Speaker For The Diodes - August 28th, 2009

05:25 am - QotD

"I offered my opinion that most everything that Jesus taught can be distilled down to one simple, if not a bit vulgar, statement: 'Life is hard, we're all in this together, don't be a dick.'

"I think the world might be a better place if people stopped wearing clothing and jewelry with 'WWJD' plastered on it, and replaced it with 'DBAD'."

-- fragbert, 2009-08-11 (Click through for inspiration and examples, but that's really the kernel of it, right there above.)

07:20 pm - My Broken (Prosthetic) Brain, and My Calendar

At Pennsic, my prosthetic brain[1] failed, taking six weeks of not-backed-up memories with it (which was doubly annoying because I thought that I had backed it up in mid-July). So not only did I lose most of the notes I'd taken on it during Pennsic, including the email address of the woman from House Bloodjack I'm supposed to send mandolin-tabulature transcriptions to (if anybody from Bloodjack is reading this, contact me, eh?) and my records of recent credit union activity (I think I can get back on track regarding my current balance unless there are outstanding checks that I've entirely forgotten about (which is the sort of thing I needed a prosthetic brain for in the first place, right?)), I also lost all my calendar notes about upcoming gigs and potential gigs, and the contact info fron the person from the city government I need to talk nicely to about my difficulties in getting my front windows replaced (as the city has ordered, threatening large fines).[2]

When I noticed the PDA wouldn't power up, I started taking notes on index cards. *sigh* I've already misplaced the first stack of those, which included some calendar notes. (I'm still looking for 'em ... but this is one of the reasons a PDA was a better solution for me than going old-tech[3] -- I didn't randomly misplace pages of it.) So at this point I'm really not quite certain where I'm supposed to be, when. I think I've got a gig tomorrow, but all I could find digging through archived email is next weekend, and anything farther out is a blank (except that I do remember that the Anne Arundel Scottish Games, usually in October, unfortunately won't be happening this year).

Between fibro-fog[4] and just generally being disorganized without the tools I've gotten used to, I really do kind of feel like a chunk of my brain is offline. My jokes about the PDA being my prosthetic brain were perhaps closer to the mark than I'd realized. This is a terribly frustrating feeling (though the changes in memory in my bio-brain after the fibro got bad are even more frustrating[5], and there are brain diseases and injuries out there that I find uncomfortable to even think about the possibility of -- <<shudder>>). I'm feeling ... helpless and incompetent. *grumble*

I think I've got another broken Clié around here somewhere that I picked up a couple of years ago for spare parts, if I can remember where it migrated to, so maybe, if the battery problem is a wear issue rather than a shelf-life issue[6], I can do a battery-transplant and get my brain back. Failing that, I may have to take a whole lot of stuff out of my purse to make room for a DayRunner binder (that seems so huge after a few years of using a PDA instead) and get a printer working well enough to print out a stack of the custom pages I used to use in it.

In the meantime, I'm still trying to reconsruct my calendar for the next couple months ... and pondering better ways to keep multiple copies of the information all accessible and constantly in sync with each other, once I reconstruct it. (A PDA that runs Linux would be a good start, I think, but IIRC there was only one that did, it wasn't marketed in the US, and was too expensive on eBay the last time I looked.) With the calendar tool in PalmOS, I think I could make it automagically sync with Outlook -- which I don't use -- or I could get at the PC copy of the info through the Palm Desktop app, but I didn't sync every week because I had to do a backup-to-Memory-Stick beforehand, then restore afterward, then access a backed-up spreadsheet via FilePoint, to unscramble some bizarre screwage hotsync did to the Documents To Go installation I used for spreadsheets ... I liked my prosthetic brain, but it wasn't perfect.

Whee. Gonna go comb my email for dates again.

( Footnotes, including a non-computer example of 'deadlock', some muttering about tools, and a bit more frustration and bitterness than I expected to come bubbling up when I started writing this )