Still going through periods where I’m working along, and then suddenly overtaken by a bout of exhaustion and must tip over and become dead to the world for an hour or so. It gets harder and harder to recover from Dragon*Con each year. But at least I seem to have avoided the traditional bout of con crud.
More D*C pictures:
From the Masquerade
An amazing “Trinity”!
Dark Spud of the Sith?
Who are these goofy people?
Dinner with my writing group on Sat. From left to right: Theresa, Ann, redherring1955, Jason Sizemore, Me, Nancy, and Lisa. (Picture taken by Scott Hancock)
sara1221 and, err, someone’s foot at her Masquerade room party with pleroma in the background.
Dean snapped this cake-in-transit shot of me. Cake. Mmmm.
dude_the as deer-in-headlight.
arkhamrefugee: “You better not be taking my picture . . . (Photo by Dean Ansley)
bevlovesbooks and jason_mitchell
dude_the and pleroma. The cool perspective on this was totally unplanned.
Kristin and Angelique at fosteronfilm‘s Film Festival award ceremony.
fosteronfilm with Jack Dann accepting the award for Best in Show, Animated at the Film Festival Award ceremony.
Dean Stockwell and Ken Feinberg (the Chaos Demon in Buffy) presenting Film Festival Awards.
A very grainy shot of Dean Stockwell and fosteronfilm at the awards ceremony. The lighting was pretty dark.
Dean (Ansley) and me winding down on Monday.
Got an email from a company looking for a business analyst in the area. Sent them my resume; they called within an hour, and they’re passing my resume up the line to the hiring people. Waiting now to get a call back for a phone interview (did I mention I hate and utterly suck at phone interviews? Ugh) which, if all goes well, will lead to a face-mail interview. We’ll see.
I’m a little concerned about my laptop. It refuses to put itself into hibernation mode since I brought it back from D*C. I’ve checked the power settings and they haven’t changed. Hibernation is enabled, and it’s supposed to hibernate when I close the lid. But it doesn’t, which means I’ve found myself in some critical battery-low situations when I’ve opened it up again. No biggie, as I usually use it plugged in anyway, but I suspect this might be the first symptom of battery failure. At least I hope that’s the case. Anything else would be more worrisome. Plus I was planning on taking it to the Georgia Big Picture conference, but if I can’t trust it to go into power-saving mode, I won’t have much use for it when the battery croaks. *grumble* It’s still under warranty. I wonder if I should pester the nice people at HP? I hate to send it in for maintenance if it’s not broken, and I don’t think the battery is included in the warranty, but urg, what if it’s an early symptom of something more dire?
Time for another shiny poll:
Writing Stuff
Gearing up to start a story for a new anthology of which I cannot say more about. Supah sekrit, and still under wraps project. I’m very much looking forward to this one. It’s right up my alley, if I do say so myself. It has a Halloween deadline, which should give me plenty of time. Well, theoretically. If my muse is kind.
Got an email from the slush reader of RoF. Apparently the story I thought had been passed up to Shawna months ago, fell through some slush cracks, and isn’t sitting on her desk yet. It will be when this next batch gets passed up, but it’s been in manuscript limbo for months. Sigh.
Is there are way to force it into hibernation? (frex on my ibook I can close it and it will go to sleep or I can manually put it to sleep if I want to even with the unit open.
Ooo. Good question. Yeah, I can force it into either standby or hibernation by going through the Start–>Turn off Computer menu. So that works. Hmph. But it still won’t put itself into either standby or hibernation with the lid closed like it’s supposed to. And I’ve set it so it automatically puts itself into hibernation after a set amount of time, regardless of whether it’s on power or battery. Ponder ponder.
Sometimes laptops will refuse to hibernate if there’s a program process running in the background that the OS can’t stop. But without looking at the computer, I have no way to guess whether this would be hardware or software. Honestly, it could be either one…
Brilliant! You reminded me that an emergency printer driver was loaded on my laptop during D*C, and sure ’nuff, there was a print job jammed in the queue, unable to complete. I cancelled the print job and uninstalled the printer. Hoping fixes the problem . . .
Let me know. I have to know whether I get smugness points for this 🙂
Wah. It didn’t work. It still won’t hibernate. Drat. I thought for sure that was it. Well, fooie.
Well, poop. That made perfect sense, since you said the problem started at the con, and that’s when you added the printer driver.
I’m afraid I don’t know what else to suggest without being able to look at the thing…
Ooo. I think you still get a pile of smugness points. I tried rebooting after I cleared off the print driver, and now it’ll put itself into hibernation just like it’s supposed to. Hurray!
D’oh! I should have asked if you’d rebooted. That’s right up there with “Is it plugged in?” for basic troubleshooting steps.
Glad it’s working now. And a much happier icon, it looks like 🙂
If the program removal doesn’t work, it may be a mechanical problem. There’s either a switch that is triggered by the hinge on the display or a magnetic switch that is triggered when the laptop is closed. Either way, this is something that a warranty should cover.
Not claiming expert status on laptop behavior, though.
The switch thingy seems to be working. When I depress it, the monitor turns off, but it doesn’t put itself into standby or hibernation. Pook.
Uh… did you check the “Power Options Properties” popup / control panel thing? You probably already check that and a thousand other obvious things.
If you haven’t or don’t know what the !@#$%! I am talking about…
On Windows XP from the Control Panel click on Display.
Hopefully You get a “Display Properties” popup.
Select the “Screen Saver” tab.
Click on the “Power” button, in the “Monitor power” group in the lower part of the popup.
If the planets are aligned and you have not offended the gods, you will have “Power Options Properties” popup.
Examine the settings under the “Running on batteries” column in the “Settings for Portable/Lapton power scheme”.
On the “System hibernates” row change the dropdown from Never to “After 10 mins” or whatever.
If you get to this popup and it is already setup correctly, kindly discard this posted comment and don’t embarrass me by posting my lame attempt at helping a fellow laptop user in a time of need.
Oops. Explained how to change the wrong thing. Doh!
You probably already checked this setting. And you probably mentioned this in you posting, but I am a pompous and condescending geek.
On the same “Power Options Properties” popup….
Select the “Advanced” tab.
Under the “Power buttons” group.
Check out the setting on the “When I close the lid of my portable computer:” dropdown.
I would guess this dropdown has been set to “Do nothing”. Try changing it to “Hibernate”.
If it is already set to “Hibernate” kindly disregard and delete this posting.
Hee. *pat pat pat* Thanks, Dean, I do appreciate the suggestion, especially ’cause the obvious is always a good place to start with me and potential hardware issues, but yeah, that’s the first place I checked to make sure my settings hadn’t accidentally gotten jostled somewhere in there. But the problem appears to have been fixed. I cleared off a print driver as well as a stuck print job that had been loaded during the convention, and then I rebooted and that did the trick. Apparently the reboot was what it needed after I deleted the printer junk. Whew. And hurray!
Cool! But… uh… you didn’t remove my lame advice! HaHaHa.
Oh, by-the-way, cool Dragon*Con photos. Trinity looks great! Next year I will have to stay the whole weekend so I can see it all first hand.
You definitely need to stay for the whole Dragon*Con! And then some, so we can have a chance to properly gab and catch up. I hope you enjoyed your first exposure to the madness which is D*C.
Vibes
Great pics. I love that “surprise” shot of you eating.
Good luck vibes your way about the job. I’m hoping my interview today with a temp agency will lead to this one position.
–Joel
Re: Vibes
Thanks, Joel. I got my fingers crossed for both of us.