I've been ill. I no longer post with the frequency I used to. And I have too many Weblog sites: two on Xanga, two on WordPress (I guess that means I now have four on WordPress if Xanga has become WordPress), one on Lycos, one on LiveJournal and several others that I set up but may never have used.

Others have moved on. The people I knew have given up posting or are posting elsewhere.

I have been cleaning out my email inbox, which has about 15,000 unread messages in it. Today I found an old Xanga posting and wanted to check if the person who posted it was still active. Surprise! Everything is different.

I have not posted here for several years. I have not posted on my other Xanga site for several years. I have posted on one of my WordPress sites and on my LiveJournal site this year. I have "posted" and communicated on Facebook, mostly from my tablet rather than from my computer.

I feel the need to find out what is new here.

I've been ill. I recently discovered why: Celiac Disease. An allergy to gluten I didn't know I had has become an autoimmune disease, causing the interior of my intestines to be damaged, allowing bacteria and toxins into my blood. There is no medical cure; I have to avoid gluten for the rest of my life.

Flock

Flock is described as a social browser. I'm not sure how applicable that description is because access to social communication sites is only part of what Flock does.

In just a few minutes after starting the program, I was able to link it to some of my Weblog sites: LiveJournal (Am0), Blogger (Am's rAmbles), and Xanga (WordJames and Am0) but not Tripod (WordJames) or WordPress (I'm not quite sure what it's called). Plus I was able to access some RSS feeds. Now I'm editing this entry on Flock, even though I prefer w.blogger for making LiveJournal entries because of its superior HTML capabilities.

Until  discovering Flock, I was using a variety of browsers and other tools to access or maintain my Weblogs: Firefox, Opera, w.blogger, Am0.us, WordJames.name, Xanga and Tripod. I would like to be able to access all of them with a single interface. I've fallen short of that goal with Flock, but it is a step in the right direction.

Flock is based on the Mozilla Gecko machine, just like Firefox, SeaMonkey and Mozilla. When I signed on to Flock for the first time, it asked me if I wanted it for my default browser. I declined. Now I'm more tempted to make it the default. I'm certainly going to give it a workout over the next few days.

Blogged with Flock

New OS

Well, the OS isn't exactly new to me: I had it on a laptop I had for a while. I'm now trying to learn to use OS-X on a Mac Mini. It's only slightly different from the version on the small laptop I gave to Cathy.

This is the first time I've fired up the machine. It's been sitting here for a while while I obtained the hardware I'd need to run it invisibly: a device to switch the keyboard, mouse and display between the Mini and my regular Windows machine and an adaptor to connect the keyboard and mouse to a USB. The computer itself is out of sight while the switch is behind my camera.

Yesterday I fixed the Windows machine, replacing a defective optical drive. That surgery worked. The Mini, to be contrary, seemed completely dead ... until I tried all of the connections and found that the power adaptor connection wasn't fully seated. With that taken care of, the Mini is just a switch click away.

As the Mini had never been used before, it wanted a software update before it would do anything. There was a list of 13 items that had to be updated, including the system firmware (which takes an additional step in a special mode). The little beast may be fast, but the update took a long time.

As I mentioned, I've used this OS previously ... but not extensively. The Mini version, Tiger, seems easier to use than the laptop version was. I've installed one application, iWork'06, which combines a presentation program with a word processor. Yes, I really feel that I need to learn a new word processor and all of its quirks; the multitude I've tried are deficient or unsatisfactory in many ways. I do intend to install my Power Writer on the Mini, too. And perhaps others.

Now to watch a DVD.

Some time ago, I wanted to install Ubuntu. When I found a site with the
download capability, I discovered they would optionally send me the
installation CDs, free, if I would accept a large enough number of them
to make economic sense for them. Today I received my package of three
sets of CDs: one for regular PCs; one for 64-bit PCs; and one for Macs.
Each set contained an install CD and a live CD, the latter to load
directly from the CD without installing (so you can try it out
harmlessly).

My Toy computer uses removable hard drives. I had a 120 GiB drive whose
content, flawed, was done better on another drive, so I put it in the
machine, loaded the install CD and started. A base Debian Linux system
installed, then extra software installed and the installer asked me to
name a user, with password. I then removed the install CD and rebooted.

I wasn't done with installation of the system. What got installed next
was a set of programs downloaded from one of the Ubuntu mirror sites. A
number of sites are available, ready to go, with no additional work
necessary on my part. After the new set of programs was installed, the
system offered to update everything that wasn't up to date. I told it
to do so, and it did ... painlessly.

For the last several years, I've used the KDE windowing system. The
default windowing system for Ubuntu is Gnome but there is a KDE version
available, Kubuntu, that is maintained in parallel with Ubuntu. The
last time I attempted to use Gnome, it was less than satisfactory. But
that was several years ago and things have improved.

Apart from selecting my user name and password, the only configuration
I, as a user, was involved in was to select my time zone. Everything
else was done for me automatically.

The default browser is Firefox, which is my preferred browser now. I've
been using it since its early release and am happier with it than with
its brother product, the Thunderbird email program, which won't allow
me to make LiveJournal updates from within a message, as I have been
able to do using the Mozilla email client.

There is little more to say. I installed Ubuntu and it seems to work. I'll play with it for the next few weeks, to be sure.

I do miss having root access. The first Linux I installed and got
working was a package at version 0.81, a beta release that included a
Linux encyclopedia that proved both necessary and very valuable. That
early installation took weeks of study, trial-and-error and
frustration. And it did take weeks to get it running, instead of a few
minutes. But then, I was installing from a collection of diskettes, not
from a mix of a CD and a high-speed Internet connection. As I recall,
it took me over a year of research and experimentation before I
discovered the secrets that would allow me to use my printer.

Times have changed. After that first successful installation, I've used
Slackware, Red Hat, Mandrake (now Mandriva, but I haven't used it since
before they changed the name), SuSe, Linspire (another Debian,
originally named Lindows and about to be renamed Freespire), a hacker's
release whose name I don't recall and a few small versions, most
notably Knoppix, that would load from a single diskette or memory
stick, super-valuable for diagnosing a flaky system. Tomorrow, who
knows: there are hundreds of Linux releases out there.

If Ubuntu works out, I may drop Linspire in its favor. Otherwise, I may move on to Fedora Core 5 (FC5).

Blood Sucker

I am a diabetic. I test my blood sugar frequently. Each time I test on a finger tip, it hurts ... for several days. If I test four times per day using four fingers of each hand and both sides of each finger tip, I'll be hitting each test site once every four days.

That isn't long enough for healing to take place.

If I puncture an alternative site, such as a forearm or the heel of the hand, not enough blood flows and there is no way to squeeze more out.

I needed something to suck out the blood from an alternative site.

I recently obtained a new meter, an Ascensia Contour, a Bayer product. Like most of the meters I've gotten in the last few years, it was free. The companies have finally learned that they make their profits on the test strips and giving the meters away gets a customer likely to buy their test strips. I, on the other hand, had been using the meter with the cheapest (to me) strips.

For a while, that was the ReliOn, from Walmart / Sam's Club. Then my insurance changed policy and the cheapest was BD Logic.

Unfortunately, I recently observed that the BD meter was giving wildly erratic high readings. A quick test showed that two tests with the BD and one from the ReliOn, all from the same drop of blood, gave different readings, with both of the BD readings, which weren't close to each other, much higher than the ReliOn.

So I changed meters and checked for about ten days that the Ascensia agreed with the ReliOn (which uses so much blood I was forced to use fingers; alternate sites would never be able to supply enough).

Included with the Ascensia was a coupon for their Vaculance, the blood-sucking device I needed. The coupon was expired, so I called the company. For a small shipping charge, they sent me the blood sucker free.

It works fine. A lancet punctures the skin and the device sucks a droplet of blood to the surface, as advertised. It is enough blood for the Ascensia or BD meters, but not for the ReliOn.

At first I didn't have my lancets seated deeply enough. That left a couple of bruises. They are unsightly but didn't hurt. The process is, as advertised, painless.

Healer Ending

I finally dreamed up an ending for Healer that satisfies me. I'm going to have to start writing up that story before I forget all of the good ideas that came to my during restless slumber.

I've gotten tired of trying to print out numerous text pages on the inkjet printer (ink costs a fortune) and of being unable to get it to print on the laser, so I spent the day installing Windows XP on my chameleon computer, the one with interchangable operating systems on removable drives, now named "VARIABLE". I couldn't get sharing to work between my old WXP system, named "AUTHOR", and the Linux modules, so I'll just move my writing to the other machine.

I made the install, then tried to download some software -- FireFox and associated extensions -- but the new installation kept wanting to upgrade. I allowed it to upgrade itself four times. By then, the Sun Java extension wanted an upgrade of its own. Every upgrade required rebooting the system at least once (as did, collectively, the FireFox extensions). The computer has been booted more today than in most months.

Maybe I shouldn't be allowed to do upgrades. I tried to upgrade AUTHOR's FireFox from 1.0.6 to 1.5 just a few days ago. It took me several days to recover from that problem. Now, with no time to enjoy the fruits of my labor, I've done another upgrade. It's like pounding my head against the wall ... will it really feel better when I stop?

In the next few days, I'll have to install my writing programs on VARIABLE and bring the associated files across. Maybe I can also get the printer sharing to work between two Windows machines. I got nothing useful done today. I didn't even open my email.

If you want to know what kind of ending I came up with, you'll have to buy the books when I finish them.

More Unnecessary Moves

We just had a new roof installed, replacing a 15 year roof after 20+ years. It is a very nice new roof that, depending on how the light strikes it, appears either light tan or gray.

When they finished the roof, my computer didn't work any more.

It wasn't the computer itself that was broken. It simply wasn't receiving any power. I checked all of the circuit breakers and found one that had tripped, a double 20-watt breaker.

When I first left the country, in 1968, my father decided to install an air conditioner. In order to place the machine in the living room, he needed a new circuit. It was a 220-volt device, a monster from Montgomery Ward that never worked, and the conduit for the new wiring was run through the attic, across the entire house and down the outside west wall.

When we wrote the roofing contract, we specified adding three dormers. Each dormer required cutting a two foot hole in the roof. I figured that the roofers, in cutting the western-most dormer hole, had severed the conduit. I so reported to the owner of the roofing company, RC Roofing. He brought in an electrician to check it out.

The problem wasn't due to the dormers, so I wound up paying the electrician for tracking down the problem. It was the power line filter block the computer was connected to, which had burned out completely.

My wireless Internet access point was also burned out and needs to be replaced. The computer itself is fine. I just can't connect to the Internet with it -- unless I rob the access point from another computer.

How many computers do I have? There are two in regular use and two or three others that should work but are disconnected and there are parts of old computers I could possible connect to get one or two more computers running. Basically, though, I just have two working machines, although one of them will run several different operating systems. That's the one that is currently off line.

Those are the downstairs computers that I use. There is another computer upstairs where we connect to the Internet and have the network. I originally had one built for Delia. Cathy took it over and overstressed it, so I had another built in a Shuttle box / board combination to replace it. Delia doesn't use it, despite encouragement to do so, and Cathy again has it strained to its limits, despite which she doesn't want me to upgrade it from Windows 98SE to another Windows system or something better.

Anyway, I had to run over to Sam's Club and get a new power line filter block for $20.

I did learn something else of value from the electrician. I always thought it would cost me many thousands of dollars to re-wire the house with three-prong outlets everywhere, but I have at least two alternatives. The cheapest, at $600-$800, is to have a crew come in and add GFI (Ground Fault Interrupt) outlets to each existing circuit, placing ungrounded three prong outlets everywhere. The second alternative would be to replace the electric meter and power panel with a new meter and power panel that already have GFI built in, at about three times what the cheapest alternative would run. Re-wiring the house, as I originally thought, would cost many thousands.

I have to buy one wireless access point for my computer. I should buy a second one so I can tie my color printer directly to the home network instead of to one computer that would share it over the network.

Unnecessary Moves

When my wireless communications were disrupted, I did a lot of flailing around before finding a workable solution. I'm not entirely sure I correctly diagnosed the situation.

Initially, I thought the problem was interference. I thought one of the big broadcast radios south of the border might be sending a signal strong enough to block reception. We've had similar problems in the past, at times finding it difficult to disarm the car alarms or having remotely controlled lights turn on or off without a command. Some of our lights had been turning on unexpectedly of late ... but that has been happening for over a decade.

I bought an amplified antenna. It didn't help.

Then I decided that the old wireless-b router had burned out and was no longer capable of reliably sending or receiving a signal. I replaced it with a new wireless-g router. Everything improved once I figured out how to set it up correctly.

Another factor in the equation is that we've been having power problems all summer long. We've been having the kinds of problems you get when the house voltage is running too low, the kinds of problems that originate with the power company.

There has been another transition. I didn't have instruments measuring the voltages or noise levels on the power lines, but suddenly things seemed to work better, the way they did before the beginning of summer. And my wireless signals seem to have improved along with it.

Was some neighbor running an air conditioning system that was dropping the line voltage or adding noise? We share our power grid with a number of small industries on the next street over, Federal Blvd. The Marketplace at the Grove mall is just a mile away, with lots of new construction for a complex to house a Twenty-Four Hours Fitness and other businesses in what used to be a bowling alley. Either of those could have been the cause of the problem.

The new router puts out a strong signal. I'm going to keep watching the signal level to see if it drops. I expect that it will remain high, but I would like to know what caused the situation ... and if I really needed to replace the router.

I'm Back

I've been disconnected for over a week. I've had connection problems for much longer than that.

Our Internet cable connection is upstairs, in the bedroom Cathy uses. My computers are downstairs. The old Netgear wireless router kept getting weaker and weaker.

Since returning from Los Angeles, Cathy hasn't been leaving her bed. Her back problems have flared up and she has been in constant pain, which leaves her in a foul mood. I haven't had access to the router.

I purchased a more powerful antenna for the wireless bridge downstairs (one of the two, not both). It didn't help when I attached it to the router or to the bridge. The old router just didn't have enough left in it to get a signal through the floor reliably.

I got a new wireless router, a Cisco / Linksys, which also upgraded me from wireless-b to wireless-g. The signal improved, enough that I was able to make the indicator light on the bridge light up, but I wasn't getting a connection. I guess I screwed up the security setting when I chose WPA instead of WEP, which I had been using previously. I screwed something else up, too, because I was no longer able to access the router through its setup program.

I did a reset on the router and on both of my bridges. Now I can make solid contact ... but I have no security. Later, when Cathy goes out and I can access the router upstairs, I'll try to set up the router better, restoring some kind of security.

But I was able to get my mail, about 600 accumulated messages, about a quarter of which was spam. I now have over 3,000 messages sitting on my machine, waiting for my attention. It may take me a while to go through it all.

But I'm back.