C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 205

Norton screws up again…

I have a love-hate relationship with this product. It seems to target my computers for problems, while leaving everybody else in the house just fine. After the disaster of AVG, the worst program I have ever used, Norton 360 began to look better…

BUT it turned out not to have spam filters. I had to get that elsewhere. AND now it's endangering my computer, overheating the CPU and generally annoying the daylights out of me. I tracked the problem to a file named ccsvchst, which enables Norton to t...

a nice article on cloud-computing…something useful to understand

Old hat to some of our group, but as we grow more reliant on computers, something to think about.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/11/04/cloud.computing.hunt/index.html

I've been spending my evenings trying to straighten out 20 years of backup files—from two people who are pretty careful about backing up. I couldn't transfer into the dos system the things I created on the typewriter (Gate of Ivrel, Hunter of Worlds, Brothers of Earth, not even Downbelow Station and Merchanter's Luck, which were on ...

Our new fireplace arrived…

Jane, as usual, has a slideshow. It's not much during the day, but it's very convincing at night. Has an on-off switch for putting out a mild heat, or not; it sits right in the original fireplace, plugs into the wall. And artificial fireplaces have come a long, long way from the concrete logs they used to use. Now they're LED, and energy-efficient. The variety we got, should you wonder, is Dimplex, and if anybody wants to know, e-mail me and I'll tell you what company we used: they're...

Can evolution happen twice with an identical result?…

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091029125532.htm

Basically, a shrew and a lizard, hardly cousins, evolved the same poison from a similar source—digestive enzymes, which evolved to a venom—a pretty nasty venom—that aids both species.

It's often been asked whether life on other planets could be like us…in any remote degree. Now, imho, there are a couple of items that impinge on that. We are genetically about 1 percent or so removed from other critters, about 99.4 % identical to...

A very overdue thank you to some wonderful people…

I refer you to Jane's site. It's been a very stressful couple of months—and a great comfort has been caring people who have been so good to us. We sent word that we wanted to do something special for the people who got this together for us—and unfortunately that 'something special' has been closely linked to the difficulties we have had getting Closed Circle online. Every week I have thought "next week, next week" and now I realize time has passed and we have not been able to get this...

Sigh. We ate too much Halloween candy, having not ONE trick-or-treater.

I'm told parents are worried about Swine Flu, aka Hamthrax, and didn't let the kids go…

Sad.

But now we are launching back on Atkins, before we gain more weight over the holidays! It's Italian roast chicken tonight.

And here comes the fire truck…

…big bang, flash outside. Nope, not the mate to the Indonesian meteor: an electric line to the neighbors house just broke and dropped into the city arterial that flanks our house. We lost power briefly, and then a pumper firetruck shows up, blocks traffic while they haul the broken (live) wire out of the street. Hopefully our local power company will roust somebody out to deal with it—and replace the adjacent street light while they're at it. What the across-the-arterial neighbor is doing...

Sadly, we lost one of our koi.

Our littlest, Rukia, that never grew much, that we tried specially hard to feed and help into her first winter. It was my fault, my inexperience. I saw her up swimming that one cold morning, and looking up the problem, found that it was a symptom of hypothermia: inability to keep her core temperature. She was only about 4″ long, and not our fattest, either. Makes me sad. I wondered then if I should pull her indoors, but I hesitated to go look up the problem, and then by the time I knew what t...

My aching fingers…

We have collected all the disks from the last 20 years of writing and doing business and having lives onto a terabyte drive, and I have begun to edit them for duplications.

There's method in this: this enables me to find the text files for past novels—never thought I'd need those~—and simultaneously to organize our lives. Some poignant stuff…a memo to get a battery charger for my boat…alas, for my boat. And a program I wrote for Dad to automate his saves when he was doing the taxes. A...

Our 600th member…

Welcome, Catier, and also everybody recent!