Tech Support Rant

Foamy the Squirrel says it so much better than I could…behold the story of my life for the last 48 hours. The MP3 player’s program will load on the Pentium III/Windows 98 machine but will not run. The PIII will download, but not run, drivers for memory sticks and other USB devices, although it HAS a USB port. Perhaps it’s not so “U”. Somebody tell Nancy Mitford!

The Laptop running Windows XP Pro will install the program, but not get online. It will run the program, but not connect to the MP3 player. It will also Copy from CDs inserted in it, at playing speed only, making lovely little album folders with icons and everything, but when you open them, they are empty.

Steve Jobs, we need to talk. Hiring a blogger? I werk foar tek.

boring old technical difficulties

Badclone

I have been gifted with a lovely used server which should, hopefully, spare me in future from this ridiculous experience of having the internet squeezed through a tube of toothpaste onto my desktop (please, a blog post should not take five to seven minutes to open. Three-minute Youtubes should not take a half hour to load) but in the meantime it’s all I can do to get my paid posts up  and even then the bloody Cable cut out in the middle of one of them. Off to use the public computers tomorrow…

I have also been gifted with a lovely MP3 player…for which my computer refuses the drivers. Luv-lee.

The Blog Song

Do you think he wants us to check his blog? Proof positive that bloggers, no matter what their skin tone, cannot dance worth beans.

The only thing that could make this better is if he were wearing a short-sleeved shirt with that polyester tie. I wonder if that’s his real face or if those are Groucho glasses? I’ve always been partial to the MadV look, myself.

Only with tentacles.

hat-tip to TheAspiringHorseplayer

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today in “People Who Are Better Than You” news…

Seriously, seriously, I thought I was doing well. I mean, not great. Not epic. But, well, well.

Well, enough.

I got two paying blogging gigs. I get enough blogging students to get by. The immoveable object in my living room appears to be moving towards movement, or making a move towards moving towards movement, which is what at least a nanophysicist would call progress, of a sort and if only relative.

And he’s not even a relative.

But there are always those, according to various Desiderati, who do it better.

Better. Stronger. Faster.

And now, it appears, there are even those who do it for a larger and more loyal audience despite being dead six months.

Writer/artist Theresa Duncan, subject of a January Vanity Fair cover story (among plenty of other coverage), is updating her blog from beyond the grave. Cries for help: now available months after they’d be useful. Duncan—whose intentional overdose on pills last July led to the suicide of her partner Jeremy Blake a week later—had become, according to acquaintances and friends interviewed by Vanity Fair, increasingly erratic, paranoid, haggard, hard-drinking, and depressed in her last year or two. She was convinced that Scientologists were harassing her and Blake, trying to sabotage her stalling career (movie and TV projects that never got off the ground, including one that was supposed to star erstwhile friend of the couple and famed Scientologist musician Beck) and his ascending one (a scheduled retrospective of Blake’s work at Washington DC’s Corcoran Gallery ended up going on posthumously). So: what does a dead woman blog about? Dick Cavett, Sherlock Holmes, and T.S. Eliot.

So, pretty much no change there, if she were a book-blogging Typepad type, of which she was only 50%. Come to think of it, this isn’t the first time we at the ol’ raincoaster blog have been out-blogged by a dead woman, although the circumstances of the last time were quite different.
The last post that appeared when Theresa Duncan was alive posted on my birthday. Aw, thankies! Since then, she’d set two autoposts: a spooky, Basil Rathbone one for two days before Halloween, and one for New Year’s Eve. Perhaps she’d miscalculated the date of All Saint’s Eve, or maybe her calendar simply had a faulty October? Or maybe there’s a deeper meaning (there always is, with conspiracy theorists).

October 29th is Saint Narcissus’s Day.

Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake

Blogger’s Union Strike!

If it can happen to the WGA, it could happen here. Thinkaboudit. WWMD?

via Matt