Oof. Y’know what’s more effective than any alarm clock at waking a person? A hungry skunk. You can’t hit snooze, can’t ignore him, and God save the person who thinks they can sleep through being walked over, pawed at, and snorted upon by an indignant fuzz loaf. Trying to explain, “I just need fifteen more minutes, Hobkin. Breakfast in 15, okay?” so totally doesn’t work. He’s asleep now with a full belly. I’m bleary and waiting for the Adderall to kick in. My life is odd.
I went to renew my eugiefoster.com domain from hostingdude.com and discovered they’d doubled the price. I guess that’s standard operating procedure. Lure you in with an initial low, low price and then jack it up. Ptooie on that, I sez. I transferred my registration to godaddy.com which was conveniently having a sale on transfers. Snagged the sale price for four years. I figure when that time runs out, I can always transfer it somewhere else if they ramp up the cost too. But there was an hour or so of anxiety between the initial transfer setup and the confirm proceedings where my website was down and my domain email forwarding wasn’t functioning. At least I was clever enough to do all that in the wee hours of the night. Everything’s back up now. Whew.
And, on the extremely annoying front, my laptop powered itself down three times in a row yesterday. Totally freaked me out the last time because I started wondering whether I’d be able to keep it stable long enough to backup my last couple day’s work. Fortunately, on the last reboot it stayed on. And then there was a massive backing up of everything.
So yeah, upgrading the BIOS and switching to a new power adapter didn’t solve the problem. Called the MicroCenter HP techs and they want $50 just to send it to HP for us. The thing’s under warranty! Doesn’t paying $50 to send it in for maintenance defeat the purpose of having a warranty?? Going to get back online with the HP tech support folks in India (sigh) and see if there’s another way to get it looked at that doesn’t involve paying a wad of cash. As an interim solution, fosteronfilm is wiping out our old Sony Vaio desktop and reloading it for me. We’ll set it up as a writing workstation in the library. The only real downer is that it doesn’t have a WiFi card, and it’s old enough to only have USB 1.0 ports, so if I want Internet connectivity, we need to buy and install an internal card. And, of course, I need my Internet, so that’s an expense and a hassle we’ll have to look into stat.
Hardware is being mean to me! And I’m also all twitchy wondering whether my system will power down spontaneously at any moment. I just want to write! Waaah! Stupid unstable technology that I’m completely dependent upon and addicted to.
Writing Stuff
Did a pair of editing passes on “Rue and Ruin” incorporating the suggestions from fosteronfilm‘s first reader experience. Declared “first draft” and sent it off to the Critters queue. It should go up next week.
Today, after I hash it out with the HP folks, I start on my re-telling of Arachne.
Oh, how awful! And it does that on the adapter, too? :shudders: I can’t imagine what you must be going through! :huggles::rethinks her own burning desire for a laptop:
Nasty! But glad to see that you’ll be starting on Arachne soon–of course it will go up at Critters, too, won’t it? :goes off to make sure that her poor membership hasn’t expired:
Thanks, sweetie. Actually, it seems to only be happening when I’m on adapter power, but since I usually work on A/C . . . sigh. I do love my laptop, but this problem is quite aggravating.
And yes, Arachne will get it time on Critters once I finish it!
Let me know if you want to borrow a WiFi card…I’ve got a couple laying around after BlackFriday…either PCcard or USB (USB 1.1 is as fast as DSL speed). I could drop it by on one of my seemingly daily dozen trips to Centennial.
That’s very decent of you! I’d very much appreciate a loan of your spare WiFi PCard (I’d go for the USB one, except we’re on a cable modem, not a DSL, and I don’t think a USB 1.1 can keep up). I’ll drop you an email after I post this comment with our address and phone number. Thanks so much!
I’ve been using Godaddy for my domain registration since I first got Mouseferatu.com. While I’d have to check my records to see if they’ve ever raised prices at all, they never jacked them up so high, in one fell swoop, that I even noticed it, let alone felt the need to change providers.
That’s reassuring to know. I have to admit being rather miffed with Hostingdude. It’s not that their new rates were so terribly high (~$13/year) but they are nearly twice what their initial price was, and they gave no warning of the increase.
Your laptop stories are really scaring me. My old HP laptop has never had any similar troubles, but it is quite aged at this point. Hope I don’t have to deal with a bunch of techies in India. I have enough trouble understanding the one who lives in the house with me.
Glad to see you got some writing tasks done. Stiff upper lip and all that rot!
The thing is, I really do adore my laptop. It’s everything I could ask for in a work machine, and it’s really facilitated my writing process. Until this little difficulty popped up, I was a thoroughly satisfied customer/user. Argh.