author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

OK so it turns out that firstly, the NUU F4L does not by default save text messages to the SIM card.

But that secondly, there is a setting by which you can tell it to.

And also, thirdly, the long-press menu for every individual text message includes the commnad "Save to SIM card."

However, and fourthly, attempts to do so result in the error message "Save unsucsseful. SIM card full." (This would explain why, despite telling the new phone to save SMS to the SIM card and then having a lengthy conversation with the out-of-town friend I was kitty-sitting for, there continued to be no SMS saved to the SIM card.)

I am not sure what could possibly be filling up my SIM card, because, fifthly, as far as I can tell, it brought nothing from my old phone over to my new except my telephone number and whatever other esoteric identifying data a new phone needs to be given, that it should successfully replace an old phone.

Ergo, I conclude that the SIM card which Credo assigned me has absolutely zero capacity for extraneous data, which is sad. Though I could test this conclusion by taking that new SIM card that came with the new unit, which I am otherwise not using, and popping it into the old phone, and attempting to save my sentimental value texts to it, but I'm not particularly hopeful about the results of that experiment.

Anyway, sentimental value texts aside, I am successfully transferred onto my new phone. Contacts imported. SD card full of music transfered. Shortcuts reassigned. Mobile data turned OFF before I could accidentally run myself into an overage charge (I have a grandparented-in data plan that's limited to 25mb but is SUPER CHEAP). And while it is exactly the same as the old phone, meaning its calendar interface sucks rocks and its playlist-creating interface is mysterious (where does it save them? Not the SIM card!) and the photos it takes are somewhat low-res, it is also brand new rather than 4+ years old, which means that when I press a button, the phone damn well knows it got pressed, making the act of composing a text about 98% less painful than it had been going on a year or so now.

Also the new unit arrived on Thursday rather than Friday, and early on Thursday at that, so, hooray! I was up and running relatively quickly. And I sprang for the insurance this time, so should I be as foolish with this one as I was when I doomed the previous unit last week, replacing it should be even more painless.

So! Thus for the saga of the NUU F4L. I sholud probably get back to talking about actually writing.

...tomorrow.

So several things have happened between last post and this one--most excitingly, a couple roller derby bouts; most disappointingly, an abject failure to keep to my morning routine--but today I want to talk about/document/gripe about my poor flip phone.

Flip phones are rugged little things. I've had this NUU F4L for, ooh, at least since before the pandemic I'm pretty sure, I'm honestly not sure how to check. In any case, I've dropped it countless times, gotten it lightly splashed, kept it in my pocket during scrimmage, and otherwise treated it roughly. Through it all, it kept on chugging. But last night at roller derby practice it finally met its match. As I was sneaking glances at a web text in between drills, I wanted the browser to stay on and open to that page, so I left the phone open. On the floor. Next to my water bottle. Also next to the track boundary. During a drill involving extreme footwork.

Yep. Poor thing got under someone's wheels. And the interior display got borked.

Happily, it is a flip phone. It is not expensive. A new NUU F4L plus its activation fee comes to less than $150. Also, after opting for the insurance plan, my monthly bill is still going to be less than $35. We're talking a lot less headache than when John has to replace his Android. Also a lot less set-up on the new phone, since there are no apps to download. Just swap in my SIM card and the 64gb mini-SD where my tunes and playlists live, and I'll be good to go.

...except I'm not actually certain that my text messages live on that SIM card. I hope they do. I have a few conversations I want to hold onto, for sentimental purposes, but there is no option to save the whole thread or forward a collection of messages. All I can do is forward single messages to myself at my email address. And I'd rather not have to do that. Also, I spent a significant amount of today combing through text logs for people I hadn't added to my Contacts yet, and also for any photo attachments I wanted to keep (again, just in case text messages don't transfer over with the SIM card). Photo attachments to texts don't automatically save themselves anywhere useful. You have to highlight the message, long press the big central button, then choose "download attachment" from the menu. And if you're me and you're using this particular device, you do this multiple times per photo, because the phone has a bad case of button-lag such that it isn't always convinced I'm doing a long press, but thinks I'm just selecting the message instead, and then I have to hit the Back button, which, again, sometimes the phone just ignores.

With all this button-lag, this "I swear I am trying to push the button, I'm PUSHING the damn BUTTON, noooooo I only wanted to push it once" factor, it was, honestly, about time I replaced this unit. I'm just glad I didn't pull that trigger and then let the phone get crushed under someone's roller skates.

But now I am ALL BACKED UP. Text photo attachments downloaded. Photos from Downloads and Gallery moved over to my computer. Phone contact list updated and exported. Everything's ready to go.

FedEx tracking estimates the new phone will be delivered Thursday, which means realistically I'll probably get it Friday, which means that, by the weekend, I'll be able to see the corners of my screen once more, and small text on the web browser will be legible again, and maybe I'll get a few years without button-lag, which will be nice.

All the above complaints aside, I don't regret my decision to continue sticking with the flip phone. Not only is it inexpensive and rugged, not only is it of a size to fit easily in my jeans pockets, not only does its battery charge last several days to a week (depending on wi-fi and bluetooth use), but also it is not eating my soul.

Which: no shade on anyone with a smart phone who interacts with it most of their waking moments! But I just don't want that to be me. It's already kind of me, what with my constant laptop use; but the laptop introduces just enough friction that sometimes, when I'm out and about, or when the laptop's in another room, it's easier to just... not. So instead I end up knitting at the pub after practice with friends, or reading a physical book over a quick brunch at a local restaurant.

(Or, admittedly, reading something on my phone's web browser that I Saved For Offline Reading. I'm not made of stone, and Project Gutenberg is right there.)

One day, I suppose, Credo Mobile will stop offering a flip phone option--or more society infrastructure will require use of apps and QR codes such that I can no longer get by with Bluestacks, I suppose that's possible--and I'll have to upgrade to a smart phone and a real data plan. Until that day, I'll just keep toodling along in the low-tech slow lane, a loyal member of Team Flip phone, texting like molasses via KT9 and occasionally grumbling "I said H, I pressed H, why will you not---no, only one H, dang it--"

Well, hi. So it turns out I have this blog. Let's brush the rust off the controls and do a round-up post of Stuff What I Been Up To Since January.

In roller derby news, which I'll start with because that's always a thing, my league, Boulder County Roller Derby (nee Boulder County Bombers), is thoroughly renamed and rebranded. We have jerseys with our new logo on the way and everything is very exciting. Meanwhile, our travel team program is up and running and so are WFTDA rankings. Sanctioned games are a thing again, and we have now played three of them: one against the Denver Standbys here at home, and two in the Taos-based Rumble on the Rio tournament a couple weekends ago. We won all three.

This weekend we're going to Salt Lake City to participate in Wasatch Roller Derby's Galactic Brawl tournmant. We'll be playing three games, two of which will be sanctioned. If there is live streaming of those games--and I don't know that there will be, but if there is--you'll hear about it via the host league's Facebook page (see the "Galactic Brawl" link).

In mundane life news, we lost a car and gained a car. The black 2013 Chevy Volt got totaled thanks to Some Dude rear-ending John, thereby causing a five-car pile-up on eastbound Arapahoe Road approaching 95th Street. Happy to report that there were no injuries! But, like I said, the Volt didn't make it. There followed a couple of weeks during which we were in far closer and more frequent contact with our insurance company than we generally like to be, meanwhile gaining a certain category of life experience we'd have been just fine never having to experience, thanks awfully.

And then we went looking for another used plug-in hybrid to replace the Volt with, and, wouldn't you know it, Boulder Hybrids had a red 2013 Chevy Volt with a price tag of not unreasonably much more than the settlement pay-out on the totaled Volt. Indeed, what with the replacement Volt being a Premium rather than an LT and having 10K fewer miles on its odometer, it was a damn good deal. And we drove that sucker to Taos for the aforementioned Rumble on the Rio tournament. And the 10-years-out-of-date onboard navigation system was entirely adequate to get us there (freeing up John's smartphone for very important business by which of course we mean VIDEO GAMES). So that all worked out.

In writing news: My poem, "On the Limitations of Photographic Evidence in Fairyland", published in the Summer Solstice 2022 edition of Eternal Haunted Summer, made the Rhysling Award long list. The Rhysling Award is given each year by the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association, whose members each get to nominate one work in each of the poetry categories, long and short. There were slightly more than 100 preliminary nominees in the short poem category, which is quite a lot, but I got to be one of them, and that's pretty darn spiffy!

That was announced back in February. Fast forward to just now, when I went Googling about to see when the finalists would be announced, so I could mention that date here. Surprise, surprise--turns out, the finalists have been announced. While I'm still not seeing anything in SFPA's official communications, I found several blogs and poetry publications congratulating the finalists. For instance, here's File770.

There are 50 finalists in the short poem category, and my poem appears to be one of them. Eep!

An anthology of the finalists will be put together and mailed out soon, and the SFPA membership will begin voting in July to determine the eventual 2023 award recipients..

So... yeah. That's my news for the year so far. Happy Beltane!

OK, so, this week's post is kind of a bummer. Also a bit of a reprise, since I posted about it Monday over on Patreon.

Here's the thing: I'm leaving Habitica.

I know! I've boosted it so many times over the years! It's helped me organize my life in so many really useful ways! The camaraderie, the accountability, the joy of clicking a thing and saying "I did it!" and getting imaginary gold and experience points for it--these have all been good things! (Mostly good things, anyway. About that, more in a moment.) So what happened that suddenly I'm canceling my subscription and deleting my account?

Well... this.

That link goes to a Reddit thread that describes, in some detail, the abominable treatment that Habitica's volunteer community moderators have received from Habitica's paid staff team. And because I rarely ventured outside my various Guilds' social spaces, I had no idea anything was going until sometime last week, when a Mastodon acquaintance, who turned out to be one of Habitica former moderators, mentioned it. Anyway, if you want the full story, follow both links; and, on the Reddit thread, scroll down for comments by former moderators.

A brief and thus very imperfect summary of what transpired might look like this: A longstanding company culture of treating the mods with very little care, respect, or gratitude for their unpaid labor of love for the Habitica community culminated in the staff firing all the volunteer moderators in early December 2022, then declaring any discussion of the situation in Habitica's public spaces off-limits and against the Terms of Service. The inciting incident for the first firing was this: After a heroic after-hours effort by the mod team to deal with a fast-moving crisis in the message boards, one of the mods suggested that maybe the staff might say "thank you" once in a while.

Again, this is a summary, not the complete story. I have left out the steps between "How about a thank you?" and "We are taking moderation in-house." And there are some pretty horrific codas. Basically, click through the links above and you'll know as much as I do. If the length of the Reddit page is daunting, I can specifically recommend these comments by former moderators MaybeSteveRodgers and ALittleYellowSpider (Alys). But I think the whole thread is worth your time.

Anyway, I was appalled. I immediately decided I could not support the app anymore. I put myself "in the Inn" indefinitely (i.e. paused damage so I could ignore the app without my character or those of my party being punished for it), exported my user data so as not to lose track of my task lists, and began the process of letting my various communities know why I'm leaving. This blog post is part of that.

This blog post is also me realizing that maybe I'm better off without Habitica after all.

Not long ago, author Elizabeth Bear wrote an article about how "Gamification might be bad, actually?" and it got me thinking. Well, to be fair, it got me resisting. I've been using Habitica so long, it's been such an integral part of my day--how dare you suggest it might be bad for me? But since pausing damage and thus freeing myself from the obligation to check in, check the boxes, complete my task lists OR ELSE, I've been thinking about Bear's article a lot.

Every time I catch myself thinking, "I didn't water the plants today - but if I do it first thing tomorrow, I can justify checking the 'Water the plants' Daily." Every time I felt bad because I didn't "Feel good about your writing - and yourself!" and thus couldn't honestly check off that task. Every time I thought, "OK, posting the Monday Muse is blogging, so it's OK if I check 'actually writing blog' today even though I didn't post to the actually writing blog." Every time I regretted failing to do my daily physical therapy or was too tired to brush my teeth, regretted not because skipping those routines isn't good for my physical well-being but purely because it meant I'd leave a daily task incomplete--

Every time, in fact, that I thought of the things I want to or need to do every day in terms of whether I got to check a box, it brought home all over again that maybe, just maybe, task list gamification might be bad for me.

I think I still need some sort of task list manager--it could be an app, it could just be me writing a list of "What do I need to do today?" in my Morning Pages--because without lists I lose track of the day's wants and needs and, like I've said before, I just drift. (I've done a lot of useless drifting this past week, despite my best intentions.) But what I don't need is any further excuse to punish myself for failing to complete a task. I do that enough just in my own head--I don't need an app telling me how many hit points each party member lost because of my failure. And I need to retain a sense of doing the thing for the sake of doing the thing, not for the sake of checking a box.

OK, but no, I'm not leaving 4thewords any time soon. For one thing, it's not nearly as useful a tool for punishing my failures. If I don't make my 444 words for the day, I have oh so many stempos stockpiled for repairing my streak. For another, it's fun. It's got great community and lots of new content regularly and actively maintained software and a culture of listening to and respecting each other and please don't disillusion me on this point I could not take it

Anyway, that's where things stand for now.

(But only a semblance, mind you. Life has been Full of Things, as we shall see here.)

Hello! Hi! Is this thing on? *tap tap tap* It would appear I am blogging again. Yay!

So anyway, what all has happened since June? Well.

I had some technical issues. There was a long, drawn-out oopsie with this website, where suddenly, starting in mid-April, I couldn't log into any private directories, and after lots of frustrating back-and-forth with my domain host's support--I mean, lots, like, MONTHS during which they tried to sell me SSL certificates, they lost track of the issue among all the different support technicians involved in the email chain and had to have it explained again, and failed to even investigate the problem as I reported it--but eventually someone finally did investigate--and it was revealed that my .htaccess files were pointing in the wrong direction. The pathway that was JUST FINE up until that point in mid-April suddenly became invalid. And why was that? Well, it couldn't possibly be because some process or other had deleted the relevant .htpasswd file from where it had lived for decades, could it? No, of course not!

All of which is to say that I'm low-key in search of a new domain host. I'd love it to be a small, woman-owned business, but I know that lightning like DrakNet can't be expected to strike twice. (My current host, a small orange, is the company to which the owner of DrakNet sold the business when she was ready to retire from it.) I'm having trouble even finding alternate webhosts at all--I mean, where webhosts means "the people who store your files on a server so that domain registration can point to it, and give you access to databases and scripting and certain out-of-the-box software you can use if you wish" rather than "someone who'll design your website for you and/or give you a limited template content management system because you don't actually know HTML or CSS, let alone PHP or mySQl."

And then searching for "woman-owned webhosts" on Google was even more fraught. That's how I stumbled upon an intriguing forum thread from 2007 in which answers to same question ranged from "Silly feminist, why do you care about the business owner's gender?" to "Women won't own webhosting companies until webhosting is made simple enough for their ladybrains to understand." In the 21st century, y'all. I guess this is the techbro version of "women don't write hard science fiction because they can't hack the science, lol."

Anyway. Anyone know anything about Earth Girl LLC?

I went to WorldCon! Incidentally, this involved taking my very first train trip since 2020. Amtrak has long since stopped requiring masks on board, more's the pity, but I traveled in sleeper so I could close the door on my own private roommette, and I had my meals brought to me in my roommette, and I wore a mask every time I left my roommette, so I felt pretty well protected.

WorldCon was in Chicago, where the sister of an online acquaintance of mine has a condo up the north end of the Magnificent Mile, and so the two of us stayed there without charge, which was really nice. It did mean a commute of a little under a mile between our lodgings and the convention, but whatever, that's why I brought my skates. I did a lot of skating in Chicago, not only to and from the Hyatt Regency but also up and down the Lakefront and the Riverwalk. It was great!

And it appears that, after all this time, I've finally reached that point in my con-going where I cobble together my schedule based less on what panels I want to see and more on the people I'd like to hang out with. Oh, I went to panels, sure, and a poetry workshop, and a craft circle too. And I did throw my name in the lottery for Table Talks with Big Names in the Industry. But more often I signed up for a Table Talk because "Hey, I know that person from Codex or Viable Paradise or from Cat Rambo's online community. It would be nice to spend some time chatting with them." And that was lovely.

This was my first time attending WorldCon since 2011, when it was in Reno. Turns out I still very much enjoy the experience and hope to do it again in two years when WorldCon goes to Glasgow. I also very much still enjoy taking the train--and I'll be doing that again Very Soon Now, because...

I'm going to World Fantasy in New Orleans! Got my attending membership some months ago. Finally got my hotel room yesterday. Today I had a chat with Dad about logistics for family-and-friends visiting before the con, and later today or maybe tomorrow I'll wrangle my Amtrak dates.

The idea behind visiting Dad and them before the con is so that I don't expose any high-risk loved ones to whatever I might have chanced to pick up during the con. World Fantasy has posted the same COVID-19 policy as WorldCon did--which is to say, must be vaccinated to attend, must wear masks properly at all times--but risk remains, so might as well be smart about this.

I'm very much looking forward to a convention in New Orleans. I'm looking forward to Halloween costumes and people-watching and good food. I'm looking forward to skating around the French Quarter! I'm looking forward to visiting the Royal Street Rouses to equip myself with snacks and beer. I'm looking forward to wandering between convention programming items with a bottle of Abita in my hand, because it's Louisiana, suckers. Although I suppose with public masking required I may have to plan my beers with somewhat more precision than I did during World Horror 2013.

Anyways, that's coming up, and I'm stoked.

I skated a whole heck of a lot of roller derby! We had our season closing event on September 17, pretty much right after I got back from WorldCon. We set up the venue Friday night and on Saturday there were three (3) bouts, two of which I personally skated in. I was sooooooore afterward, but very happy.

In the intraleague mixer, my team won by three points. That's a seriously close game! There was a point midway through the second half where it was tied at 150, and I had to bite my tongue because most of my teammates would prefer not to know the score actually, and I prefer to respect my teammates' needs for preserving their Game Mentality. (This is a subtweet.) But I did sidle over to one teammate I knew did like to know the score, to whisper "Eeeeeee it's tied it's tied it's tied!!!!" and she went "Eeeeeee!" back.

Eeeeeeee!

The last game of the night was us versus Denver's C team, who beat us authoritatively but told us at the afterparty that we'd made them work hard for it. We were pretty proud of the score we put up against them.

So. Turns out, that was my last roller derby experience to date, because right after that event...

I caught COVID. Alas! My two-and-a-half year record for avoiding the plague came to an end when I tested positive on September 22. I'm fairly certain of the how, when, and from whom of contracting the virus, but all I'll say here is that it was most likely not directly from skating on the 17th, but rather from a social outing later that weekend.

Obviously I hold no grudge whatsoever against the person I got it from. They didn't know they had it until two days after they passed it on to me, and I didn't know I had it until I'd had plenty of time to pass it on to John. Once I knew, I tried to isolate, but that was probably a futile endeavor from the start. He tested positive a couple days after I did.

We'd both just gotten the new booster, like, less than a week before we got the virus. So aside from not having the benefit of a full two weeks post-shot, we were fairly well protected. That's probably why our symptoms were no worse than those consistent with a really obnoxious cold. But I had that dreaded rebound--return of symptoms plus new positive test--that turned my Day 7 into a new Day Zero, so I'm only on the exit ramp now.

But I am on it. I will say that with certainty. It's Day 7 again, I've gone three days with no symptoms at all, and I tested negative yesterday. Hoping for another negative test tomorrow morning, and feeling pretty confident I'll be able to leave the house and go among the nice people again Real Soon Now. With a mask on, of course.

(Maybe then the dreams about "What am I doing out among people when I'm contagious? And why aren't I wearing a mask?!" will taper off. Because yeah, I got those. Multiple times. Thanks, brain.)

And those are the highlights. There's probably more, but this is a long enough post already, and I might as well save some for tomorrow. Because I am going to try to blog again tomorrow. And the day after that. So do please stand by.

Oh hi there. It's been more than a month since my last post, so maybe let's use this post to tie up some loose ends from that post.

Regarding the computer repair saga: Space Invader is finally whole and healthy. But it's been a ride. In between last post and this, the LCD was replaced no less than three times, as follows:

1. Went to repair depot after the self-destruction incident previously described. When it came home, it looked good out of the box, but when I turned the system on, there were weird horizontal lines across the middle of the screen. Troubleshooting with Dell over the phone confirmed that the LCD, not the graphics card or the Windows installation, was at fault.
2. On-site technician replaced LCD again. Everything seemed fine for the next 6 hours. Then more horizontal line visual defects manifested, this time across the bottom two inches of the screen. More troubleshooting confirmed that yes, it's still an LCD problem. Or at least it's not a graphics card or Windows problem.
3. Went to repair depot for full diagnosis and, as it turned out, yet another LCD replacement. I was skeptical. They reassured me that they'd discovered tiny cracks in the LCD and it really did need replacing.

And indeed, this time when the computer came home, everything was fine. And has remained fine. Also, I now have a new charging cable. While I lost touch with the original phone support technician who said he'd see if I could get it covered as a one-time exception, I did wind up including the cable with the laptop on its latest trip to the repair depot, so the techs saw that there were exposed wires and could not let that stand.

Yay! Hopefully I may now hope for more than six months of uninterrupted use before the next problem arises, whatever it may be.

Regarding the item known as "Thing the Second": Right. There was another saga I was going to tell you about. That was the saga of Medical Scheduling Tetris.

Basically, I scheduled all my regular annual check-ups around late March and early April. Like you do. But when you do that, all the follow-up happens rather all at once, too. Which meant there were several weeks in which I was doing very little except recovering from one thing and preparing for the next thing. Which is to say:

• "Hey, you're over 45 now. Time for you to get a colonoscopy screening." About which, the less said, the better. It is done and I don't have to do it again for another seven years. Hooray.
• "Hey, that mole we scraped off your face at your annual dermatology skin check? So very much melanoma. We're referring you to a specialist to have every bit of it excised ASAP or sooner."

So now I am a veteran of what they call "staged excision" or Mohs surgery. This means they take as little skin off of you as they think they can get away with, then examine it to see if they need to take more. (I had the "slow" version, in which the excised skin had to be sent away to an outside laboratory, rather than examined in-house then and there.) I wound up only needing two rounds of excisions before the lab said that the margins were clear and they could sew up the open wound that had been just hanging out on my left cheek all that time.

So that was easy. For certain values of easy. "Easy," as in, "an hour at a time of outpatient surgery under local anesthetic." That kind of so-called "easy."

Honestly, the worst part for me was not being allowed to play roller derby. From the moment they first cut my face open until a week and a half after getting sutured up--so, from April 12 until April 30--I wasn't allowed to skate. Or bike. Or jog. Or dance. Or jump up and down. Basically, no hard exercise, no heavy lifting, nothing to raise my heart rate and risk getting things bleeding again. My friends, I was climbing the walls. (Only not really, because that would be exercise.) I kept going to roller derby practice, soaking up the drills mentally if not physically, helping train the newer skaters to the extent that I could from my sneaker-feet, but I couldn't skate. And then I could skate, and I did, a lot, but for another week I still couldn't derby, because full-contact derby involves risking getting hit in the face, which the dermatology specialist didn't want happening while I was still in a vulnerable stage of healing. Not that they wanted it happening ever, but they absolutely forbade it happening until May 7.

And then May 7 came along, and I could do all the things again, including a very rough-and-tumble scrimmage in which I did in fact take an unexpected blow to the face, which just goes to show. I was so happy I could have cried. "I hit my friends! They hit me! It was great! And check out my new bad-ass scar!" Yep. We roller derby skaters are a special kind of weird.

All of which leads to...

A special roller derby announcement! This Friday, May 20, I will be skating with Boulder County Roller Derby against Pikes Peak Derby Dames in PPDD's home venue, the Xfinity Roller Sports Arena in Colorado Springs. Doors open at 6 PM, and first whistle will be at 7. (Mountain Time, naturally.) If you're in the area and can make it, AWESOME! Be there and say hi! Otherwise, they do say on the event and ticket sales page that livestreaming will be enabled by Roller Planet. (I know very little about Roller Planet beyond that they exist and there is a small monthly subscription fee involved.)

So that's happening. And now you know.

Next time: An upcoming author appearance! And other writing news! Including new and exciting schedule variations! Yay!

Hi again! So it's vaguely more tomorrow-like than otherwise. Not a heck of a lot of writing happened yesterday because of two things that loomed disproportionately large on my radar, both of which I hinted at the other day.

Thing the first: I had to get Space Invader (my Alienware M15 laptop) ready to ship off to Dell's repair depot. AGAIN. Not because their previous repairs didn't hold up beautifully. They did! There have been no unexpected crashes, no soundcard problems, everything's been great. But. The other day, seemingly out of nowhere, the monitor just sort of self-destructed.

Seriously. I was was adjusting the angle of the monitor, lowering it so that it wouldn't dominate my vision during a conversation, when the thing hit an internal obstruction and went CRUNCH and John said "Stop, stop!" and I said "I know!" and I let go of the thing. The frame of the monitor had sprung open in the lower-left corner, and when we shone a flashlight in it, we saw a bunch of screws and a bit of broken-off hardware rolling around loose in the gap.

So this will probably fall under my Accidental Damage Warranty (which can only be invoked once a year), rather than the Premium Service Warranty (which can be invoked any time shit goes wrong) because I think the Dell techs don't quite believe the machine would do this without provocation. Like, dropping it several times (I swear I didn't!) or being less than gentle with my backpack when it's inside (I mean, maybe?). "We don't have a record of such issues with this model," my Dell Support contact said. The techs at the depot will take a look, decide which warranty to charge, and then they'll fix it. And I'll get it back. And hopefully I'll finish out my first year of owning the thing without further incident.

I gotta talk up Dell Support, though. I had finally finished all the backups and data transfers and the deletion of sensitive material, and I was ready to put it in the box (Note: Dell sends you a box with appropriate protective packaging material inside; Asus, last time I checked, does not), when I read the instructions and realized they conflicted with what my Dell Support contact had told me. So I emailed a question in and just hoped he'd get back to me sooner rather than later. In fact, he called me up not five minutes later.

My question was this: "You said I should include the power cable, but the instructions say don't. Which is it?"

His initial answer was as follows: "It's really up to you, but if your laptop's battery is out of juice when the techs need to turn it on, it would be handy to have a compatible cable right there."

I had second thoughts. "OK, but should I include a note that says, 'The visible, cosmetic damage to the power cable is not what I'm invoking my Accidental Damage Warranty about'? Or will they just include that replacement along with the repairs to the monitor as a single invocation of the warranty for this year?"

"Hmm. In that case, don't include the power cable. Let's not confuse anyone. However, when your computer is returned to you, email me requesting a call back, and we'll see whether I can get a replacement power cable approved as a one-time exception."

Well, that would be splendid. See, the plastic sheathing at the end of the cable that plugs into the computer, where it bends a lot, started sort of disintegrating after only about three months. Again, only cosmetic, but a little demoralizing every time I looked at it. If I get a replacement cable out of this, that would be totally sweet.

Thing the second: ...you know what? This post is hella-wow long already. Let's save the Second Thing for tomorrow's blog post, along with the February Fictionette Round-up.

In any case, after doing the two big-but-not-really things and then walking the package over to the nearby drug store for FedEx pickup, I walked a half block further to take myself out to My Ramen & Izakaya for a late lunch of ridiculously self-indulgent proportions. Then I took my overfull belly home to be pleasantly worthless for the rest of the afternoon and evening.

And that's why you're getting this post now rather than yesterday. Ta-da!

Hello the blog! I have an announcement for y'all: TOMORROW, March 16, I will be a guest reader on ephemera.

ephemera is a dreamy Toronto-based reading series (which has gone virtual for the same reason everything post-2020 has gone virtual) chaired by KT Bryski and Jen Albert. It's held the third Wednesday of every month at 7:00 PM Eastern Time. It typically features three guest author readings and a performance, all stitched together by the hosts' quirky continuity shenanigans. I have no idea what those shenanigans will consist of this time; the Twitter announcement says "BRING-YOUR-OWN-THEME" which could mean anything.

How this came about is, last year I worked with KT Bryski on the podcast of "Survival, After." I was, and am, immensely grateful to her for giving me the opportunity to narrate my story for that podcast, and grateful again that she remembered my work positively enough to invite me to be part of her show. And now that I've listened to a few older episodes and read the notes for a few more, I find myself gently wibbling to the tune of "Holy shit they've had some big name authors on this show!!! What the heck am I doing here?!" So it all feels very star-studded and amazing.

Anyways, I'll be reading a ten-minute miscellany of poems and flash fiction which aren't connected by any particular theme at all, except perhaps that they are all A. tiny, and B. hard-to-find: it's all stuff that either isn't online at all (due to being published in a print-only publication) or can only be found with the help of the Internet Archive "Wayback Machine" (due to the online publications they were published in having been discontinued). The poems are relatively new. The flash stories are relatively old, but I'm still proud and fond of 'em.

Again, the show will be TOMORROW - Wednesday, March 16 - at 7:00 PM Eastern / 5:00 PM Mountain, and, as things currently stand, I'm scheduled to read first. You can tune in live or watch it later via the YouTube channel.

In other news: I'll be appearing on Story Hour again on May 25, and (keeping things vague until contracts are signed) I appear to have sold another poetry reprint. The technical issues I lamented last time appear to be all cleared up; Space Invader has been working perfectly since it returned home. And this week is tryouts week as my roller derby league prepares a roster for our first competitive game (i.e. versus another league, that league being Pikes Peak Derby Dames of Colorado Springs) since 2019.

Tomorrow: the Friday Fictionette round-up for January. As soon after that as possible: the Friday Fictionette round-up for February. (Have I mentioned I am very, very tired of being constantly behind schedule. Well. I will soon have more time in my week to deal with things--but about that, more later.)

To heck with all that aspirational talk about wanting to blog more than twice a week. If I can manage once a week, I'm doing pretty well.

Today was more challenging than Wednesdays usually are. Today I had a much-anticipated visit from an on-site computer repair tech, and the visit unfortunately did not result in all of my problems solved. Here's the quick version of the story. (Heh. "Quick.")

For the last couple months, the Alienware M15 (which I like to call "Space Invader" because I'm a child of the 80s and I grew up with an Atari 2600 in the house) has been growing increasingly unstable. The main problem has been its tendency to freeze-crash and need a hard reboot. At first I thought it was a matter of asking too much of it (a frustrating assumption, this being a *gaming laptop),* but it also crashed wen I was running only one of my resource-heavy games, or zero. Eventually a pre-boot diagnostic reported that I had a failing hard drive. Yep. That would do it.

I reported this to Dell, and Dell ordered the parts, and I backed up everything-I-mean-everything to the old Asus in preparation for a fresh Windows install. Meanwhile I kept using Space Invader as usual, but with the extra steps of 1. immediately backing up each change to every file, session, or preference, no matter how small, and 2. rebooting it a lot. And then Dell informed me the parts weren't available, so I'd be limping along like this for a while longer. Argh.

Yesterday I got the good news that the parts were in stock again, had shipped, and would be in the tech's hands, and thus inside my laptop, today. Hooray! And great timing. By yesterday afternoon, poor Space Invader had become entirely unusable, obliging me to work off the old Asus, and wow was I looking forward to not having to do that anymore. The old Asus is slow. BUT. Turns out, the hard drives Dell shipped out, while being identical in capacity and function, were only half the length of the originals. They could be slotted in but they couldn't be bolted down. This would have been fine in a stationary machine. It's less ideal for a machine I'll be schlepping around in my backpack and in the car.

The tech sent in the order for the correct replacements, and arranged with me for a new visit tomorrow. He installed the new-but-wrong-sized hard drives so that I'd at least have limited use of my good computer. And I rejoiced. For tonight, it would be less of a home than a hotel, a place where I could bring my toys (data, programs, etc) but could not keep them (because everything gets zooked tomorrow). But it would be less obnoxious than waiting five damn minutes for Firefox to boot up on the old Asus.

And then the Windows install FAILED. One! More! Dratted! Thing! To go wrong! It's fine, it's OK, I eventually remembered I could press F12 for boot options. I did so and told it to boot from the Windows-installing USB. The Windows install started over from scratch, and this time it succeeded. Hooray!

But by now all I want to do is sit back in the tub and do brainless things, like read blogs and click on Harvest Land or something. To hell with my Afternoon Shift. I was drained. Well. At least I have written this post. It's not the post you thought you'd be getting next, but it is a post. Huzzah.

That said, considering this may be the only post you get this week (though we shall see), I should mention to any of y'all who are local to me that THIS SATURDAY, February 12, 2022, Boulder County Roller Derby is hosting our very first public game in over TWO YEARS and maybe y'all should come? If doing so is compatible with your current risk management strategies, I mean? Click here for event details! (It's Facebook, but the post is accessible even if you don't have an account. I checked.) Also, do yourself and my home team a solid: use the code "BLUE" when you buy your tickets. Good for a couple dollars off your purchase! Also good for Team Blue. We're kinda competing about this. So remember: The code is "BLUE". Not any other color. Just BLUE. As in Team Blue, who'll be the ones wearing the blue bandannas among those skating in the black jerseys for TEAM LOVE-TAKERS!

Our bout is the second bout, but don't even think about missing the first one. That's the one showcasing our juniors' skills and accomplishments. Y'all, we are so proud of them. They are the FUTURE of ROLLER DERBY and they make it look like a bright future indeed. So please arrive in time to cheer them on!

Heyyyy, it's another blog post. Two in two days! Go me. Only I am here to report that no, I did not manage to adhere tightly to any sort of schedule on this tightly scheduled Thursday, so, y'know, booo.

I have some Excuses. Actually, I have one main excuse. You know how when something has gone wrong, you can say to yourself, "I will deal with it later tonight," but the Wrongness continues scritching and scratching at the back of your head anyway, this awful persistent distraction that just won't let you concentrate on anything else? Yes, well, I was distracted with getting my blog back.

(This is also why, if I don't manage to do anything else writing-wise today, I'm damn well posting this blog post. Because I need to gripe.)

I didn't realize anything was wrong until I went to post last night's entry. I'd composed it in 4thewords, no problem, copied it into Scrivener, yup, compiled to HTML for proofreading in Firefox, awesome, pasted it into my homebrew blog-editing web-interface, so far so good, and finally hit PUBLISH. If that sounds complicated, well, I complicate everything. It's my brand. The upshot is, the only part of nicolejleboeuf.com I've touched thus far is the private directory with the server-side password prompt protecting all the controls whereby nobody but me gets to post, edit, or otherwise fuck things up.

But someone else had already fucked things up, as I would shortly find out.

After I hit PUBLISH, the next order of business is to rebroadcast the post on social media. I have an RSS feed, hand-coded in PHP from MySQL just like everything else on this website, which dlvr.it scans for new material to auto-post to Twitter. But it doesn't auto-post to Facebook anymore because Facebook took away their ability to auto-post to personal pages years ago, and I'm just not dedicated enough to set up a Totes Professional Facebook Author Page. Sorry. My Facebook presence is just me under all my hats, ink-stained writer cap and roller derby helmet and witch's hat and whatever else looks must-have to my questionable fashion sense.

So I do the Facebook rebroadcast by hand. I head over to the nicolejleboeuf.com home page, incidentally making sure the new post shows up on the RSS round-up without weird errors (I need to fix something in the encoding, but until then I just avoid quotes and ampersands in the blog post titles), to snag the link so I can paste it into a Facebook status update. Once I do that, I'll note the URL and date in that post's custom metadata on Scrivener, and then I'm done.

Well. I headed over to the home page, and damn if it didn't say "Sorry, no RSS for you. Can't read the data. Sucks, dunnit?" Well, not in those words, of course.

So of course I panic. Not only did I hand-code this blog and the related manuscripts-and-submissions database interface (which continues to be incomplete, because I suck, which is why I still have to do a lot of submissions logging directly into MyPHPAdmin), but most of the code I haven't touched since, oh, 2003. And every once in a while my domain host upgrades the default PHP install, some bit of code or other becomes depreciated, and my website breaks. So I was like, argh, it's 10 PM, I do not have the wherewithal to play hide-and-seek with depreciated code bits. I'll deal with it tomorrow. And then I promise I will proactively comb through my code for anything that's depreciated by PHP 7.0, and then I will upgrade from 5.6 to 7.0, and I will be FUTURE PROOF. For some small segment of future, anyway.

Well. Tomorrow comes around. I get up. I do the bunny chores. I make myself tea. I do a couple writing tasks that absolutely have to be done First Thing in the Morning. (One of these is a short story critique that I promised a friend the other day. If I accomplish nothing else, I can now feel virtuous about keeping that promise.) Finally I pull up EditPlus and tell it to Open Remote via FTP so I can get some debugging done. There follows a period of 20 minutes or so during which the FTP won't connect and neither will my email and the domain host's server status page isn't even resolving but we won't go into that because eventually everything does connect and I find out the problem is both bigger and smaller than I'd thought. To wit:

The whole public blog folder, nicolejleboeuf.com/journal, is kaput. 500 Internal Server Error. Even on index.html, which has no php code whatsoever. It's not my code. It's something in the file structure.

A bit more poking around and dredging my technical memory for "how did I used to deal with this back when I was actually fluent in Programming?" and I figure it out. But because I do not assume you are fluent in Programming, it'll take some explaining. (If you don't need the explanation, you can just skip to the next dramatically single-sentence paragraph.)

So, remember that directory that's private? Where I do that first bit of blog uploading? That I have to enter a password into my web browser to get into? OK, so, that's enabled by a special file called .htaccess that lives in the folder and specifies stuff like who's on the guest list and what password they need to use to prove it. It can specify other stuff, like that index.php is your default web page and not index.html, that sort of thing, but it's the password protection stuff that's important for this story, because that's what was kaputting my blog.

The private directory's .htaccess file had been copied into the public /journal directory.

Very specifically that .htaccess file. I know because it said AuthName "Niki's Weblog: Staging Area" and everything. And I really must emphasize that I did not do this. I don't know how it happened, and I've got a support ticket in to my domain host to see if they know, because this sort of thing can leave a web developer feeling distinctly uneasy.

But the good news was, the solution was super simple. Delete the offending file, and I've got myself a blog again. And an RSS feed. And a blog round-up widget on my front page. And everything.

And then suddenly it was time to go pick up this week's veggie share at 63rd Street Farm, and then come home with the veg and put it away, and make myself some food, and putter away at nothing in particular, because I am now in the two-hour window between the farm and the roller derby during which nothing gets done.

Well. This blog post got done, anyway. Which is more than I can usually say for the Thursday PM doldrums.

If I am very good and do not join my leaguemates for beers after practice (wistful sigh), I may actually get the rest of the writing done. Which is to say, I might manage about 15 minutes on each of the three tasks I had hoped to get done. Which would be better than not doing them at all.

Here's hoping.