isolated figure huddled in a corner of an empty brick-walled room

Well… hell


I had all the pricing and shipping info ready to post so any of you in a book-acquiring mind could buy books from me. But it turns out that my WP Forms-generated contact form has not been sending me email since… well, I’m not sure, but the last email I got through this site was back in January  of this year. I’ve been trying to solve the problem, but so far, it’s defeating me. Tomorrow I shall bring out the big guns: Mr. Kat (who used to work for my ISP). Hopefully, we’ll be able to get it working and then I can sell you guys books! And exchange email with you!

And all this time I thought no one was sending me email. Gosh, I hope I didn’t miss something really wonderful while my contact form was broken…

 

Locked Out of Your Stuff


So, there’s an article at the New York Times about Bitcoin billionaires losing access to their accounts because they’ve forgotten their passwords and the bitch of it is that the structure of Bitcoin means they can’t just reset the password, so unless they magically remember, these poor suckers are out, in some cases, billions of techno-dollars.

My first impulse is to snicker and mutter snarkily “oh, poor babies.” But on further consideration, I don’t like that response. Here are people who took a risk and invested in a start-up technology, just as anyone who invests takes a risk, This tech worked and it turned a ridiculous profit. At least for now. You wouldn’t laugh at the misfortune of someone who lost their wallet, or lost money investing in, say, the Rocket e-Book. Taking public pleasure in the misfortune of these guys isn’t really any different—yeah, they are great targets when a lot of us are struggling to keep a roof over our heads, but taking the piss smacks of juvenile jealousy and gloating. It’s beyond Schadenfreude.

You’re probably rolling your eyes at me and muttering “Oh come on, Kat…” But I’m serious. This is a lousy attitude and one I don’t want to feed in myself.

Why? Because the root of their problem is something very ordinary, very human: the difficulty of remembering a complicated string of letters, numbers, and symbols that are otherwise meaningless. Here are a handful of people who might be ridiculously rich—and some already are, but some aren’t—if they could only remember their password, and we’ve all been in the position of forgetting a password. Some people even lose access to important things because of it. You know: that email address that linked to your old website or Facebook page, your old phone’s backup directory, or that guest account on the old laptop… It happens all the time. It’s happened to me, and it’s happened to you. Don’t pretend it hasn’t.

And don’t pretend your urge to sneer isn’t at least partially motivated by old-fashioned jealousy that you don’t have that kind of dough to lose. I know mine is.

But to gloat and make public mock of these poor schmoes is hypocritical, and after the year we’ve had, this sort of snark is just petty.

Let he/she/they who are without password-forgetfulness cast the first stone.

Me, I’m thinking of writing a book, instead. See, there’s this guy and he can’t remember…

 

Close up of Egg Shell with coffee grounds inside, which have colored the shell with swirled watercolor-like shades of green and brown

reddish brown sky with red-orange sun

 

Strange Nature


I was cleaning up after breakfast recently and happened to look into my countertop compost bin, where I saw this interesting color effect on an egg shell which had caught some coffee grounds. I found it so interesting that I went and grabbed my cell phone to take the picture here at the top of the left column.

I know that to most people this is just a photo of my garbage, but I was struck by the interesting colors, especially since I knew there’s nothing else in that bin other than coffee grounds, egg shells, and a green tea bag. Nature creates some amazing colors—even in the trash.

By contrast, the lower photo is also the colors of nature, but in a less-friendly mode. This is the sky above Silverdale Washington, at 14:30 hours on September 12, 2020.

Due to windborne ash in the air from wildfires in Oregon and California, the sky was a reddish brown and the sun a mere orange spot that could be stared at without any eye protection.  I’ve started calling this effect “Apocalypse Sky.” I think that would make a nifty title for a book, or an anthology of short stories, though what it would be about I don’t yet know.

 

Just Photos of My Dogs


We got the dogs some new Jolly Balls on July 4 and they’ve been playing with them in the yard until they’re both exhausted. Good thing too: our neighbors set off very loud, colorful fireworks for two and a half hours starting about 21:30 that night. Normally Jack and Banjo dislike loud noiseds and bark like mad, but they were too tired to get wound-up about the noise this year.

Remind me to buy “The Best Toys EVAR!” (according to Jack and Banjo) again next year.

And below is Banjo playing with “his” Jolly Ball while Jack looks on. Jack doesn’t like to be recorded, so he sat this one out.

 

Jack Puppikins

Labradork

 

 

 

 

 

 

Banjo Wigglebotham

Brown Hound

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tuesday has been Monday all Day


This has been one of those days that seems destined to end in a barrage of gunfire and bad language that have no actual impact on anyone or anything. Some days, I wish I’d stayed in bed. Since last year.

I Have No Idea What I’m doing…


I haven’t figured this all out yet… and the build system which is supposed to be so “simple” is killing me.

In the process of converting to the new platform and updating the design, I established a new database, but lost easy access to the old one. I also inadvertantly blew away the old site before this one was really ready to go, so I am trying to create content from scratch and ferreting through my very messy directories looking for pictures, cover copy, blurbs, CV, bio, and various other information that was already up on the old site.

While I know that the automated WYSIWYG, click-and-drag systems are easier for a tyro site-keeper like me to maintain, they aren’t always self-explanatory or as “intuitive” as their inventors may think. I’m a proto-nerd and yet I’ve been very frustrated with this process—which should have been done-and-dusted months ago, to boot. I’m also currently hosting 3 separate sites on 2 different systems/ISPs. One of them is not entirely open to me, as I only manage the site, I don’t have administrative control of it. Needless to say, it’s a little… fraught over here.

Trust me: I am trying to get this all done as soon as possible.

Stay tuned!