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Electronicae (2)

The computer saga continues….
After my motherboard blew, I remembered there were a couple of old boards at the bottom of my Big Box of Computer Bits. I went a looked, and joy, both of them took my processor and memory. One of them, I knew, wasn’t working (don’t ask me why I’d kept it); I was pretty sure the other one was OK. Anyway, guess which one I tried first, spending about two hours wrestling with the heatsink and going squinty-eyed from trying to decipher the inadequate diagrams…? A banana to the gentleman at the back!
Anyway, the second one turned out to be good(ish). It didn’t take the new DDR400 memory that I’d bought, but never mind, the stick of DDR330 memory that had originally been in my machine fitted.
Upon connecting up (nearly) everything and switching it on, all seemed well – it seemed that all I had to do was download and install the board drivers. Then… (yes, there is always a then…) I noticed that I hadn’t attached the CD/DVD drive.
I did so. And everything went tits-up. A big red message on the bootup screen, with enough exclamation marks to earn the envy of any teenage texter, informed me that I needed to turn the CD drive from secondary slave to secondary master before it would proceed any further.
After several frustrating hours of fiddling with the BIOS and consulting online forums, I haven’t got an answer – beyond permanently unplugging the drive’s data cable, so I can’t play CDs or DVDs. The floppy drive was already dead, so the only external storage I now have is my little pen flash drive.
So it looks like I still need a new motherboard. Sigh.

ETA: Fixed it. After hours of swapping cables etc. I looked at the CD drive and had a “D’oh!!” moment. Until then I had never realised that CD drives had jumpers just like hard drives. Resetting the jumper from ‘slave’ to ‘master’ did the trick.
Still got the sound to sort out, but otherwise the system is usable. Now for tea.

in:

Techie Stuff

Electronicae…

Woes, woes, woes. Last night, I decided (because I was bored and peed off with learning the ins and outs of various CMSs – I’m still trying to find some easy, simple CMSs for future clients – WordPress is getting a bit heavyweight nowadays, with too perhaps many bells and whistles for a n00b to be comfortable with) to have another go at installing the new memory into my machine.
Everything seemed to be going OK, until I switched the PC back on. Nothing. The fans and the drive spun, the drive lights came on. But nothing on the screen, no sound from the PC. Then I noticed a scorching smell. I hit the rocker switch and stuck my nose into the case. Yup – a smell of something burnt wafted up from one particular spot on the motherboard.
Since then I’ve tested what I can, and it all comes back to the motherboard being fried.
buggerbuggerbugger. Just what we don’t need right now.
I had actually been thinking for a while that I should get a new board at some point – this one is five or six years old. But there’s always been something more urgent to spend money on (like a new car, forex).
It’s lucky I have this old laptop. But it’s far from suitable. With only 128mg of memory, it won’t run any of my programs (not that the programs I use most often will run with Linux anyway); the browser freezes when it gets a page with too many images and/or scripts; the keyboard and touchpad are awkward to use; it’s so sloooooow!. And I was congratulating myself earlier on backing up all my data only three weeks ago, before discovering that it’s all on DVDs, and the laptop has only a CD drive.
But at least I can use email, do (limited) websurfing and update my websites.
I am peed orf.

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General

Bleurghhhh…

…is how I’m feeling today. Tired, out of sorts, and my left knee is giving it some welly. Hope I’m not coming down with the bug that Son came around with last week. Seem to be coming up against frustrations and impediments with everything. Short of money (so what’s new?), can’t seem to get the new Oakleaf Circle site working the way I want it (but at least it’s a development site, and not yet live). Oh well, the post hasn’t arrived yet – I’m always hoipeful that something nice will arrive.
Caught a few minutes of a Marianne Faithfull concert on the box last night. She should be suing her plastic surgeon – her trout pout wasn’t the worst I’ve ever seen, but she had a visible lump of filler in her cheek. Plus of course there was the overall shinyness and botoxed deadness. But, shut your eyes and listen, and it was pretty dammed good – her Sister Morphine was scorching. Her voice has the raw bluesiness that comes with maturity and an interesting life; she’s also got a terrific backing group.
Might try and find a few of her tracks, to add to my collection. I’m still aiming to get myself an iPod player – just as soon as we can spare the cash……

in:

General

Life etc…..

…in astrological terms, being 59 means you’re in the middle of your second Saturn Return, when Saturn transits its own place for the second time in your life. It’s generally regarded as a pretty heavy time, of restrictions and difficulties.
By accident, I’ve just stumbled on the blog of a fellow astrologer who was born in the same year and is therefore also experiencing his Saturn Return. He wibbles on about it quite a bit, about the fear, the doubts and so on. Makes a bit of a deal of it.
For me the Saturn Return (so far – I’ve still got the third and last ‘hit’ to go) hasn’t been too different from life during the last few years, except ratcheted up by a factor of two or three – it’s just yet more of the same old worries about money and security that I deal with all the time. It’s wearing, wearying and tiresome, but I know I can deal with it. Sometimes I think that the worst thing that Saturn could do to me would be for me to win the Lottery jackpot; I think I’d lose all sense of purpose if I had nothing at all to worry about.
As I said, this astrologer makes a big thing of what he’s going through – but he’s right about at least one thing. It really does make you think and wonder about your personal future, about your purpose, about what you’ll leave behind. That’s been on my mind a lot lately, and I’m beginning to lay plans.

On a slightly different topic – this astrologer is spending his Saturn Return travelling. He’s presently going around a few of the prettier bits of the West Country and Wales, before travelling to Palestine to work (apparently, he’s none too clear on just what he’ll be doing there) as a ‘spiritual activist’.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all in favour of him and others going out to help there. But I do wonder – why this activist focus on Palestine, why do so many people think that it’s so overwhelmingly important in the world that they have to drop everything to fly out there and give some sort of help? There are plenty of other conflicts, plenty of other oppressed peoples desperately needing aid – just look at the news.
Plus, what about all the communities needing help in this country? As I said, this astrologer is “travelling around Britain”, but is keeping to just a few of the nicer bits. No cities or ravaged industrial areas (or any part of Scotland even) feature on his itinerary. That’s his choice, of course; but I do wonder why he misses out so much. (Yeah, I’m a nosy cow; with a Scorpio Moon, I’m always wondering about peoples’ inner motivations.) Somebody experienced in counselling, community organising and conflict resolution, as he is, could find plenty of purposeful and rewarding work without having to leave home.
For lots of peace/leftist activists, Palestine is the big focus of their attentions; I get the distinct feeling that it has hugely symbolic and psychological associations for them, far beyond the mere matters of politics and human rights. The same thing goes goes for many other groupings of course; anti-abortionists hold up picture of babies and scream about “murder of the innocents”, animal-rights activists do the same with animals, Christian fundamentalists do it with Bibles. And so on. All invest the object of their particular cause with enormous symbolic significance that more often than not obscures the reality of that object. With some groupings, to point at that their presentation of their symbol does not accord with reality is to invite attack as “The Enemy”. Try telling some Christian fundies that the Bible isn’t inerrent, or an ALF activist that medical researchers try to treat their animal subject humanely (to take just two examples) and you find out the huge personal and psychological investment they have in their pet cause, their fetish-object. So much so that any hint that their view of this fetish-object does not accord with reality actually threatens their sense of identity.
Anyway, I’m trying to point out that people rarely apply rationality to the causes they hold dear; and much prefer to construct something that fits in with their thinking, rather than change their thinking. I was reminded of this the other day, when I came across an article opining that children with autism and Aspergers Syndrome (the fluff-bunny New Agey writer clearly had no idea that there are many adults on the autism spectrum) are “transhuman” and the next stage in human evolution. Now, as an adult with Asperger’s, the prospect of being put on a pedestal and labelled “transhuman” doesn’t thrill me at all, any more than being labelled “mentally ill” or “dysfunctional”. I am a human person and want to be accepted as such, not hidden away under a label. Putting a catch-all label on somebody effectively makes them Other, so that you don’t have to bother with dealing with them on a human level.
It’s my feeling that the many political and human rights activists who are so caught up in the Palestinian cause think the same way about Palestinians; for them, Palestinians have become symbols of human suffering and wrongdoing, something to hang their righteous anger on, something to march for and shout about, not human beings. The astrologer who is going to Palestine actually writes that he admires them for their large families and is looking forward to being amongst one – even though he’s certainly intelligent enough to realise that Palestinian women don’t have much choice about marrying and having children, that big families are the norm in places like Palestine largely because there is little in the way of material and social stability and that the small, fragmented families that he despises in the West are the result of social stability and universal welfare. It’s clear that big, nurturing, close families are something he longs for.

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Astrology, General, Rants

Fairly Productive….

….I think my Astro*Diary site may now be taking off – today I have scooped the other astrology sites with an article by Robert Blaschke on the phenomenal Susan Boyle. Every astrologer has been gagging for her chart data and I got it (almost) first.
He sent it to me as a PDF; it took me over four hours to format it into HTML – most of the time was taken with redoing the six charts with it, which I was unable to extract from the document. But getting it finished, uploading then announcing it – and Twittering it! – was highly satisfying. My site stats are already climbing, with hits coming in from worldwide. It’s a good feeling when you know that loads of people are seeing your hard work.

So now I’m having a rest.

in:

Astrology

Watching Me, Watching You…

Living in a remote(ish) rural paradise far from the milling wotsits, I tend to miss quite a lot of things going on in the rest of the country. For instance, I’ve only just become aware of this anti-terrorist poster poster campaign going on. It sounds like something dreamed up by a satirist; unfortunately, it’s not. People really are being told to watch out for and report people photographing CCTV cameras (because they could be terrorists reconnoitring a bomb target!!) and neighbours who put an unusual number of empty cleaning products bottles in their bin (because they could be bomb-making terrorists!!)
Well, of course, terrorists are ALWAYS out photographing CCTV cameras, aren’t they? And of course they want us to think that they use all these cleaning products because they like a clean house.
Hopefully, it won’t last. The CCTV poster has already been reported to the Advertising Standards Authority. And an internet campaign to ridicule them is gathering momentum – parodies of the posters are appearing everywhere (there’s even a group on Flckr). If you want to make your own parody, there’s a tool here.
Here’s my own effort:CCTV poster

in:

Rants, Stupid Things I Have Seen

The Forest….

Loch Grannoch 2006
Loch Grannoch 2006
….so we went for another drive yesterday, through a section of the Galloway Forest we’d last visted three years ago. What a difference!
Much of the trees have recently been logged; so instead of dark brooding masses of conifers, there was moonscapes of bare trashed ground. Since the Galloway Forest is primarily an industrial-scale tree-growing operation, this didn’t shock us – everywhere we go in the Forest, there are logged-out clearings, along with newly-planted and young-growth plantations. It was just the comparison with that we remembered from out previous visit that jarred. Before, we had driven for miles along almost-tunnels of firs that blocked out the sun; now the empty landscape, littered with branches, rooted-out rocks and tractor ruts stretched all around.
We were heading for the remote Loch Grannoch. It’s pretty well unvisited – except by fishermen, mainly – and you get to it along about ten miles of rough forest track. The last part of the road – thankfully unlogged – runs through trees and comes out along the lip of a near-vertical cliff for a several hundred yards. Then you see the loch stretch gloriously out in front of you. On this occasion, we disturbed a herd of wild goats, looking ferociously shaggy and huge-horned.
Like many of the ancient lochs around here, it has beaches of coarse white sand, produced by millennia of weathering on the granite that underlies this part of Scotland. On a sunny day, you can nearly imagine you’re at the seaside. It was sunny when we got there yesterday, but getting late – we didn’t want to be caught out in the dark, so after a short walk along the beach, we started driving back, this time disturbing a solitary red deer as we bumped along over the ruts and rocks.
“I can remember” said B “there was a time when we’d say ‘Look! A real deer!’ Now it’s just ‘Oh, another deer'”.
A while later, he exclaimed “What! Is that a hare?” while I cried at the same time “Look, a buzzard, really low!” For a few more seconds we saw the hare leap along the road in front of us while the buzzard swooped in low; then the hare leapt into the grass and the buzzard wheeled away, disappointed.

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General

Wot I Did on my (Non)Hols….

….I completely redesigned the front end of this website. I spent a couple of days beforehand cruising around web-designers’ websites, putting myself in the place of a potential customer and noting what worked and what didn’t (tip no.1: don’t boast about how your sites are correctly coded and conform to web standards, and how your competitors’ sites are badly coded – potential customers aren’t interested in coding and don’t know HTML from HMV, otherwise they would be building their own websites; tip no. 2: remember that you’re a designer and that “the medium is the message” – in other words, don’t just rely on words but use the whole look and feel of your site to advertise your skills; tip no. 3: proof-read your copy!) It now looks a whole lot better, much more “web 2.0” and definitely more eye-catching.
…..I’m busy transferring the contents of the Oakleaf Circle site into WordPress – it’s a wearingly tedious and lengthy job, but updating it in future will mean quite a bit less work to do.
….I’m almost ready to launch Astro*Diary. The site’s not up yet, but it only needs a few more hours work. It’s now online.

Oh, and we sold our old Citroen and have just bought another car. It’s not here yet – it’s down in Preston, so B will be getting on the coach tomorrow morning to go and collect it.

And I’ve joined Facebook properly – I’m finding it very useful for keeping in touch with the kids. I’ve also joined Twitter, and using it to write short poetry (I’m on my real name there, so you can go and look).

And that’s about it….

in:

General, Techie Stuff

A Short Service Announcement

This site will probably be offline for a few days from tomorrow (Monday); the hosting fee is due and I haven’t yet found the dosh. However, it will only be a temporary interruption – a fortnight at the most.
Byeee!

in:

General