…said the person who has confessed that February has been “challenging.”\u00a0 One of my books on riding suggests that riders quit thinking and talking about problems with their riding or their horse, and start calling things “challenging.”\u00a0\u00a0 It’s a mental trick.\u00a0\u00a0 It really does work though it requires firmly making a sharp turn in which ways your eyes are pointed.<\/p>\n
February started with a polar vortex and an ice storm, with the expected (but not wanted!) power outages and Very Chilly House.\u00a0 I contrived a candle-stove for heating up meals.\u00a0 Yes, it was safe.\u00a0\u00a0 The satisfaction of that accomplishment warmed my creative soul the way the hot chili warmed us.\u00a0\u00a0 The month continued with flooding rains which–with the melting ice from the ice storm–produced a Plumbing Failure (septic tank got full, toilets wouldn’t flush) and necessitated multiple visits by people who deal with these problems. \u00a0 I will spare you details, having previously discussed waste treatment on either this blog or the Paksworld one. \u00a0 All thanks to R- for digging all that dirt off the top of the old tank yet again so it could be pumped out, McDowell Enterprises in Copperas Cove and Flores Septic Services in Bertram, for the “snaking” and the septic tank cleaning, and Oncor, who got our power back on for good sometime Friday after the ice storm and corrected quite a few shorter outages in subsequent days and weeks.\u00a0 The phone guys tacked the telephone wire back up to the poles yesterday.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, my main bank has a “system” for recovering online access that simply does not work.\u00a0 First step–getting through the phone tree to an “agent” yields someone who can’t do anything if any of the entry checks fails. \u00a0 They will explain that their inability to do anything is good, because it protects your privacy and security, but if the system doesn’t think your phone number is your phone number (it did until late January)\u00a0 then there’s nothing they can do. \u00a0 You are then told to use a different automated system for submitting more data (that I’m not thrilled to have to submit…repeatedly.\u00a0 That system\u00a0 boots the user out of the system one way or another before the application to recover ever reaches the human who is supposedly going to call the customer to check on things.\u00a0 “Server unavailable. Try again later” is singularly unhelpful, especially after multiple tries over two DAYS.\u00a0 No way to contact anyone who *might* be able to give a helpful answer.\u00a0 Bad system design, says the person who once actually helped design a large customer-fronting system.\u00a0\u00a0 (Not for internet, which was only a gleam in the brains of many code monkeys who really wanted to play games with each other at that point.\u00a0 “But surely we can hook these computers up via phone lines….and then anyone can ask all the questions they want directly….”\u00a0 We were still “sneaker-netting” 80 column punched cards up the hill to the computer center for the operators to put into card readers at that point.\u00a0 We didn’t call it sneaker-netting.\u00a0 That came later in time with home computers when sometimes couples would communicate online (slow) or go from one room to another in person (often faster until high-speed internet arrived.) We called it finding some low-ranking person and handing them a box containing our precious new chunk of code and telling *them* to run it up to the center and put in a work order for it to be compiled.)\u00a0 New person on a team was often tasked with the run, though if they turned out to be a better coder than someone else, the someone else would become the transport.<\/p>\n
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…said the person who has confessed that February has been “challenging.”\u00a0 One of my books on riding suggests that riders quit thinking and talking about problems with their riding or their horse, and start calling things “challenging.”\u00a0\u00a0 It’s a mental trick.\u00a0\u00a0 It really does work though it requires firmly making a sharp turn in which Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[17],"class_list":["post-1447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-beyond-writing","tag-life-beyond-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1447"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1447"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1447\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1448,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1447\/revisions\/1448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}