lizvogel

I finally cowboyed up, picked a web host, and got myself an author website. lizavogel.com exists!

It is very much just a placeholder right now (though I am rather proud of the construction sheep).

I went with Namecheap; it seemed to have pretty good pricing, whois privacy included free, useful and easy-to-find how-to docs, and actually acknowledged the possibility of someone wanting to code their own pages. When I had a question, their live chat responded promptly with a clear answer from a real human.

Unfortunately, the shine wore off a little when I had to spend half an hour on the phone with my credit card company to get the payment to go through (and jumped through about a dozen security hoops with them). But I eventually got it cleared, and went through all the purchasing process again, and got my new account. Whee!

And then an hour later, got an email from Namecheap's "risk management" department that my brand new account was frozen, and I had 24 hours to tell them the "payment descriptor from your statement" -- meaning my credit card statement, apparently, which I'll get in the mail in about a month. They have absolutely no facility for any other verification, and no acknowledgement that, yes, there are some people who don't do all their financial stuff online. So there went another twenty minutes of my life on the phone with the credit card again, jumping through all their ridiculous security hoops again, to finally fight through to a very confused rep with limited English who tried to tell me that since the charge was still "pending" they couldn't tell me anything but the amount. Like who the charge is from, maybe?! Oh, yes, they can do that. And then, finally, got that to the account-lockers, and got my shiny new account back -- rather tarnished from being driven to screaming frustration for hours.

I feel like I need to keep checking it to make sure it's still there, and not frozen again. Oh yes, and apparently they're going to make me get a verification code every single f'ing time I sign in.

Swear to ghu, between the credit card and the hosting company, if this crap gets any more secure I won't be able to use it at all.

But. I have a website! And soon I will make it both pretty and informative. This is only about six years past when I first said I ought to do it, so I'm feeling pretty good about getting this far.

( Cut for a great deal of cell carrier ranting, mostly for my own reference. tl;dr: AT&T lies a lot. )

And then yesterday, I dropped my phone.

I was, as usual, trying to do two things at once because ghu forbid I take 30 extra seconds to deal with something. I thought the phone hit the soft dirt on the shoulder of the road (I was doing yardwork at the time), but it must have struck a rock at just the wrong angle. The screen is shattered. It still works, but it's bad enough to absolutely need fixing if I'm going keep using the thing.

I think the universe may be trying to tell me something.

Tbh, I haven't been entirely thrilled with the new phone; it's the size I wanted, it's comfortable to use, but it turns out a lot of the stuff I liked was LG software that's no longer distributed, or hardware on the 3 that they changed on the 5 to make it more like a iPhone (because everything has to be like an iPhone). (One of those things was that the 3 had a textured back, whereas the 5's back is skating-rink slink, thus contributing to the drop.) It's mostly worked great, but it did have one episode of completely freezing up for about 10 minutes and not responding to anything (and it apparently doesn't have a removable battery???, so damn good thing it eventually cleared itself). I wasn't about to throw away the time & money I've invested just because AT&T are lying thieving bastards, but do I really want to sink more money into this thing just so I can keep fighting AT&T to the death for half a year?

I am seriously considering just buying another phone. A completely unlocked one, with no connection whatsoever to my soon-to-be-ex-carrier. A friend has recommended Unihertz, which at least has the merit of not thinking that everybody who isn't buying an iPhone really wants an iPhone. (ETA: Unihertz does not work with Consumers Cellular, per the company's chat. Bummer.) It'll be more money, and more waiting, and more stress over whether the thing will work with my new carrier (which is ridiculously impossible to confirm until you have the phone in your hand), but it might just be the best move under the circumstances.

So, the time has come when I really should put together an author website.

1) Suggestions for web hosting? I don't need anything fancy; static pages and a contact form, maaaaaybe a blog and/or the ability to selectively link in parts of this journal. I do want the ability to get in and control the structure myself; WordPress, for example, is handy for quickie set-up, but I find it rather limiting when I'm used to being able to manipulate files directly.

2) At the rate it's going, getting a proper website set up is going to take a while. In the meantime (however long that meantime proves to be), would it be tacky by Dreamwidth standards to put a sticky at the top of this journal listing my published stories? I figure that's the part of an author website people are most looking for, and this is my biggest web presence.



Dreamwidth polls only work for logged-in users, but if you're here without portfolio, as 'twere, feel free to give your answer in the comments!

Long story short, the "work" laptop (a different computer than in the last post) went from its usual persnickety functioning to eeeeeeeeeing uncontrollably to not taking input from either keyboard to eeeeeeeeing again to... going dark and refusing to boot. Period.

This was an ex-computer. Of course, no current backup, and I was in the middle of something that needed to be done yesterday.

I decided to take a chance on a local computer store I'd gotten good vibes from on initial scouting, and I'm so glad I did. They managed to clone the old hard drive to a new machine -- in about 24 hours, for a very reasonable fee, and without even a breath of mockery for me wanting an old OS and not wanting to embrace the newest and latest. I'm still playing with the new (well, "new", it's a refurb, but it seems sound so far) machine, but so far everything's working just as it did before. A few settings to tweak here and there, but so far it's just personalization-type stuff, and not even too much of that.

Okay, that's a lot of "so fars"; I'm trying not to jinx anything. But so far (sorry), I'm pretty damned impresed. And I like the machine itself well enough; it's a Dell, which is not my fave, but it's got a nice clicky keyboard and it's very shiny, and actually has better brightness and volume controls than my old Toshiba. Not sure about the screen; I may need to see about an overlay, although tweaking the contrast has been helping. The wifi doesn't detect the 5G, but the non-5G option is not perceptably slower. Need to play with the CD burner and such.

Overall, I can't believe I got off this easy, given how much of my life was/is on that/this machine. I still need to beat the rest of my life into submission, but at least now when I can get some time for convention and career stuff I'll have a computer to do it on.

It says something about the current state of the IT industry that when I reported the spell-checker wasn't working in my little ol' text-based email interface, I was braced for a reply of "nobody uses that anymore!", probably with a side-sneer at my obvious moral inferiority for even caring about such a thing.

Instead, I got a response back in about an hour saying that the problem was due to a recent hardware upgrade (the spell-check module seems to get missed in these things; this has happened before), it was now fixed, and thanking me for reporting the problem. And yes, it is working fine now.

IOW, Tuffmail rocks.

Lost in the shuffle of cons and cats and exploding electrical lines, was the fact that I came back from Narrativity having promised myself I would start writing again, settled down after a few days' recovery time with the best of intentions, and my writing laptop promptly died. Now, this was the not-happy machine previously mentioned, so it could have been worse, but watching it half-boot, crash, and restart itself, wash rinse repeat, was kind of a giant middle finger from the fates.

So I ventured forth (sporadically, because life) to find a replacement. Of course, none of the sources that other people had been assuring me with entirely unverified conviction would have what I wanted, did. The problem here is that what I'm looking for is really old -- pawn shops and the like don't deal in anything even remotely close, surplus stores generally cleared out that generation of laptops a decade or more ago, eBay lists a few but none of them are tested (and the prices are outrageous, though I'd pay that for exactly what I want if it were guaranteed functional). And even other people's closets are starting to be bare of the era of equipment I'm seeking.

So when the MSU surplus store offered a laptop that I could theoretically find a swappable floppy drive for, that would theoretically run what I wanted, I decided to risk ten bucks ($5 for the laptop, $5 for the hard drive) and see what happened. What happened was a lot of swearing; the machine powered up fine (as tested in-store), but getting a bootable OS onto the hard drive was another matter. My no-product-key Win98 CD was corrupted, so I went for plain old DOS, just to get something in place so I could test out the hardware. I FDISKed, I formatted, all the stuff was there that should be, but the machine kept booting to the KillDisk blank-drive message. WTF??? A trip back to Surplus didn't help. ("You could install Ubuntu" -- riiiiiight. I'm going to spend 6 hours of my life figuring out how to install an OS you're comfortable with, because you don't speak DOS? I think not.)

I finally gave up and ran the Win98 install from my other CD -- not ideal, because you spend an hour-plus going through the install before you find out if the product key you cribbed from another machine will actually work. But the install ran, and the product key did work! And then I got all the way through the setup and discovered that Win98 does not play well with more than 512M of memory, and this thing has 2 gigs. Oh, bugger. And none of the tricks recommended on the intarwebs worked; one managed to get me through the final steps of the install, but Windows still won't boot. Bug-ger.

On the other hand, I can now boot to DOS. Which won't let me run any of the other stuff I'd really like to have, but will let me run Textra, my word processor of preference, which is the one thing I really need. Which I had to install from diskette, but for reasons that I'm sure make sense to someone the USB floppy drive works fine even though USB drives proper don't, so that was okay.

And so last night, after all that tech fiddling, I wrote. 334 words, on the post-HoM self-indulgent Thing that's been niggling hardest at my brain. (Of course, the instant I had a working writing laptop, the urge to write that's been hammering at my skull faded. But I sat down anyway, and words happened.)

I'm still using the external USB floppy, which is less than ideal. But I like the machine otherwise; the keyboard is comfortable, the display is properly-proportioned and brightness-adjustable, and it's sleek and just generally has a good vibe. It probably is worth my time to find it an internal floppy drive.

I am, for the record, still in the market for old, working laptops with built-in floppy drives. I could stand to have two such machines in active use, and spares are good, too. So if you've got one kicking around in your cupboards, do let me know. But in the meantime, I am at least up and running again. For the time being, but that's all we can ask in this world.

So, MediaWest*Con was this past weekend, and I've finally recovered enough to type up a post about it.

As that implies, it was a good weekend. Attendance was down again, but the attendees seemed to make up in quality what they lacked in quantity. And the con scaled back the function space to match, so it felt more intimate and less echoey.

We had a dealer's table this year, which was a new thing for us. The "Deaccumulation Station" (i.e., fannish yard sale) went over pretty well; a lot of stuff went on to new homes, which was the point of the exercise. It was weird, being on that side of the table; even though we'd run the Dealers Room in past years, it was still a learning curve actually doing the thing. Things like "bring your own table coverings" we knew from our organizing days, but things like "bring change for the table" (which you'd think would be obvious) snuck up on us. But it all worked out in the end. I don't think we'll do it again; it was surprisingly restrictive being tied to the table (even though we usually spend half the con hanging out with the dealers anyway), and hopefully we won't have another table's worth of stuff we want to get rid of. But it was worth the doing this once.

In line with my new motto of "Be the con you want to see in the world", I did two panels. "Old School Spies" had a lot of people who expressed interest, but very few who showed up, and it faltered a bit because of that. Still, worth a try; I'm contemplating variations for next year -- and will do a better job of guilt-tripping more people into coming. ;-) I also did a juggling workshop, which went quite well; a decent number of people came, including several beginners, all of whom were making respectable progress by the end of the hour. Requests were made for a repeat next year, possibly even two sessions, which sounds fine to me.

The juggling panel did have one unexpected consequence. I've messed up my right shoulder a few times lately (mostly by sleeping on it wrong). It was fine during the panel, I didn't even think about it, but when I got back to the table five minutes after, I couldn't even raise my arm! I spent the next couple of days eating left-handed, and finding one-handed work-arounds to two-handed tasks. It's nothing that rest and Icy Hot won't cure, and it's improved significantly already, but today is the first time I've felt up to extended typing.

Between being tied to the table and my time-sense apparently being scrambled, I only made it to a couple other panels. The Pros panels were good, well-run and in-depth, as usual. The Endgame panel went off into people's personal issues, and my opinion of the movie was basically "meh" anyway, so I bailed early. There were several promising-sounding ones, especially on the space program and classic SF, that I didn't make because they were half over by the time I looked at my watch properly. Oh well.

It was a little schizophrenic riding herd on Narrativity whilst attending another con, and of course things came up while I was away from home and over a holiday weekend. But they were easily solved things, especially since the folks involved were patient, and it was a good test run for doing everything with the portable equipment that I'll have with me come July. Skippy the Streambook needs some more software installed, but I knew that already, and I am increasingly fond of my cyber-control device, which makes several things about the smartphone less annoying.

As always, the highlight of the con was the people and the conversations. I had fun chilling with the other dealers, hanging with the Pros crowd, playing Cards Against Humanity in the lobby until the last eyelid drooped, intermittently smoffing with people who've been doing this a lot longer than I have, and so on. I had fun, and I'm already looking forward to next year.

(backdated; found on USB about a year after the fact)

The original plan was to take December off, goof around with writing fanfic or whatever took my fancy, and then get back to Lightning Strikes Twice. Technology and other issues put paid to that, and I ended up not writing at all for most of December. So then January was supposed to be my goofing-off month -- and I did noodle around a bit with fanfic and such. But I also had this idea of starting a new series, and writing the first story in January -- which I mostly did, putting the finishing pre-beta touches on "Dix Dayton, Jet Jockey" only one day into the next month. Only now it's February, and the deal with taking January to goof off was that I would start cracking on LST again in February. And I'm still scrambling around with half-assed technology, and a non-writing project that's eating all my spare time and badly needs more, and the last-gasp push on querying Highway of Mirrors that somehow was also supposed to get done in January and is... only half so, and I am in no headspace to dive back into LST even if it is at a much-reduced pace from NaNo's.

Somehow, this month, I need to:
-reactivate LST
-finish querying HoM
-sub one|more short stories
-write another short story, no wait, two short stories (I still owe somebody one from May)
-do something about the writing laptop situation
-do enough stuff for the non-writing project to qualify as a full-time job if I were getting paid

Let's all sing the Doom Song now, shall we?

Happy New Year! (How on earth did that happen?)

I ended up with a surprise week off from the Day Job, I think because my manager forgot to put me on the schedule. So I decided I would spend it querying Highway of Mirrors. Good plan. I also told myself, way back at the end of November, that I could take a month off from Lightning Strikes Twice, and dive back into it starting in January. Also a good plan.

I somehow failed to notice that these two chunks of calendar overlapped significantly.

I've decided to roll ahead with the querying. I'm making good progress, and it is something that I have so much difficulty getting myself to do, it would be silly to put a halt on it. So I can have at least one week of January for that, and at least three weeks for LST. (We'll see what happens to those few unassigned days in between.)


In other news, I reclaimed the old laptop that I had lent to the housemate, who never got around to using it. I'd frankly forgotten all about that machine. The floppy drive in it does not work, but the USB ports do -- and I've got a USB floppy drive. It's awkward and inconvenient using the external drive, but it does technically function as a designated writing laptop that I can keep by my bedside and haul around the house. I very definitely still need to acquire a new-to-me old laptop and/or get one of the dead ones repaired; the friend I got this machine from is not known for taking good care of his stuff, and the poor thing has really been through the wars. It's missing a couple of keys, and I had to wrap electrical tape around the exposed wires on the power cord; it's also had a couple of glitches that make me suspect a hard drive failure is in its future. But, for a temporary emergency stand-in, it's a darned sight better than nothing.

Of course, now that I finally have a writing laptop again, the urge to mess around with stories at night, which has been nagging at me like a junkie craving a fix, has almost entirely subsided. *headdesk* But I am at least sleeping better knowing I can have my late-night writing dose.

So I was all set to buy the 20-year-old computer that I previously mentioned, but for due diligence I called them first -- ostensibly to confirm that they tested their floppy drives, but really to make sure I could talk to a human being who sounded legit.

So I asked, and the answer seemed to depend on what machine I was looking at, and when I told him I got "that's been replaced". Apparently the listing on the website that still says it's available isn't valid, and if I tried to buy it the order wouldn't go through. But I can buy something else and tell them in the comments that I need a floppy drive, and obviously I should know this, they sell these machines to businesses that need a particular OS and they sell 20 computers a week and it's a labor-intensive process to refurb these machines and apparently it's completely unreasonable of me to expect to be able to buy the exact machine that their website still says they have.

Yeah. Your website tells lies about what you have in stock and you're condescending to customers who don't roll with that? I think I'll keep looking in friends' closets, thanks.