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Nov. 21st, 2003 07:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miko2I own a book. It's called "Dynamic Characters: How to Create Personalities That Keep Readers Captivated" by Nancy Kress. It's a hardcover that I found by accident a few years ago and bought. Nancy Kress is, of course, an award-winning science fiction author and has taught at Clarion writer workshops, so I figured it would be a good book, and it is. It's very good. I haven't tried to read it cover to cover but I keep it handy and read a little bit at a time, skip around, that sort of thing. It's full of good information. Developing your own characters is not always an easy thing to do, so I find this book quite useful.
So I was reading it today and I thought, you know, this would make a good gift for any of my friends, assuming they didn't already have it. I thought specifically of Drascus because of the story he read at our last writer's meeting. Only of course I really don't know him that well, and hadn't really been planning on buying a specific Christmas gift for him. You know, our extended social group is quite large, and you can't just buy Christmas gifts for everyone you've ever met. But I've been thinking about this for a while because last year I didn't do anything about it and I felt bad. So I'm trying to think of and/or find nice gifts for everyone... my friends who I see on a regular basis.
Anyway it hardly matters because I looked this book up on Amazon and it's out of print. Grrr. Oh well, another idea shot down.
So today I have the day off. I drove to my bank and deposited my check. I dropped by Gene and Mike's but they must have seen me coming because nobody answered the door. Or maybe nobody was home. I tried to stop at Ballard Market but the parking lot was full so I just drove to my comic shop and then Safeway and then home.
My computer in my room is dead again. Please explain this to me: For years it worked just fine. We had a power outage and Windows decided to lock up. It would back up and restore the registry ad nauseum and make you reboot over and over, never allowing you to get past that stage. Okay, so Mike and Jeff came over and we decided to do a reinstall of Windows. Fine. Since then, I've tried to use Adobe Photoshop twice (it froze up twice), I tried to use Explore twice to transfer files between computers (it froze up twice), and I tried to use Irfanview (it froze up). So I left it alone, running, and only accessed its files from my main computer. This seemed to work fine for a week or two, but then it decided, in a fit of petulance because I was ignoring it, to freeze up all on its own.
When I tried to reboot it, it went back to the old back up registery - restore registry reboot routine. So it's dead again.
Now it doesn't make any sense to me that this is a software problem, because I really haven't even used the computer since we reinstalled Windows and yet it still ran into the same stupid glitch. So explain this to me. Is this because we didn't do a full clean install of Windows? Is this possibly a sign that my hard drive is failing? Or could it be some other kind of hardware problem?
Anyway I have current versions of all of my stories on other drives this time so no worries for now.
So I was reading it today and I thought, you know, this would make a good gift for any of my friends, assuming they didn't already have it. I thought specifically of Drascus because of the story he read at our last writer's meeting. Only of course I really don't know him that well, and hadn't really been planning on buying a specific Christmas gift for him. You know, our extended social group is quite large, and you can't just buy Christmas gifts for everyone you've ever met. But I've been thinking about this for a while because last year I didn't do anything about it and I felt bad. So I'm trying to think of and/or find nice gifts for everyone... my friends who I see on a regular basis.
Anyway it hardly matters because I looked this book up on Amazon and it's out of print. Grrr. Oh well, another idea shot down.
So today I have the day off. I drove to my bank and deposited my check. I dropped by Gene and Mike's but they must have seen me coming because nobody answered the door. Or maybe nobody was home. I tried to stop at Ballard Market but the parking lot was full so I just drove to my comic shop and then Safeway and then home.
My computer in my room is dead again. Please explain this to me: For years it worked just fine. We had a power outage and Windows decided to lock up. It would back up and restore the registry ad nauseum and make you reboot over and over, never allowing you to get past that stage. Okay, so Mike and Jeff came over and we decided to do a reinstall of Windows. Fine. Since then, I've tried to use Adobe Photoshop twice (it froze up twice), I tried to use Explore twice to transfer files between computers (it froze up twice), and I tried to use Irfanview (it froze up). So I left it alone, running, and only accessed its files from my main computer. This seemed to work fine for a week or two, but then it decided, in a fit of petulance because I was ignoring it, to freeze up all on its own.
When I tried to reboot it, it went back to the old back up registery - restore registry reboot routine. So it's dead again.
Now it doesn't make any sense to me that this is a software problem, because I really haven't even used the computer since we reinstalled Windows and yet it still ran into the same stupid glitch. So explain this to me. Is this because we didn't do a full clean install of Windows? Is this possibly a sign that my hard drive is failing? Or could it be some other kind of hardware problem?
Anyway I have current versions of all of my stories on other drives this time so no worries for now.
