Thursday, October 04, 2018

Back...sorta!

Duchess of Yowl (stationed at the door because dinner is late): WHAT is that STENCH?

Me: (startled, fumbling packages, dropping reticule, spectacles, book bag and feather duster) What? What? I smell?

DoY: You are foul. What have you been doing?

Me: Umm...working?

DoY: In a kennel?

Me: ohhh. There was a dog in the elevator. He was very nice. I petted him.

DoY: You are fired.

Me: Are you hungry? I have tuna!

DoY: You're fired after dinner has been served.


******
Sorry about the lack of blog post yesterday.
My computer had an attack of the vapors.

If you've emailed me recently (or actually, within the last couple months) and have not heard back, please email again.  I lost some email in this crash, and I really can't bear to download 100K emails to find the ones that were pending. 

This will teach me to fall behind on stuff, that's for sure.

The good news is I didn't lose any requested fulls, or the data base of requested fulls, or the submissions data base.




25 comments:

Kitty said...

What a coincidence; Janet had computer issues on the same day a 60-year-old bottle of Macallan Valerio Adami was sold for $1,101,729.00. Hmmmmmmmm...

Brenda said...

Notice that she dropped everything else but...

Katja said...

I had to translate "reticule". Came up with something strange. Then I googled it.

Is this where you carry your whiskey in??

roadkills-r-us said...

I was quite confused by “reticule”, being familiar only with its usage in relation to oscilloscopes, rifle scopes, etc. so bonus points for that, and for the use of “vapors”.

Mister Furkles said...

Janet,

We use Carbonite for that particular reason. Eventually all computers fail. You can accomplish the same thing yourself using thumb drives. You can get a USB Hub with up to ten ports for thumb drives. In your business, data recovery is necessary. Annoying when a hard drive dies but recovery capability is important.

Mister Furkles said...

Reticule is also a glass plate printed with, usually chromium, lines for printing on semiconductor wafers. I'm guessing Janet makes processors in her walk-in closet.

Claire Bobrow said...

Has the Duchess recovered after a supper of delectable tunafish? I hope to heck it was served upon a silver salver.

True confessions: I love the word 'reticule,' but always thought it meant a large handbag (like the carpet bag carried by Mary Poppins). I'm glad I looked it up and discovered the actual meaning. Thanks for the learning opportunity, Janet!

Claire Bobrow said...

And thank you roadkills-r-us and Mister Furkles for even more definitions! I had no idea.

Carolynnwith2Ns said...

'reticule,'

A Russian word meaning "gotcha".

nightsmusic said...

Poor DOY...it's a good thing the dog stayed in the elevator, yes? ;)

Kitty while I love Macallan, I don't love it that much! O_o

Mister Furkles a word of caution about Carbonite, if you've never had to restore. I used them for oh...three years I guess. I had a laptop breakdown that was unrecoverable, bought a new one, loaded most things on it and it broke down two days later. I hadn't as yet reloaded the Carbonite interface. After a ten day go round with the laptop company who insisted it had to be my fault, I bought a new one yet again, reloaded everything including Carbonite and went to restore things but lo and behold...after ten days, everything was deleted! Everything! I called and after four hours on the phone was finally told by a senior tech that, should there be no activity on your account within a certain amount of time, and there's no set amount of time, their bots or whatever they have running the servers, deletes everything to make space.

I've since switched to two other backup solutions after thoroughly investigating them to make sure that doesn't happen again, as well as using a mirror backup program and an external hard drive to back things up.

Just an FYI...

Karen McCoy said...

I maintain that email inboxes are too overfull to be sustainable anyway...perhaps your system was hankering for a self-inflicted reboot? Still, sounds like a pain...hope the fallout gets resolved quickly!

Melanie Sue Bowles said...

So sorry about the stress of computer problems.

I remember when email was fun. Now, not so much. Now it's an endless barrage of people who want to dump their elderly horses so they can move on to the next best thing.

Kitty, HA!

Beth Carpenter said...

What a day! At least you got to pet a dog. I don't care what DOY says, petting a dog makes everything better.

Jennifer R. Donohue said...

Sometimes I occasion to pet a dog in the course of my workday...my boss brings hers in sometimes, or a patron will have one parked outside who's an acquaintance, a guiding eyes puppy comes in, etc. For Elka, this would result in concentrated and vaguely worried sniffing when I came through the door. Puppy Ulrike doesn't care at all, she is simply overwhelmed by my arrival home (and we've learned from our mistakes and she goes to puppy playtimes that weren't available when Elka was a puppy).

Julie Weathers said...

I am so sorry about the computer loss. Mine crashed thanks to Microsoft 10 which I didn't want and doesn't play well with older computers, but the pop up window kept coming up and I hit yes instead of no one day.

I thoroughly hate Microsoft, but I hate Apple as much, so what to do?

We did recover my hard drive, but it was pretty stressful and I lost 3 years of research in the mess.

I have two hard drives on the new computer and the external hard drive.

I love reticule and used it in Rain Crow. No surprise. I'm sure some people will object to some of the archaic words, but sometimes they are simply the most perfect choices.

Katja said...

OK, I'm brave now (have tossed and turned shall-I, shan't-I), since there is no OP today whose attention I would steal.

(I picture DOY's claws, ready to scratch across my face... and I apologise to all the cats and dogs out in the Reef!)

And I've now thrown away the idea of emailing Janet as an OP, given she's got to catch up anyway. She shall be spared :).

I need some advice since I'm going to be querying here in the UK very soon:

I've had an invitation from a radio station to talk about my book. They don't know my writing yet (or how good the story is, ha ha ;) ), they just know the topic and that's why they're keen.

My topic is a hot potato throughout this country (yep, even the Royals have some label-campaign going).

I didn't go to the radio station (yet), but they said "whenever you're ready".
Well, it's a small station in the area I lived during summer (I have moved away from there but could travel back up). It's NOT the BBC, but hey, you've got to start somewhere, right?

Do I include this into my query??

We had this recently, when agent Carly W. asked us to deliver a marketing plan. I don't have one, really, but I still wonder if this is good or really bad to mention in my query.

Thank you, Reiders, if you've got some thoughts for me! Much, much, appreciated!

Kitty said...

Mister Furkles, I'm sorry to hear about your problem with carbonite. I've never had any problems with them for years, not ever. We've had several computer problems over the years, along with several new computers, and each time we were able to backup all of our files. One time I wondered how to do something, and a live customer support tech walked me through it on the phone.

However, I do know that iDrive is another backup service which is highly recommended. I can't imagine anyone in this day and age not using a backup service.

Barbara Etlin said...

K OCD,

Are you writing a novel? If so, I'm going to jump in and take a guess, although I don't really know what I'm talking about. But that's never stopped me before...

My guess is that talking on the radio about your novel is a form of promotion. And I think that the timing of that probably should wait until shortly before or at the launch date. Keep the info on file and don't promote until you have a published book to promote, so the public can get all excited and rush out to buy it when it is actually available, not in two years' time.

Craig F said...

A surfer girl friend calls those mesh netting, draw string bags you put wetsuits and such in reticules. I've been hung up on the use of it for quite a while.

If you are writing about a sniper you can use it for cross-hairs in gun sites.

Down here it is best not to use the word a lot. It makes people think of reticulated pythons. You get two reactions from that, half run screaming and you can see dollar signs in the eyes of the others as they consider bounty money.

I shy away from cloud storage. It doesn't matter who you contract with, you are stuck with whatever cloud company they stick you data in. Some of those companies a little iffy on security.

Megan V said...

I love the word reticule, though it almost always gets Sweeney Todd stuck in my head.

Julie—have you considered trying Linux for an OS? It’s what I preferred when I used PCs rather than Macs. There’s a tricky setup if you want to use Word though.

Katja said...

Barbara Etlin,

Yes, it's a novel.

Thank you so much for having jumped in!!

Julie Weathers said...

Megan,

Nope, I am tech illiterate. I am now fighting with word because it does that stupid crap of me having to go online to open a word document. I'm going to find an old version of office and bypass this onedrive bs.

Craig F said...

Julie,

Have you checked into Open Office? I'm pretty sure it is still free and their Writer program is close the best Word program, the 2003 model.

Julie Weathers said...

Craig,

Yes, I'm going to download it again. There are some things that I don't care for about it, but I don't have to fight it to open documents.

Thank you.

CavalierdeNuit said...

Does this include emails sent to Query Shark? Thank you for letting us know.