It never goes smoothly
Yesterday was an exercise in frustration. I was overtired and restless, and couldn’t settle to anything.
I tried to write AB posts, and managed to get one down. But my brain didn’t want to focus on being creative, so I left it alone before I wrote something awful. I’m wrangling my way through a big and important encounter for Faith, and I don’t wany my restlessness to suck all of the emotion out of it. I managed to do most of the second part of the encounter this morning, before my laptop battery crapped out.
Which leads me to frustration number two. I’ve checked out a few utilities (thanks Ann for linkies), and they all tell me that the battery is not well. I tried to do a bit of manual reconditioning, but that requires being able to fully drain the battery, which I can’t do (the computer switches off when it hits about 72% charge remaining and won’t stay on until I plug it in). I reset the PMU a couple of times, but that made no difference. According to the stats I found, it hasn’t done the cycles that would be expected of this type of battery before replacement, but it’s over four years old now.
I think the only thing for it is a new battery. Which is perfect, because I really can’t afford it this month. I’m gonna have to just cope with about half an hour of frantic typing on the train before it switches itself off on me (I save very frequently, so I don’t tend to lose work). It’s not long enough to do a proper AB post, but better than attempting to do it longhand. I might see how I go with writing posts in the evenings as well, but that depends on how drained I am after work.
I also tried to set up my computer at home for VPN access to work. Got everything installed okay, but despite checking with the tech guys twice, I still didn’t have all the logins required to get into the system. I’ll have to try to get that out of them today so I can test it out tonight. Also, someone switched my machine off in the office, which meant that the VPN wouldn’t have worked anyway, as it has to be on for me to log into. Rrrrr.
On the plus side, I decided to ease my technical frustations by putting together a test-site for the next fictional blog I have percolating in the back of my head. Definitely not going to start writing it until AB is done (because my head will explode), but it’s nice to have the site all tidied up and sorted. Spent an evening fighting with CSS code, and came out mostly victorious. It doesn’t display completely right on Safari, but it looks fine on a Windows machine.
And now, here I am at work, using up some lunchtime to post. Haven’t had a very productive morning, but hopefully this afternoon will be better.
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