Scalped!

When for some reason I can't see my regular barber, I tend to use one of those chain barber shops. The first time you visit one they want your phone number and address. Once when I went into such an establishment with my wife I said politely to the woman at the counter, "Is this necessary? I just want a haircut."

The woman was mortified. How dare I say such a thing?! My wife, too, thought my request was beyond rude.

Wimmen.

So, due to my schedule last week I couldn't go to the lady who normally cuts my hair who owns her own joint. So I had to go back to one of those chain stores where I had been before. The first thing the woman at the counter asked me was if I was a "member". I was and gave her my phone number.

My name popped up and she pointed at the screen to show the lady barber who was going to do my hair. "Oh. You haven't been to one of our shops since June--eight months ago!" Alas! What could I have been thinking?

The barber directed me to a chair. She had looked at my chart. As I sat down, she asked me, "Do you want the same cut as last time?" I assumed that, having looked at my chart, she obviously knew the kind of cut I wanted.

"Sure," I said.

When I get a haircut I am not one of those anal-retentive types who sit there micro-managing the process and watching every move the barber makes. In fact, I'm the opposite. Most of the time I will close my eyes and meditate. This is exactly what I did.

The hairdresser/barber got down to business. She ran the clipper through my hair. The sensation dragged me a bit out of my reverie. A second pass. Was that cold air on my scalp? I opened my eyes. And she had pretty much taken the hair off down to bare skin.

It was at this point that I realized that back in June I had taken my son to this chain operation and paid for his haircut. And he does indeed get his hair removed to the scalp when he goes. So what the barber did was look at my chart and saw the haircut my son gets...not the one I get.

So much for computers and digital file keeping.

But I didn't get upset. I just closed my eyes and went back to meditating. I couldn't very well get upset with the barber because she had, indeed, asked me if I wanted the same haircut as before. I had ample opportunity to tell her how I liked it, but I just said, "yes" to her question. Totally my fault.

I have to say...I've had this kind of scalping before, back when I was a letter carrier. And it is a comfortable haircut when you work at hard labor in hot weather. So it doesn't bother me. It was just unexpected.

This particular haircut did not take long. ZOOM! ZIP! All the hair gone. So I got up, paid my tab, and tipped the barber. As such haircuts go, she did a good job. It'll be weeks and weeks before I need another haircut, that's for sure.

"You're a gott-damn genius, Private Gump!"

Computers

The computers that I have owned are like the motor vehicles that I've owned: they seem like something you need, but they are often headaches and more trouble than they're worth.

Recently the printer that I've been using for a few years stopped working. I tried everything to get it to work right, to no effect. Frankly, it was a poor design from a crappy manufacturer that I bought because it was cheap. I go what I paid for.

However, I had a printer that came in a package with my current computer. I never unpacked it because I already had the previously mentioned printer (now on the fritz). So I wasn't worried about having to buy another one. All I had to do was unpack the one that came with my desktop and hook it up.

So that's what I did. Hooked that sucker right up. Plug and play. Just connect it, turn it on, and start printing.

Not.

I did everything as per the instructions, but no dice. The printer would power up. But the software wouldn't quite load. The software would get about 90% installed and then malfunction. I know almost nothing about computers and how they work. I did take a computer course offered by the local community college, but that was just the basic. In all reality, I don't know much about how the programs operate.

Argh.

But I learned years ago not to lose my temper with the computer. Just remain calm and keep trying various fixes and generally things would work out. I have grown to become very stubborn in that respect. So...I looked up various fixes on the websites of the maker of the printer (HP) and the maker of the computer (also HP). I downloaded the software online instead of using the disk that came with the printer. I tried many things.

Nada.

The printer and the computer still would not communicate.

Finally, I went over various programs on the startup files, one at a time, looking for something I may have missed, or for something that might help. And that's when I noticed an update from HP that I had not downloaded. I looked at the description for it, and it informed me that it was to correct a flaw that prevented the computer from communicating with the printer.

I downloaded and installed it. The printer works.

I'm glad I'm stubborn.

Woo HOO! It works!

Gizmos

I grew up before the digital age. It was just coming in as I reached college. I was a child of the transistor age when computers were vast room-sized machines with punch cards that needed other, vaster, room-sized cooling units to dampen the temperatures of all of those freaking vacuum tubes.

When the digital age finally did come down on us I went along for the ride, mainly. There are aspects of digital technology that I truly do not like. Some things I'm still fence-sitting and haven't made up my mind about. Computers are okay and I have a desktop and a laptop and a phone that is actually a small tablet computer. And I have an ereader that is a tablet and which I look upon with distaste because of my adamant hatred of the world of self-published ebooks.

But one thing that I do love about digital technology are cameras. I adore the things. Because I travel about a fair amount and I like to take photographs and videos of the places I visit and the things that I see. Back in the day of film photography I had a decent camera, but film photography was expensive and I had to be very careful of the subjects I chose to photograph. Those trips to the drug store to develop the photos could be prohibitively expensive!

Enter the digital camera. I bought my first digital camera in 2004. It was not an SLR...I'm not even sure if they offered digital cameras in SLR format then. But it was built like a tank--an earlier Canon model. I must have dropped it on the rocks and boulders half a dozen times and it never stopped working. Finally, I just wore it down and bought another Canon camera. I've been through a number of digital cameras since that time and still have most of them. Mainly I stick with Canons (they don't pay me for promoting them, but I've always been happy with the performance of their machines).

But my newest gizmo is a digital camera mainly meant for making video footage. It can also perform as a still camera, but I don't suspect that I'll use it in that capacity very much. (But, you never know.) It's one of those GoPro Hero cameras. Mine is the Hero 3+ Black Edition. So far, I've only used it to shoot some experimental images, but I'm happy with it. I'm looking forward to getting it out on the trail to see what kind of video I can shoot. Before this I have always been stingy with shooting video on my hikes and backpacks, because my SLR and point-and-shoot cameras were mainly for still photography and I was generally worried about running out of room on my memory cards.

At any rate, it's my latest digital contraption. Computers aren't all bad, I figure.

My GoPro video camera. I have several ways to mount this thing. Tripod. Dashboard. Chest harness. Helmet harness. It's amazing. This is the camera in its waterproof housing. I also bought several extra batteries for it and a high capacity memory card. We'll see how it works in the months ahead.

Computers. Feh.

There are some things about computers and digital technology that I like. Cameras. Love those things! Wordprocessors. Fantastic! Beyond that...I can either take 'em or leave 'em, or I hate them.

Also, I've reached a point where all of this rushing advance and geekery often makes me just go blank. If someone is talking to me about some of this stuff, I just glaze over and zone out.

I'm tired of it.

Give me a place in the woods where I don't have to freaking deal with this crap.

Apparently our big TV can receive channels available over the Internet. In a nutshell, a vast world of films and old TV shows open up to us. I just don't care. I don't feel like figuring out how to activate that option. I don't watch much TV anyway.

I just want to go back to the forest and find some peace, some quiet, some solitude.

You can keep yer apps and yer gigabytes and go all cyberpunk. I'll be off somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Probably reading a book. A real book. Not one of those damned ebook things.

Where we hope to build a cabin.

Panic!

When I was a kid I used to watch the television show, THE WALTONS. Mainly the first couple of years. I liked it for a lot of reasons, not least of which was the fact that the main character was a young fellow who wanted to be a writer.

And one episode that I always liked was one in which that young fellow lost all of his journals and fiction in a house fire. All of his work--all of those words--were consumed by flames. He was left with nothing but empty notebooks and had to start over. It was both a devastating and encouraging bit of TV drama.

My agent emailed me last week asking for an updated file of my novel BEAUTIFUL BOY. He was submitting it to an editor and wanted to ensure that he had the most up-to-date and fully corrected version. No problem, I thought. I'll just call it up and send it on to him. I generally make multiple copies in various places to make sure I don't lose my precious manuscripts.

I clicked on one which was titled "Final Version" and had the latest date. The book is a 105,000 word novel. I scrolled down. It didn't look right. It ended in a series of thick black dots that aren't on any keyboard I've ever seen. I did a word count: 67,000 words. Damn. This wasn't the whole novel! I pulled up one of four different versions of the novel on my hard drive. None of them was over 67,000 words.

It was at this point that I was feeling queasy. I looked in my portable hard drive. It, too, had the same versions as my desktop computer. I have a flash drive that I keep by the desk purely for backing up manuscripts. I plugged it in and took a look. Same deal as before. Now I was really getting scared.

I tried to figure out what had happened. From the state of the manuscript marked "Final Version" I can only deduce that it became corrupted somehow. Thus, those black dots at the end of that manuscript. Obviously the product of some pernicious glitch.

There was no way I was going to be able to produce those missing 40,000 words! Fuck John Boy with a crowbar! Where was the file?

And then I remembered that I'd last worked on the book on my laptop computer. So I went downstairs and booted it up. I checked the files and was getting the same results as on the other hard drives and flash drive. Now panic was setting in. I was totally screwed. This novel had been a bear to write. I worked on it sporadically for a very long time--two decades, in fact, before finally finding a way to finish the job while taking time off from work to write in the North Carolina high country. It was sickening to think that I'd lost all of that hard work.

However, I didn't give up. I recalled that this was the book I felt the need to re-title after the appearance of a non-fiction best seller called BEAUTIFUL BOY from a year or so back. I looked to see if I'd saved it under one of the working titles that had never seemed, somehow, to fit the book.

And there it was, on the laptop hard drive and also on another flash drive that I keep with my laptop. It was under the title THE LOST CHILD. I had found my full 105,000 words of hard won fiction. You cannot know the relief that flooded through me.

I immediately backed it up on the flash drive and took that upstairs to my office where I saved it on every drive I own. My wife is always after me to print out hard copies of everything I write and to make copies on DVDs. After this experience I'm going to heed her advice.

Too Much of a Good Thing

Due to the nature of 20-something white male geeks with too much time on their hands, we have to constantly worry about computer viruses. I always have a good anti-virus program running on my computers. The best program I have ever encountered for keeping my AI machines safe from the creations of young computer geeks has always been the anti-virus program that came with my RoadRunner subscription. It's called the Computer Associates Security Suite. However...there is something called "too much of a good thing". And their anti-virus program is it.

The security suite is so aggressive that I had to constantly tinker with it to look at relatively safe websites like Facebook and the CIA World Factbook. Generally, even after telling the program that these sites were safe, I'd have to resort to shutting down the firewall while I perused those sites. In addition, email from friends and professional acquaintances would routinely be routed to the spam folder and I'd have to search through that crap to locate important emails from editors and publishers, and even from my literary agent.

Now, I have to say that the program would flat out attack and quarantine and/or destroy any virus it encountered. For that, I have to give it the highest marks possible. However, it got to the point that I had to wipe it from my hard drive because of the necessity of constantly tinkering with the program and of having my computers slowed to the point of freezing by the program's tenacious tendencies. In a nutshell, it was almost as bad as having a virus on my computers.

Alas.

I've been running two different anti-virus programs since I got rid of the CA stuff. Both of them worked well and my computers are--as far as I can tell--virus free. Plus I haven't had to worry about the constant freezing and the incessant tinkering to tell the system which sites are safe and which ones are not. I give the guys at CA great credit for making an aggressive program. But I'd rather have a barking dog than a pack of territorial wolverines.

Computer Problems

Well, the old desktop system at home is going wonky. I've seen this before. I don't think I've ever had a computer that lasted for more than four years--generally they start to break down after about three. So the desktop at home has had what is, in my experience, a normal lifespan for a small home computer. We're going to have to buy a new one.

So I've been very busy over the past few days backing up various files before the machine completely shuts down. With no time for blogging. Fortunately, I have my laptop and my novel writing has continued unabated.

The Animal Philosopher:

The strangest thing about love is this--when it's gone, it stays gone.