080224 Resolution Dissolution

New Year’s Resolutions always start with the best of intentions. This New Year’s I vowed that I work on my writing every day beginning with retyping a minimum of one page of my horrendously clichéd novel The Cursed Yet Free into Word format each and every day. I also vowed to work on updating my website weekly. It all went well in the beginning. New Year’s Resolutions often do. However, I have only been successful with a New Year’s Resolution once. I vowed to learn who Steve Buscemi was so I knew who people were talking about and so when he popped up in every movie ever made, I could say, “So that’s who that guy is.” (Note to readers: look closely at the scenes of downtown Atlanta in Gone With The Wind.)

Identifying actors and actresses has never been my strong suit. When I was little, I could not tell Bill Cosby from Bing Crosby. After I mastered that, I tackled adolescence only to emerge not knowing who was Haley Berry and who was Lauren Holly or knowing if F-Troop starred Forest Whitaker or Forrest Tucker. Currently, I am having trouble telling Fergie from Nelly Furtado. (Reader caution: Fergie is not from the British royal family and the singer Nelly is a man unlike this Nelly who is a woman.)

As you can see, my confusion is not bounded by race. I am blind to color. I have been told that my girl friend is a beautiful white woman, but I can only go on what others tell me. As for myself, I never get pulled over for no reason by the police so I can only assume that I am white.

Back to resolutions.

Redoing my website into a more usable format was exciting enough that I was installing major additions daily. I was also staying ahead of schedule on reformatting the novel. The flaw to the plan was that I did everything on both resolutions on my notebook – a very convenient to use HP Pavilion 9710 which could juggle GoLive, Photoshop, Word and Excel. My main error was backing up everything I did on external hard drives with the exception of the novel and the HTML code and graphics of the site.

The day that the notebook would not turn on was a little traumatic. What kept me calm was the knowledge that I had a quality machine and my friends at DEA Computing would be able to fix it easily. When I brought it to their shop in Wynantskill, NY, their initial assessment matched mine: the power jack seemed very loose and had probably pulled free from the motherboard. Often things are not as simple as they first seem. The jack fit loosely but was properly attached. What lay ahead would be an arduous task of replacing component after component. Oh, and I was one week beyond the one year warrantee. The folks at the Circuit City call center were not exactly helpful.

As of today, the hard drive from the notebook is in a USB sleeve ready to attach to my tower so I can extract the files and return to work on the site. The 9710 is under a living room couch waiting to see what I may do with it and a new 9720 rests on a cooling tray in my bedroom as I tempt fate by reaching into that same fire that just burned me. Before the sun sets there will be backups to my files on two external drives.

What all this means is I no longer have an excuse for not working to figure out why the roll over buttons covering my index page and that work so well in a closed setting fail to do anything when out on the internet.

First I need to figure out if Stephen Cobert was Ace and Steve Carell was Gary in the old Saturday Night Live Cartoon Funhouse episodes or if it was the other way around.