So I gotta retool. Fast. And these are not gigs when you can be a diva and show up late to the stage, and have a opening act do a second encore as a coverup for you. Paranoia will destroy ya. But neurosis lives on, to fight another day, assuming the wifi works again. Like it just now has.
It all only started, I think, with planned obscelliscence.
The old and often unreliable types of computer programming indeed programmed my brain. And if you read this website long enough, or not that long at all, you will see what this long post is getting at. Timely, shimely. Technology is not always your friend, and its shortcomings can back you up in publishing things that suddenly go blip in the night — and isn’t that when we do most of our deadline stuff?
– Baldwin’s June Bug Days has been replaced by Windmill Days, a couple of years ago, but there still are loads of things to do, much more than any other area summer festival. Multiple music acts, of course, but you would expect that. All kinds of other entertainment, arts and crafting stuff, demos and their specialty, many ethnic as in Dutch themes to-dos. It goes on all weekend, to complete its longer than usual for such fests, five-day run.
Along an established line, the be-as-it-May-month-message-board on the wall at Ziggy’s has been blank for June bands. But they make up for it with posters, individual ones for their week’s seven days, on the door of the elevator (yes they have one). Most notably, positioned to the right and downward corner is the Saturday night live act, Pop Syndrome. They’ve been around long enough for treatments for and to their … syndrome. –
Do you ever get the jitters when you hit the next button on the computer that you might lose everything you gained when hitting the hundreds of buttons beforehand? Call me the product of my profession, as I recall far enough back, before there was anything like backup available, to still have bad dreams about VDTs and dialup internet, and their very frequent failures. Made the old manual typewriter seem easier and maybe even more efficient.
So you’d think the only real aspect of this I still have to worry about — at least at first thought — would be a no-brainer to withstand.
I would not have drafted that draft button, would I have known, or at least put full faith in it, as I get caught up on when is the last time, even in seconds not minutes, that the “saved draft” appears and eases my fears, but did it really work that way? Did I see it out of the corner of my eye?
So yesterday’s news can break down in the save process and need to be refashioned as todays, as I lost my post prior to this last weekend I was working for, but not until I was at its end and ready to strike “publish.” Ouch, in those last few minutes, my wifi went out.
Backing up, my popular website, which you are now reading, has a quirk that came about when — gee I don’t really know why — it became clear that when I cut and paste to post in an inside department, it will also appear, as you have seen very recently, as my lead story. Obviously, some posts have more merit then others, so they go inside. But there is not a save button to hit to secure this process and section of posting, I’m taking my chances. If the wifi that I am just newly doing becomes overloaded within the overall network, with too many users at peak times, I run the danger of losing it and having to start over — and even after that maybe get the same result. This is when I need the autosave feature to save me, but it doesn’t accept it as a draft right away, as there are gaps before the protocol again takes precedence. Like just a few days ago. Got all that?!? I wish only for the technical mastery of Audioslave in Like A Stone and its understated but powerfully whining guitar.
It is a total pain to redo such typing, because of the obvious redundancy of content, repeating in your brain. But then sometimes I’ll remember to put in more detail and not keep it so short, rather than rushing to beat time, before the network crashes and my post essentially becomes invisible, at least until I redo it.. So Sometimes Goodbye To A First Draft Is A Second Chance.
But this doesn’t scare me nearly as much as the old VDT, the size of an all-metal refrigerator, and not the college dorm variety, where it was hard to even go back and edit before the page often would go poof! No quarter here, in more ways than one. Or the dialup where you’d not even get the screech like a wounded animal — or wayward reporter — to complete your writing and then send, before you would get that awful blank screen without any flickering lights gazing back at you.
So here we go with Joe psychoanalyzing himself and lining up his neuroseses, most of which we can all relate to, in roughly the order they appeared in his life. I reference via Dr. Phil the difference between anxiety (like someone simply yelling snake without any backup context) and the idea of that same person actually placing a snake down in front of you.
So here we go …
That nasty you just might have a virus message appears. Do you think on the fly, that if you just shut down and turn off your computer, the problem will go away. Doesn’t seem likely and I don’t know the merits of that line of thought, but it gives you comfort and a sense of hope that the one button you hit will fix the difficulty. So your computer won’t virtually explode and you can be allowed to continue anew. Also, when you have to click a button — any button or should I call it key — to make your screen saver revert itself back to what you had open on your desktop, you always choose to strike M not any other vowel or consunant. Am I a bit OCD too?
Do you ever hesitate to firmly and totally, and thus irretrievably although the techno among us might know an avenue, delete something by sending it to trash? You know you’ve had that angst. Fear of the dark?
Or to delete a long string of words as part of a search so you can’t be trafficked, if looking at something that’s a no no — even if just browsing for a second or two or just selecting preview and is that a mitigating factor? — and then not bring in as much reader traffic as your computer dies?
So put it on a flash drive. But can that boatload of letters, stories and other documents ever just disappear from the flash drive if it sets in your drawer, or in the sun too long? Living that shelf life too much in the sun?
And even if you don’t lose emails, and they are there right in front of you for the moment, did you remember to strike both reply AND send. Anxiety in the moments before you check your box to see that it announces, formally, that the message has been sent. And when your screen saver comes on with its beauty scenery, is the scene that you might have lost everything that got typed up and then is momentarily replaced by cool color patterns.
Hey, you highlight something with the good old cut and paste, and fear that if you hit a backspace to delete the extra typo in the sentence below — Type O Negative? — you will have been deprived of more than that one letter, as what you had highlighted will go bye bye. There is the undo button, but did you already use it, for something even prior that you’re trying to get back to where it once belonged? Or if you keep multiple windows open, are there too many in regulation?
And as far as regulation, to go back a couple of decades, what are some of the rules, as I did a gig for Patch for a few months, back when wifi wasn’t as widely and wildly popular, and wasn’t even wellknown. Supposed to publish from my home computer. But as is my theme today, it went down, part on my end and part on theirs. Double trouble. What did my editor say? Find the nearest bar and grill and piggyback by using their inhouse wifi. Just don’t partake in things you should not while on the job. As I unlike he, had no expense account. Being so fish out of water, I did something he considered fishy and just waited until the next day. That did not go over well, as a sports team and their game waited.
All these things can be resolved with time, but that isn’t always there as seconds tick away. Like the recent White House announcement that a debt ceiling pact had been reached. It took them weeks to put together a bill that granted, was likely much longer than one of my stories. Sometimes most of us work best under pressure. But that puts on almost as much pressure on as when, again, a screen goes poof.
Or when the speaker of the house realized that his speaker was not on when his last arguments were being made. So retool. Now that’s real pressure.
A thing that’s somewhat less so is if your car is on fumes and the gas station if still a half-mile away. We’ve all been there at some point. Easier, since the period of angst is spread out over close to a minute, rather than that one strident moment of pure terror. Much the same with backing up your files. The short-term is that its one less thing to have to do, and any consequence for not doing so is off in the future. Backup to the future?