The Year of Living Musically
{ Category Archives }
I’m blogging this from the elite WiFi lounge in the US Airways terminal at Newark’s Liberty International Airport — by which I mean that I’m one of a half-dozen or so people sitting on the floor. The wireless signal reaches one wall of the long corridor from the Sentinels of Indignity to the gates. This short stretch also has power outlets — though I had to keep an eye on one and dive for it the moment that the person next to me unplugged.
Continue Reading »
As usual, work on creative stuff has gotten stuck in a sargasso of technical crud, but I’ve dug my way out, and the accelerated composing of “Moses” continues.
Thanks to all who responded about my Bluetooth problem and keypad confusion. John’s comment, erudite as always, explained the odd history of keypads in a way that made sense of things (though my hands will remain confused until my brain convinces them of how things are).
Ron’s comment explained what I needed to do to get things working.
Here I am again, trying not to go to bed angry after having spent several hours battling to get my technology to do something that should be dead-simple.
I just got a Bluetooth USB dongle for my laptop, so I can send photos to it from my phone more easily. Setting up Bluetooth on both the phone and the laptop seem quite easy–until I get to the point where each is asking for some sort of passcode.
I’ve always been told that it’s not good to go to bed angry. But waiting to calm down, after using my computers, means that I get very little sleep.
One thing that drive me utterly nuts is when software does something on its own, ignoring my directions, just because it wants to do it.
I’ve been getting messages for the past few days about the new format of this blog. Since I hadn’t looked at the blog in several days, I wasn’t sure what people meant. When I went to the page, I found, to my dismay, that the formatting that I had carefully created was gone. The large, very readable serif font was gone, replaced by the current tiny sans serif font, and the margins were wrong. (If you look at the pages with full posts, you’ll see my picture overlapping and obscuring several character from the left end of the paragraph next to it.) Continue Reading »
I’m working on a small quick book, a subset of the infamous Book of the Blog, focusing on my secondary job at a nearby church and the neighborhood around it.
I’m putting it together using the LaTeX document preparation system, which is wonderful in almost all ways, especially for a command line and markup language geek like me. However, as an otherwise unrelated poem goes, when it is bad, it is horrid.
I’m pleased, proud, and relieved to announce that my father’s novel, Troika, is now in print.
It’s been a process that’s taken over twenty years, counting from the conversation that I had with him that sparked the book, as we sat in a plaza in Tel Aviv in the summer of 1986. While the first draft of the book was complete about ten years later, a wide variety of delays had led it to only being published now.
The official publication date was November 7, the one-year anniversary (according to the Jewish calendar) of my father’s passing. I had let the family know, but held off on a public announcement until I had received a copy of the finished book from the printers. (Fortunately, my father got to see and hold a proof copy in his last days, though he was too tired to look at it for long.)
Continue Reading »
Apparently the problem with posting to a mailing list was part of a bigger problem. According to this post to Slashdot, there was major cloggage somewhere that backed up messages from gmail addresses to mailing lists hosted at SourceForge.
My mailing list posts haven’t shown up yet, but there’s probably quite a backlog.
By the way, I heard about this on one of my favorite podcasts, Slashdot Review, which is now one of my main sources of information about tech stuff.
(Yeah, that’s somewhat provocatively tongue-in-cheek…)
OK, maybe someone can explain this to me: I’ve been trying to post to a mailing list for the past few days, after a long time during which posting was no problem. It now looks like the mail is getting stuck — and it’s because gmail can’t verify that mail is valid when coming from, er, gmail!
Continue Reading »