It's looking like not dragging my laptop along for this trip may have been a miscalculation. I left it in Madrid after hearing that laptops were currently targets of intense security scrutiny at airports. Opting to minimize stress, I assured my little buddy I'd be back in December, left it on the dining table (where it normally lives).
My downstairs neighbors here in Cambridge use part of my apartment as an office for their architecture business, and they have -- kindly, graciously, generously -- allowed me to use their computers now and then. In an effort to impose as little as possible, I went out this last week, rented a small laptop for writing purposes, the theory being I could sit and pound out text on the bugger, save it to disk, go to the Cambridge Public Library, use one of their machines for uploading the material to this page. A fine plan. Yesterday, however, when I turned the rented unit off after doing some work, it hung itself up on the 'Windows is shutting down' screen and has since refused to power down, clear the screen, or do anything more than persist with that final lying message. Tomorrow it goes back to the rental shop, for now I'm back in Ron & Sarah's office, consorting with their computers.
If you've checked out the previous two entries to this journal over the past 48 hours, you may have noticed that the writing and presentation appeared even shoddier than usual. They were typed up on that truculent, uncivil rented laptop, transferred to disk, then uploaded at the library. Somewhere along the way, all graphics were converted to question marks, so a phrase originally written: "Dear God, don't touch that sexual adjunct, Billy -- you don't know where it's been." came out as: ?Dear God? don?t touch that sexual adjunct? Billy ? you don?t know where it?s been??
Annoying.
After performing text clean-up, the accept/post button disappeared, so I had to cancel out, log back in, stumble through the process again. And again. And yet again. After which I gave up. When I logged on today, all the uploaded attempts showed up, one stacked on top of the other, complete with thousands of questions marks.
Someone is getting some fine entertainment at my expense. Which may be all that counts.
rws 3:07 PM [+]