now (you may have guessed) back up, with a certain amount of cash outlay (oh ghu, like I need MORE bills?). And, the links check, which was interrupted in the middle, is now finished. Thanks to all who participated; their names are in the usual place of honor on the links page itself.
The proofers are not distinguishing themselves with valour at the present time. Tuck writing continues sporadically, however, beyond the proofing. Attempting to write more; sometimes succeeding.
16 December 2004
Well, this is 'writing blind' as it were, since Internet has been cut off. Hopefully I'll have some kind of access tomorrow, and be able to post these up.
Tuck 108 is now in proofing, having finished the first draft. #109 is started, and I think I have some idea of what will happen there as well. There's a lot of threads, as you have seen in the last few episodes; it's somewhat hard to keep them all together.
The Links check will most likely be finished the day after this goes up. Thanks to all who participated, and extra thanks to those who have suggested links to add. I need to add some more myself...
12 December 2004
Tuck cometh along, but very slowly; a combination of depression and anxiety is making it hard to do anything productive. Some of that is worry about money. A donation would help.
Also, I missed the Links check back in June, and this one's late; but if anyone wants to bother, or add one or two, or six dozen, this is the time to do so. If you want to check, please do an entire section at a time; it's easier on my little overloaded brain this way.
13 November 2004
Some people think that Tuck and his family are overly-knowledgable about medical stuff.
From The New England Journal Of Medicine:
A 1999 report from the Institute of Medicine (IOM) featured a now-familiar statistic: 44,000 to 98,000 people die in hospitals each year because of preventable medical errors, making hospital-based errors alone the eighth leading cause of death in the United States, ahead of breast cancer, AIDS, and motor vehicle accidents.
Ignorance equals death.
07 November 2004
Tuck #106 and #107 out. Hurrah!
A donation would be greatly appreciated...
And, work continues, both on Seasons and on the next Tuck... which is why you should donate, so I can pay bills and buy food and things. No electricity or phone, no Internet, no writing. Neh?
01 November 2004
All Saints Day, in which we hope that the Portals of the night before are firmly closed for another year.
Tuck proceeds; the episode of the weekend is stretching more and more; there's a lot of people involved in this series, have you noticed? And a lot of them have something to do with Homecoming. Which, I'll remind you, is this weekend.
If things go as I'm planning right now, there will be a DOUBLE release in about a week. One episode just could not handle everything and everyone that showed up... so I'll put out two at one time.
Vis-a-vis Seasons, part 6 is being written slowly (always too slowly), and utilizing as much of the commentary from the discussion board as I can keep in my little brain. Not helped by the fact that some people have widely diverging opinions, which forces me to rely on my own judgement but leaves a feeling that I'm not pleasing anyone.
Ah well... this is one of the reasons I take the title of 'Bitch'; I am therefore excused from having to 'be nice' and accommodate everyone's wishes at once. *makes crazy noises*
Later:
Two episodes now in proofing. Heh. And don't forget to vote.
24 October 2004
Seasons #5 is finally out. Hope you like it.
No, I hope it's good. I'll worry about whether people like it when the
story is done. Which it isn't yet, not by a long shot.
Tuck #106 is still not finished, though I am on the fourth cycle of revision. I need to do more of that this morning. It's easier to write than it was, but I still couldn't do any writing yesterday (tired, then emotionally shaken for a while). It also may end up mitosing into two episodes, again... but I don't think you'll mind this time. =)
Still taking donations, too. They're keeping us (me, SO, cat) alive and online.
Seasons #6 is also proceeding along, with more being added as I think to do so. There's some tricky bits in there... You may start to see why in #5. This isn't at all the same as the previous first draft version... this one's better, and thus more emotionally distressing.
18 October 2004
Tuck #106 is mostly-finished, and in proofing. I have a few more things to add, but there's enough that the CE's can start hacking on it with editorial axes...
Writing has been easiER the last couple of weeks, but not easy. It's too simple to just not-write... and then there's the plot complications. Which you can't see yet, not all of 'em. *smirk*
However, we do have a (belated) fanfiction, starting waaaaaay back in the depths of time, which I have finally remembered to post. Say yay! Now go read it.
I'd like to avoid having my guestbook become a playing field for political 'debate', so please restrain yourself. My political thoughts are: We need a None-Of-The-Above candidate in all elections; if NOTA wins, all other candidates are disqualified for that election and someone new needs to be chosen.
01 October 2004
More problems have cropped up in Seasons, and the proofers that I thought were alive, have all disappeared again - thus the extra delay on Seasons #5. Maybe you could put some encouragement for them in the guestbook or something? (hit them with sticks, shoot their televisions...) Those that have not responded, have been culled. Those that think they shouldn't have been culled, can try emailing me...
Work on Tuck #106 progresses slower than I'd like. Still having 'fun' with paralyzing bouts of depression and anxiety; they make it hard to write. But it is moving.
26 September 2004
Work on Tucky Seasons proceeds, with an amazing number of changes in the latest revision. I'd like to mention (smugly) that 'curtsey' is listed as a completely equivalent spelling in my dictionary. And the dictionary.com meanings for 'pouf' are entirely different, and what I wanted, compared to 'poof'. Nyah nyah!
Now to go work on #106 until my eyes start bleeding again...
Your donations are keeping me afloat financially; the cat thanks you for her Kitty Krunchies.
18 September 2004
Tuck #105 is published.
Now, some of you aren't going to be satisfied with the lack of some resolutions in it... and neither am I. But there's too much going on to get it into one reasonably-sized episode; in fact, I have a decent 'starter culture' for 106 from outgrowth of 105.
On the other hand, the existance of a starter culture for 106 ought to give you an idea that it may not take so long as the last one. And, I hope it won't.
Seasons part five is in proofing, and part six is coming along as well.
Economics are dire at this point. I would really appreciate a donation at this point, as right now I have about zero money remaining. Remember, I'm cheaper than income tax, and I give you more tangible results... *grin*
*grin goes away* Other than that, my life sucks about as much as usual for this year (which is a lot) though I'm not as depressed as I was a fortnight or so ago. While some of you were anticipating the episode earlier today, I just could not sit down and do it; other things are worrying me as well.
12 September 2004
Life still sucks. However, Tuck #105 is in proofing, if the proofer/CE members will actually wake up and check the appropriate drops.
26 August 2004
Life, such as it is, sucks.
I'd ask for your patience or forgiveness, but I don't have any, so it's
stupid to expect any from you. Suffice it to say, today's one of the
better days, and I've gotten some things done.
Tuck #105 is first-drafted and in proofing.
Tucky Seasons #5 is also in proofing, though I think it requires another
few passes.
There are three new Tuck fan-fictions up, one an
alternative September , and one an
alternative episode #105.
And the third I dug up out of the dusty bits, and it is presented
here, finally.
There are also three new SickTime endings,
18,
19, and
20.
You should also go and read The John Edwards Epiphenomenon, The New World Order, And Ronald McDonald which is an amazing work by an enigmatic source going by MarcoPolo. Let's hope this isn't the last thing up here by him. Hint: positive comments in the guestbook and email work quite well as motivators.
There are a few more things in the box waiting to be put up, which I may get to today, if the sort of shit that fell on me last Friday doesn't happen again.
25 June 2004
Must be depressed or something. Or, hopefully more correctly, I must HAVE BEEN depressed, and thus unable to write much of anything; because I am slowly starting to write again. Not enough, of course; if I wrote an episode a day, that wouldn't be enough for you greedy folk...
*grin*
Still, a little is a fantastic improvement on what I was doing before. *sigh*
So, the fourth episode of the revised, final edition of Tucky Seasons, is now available for your perusal.
So is some new fan art by Pacchi - go look at it, and marvel. There's some more in the works as well.
I finally posted two new Mono-Mania endings. And I still take submissions, and I hope to process them a leeeetle faster than I have been. Like, before the authors forget they've written something.
There's still a discussion board over at Tuckerspawn, and there's lots of posts there. I read them occasionally. And laugh a lot...
You can also donate and add to my fast-dwindling funds (still no job).
I'm also working a bit on other tasks, like at least one more Mono-Mania ending, and some reviews of other pieces. Basically, I should lock myself in a small box with the laptop and a wall plug, and stay there for a few days.
Keep sending that good karma and positive energy and whatnot this way; I need it, and I think it's starting to help.
16 May 2004
Well, patience is finally rewarded. And you can call off your assassins; the ones you can afford have been a waste of your money, and since I got fired - again - I now have much more time to work on writing. When I'm not digging through dumpsters to find nifty things to eat.
As soon as the hoopla dies down over this episode, though, I also have two more SickTime/Mono-mania endings, including one I bet the original author has forgotten... and there's Seasons to work on as well.
More of this, more of that...
12 April 2004
Well, my life has once again fallen into chaos and despair. I hate that.
On the positive side, I have a new SickTime ending from Emily, so go read it.
Work on Tuck, both sides, proceeds slowly but onward.
And, doesn't anyone have any comment on the picture of Charlene I put up? Sheesh.
3 April 2004
Happy Tucker's Birthyday!
Now that we have that out of the way...
Another TWO episodes of Tucky Seasons are up. Also, a picture which I am saying is Charlene. This is of an actual person, that I found on a website somewhere, and while it is a real person (I think), it really isn't the character in the story. Story fictional. Not real. I have some shots of other characters, all of which I think are 'my' characters, and they'll be showing up when the characters themselves do.
20 March 2004
Bitch bitch bitch, when's she gonna do something, bitch bitch
bitch...
So, okay, I did
something.
Probably what you wanted, but... hey, this next section of regular Tuck is hard to write. I know what will happen; but to actually write it, I have to be there for long periods of time, and I am - shamefully - out of practice at feeling this bad and writing it down. Lately, when I've felt this bad, I've gone and cried, and not on the keyboard either.
But at least I've got something fresh...
By the way, I am also taking suggestions for things I can stick into Ellen's Select if you happen to know any decent fiction. But DON'T SEND ME A STORY; send me a LINK where I can get it myself.
Any bets on how many people will be stupid enough to send me a
story after that warning?
I suspect no more than half a dozen in the first month; I've made a
concerted effort to remove those obnoxious 'readers' that seem to skip
over the important parts that start with DO NOT.
Oh, and feel a gnawing sense of guilt until you make a donation. No, a bigger one. I mean, when was the last time your children did something you liked as much as you do Tuck, huh? So who deserves a new summer wardrobe more, them or me?
5 March 2004
In order to keep your brains from shriveling completely, I've added Ellen's Select to the website, to keep me from having to repeat the answer to "So is there anything you like to read other than Tuck?" or "Are there any OTHER good stories out there?"
Go read all of these; it'll help cut down the shaking.
25 February 2004
Ha ha, very funny.
It has taken me rather a long time to remove the applewood stake from my chest and dig my way out of the rather lame grave (WITH NO INTERNET) that I've been stuck in. I am also in an extraordinarily bad mood.
However, I know that cremation WORKS, so we won't be having that particular problem from that particular 'fan' ever again.
Folks, as a general tip, if you can't decide which myths and legends to believe about disposing of those Dark Forces you're trying to off, use 'em all. And Buffy The Vampire Slayer is not a reliable source.
Now, not actually being in a dyspeptic state of digestion (since I found a couple of rather inattentive co-eds, who will apparently not be graduating) like I was when I wrote the last note, I can assure you with beaming countenance, Tuck Will Go On. Please ignore the bits of flesh in my teeth; I haven't had time to brush.
However, I'm still having... mmm... call 'em hunger pangs; so email will not be going out this evening. Gimme a day or two.
16 January 2004
"Well, this grenade ought to stir things up a bit."
15 December 2003
Busy week. 'Some little fucker' decided that I was being annoying, so he had my ISP whacked. So, not only was I off 'Net, I had to spend a week tracking the shit down. Still got sand in my panties, I think. I was very glad to hear the news, Sunday morning... he got found 'somehow' by the authorities. Heh. Bet it's a while before he gets access to a phone or computer again...
But email is partially down - I can get it in, but I can't send replies out at the moment. Time, perhaps, to reformat my algorithms for doing things, and go to something better, like mh.
Anyway, work progresseth on the new episode, and there are things beyond it which also need writing, and I can work on those as well. Wheee.
Links check is done, and muchos nachos to those who participated.
Mmmmm, muchos chile rellenos y queso....
I think I need to go home and eat something. Several somethings.
7 December 2003
In the early morning hours of December 7th...
Anyway, I got #103 in first draft editing/proofing today. More letters might help... and more money wouldn't hurt either.
The email change has been a WONDERFUL success - it's a great feeling to hit the mail server after six hours and find NOTHING waiting, rather than a couple of dozen lumps of foetid shit.
Meanwhile, this file is getting kind of long... should I truncate it?
And, it's about time for the semi-annual links check once again... except I missed the summer one. Stil, that means there's plenty there to check... This is also a good time to ADD links that you think ought to be included. Which I won't know about unless you mention them to me.
1 December 2003
I wasn't sure I'd get this one out 'this weekend', but I guess I did.
Controversial episode amongst the proofers...
Which, someone pointed out tonight, do a hell of a lot more than 'just' proofreading. They also do continuity checking, realism checking, and a host of other things. The someone suggested they should be called "Contributing Editors", and I have to agree.
So, a Great Thanks to the Contributing Editors of Tuck, who are still protected under my cloaks of anonymity for their own safety...
Also thanks to those who donated in the last few weeks; it's nice to have some financial cushion, especially this time of year. So much more dignified than robbing the Salvation Army bellringers.
I'm a little blasted, so I'll stop here, and toddle off to FTP all this up, and then you'll have something to do on a dreary Monday morning...
27 November 2003
Ahh, American Thanksgiving...
What I am thankful for, is that my ISP and a couple friends have helped out, to change my email address so's to dodge the spam that has been deluging my account.
Go find the email page, re-read the email rules, and the new address is at the bottom.
If you think it's ugly, I'll take suggestions, but I can no longer have a link-to-email, nor have the address available in text. The spammers have ruined that.
I suppose there are other things I am thankful for, but at this particular moment, that's what I'm thinking of; how blind slithering commercialism and the desire to make a quick buck by fucking anyone they can find, has ruined and despoiled something that used to be far more fun and good and open and relaxed.
23 November 2003
Eh, sorry, I thought I'd said something more recently than that.
Well, due to donations, I had a nice carouse last weekend; that was fun. The scabs fell off today, too, and I have all the feeling back in my feet, so I'm just about fully recovered.
And, Tuck progresseth. Which it has been, silently and unbeknownst to you poor fans, sitting out there gazing woefully at the "0.8" that sat there on the writings page until now.
Do not despair; it's been at '1' for a while, and has been going through the necessary and inevitable proofing cycles, a vital and oft-neglected part of the Internet writing/publishing process.
Sorry, I'm feeling loquacious or something tonight. *shrugs*
Anyway, one in proof, one coming along nicely, first couple parts of Seasons ReWritten in proofing - that's the 'final' version of Tucky Seasons, BTW - and in general we're all gonna have a good holiday season.
Or the beatings will resume.
1 November 2003
Another All Saint's Day and still alive, which means I did not get my soul sucked out of my body by the forces of darkness the night before, nor was I murdered by a vengeful soul from beyond the veil. Which I am glad for. 'Course, the sun hasn't come up yet...
I feel vaguely ashamed... I seem to have been very productive this last week, and I didn't WANT to tie any of it to the donations thing, but there may be some correlation. I feel annoyed at myself if there is.
Or is it just Post hoc ergo propter hoc ?
On the other hand, I wrote at least 1/4 of #102 so far tonight, and I may go further... and the Seasons rewrite is progressing when I don't feel like working on #102. And this happened after I talked with our therapist, a lot about the donations thing and about writing and self-esteem and things like that.
I dunno.
On another matter, I've only had one opinion on whether I should
publically thank donors; that's not enough for me to decide. If you
have an opinion, let me know.
In addition to all those lovely discussions going on all over the
place that are giving me plenty of ideas and hints - keep THAT up!
However, I did get this from one correspondent:
On the other hand, I think you could offer something for donations, but not exclusive episodes of Tuck or drawings. As someone who attended a Catholic school you should be be aware of the importance of relics. Couldn't you send a lock of your hair or a toenail clipping in exchange for large donations?I am... stunned.
Addendum:
You know what I find really annoying? I've read a few dozen articles
and warnings about carpal tunnel and repetitititive motion injuries from
using computers... and the only time I have problems is when I try and
do things like a normal person. If I sit with my legs crossed, pull the
laptop or monitor up to the edge of the desk, and put the keyboard (my
lovely IBM 1391401 monster) on my lap, I never have eyestrain, I have no
wrist problems, my ulnar (elbow) nerve never gets pinched, my fingers
don't go numb (happens within 60 seconds with the SO's nice wrist rest)
... Everything works out perfectly if I sit on the floor, back to a
wall, and put the laptop in a chair. (Except my butt starts to hurt
after a while - the solution to that is simply a large pillow)
But try doing that in 99.99% of workplaces, and they'll pull you into a manager's office for a 'talk' about 'proper workplace etiquette' or something like that.
26 October 2003
See? Good things come to those who wait. Tuck #101 is out.
Did you see the part about donations yet?
25 October 2003
Believe it or not, some people actually have written me saying that they wanted to give me money. Go figure.
Well, now there's a way.
Through the rapacious conniving of PayPal, a tiny burst of mental
effort from me, and a great deal of work from the somewhat-faithful and
ever-hungry minions, I can now accept donations without having to deal
with the icky necessity of having to launder checks, money orders, and
credit cards through the local drug dealers.
Isn't that nice?
Instead, I can now launder it through D & E Personal Services.
I can assure you, that every dollar you send (minus the chunk that PayPal takes for itself) will be spent on improving my life in minor but telling ways. Since I am making around $11,500 after taxes - no that is NOT a misprint; it's well under twelve thousand dollars a year - I could rreeaallllyy use some extra cash.
What donating WON'T get ANYONE is some sort of special consideration. There is NO amount of money that will make someone a proofer, editor, co-sysop of the site, or anything else. It's a GIFT, and if you don't understand what that means, go look it up.
So, those of you that are poor as churchmice don't have to worry that other, richer readers will somehow get something that you can't. Well, they will, but not from me.
I am debating whether or not to make a list of financial contributors (you'd pick your handle or nickname). Should I or shouldn't I?
Tuck #101 may come out this weekend, depending on how some more proofing
goes. #*&@ it's hard this time... and none of the kids are helping me
write this one; I think they're all pissed at me for letting Tucker get
caught.
I'm also working on the first draft of #102. Yay!
The email change is in the works. Not yet, but soon...
Tucky Seasons Rewrite is also coming along, for those of you that like that one. I could, I suppose, put the four or so redone chapters in the proofing pile, and see what the folk do with them...
Visualize Rich Fans Sending Ellen Lots Of Money So She'll Be Happy And Write A Lot.
20 October 2003
Well, maybe in a week. And, maybe not. This one is also darned hard to write right. (Heh) But I am, we are, working on it. Let's hope...
You are hoping, right?
13 October 2003
If you saw that a new Tucknote was up on the 11th, and then couldn't find it, I shall lay the blame on Eris and hubris. Who seem like they should be twins...
Suffice it to say that I had a reason to make a panicked backup Friday night, then felt relieved, then had the computer crash before I saved that Tucknote (but after I saved everything else). No, I won't explain further.
Anyway, most of what I said was:
Episode #101 is going to be as hard to get right as #100, and thus will
take at least as long to get out, minus computer crashes, illnesses, and
catastrophes on this end. The less of those I have, the faster it'll
come out...
Some of the proofers are working hard on this; I thank all of them who
have commented so far. We're just having significant difficulties, and
not surprisingly Tucker wants NOTHING to do with this, so he's not
helping the writing along like he does sometimes.
Little selfish brat.
But, we'll get it eventually...
6 October 2003
Well, #101 is first-draft-done, and now in the proofing cycles... which ought to keep my blood pressure up for the next couple weeks.
Also, I am being blackmailed. Rachel has intimated that she will refuse to work on a sequel to her excellent Tuck Squared until I get the long-anticipated Yeah Right Tucky Seasons rewrite and finalization done.
Darn her to heck anyway.
But it is helping, since if I get tired/sick/upset/bored with one, I can go work on the other one. I'm still not writing 'enough', but I wrote more than I have usually/lately the last couple days. Which is GOOD.
And, thanks to the half-dozen of you that wrote to tell me that the Jargon-file link had changed - now _I_ have changed my pages to match. After several months.
So. Good news in the works, eh?
Keep visualizing Ellen Happily Writings, and keep them letters comin'!
26 September 2003
Be happy.
It would have been out last week, but a dental abscess almost the size of my little finger (along my left-side mandible) had me rather, well, demoralized and lethargic. Not to mention crazed with pain at times.
Working on some other things around here as well. I am just about COMPLETELY FUCKING FED UP with spammers, and I'm probably going to change my email address before the next episode comes out. I'm getting around a hundred spams a day now, 300k or more, and that's getting tiresome to deal with. I don't like spending the time necessary to download the damned things either; I have better things to do with my CPU cycles.
Anyone who is blind, needs assistance programs like JAWS to read, uses a text-only browser, or otherwise isn't going to be able to handle a human-only-readable image file containing the new email address, better tell me now. When I make the switchover, everything to the old address is going to be bouncing, completely unread.
And, by the way, if you've ever even looked at someone's spam, you are encouraging the fuckers to keep doing it. Get rid of Outlook and Outlook Express and get something that doesn't automatically spread its legs for any HTML or program included in the email, mmmmkay?
6 September 2003
Well, this one's going to be late too, but not because anyone's been slacking off. Except possibly me, on the got-it-right-the-first-time writing part. Yep, the proofer/editors and I are engaged in a titanic battle of wills...
No, seriously, they keep coming up with major objections that make sense.
So, if _I_ get it right soon, it'll be up next weekend. Cross yer fingers, and keep Visualizing Ellen Writing!
And STOP visualizing Ellen eating fast food, okay? I've been having cravings...
16 August 2003
Got it this time! Thanks to the few proofers who either made bail or
escaped... big help, folks. The rest of you proofers should be ashamed,
and you're likely to be disbarred if this keeps up.
It's bad enough when I sit around on my keister not doing
anything, but when y'all do it too...
Anyway, like I think I said, the next one is in proofing since last week, and that's coming along better too. Now just to work on the one after that... and faster than I have been...
The reformatting is sort of done, sort of. Kind of. Vaguely. At a plateau, anyway.
10 August 2003
Yeah, well, oops.
On the other hand, I've gotten episode #100 finished and in first draft.
On the gripping hand, I wish someone would find the money to bail most of my proofers out of jail, which is where I guess they've been hiding lately. That's part, though hardly all, of the reason that #99 has been delayed so long, lack of proofing.
You know who you are; I just hope you know who your bail bondsmen are.
And, the reformatting continues...
2 August 2003
I have been busy reformatting things. I have reformatted my hard drive (several times), I am reformatting my purse and other LBE/kit, I am reformatting my entire house. A friend and I were talking tonight, and we independently had decided that if we could find installation sets for Humans, we'd be reformatting ourselves, too. I still need to reformat my finances and my car - though maybe just a good defrag would work on the car...
Next episode, that being #99, will be up next week.
14 July 2003
Got some more done this weekend; proofing continues on #99, writing on the next ones. Slowed, but not stopped.
5 July 2003
Well, finally made the episode come out the way I wanted it. I think. In actuality, this one was almost finished, I thought, when I realized something 'should' happen, and so I had to go back and rewrite some of it. Which, given that Real Life is hanging on me like a pack of Jehovah's Witness pit bulls lately, wasn't last week.
Well excuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuse me!
Which some of you might actually remember hearing. The older ones, anyway.
I could tell you about my RL woes, but then some dumbass out there would send me some sort of idiotic mundane's brainless pseudo-empathy spasm and then I'd be all frustrated because I can't afford to go travelling right now and kill the fucker. Make sense?
Sure it does. You know it does.
And, I was thinking, I've got an awful lot of fanfiction that, to my eternal shame and darn-nation, I haven't worked on enough. So I think I'll do some of that this week, and do some polishing on the existing draft for #99, and not worry too much.
IwillnotworryIwillnotworryIwillnotworryIwillnotworryIwillnotworryIwillnotworry
If I repeat it enough times...
Anyway, keep visualizing Ellen happily writing and editing.
22 June 2003
I made ONE little mistake on the writings page, and two people have asked me in FAR less than 24 hours where the 'new' episode is?
There isn't one - yet - because I changed the wrong date. I shoulda aimed for the 'latest Tucknotes' date not the 'last release' date. Whups, my bad.
On the other hand, in my offended state, I think that both of you should have checked the S'new page to confirm a release, if you couldn't find one instantly.
Anyway.
I did finally get an episode finished - 'BOUT FUCKING TIME - and got that up for the proofers, and I'm working on the one after that. I think the way to do this is to reverse my usual order and do writing FIRST, and THEN reply to email.
21 June 2003
Since at least two of you have mentioned it, that means there's probably close to two hundred of you that have wondered. So here it is:
Somatic mosaicism: when all cells in a person do not have
essentially the same genetic makeup. This can result from a mutation in
one cell during the early stages of embryogenesis, or even from fusion
of two fertilized eggs to produce one person (i.e., a chimera -- *
ponder that!, fortunately, it's rare.)
Chimerism may also result from blood exchange between
fraternal twins, and the person has two people's bone marrow. Future
blood bankers: these patients will probably have two different blood
types.
Somatic mosaicism probably underlies many (if not most)
birthmarks (for example Lancet 345: 596, 1995). People living
comfortably with a "forme fruste" of some dreadful classic lethal
disease may be mosaics (forexample, Am. J. Hum. Genet. 46: 591, 1990).
It's also the basis of tumorgenesis[...]
From somewhere on the
PathGuy website, in his lecture
notes I think.
I took last week offa Tuck, working on [CLASSIFIED] instead, but I think I'm back on track. Sorry 'bout that.
1 June 2003
I actually put the Tuck episode up yesterday, but you didn't see it, because... it was invisible. Yeah. *nods a lot*
Anyway it's there^H^H^H^H^Hvisible now, so go have fun with it. Hopefully by this time tomorrow I'll have another one in first-draft proofing.
Also, Pacchi came up with a somewhat smaller version of hir latest, so check that out too.
25 May 2003
No Tuck this weekend, as you might have figured out by now; but it's coming next weekend.
And, I seem to have gotten out another first-draft, which is good. I also seem to be in a groove again, at least for the moment, so I think I'll write some more tonight.
That's good, right?
Also, the wonderfully talented Pacchi has come up with another piece of art, and I do mean 'piece of art' rather than drawing or pencil or whatever. Go look, if you haven't.
11 May 2003
A day late, and many dollars short...
I said I'd get up some fan-fictions, but I haven't done that. They need proofing, and I need to work on that, but I also need to work on writing more Tuck. The just-released episode needed a fair amount of proofing, including several logical/continuity errors that no one caught but me, on the last read-through.
On the good side, I do have another episode sitting in proofing, and 'plenty' of time to write another episode, and I have a good idea of what needs to happen in that one, and the ones subsequent. "A hundred lines a day..."
28 April 2003
Finally, some vindication for MY Tuck story.
>I now understand one thing, it was nice and then scary to have >all the extras stripped away (parties and field days) and get to >the meat of the stories. Getting to the meat that fast [meant] >getting to the END fast. I really dont want that.!!
See? There's a REASON I made you go through so many episodes where 'nothing' happened.
Also, during writing, I encountered the damnable question, What's the difference between a shrimp and a prawn?
Naturally, I got more than one answer. Here's some distilled wisdom on the topic, links one, two, and three.
Or to summarize: unless you're a marine biologist (or taking a marine biology class), there really isn't a difference that is consistent.
In direct Tuck news, I have Now+2 about half finished, and Now+1 is shaping up nicely. Although, you'd better generate some enthusiasm for MY series, or I'll hold back release until you do...
Rachel: see? I wasn't worried, because I knew I had 'em hooked. =)
26 April 2003
Haha, silly me; I thought releasing a Tuck episode on the same day as a fan fiction might make the fan fiction sort of disappear beneath notice. Judging by the approximate doubling of the size of my guestbook in the last week, none of which is directed at me, I'd have to conclude that isn't the case.
That's fine; I saved mine until this weekend anyway.
19 April 2003
First, the 'new Tuck' is a fanfiction, but not JUST a fanfiction; it's the longest one by far that I've received yet, it's fantastic, and I have a great desire to see more. So will you, after you read it.
So, put your comments in the guestbook for Rachel, or use your little brains and send her an email, thanking her for the tremendous amount of effort she put into this and worshipping her imagination and creativity.
If you don't, I'll know, and I won't be pleased with you. YES YOU!
Vision upgraded, I now have an extra week to twiddle Tuck episodes, which is good, because this Now+1 episode can use a little more twiddling, and while I think I've got it, I need to integrate it into the next one, and re-work that one as well, and then have the proofers go over it with their bloody keyboards and mice to make sure I haven't screwed it up again. But the Next One is essentially done, and the one after that is probably more than done, which leftovers will provide a crystallization seed for Now+3...
14 April 2003
No writing this time to announce, but I did get out all the mail, make major proofing revisions on the Now+1 episode, and survive an attack of Volcanic Colon, about which I will not speak directly. But it did enervate me quite a bit, and I spent quite a while dazedly reading and wishing I could sleep.
Next, vision upgrade. And more email, more revision/proofing, and more Tuck.
Sometime in here I gotta get the concessions stand going...
7 April 2003
Two episodes in proofing. Two in, what, less than a month? I feel rather pleased with myself.
And this one is... interesting. *evil grin*
6 April 2003
Despite this being the shortest night of the year - due to US Daylight Saving Time, the clocks theoretically advanced from 01:59 directly to 03:00, do not pass Go do not collect sixty minutes - I seem to have written a large amount of a new episode of Tuck. More than half, anyway. With luck, and fortune, and most importantly me getting off my mental ass again Real Soon, I could have this finished within the week.
Which means I'd be that much more confident about putting out #95 Real Soon too.
Which can't be anything but good, right?
Proofers to your stations! Full speed ahead!
3 April 2003
A new Tuck episode is finally out, and I've still got another one in reserve. More writing to come; I can feel it.
And, today is Tuck's Birthyday! Celebrate! Preferably in some subversive and non-conformist way, that scares the mundanes... he'd like it that way.
30 March 2003
Seems so easy now, I wonder why I stopped...
New first-draft Tuck now in proofing. New episode coming out on Tuck's Birthyday. Eat some cake and do something subversive to celebrate.
I still don't feel like doing the character listing yet, but the night is young...
23 March 2002
Well, it's not actually new art - since I've had some of it for months and months - but most of you haven't seen it, and some of them I don't think have been seen at all. So, I finally got around to putting them up.
No new writing as of yet, but you might've noticed that a week or two hiatus in email has now been cleared; you might also notice that I finally put up the fan art like I was supposed to long ago. This is Good; this is Positive Motion.
Next, I have some fan-fictions... and then it's either a new episode of Tuck, or the character listing, or - just barely possible within the physical laws of this universe - both. Don't hold your breath for both, though.
And keep visualizing Ellen Writing New Tuck. It's helping; I keep having these weird dreams...
Later:
I changed my mind about doing the fan fiction editing I'm supposed to
do. Instead, I went and wrote about 40% of a new Tuck episode, which is
the first time I've written anything new in like months.
Anyone mind?
4 March 2003
Well, work has become a major problem; I am trying to get around it, but
if this keeps up you can expect MAJOR delays in Tuck compared to the
last year or so - I just do not have the time lately at work, and I am
no longer used to writing at home.
On the other hand, I have been coming closer and closer to quitting,
which would give me plenty of time to write until I got evicted.
As for a character listing...
The idea, I always thought, was bad - mainly because I've seen them in the fronts of other books, and they give a lot away, usually. You may have noticed that Tuck is full of surprising revelations about characters, yes? I would really hate for those surprises to be given away wholesale by a character listing. That is why I have rejected all such ideas before now; fear that they would give too much away, like Cliff Notes.
And I'd really REALLY hate it if someone was distributing one 'behind my
back' as it were. I mean, really intensely hate it.
You know who you are...
But on the other hand, what Ol' Mo came up with, which is a fairly sparse listing that (importantly) doesn't give anything away, is actually a decent idea.
So, if I get a listing (or several listings) that allow me to strip out the detail I don't want people to 'cheat' on - it's been a fucking effort to write it; people should make the fucking effort to read it if they want to know what's going on - then I'd be happy to put that up as a publically accessible thing.
21 February 2003
Looks like I remembered to put a new Tuck up today. Be Happy.
Now, visualize Ellen Writing New Episodes.
...
Also, there are a few more fan-fictions and SickTime endings on the way, if everyone else will stop imitating me and actually keep writing and revising like they are supposed to. One of them is really long and really excellent; the rest are somewhat less than 300k of text *grin* but nonetheless I look forward to putting them up as well.
19 February 2003
NO the Tuck series is NOT ending anytime soon (unless I die in a completely unexpected fashion).
NO fan-fiction is NOT impeding my writing.
NO neither are emails.
NO neither is Real Life (TM).
I just have not been in the mood lately. I had a semi-decent string of about two years or so, and I think I needed some time off. So, I've been taking it. I've been reading instead of writing, and doing the occasional bit of research into Tuck and other topics. Tuck is still on my mind - the little bugger seems to have written himself into ROM somehow; I'll never get rid of him - and I have some idea of what I'm doing next, and where everything is going in the next few weeks/months of Tuck. If anything, I have a hurdle occupying a couple of hours at most, and it's not very high, I just have not been that interested in getting over it.
This is slowly changing. I'm starting to miss writing, rather than dread it, and I am also running out of books I want to re-read. *grin*
I am also re-reading the entire thing, start to finish, which takes a while. Not that long for me, but there's these other books too...
And I'm putting up a new episode this coming weekend. So there.
22 January 2003
2 new fan fictions up, and I like them both. Also, there are two SickTime endings in the editing/revision pipeline, and I am still (always) accepting more for that story...
18 January 2003
Nope, not this weekend. But, I'm working on it.
I feel a little weird - I actually had to write out a timeline about what is going to happen in the next six weeks so that I could keep it all straight in my head. It's been a long time, like maybe never, I've had such a complicated set of situations to juggle around.
Also, there are several fanfictions on the way. If you haven't sent me a revised copy in the last week, and you wrote one and it's not up yet, send it again ASAP - formatted with hard carriage returns at 75 columns, or Save As MS-DOS Text With Line Breaks for you wusers out there. I don't quite remember who you are, but I can find out.
2 January 2003
Starting off the new year (in some calendars) right this time, by finishing the episode of Tuck that I was working on, as well as a few other things.
Let's hope this year is a lot better writing-wise than the last one, which really wasn't a good productive year...
28 December 2002
Have a present from Ellen...
And remember, Ellen likes fan mail. Ellen is also close to done with another first draft.
18 December 2002
The links check is done - thanks to everyone who helped!
As for Tuck, I was so happy at getting the links done tonight that I am now up to about half a chapter of new first draft. Isn't that nice?
Now if the power won't go out any more...
11 December 2002
Eris was not kind. I have, however, persevered... slowly.
On the good side of the ledger, I'd forgotten I'd written about 25% of the Field Day episode already, so I'm that much further ahead than I thought.
On another note, it's about time for the semi-annual Review Ellen's Links Section. If you want to help, pick a section, check all the links in that section, and tell me the broken ones. I don't need to know the ones that work - wastes my time, slows me down even further, which I don't think we need at this point do we class?
15 November 2002
Well, Tuck is coming along in what I see as dribbles, but it's coming along. Haha, the old writer's dictum of "Sit down and WRITE, you dumbass! SOMEthing!" [wildly paraphrased] seems to work wonders. You'd think I'd know that one by now...
And, for this quarter's Audience Participation, someone needs to name the cat... it's quite young, maybe nine weeks old, male, and a long-haired orange tabby. Despite appearances, it sustained no permanent damage from its abuse - the vet checked it out pretty well, and let it come home, so we know it's okay.
Come up with the best name, and a reason for the name ("It's cool" or "I just like it" is fine) and a handle to attribute the name to if you win, and you'll be Mentioned In Dispatches.
If you have a better 'color' or description, or can point me to a good high-quality picture of a good-looking cat on the Web, I'd even change the official appearance of the cat. No Persians, crossed-eyed Siamese, or 'weird' or unusual breeds like Russian Blues or Manxes - I want it to look like a cat, not a cat-that-someone-slammed-its-head-into-a-wall-face-first or a cat-with-its-tail-missing. You know, a real cat, Felis Domesticus.
9 November 2002
Well, I got this one out... but the 'replacement' first draft of Now+3 is nowhere near finished. I think I'm either avoiding something, or I need some old Asian dude to beat me with a stick for a while. Can't tell from here.
Maybe I can get a little done tonight, now that I'm thinking about it...
30 October 2002
On track and moving forward... looks like PERHAPS the next episode will be out in a fortnight, rather than a fortnight-and-a-half. Go look it up.
And, let's all be careful the next few days... for those of you that don't know the original reason for this upcoming holiday, it's not to spend money, have parties, and eat candy. It's to confuse the ghosts and spirits that come through from Beyond, on one of the nights when the wall grows thin.
26 October 2002
I didn't realize it had been quite that long, but here's another episode...
Must write more, must write more...
23 October 2002
Tuck is delayed again from the usual fortnightly release, but that's the way it goes sometimes. I dunno. Life is hard, and sometimes the hardest thing for me is to just sit down and DO. I've been doing other things at night lately, though those of you that are sending email know that I am keeping up with that, pretty much.
Looks like another episode will go out around the end of this week, though. So you can stop holding your breath...
10 October 2002
Why, someone has already asked, has Tuck been removed from
Sapphire's site?
Here's why.
27 September 2002
Some days go better than others, of course... at least I finally got this one out. And I don't want to hear any complaints from English majors or theater types about what I took liberties with.
Everything else needs those damned rewrites... *sigh* I'd really feel awesome if I could get more of it on the first try, but I can't. At least I'm sparing YOU.
21 September 2002
What's a good day's worth of writing for me? A quarter of an entire episode.
This looks like it may just be one of the better days. *grins* You know the writing's going well when I keep forgetting to take the cough syrup which is within easy reach. Until I start dry-coughing, of course.
Next episode will be out when it completes proofing, which should be any day now, I hope.
18 September 2002
Well, I haven't added much lately; that's because I haven't written much lately. RL and illness, plus a general malaise, have kept me down, so to speak. But I got some done tonight.
6 September 2002
Looks like the unofficial Tuck fan site and discussion area is at http://tuckerspawn.ateros.com
Throw in your two cents...
I am assured by the owner/operator that the registration information is collected only by the locally-run software, and not mailed off to some corporation for collection and spam purposes. If this turns out to be a false assurance, well... I like vengeance. Anyway, it's not too bad, and I'm checking there a lot. I like reading about Tuck as much as you do.
And, oh yeah, Tuck #87 is now up. And another episode is finished enough to go into proofing, thus maintaining three in the pipeline. Not as good as the six or eight, but better than I've been doing for a while... and I don't feel quite done yet tonight.
As for paper-printing... I'm still looking into it. It looks like initial cost is going to be in the $500-1000 range (probably closer to the low end) for the first X episodes in paperback, for which X is not defined yet. I'm gonna have to do market surveys amongst you to see what you'd prefer, 'more cheaper' or 'fewer bigger more-expensive'. Letters of inquiry are going out, slowly...
3 September 2002
I gotta sit my ass down one of these days and just WRITE - maybe some
tonight, but I'm missing those six-hour blitz sessions I used to have.
Damnit.
Anyway, with the addition of some minor corrections and a few additions
in story arc, I think I have most of September plotted out.
But, that's not why I'm writing this tonight...
There has been a Big To-Do (who knew, what you'd do, you otaku you!)
lately about me (or someone) publishing Tuck in a paper format.
Don't think I wasn't paying attention.
And, here's what's going on in my head:
Later: half done with Now+4 ...
23 August 2002
Episode 86 is released, I have three more in proofing and one first
draft about a third done. Something plotwise has been causing a lot of
thought, which takes away from writing Tuck, since I can only torture
the poor brat while I'm thinking about him. Hopefully, I have it
somewhat figured out at this point, and the proofers won't projectile
vomit on it.
I'd tell you more, but that would spoil the surprise. Surprises.