I escaped from my office for a few minutes today during the audit – the clouds following the front were piled up high over China Doll.
Now, it’s almost midnight (AGAIN!) and it’s time to get back to the number crunching.
Author Archives: momdude
Too Stupid To Know When To Quit
It’s not a bug – it’s a feature!
It helped me finish marathons.
It helped me though grad school while holding down a job and being a parent and a husband.
It kept me in a job that I didn’t like much wile I was a single parent.
Tonight (with a little help from my friends) it helps me at least get close (closer? close-ish?) to giving the auditors what they want at 8:00 tomorrow morning.
But I’m definitely going to need a nap tomorrow night!
Too Many Computers
00:07 Friday morning (Okay, it’s Thursday night…)
I just finished writing (what is now) last night’s “Too Many Numbers” post, the process of which was way, WAY too stressful.
Too tired, too many computers (five right now, counting the iPhone and iPad which I’m using to pull up data), too many screens (seven total), too many numbers…
And suddenly I see that my website directory has vanished. The directory on my local hard drive which keeps all of my working files for my website as well as the original copies of all of the pictures I’ve posted for the past five years or so, as well as the backup documents and…
But that’s okay because it’s on Dropbox! I can recover it! Yeah for Dropbox!
Except that Dropbox isn’t showing ANY of those files in its deleted files list…
Crying starts to sound like a perfectly good option…
There was a power outage today – did that fry something? I’ve gotten an occasional error message from Win 10 that the primary SSD hard disk is doing unexpected things – did that fry something? Do the gods just hate me?
From somewhere a calmer brain takes over. A quick search of Dropbox for the directory name shows that it got moved to be a subdirectory of another directory. It’s now sitting under a directory that used to be next to it alphabetically on the list of directories. Which makes me think that I’m using too many mice, trackballs, and Apple Pencils on too many computers on too many screens.
I wonder if I didn’t point, click, and drag on computer B when I was looking at computer A and computer B did exactly what I told it to, i.e. take this directory and move it and drop it on top of this other directory, which translates in most OS’s as “move this thing into that thing.”
I need a smarter and less literal computer. And an antidote for adrenaline.
23:40 Friday night (not Saturday morning yet!)
Oh, and I had the sense while I was waiting for my heart rate to stop resembling a hummingbird’s to pull out a 6TB external drive and let it run overnight, copying everything off to something less dynamic than DropBox.
When did you run your last full system backup to an external drive?
Too Many Numbers
Do I owe someone that? Do they owe me that?
My brain is swimming in an unnatural and toxic stew of accounting numbers. And this is just the prep for the audits. The real thing doesn’t start until next week.
Filed under Paul, Photography
“My Battery Is Low And It’s Getting Dark”
To the cold hearted pragmatists it was probably just two small bits of telemetry, numbers, indicating the level of battery charge and the transparency of the Martian atmosphere. A machine, built by humans, launched to Mars by humans, guided by humans, running a program written by humans.
Two numbers.
But humans put it in context and translated it into our languages, in the process adding context and massive amounts of emotion.
I hope when my time comes I’m lucid enough to remember those words. They wouldn’t be the worst final words to use if you get to pick.
I also hope that I say them on Mars in about 200 years…
Good Night, Opportunity
I know we’re not supposed to cry over robots, especially after we send them into hostile environments a billion miles away, and especially after they run for fourteen years in their ninety-day missions.
But I’m going to anyway.
Stupid Brain
Hi, there!
This is the stupid brain speaking, the one which is now being allowed to freely associate since I only have four minutes left before midnight and I’m the one that couldn’t get out of my own way all freaking night like a car stuck in first gear and then all of a sudden hit the LUDICROUS SPEED button at about 22:30 and a logjam that’s been bugging the crap out of me for weeks all of a sudden revealed the solution and it turned into a giant game of matching figures and sorting this huge Excel file over and over as I eliminated matching entries like a high-tech version of that kid’s game where you match pictures (wasn’t there a TV game show version of that, probably with Gene Rayburn hosting?) and once I got into it I reminded myself about every five minutes, “Don’t forget, you’ve still got to post something tonight!” but I had no idea what to post and all of a sudden it’s 23:55 and “HOLY SHIT!” so here I am.
I’m glad that the logjam got broken.
It sucks that I have a stupid brain.
Filed under Deep Thoughts
No Context For You – February 10th
There are places that we need to have ready if we should need them – but we really don’t want to ever need them.
There are places that don’t exist that we desperately need to have, but we go on every day knowing that they’ll never exist.
This reality thing is really weird sometimes.
Filed under Entertainment, Family, Photography
Sunset & C-46
Some days you just have to be lucky enough to be taking the trash out at the right time.
Filed under CAF, Photography
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 