• Who is this chick anyway?

Nova Terra

~ Just another way of stalling on my other writing

Nova Terra

Tag Archives: computers

Greetings from Gaia

10 Sunday May 2020

Posted by lionsofmercy in Blog

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

computers, life, work

To save you from having to read the preceding post (although feel free): I opted to use part of my stimulus $$ to replace my old computer Merlin with new baby Gaia, and had to clone his hard drive in preparation. And cue diabolical laughter . . . now!

Merlin died. As in before Gaia arrived. As in the day after I did the clone. Those of us who don’t believe in coincidence are all nodding our heads.

It took Gaia a week to traverse 45 minutes worth of Colorado, which I spent trying really hard not to curse at Amazon and the USPS. Meanwhile, I was propped up in my tiny studio on my tablet, which has 2/3 the memory of my phone. (Literally. 2GB. I don’t know how the little darlin’ crosses the street by itself.) Had to Zoom through my phone for audio. It was . . . stressful, and I credit Insight Timer with teaching me that I could meditate on my own terms, because this week, already in quarantine, could have been Really Bad.

But she came! At last! Made in Germany, according to the sticker–am I alone in thinking this a bit odd? I must be; Lord knows das Deutsch have mastered engineering from cars to pencil sharpeners. She wasn’t *quite* the computer I thought I bought–lots of space for an additional couple of drives. If I’d known this, I wouldn’t have bothered with the cloning or the hasty cloud backup I’d also done . . . right before Merlin dropped deader than Jacob Marley. Let’s hear it for paranoia and ignorance!

Her HDMI port isn’t connected to anything (what the sheep??) so the monitor is on VGA, but these are first-world problems. Gaia is fast and silent, a veritable ninja compared to the lumbering Merlin. Of course, all my cookies are gone, but seeing as I also had my debit card expire last month, I have to re-enter a lot of data everywhere as it is. Moving on.

So I plugged in the external drive and . . . nothing. Downloaded the software. Nothing. My son tried, and discovered that a-a-a-all the data was gone. Poof. We still don’t know what happened. If I hadn’t been a canny old person with no trust in technology, having known technology when it was still teething, and thus backed up my essential data onto Google Drive, all my writing would be GONE. I would probably be in the hospital if that had happened, because I’ve been loosey-goosey about backups.

Currently I am still moving into Gaia, and enjoying such fluff as being able to greenscreen in Zoom at last. Merlin’s hard drive is plugged into my son’s machine because we want to troubleshoot a bit, but it’s not talking to anybody right now. We’re waiting for the geek to advise us as to the next step.

Oh yeah, the casual games: Had to re-download and restart them. Not so bad; I guess the journey is worth more than I had credited.

Data Footprints

22 Wednesday Apr 2020

Posted by lionsofmercy in Blog

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

computers, first world problems, geekiness, life

My foot stumbled against the faceplate of my desktop for the forty-leventh time, knocking it akilter. (Merlin sits on the floor beside my desk, because I don’t have the desk space for him.) I winced as always at the clatter. “Last day, fella.” According to all sources, his replacement, to be named “Gaia,” because it’s Earth Day, will arrive sometime today. I’m excited, scared, and a little sad.

Excited is easy: New toy! More memory! Zippier graphics! Sad stems from my tendency to anthropomorphize the world–Merlin is a person to me, sorta. Or at least a kind of critter. I feel bad that he’s down on the floor, sitting there like an obedient pet. Sometimes I wonder if that (and all the inadvertent kicking) is why he’s cranky, but inside I must admit: It’s old age, which these days means five or six. Little things, like him refusing a soft restart. (That means I have to push his power switch to reboot, which takes longer. The next step from this would be having to pull his power cord, sigh. And then will come the day where he won’t immediately restart. Been here, done this.)

All that said, I’m building Gaia a little platform, to be composed of part of our stash of a local library’s discarded Encyclopedia Britannica. Moving on:

A good bit of the Essential Me lives on Merlin for much of the day, which is why I was dismayed to learn that Gaia has no slot for his hard drive, which brings us to scared. “Get creative,” our local geek advised.

According to the interwebs, this often involves that structural component known as doublesided tape. I opted for Plan B: Cloning Merlin’s hard drive onto an external. (For the curious: These days you can get 1T for fifty bucks. Sweet!)

Well, my patient daughter fetched me the external drive, Micro Center being an essential business right now. Holding it in my hand, I experienced a whole terabyte of space weighing less than a cheeseburger. (I spent my salad days sharing bunk space with my husband’s pet PDP-8, fittingly named “Goliath.”) I downloaded a free program that people seemed to think well of, and hit “backup” from C: to E:. Et voila, I awoke to the deed being done, having taken at least three hours.

This will be the version I will plug into Gaia upon her setup, and if all goes according to plan, my apps, etc., will still be available. Being an Old Person (see “PDP-8,” above) I am taking this on the best assurances of my kids and the interwebs. So let’s assume that this is all well and good and will work the way I want it to. (I am convinced that it won’t, because Old People who grew up in the Hollerith card era know the Nature of the Beast.)

This means that from now on, any data I put onto Merlin today has either got to be backed up on the cloud (easy enough for writing, etc.–I’m backing a bunch of stuff up onto the cloud anyway because of that canny Old Person thing) or it will VANISH like footprints in heavy snow: Tomorrow I will open a window and they will be gone.

I spend far too much of my quarantine time playing my collection of casual games, and today that won’t be an attractive option, because those levels, that time–however poorly spent–that experience, won’t be available tomorrow. So that leaves me with writing (hi!) and things that happen online (hi again!).

And then there’s the real world, which has these great redundancies called Time and Space and whatnot. Too bad right now it’s mostly confined to a three-bedroom apartment in Cambridge, #firstworldproblems, heh.

My personal takeaway here is the assignment to figure out why it matters so much to me that my game-playing (and other) efforts count. Why isn’t the journey itself worth the trip? Why must my data footprints all be tracked across wet cement?

 

 

 

 

Nova Terra

just another way of stalling on my other writing

Categories

  • Blog
  • Fiction
May 2022
M T W T F S S
 1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
3031  
« Apr    

Blogroll

  • Aaaand it's my brand new Patreon page! (Still being set up.)
  • All the Google Doodles
  • And there's even a Google Doodle store!
  • BBC has all these nifty all-about-you tests . . .
  • Free downloadable SF books! Good ones! Really! Legit even!
  • Help transcribe the New York Public Library's menus! Minimal effort required!
  • Lunar Calendar
  • My YouTube favorites, in case you're bored or curious
  • Places to increase your mellow
  • rathergood.com. Well, pretty darn good.
  • The International Center for Bathroom Etiquette. Really. Awesome.
  • The Muppets: Bohemian Rhapsody
  • The Onion interview with God, September 2001
  • Translate Japanese characters to Roman letters
  • Want a koan? Pick a koan. Any koan.
  • What people of X height look like at Y weight

Stupid Art! doh!

  • Graph Paper of the Gods
  • The Museum of Bad Art

Stupid Writing! doh!

  • By golly, this is a pretty darn good Inuit-family language vocab site!
  • Lunar Calendar
  • Random noun generator
  • Revised Standard Version
  • The Bible

Blog at WordPress.com.

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
  • Follow Following
    • Nova Terra
    • Join 424 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Nova Terra
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar