Tech Support Tag - Week 2

For two weeks and more
You have failed, you have failed.
For two weeks and more
You have failed me!

For so long you've been true,
But now nothing that you do
Can make my problem up and go away.

For your tech support
I have begged, I have begged.
For your tech support
I have begged you!

I've complied with your demands,
Yet you will not understand
That it just don't make my problem go away.

Grumble, mutter, snarl... I've had nothing but good luck with my site host for years. Whenever there's been a problem, a quick missive to tech support got things straightened out within a message or two. Now, they did restore my site when they figured out it was on their end, but that's when the annoying User Name/Password loop set in. I couldn't publish to my subdomain (Brightdreamer Books) without being locked into entering my User Name and Password time after time after time... and it never did take. I just sent my fifth e-mail informing them that I cannot publish to one of my subdomains, and that, once again, their suggestion failed to fix this lingering problem. It's on their end. It has to be on their end. Nothing in FrontPage 2000 has any capacity to screw up a user name/password authentication on their server, especially since it works not only for my main site, but for my new subdomain. Besides, it was their glitch on their end which had the whole site shut down to begin with, so logic tells me that perhaps it's yet another glitch on their end which suddenly doesn't allow me to publish a subdomain which I have been able to publish successfully for well over a year.

The last e-mail from their support had a slightly snippy tone to it, so I finally had it. I spent this morning doing screen captures of every step in the process of my attempt to comply with their demands, the disastrous results (the main site was overwritten and the index page screwed up - this is why I've never had an index.htm problem on my subdomains, folks, and I never had a publishing problem until now!!!), how I fixed it, and how I still cannot publish my subdomain. I even went into Paint Shop Pro and added helpful circles and lines, and in my e-mail I annotated each image. I'm pretty sure they hate me by now, but they're just not listening to the problem and I'm getting very, very angry. So Brightdreamer Books languishes as the book review backlog creeps ever closer to 20 (I think I just hit 16 with the latest addition.) It's the only site I have with a potential for revenue, and while it hasn't exactly been a gold mine (or a silver mine... heck, even a coal mine), I rather liked the possibility of a little extra income now and again. This whole problem is, in a word, ridiculous. Actually, it's absolutely frellin' inexcusably ridiculous, but that's four words and I promised one. If this doesn't clear up soon I'll have to find another site host; I should not have to pay for a second domain name/server just to publish one third of my site. If this means teaching myself Dreamweaver so I'm not limited by FrontPage compatibility, so be it. I've just about had it.

I think I'll grab a cup of cocoa and and find something mindless and vaguely aggressive to do.

If You're Looking For Skyhaven...

Okay, just a quick little post here to say that I know my domain (Brightdreamer.com, home of Skyhaven Adoptions and my book review site that I don't think anyone even knows about) is having "issues" at the moment, as in it's been essentially inaccessible since Friday night. I'll be throwing together a quick update as soon as possible to see if that helps; if not, I'll be trying to contact tech support to see what's up. Just so you know, the Skyhaven Hunt will NOT be returning in this update - I am simply trying to get my sites back up and running. Work on the Hunt has begun, though, so don't fear, but this problem will be delaying the process. (By an odd coincidence, it was the night that I requested the subdomain for the Hunt - so it'll be easier to manage via FrontPage on my end without poking through the rest of Skyhaven - that my sites went down. I sincerely hope the two aren't connected...)

Anyway, if you need to contact me, leave me a message via Comments here.

UPDATE - It's Saturday night. Tech Support got back to me (yes, on a Saturday) to say that the problem was indeed on their end and it should be fixed within 24 hours. I'll probably be too busy tomorrow (Father's Day stuff and all), but I'll try posting Monday.

UPDATE UPDATE - So close, yet so far away... I finally got my main site (Skyhaven) back and updated, but I get stuck in a weird loop whenever I try updating to the subwebs (Brightdreamer Books and the new Skyhaven Hunt subweb.) I'll give them another day to work it out... maybe it's a last glitch. But at least the site's back up now. That's something.

The Joy of Creating

A few months ago, my grandfather asked me to paint an eagle on a cheap tamborine he picked up at the second-hand store. I kept meaning to start it, but first I had to get the right paints... then I had to track down a good reference... then I had to read up on color theory... then (fill in the vaguely art-related excuse for not sitting down, shutting up, and doing it.) The past few weeks, Grandpa hasn't been quite himself all the time. He is, after all, 88, but he's been fairly sharp and active, until a recent fall let his age start catching up with him. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew I'd never forgive myself if I didn't finish the eagle drum before he went away, be it to the grave or the shadowy mists of his own mind. So, yesterday, I dusted off my workbench, dug out my paints, printed out a royalty-free ref image from Corbis, and started painting. In the space of a few hours, I did what I hadn't done in months and months: finished something. The above picture, scanned in with my recently-reconnected scanner, is the result. Considering that it's been years since I even attempted remotely realistic acrylic painting on any surface, I'm fairly pleased with how it came out.

As I sat there at my workbench, carefully picking and mixing colors, listening to the ambient noise of the local classical station in my headphones, I realized how much I missed the simple act of creating something. I looked around the workbench at all the things I've accumulated for "someday" projects: the pyrography equipment, the wire and foil and accessories for polymer/Paperclay sculptures, the brushes and paints, the pens and pencils. Is it really so difficult, I asked myself, to find an hour - or even half an hour - every day or so to come down here and Do Something? Is it any more difficult to find the same time to Do Something on my computer, to dust off the tablet for Paint Shop Pro, work on site expansions in FrontPage, or write a few pages in Word? I've been going through Bryce 5.5 slowly, with the help of a great online tutorial link I found after I broke down and registered for the official Bryce forum, but mostly I've been poking around, memorizing controls and staring at pretty buttons or presets.

I also recently got the go-ahead to start the logo for one of the day camps I design annual logos for. (The other one just got their committee together and hasn't decided on a theme; the camp's in early July, and this is May.) Though they have a fairly specific idea of what they want, and it will therefore take minimal efforts on my part to come up with the design (one of my usual hang-ups), I still find myself holding back. Last year, I had the logo for this camp pretty much done by this time. This year, I haven't even started any serious sketches. There are reasons, of course - there always are. Last year I didn't have a job. Last year I wasn't breaking in a new computer. Last year I had a bit more lead time. Last year the sky was a quarter of a shade more blue. I know the bottom line, of course: I'm still afraid to screw up, so I just avoid starting things. And every day I avoid starting it is one less day to get it done.

Time isn't just getting away from Grandpa. It's getting away from everyone, every day, whether we use it or not. I need to stop thinking in terms of whether the end result will be worth the time and effort. I need to remember what it's all really about: the joy of creation. And I need to start now.

Wasting Time Faster Than Ever Before

Oooohh, this is a nice machine...

Granted, I'm coming to the duo-core world off a Pentium III 800, but still... this is a nice machine. It boots in half the time (or less) as my old computer. It loads and runs like a dream. A good dream, I mean, not the bad kind... or even the surreal, nonlinear normal kind. It even looks cool - the case is black, with a flip-up panel on front for USB ports (I have 4 in the back, but it's nice to have 2 in the front for things I don't need plugged in all the time, like my camera) and little blue lights that flash when the hard drive's thinking. So far, I've been busily recluttering the empty hard drive with old vices and new ones. A few stand out in the crowd thus far, and I haven't finished loading junk yet...

First up, of course, is Bryce 5.5. I had hoped (rather naively, I know) for a relatively easy transition from Paint Shop Pro-type 2D graphics programs to the 3D world. I'd tinkered with the free program Terragen, a terrain rendering program capable of great things but which I usually just poked around at until I got something I thought looked cool (for me, that bar's rather low.) Lots of strange little panels that made no sense to me, but if I punched enough buttons and tweaked enough settings I could come up with something cool, if utterly random so far as I was concerned. As one might expect, real 3D isn't exactly that easy. Unfortunately, several online searches have turned up no supplemental documentation for Bryce 5.5, not even a stray tutorial page. The official site's moved on to Bryce 6, and most forums seem to linger on Bryce 5 (I read enough to know that there are apparently significant differences between 5 and 5.5, thanks to a post by one poor person who was told, most unhelpfully, that they should learn to use it on their own and write their own tutorials, ha ha)... on a level far above my newbie head. I found one Bryce 5 book on Amazon, but 9 out of 10 reviews were one star or less. I skimmed them hoping to find a better recommendation, but I found none. It seems that nobody wants to write about the program, even though I've heard about it before and was given to understand that Bryce was a relatively big player in the 3D graphics world. Fortunately, it came with a PDF manual. A big manual. A 500+-page manual where the table of contents alone spans 20 pages, outlining the contents of over 100 chapters. So, I've made it my personal mission to get through that thing and teach myself at least how to get by in Bryce 5.5, if only to hack off the kinds of people who post on 3D graphics message boards and berate newcomers with nonadvice and scorn. My goal is at least one chapter every two days, but that may slow down if/when I reach the point where I can actually start creating things on my own.

Another unexpected addiction came in the form of a cheap jewel-case game from the office store. Now, it's not entirely my fault. My sister and I found a jewel-case copy of a game my mother had once had and lost, and the display said that if we bought two other games we'd get the third three. Considering how Mom has a way of backhanding us (not literally) for attempts to do nice things (case in point: the reason she lost the game, she'll tell anyone who will listen, is that we evilly replaced her dying, crash-prone computer with my sister's older-but-still-newer-and-faster-and-far-more-reliable computer, which was built for gaming and runs beautifully but which she'll never forgive us for giving her), we didn't want to spend a dime more than we had to. So, you see, I had to buy a couple cheap games... One of them was Heroes of Might and Magic IV. I'd heard the name, and it looked fun in a timekilling sort of way. It turns out to be a remarkably complex and addictive game, a cross between the kingdom sim Majesty and RPG games. I suspect I'd be doing much better if I'd sit down and print out the whole manual (on PDF again - whatever happened to the days when the manual design and text was part of the setup for the game, when reading the manual at least once through was a time-honored ritual before one dared put the disk into the drive?), but my ink and paper supply are currently reserved for the Bryce manual.

Then, there's The Sims 2. Now, the first sims was addictive enough. Blame my sister for roping me into that one... and this one, too. I've watched her play enough to realize that this game is much, much, much more potentially addictive than the first one. See, you only need the latest expansion pack to actually play the game, so she's generously/evilly offered to let me use her old disks to "get started," and then I'll just buy my own Seasons expansion when I'm ready for that. (Little tip: each successive pack messed up the original "scenarios" described in the Prima manuals, so it's advisable to play through those parts before installing the latest expansion pack.) Now, when my sister gives me a game, it's never just the game. When I got roped into the original Sims, I was presented with several burned CDs of downloaded content, tweaks, and hacks, plus a full printout of where each file went and how/when/why to install them. She doesn't just download everything, either - she only downloads the stuff that works, the stuff that's made by people who know what they're doing, the stuff that won't overwrite vital game files or crash the system. Same thing with Zoo Tycoon. I've seen her typing up lists again... I wonder what she's burning off this time...

I'm still waiting to install a few other games, and I haven't finished reloading all the favorites from the past. Heck, I haven't even reintroduced my reloaded FrontPage 2000 to the websites it will be helping perpetuate, nor has the reloaded version of Word been properly acquainted with the stories it will someday bear partial blame for producing. I've been too busy wasting time at the speed of light, or at least the speed of a duo-core Pentium processor.