Sunday 17 October 2004

Pic of the day: Goodbye to you my trusted friend ...

Breaking down

So this is the end of the road for Cassie, my Cassiopeia Pocket PC. This morning when I tried to turn her on, she did not wake up. I tried to fully recharge her batteries and press the reset switch hard and often. I took out the batteries and put them back in. No response. Her battery life has been steadily shorter for a while, and she had a bad reset where she lost everything except what was saved to the memory card. (Which was not as much as it would have been if I saw it coming – but this is the case with all things, is it not? If we saw it coming ... but we don't.)

Not only is the warranty expired, but I've used a new and better Pocket PC for some months now. Still, it was kinda surprising that it should end like this. But all things that have form must come to an end. For consumer electronics, I can kinda accept that. It is harder when it applies to humans, but no less true.

***

I am still sick, although so far today has been much better than yesterday, which was better than Friday. A new strange thing to report today: My left leg is from time to time pricking like when you have been sitting on it for a little while. It does not go away when I use a different chair. It does not go away when I pace my living room for a quarter of an hour, which pretty much tells me that it is not the sitting. But what it is, I do not know. I don't feel it all the time, just when I put my foot down, typically when walking. When I put my left foot down, this prickling sensation comes in my lower leg.

At least lack of sleep is not currently a problem: I slept approximately 7 hours this morning. I cannot remember last I slept that long in one stretch. No memorable dreams, though.

I just came to think, if I am going to keep up this whining, I should set aside a separate part of my journal for it. That was, if I suddenly stop posting, the curious can read back and make an educated guess as to what affliction finally got me. But of course, I could just be run over by a bus or something, so it's not all that useful. And mixing it in with the entries like this is bound to feel pretty ironic to those of you who are actually suffering from incurable, terminal illnesses or have family members in that condition. Which is not all that uncommon, especially the family members part.

Be that as it may, right now I am feeling small and alone and afraid. This too should go into the records. Even I cannot always be strong. Though I have certainly been so, a lot and for a long time. Perhaps too much and too long, but only time will tell.

***

I wrote a guide to Sims2 pregnancy and baby care, since the FAQ at GameFAQ was not just incomplete but flat out badly wrong in several places. I wrote it in Power Writer, even though it was not a typical fiction, because I wanted to test out the parts of PW that are about normal writing: Quick editing, spell checking, saving and exporting, stuff like that. Well, it isn't all that bad, but it isn't all that good either. Perhaps I should sleep on this some more. Anyway, it turns out that I cannot export the finished text in any other text format. This is a feature of the evaluation copy, and I'm OK with that, except this was not mentioned before I tried it. There were mentioned a couple other limitations, on the size of text and the number of times used. So I decided to do it the hard way, select text, copy and past into another program. Except you can't do that either. Instead, the copied text will be the information that you can't do that. This is the first place you learn about this feature as well.

I don't begrudge them their paranoia, I just wish they had told me this earlier. Good thing it was just a game-journal entry. And no, contrary to their belief probably, this is not going to make me more eager to buy the program.

Also this evening I have transfered some months of my old archives to chaosnode.net. Luckily I can transfer one month at a time, so I don't need to click (or even type the name of) each of the around 4000 files. But even this came to a halt, as the FTP stopped sending the files with a cryptic error message, even though I had done nothing different. Then it closed the connection in the middle of December 2002.

It seems to be the day when things break down. Hardware, software, connection, body and soul. So this is how it feels to be human. How long will I remember that if the thumbscrew is removed?