Computers

Computers. Bah.

I used to be very lucky with computers. My first laptop, a 1997 Toshiba brick, lasted me for four years, until it was stolen. Its replacement (which I count as the same computer, because the insurance paid for it) lasted me for six more years. In ten years, I only had to buy one computer. That's a pretty good track record.

At some point, Jeremy convinced me to put Linux on my laptop, and in spite of my initial frustrations, I eventually got used to it, and even came to like it. I'm not a typical Linux user, though, because I don't care about what's new and exciting. I just want a basic computer where I can find what I want, do what I want, and not have my computer freeze all the time. If there was something I wanted my computer to do that it didn't do, I would describe it to Jeremy, and he would eventually get my computer to do it for me. (Usually. Apparently, the things that I think are basic and simple are often ridiculously complicated.) That computer kicked the bucket about two years ago. I'd like to blame Linux, but really, I think Linux was its life support, dragging it out for several years of life past its natural lifespan. So I can't complain too much.

When we replaced that laptop, Jeremy was on a relatively short-lived mac kick. So, I got a refurbished iBook. It was great except for that little line on the screen, and the tendency for the screen to invert colors when it was at the wrong angle. But those little screen problems kept on getting worse until one day, it just went black. Poof. Display gone. In less than a year.

Apparently, you can't fix an iBook screen for anything like a reasonable price, so that was the end of that. I had Jer set up his extra desktop in the living room for me, but I really missed having the mobility of a laptop. I was given a hand-me-down ThinkPad (fourth-hand, I think?), which is great for 90% of what I do on a computer - email and reading blogs - but doesn't really have the speed for things like editing pictures and videos. But Jer liked having a desktop in the living room, anyhow, so the desktop stayed, and I use it for photos and videos, and do everything else on my laptop.

But then Jeremy, who is a typical Linux user, decided to install a new version of Linux on the desktop, even though the one it was running was perfectly fine. And the next time I tried to use it, the photo software crashed. And the time after that, and the time after that. I really wanted to post pictures from our trip to Virginia last month, but I couldn't get the photos to upload. And while it only takes a day to make Linux stop working correctly, apparently it takes a month to get it working correctly again. Or more.

So, I am trying to get Valerie's monthly letter written, but most of this month's photos are still on the camera. Fortunately, I have a spare memory card, so I'm still able to take pictures, but the prospect of sorting through them all just gets more and more daunting every day. I finally broke down and started uploading some of them to my laptop, but it's really testing its processor's limits. And my patience's.

Monthly letter coming soon. I hope.

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New toys aren't all they're cracked up to be

There was a joint birthday party for Jer and I this weekend, and we got a digital video camera as an awesome joint gift. I've been snapping little video clips ever since we got the camera, and I'm loving it. I decided that today was the day to figure out how to upload some of those videos to my blog, so that I can officially join the ranks of annoying mommy bloggers posting videos of their babies doing things that are only cute to them and their moms.

Problem Number One: Our camera has a nifty "feature" that allows you to plug it directly into your USB port - no cables required! Which seems like a nice idea until you remember that a video camera, however small, is still bigger than a normal USB cable. First, I tried to plug it into the desktop, which meant fumbling behind the couch to access the back of the tower. Once I got to the USB ports, the camera wouldn't fit into the small space allotted. In order to make room to plug the camera in, I had to unplug three other things. Unfortunately, two of those things were the keyboard and the mouse, which left me with no means of actually interacting with the computer. Not directly, anyhow. I'm still only a partial geek, so rather than getting excited about an opportunity to hack into my desktop from my laptop, I just decided to upload the videos to my laptop instead. I only had to unplug the power cord to make it fit into the back of my laptop. So far so good. I now have the videos off the camera and onto a computer, time for step two.

Problem Number Two: I read a lot of mommy blogs, and I have decided that 30 seconds is approximately when my patience runs out for cute kid videos, unless something dramatic and exciting is happening. Maybe I'm just easily distracted, but unless something is on fire, "Aw, that's so cute" gets replaced with "How much more of this is there?" after 30 seconds. So, before I upload any videos, I want to be able to crop them to around 30 seconds. Oh, and did I mention that I need to do this on free software that runs on Linux? So now that I have videos on my computer, I have been trying to figure out some way of trimming the length. I would have thought this was a simple request, but Jeremy always tells me that the things I think are simple are actually complicated. All I want to be able to do is pick a point on the video and say "cut out everything before this point" or "cut out everything after this point". I've been trudging through long pages of lots of Linux jargon that I don't understand, installed and uninstalled three different programs, and I've managed to find software that will layer videos on top of each other or next to each other, but nothing wants to let me cut them shorter. Is this really such a difficult request? Maybe the problem is that it's too simple. Open source programmers are too busy doing things that they think are cool, no one has time to do boring things like making video clips shorter. Alternatively, there could be many programs that do what I want, maybe even the ones I just installed, but the capability is lost to me in the forest of features that I don't have the first clue about. It took me ages to figure out how to use the Gimp to do simple things like resize pictures, so the latter is probably much more likely.

I'm pretty fed up with the whole thing right now, so I'm going to drop it and come back to it later. When I figure it out, I'll post some videos. Or, when I give up, I'll post obnoxiously long videos. One or the other.

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Station Break

We interrupt the miniseries currently in progress to bring you this special announcement.

The management apologizes for any delays you may have experienced in the delivery of the Road Trip story. It's just like when there was that writer's strike, except in this case, there's only one writer, and the laptop that she always used to write while nursing her baby comfortably on her couch went on permanent strike. We are seeking creative resolutions to this problem, which currently involve pretending that a desktop computer is a laptop and setting it up in the living room. Unless anyone wants to give me a laptop. Anyone?

Hopefully, the couch/desktop configuration will be up and running soon. Until then, you can always cheat and peek at Flickr to see what I am hoping to eventually blog about.

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A Quick One

Sorry for the disappearing act. The computer situation in our house for the past few months has been thus:
One laptop with a broken screen,
One laptop with no power supply,
One desktop buried under a mountain of crap in the spare room,
And my laptop, which everybody uses, and I always feel guilty about kicking people off of.
Hence the infrequent updates.

But, for the past two weeks or so, the computer situation has been thus:
One laptop with a broken screen,
One laptop with no power supply,
One desktop buried under a mountain of crap in the spare room,
And one seven-year-old laptop with a completely fried RAM.
Hence the zero updates.

But Jeremy's work bought him a laptop this week, which would help me with my computer situation if only it didn't live at work with him when I am home and wanting to write. So I cleared a path through the mountain of crap today to the desktop in the spare room, and I had Jeremy hook up a mouse for me so that I could actually use it, and I squeezed myself in between the three currently non-operational computers that take up most of the desk. And everyone else is downstairs with Jeremy's laptop in the living room, with the distracting TV on in the background which always kept me from concentrating on writing anyhow. Okay scratch that, now everyone is crowded into the spare room reading over my shoulder and trying to drag me off to a thrift store to buy costumes for Jon and Rachel's 1920's-themed party tonight. Which is ironic, since the next thing I was going to type was, "I'm really enjoying having a private, quiet place to write, and I think this is exactly what I needed to get back into blogging regularly again."

Anyhow, work is going pretty well, I'm adjusting to my new store and they to me, and I'm extremely happy to be back in the people-serving business again. And now I am off to buy a costume, because whatever else I had planned on writing, I can never turn down the chance to go to a thrift store. Maybe, while I'm out, I'll buy a lock for the door to the spare room.

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