aggienaut: (Default)

   I spent at least an hour editing an article someone had submitted for the magazine the other day, saved it as a word file, and thereafter I haven't been able to open it (all programs claim its not a word file, but it's not anything else??). This reminded me that it was that kind of shenanigans which had driven me to edit documents in the browser on google docs already years ago. Well, right now I'm trying to make some simple edits to the most recent section of I'm about to post of my Apinautica story and it will let me spend five to ten minutes making edits before telling me it failed to save, and then when I reload there's a nightmarish mix of some but not all of my edits creating half words and mangled sentences. Argh. Am I going to have to retreat to using pen and paper?? ... or learn to use the Apple computer I've been provided with as the official work computer? Hmmm pen and paper sounds more appealing ajajaja.

   Anyway, I guess I'll make my edits HERE and hopefully be able to go back and re-integrate them to the master file on google docs some time when it's not being insanely loopy.

   (My computer has been doing this insane thing where the mouse loses the ability to click on buttons or tabs, but it fixes itself when I ctrl-alt-delete and open task manager (not actually resetting my computer, just opening task manager). I mentioned it to my IT friend but he must have been busy with something cause he was just like "huh that's odd." Similarly this google docs problem is... presumably a problem somewhere between my computer and google docs, like, I assume the latter isn't broken, but if my computer's memory had gotten bovine spongiform encephalitis again you'd think it wouldn't effect inputting things into google docs. I dunno, it's probably cursed.







June 23rd, 2013, Turkey – Sometimes, on a random Tuesday in June, you decide you really need to go see a beautiful young woman in Turkey, so you buy a ticket for four days hence.

   When I had arrived in Turkey for the first time in 2009, it had seemed so exotic, “third world” even. The plumbing hadn’t worked well in one of our hotels! The strange and alien call to prayer warbled out throughout the town several times a day! This time I have the perspective to laugh at my earlier self – Turkey is just another place with its own rich culture, and when we had finally mentioned the plumbing problem to the hotel proprietor asked in surprise why we hadn’t reported it earlier.

   In 2009 my friends and I had taken a taxi from Ataturk Airport, getting mired in traffic and slowly navigating the narrow roads of old town before arriving at our hotel in the center of the historic city in Sultanahmet.
   This time I discover what an unnecessarily tedious adventure that had been, when Deniz meets me at the airport and leads me down the escalator from the terminal directly to a station on the highly effective and easy-to-navigate city light rail system. We ride it to the waterfront and board a ferry to cross the Bosporus, the channel that separates Europe from Asia, and walk a few blocks to her apartment. The roads are narrow, steep and cobbled. We pass a random ancient fountain that has probably seen empires rise and fall around its gently burbling water. Perhaps my namesake, Saint Christopher, the patron saint of travelers, had paused beside this very fountain. He was martyred right here in this district (then the town of Chalcedon) in 251 AD – first tempted by two beautiful women and then beheaded, so the hagiographies go.
   We arrive at Deniz’ narrow apartment. Rather to my surprise, it is filled with “Route 66” sign, saguaro cactus knicknacks, and posters of famous landmarks in the States. Well this is more Americana than I expected to find here, but I can’t believe how fortunate I am, this incredibly cute, fiercely strong young woman I had initially had a vague “internet crush” on has welcomed me into her heart and life, me, scrawny itinerate agricultural laborer that I am. I hope I don’t fuck this up!
   She’s taking some classes at the nearby maritime academy so in the mornings she departs in her crisp white uniform with gold epaullets, and I usually explore the city with her brother, who lives nearby. Sometimes sitting in her apartment I hear someone playing a concertina or accordion, the Old-World-y music beautifully funneling up through the acoustics of the stone walls and cobbled streets and fading away again as the player continued their inexplicable musical journey. Some evenings the acrid sinister aroma of tear gas floats faintly on the breeze from the ongoing protests at Taksim Square across the water. We avoid that area but even in our neighborhood giant police water-cannon trucks drive by occasionally, and young men in black tactical police uniforms can be seen having coffee in a cafe, as if “dystopian storm trooper” is just a normal job.
   After a few days in Istanbul we set off by the efficient local buses to travel around a bit. We visit her father in the town of Izmit on the coast. He’s a retired naval officer and (jokingly?) maintains that given all my travels, he thinks I’m a spy. Deniz describes living through the 1999 Izmit earthquake which killed nearly 20,000 people – her parents had been out of town, they rushed back as soon as the earthquake happened, but her dad stopped just behind the last ridge before the city would come into sight and walked to the top so he could discover if the building containing his two children was still standing while not driving in the car with their mom. Deniz had awoken to the shaking, jumped over an opening crack in the floor, grabbed her little brother and ran out of the building. She says you could smell the dead buried under the rubble for weeks afterwords.
We continue down the coast of the Sea of Marmara to Bursa to spend a few days with her mom before returning to Istanbul.
   For the past two weeks it has been smooth sailing, her brown gazelle eyes sparkling; but, turbulent like the sea, we have an argument and lightning flashes in eyes that aren’t used to not getting their way. If I love her, she argues, I would marry her next Tuesday. I look around at the Americana on her walls and feel this is all a bit fast. Things escalate, she suddenly feels I am distracting her from her studies and should immediately cast off from her place. And so out I go with my seabag over my shoulder, suddenly cast adrift in Turkey.
   I head across the Bosporus again, on a mostly-empty evening ferry, towards a sky pink with sunset behind the city’s many minarets. The lonely call to prayer warbles out as I wend my way up the streets towards a hostel in Sultanahmet.



   For weeks there’d been daily protests at Taksim Square. Deniz as a reasonable person wanted nothing to do with it, but, like a moth to a candle, I longed to see this political turbulence first hand, and now I can at least do that.
   I descend from Sultanahmet hill. By the waterfront, in front of New Mosque (founded 1665), there’s a big demonstration against the toppling of the Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt, the culmination of the tension that had been there when Deniz and I had met. I edge past the Egyptian-flag-waving throng and cross the low bridge across the inlet known as the Golden Horn heading up the steep Galata hill on the far side, towards Taksim.
   On the broad pedestrian-only boulevard leading to Taksim, crowds go about their shopping as usual, contrasting strongly with the young men in black police uniforms standing around. In their ominous dark uniforms and combat boots they joke with each other, like twenty-year-old boys do the world over, and they chat with passers-by like normal people, and they sit at cafes and play backgammon with old men, passing the time until they’ll go into action. About fifty young people are doing a sit-in in honor of people killed in the protests, holding nearly two dozen pictures of people from all walks of life. Several squads of riot police stand off to the side, awkward and motiveless until the command will come which will cause them to suddenly move like coordinated marionettes, linking shields and following orders. Finally I come to the broad open space of Taksim Square. On one side a huge red Turkish flag flutters fitfully in the wind in front of a government building. A huge picture of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk gazes sternly over the square from the wall of the building, with steely blue eyes, a stately handlebar mustache, and a cylindrical astrakhan hat on his head. He’s not Big Brother, he’s the father of the nation, the hero of Gallipoli, and he gazes on the police and the protestors equally.
   The concrete of the square is pockmarked with little craters from the violence of the recent encounters. Armoured water cannon trucks rest in the shadows to the side, looking like weaponized zambonis. Beside the square is the grassy and tree-filled Gezi Park, the proposed demolition of which sparked the protests, and ironically it is here that during the day more than a hundred riot police lounge in the grass, looking for all the world like a resting Roman army from the future – plastic shields and black helmets lying around them, armoured shin guards on their legs, some are napping in the grass, some sit as if on a picnic.
   I walk around the park, it is very lovely. Children gambol about and couples stroll. Next to some playground equipment covered with frolicking children, a concrete wall has recently been knocked over in places by the violence. I sit on a bench for awhile and enjoy the park. I’m hoping at any moment for a conciliatory message from her on my phone but none comes as the afternoon drifts towards evening. The policemen are getting up and stretching. Having seen Taksim Square, I don’t really feel the need to be there in the evening when it becomes a combat zone -- I walk back to the hostel.






   This section had some interesting decisions on how to cover it. Basically, the section that begins right after that is a little mini arc I like a lot, I wrote it first as the final story for a creative writing class, and used roughly the same arc for a series on Medium that was a travelogue of Turkey, drawing parallels between my travels and mythical Bellerophon's travels. In those other contexts the back story was limited to more or less one line ("I got in a fight with my girlfriend") but it needed more here, and while I didn't really want to dwell on the good times, they needed to be here to balance the rest, hence its a bit fastforwardy.
   I had thought about writing more about my initial visit in 2009 but I find I don't really have a lot to say about it because we pretty much just came as tourists and did tourist stuff, any plot arc that could be found, other than oh we were so naive, is no longer relevant I mean there's a plot arc of "and that's why I don't travel with friends any more" but that would be distracting and tedious to fit in. Its a bit ironic because I think even at the time I thought "I'd like to write a travelog some day" but even while I'm doing it I'm not writing about that trip.
   The other decision, was this section actually encompasses two trips -- I had gone to Turkey in June and then returned in August, but I decided to simplify it into one trip. But now all my dates for the latter half are off, oh well.



   In other news I'm currently reading a book I'm really liking, called
Adjacent to Argonauts by Julian Blatchley, which I had gotten onto actually after I encountered him being remarkably witty in comments to a post in a facebook group and he quipped about wishing people liked his book as much as his post. The broadest simplest way I unintentionally categorize things I read is "bah I could do better than this" and "fuck I could never write this well." This book falls into the latter category! It's funny it doesn't say anywhere on the blurb or anything but from the first line I picked up on that it took substantial inspiration from Three Men in A Boat, but while I actually felt that classic book came off as trying-too-hard and not as funny everyone makes it out to be, this book succeeds in actually being constantly funny.
   So being in the midst of reading that as I re-read the above section of my own writing I'm like ugh, it's so flat, unfunny and lacking in creative descriptions compared to Blatchley's book! The creative descriptions are something I can aspire to but I really can't think of how I could make almost everything sound as humorous as he does. Anyway, suffice to say I really wholeheartedly recommend his book, especially to the surprising number of you who were fans of Three Men in a Boat

aggienaut: (Default)

So I woke up this morning bright and early planning to make an update about yesterday (nothing dramatic happened yesterday, just the usual observations), sat down at my usual place at the tables in front of the hotel, opened my laptop and...


"NO BOOTABLE DEVICE"

😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱

I employed all my technical know-how, which consisted of turning it off and on again, and when that didn't work doing it again but leaving it off longer, but still no boots, not even a sock.

This is the second time I've had a laptop fail in mid assignment. I don't think it actually experienced rougher handling than it should be capable of taking (just a lot of being carted around in my backpack) -- i think the real reason for the high electronics failure rate while on assignments is just Murphys Law.

My immediate concern over a computer crash is loss of critical documents and irreplaceable pictures -- fortunately after my phone was stolen love Nairobi in 2015 I set automatic backup to Google photos up (AFTER losing 40 days of irreplaceable photos from East Africa), and after my computer went through a period in 2020 as an amnesiac with no memory i got in the habit of writing all my documents directly at Google docs. Other than those two categories most important things probably came from an email and can be found there again.

BUT I never got in the habit of making PowerPoints on Google docs even though i suppose one can. I've spent many hours over the past month making new presentations and refining old ones, and most of that work is probably a complete loss. Though i think i had sent two PowerPoints (of about five I've been using) to the host organization of this project to translate into French, and that was pretty much at the end of the Ghana project so they're more or less complete ... though now they only exist in French. Jk I'm sure i can get the original back from them.

The substantially revised Guinea presentations and had hastily put together of course would be a loss as well.

And of course there's the sheer inconvenience of losing my laptop an hour before i was going to be once again presenting for hours.

As it happens, Ousman had already departed to assist another volunteer, which was unfortunate because he had the translated presentations on his computer. Ibro was still here so we were able, after unsuccessfully spending half an hour trying to transfer it to another laptop so he could still do work he needed to do, to use the presentations on his laptop.

We'll only have "practicals" at the beehives this afternoon and Saturday. Off Sunday, and Monday I'll do my honey harvesting and processing lecture without any visuals because that's one of the complete loss presentations.

I find this all rather frustrating. My computer savvy friends say the memory might still be recoverable though if hooked up to another device.


In other news, so this morning just after i discovered my computer had crashed, the hotel restaurant guy came by, and asks "cafe?"
But see, I said that to him yesterday and he brought me gosh darn tea.
When my translator came a bit later i grumbled about it to him and he rattled off something to the guy and he promptly came with nescafe.
i complained about it to my translator, saying "how does 'cafe' sound at all like "tea??" Like, maybe my pronunciation is bad but surely he could put it together, how unrecognizable can my pronunciation of cafe be (the word in French is definitely 'café')" and my translator said "oh maybe you should have said nescafe."
So today after he says "cafe" i say "nescafe," and he says "cafe?" and i say "_nescafe_" and then he nods and says "okay" and BRINGS ME FUCKING TEA. (for the record nescafe is a terrible substitute for real coffee)


Needless to say from here on out any updates i post will be from my phone, which I find much more tedious to write things on than my computer.

aggienaut: (Default)

In Review: So, if you didn't see the post I made yesterday, I need to get some documents together to file for my fiancee's visa and am in a hurry to get it done before they make the visa harder to get which could be any day. Yesterday I needed to get some "stat decs" (notarized statements) from friends attesting to the genuineness of the relationship, as well as some papers filed with a "registered celebrant" (authorized officiator of weddings, which apparently requires like an associates degree in officiating or something, seriously).

Yesterday's updates: I added some updates to yesterday's post after initially making it so you may have missed them. First a neighbor was willing to make a stat dec but couldn't print it for lack of ink, so I volunteered to print it for them but then discovered I couldn't print it because my wifi was down and my computer talks to my printer via wifi. Attempting to use my phone as a hotspot didn't seem to work with my printer. So that was frustrating.
   Fortunately that evening the wifi was back, and I was able to print the form and bring it to the neighbor. Then I got working on the NOIM form (the one needing to be filed with the celebrant), lined one up to meet with one in the morning, filled out the form, went to print it and.... despite wifi at this time working the printer wouldn't work. Tried everything in my limited IT knowledge to troubleshoot it, ie resetting both the computer and printer, running the printer troubleshooter function on the computer (which confirmed there was an error but aside from ruling out a lot of things couldn't identify what the error was). I ended up spending two hours trying to make the printer print and couldn't do so, staying up unusually late until 12:30. This was very very frustrating.

New news since last updates:
   I was meeting the celebrant at 8am, so I got up at six and went to the general store, even though printing is not a service they provide I was desperate and hoped maybe they'd take pity on me. They didn't. The post office here which makes copies doesn't open till 9 and I was standing outside the general store pondering whether I had any chance of finding a place open that early in the larger town (pop 11,000) of colac 15 min away when another neighbor of my aquantaince happened along. In our "how's it going"s I mentioned my frustrating problem and he said he had a home office and he'd gladly print it for me after he got his coffee. We walked to his place and printed it out, problem solved!

   As of tonight (the penultimate day of the month, "by the end of November" being the timeframe I was told the laws would become stricter in), I have the necessary two stat decs, and the celebrant has promised to send me the filed documents in the morning. Really down to the wire!

aggienaut: (Nuke / Clango)

   Arriving home to my cute little house in my cute little village on the edge of the temperate rainforest in southern Australia, I naturally was eager to get the pictures off my DSLR as well as try to trouble-shoot the external hard drive. Recall that (A) I bought a new laptop right before the trip since the old one had finally become too tedious to feasibly use with several keys no longer working; and (B) that the external hard drive worked until literally the moment I was setting up for a presentation to a room full of people, and all my presentation materials were on the hard drive! Since the whole reason I lug a laptop around the world is to give presentations, this is the very definition of "you had ONE job!!"

   I'm not actually that technically adept. Trouble shooting the hard drive consisted of confirming that nope, it still doesn't work. Plugging it in makes a connect noise on the computer, and the light lights up on the hard drive, but it doesn't show up as a network locaiton. I tried all three USB ports with the same response. That was the extend of trouble shooting ideas I could come up with.

   Okay time to try the DSLR. I had neglected to bring the proper cord with me, the camera end connection being the wider trapezoid. The proper trapezoid-to-USB cord rigged up and... nothing.

   Okay two memory-through-USB devices aren't working. Try my phone to see if that works. Phone seems to work (though yesterday it was behaving a little odd itself, very slow to read the files). Still though, two devices not working and the third not quite 100%, seems to be a computer issue.

   So I dust off and turn on the old laptop, (which I've decided to rename from "Sparky III" to "Rocinante.") and... neither device works there either!! Though also that laptop had lost the ability to transfer pictures from the phone a few months ago (can read them fine but the file transfer of even just one image will often never finish).

   Electronics naming aside: I kind of feel like naming the new laptop after one of the "horses of loa" in William Gibson's Neuromancer series but can't remember their names and can't actually seem to google them up... which is kind of ironic. Anyone remember their names?

   Bottom line... it's kind of hard to trouble-shoot and isolate the problem when every electrnoic device I have is ancient and unreliable!!! My phone itself has a number of quirks (its from 2013 I think), old laptop is from 2010, DSLR I bought off my cousin in 2012 and it was old then, external hard drive is from 2013 and never had a problem before this. Problem could be in any one of the cords as well, I don't know how old they are, but have used a different cord for each of these devices, but don't have spare cords to try.

   My computer savvy friend Mick might come over this evening with some new fully functional equipment which will aid in trouble-shooting.

   Since this laptop is brand new and all my documents and everything is on the hard drive I'm currently unable to access any of my stuff.

   Anyway in the mean time if anyone has any ideas I'm all ears.

aggienaut: (Nuke / Clango)


So last Friday my laptop, creatively named Sparky II, started giving me nothing other than the above screen. Note that it is displayed on an external screen because the original screen had long since ceased displaying on the lower third (which, when you account for all the taskbars that pile up above windows, left only a band of two inches or so of visible screen).

Fortunately my good friend Papa Smurf is an IT professional so I brought the comatose body of Sparky II over to the smurfcave. After working some magic, which I'm assuming involved arcane incantations, burning incense, and perhaps invocations of dark unholy spirits, he was able to exorcise its contents onto an external harddrive, much like the soul of Koschei the Deathless. However, all his smurfy magic was unable to bring the laptop back to life, and yesterday I returned home with the lifeless carcass of Sparky II in my arms.

Sparky II served me well for many years, and best of all, years of ruthlessly adblocking anything that even remotely annoyed me had reduced advertisements to an unpleasant myth. I didn't even get advertisements on pandora!

a closer look at those last words

I had hoped to limp through February with Sparky, being as any computer i get now will be utterly obsolete by the time I return from Africa two years later but alas no luck.

Papa Smurf informs me however that this laptop, on sale on Friday morning for $189 is a really good deal and I should get it. I actually know very little about this computery stuff. I just want a computer I can play my circa 1998 games on (Civ III for the win!) and edit photos with a pirated version of paint shop pro on. ;) So computery people is the aforementioned computer worth showing up at Best Buy at 4:30 in the morning for?

I still think this "black friday" business is strange shenanigans. Why do they do it? If people start their shopping the day after turkeyday thats fine but why then slash your prices on that day ridiculous amounts in order to make the frenzy ridiculous and require people to come out at godforsaken hours?


Bonus: spot the Xylocopa californica (that had a fatal error itself) on the desk in the above above picture. And for +3 points, do you recall what X. californica is (I mentioned it a few entries ago)?

Surviving

Sep. 5th, 2005 08:13 pm
aggienaut: (fish)

   So New Orleans has been completely destroyed. My best friend Aaron Davis and Grear Aunt Iseult live there (well in neighbouring Biloxi and Mandelburg respectively).
   Iseult is 93 and still has a thick Irish accent despite having lived in Mandelburg for the past fifty or so years. Apparently she got a ride out of town before the hurricane and returned to find her house in pretty good shape, on account of it being built on stilts and thusly avoiding being flooded. Craftiness.

   Haven't heard from Aaron yet, but I'm sure he was right in the middle of it. And I'm sure he was alright. Petty Officer 3rd Class (or something) Davis is in the coast guard you see, so I don't expect to hear from him until he's done doing some serious lifesaving. Here is a picture of him sitting on $80 million worth of cocaine.

   Local Diedrichs urchins Kyle and Matt Christie apparently are planning on volunteering with Red Cross and getting shipped to the New Orleans area to help in shelters.


   Computers are still crashed here. This computer is ancient and for unknown reasons will usually not get an instant messenger connection, but does sometimes randomly. Thing won't play music but has a CD Burner so I resorted to burning the few songs I could find onto a CD and playing it on a nearby stereo.

   Recently halved my workweek down to 40 hours a week.


Picture of the Day



   200 Pictures Ago: Prior Light - Kells Priory, County of Kilkenny, Ireland. No longer among the most recent 200 viewable pictures on flickr.


Previously on Emosnail
   Two Years Ago Today:
Bulgarian Steel - Mike the Horrible Human (MtHH) acts dumb. At the beginning of this summer he was behaving himself pretty well but then he found out I'm planning on going to law school and has decided to hate on me again. But he lives under a bridge so its pretty hard to take him seriously. In unrelated news, Elena, the Bulgarian, is back and works at Harbour House now.
   Year Ago Today: Being Sociable - "Has Jeff Whetstone seduced anyone at Wild Rivers THIS year? Some research may be necessary" I didn't end up doing the research. But hey anyone's golden as long as they've never dated the pool tech.

aggienaut: (fish)

   Finally got on a computer today around 1700hours to find my email inbox at 108% of capacity, about 15% of which was spam email.

   Went to the Unlistola House (where the bands Unless and The List reside on Loyola street) for their halloween party. It was hella crowded (crowd estimated at 300 persons by Sue), and there were of course bands, and Eric's Noxious Brew, which is far from "noxious" (though Kristy couldn't get over the fact that it was blue). I definitely got my mosh on to one of the bands (and I hear there are pictures of this, so hopefully I'll get my hands on them soon).. and my costume...
   ...it started out with a joke. Filling out that livejournal trick or treating meme thing I tried to think of something rather ridiculous for a costume.. coming up with "weapons of mass destruction." But then I started thinking about it.. and you know what happens when I do THAT. Needless to say, with a yellow radiation symbol on the front of my shirt and a big black biohazard sign on the back and my sleeves, and "DOOM" written on my arm, I WAS "weapons of mass destruction."

   Saturday Kristy and I went to a party one of her roommate Terra ([livejournal.com profile] daisycat99)'s friends was having. We get there feeling a bit weird about now knowing whose party it is, but then my friend Sica answers the door. Now suddenly launching on a completely unrelated tangent here, no girl I know named "Jessica" goes by "Jessica," instead I know a "Jessie" "Jessika" "Jesska" "Jessiska" "Jesikita" and "Sica."

   Just ran the issues in appendices II and III of the last lj entry past my legal theories professor, and he agreed with me 100%, telling me almost the exact thing I had concluded before I even showed him my written answers. God I love being right.


   The following is an exerpt from the book I have to read for POL154 (Legel Theories & Jurisprudence): The reasoning may take this form: A falls more appropriately in B then in C. It does so because A is more like D which is of B than it is like E which is of C. Since A is in B and B is in G (legal concept), then A is in G. But perhaps C is in G also. If so, then B is in a decisively different segment of G, because B is like H which is in G and has a different result from C.
   Can someone PLEASE explain to me HOW that can POSSIBLY make sense?? All I know is it has something general to do with legal reasoning by drawing comparisons between court cases.


Ramen Trove III
   I have a green lightbulb in the livingroom which I use as rather a night light, so I don't break my ankle walking through there in the middle of the night (I had mightily stubbed my toe in there before the light). I turn it off when I go to bed but while I'm still awake in my room... anyway it disappeared a few days ago. Finally I ran into apartmentmate Gil and asked her about it. She said she was holding it hostage because I kept leaving it on.. and made no comments on when it would be returned to me. Now I've actually been getting along very well with Gil, but does this strike anyone as healthy roommate behavior?
   Anyway shortly thereafter I asked if she was also holding my box of cereal hostage, because I had left it on the counter as evidence that it was to be community property and it had disappeared. She said she had put it on my shelf.. a short investigation revealed that the shelf she'd put it on everyone assumed to belong to someone else, whereas in reality its contents were abandoned from the year before. So I just inhereted some nestles quick and hot cocoa mix among other things. No ramen this time though actually.


   It now appears my laptop actually has a hard disk problem. Meaning it'll be even LONGER before I have a computer now. Arghhhhhh


   Now I'm late to a meeting. Blah.

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