We have collected all the disks from the last 20 years of writing and doing business and having lives onto a terabyte drive, and I have begun to edit them for duplications.
There’s method in this: this enables me to find the text files for past novels—never thought I’d need those~—and simultaneously to organize our lives. Some poignant stuff…a memo to get a battery charger for my boat…alas, for my boat. And a program I wrote for Dad to automate his saves when he was doing the taxes. A schedule I left for Mom when she was housesitting. I don’t know whether to erase them or not—but I think I should. Better to remember the camping trips and the hikes in the woods. There was a lot of fun in the lake house, but the climate nearly killed me. Pets, now gone, Lord, personal archaeology is bittersweet. After Khym (silver Persian) I wouldn’t get another Persian: he was the be-all and end-all of that breed. Wonderful kitty. Although Dustbunny was a sweetheart. She got her name from hiding under furniture.
I have found, however, a raft of articles I thought I had no copy of. I should post them, one at a time.
Speaking of archives……years ago, CJ, you had a recipe for cat food which worked wonders for my then geriatric cats. Alas, said recipe got lost with time. Should you come across it in your readings of your life a reposting would be much appreciated by many old kitties I know.
If I haven’t said it before: Thank you for all the work you do to keep this blog welcoming, lively and interesting. Are you sure you and Jane don’t live in an area of Washington that provides several extra hours for each day?
Oh! HAPPY HAUNTING TO ALL!
I haven’t run across the kitty-food recipe, but here are a couple that have helped. First of all, in any prepared food, you need a dose of taurine. Cats require it, and most food we would eat doesn’t contain it. (The ancient Romans may have eaten mice, but I don’t think it will ever be in top restaurants.) The two recipes, for the food part: both involve rice. 1)boil a whole chicken, including liver and gizzard, until it falls apart. Strain out the bones, add rice, cook until rice thickens the mix. 2)recipe 2: boil beef heart and grate it fine. You can mix it up with cooked rice and add condensed milk.
Neither of these will make Chef Ramsay’s menu, but they are 2 different flavors, and condensed milk adds sweetness some cats like. You could add it to the chicken. Neither recipe requires much chewing, and both are easy on the stomach.
I’m hoping that you’ve bought something with RAID support, to store all of that stuff! I bought a Ready NAS, and it’s been a great device, despite having burned up a drive in the first week (manufacturer’s defect). Without RAID, I’d have thought that I was safe, and would have lost 200gb of raw images.
We have the drive next to our evening work stations, and can easily backup. Also when I’ve completed anything memorable, I go onto housenet and backup to the desktop. Every time we’ve tried RAID it’s been a hardware nightmare. Probably because we have multiple drives and a lot of users. But so far so good. The only current trouble I’m having is a rebellious trackpoint mouse that has done some weird things. Took me two hours of maneuvering it to get in and restore all the defaults. Dunnow how it got OFF the defaults, but, hey, passing neutrino or something. If it does it again, Dell’s getting a call.
About the settings for the trackpoint:
It’s at times like these that you want to be using ERUNT Registry backup, because it will almost always sort out such problems with a few clicks and a restart.
ERUNT, Emergency Recovery Utility NT
http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de/erunt/
It’s free. It automatically makes a Registry backup every day when you start up your machine.
The Windows Registry contains all the settings for Windows, and most of the settings for the different software and hardware you are using.
95% of the time when any settings get somehow ‘messed up’ (such as the trackpoint mouse), restoring the last Registry backup will fix it, and will painlessly get it back the way it was.
I’ve used this for years. Once it’s set up it just works. It’s saved me many times, including when nothing else would.
This is not a fancy program with bells and whistles, it doesn’t look pretty, it’s a little ‘geeky’ and the web site was not created by an artist. But it actually works, and it well worth spending 10 minutes figuring out how to set it up, because it will save untold amounts of hassle.
Thanks! I’ll look into that. I suspect the ‘tap’ and ‘area’ functions they added to the stick are at fault…simultaneously. A stick accumulates impetus in one direction or another, and left to itself after heavy use will often wander to one side or the other until it has ‘unwound’ the mathematical tension in it. I’ve somewhat tamed the beast—at least it’s stopped invoking programs I didn’t ask for and (more annoying) dumping me out of what I’m doing, but it has other tricks I’m trying to track down (pardon pun.) I’m restoring all defaults and killing the bells and whistles, as I find them. Plus I’m going to replace the stick cap: I wear them off pretty fast, and it may be contacting neighboring keys.
When considering what to save or what to delete, please save the raw uncut files for your works. Some scholar and your devoted readership would find it quite interesting to read what you had to cut out of publication considerations.
We do save the working-saves. Some researchers have complained about the electronic mode of creating books, but the old way (hand-typed and 2 carbons) only preserves the last draft, along with some scrap paper, a lot of which suffered from white-out and preserves no prior version. Digital storage makes these files more accessible, not less, plus searchable—granted you can read the data, and ascii and its relatives are among the easiest data to read.
I have all my manuscripts in the Jack Williamson Collection at Eastern New Mexico University, and you remind me—they will also benefit by the electronic collection.
A terabyte drive is hard to conceptualize, in terms of stored text. Say that it has no trouble containing every version of everything two writers have done in a couple of decades, including photos and correspondence. It’s large. But once we organize it all, we will spit it all out onto dvd’s so that there’s not just one storage for the lot.
A couple of years ago or so, a new random scientific fact was “revealed” (or however one wants to conceptualize those floating bits of knowledge): the cat family, apparently, lacks the ability to taste “sweet” unlike pretty much all other mammals, as I remember this, well, perhaps it is trivia, but it’s still fascinating.
Hmmm.. let me see if Science Daily (yes, also one of my favorite and oft’ visited sites) has anything on this…. Nope, and I tried not to get distracted while searching on it. Google turned up a number of articles, though, including Scientific American:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=strange-but-true-cats-cannot-taste-sweets . Hmmm…, now I think I will poke around Scientific American’s website and see if it is worth while book-marking. Oh, and it was in 2005, which now counts as more than just “a couple of years ago.” Oh well.
They evidently can’t taste pepper either, though they like salt. I’ve had mine take after Thai food, though I won’t let her have it: I’m not in favor of giving peanuts to a pet—I figure if people sensitize that extremely, I’m not giving it to a critter that doesn’t ordinarily include that kind of thing in its diet.