C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 81

Surprise! Bios Flash!

A bios flash is something you may need to do periodically with an older computer—but I didn’t look to have to do it on one only a couple of months old.

Get this: here I am trying to sync my Ancestry and Family Tree Maker trees…since my tree, combining mine and Jane’s, is 17,000 people—yes, this isn’t rapid.

But it’s been slow. Way slow. It can take 2 hours when it (or Ancestry) is in a bad mood.

I was thrilled last night when, just as the process was within 15 minutes of finishing, Seishi nudged the computer with one of his head-butts, and it restarted.

It was being incredibly slow. Well, turns out in the middle of this process, Dell was trying to get my attention, and was pinging my computer, and doing a slow feed of data in the gaps between.

At 1 am, I finally got the sync to work, as a square saying ‘Dell Update: urgent: click…’ kept flashing.

Why not? I click the thing.

Bios flash.

Now, I’m really glad Dell’s doing it this way. In the old days, you could have a bios outdated for a year or more and not find it out until something went really wonky and you were down to esoteric fixes.

But I really wish I’d gotten, in advance, an e-mail from Dell saying: “Hi! A bios flash will be coming your way Monday night!”

At least it all went smoothly.

And for those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, just say—interrupting that process is Not Good.

Now it’s up to date and ok.

Got up with a headache and nausea…oh yay!

Better now.

We’re also having a spate of registrations getting past si captcha. Sigh.

At least…the pond is staying crystal clear. If I felt better I’d really get after some chores that wait doing, but I’m just about marginal today.

Temperatures are heading to the low 40′s at night…

I don’t say we won’t have more warm weather, but it’s sure starting to look like fall.

I wanted to let the koi have the high-protein food to the bottom of the small bag (improves color) but it blew over and got rained on. This is a sign. They’re now on wheat, definitively. I found some in the freezer, but I’m going to get some new, because this is old, stale stuff.

Starting to feel better after the bout with crud.

And I’ve discovered something delightful: bamboo shoots are within our allowable-carb range. I can do stir-fry. Can’t do it with rice, but, hey, enough bamboo shoots, you don’t notice so much. A curry. I love curry. And coconut milk is NOT off our dietary list.

Talked to Lynn last night. She’s doing the DNA thing too. Will be interested. It’s interesting to know. British Isles, but I thought I was completely British Isles, too. Surprises can be had.

I seem to be getting through the ‘cold’ or bug…

Pretty well. I’m not quite well, but not sick either. Drippy nose, potential for sore throat and bacterial infection if I didn’t take Theraflu and DayQuil to stop the postnasal drip. But I have. I’m sleeping late in the morning: until 8; but I’m having no trouble concentrating. This morning’s addition is a headache, but not a bad one.

Weather’s staying drippy and cold. I told Jane at breakfast I think we need to devote 2 hours a day to whittling down that massive pile of basalt chips that’s on our righthand half of the driveway, blocking Jane’s car. We have 2 wheelbarrows. I shovel and load a ‘barrow, and Jane rolls it and dumps it where she wants. There are some places we know we need deeper gravel, and we can start with those.

Wind blew over the fishfood and spilled it last night, so I have to make a run to the store to get some more, and I think it’s time to go to winter food. I’d have liked to give them more protein before the chill, but once the water chills into the 50′s, it’s time to switch to wheat germ, which is easy to digest.

The feel in the air this year is of an early winter, and that wouldn’t be unwelcome: we had no-winter last year, which meant pests didn’t get frozen out, and that meant a hard summer of whacking and tending. So I could go with some snow.

Windows scam artists…

Are calling people, claiming to work for Microsoft—they don’t. They want to know details about your computer, and as much personal information as they can get.

Don’t give them the time of day, literally.

One called me, identified herself. Me, delightedly: “Oh, you’re one of those scam artists!” She: (anxiously): “Where you hear dat?”

Riiiiiiiiiiight….

Once upon a time at Contact…

…which is a California convention that asks multiple sf writers to ‘game’ first contact…

we came up with a planet in which, essentially, whale-sized (and voiced) oceanic creatures more resembling giant squid make it to spacefaring tech…

Part of the notion was a religion based on pressure, the euphoria of a rise from the depths. The creatures had no vision of the stars, but they began to regard the ocean surface as a boundary they could surmount, viewed currents as a kind of topology in addition to the rock of the planet, and used subsea vents as a fire and mineral source… The first step toward flight was balloons. Then they began to think about the ultimate escape…it was worth some laughs along the way, but we thought it really pretty clever…

I love planetary atmospheres—

It’s sort of like running a mixmaster and trying to decide how the eggs get distributed into the sugar and flour…

Only more important.

Atmospheric gyre affects oceans…in a way we didn’t realize

We went visiting over the weekend…

..with our friends Patty and Mike Briggs. Mike had a nasty cold.

And now I think I do.

Theraflu and Emergen-C are my friends.

Jane is starting on them, too.

Meanwhile I got the Matala filter cleaned out. It’s got 8 mats to wash, the finest of them weighing about like a full sack of canned goods when fully loaded with crud.

I had to attach the pool-hose (screwdriver and quick shove of hose onto the pipe.) And then you have to take all these filter and hose them out, which requires standing in cold water. (Garden sandals.) And spattering crud all over. But the pond water is beautiful.

Meanwhile the main tank is going through a belated hair algae bloom—this happens when phosphate bound up in the rock starts leaching out, and feeding hair algae. Glug.

This too shall pass. I’m running a resin that uptakes the phosphate. So it will ultimately die out.

We did find our resident shrimp putting in an appearance: this is a sign of not-bad-water quality, re fish and inverts. The corals won’t be happier until we solve the phosphate problem—but we’ll get it.

Meanwhile I figure I’m going to feel like crap for the next week. Probably Jane will.

But hey, we had a good time on the drive. The Prius is a joy to drive. It’s particularly fun when you hit the downhill and coast with no engine. We normally used 14 gallons of gas on that drive, in the not-bad-mileage Forester. That’s 50.00…to drive down there and back. We made it round trip on 7 gallons, or 25.00. So cha-ching! that’s 25.00 toward the purchase price of the Prius, eh?

We’re getting about 45 mpg on the highway, with a lot of hills. In town, we’re around 50. We got the car in mid-July, and if we hadn’t taken the trip south to see Mike and Patty, we’d have been into October before having to buy gas. This is nice. We’d been filling a 14-gallon tank every couple of weeks. This is 6 weeks on ten gallons with no fill.

Ah, and you ask what the cats think of the new car, which they hadn’t been in. I think it was a hit. It’s quieter. They were up and about, going to their usual places for the drive. They were quite cheerful.

Interesting bit: ‘black holes’ of the ocean…

Black Holes of the Ocean

Fall is a-coming…

Mornings are getting nippy. The koi, while active, are going to be going on winter-prep wheat germ soon.

We’re looking at last bits for the garden—time to trim things up that will stay trimmed for spring, and to deprioritize those things that are going to die back.

We’ve still got a monster pile of basalt chips we need to distribute along the paths…sigh. That’s a heckuva chore, and it’s pretty taxing for me, which throws more of it on Jane. Think of a chest-high boulder that needs to be moved, as chips.

But—we’re in good shape. Had a pretty good review by the endocrinologist, and am down another pound.

We’re making plans to get back to the gym, too.