Okay, flist; I'm in a bad spot, and maybe one of you can help. My email provider is shutting down at the end of the year (yes, ~3 weeks) and I still haven't found a replacement. My needs are simple but non-standard, and the cognitive load of trying to research providers while keeping all the other balls in the air is squashing me flat.

The ( Read more... )

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 ( Read more... )

The cloned-salvage-lifesaver laptop is back in the shop; they did well, but wrangling Micro$oft activation for a no-longer-supported OS is not surprisingly a challenging process. They seem optimistic that they'll finagle something ( Read more... )

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 ( Read more... )

I know, I know, losing one's temper and smashing an inanimate object repeatedly against the floor is universally regarded as a Bad Thing in our society.

And yet, it just fixed the computer. And not for the first time.

This entry was originally posted at https://lizvogel.dreamwidth.org/213682.html because I got tired of dealing with whatever ( Read more... )

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 ( Read more... )

Found out the hard way that the new-to-me writing laptop does not have a BIOS-level alarm when the battery's about to run out. Luckily I was just tweaking a couple of sentences, and remembered what I'd done ( Read more... )

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 ( Read more... )

That trick where you unplug a laptop and hold the power button down for 30 seconds to clear a locked-up-won't-boot machine is a fscking miracle cure. My only qualm is that the last time I did it, the laptop in question kicked its little heels up in the air shortly thereafter ( Read more... )

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