Last Updated on: 11th November 2013, 09:25 am
I’m feeling all frazzled so maybe if I ramble, I can unfrazzle myself. I’m sitting here, time’s going tick tock, and my brain is screaming at a fever pitch “You have so many things to do! Do them! Do them now!” At the same time, an equally loud voice yells “But you either don’t have an idea of how to do the things you want to do, or you don’t have the will.” Both sentiments are completely true. But the war between them is consuming bunches of my energy.
Because this thing is such an epic, I’m going to put headings in it. That’s how freakin huge it is.
“Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone?”
That’s going through my head this week, as something has gone horridly awry with my Trekker.
I was happily sleeping out on the couch when I heard it. “Beep…beep…beep…” That was the tell-tale sound of my external speaker saying “Hey nitwit, my battery is crazy low. Do something about it.” But it was already pplugged in, had been for days. So what the hell was wrong?
I got up to investigate. Maybe the splitter had just come loose. Nope. Maybe something had gone wonky with the power bar. Nope. Maybe the splitter had gone bad? Nope.
So here I was staring at this unit wondering what in the name of all that’s holy was wrong with it. The consensus from the trekker support list was that something had gone south with the charger. It’s possible, since I did get this unit well-used. But here comes the fun. How do you get a new charger for a device that has been discontinued by the manufacturer?
Everyone said I should do two things: 1. get all the specs on the transformer box written down and ask for a charger just like that, and b. test the voltage being transmitted through the charger and see if it’s changing or less than what it should be.
Both of these tasks require eyeballs at the current moment. I have heard that some time ago, there was a talking multimeter that was available up here, but hell if I can find it. And although I could scan the box with KNFB, if it made any errors, I could seriously damage my trekker if I gave the wrong specs.
So…does anyone know where I could go in Guelph to have the voltage tested out of the charger, and maybe have them read off the specs so I could make sure I get the right stuff?
In the meantime, I am GPSless, and I’m realizing how much I had come to depend on it, especially with all this guelph remastering going on. And every day I don’t fix it, I get madder at myself. I am supposed to be resourceful. I am supposed to be able to figure this crap out.
I’m The Stupid Sometimes
Back when I was a wee little kid, for some reason I can’t remember, they put me in the gifted class. I don’t feel gifted. I mean, I consider myself to be pretty smart, but gifted? Cmon now. I’m not Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking or other people like that. I dunno. Maybe the smartest thing I did was figure out what date any day falls on during the year because I couldn’t stand braille calendars. But I don’t think that qualifies me as gifted by any stretch of the imagination.
Anyway, one day the teacher walked into the room and gave us a quiz…and it was really goddamn hard! It was full of obscure sports questions and stuff. By the end of it, I was just praying for one question, just one, that I would be able to answer. I began to sink deeper into my chair. I started celebrating any time I got anything right. I started wondering just what part of school I slept through to miss all this stuff.
At the end of it, he asked us all how we did. None of us did very well. He then said, “Now you know how it feels to struggle in school.” Well, I have revisited that quiz in two contexts: building a website, and putting shoes on a baby!
Ok, let’s start off at the place where you know how much knowledge I had of websites. The only websites I have either run or assisted with are an eeny weeny homepage I built off the U of G’s server as a class project, and this blog. As for the website, you know the type. Hi. I’m me. Here are my hobbies. Oh, there’s a picture. Want a list? Have a list. How about some bold and italics. I’m a baby code monkey learning about HTML back when HTML was, like, the only way to make a website.” And of course there’s this blog. But really, I just wrote code inside the post, and spleerched code into places on the template as directed by people who belong in classes for the gifted. So, this was a whole new league for me.
The first thing I noticed was Holy hell, I have a lot of admin panels. I’m used to like 1, you know. But that isn’t the way things roll anymore. I bought the domain, after driving the poor folks at Skynet Communications absolutely fucking insane. To their credit, they never let me know I was driving them insane, but I’m sure I was. I just know I was, considering the barrage of rock-stupid questions I asked them. I’m sure they were internally second guessing the assumption that I possessed neurons.
“So I have an account,” I said to myself. “Where do I put the stuff?” Seriously. I thought the client panel was somehow the gateway to the stuff-putty uppy panel. Yeah, right. Then I got the happy email, with a link where I could access the admin panel. “Yea! Stuff putty uppy panel!” Er, how about no? You silly insect-brain, this thing just gives you the chance to build a website in whatever way you want. It doesn’t know you want WordPress. “Oh, me install WordPress? Right, how me do that then?”
As I sat there, staring at the screen, I felt like I used to feel in the dos command days when I would enter a command wrong and I would get greeted with the “Bad command or filename” message. Yeah, ok, so, where to now, boss?
And that’s when they told me what was abundantly clear. “Hey there. That heading that says software? Look under there.” They were super nice about it, but well, I thought at that exact second, you could hear the ocean if you walked up close to me.
And that’s the funny part. Once you feel stupid, it’s a vicious cycle. All the previously smart things you used to do escape you, and you sink into a deeper pit of stupid…which makes you feel more stupid…
Once I found it, I managed to install the damn stuff in the wrong spot, even though it was written right where it would go if I would stop for a second and, er, read!
Once I fixed that, things got easier, but holy hell, I spent more time that day sitting around waiting for answers, where if I had just, ya know, tried a little harder, used that supposed gifted brain of mine, I might have solved the problem my damn self.
Now on to baby shoes. One day, I was down with the huppy and his mom. It was time to put his shoes on, and the huppy’s mom was busy doing something. So I thought, “Ah! I’ll just slip his cute little shoelets on his cute little footlets! How hard could this be?”
…
Harder than I thought!
I took the first shoe, and eventually figured out that it was the right shoe. But for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how to get it facing the right way so that heel went to heel and toe to toe. Plus, it was a sandal, and suddenly I couldn’t tell one end from another!
I thought to myself, “It’s a shoe, a goddamn shoe. Ya know, a shoe? You put shoes on every day? How the hell hard could this be?” I sadly never succeeded in this task, and huppy’s mom had to rescue me…rescue me from putting on shoes of a baby! I so totally fail.
So I really need to do something that makes me feel smart again, because I’m sick of feeling like the stupid.
Hold On To Your Hats, Qwitter Users
Ok everybody who uses Qwitter who still lives under a rock and has not heard the news, let me tell you about it. I’ll even break it into teeny chunks so you might be able to understand it.
Twitter is changing something to do with the way Twitter clients access direct messages.
Because of this, until the Qwitter devs write a fix for Qwitter, you ain’t gettin’ no DM’s after tomorrow through Qwitter.
This is not something of their choosing.
You have alternatives. EasyChirp, your phone if you can text, I’m sure you can find something.
It will work again once the devs stop unbuggifying the fix they are building.
Until then, deal. Find another way to get DM’s. Do not bitch. If you want to help, send money, or if you have code brain, help.
And Qwitter Pro does not exist. They are attempting to be humorous, although I find their brand of joke not so funny, especially since I heard that they think nothing of stealing other people’s code and branding it as their own.
Ok. Aaa. Now that that’s out of my system, I feel better.
Oh, and for all the people who say the fix isn’t all built and ready to go because the developer is being a lazy prick, chew on this a while.
Yeah! So, on top of going to school and making Hope and Qwitter, he’s dealing with that. I’m feeling burned out and I’m not doing nearly as much as he is.
And on to one of the reasons why I’m feeling a might frizzle fried.
Access Recreation Day was great. Steve captured some super awesome audio. Now, I’m down to manhandling the larger files into something digestible. And thinking about the task is enough to make my brain make cool sizzling noises.
Ug. I dread editing. It’s not the act of editing that makes me go yuck, it’s the act of snipping out portions and not making it sound like Laurence Olivier advertising for Diet coke.
And then the voice in my brain that likes telling me which kinds of useless I am today tells me to shut up, because I could be editing the Audible Otter, a yearbook on cassette that the school for the blind did, back years ago. They didn’t have fancy shmancy digital recorders and cutecy wootcy editing programs. They! Had! Tape! So shut up, get off your butt and finish the job you started.
And that is the large pile of brain splat that’s on the menu. “But what about Trixie,” you say. Oh, she gets her own pile of brain splatter. You just brace yourself.
