IAs of yesterday, I have finished(pant, gasp!) uploading Michelle Cameron's answers to my questions, for the blog tour spot on The Writer's Daily Grind. It turned out to be a horrible chore. This was probably partly because I didn't really know what I was doing, when I tried to save her e-mail to a file I could retrieve for this blog. You see, I thought I sent it to Live Writer, which is Microsoft's connection with Blogger.
Well, surprise, surprise. When I looked for the relevant file, I couldn't find it. Anywhere! I couldn't find the relevant e-mail, which I always save in a special file on my e-mail. I looked and looked. Then I looked in just about every reasonable-sounding file on my hard drive, that I could think of. No luck. At last, however, I found the relevant e-mail, questions, answers, and all, in some file like "Recent activity" or something like that. So I then tried to copy it here, to my blogging program, Live Writer, so I could send it to The Writer's Daily Grind. Unfortunately, it didn't copy, for some reason I couldn't fathom(maybe a computer can). All I had was a filed post with my questions. No answers from her. So I had to start the search again!
Fortunately, I more or less remembered where I"d found it before, so I went back to that file and made sure, this time, that I did a copy-and-paste. And lo and behold, it worked! My relief, at that point was boundless. But what I had to go through to get it successfully uploaded to my blog, was positively enervating.
And that, dear Gentle Readers, is why I love, and hate, computers! They are very convenient beasts, but they have minds of their own,and if you don't do whatever it is you're trying to do, the way the computer wants you to do it, you end up tearing whatever hear is in your head. And that can be very, very frustrating.
However, on balance, I must say that I wouldn't be where I am today, certainly not as a writer, without the help I've gotten from people on the other side of "online", both with regard to the "prehistoric" and the "medieval" aspects of my writing. And that doesn't even take into account, the "writing" aspect, which is help I've gotten over the months and years, from some absolutely lovely people, and for whose existence, I can only say I'm extremely grateful. And without computers and the Internet, all of this would, essentially, have been impossible, at least in the form I'm getting my research and my writing, now.
But still. . .
Anne G
3 comments:
I hear you, Anne! I regularly want to shoot my computer, but then I realize I'd be even more frustrated without it.
Gemi:
Theer have quite fequently been times whin I would have loved nothing more than to dump my %^&* computer into the middle of Puget Sound. Trouble is, that would only pollute Puget Sound, and it's polluted enough as it is!
Before I retired I worked on computers, programming, and on data networks, so I have more than a layman's knowledge about them. Still, stuff happens....most of which I can resolve, but that doesn't mean I don't encounter some really sticky problems.
Let me tell you why font is my four letter word (and an eff word at that!). I was setting up a large printer for a client (this printer churned out over a million letter sized pages a month) and one application kept failing because the required font could not be found by the server. It took me two solid weeks to find the originating PC had renamed the font before sending the application to the server. The person using the PC had not programmed it to do so. So even though the server actually had the required font, it didn't recognize the renamed font as being the same animal.
Computers are DUMB and DIABOLICAL!
Sorry for boring you with this story, but you see, you probably didn't do anything wrong.
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