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He was a loser, you know. Every high school has to have at least two; it's like a national law. One male, one female. Everyone's dumping ground. Having a bad day? Flunked a big test? Had an argument with your folks and got grounded for the weekend? No problem. Just find one of those poor sad sacks that go scurrying around the halls like criminals before the home-room bell and walk it right to him. And sometimes they do get killed, in every important way except the physical; sometimes they find something to hold onto and they survive. Arnie had me. And then he had Christine. Leigh came later. --from Christine, by Stephen King. 18 days until my birthday! |
Thursday, April 22, 1999 Mac Attack Looking over yesterday's entry, I'm struck by two thoughts:
Which reminds me; check out this week's mouth organ. They decided to write about something other than sex this week, and while I'm still not sure how completely I agree with their viewpoint, it's well-reasoned and well-articulated as always.
I put up Wednesday's entry early for a change (which turned out to be a Good Thing, the way things worked out), read a bit more poetry, and then started work on a short essay comparing two sonnets by Spenser, which was due at 6:30. Along the way, I made intermittent calls back to Far Rockaway, 'cause I hadn't spoken to my mother for a week or so. Rather to my surprise, I kept getting that annoying three-tone phone company signal, followed by "I'm sorry; all circuits are busy," which I don't remember happening in ages, if ever. It turns out that some workers accidentally cut a couple of fiber-optic cables, which knocked out service to the entire area for a few hours. I finally got through around 4:20. My mother hadn't known that there was a phone problem in the first place. So we talked for a bit about this and that, most of which isn't worth reporting here.
At the end of the conversation, I got one more bit of upsetting news: A friend of mine had a daughter four months ago. Said daughter passed away this week. Sigh. There are limits to what Whitman can help with.
Anyway, by this point, my essay was about 50% done. The only catch was that I had previously arranged to meet a friend at 5:00 PM, not having realized that I'd have an essay due that day. And since we'd been planning to meet since, like, last January, and hadn't managed to do it until now, I was a bit reluctant to cancel on her. On the other hand, I had to get this essay done. So I decided to go to the assigned meeting place, tell her the situation, and offer to either talk for just a little while before rushing off to finish the paper, or postpone our meeting altogether. It turns out that she couldn't make it either, but had lost my phone number. Nice to know we're on the same track, I guess. So we're finally going to have that conversation next week, and this time, we both mean it! I think.
So. From there, I went to the bookstore, for I needed art supplies, and I hoped they might have them. I picked up two 15"x20" illustration boards, and some cheap white acrylic paint, which didn't look like the type I needed, but looked as if it conceivably might work. From there to the computer lab. The PC labs being packed, I went to the Mac lab, which was mostly deserted once again. I tell you, I can't believe this. Part of me wants to shout out the news of this discovery to the entire campus, but that would utterly ruin it, so I'm going to have to just keep my mouth shut. Anyway, I leaned the illustration boards against the wall, making a mental note to remember to take them with me when I left, sat down at my system, retrieved my file from my Internet account, and got to work. An hour later, I was cruising along, and was 90% done, when my computer stopped working. My cursor just started blinking wildly, and nothing I typed had any effect. So. I remembered what Stacy had told me the day before, via e-mail. Specifically:
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a) console the mac. it's just as frightened and frustrated as you are. one
"uses" a pc; one co-operates with a mac. b) move the mouse around. if the pointer does move around but can do nothing else, it's likely the application is stalled, not the mac itself. press command-option-escape. c) if it appears that the whole system is stalled, the last ditch effort is command-control-restart button (the key with the <| on it). d) hum happily as you hear the startup tone.
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I tried command-option-escape. Nothing happened. Cringing a bit, and hoping that Word for Mac wasn't too bad with crash recovery, I tried command-control-restart. Nothing happened. I tried virtually every combination of command, option, control, escape, and restart. Zilch. I hit the button of the front of the computer. Windows started shutting down like anything, and I was presented with a dialogue box asking me if I wanted to save my document. I pressed the relevant keys, to no avail. And either clicking did nothing, or the pointer wasn't available, I forget which. I leaned over to the next terminal and sent Stacy an S.O.S., while trying everything else I could think of, and looking for an "off" switch.
Ultimately, I called in the guy from the front desk, who, after trying command-control-restart himself, yanked out the power cord, and put it back in. The system rebooted, then said I hadn't shut it down properly before. Press "return" to continue. I did. Nothing happened. I went to use another system.
So... once again, I retrieved the earlier draft from my Internet account, and got to work, recreating all the changes and material I'd added just before. Along the way, I periodically checked back at the first system to see if it had somehow started working. I had just "broken even" with what I'd written the first time around, when, going back to system #1, I discovered where the problem was. The person in front of me had knocked out the keyboard cable. The keyboard cable that connects the computer to the keyboard. To the keyboard that is used for those control-option-etc. sequences that had mysetriously failed to work before. To the keyboard that one is supposed to hit "return" on once you reboot after not shutting down properly. (To the keyboard that, on a PC, would have been noted as being missing with "301: Keyboard Error" on bootup, but never mind that. <g>) I suppose I should have thought of that earlier, but, being more used to Windoze's ideosyncracies, I'd automatically assumed it was a software problem. So. I got the first version back, compared the two files, found that I'd mostly reconstructed it the same way, but had done one paragraph differently the second time around. I decided that I liked the first version better, and restored it. By this time, over an hour had passed since I'd run into trouble, and class was starting. Oh, well; it couldn't be helped.
Anyway, I finished the essay, printed it out, and rushed off to class, around 7 PM. I'd never gotten to that particular class a half-hour late before, but I decided that it wasn't the end of the universe. I get there, and half the class is out of the room, and those who are there are reading newspapers, chatting, and so on. Ummm... what's going on? They're at the break? But that shouldn't be for another hour! As particularly perceptive readers (unlike myself) might have already noticed, the amount of time I spent working on the paper, and the time I thought it was, don't actually match up. As a matter of fact, it turns out that nobody had bothered to adjust the Macintoshes in the computer lab to Daylight Savings Time. It was actually 8 PM. Oops. See, I don't have much of a sense of time under the best of conditions, and when you factor in everything else... Anyway, my professor was both understanding and sympathetic when I explained the whole thing after class, so all's well that ends well, I guess.
Oh, finally, remember those illustration boards I leaned against the wall of the computer lab back when I entered it? Neither did I. On the whole, I've had better days.
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