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Announcing departures.
Jan. 7th, 2009 08:25 amMy uncle---one of my uncles, I should say... one of my father's brothers---passed away on January 2nd. Because my email was out of order at that time and I was in between phones, I didn't get the message about it until late Monday night.
My parents are both from the traditional Irish Catholic sort of family; i.e., large. I don't feel like I know my dad's family as well as I do my mother's... not because of any huge rift or anything dramatic like that, simply circumstances and logistics. We've simply logged more holiday hours with the one branch over the years than with the other.
My parents are, for the record, both alive and still together and I have a wonderful relationship with both of them and love both of them very much. Yes, I realize that means I have no excuse whatsoever for the angsty emo bullshit I put my characters through. I'm just sadistic that way.
I've got a lot of big writerly thoughts about mortality and such swirling around in my head, but I don't know if I'm comfortable subjecting you all to that. I've always been much more comfortable writing fiction than autobiography. So, I'm going to leave the report off there and move onto some good news.
I'd been trying to get my old email exported from Windows Mail (running the lappy in safe mode) and imported into a client on Ubuntu (Thunderbird, Evolution, didn't really care as long as I had my old messages and folders and accounts all set up) and there isn't really a way to do that directly, and I wasn't satisfied with any of the solutions I was finding (a lot of them don't preserve folders, and I'd have to set up my sorting rules again, etc.), and at the same time I was finding it hard to do anything besides the very simplest actions with the pre-installed programs in Ubuntu.
So, at 3:00 o'clock in the morning, when I couldn't sleep for various reasons, I got up and decided I was going to take one last concerted crack at making Windows Vista work. Yeah, call it Stockholm Syndrome... or Battered Housewife Syndrome. I don't know. I know everything that's wrong with Microsoft and its operating system and its software, but when it works it's so easy.
I'd previously messed around with selectively disabling components/services/programs that I thought might have been causing the problem, based on things I'd recently installed or uninstalled and/or Googling people with similar problems, but this time I disabled all services and then went through one by one from top to bottom re-enabling them to find the one that was preventing the lappy from operating normally.
It turns out that it was Windows Search that was breaking everything... what you would expect to be a fairly integral service, one that I hadn't done anything with recently, one that I've never changed any settings for or otherwise fucked around with, and... hilariously enough... about the second or third service from the bottom of the list. Yeah. Since I had to restart after each one, I finished around seven in the morning.
But whatever. I have my computer back in working order. As I said of Ubuntu, I don't necessarily consider this a long-term solution... if Search can randomly break like that, who knows what's next? I'm keeping all options open for my next laptop, and I'm going to be taking the advice of the commenter who suggested I move -all- my data to the other drive so I can just reinstall if necessary.
This is going to be a long blog post, but some other stuff that needs covering: I made a change to the Tales of MU website the other day and then got interrupted before I could put up a proper explanation. The sidebar now reads: "January Contributions" and has a total out of $1500. The amount currently there is actually how much money I've received since I gave the total for the big push in December. (I need to update it, as I've gotten a couple since I changed it.) I'm pulling the separate donation funds for Star Harbor, Void Dogs, and the bonus stories and simply having one pool. All three of those have received consistent support... I don't see any reason to keep making people choose between them when they spend money, as I don't think I have to keep gauging reader interest on an individual basis. I'll be updating the individual pages to reflect that.
I've got a feeling there's more I wanted to put here, but I can't think of it at the moment. Lot of stuff going on. On top of everything else, I'm supposed to go look at an apartment today, but I think I'll let the roommate handle that because I don't know when I'd have time to write otherwise. We're not moving until March, so I'll have a chance to see it later if she's not sure.
My parents are both from the traditional Irish Catholic sort of family; i.e., large. I don't feel like I know my dad's family as well as I do my mother's... not because of any huge rift or anything dramatic like that, simply circumstances and logistics. We've simply logged more holiday hours with the one branch over the years than with the other.
My parents are, for the record, both alive and still together and I have a wonderful relationship with both of them and love both of them very much. Yes, I realize that means I have no excuse whatsoever for the angsty emo bullshit I put my characters through. I'm just sadistic that way.
I've got a lot of big writerly thoughts about mortality and such swirling around in my head, but I don't know if I'm comfortable subjecting you all to that. I've always been much more comfortable writing fiction than autobiography. So, I'm going to leave the report off there and move onto some good news.
I'd been trying to get my old email exported from Windows Mail (running the lappy in safe mode) and imported into a client on Ubuntu (Thunderbird, Evolution, didn't really care as long as I had my old messages and folders and accounts all set up) and there isn't really a way to do that directly, and I wasn't satisfied with any of the solutions I was finding (a lot of them don't preserve folders, and I'd have to set up my sorting rules again, etc.), and at the same time I was finding it hard to do anything besides the very simplest actions with the pre-installed programs in Ubuntu.
So, at 3:00 o'clock in the morning, when I couldn't sleep for various reasons, I got up and decided I was going to take one last concerted crack at making Windows Vista work. Yeah, call it Stockholm Syndrome... or Battered Housewife Syndrome. I don't know. I know everything that's wrong with Microsoft and its operating system and its software, but when it works it's so easy.
I'd previously messed around with selectively disabling components/services/programs that I thought might have been causing the problem, based on things I'd recently installed or uninstalled and/or Googling people with similar problems, but this time I disabled all services and then went through one by one from top to bottom re-enabling them to find the one that was preventing the lappy from operating normally.
It turns out that it was Windows Search that was breaking everything... what you would expect to be a fairly integral service, one that I hadn't done anything with recently, one that I've never changed any settings for or otherwise fucked around with, and... hilariously enough... about the second or third service from the bottom of the list. Yeah. Since I had to restart after each one, I finished around seven in the morning.
But whatever. I have my computer back in working order. As I said of Ubuntu, I don't necessarily consider this a long-term solution... if Search can randomly break like that, who knows what's next? I'm keeping all options open for my next laptop, and I'm going to be taking the advice of the commenter who suggested I move -all- my data to the other drive so I can just reinstall if necessary.
This is going to be a long blog post, but some other stuff that needs covering: I made a change to the Tales of MU website the other day and then got interrupted before I could put up a proper explanation. The sidebar now reads: "January Contributions" and has a total out of $1500. The amount currently there is actually how much money I've received since I gave the total for the big push in December. (I need to update it, as I've gotten a couple since I changed it.) I'm pulling the separate donation funds for Star Harbor, Void Dogs, and the bonus stories and simply having one pool. All three of those have received consistent support... I don't see any reason to keep making people choose between them when they spend money, as I don't think I have to keep gauging reader interest on an individual basis. I'll be updating the individual pages to reflect that.
I've got a feeling there's more I wanted to put here, but I can't think of it at the moment. Lot of stuff going on. On top of everything else, I'm supposed to go look at an apartment today, but I think I'll let the roommate handle that because I don't know when I'd have time to write otherwise. We're not moving until March, so I'll have a chance to see it later if she's not sure.