Incorporeal Works

Here is to better days, which seem to have arrived. Whatever indigestion my computer/connection/node etc. had yesterday has completely cleared up. And that is a very good thing, since I am clueless as to how to diagnose really serious problems tech-wise.

This afternoon I took a holiday from silicon matters and went with Babs to the First Tennessee Pavilion, aka Chattanooga Market, where we listened to a singer-songwriter named Angel Snow, a folksy, country-blues type of performer. Quite good, she was. I had heard her Friday night at the Nightfall free concert series downtown in Chattanooga. This was Babs’ first hearing, and she was impressed, as well.

To complete our joy, we heard from the parents of the World’s Most Nearly Perfect Grandchildren late this afternoon, and we are babysitting tonight.

A very good day.

Another day, additional issues and some progress. Late this morning, my connection to the internet slowed to a crawl, especially the upload part. No pictures went up to my Gallery server, and after a while even downloads became problematical. As of now, things are better, and once again internet connectivity is mine, although still not up to par.

I suppose, considering the complexity of processes that whisk my keystrokes through unimaginably byzantine skeins of wire and silicon, I should be grateful that I can connect at all. And I am.

But, oh, please gods of the internet aether, restore my full connection tomorrow. I will sacrifice seven virgins to the web volcano, supposing I can find that many.

A fresh day, a few new problems, but all is well with my Gallery installation for the present. I still have to figure out how to embed the gallery into my CMS page, leaving room around the images for text. I should learn just to walk away when frustration goads me into shouting at the computer and cursing software geeks. It is amazing anybody can write software I can use at all. Props to all geeks.

Now, back to uploading lots of pictures. Heh.

I suppose this post will qualify as a rant. I have spent the better part of a day trying to puzzle out how to make several programs do what I want them to do, rather than what their creators imagined they should do.

FTP. A protocol for transferring files from one source to a destination, in my case, from my computer hard drive to a server where I keep my web files. I had used successfully a free program for several years, which lately became purchase-only. I tried to load and use a couple of free programs to avoid paying $37.00 for a real copy of the FTP program that had served me well. Both free programs refused to talk to my hosting service, so after four hours of effort, googling tech advice and checking all sorts of help forums, I finally spent the money for the program I knew would work. Ten minutes, and I was up and running.

Now I have spent the past two hours trying to make a bulk update function work with my photo gallery program. Problems are presently insoluble for me. Too late at night. I will try again tomorrow, when I am more functional mentally.

Somewhere, pimply-faced geeks are guffawing over my cluelessness, I am sure.

Perhaps it is because the primary campaigns sapped all the substance from both nominees, but the past couple of months have been disheartening to me. I hope Obama and McCain can get down to real issues and forget about celebrity status and whether one is an elitist, and one has more houses than he can remember.

After the speeches last night at the Democratic National Convention, commentators were reduced to analyzing what Hillary did not say, or hint, or perhaps just didn’t care to mention. Will the Democrats form another circular firing squad? Will McCain blow a fuse in some future interview?

Where are the questions being asked about the drifting economy, already on a lee shore, and no coherent navigational aids offered by either nominee.

To reprise Reagan’s campaign mantra from 1980, are you better off now than seven years ago? Not many outside the top tax bracket can answer in the affirmative. The deficit is ballooning, the dollar is fitfully resisting final collapse, Iraq staggers on, shored up by belated energy on the part of the Sunni leaders, and the Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan.

Does anyone care about real issues?

Feh. It is late and I am so very tired.

I have been thinking lately about my childhood - actually, like most everybody, scenes from childhood recur every day with me - and following a letter from my Aunt Barbara last week, I have been remembering the summer she married my Uncle Tommy. It was 1952, Uncle Tommy was in the Army and the wedding was in the chapel at Fort Myer, adjacent to the Arlington Cemetery. The newlyweds left the chapel under a series of arched sabers held by Uncle Tommy’s Army friends, and settled into a horse-drawn open carriage for the short trip to the Fort Myer Officers’ Club for the reception. I had been the Ringbearer for the ceremony, and my sister Patricia was a flower girl. I was eight, Patricia was five.

What really has absorbed me the past week was a trip I took the week following, while my sisters stayed with our grandparents in Arlington, VA. My parents had left for a trip by themselves right after the wedding, traveling to Norfolk, Va, where my father had spent time in his first months in the Navy, during WWII, soon after graduating from college. After a week, I was dispatched to join them, and be introduced to Virginia history, starting with the naval base at Newport News. At the age of eight, I was tagged like baggage and loaded onto a DC-3 (I knew my airplanes, even then) to fly to Richmond and join my parents. The stewardesses were most attentive to me, and I felt quite grown-up to be on my own on this Adventure.

Collected from the airport by my parents, I was given a tour of Historic Virginia, starting with the naval base at Newport News, where I asked my father if a ship we saw was a submarine. The radar antenna on the top of the tower looked like one in a book I had. It actually was an aircraft carrier. Slightly different in size and everything else from a submarine. My father gently corrected my mistake. He was always kind.

We went on to see the battlefield at Yorktown, the restored colonial capital at Williamsburg, where I climbed the wall at the Governor’s Palace, caught and restrained by my father. Behind the Palace was the most interesting thing I saw the whole trip, a holly hedge maze which entranced me. A museum of hands-on naval armaments in miniature was on our agenda, complete with a remote-controlled gun turret for a battleship.

We swung west to pass the University of Virgina, my father’s alma mater, and paused at Washington and Lee College, standing before the tomb of Robert E. Lee. And so on home, my first solo plane trip, educational and entertaining sights and activities. I felt quite grown up. Important for an eight-year-old boy.

My parents loved me and gave me all they could. I would thank them personally if I could, were they not both gone. But they live on in what they have left me.

In a column printed this morning in the Times Free Press, originally appearing on August 6, 2008 in the Miami Herald, Leonard Pitts, Jr. addressed the virulent partisanship that exults even in the mortality of those of differing opinions. The springboard for the column was the outpouring of venom on the news of columnist Robert Novak’s diagnosis as suffering from a brain tumor.

Expanding on this fresh evidence of the coarsening of political discourse, Pitts said:

There is nothing new here of course. Similar responses attended the late Tony Snow’s battle with the cancer that took his life. And Michael Savage, a barely-housebroken radio personality, played a song by the Dead Kennedys when news broke that Sen. Edward Kennedy had been diagnosed with brain cancer.

The intention, I imagine, is to debase those with whom one has political disagreements. The authors of this sort of abuse evidently don’t realize that what they really debase is themselves — and political discourse as a whole.

No reader on a regular basis of Op-Ed pieces, and especially of blogs and message boards on the internet, will find this poisonous trend unusual.

Political positions have become dogma no less merciless than that of the Catholic Inquisition of the 17th century, or the theocratic rule of the Taliban in Afghanistan more recently. To dance on your enemy’s grave, metaphorially and even in advance, is not a convincing endorsement of your own ideology.

…are the most likely answers to computer problems. I spent several hours today eliminating many possible problems which might be the cause of my computer refusing to acknowledge the existence of the internet. I had clicked on MS updater to load XP Service Pack 3, an install which churned on for an hour before crashing. Some message about a lack of memory flashed across the screen, and I re-booted, my main recourse when things go wrong.

That is about the extent of my knowledge of things computer wise, so I don’t know why when I saw there was still a problem after rebooting, I went through so many self-inflicted changes. Finally, tonight when the grandchildren went to bed, it occurred to me to simply run the installation again. After a l-o-o-n-g time (I do have an anemic RAM) the update completed successfully. Reboot, and bingo, every thing is copacetic.

At least this time I didn’t rage and scream and throw things, my second line of defense when the computer goes all sulky on me. Maybe I am maturing. At sixty-four, about time that happened.

At long last today, Lucy visited the Dog Park in downtown Chattanooga. Along with a shifting cast of other dogs, she greeted each new arrival clustering around him or her, doing the sniffing thing from nose to butt. For forty minutes Lucy ran and ran and ran and jumped and jostled and did dog things with other dogs, all sorely needed to make her doggy life complete. Lucy also met Larry and his dogs, Sammie and Mattie, who were in town for family birthdays. So I had good conversation as well as the pleasure of seeing Lucy interact successfully with other dogs.

Most of the visit, Lucy gave me a wide berth, leaving me in no doubt she wanted to stay. Finally, though, her tongue lolling out and drool hanging in ropes from her mouth, Lucy slowly walked over to me and allowed the fixing of the Gentle Leader to her panting muzzle and drooping neck

It was a much quieter ride home than the ride down. We will be back.

I am fighting the battle of software upgrades again, this time it’s Wordpress and Gallery2. I am not sure where the conflict is, but I can’t get Gallery2 to embed in the content management page I set up for photos. One problem I am sure involves my effort to embed Gallery in this CMS page which I have on a different subdomain, but on the same server. Should work, if I understand the instructions. But it doesn’t, so I probably once again am failing Instruction Comprehension 101.

I did briefly succeed in partially embedding Gallery in the old CMS page, which I want to retire, which is in the same subdomain.

Feh. I will tackle it again this weekend, early in the day when a few more synapses are firing. I am not a late-night person for any task, especially tech stuff.