queerbychoice (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
queerbychoice) wrote2004-05-10 01:36 am
queerbychoice) wrote2004-05-10 01:36 am
Darwin's Point
By spontaneously rebooting itself at strategic times twice in the last couple of weeks, my computer has managed not only to destroy about six very long, complex, carefully composed, almost finished but not yet quite posted LiveJournal entries (why yes, I was indeed simultaneously composing three entries at a time in separate windows and not saving backup copies of any of them), but also to sap me of the will to attempt to compose any deep or insightful entries anymore right now. Hopefully I will recover from this soon.
In the meantime, I shall see if I can at least manage to work my way back to posting brief totally unimportant blather. Or pictures. Especially pictures of the kind you have absolutely no reason to take interest in, such as pictures that are not of me or my home or anyone I know or any other image from which you might actually learn something about me - pictures of the kinds of things you could easily see anywhere else at all, like cars or plants or the sky. Or ultra-closeups of what human ears look like, just in case you didn't already know. Yes, that's a good one. Here's a closeup of my ear:
Actually, I do have a reason for including this. My mother recently emailed me to tell me the name of a part of my ear. Where the outer edge of my ear folds over, do you see where the inside edge of that fold comes to a point at the very top of my ear? Apparently that point is called a "Darwin's point." I must say, I'm honored to find that one of my body parts has been named after Darwin - it's sort of like having earrings in the shape of that Darwin fish/lizard people put on their cars to irritate the Christian Right, except in my case I get to irritate them without having to actually poke holes in my poor ears or put earrings on, or for that matter, even buy any trinkets for my car. Anyway, the majority of people don't have a Darwin's Point in their ears. It's a recessive genetic trait - neither of my parents has a Darwin's Point, but my paternal grandmother had one. And the reason some people have a "Darwin's Point" is that, according to this, "Some millions of years ago, the ear was not rolled inward at all, and this point is a vestige of our hairy ancestors' 'formerly erect and pointed ears.'"
See, my journal is educational! Of course, this still leaves something of a mystery as to how my brother's ears ended up with two Darwin's Points each, spaced a little to the left and right of where the Darwin's Point in my ear is. I guess his ancestors had square ears instead of triangularly pointed ones like cats. I always knew there was something odd about him . . .
[Poll #291167]
There, now my journal is interactive as well as educational. But actually, perhaps it would be more useful to reverse the direction of the education. Remember how in the old days, whenever your computer was frozen or moving at a snail's pace because it was overloaded with too many processes at once, the Control-Alt-Delete function was the one function that would still come up and you could use it to shut down all the unnecessary processes and thereby get your computer to work at a normal speed again? Well, on my new computer with Windows XP, the Control-Alt-Delete function does bring up the Windows Task Manager that lets me shut down any running processes - but only if my computer isn't having any problems to begin with. The second I assign my computer too much to do at once and it starts pausing for 5 seconds or five minutes before responding to keyboard commands, the Control-Alt-Delete function is also slowed down every bit as much as all the computer's other functions are. So every time my computer starts slowing down and ceasing to respond, I press Control-Alt-Delete but nothing happens, and I press it twenty more times in frustration and still nothing happens, and I walk around the room waiting in frustration for my computer to finish whatever excessively demanding task has slowed it down, and then ten minutes later it finally does start responding again and all the windows I'd been trying to open finally open all at once, and then 20 separate copies of the Windows Task Manager open up all at once in response to the 20 times I futilely attempted Control-Alt-Delete. Gosh, thanks. Those 20 copies of that sure are useful now that my computer has already started working fine again! What idiotic programmer decided to downgrade the priority of Control-Alt-Delete so that it's no more likely to function than anything else in Windows is? Does Microsoft imagine that giving people worse tools for coping with crashes will somehow cause people to think that crashes don't happen as much? Or is there a well-hidden setting I've missed somewhere that will cause Control-Alt-Delete to actually work again the way it used to on my Windows 98 system? Please, someone tell me there's a way to fix this. Short of formatting the drive and installing Linux, I mean.
P.S.: Hey look, I actually successfully posted this entry! That's one entry successfully posted, and six far better ones lost forever to the evil of Bill Gates. I might yet manage to even the score.
In the meantime, I shall see if I can at least manage to work my way back to posting brief totally unimportant blather. Or pictures. Especially pictures of the kind you have absolutely no reason to take interest in, such as pictures that are not of me or my home or anyone I know or any other image from which you might actually learn something about me - pictures of the kinds of things you could easily see anywhere else at all, like cars or plants or the sky. Or ultra-closeups of what human ears look like, just in case you didn't already know. Yes, that's a good one. Here's a closeup of my ear:
Actually, I do have a reason for including this. My mother recently emailed me to tell me the name of a part of my ear. Where the outer edge of my ear folds over, do you see where the inside edge of that fold comes to a point at the very top of my ear? Apparently that point is called a "Darwin's point." I must say, I'm honored to find that one of my body parts has been named after Darwin - it's sort of like having earrings in the shape of that Darwin fish/lizard people put on their cars to irritate the Christian Right, except in my case I get to irritate them without having to actually poke holes in my poor ears or put earrings on, or for that matter, even buy any trinkets for my car. Anyway, the majority of people don't have a Darwin's Point in their ears. It's a recessive genetic trait - neither of my parents has a Darwin's Point, but my paternal grandmother had one. And the reason some people have a "Darwin's Point" is that, according to this, "Some millions of years ago, the ear was not rolled inward at all, and this point is a vestige of our hairy ancestors' 'formerly erect and pointed ears.'"
See, my journal is educational! Of course, this still leaves something of a mystery as to how my brother's ears ended up with two Darwin's Points each, spaced a little to the left and right of where the Darwin's Point in my ear is. I guess his ancestors had square ears instead of triangularly pointed ones like cats. I always knew there was something odd about him . . .
[Poll #291167]
There, now my journal is interactive as well as educational. But actually, perhaps it would be more useful to reverse the direction of the education. Remember how in the old days, whenever your computer was frozen or moving at a snail's pace because it was overloaded with too many processes at once, the Control-Alt-Delete function was the one function that would still come up and you could use it to shut down all the unnecessary processes and thereby get your computer to work at a normal speed again? Well, on my new computer with Windows XP, the Control-Alt-Delete function does bring up the Windows Task Manager that lets me shut down any running processes - but only if my computer isn't having any problems to begin with. The second I assign my computer too much to do at once and it starts pausing for 5 seconds or five minutes before responding to keyboard commands, the Control-Alt-Delete function is also slowed down every bit as much as all the computer's other functions are. So every time my computer starts slowing down and ceasing to respond, I press Control-Alt-Delete but nothing happens, and I press it twenty more times in frustration and still nothing happens, and I walk around the room waiting in frustration for my computer to finish whatever excessively demanding task has slowed it down, and then ten minutes later it finally does start responding again and all the windows I'd been trying to open finally open all at once, and then 20 separate copies of the Windows Task Manager open up all at once in response to the 20 times I futilely attempted Control-Alt-Delete. Gosh, thanks. Those 20 copies of that sure are useful now that my computer has already started working fine again! What idiotic programmer decided to downgrade the priority of Control-Alt-Delete so that it's no more likely to function than anything else in Windows is? Does Microsoft imagine that giving people worse tools for coping with crashes will somehow cause people to think that crashes don't happen as much? Or is there a well-hidden setting I've missed somewhere that will cause Control-Alt-Delete to actually work again the way it used to on my Windows 98 system? Please, someone tell me there's a way to fix this. Short of formatting the drive and installing Linux, I mean.
P.S.: Hey look, I actually successfully posted this entry! That's one entry successfully posted, and six far better ones lost forever to the evil of Bill Gates. I might yet manage to even the score.
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Well then, sorry, I have no viable suggestions for you. :)
(Actually, that's not true: when I see spontaneous reboots, I become suspicious of hardware. Is your computer getting enough power? Old power supply? Old house with old wiring? Bad grounding? Are the fans caked with gunk and overheating things? Might be something to check out.)
I hate losing half-composed entries as well. Losing any data is a tragedy to me. All the emotion and creativity and motivation for the original post is gone, and if it's important enough I might try to slog through a re-write... but it's never as good as the first time. :-/ Gah!
Good luck :)
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But actually, only the first of the reboots was technically spontaneous, and that one informed me it was caused by an error from a program conflicting with Windows. I uninstalled the program (it wasn't a good program anyway), and then I discovered via Google that Windows XP comes with an option set by default that causes it to spontaneously reboot in response to any system error, so I unchecked that option and then felt safely protected from any further spontaneous reboots. Which is when the slow/non- responsiveness of Control-Alt-Delete got me instead, and I ended up rebooting the computer myself because it had remained totally unresponsive for the past half hour.
Thanks for the suggestions and the luck.
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