freckles_and_doubt | Entries tagged with techno-jinx

Not my favourite moment in completely not my favourite time of year in a completely ungodly horrible year in anyone's terms anyway.

We are
(a) running remote registration too slowly, because students don't follow instructions, so we have processed a third of our returning student cohort in three weeks and have only a week left to process the other two-thirds, which explains everything you need to know about my 12-hour days, and
(b) last night, after two weeks of wrangling in which the Law faculty tried to make me do the data crunching and I, fortunately backed by the full and pleasingly territorial might of our faculty manager, refused, I could finally release the list of students accepted for the Law major, about which said students have been bugging me with increasing fervour for three weeks, only to find that
(c) when I woke up this morning, it was to an inbox full of indignant students not selected for Law despite clearly meeting requirements, because the Law faculty, in a probably unconscious display of the if-I-do-it-really-badly-they-won't-make-me-do-it-again trope so beloved by domestic spats the world over, had completely screwed up the data, at which
(d) my internet promptly went out, which after half an hour on the helpline and crawling under the desk to diagnose the fibre box, and establishing that Octotel was suffering from either "problems" or "scheduled maintenance", was accompanied by
(e) the water going off, because the landlord spent two days this week rendering my hideous workload even more hideous by banging, scraping and SOMEONE IN MY SPACE KILL IT WITH FIRE, in order to install a prepaid water meter, for which
(f) he gave me absolutely no documentation, which means I've spent odd moments in the frantic week trying to work out how to prepay on insufficient info based purely on the brand name of the water meter packaging he left in my recycling, and working through the tiny prepaid amount he actually preloaded into it, culminating in
(g) this morning: no water, no internet, so no way of getting water, and no way to access the steadily increasing public relations disaster in my inaccessible inbox in addition to the massive pile of work I have to do this weekend.

Fortunately the internet came on again at lunchtime, and unlogjammed the logjam, so I am watered, internetted and have with consumate skill and dexterity placated the students by blaming Law entirely and being very sympathetic. (They're nice kids. I posted the list the instant it was finalised, which was at about 9pm last night, and three separate students emailed me a heartfelt "thaaaaannnk yooouuuuu!" with varying vowel extravagances in both the thanks and my name, they have all been incredibly anxious about this, hence the late night announcement). And I have to say, typing up the above Itemised List of Inexorable Doom made me giggle hysterically, because good grief.

But I am a very, very tired thing. My Monty Python subject line serves to describe both my life in general, and my voice in particular, which is evincing that gravelly octave-drop so characteristic of exhaustion. Come, oh, the end of March, when this is all over, I am going to assume the horizonal position and not move for several years.

An incomplete and evolving list of the typical and atypical perils of conducting meetings virtually from home via Teams, Zoom or any other catchy single-syllable-branded meeting software which is probably sending snapshots of your hard drive, conversations, breakfast menu and taste in dodgy fanfic back to the mothership at frequent intervals:

(high-speed falsetto gibberish)
(apologetic note in chat) "Oops, sorry, I sound like a Minion again, I'll disconnect and reconnect".
(child's voice/screaming parrot/angle-grinder swims in and out of audio)
(plaintively) "Please could everyone turn off their microphone when not actually speaking?"
(Cat's ears and tail amble past my face on the video feed)
(long silence in response to a direct question to a meeting member)
"Um, X, you're still on mute..."
"Oooh, sorry, one moment, that's my grocery delivery arriving."
"Can we take this offline?"
(distracts self from pointless circular argument by answering email)
(distracts self from pointless circular argument by reading fanfic)
(my face is eclipsed momentarily by an entire cat butt)
"Oooh, sorry, one moment, the robot vaccuum is eating the carpet."
(slightly desperately) "Please can we take this offline?"
(leaves long, futile, circular argument to faint creatively in coils on mute while I wander off and make myself another cup of tea. My absence goes entirely unnoticed.)
"Oooh, sorry, one moment, the plumber has arrived to fix the geyser."
cat walks deliberately over keyboard and/or mouse, causing random effect:
- disconnection
- hand up
- burst of gibberish in chat
- unmuting at wrong psychological instant (swearing)
- muting at wrong psychological instant (mid technical presentation)
- sudden burst of unplanned camera revealing I haven't brushed my hair this morning and t-shirt reading "I found this, it's vibrating"
sudden realisation that my shared screen during tech support session is revealing not just the database browser window, but:
- five videogame walkthrough tabs
- eight fanfic tabs
- Tumblr
- Twitter
- Dreamwidth
- my active Witcher 3 taskbar icon
(sudden drop out of meeting as the geyser, yet again, trips the mains)

I have successfully not left the house for two reasonably pleasant weeks, work irritations and general global angst notwithstanding, but today I planned to go and pick up a prescription. Which was not entirely simple, because our current lockdown rules require that you wear a mask in public, and it's taken over a week for me to flog myself into hauling out the sewing machine and constructing one, which in the event, when I did finally reach a critical gumption mass, took me just over half an hour and wasn't onerous. Apparently on some subconscious level I really don't want to leave the house.

Which, apparently, my techno-jinx recognises, because I finally hauled myself out of the house this morning, after the regular Sunday morning hangout session with jo&stv, and... the car made the nasty choked whirring noise of a totally flat battery, and wouldn't start. Which is inevitable, I've been hearing that exact noise up and down the road all week as neighbours who, like me, haven't driven in a while, made the same discovery. (Said sound effects have been interspersed, from Friday onwards, with the ecstatic yapping over-excitement of neighbourhood hounds permitted, since lockdown went down a level, their due and just walkies for the first time in a month. I swear on Friday they were going down the road at approximately two minute intervals. This just in: Nation's Hounds Officially Stir Crazy).

But the car battery is an interesting tactical problem, actually, because it must be so common. I am hoping madly that car mechanics are an essential service and still operating, because, my hyper-prepared possession of jumper cables notwithstanding, I really don't think any of my neighbours, under the same restrictions as I am, will have car batteries any better charged than mine. Which means that said car mechanics are going to spend the rest of lockdown wafting from client to client with their happy portable charger thing, rescuing us from the inevitable effect of all this sedentary staying at home. Lockdown: inevitable physical decay, both human and mechanical. I should possibly take the car for a run when I've achieved actual function.

Spent the weekend mostly working, what with email catchup and exam committee checking, because the one thing that reg/orientation season absolutely needs is a board schedule in the middle of it, amirite? But we have to code students whose deferred exam results came out on Friday and affected their graduation/continuation status, which would have been slightly easier if half the departments had put the marks up on schedule, which they didn't, so I need to carve an hour out of my morning to check them all manually. Honestly, I think the administrative rot has really set in to my Cherished Institution. Next up in the administrative nightmares: venue clashes (parents' orientation is squatting on the good ones), handbook errors (rife) and another round of arguing info talk recording with academics.

Oh, and to assist in all of the above: my computer slowed to a crawl, hung and crashed completely within three days of me returning to work at the start of this year, necessitating me stuffing it in the car and taking it down to the IT department after they spent three days neglecting to fetch it. Complete hard-drive wipe and reinstall, "probably malware" but they didn't seem too sure, lost a decade's worth of archive which is only mostly backed up. Oh, and lost a week of orientation prep time because no computer, and my netbook, while gallant, is small and slow. So this morning there was a cold, sinking feeling when I tried to log in and everything slowed down, tried to reinstall Office, stuffed around intermittently for half an hour with lots of meditative pauses, and then froze terminally. Switching it off and pointedly leaving it for an hour seems to have mostly sorted things out, but the new Office install seems to have sneakily uninstalled Firefox, which narks me more than somewhat. Also, there is no fury like a harried administrator who has specifically arrived on campus at 6am to sort things out before reg at 8, and can't do a thing for 90 minutes because of computer crashes. Homicidal doesn't begin to cover it.

Also, the strained ankle tendon which I stuffed at Grahamstown last year and which has been slowly recovering, really doesn't like all this harried running around and is flaring up again in the teeth of orthotics. On the upside, it seems madly appropriate to be stomping around in boots rather than sandals despite the weather. Things may need kicking.

I have the impression that the universe is really trying to tell me something with this reg season. Namely: be anywhere else but here.

My cellphone, in a particularly arcane manifestation of my techno-jinx, has been unable to connect calls for the last six months or so. Everything else works; calls ring, I can swipe to answer them, but there's no actual sound when I connect. I have been forwarding all my voice calls to the nearest landline for months, which is non-ideal but hasn't been a particular issue because I really don't get many voice calls, and most of them are spam, and it's far more satisfying to hang up on a sales call with an actual handset that you can thunk down with extreme prejudice. When I finally got around to doing something about the problem, the lovely lady in the MTN shop tested it, went "Hmmm", and gently pointed out that calls worked perfectly fine if you put them on speaker, which means that the actual phone speaker was fucked (apparently the calls-on-speaker one is separate). New phone time. As I have every intention of shaking the dust of this country from my feet one way or another in the next year, I didn't want to upgrade and lock into a two-year contract, so I madly bought myself an advance-Significant-Birthday-Present new phone, which arrived yesterday, in, according to the inscrutable workings of the techno-jinx, the middle of a thunderstorm. I have spent the morning happily switching phones, and crooning gently to myself about how cool technology is when it works. (The new phone is Large and Glossy and the Samsung switch programme is a dream to use, happy little obedient functional thing).
I found myself, however, weirdly and genuinely choked up when it came to shutting down the old phone for the last time. It was my first smartphone, and led me gently into smartphone ways, and was fun and small and sweet and worked for years, and I played Avengers Academy obsessively on it for months, and it was a reasonably constant companion I had just started to train myself not to leave behind, and I shall miss it. I thanked it affectonately in the approved Marie Kondo fashion, but it was still a sad parting. And, really, humans are very weird about anthropomorphising tech, increasingly so as tech becomes more active and complicated and thus easier and easier to anthropomorphise. I had a very entertaining conversation with the GPS lady driving into Woodstock to pick up the phone yesterday, we had Certain Disagreements on the route. Or maybe it's just me and I'm just weird.
I am, also weirdly given my usual state of hermitlike introversion, seriously looking forward to the Arts Festival trip this coming week. (The Jo's Infinitely Expanding Social Circle was employed by her to good effect in that she found me a house-sitter, who is called Landi and is lovely and who my cats like immediately. It is something of a relief.) Possibly the anticipation is more acute because the faculty is Exerting Reproach, with a strong subtext of You Should Cancel Your Leave, at my absence from Significant Meetings, the more so because the otherwise lamb-like deputy Dean has decided to fuck off on sabbatical suddenly and without warning and also won't be in the meeting. I have stuck to my guns, with increasing irritation, and have spent chunks of the last week rustling up and training replacements, and trying to talk down the faculty manager from a flat panic. I am assuaging the inevitable guilt by promising to be on WhatsApp for the significant few hours, in case they absolutely can't do without me, but really, are they toddlers? Seriously, life's too short to hold the faculty's hand for ever, and they bloody well have to get used to doing without me because I Do Not Intend To Stay Here Much Longer.
I enjoyed this Buzzfeed article about making yourself more desirable to men, which may seem weird given that making myself desirable to men is something I haven't been interested in for at least a decade, but becomes less weird if you actually read the article. "Instead of shaving your arms weekly, add more hair to them and become a human blanket for your boyfriend in the winter. Or remove every strand of hair from your body and scream through the night like an infant. Really embrace having baby-smooth skin." I also haven't shaved my legs in over a decade, the resulting fur is useful in our current cold snap; I occasionally shave under my arms, in a desultory and intermittent sort of fashion when it randomly occurs to me to do so, mostly because I can do it in under a minute and, weird unpleasant smooth-skinned youth/baby fetishisation aside, the thing which narks me most about male-focused expecations of female grooming is how much bloody time it expects you to devote to it. Bugger that for a game of soldiers.
I am living in something of a Good Omens haze, the fanfic is increasingly adorable and, in large tracts, weirdly domestic. It's almost all Aziraphale/Crowley, and a lot of it is steamy, but there's a larger than usual subset of asexual fic, which I'm enjoying because that's my personal headcanon for the angels. Also, the wingficcers are out in force. I loved this in particular. I also recommend Michael Sheen on Twitter for righteous takedowns of bigotry. And the Christian group's misguided petition is hysterical.
It's not at all weird that Jo&Stv are hauling me off to Overture for a birthday lunch tomorrow, because excuse for Overture, duh. I am Looking Forward To It. A lot. And the Nicest Ex-Supervisor in the World is taking me out to lunch at the Cellars on Wednesday. Ditto. I have lovely friends. But you knew that. Lots of them are you.

I would not have believed until it happened the sheer level of relief occasioned by the arrival of a new lightning cable for my Ipad. The old one had semi-disintegrated, it had worn at both ends to the point where the only way I could transfer Stardew Valley files between the Ipad and the desktop was to seize the neck of the Ipad end (already taped up with duct tape and toothpicks to keep it straight), wiggle it until it beeped, and then hold it in exactly the right position with my right hand while I frantically and ineptly transferred files on the pc with my left. Also, charging the Ipad entailed laying the cable out in a straight line and moving it millimetre by millimetre until the charge bar went green, then putting heavy things on everything to hold it in place and fence off the cats. As I darkly suspect that the weakness at the cable ends is a deliberate Apple ploy to make us buy more overpriced specialised peripherals, I have wantonly researched and acquired the most durable, by internet review, non-Apple replacement. (FWIW, Anker). *makes rude signs at Apple*.
Work is very boring, which I think is a combination of work actually being very boring (we're in the post-curriculum-change-period doldrums), and my state of health - I am still very glandular and sinusey and perpetually exhausted. I think a 'flu bout may be incoming, but in addition, following, weirdly enough, someone's Tumblr post diagnosing pre-serum Captain America, I am mentally resolving to research CVID and go and see an immunologist or rheumatologist or some such fancy specialist. Because the constellation of symptoms was startlingly familiar, and, frankly, bored.
Jo&Stv have inveigled me into attending the Grahamstown arts festival in June/July! I have not been for many, many years, the one time I did was in early postgrad, that epic five-person camping expedition with various Andrews and an elderly family VW Combi which blew a head gasket in PE on the way back, stranding five broke students for an extra two nights in the middle of a minor social meltdown. I remember Grahamstown being fun, but cold. Jo&Stv have booked a house and we're flying, so, water restrictions permitting, I confidently expect this to be a far more grown-up event. Also, they are generously standing me the plane ticket as a birthday present, because they're lovely that way and I'm kinda broke.
I spent part of the weekend re-reading Katherine Addison's Goblin Emperor, mostly because dragonlady has been blogging her responses, and it reminded me how much I loved the novel. It's becoming a comfort read, that must have been my, what, fourth or fifth re-read? It's incredibly interesting world-building, but mostly it's a deeply emotionally satisfying read in the same way that I find Jane Eyre or Fanny Price satisfying: gentle, empathetic main characters whose horrible experiences of abuse have not eroded their basic core of steely resolve to be decent. I love watching them triumph against the structures and bastard individuals who try to oppress them. It's the kind of vindication of decency that's very consoling in our current state of general global political fuckwittery. I recommend the novel. keeping the names straight will bewilder you, but it's worth it.
Gosh, this seems to be sort of working. Go five things structure. Also, it gives me happy early-internet flashbacks to be coding the bulleted list in basic HTML. I used to put up my own websites via FTP and with files coded in HTML in Notepad. Backwards. Uphill both ways. Through the snow. There is something pleasingly structured about HTML tags, I always enjoyed their logic and found it intuitive. Probably because, weirdly enough, of a typing course I did in my last years of high school, which left me touch-typing but also introduced me to very early word processors, all green screen and WordPerfect (remember WordPerfect?). WordPerfect used anglebracket commands rather like HTML, I remember at one point diligently coding substitutions for ten green bottles hanging on the wall to end up with ten purple marshmallows sticking to the ceiling, which somewhat disconcerted the teacher. Of such things is our early imprinting made.

Orientation started this morning. I worked 12-hour days all last week, and straight through both of the last two weekends. I am ... very tired. And very, very, very reluctant to do this again, I dragged myself out of bed at 5.30 this morning with the approximate affect of a sloth in treacle. The faculty administrative melt-down is reaching new depths of horrible, with staff on minimal effort strikes all over. It's surprisingly impossible to make large-scale academic admin work when only a tiny fraction of the staff are in any way committed to the success of the enterprise; it means that, when most staff members run across obstacles, which happens often, they simply shrug and give up. They also don't tell anyone they haven't done what they should. Since error and failure are rife, students are unhappy, and guess who's sitting on the front line of all the student complaints? Muggins, is who. Muggins, a treacle-coated sloth on too little rest, is over this.

Large-scale administrative breakdown also operated in microcosm last week, when Octotel, rot them, "installed" and "activated" my "fibre" line. By which I mean they logged the fibre lines in my area as "active", causing my service provider, aka the lovely geeks at Imaginet, to schedule an installation. The Octotel technicians arrived four hours early on Monday, when I was still at work; my nice cleaning lady let them in, and they drilled holes (to their credit, very neatly and without destroying any electrical or water lines) and put two little blinken-boxes on my study wall. When I got back home, both the ADSL and the phone line were dead. I thought, oh, well, fibre is clearly incompatible, set up the new router, and spent an hour on the phone to Imaginet, crawling around under my desk at intervals, to discover that we could not persuade the fibre line to connect. This, it transpires, is because whatever Octotel's clearly mendacious indicators say, the fibre lines are installed but not actually active in my area: scheduled activation, mid-February. By which I am assuming, on current evidence, that they mean July.

So we logged a call to Telkom about the dead phone/ADSL lines, because internet withdrawal on top of orientation/registration stress is an ugly, ugly thing. Around Wednesday evening, however, I came home early enough to have enough energy to do a proper check, and tried the basic first step of plugging the dead phone into the phone jack with a different cable from the 5m one which goes around the piano from the phone jack to reach my desk. You can see where this is going, right? Happy dialling tone. (Or, at least, the weird intermittent dialling tone which I seem to get here).

Those idiot technicians had moved the piano so they could drill next to it; they'd pulled the phone extension cable off its little hooks and onto the floor, pulled the piano over it (by the evidence, moving it back and forwards several times) and, since it's a bloody heavy oak thing which takes 6 people to lift, thereby destroyed the plastic casing on the phone extension and severed two out of its three wires. I am, to say the least, severely unamused. Ham-fisted dingbats. Really. But fortunately I have a back-up 5m phone cable for reasons lost to history, and having re-cannibalised all the cabling I just cannibalised to set up the fibre modem, I am once more ADSL-connected and can soothe my soul with half an hour of dodgy Teen Wolf pr0n before bed, which is very good for the mental health.

But I am not enjoying orientation. I am tired, and wish to be elsewhere at this time. My subject line is the fragile tragic vampire girl from Angela Carter's Gothic fairy tales, because I feel fragile and tragic and Gothic.

Right, so, another year, another crisis. LJ has just relocated all its servers to Russia. This means that LJ blogs are likely to come under Russian censorship, but more instrumentally, apparently Russian LJ users are jumping ship in droves, and there's a fairly high chance that the site will go under for lack of custom. I have mirrored the entirety of the extemporanea archive at Dreamwidth, where it's freckles_and_doubt. (This was because some evil-minded individual has nicked the extemporanea title on Dreamwidth; on the upside, freckles_and_doubt was what I initially wanted to call the blog but was prevented from doing by LJ title limitations).

So I fear that, suddenly and without warning, this has become a Dreamwidth blog rather than an LJ one; I will post from Dreamwidth, and crosspost to LJ with the comments disabled, at least until the point where it's clear my itsy bitsy audience has made the migration. Please update your RSS feeds accordingly! If you want to comment, do so on Dreamwidth, please, and with my apologies if LJ is easier for you. Dreamwidth does cheerfully support OpenID. It's also a fan-created and fan-driven site which has been the alternative to LJ for a while, with any luck it won't have the wobbles of shifting ownership that LJ has had to endure.

I have been on LJ for almost exactly 12 years, my first post was at the end of January 2005. Blogging generally has declined a lot from its heyday in the oughts, and the LJ community has shrunk a great deal, but it was a safe and happy internet home for a long time. Dreamwidth feels very similar, but it's still the end of an era, and I'm sad.

We have Schrödinger's Protests, apparently. They only exist if they're observed, or possibly if they observe you, i.e. if you happen to be in the building at the time that the protesters happen to be congregating. Up until then, we are not in a state of protest: campus is quiet, and somewhat short of students as many of them are confused, terrified or grabbing the opportunity to bunk and haven't come to campus at all. If protest happens, dozens of students singing harmonious protest songs erupt into the building and set off the fire alarm, at which point either lock your door and pretend you don't exist, or if you choose to submit to observation, are gently but firmly escorted out of the building, briefly, to stand around for a few minutes until the focus point shifts again and you can drift back indoors and resume the placid course of non-protesting life. It's a bizarrely intermittent existence, and is playing merry hell with teaching, which is exhibiting equal parts distraction, confusion and uglification. (Tracy: hugs).

The whole has not been materially assisted by my techno-jinx, which is attacking my car. Two weeks of intermittently closed campus has led to a number of days at home, going nowhere and feverishly refreshing email, the website and my fast-compounding WhatsApp network. As a result I haven't driven the Beastie much, and her battery isn't charging. I was very tense about Monday, and braced for protest horror horrors (which fortunately didn't actually materialise), and climbing into the car to have it make a series of unpleasant coughing noises in lieu of starting, really didn't help. Except when it did, as waiting for the jump-start people ended up delaying my arrival on campus by a couple of hours, thus neatly avoiding the road closures, which all packed up and went their merry way at about 10am. I have had a rinse and repeat this morning, and have just returned from an expensive little trip to the Hyundai service people, who replaced the battery and, it being six months out of warranty, charged me merrily for it. Now at least I can reliably arrive at campus on time tomorrow to be turned back by the barricades. Yay.

By way of distracting myself from the political insanity of my current context, a word on the political insanity of America. Not even Trump, although I have to record for posterity my glee at Trump being pwned by Clinton in the debate. (See also: Shimmy Song). Do you know that the US gun laws, in their NRA-funded money-grubbing madness, prohibit the use of any computer database to track gun ownership? So everything is on hard copy or microfilm, and has to be searched manually. There's an amazing GQ article which chronicles the bloody-minded determination of the gun ownership records office to be halfway functional in the teeth of one of the world's most warpedly biased constraints. It warms the more administrative cockles of my heart. The rest of it (the non-administrative cockles) are being chilled by the sheer number of unrestrained firearms in America.

(My subject line is Bowie's "She'll Drive the Big Car", which is one of his more melancholy and contemplative numbers off Reality, and something of a favourite of mine.)

I am slightly saddened that the Great Year Of Subject Line Bowie Mourning is still in force, as really this post should be entitled "Into each life some rain must fall". On the upside, the actual subject line I chose does come from possibly my favorite track on Blackstar, "Girl Loves Me", which is bouncy and catchy and written in a sort of frangled Clockwork-Orangesque mad post-apocalyptic vernacular¹, which is not unapposite to my week.

The Cosmic Wossnames are gonna mess with me, is who. I am on leave. It's lovely. I'm catching up on sleep, and apparently all I need to do is to leave work for my dream-life to swing back into nightly focus with an audible click. And in my personal value system, shaped as it is by a drought-scarred Zimbabwean childhood, actual rain falling into my life, as it has done for the last few days, is cause for rejoicing. It's been bucketing, and cold, and the cats and I have been congregated around the contented purr of the gas heater for large swathes of time. I would prefer, however, if the otherwise much-enjoyed precipitation could refrain from precipitating actually inside the house.

So the bathroom sprang a leak on Tuesday. A little one, in the corner, where it rained gently on the towels. My nice landlord came round on Thursday and spent several hours tromping around on the roof, doing mystic passes with sealant and cloth coverings and what have you. This appears to have been something of a catastrophic fail in the DIY department, one of those epic fumbles that made everything worse, because Saturday's heavy rain revealed that the original leak had multiplied its output by a factor of ten, the bathroom had sprung two additional leaks in solidarity, and there were another series of sinister plopping noises in the living-room ceiling. Plus one small, diffident leak from the skylight contributing intermittently and with mathematical accuracy to the center of the carpet. I have no idea what the hell he did up there, but the roof really didn't like it. I await, somewhat damply, his no doubt shamefaced return to make good.

In retrospect possibly the leaking roof was inevitable, because I've been playing Fallout 4, which is littered with destroyed houses and makeshift shacks all with gaping holes in their roofs. But I can't even retreat from the deluge into more literal, if abstracted, postapocalyptic ruination, because the Cosmic Wossnames' two-punch sabotage followed its own inexorable logic: if I take ten days of leave and download Fallout 4 as the gaming project for said time, two days into the leave my computer will awake bright and early to an existential crisis in which it has convinced itself that it doesn't have a graphics card. Crawling in emo denial under its metaphorical bed, it will paralyse its own functions to the point where it not only wholesalely refuses to admit the existence of the graphics card on which it has been happily playing Fallout for two days, it will also reduce its screen resolution to a lowly 800x600 and refuse to change it at any price.

I dunno. It's distinctly possible that my computer is hallucinating it's Kylo Ren; if this is the case, hopefully the nice geeky types at my local computer shop will apply sufficient therapy to disabuse it of this misapprehension. If it's not, in fact, hallucinating and the (brand new, circa two days after the Inquisition release date) graphics card has in fact died, I apologize for the Kylo Ren slur and reflect, with some satisfaction, that at least the damned card is still under warranty. Either way, hopefully my computer returns to my bosom today, and I can stop this ridiculous half-existence where I experience the world through an IPad and my phone. Blarg. Any errors in this post are entirely attributable to the IPad's over-zealous and unduly American auto-correct. The verbosity is, however, absolutely my own. It's been over-watered.

¹ Actually, subsequent research suggests it's half Nadsat and half Polari, which is something of an enchanting mix.

Last night was deeply annoying, because (a) lights, none, and (b) so many legs! As well as (c), residual Age of Ultron grumps.

I am narked with the City of Cape Town because they confirm a load-shedding session so much at the last minute. I checked the loadshedding page four times yesterday, and every time it was "load shedding suspended until further notice." Then they cut us off at 8pm, at the point where I'd assumed we were safe for the day, right in the middle of the first episode of Daredevil, which is a new Netflix series which is doing a slow build thing that definitely doesn't need to be arbitrarily suspended. Although, in retrospect, having to feel my way across the living room in the pitch dark was at least thematically appropriate. (I'm reserving judgement on Daredevil for the nonce, I kinda like what they're doing, it's gritty and real and Charlie Cox is marvellous, but it's currently moving very slowly and I hope they sort the pace out a tad).

"So many legs!" is a quote from Cole in Inquisition upon meeting the giant albino spider which lives under the Crestwood keep. There was a sudden, huge and inexplicable spider in the corner of the bathroom last night, just above the shower. Arachnids are clearly evil because they choose to manifest (a) in the moment when the room is illuminated by flickering candlelight which most efficiently conceals them in shadows until you're really close, and (b) in the room in which you are most likely to be wandering around naked, and thus unprotected from arachnid multi-hairy-legged scuttling by any form of civilised armour. Bastards. Having stripped completely and wandered towards the shower, I spotted the spider, thought, "Hell, no", backed away slowly and went to bed unwashed, shutting the bathroom door behind me so the wretched thing couldn't infiltrate the house. It was gone this morning, hopefully out the window rather than into a dark bathroom corner from whence it can more unexpectedly pounce. I am a wimp, but somehow it all seems more horrible when you're trying to eject spiders without the benefit of electricity.

I have worked out why Age of Ultron annoyed me so much. It's not actually because of the final, headcanon-ruining upshot of the story. It's because absolutely none of the narrative and character arcs which led to that outcome felt earned, deserved or properly explored. I could adjust my headcanons if the film gave me any bloody grist whatsoever to my imaginative mill. But it doesn't: the romance isn't substantiated, the death isn't justified in any thematic sense, the departures are glossed over, the whole thing feels like random events cobbled together randomly, rather than an actual plot. Joss can do so much better, and I tend to agree with this article, which argues that the Marvel meta-marketing drive has constrained the director to the point where he is completely hamstrung in trying to give the story any sort of satisfying shape.

Also, while Joss Whedon is definitely still my master now, I can't help thinking that his particular brand of feminism, which resides mostly in strong female characters, is in a weird sort of way slightly out of date. He was groundbreaking at the time with Buffy and Firefly, but levels of feminist awareness have overtaken him - simple strong female characters simply don't cut it any more, we need a more pervasive critique which the Marvel straitjacket certainly doesn't permit. (See: leaked CEO email giving a demonstration of beautifully spurious logic: bad female-led superhero movies bombed, therefore all female-led superhero movies are bad and will bomb. To which we answer, succinctly and pointedly, "Ben Afflek's Daredevil". Because really.)

In other news, my mutant foot has died down to its usual shape and is only rather red and mottled. Antibiotics and two days with my feet up have settled its hash onetime quick. Now all I have to deal with is the nausea occasioned by the antibiotics...

My ridiculous body is officially ridiculous. I mean, seriously. It's not normal for the human form to damage itself or randomly disintegrate quite as readily as mine appears to, or to make mountains out of arbitrary medical mole-hills quite so dramatically. My current context looks something like this:

i.e. this post brought to you courtesy of typing awkwardly around Hobbit on an Ipad from the sofa. I am under strict doctor's orders to remain at home for two days with my feet up, which is actually considerably more boring and annoying than it sounds. This is the result, ultimately, of PMT. PMT makes me even more klutzy than I am normally, which is considerably. On Saturday afternoon I got out of my car incautiously without checking, and narrowly missed bashing my door into the car pulling in to the parking space next to me. In dodging, I dug the corner of the car door viciously into the calf of my left leg, producing a three-cornered tear which bled like a bugger. Being used to this sort of minor injury as the result of having the approximate grace and co-ordination of a drunken pet rock, I cleaned it up, patched it with the plaster I carry in my handbag for precisely this sort of occasion, and toddled off to enjoy tea with various lady friends.

By Monday evening my left ankle was somewhat red and swollen, and I thought, huh, all that standing around when teaching. By Tuesday evening it was imitating the action of the angry puffer-fish and was incidentally excruciatingly agonising when I stood up. Last night ditto. When I limped off to see my nice doctor this morning after a more than usually bedevilled lecture, she rolled her eyes (which she does at me a lot, I've noticed) and diagnosed a bacterial infection and cellulitis. I am imbibing antibiotics and anti-inflammatories in measured doses in addition to the enforced foot-elevation, and am forced to admit that, systemic response to infection being what it is, I'm actually feeling rather crappy. This is not assisted by the fact that the Screaming Agony Death Type Three which occurs every time I clamber off the sofa and stand up, is identical to that which I experienced under the dread DVT experience, and is giving me unpleasant flashbacks.

I think the Cosmic Wossnames are out to get me, frankly. This morning's bedevilled teaching experience went as follows:
1. Plan elegant and arresting lesson around powerpoint slides.
2. Arrive just before lecture to collect data projector from department office, to discover that it's locked and the nice secretary lady with whom I booked it is off at a meeting for the next hour.
3. Arrive in class having spent three flights of stairs mentally rewriting lesson plan so it doesn't rely on the powerpoint.
4. Realise on entering lecture venue that 16 out of 20 class members have a laptop in front of them. Hah! I can put the slide show on the course website and they can download it and follow along. Technology!
5. Realise that I have the slideshow on my Ipad, and there's no way of uploading to the website from an Ipad.
6. After much technical confabulation with various students, arrange for slideshow on my Google Drive to be accessible to student with normal laptop; he downloads it and, after I've logged into the course website as me, we upload the file.
7. As the students are starting to access the file, the lights go out, because loadshedding, and all their internet connections collectively die.
8. Hysterical giggling, because what else can you do. I opened the lecture with a quick dissection of all of the above in terms of (a) the themes of these lectures, which are along the lines of the power, accessibility and all-round sexiness of Teh Internets, and (b) the technical definition of irony.

I don't think it was actually a bad lecture in the end, even if we were all peering through the gloom. But my leg hurts.

I am once more computer- and internet-enabled! This has taken four entirely unnecessary days, given that (as usual) the problems were very simple and I could have sorted them out myself if I'd only known.

The computer problem wasn't the graphics card, it was a boot-up problem which for some bizarre reason hinged on a defunct wireless card. If you unplugged the wireless card it booted up fine. Since I connect the desktop to the router with a cable, the wireless card is entirely redundant and has in fact never been used (mostly because I could never get it to work, making more sense in retrospect than it ever did at the time) and we simply left it out.
I should have been able to tell that it was a boot-up problem because of the missing beep when it tried to boot up. It transpires, however, that for some reason my computer doesn't actually beep when you boot it. Something has cruelly silenced its beep. Or it has my bronchitis, one or the other.
The internet problem was because the router randomly reset itself to my old Imaginet package rather than the new one. I have no idea what caused this. I'm perfectly capable of configuring a router myself, but couldn't do so because I had no functional computer to which to attach it. Next time my computer dies I'm going to check the router first, since it apparently has these random fits of self-definition.
Hmmm. I don't ever appear to have named this computer. My old one, the one who got stolen after a service career of continual revolving upgrades over approximately a decade, like a dwarven axe, was called Mnemonsyne. My netbook, before she too was nicked, was Tiamat. I need to think up an appropriate female goddess stat.
Having sorted out all of the above (except the name), I couldn't access approximately half of my usual websites without incurring a security warning. Which turned out to be for https sites, which it categorically refused to load on the grounds that Unspecified Evils (possibly the usual aetheric bears) would steal my data if I did. Apparently https sites consider you to be suspect anachronisms if, for example, the technician who diagnosed your wireless card problem managed in the course of it to reset your computer clock to somewhere in 2007. Updating the calendar made all the little security warnings and red padlocks go the hell away, with the result that I have now managed to subdue my rampaging Tumblr feed.

I am please to be imagined in a triumphant pose, with my booted foot on the neck of the technojixary beast. Like a questing beast, or more accurately the exact opposite of a questing beast. Far from questing after it, you rather wish this one would go away, as it breathes down your neck and muddles your technology until you manage to work out which end of the sword is the pointy one and slay it.

In celebration, please have some deliriously funny BBC radio satire (more accurately, a radio sketch show called “Lewis Macleod is Not Himself”) on the eternal nature of the Freeman/Cumberbatch cinematic duo. The one about The Office, The one about the moose, The one with the cocktail stick. *fairy tale harp chords* [medieval choral chant] Ben-ne-dict Cum-ber-baaatch!

I suppose I'm due for an outbreak of my techno-jinx, it's been lurking in hibernation for a while, but the emphasis is on the "lurking" - it's an undead horror that will never truly die. I have been without home internet since Wednesday morning, my existence bound by the sad contemplation of that doomful little red blinkenlight on the modem. My helpful Imaginet geek checked all the widgety connection thingummies, and the problem is apparently Telkom doing "routine maintenance" on the lines in the area, by which I assume they mean they're digging up the perfectly functional network and replacing it with something they crocheted from palm fibres while high. Techno-jinx 1, me 0, Telkom their usual 32 956, while cackling.

They may well have sorted it out since Wednesday, but I have been unable to check, on account of how my computer monitor abruptly stopped being able to talk to the actual computer sometime on Wednesday night, right in the middle of a high-stakes Dragon Age battle. Intensive operations swapping out monitors and connection cables suggest that it's not either of them, so I somewhat amateurishly diagnose that my video card has died. Either that, or it's a more pervasive problem with either the power supply or the RAM or the hard drive itself, which is preventing the poor creature from booting properly at all. Since it can't get as far as talking to the monitor either way it can't tell me what's actually wrong, which is a horribly helpless sort of position to put me in. These days I can usefully solve a good 70% of my computer problems by the power of random semi-competent fiddle, creatively channelling the Evil Landlord and various ex-boyfriends, and Google. Not this time, clearly. Techno-jinx 2, me 0, Telkom still cackling in the background because still no internet, which means my perfectly functional IPad is useless for internet-withdrawal-placation purposes as the wireless doesn't work. Curse that cloud computing, anyway.

It's entirely possible that this dual techno-failure was a signal from the Cosmic Wossnames on high that I need to get my butt back to work after ten days of sick-leave - certainly I have been far more motivated to actually leave the house when I can neither noodle around on the internet nor play games. I am thus back in the saddle, placating the swirling black clouds of internet withdrawal by virtue of my work internet (although my Tumblr feed is pretty much out of control as reading it full-time is not compatible with student advice or doing any actual work), and plotting to take the hapless computer in to the nice Korean geekpersons at Cafe Viva this afternoon. I am also way ahead on my tv-watching and reading, which means I have finally cracked open Parade's End, of which I have been somewhat scared in my weakened state as it looked heavy and possibly tragic. In fact, it's both tragic and absorbing, and exquisitely made, and is providing a horribly addictive plethora of compelling characters and amazing set and landscape porn. Last night I also combined the high-class BBC period drama with a completely random and uncalled-for acquisition of Chinese takeout, all on my own, just because I was grumpy and could. It turns out that techno-jinxen, if not placated, can be more or less forgotten with sufficient crispy duck with pancakes and Benedict Cumberbatch being Noble in spades. Thus Techno-jinx 2, Telkom infinity, but me 1.

In the context of all of the above I record, for posterity, my delightful discovery in the course of looking up "blinkenlight" to confirm that it was in fact spelled thusly and did indeed mean what I though it meant. Namely, the Wikipedia article on same, which reproduces in its entirety that beautifully Goonish conglomeration of mock-German warning sign which is one of the most elderly of tech memes, and whose existence I had entirely forgotten about. When confronted with a rampaging techno-jinx, horned and clawed, it is as well to remember that DAS KOMPUTERMASCHINE IST NICHT FÜR DER GEFINGERPOKEN UND MITTENGRABEN! and to RELAXEN UND WATSCHEN DER BLINKENLICHTEN. If I can get them to blink. News at 11.

Telkom was designed by Kafka. It's the only explanation that makes any sense at all, if "sense" in any sense can be said to apply to Telkom. I have chronicled before the unlikely sequence of events which has led to my acquiring ADSL in the teeth of the odds. I suspect, however, that I am still suffering the lingering, ghostlike traces of the particular screw-up which led Telkom to register my order twice, and then fail to do anything about either for several weeks because of apocryphal lack of ADSL ports. I've had two Telkom technicians arrive abruptly out of the blue in the last week, both swearing up and down that they're here because of a fault logged for this address by my landlord, who lived here six months ago, on a phone number which isn't any of the three I've had since I moved in. Their system, I suspect, not content with the extreme numbers of real faults Telkom systems throw out, is hallucinating completely new ones just for fun.

At any rate, this morning's technician was somewhat bizarrely well timed, as I had just woken up, made tea, fed the cat, sat down at my computer and discovered, after some swearing, that I was utterly without either internet or a phone line. Just a dull buzzing sound, as of distant demonic bees. I was faffing around trying to remember which fault reporting line works from a cellphone when there was a knock at the door and there was a technician, apparently summoned out of the aether by Telkom's telepathic awareness of my need. If my need was to have a completely different line repaired for someone else, that is, which it really wasn't. He obligingly fuffled around a bit, prodded the local junction box, and informed me that it was probably a fault in the underground cable and couldn't be sorted out without a proper fault log. He did, however, provide me the SMS number for logging faults, which I immediately phoned.

Ten minutes later I had received five text messages all saying "A fault for this phone number has already been logged", and two saying "A fault has already been logged from this cellphone number." None of the seven iterations of this are, needless to say, true. I then received the actual acknowledgement which allowed me to report "No service", and a nice text message assured me it would be sorted out within two days. I expect this to have as much relationship to actual reality as any of the above interactions, i.e. none at all.

In the meantime, though, please note that my landline is an ex-parrot for the time being, you'll have to use my cell. I do have internet, by virtue of the fact that I never got around to returning the 3G dongle to Claire, on whose head be many blessings because re-activating the 3G is saving my sanity. Not money, but definitely sanity. Email may be the safest bet given cell reception in this area.

I should never have introduced my techno-jinx to Telkom. The results are horrible to contemplate. I am also darkly suspecting that at least some of the recent shenanigans are a sadistic Telkom response to the fact that I cancelled my data package with them last week, and will move back to Imaginet, sobbing in gratitude, at the end of the month. I'm being punished for my lack of customer loyalty. While laughing rather hysterically at the idea that Telkom could actually expect loyalty from its hapless customers given the horrors it inflicts on them, I will survive the next few days solely because of the awareness that if my service goes down again, I phone the Imaginet helplines rather than the Telkom ones, and am immediately (rather than after a 35-minute wait) put through to a lovely geek whose job it is to sort it out. At least one of them professes to rather enjoy shouting at Telkom. That's customer service.

Because it's traditional, that's why. Also, weirdly enough, happy Alan Turing's birthday. I am very much looking forward to the new film about his life, not only because Benedict Cumberbatch.

I have horrible 'flu at the moment, which is a bit of an unkind way to finish up 10 days of leave. They were a very nice 10 days of leave, we went up to Bartholomeu's Klip again, and then I fuffled around the house for several days generally relaxing enough for my body to realise, "Right, we're run down!" and pick up lurgis. On the upside, I'm too out of it and generally disgusting to be at work, and Telkom have just left having performed mystic wossnames in my living room which have, miraculously, and in defiance of probability, resulted in a fully operational phone line (albeit with a different number to the one they first gave me), and ADSL. Apparently they dealt with the lack of ADSL ports in the area by creating me one, presumably out of cardboard and string or thin air or the tears and cusses of frustrated customers. Negotiating their helpline and mutually contradictory updates over the last month has been a deeply unpleasant experience, and I shall wait only until the end of the month before joyously cancelling my Telkom internet package and fleeing back into the welcoming geeky bosom of Imaginet. Imaginet's helplines are things of joy and relief.

I should dig up my Bart's Klip photos and blog about it. Yup. Getting right onto that, once I've stopped floating gently around the house in the 'flu-ridden state which means I don't quite connect with anything, ever. It's entirely unproductive but surprisingly pleasant.

So, that techno-jinx is alive and well and feeling free to infect anything remotely technological in my immediate vicinity on a more or less random basis. I'm driving the EL's car at the moment, his old Elantra, as achieving a new car without a valid driver's licence is proving bloody difficult. Today, on the way home from shopping, it picked up an extremely flat tyre on the far corner of Rondebosch Common from our place. Interesting points about said flat tyre fall into place with a sort of inexorable, bloody-minded beauty:

I am generally perfectly capable of changing a flat tyre, with the trifling proviso that my buggered left arm gives me limited strength for wrestling two-handed with anything that's been fastened very tightly. Like, just for example, wheel nuts.
Oh, and like the weird screw fixture thingy which appears to fasten the spare tyre onto the bottom of the boot in the Elantra. Can't budge it. Immune to swearing, hitting with heavy things and every ounce of muscle I possess. In the Changing The Tyre stakes, I have fallen at the first hurdle.
My exertions are lacking a certain element of confidence given that it's not my car and I'm not even sure I'm swearing at the right fiddly bit.
A further lack of commitment is evinced in my sneaking memory that the spare tyre on the Elantra is actually the wrong size, anyway.
I cannot phone the EL and check any of the above because he's in the garage industriously crafting pewter, and he doesn't hear the landline ringing from the garage. Nor does he have his cellphone with him, because Evil Landlord.
A half-hour process of swearing at the immovable screw fitting, interspersed with intervals of phoning both lines repeatedly or sitting in the car frantically googling "change Elantra spare tyre" on my phone, is rendered rather more horrible by my sneaking awareness that as a good feminist and marginally self-sufficient person I should damned well be able to sort this out for myself.
The knowledge that the EL is perfectly capable of sitting in the garage for upwards of hours at a time peaceably pewtering, adds a slightly despairing note to the whole proceedings.

Eventually I got the hell in, locked up the car and stomped home across the common, arriving, as the bloody cosmic wossnames would have it, just as the EL had emerged from his pewter session into the house. He confirms that my memory is perfectly accurate and the spare tyre wouldn't have fitted, anyway. Despite the fact that I wasn't even particularly homicidal, he then volunteered to go and sort it out, i.e. remove the flat tyre and pick up my three big heavy bags of shopping, which I'd left stashed in the boot, an offer I gratefully accepted.

I need a cup of tea. Or a gin. Or a cup of tea and then a gin. I like this plan.

The Great New Year's Eve robbery relieved me of Winona, my netbook, whose petite Goth self I sincerely mourn. In a bizarre and unprecedented move straight out of left field, however, the insurance has actually paid out for more than the replacement cost of a low-end netbook, as a result of which the whole "resistance is futile, you will be assimilated" thing has kicked in, and this morning I toddled forth (with Jo&Stv for moral support and hand-holding) and acquired myself an Ipad entirely within the bounds of the insurance proceeds. While I still regard the whole Apple cult-edifice with a fair amount of distrust, I also feel that I badly need to acquire tablet and touch-screen skills, on account of how my tech cred is slipping and I'm becoming obsolete. So far I have resisted Itunes, which I loathe with a passion born from actual experience, but I have ordered the cute keyboard-case thingy that Claire had, which looks as though it'll make actual typing actually possible.

It's all very exciting, and I am not significantly deterred from my geeky "new tech!" dance of joy by the inevitable intervention of my personal techno-jinx, which promptly stalled the setup of the new Ipad by two hours while it meditatively downloaded and installed an OS upgrade. This is, alas, simply par for the course. It's all working now, and is offering me a friendly and intuitive interface with which I am becoming rapidly acquainted. I'm taking suggestions for a name for the new creature, though - I'm reverting to "Cupcake" in moments of stress, which is simply silly. (As in, "Please don't do this to me, cupcake!" in tones of plaintive despair).

I forgot to do month-end quotes again! I am a bad academic. Herewith the intellectual debts for February, which is fortunately a short month in which I haven't blogged much owing to thing, and have descended to actual originality in subject lines more than once.

4th February: I quote a newspaper headline from E. Nesbit's fairy tale "The Deliverers of their Country", which features alarming plagues of dragons infesting Victorian Britain strictly according to the dictates both of Darwinian evolution and of the St. George narrative. Also notable for beautiful Victorian magical tech in the form of the Tap-Room, which controls the weather. One of my favourites, and I really must buckle down and write that damned Nesbit paper.
12th February: a line from Thomas Moore's "The Fire Worshippers", which is one of the four poems in his Oriental romance Lalla Rookh, a marvellous concatenation of swooning emotion and sultry, exotic atmosphere. Also the poem which features the famous bit about dear gazelles gladding maidens with their soft black eyes, and thus a source from which I am frequently driven to quote more or less ironically in the context of students.
14th February: a quote from Nimona early in the web-comic, while she's fangirling all over Sir Ballister Blackheart's villainy and trying to persuade him to take her on as a sidekick. Nimona rocks.
23rd February: Tony Stark in the Avengers movie, as any fule kno, trying to dodge a call from Coulson. I'm madly amused by the Life Model Decoy reference, as it's one of the recurring elements in the comics which they use to retcon character deaths and behavioural weirdnesses - LMDs are S.H.I.E.L.D. robots programmed and constructed to replace and be controlled by actual people, and thus to serve as a plausible decoy for attacks. A beautiful narrative kludge, in other words. We like those.

Today I celebrated the new bookshelves by relocating a swathe of my sf collection and opening up shelves to store my DVDs, which have outgrown their cabinet by a factor of two, which is coincidentally the factor by which, it turns out, my collection of superhero films outnumbers the fairy tale ones. This possibly suggests the need for a change in my academic focus. I'm down with this.

The Lake District is very beautiful - the perfect balance between the neat, green, patchwork fields with their drystone walls, and the far more rugged fells which prevent everything from being just too safe and cultured. I totally get why the Romantic poets were mad about this place. I've been staying with my mother since Saturday in Sedbergh, and we've been driving around the lakes - Windermere on Tuesday, Ullswater today, and home through Kirkstone Pass, which is stunning. It's been overcast and dampish, my perfect kind of weather.

This is Windermere:

wndermere

On Tuesday we also went and wandered around Muncaster Castle, which is pretty tourist-trappy and is not an actual castle so much as a mansion with delusions of crenellation:

DSCN2548

... and which was selected almost entirely by virtue of its owl sanctuary. I share with my mother my obsession with owls, which I discover makes us strigiphiles. They have owls from all over the world, including several species I've never seen before.

DSCN2539

Points for spotting the second owl in this photo. Thursday wol is definitely a ninja.

A quick heads-up: the wireless connection in the school where my mother works refuses to acknowledge the existence of Winona, my netbook (it insists she isn't adequately virus-protected, which is bollocks). This annoying fact, coupled with the inevitable corollary that I forgot to bring with me the password which allows me to access my mail on the web, means I can't get into my usual email, and am thus doing all email contact via Gmail. If you've emailed me over the last week or so and I haven't replied, that's why. Sorry. Try Firstname.Lastname@gmail.com.

Current Mood: pleasingly relaxed

There's this unruly bugger somewhere in Russia or the Ukraine or whatever who routinely hacks my website, specifically the one in my actual name where I keep my teaching pages - it's a WordPress site, which is apparently tantamount to sticking a huge banner reading "HACKERS WELCOME!" over its front page. Since one of the things I teach is a section on vampires and the internet in a History of Eroticism course, it's clearly being targeted by a sort of "hur hur hur" juvenile whose so-called "thought processes" are rendered even less functional than usual by the mere mention of the word "sex". He (and I say advisedly, it feels very maladjusted-juvenile-male to me) habitually overwrites the index.php, to replace every page in the site with a GeoCities-style black page featuring some scantily clad female, often of the vampiric persuasion, in a vacuously available pose, while scrolling inscriptions in various languages crow pointlessly about his own cleverness in hacking me. It's the virtual and textual equivalent of some awkwardly skinny and acne-ridden dude in a too-tight speedo flexing his nonexistent muscles in the vain and delusional belief that it renders him the cynosure of feminine admiration. Sad, really. And bloody annoying, because it's my professional page in my own identity, and doesn't really create a very good impression if a colleague looks me up, which they actually may do given that I have three conference papers accepted for this year.

Stv used to exterminate these little cockroaches for me, but I've just moved my sites out of his hosting ambit, which means I can no longer meep at him about it, but conversely in the last few days have become involuntarily far more proficient with basic WordPress functions. I am now perfectly capable of rewriting the index.php when necessary, it's very simple, and caused me a certain amount of vindictive satisfaction to reverse things in moments when the bastard hacked me for the inaugural time on the new servers yesterday. It won't, of course, sort out any nasty backdoors or other bits of code the Juvenile Hacktwit has left lying around on the site, so a large chunk of this weekend is going to be spent working painstakingly through various sites which detail how to protect oneself from this sort of attack, and fiddling accordingly while desperately hoping I don't break anything.

It occurs to me, however, that the high concentration of computer proficiency among the witterers may be useful in providing an answer which I couldn't actually find on Teh Internets. The stat counter thingy on my site identifies robots.txt as one of the most frequently-hit resources, which is interesting as diligent search suggests that, unless it's tucked away somewhere really counter-intuitive, I don't have a robots.txt file on the site. (Which is apparently quite fine, since malign bots ignore it and hackers use it as a pointer to the stuff you don't want them to see which they therefore really want to see, so it all seems a bit pointless). The statcounter insists that the hits are all real people rather than bots. My question is, what are these people looking for? Are they simply checking for the aforementioned "private" bits of the site, or is there some other nefarious purpose? Enquiring minds want to know.

Current Mood: annoyed, determined
Current Music: Magnetic Fields

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Freckles & Doubt

With my mastery of narrative structure I should be ruling the cosmos by now.

Entries tagged with techno-jinx

I do not want it, it is skraaaaatched

Day 108: the hazards of homework

Day 38: the penalties of insufficient exercise

these things are sent to try us

other random things, variously weird

five more things

her horrible reluctance for the role

virtual perambulations

she felt too old for all of this

Who the fuck's gonna mess with me?

grrr, aargh

the game's afoot

as is my duty as the put-upon everyman character

techno-jinx rampant, sable, in chief three small thunderclouds

broken telephone

happy Joss Whedon's birthday!

up yours, cosmic wossnames

I came, I saw, Ipad

the level plain / Of waters coloured by impending clouds

hack, slash

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December 2024

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