Friday, January 30, 2009

With All Due Respect to The Smiths, Hang the DJ...

Yowza, what a day. Posting late today.

Computer issues are popping up en force lately. The big one, of course, being the meltdown of Crown Stealer. The hard drive died on me last night - apparently the drive I got for it has an issue with suddenly going bye-bye. It can be fixed, apparently, with something called a "firmware update"... of course, I have no clue what that is, but Vye said the drive can be salvaged, so that's good. It will just take a while. So I think I'll buy a new internal drive, give it to Vye this Sunday along with my system and all the driver disks, etc, and let him put the new one in and get it running again... and then take his time doing what he needs to with the frozen drive, and once it's fixed, stick it in as a secondary drive.

My iMac is having issues as well. So is my 500 GB external hard drive! Good thing I backed up all that data - if it dies altogether, I'd be out of luck. I think I'll get a solid-state external hard drive to replace this one. Maybe they're more reliable...

So much for not making any more big purchases until April, lol... Just doing my part to stimulate the economy, I guess...

But I'm sure you don't want to hear about my computer woes! Let's see, what other woes can I detail for you...

Had a meeting at church tonight, to try and get a plan going for Easter. I'll be hammering out a script, methinks. Not sure what I'll write yet, but I do know the theme. I'll be keeping it small (3 actors) and it will be in three parts (calling it "three acts" is kind of stuffy...), and it will be spaced between some songs. We'll see...

Still reading The Name of the Wind... it is rapidly becoming a terrific book... I can't see how it will keep this pace and level of quality... if it does, it will easily take it's place among the best books I've ever read. The story and the writing, and the depth of the characters. I can see why it won the Quill Award.

I do have a question about names in Fantasy stories... why do they have to be so off the wall? Every time I have to read a weird name, it detracts a little bit from the story in my mind, and reminds me that I'm reading a story... In Robin Hobb's The Assassins Apprentice, the hero is named "Fitz," which is short for FitzChivalry Farseer. Gimme a break. In Across the Face of the World, the names are a bit better: "Leith," "Hal," and "Stella"... but then with The Blade Itself, you have "Sand dan Glokta," "Jazel dan Luthar," "Logen Ninefingers" and the wizard "Bayaz." And now, in The Name of the Wind, it's "Kvothe," "Bast" and "Chronicler."

What is up with that? What happened to regular names, eh? lol. Of course, Tolkien is to blame, with his Gimli and Aragorn and Legolas and all. When I write a fantasy novel, it's going to have regular names for the characters. I'll take a Bill over a Bilbo anyday...

I'm sure I'm missing the point...

My technical problems with my mac are delaying my ability to post a Favorite Scene at the moment. I'm still working on it - if I get it done tonight, I'll pop back in and edit it into this post. If not, I'll post it tomorrow.

In the meanwhile, here is a YouTube video of perhaps the most incredible break dancer you've ever seen:



If you're anything like me, you won't be able to watch that video only once... you'll need to watch it several times with your mouth open, and your head subconsciously nodding to the beat...

Tomorrow, I will have been blogging for a month straight! Happy anniversary to me! Well, sort of...

Until tomorrow, pump up the volume...

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Here's a description of the firmware problem: http://tinyurl.com/cwsozz

Turns out all 3 drives in my raid-5 array downstairs are affected. So, I think I'll leave that box on until I get them updated. I wouldn't want to risk losing my 900GB Anime collection. ^_^

You can't hold me responsible for recommending that you spend more money... but if you are looking to keep your data safe, you might consider replacing your current external drive with a drobo :-D

http://www.drobo.com/

those push ups that break dancer was doing were insane!