rage_against_the_machines epitome of incomprehensibility My laptop keyboard showed this problem shortly before I left for England, when I was blathing_from_an_airport: the keys w, e, and r would randomly stop working. Same as the tab key on the left (but not the q in between, oddly). e and r are extremely common letters. w less so, but try writing a word that starts with "w" without that first letter. Will autocorrect get what you mean? Not usually. Sunset_on_glastonbury_tor took about two hours to write. Okay. I'm pretty slow anyway. But that's about twice as long as something like that would ordinarily take. ... I'd been taking pictures fairly often, but I didn't when David and I were walking from the train station to the theatre in London on Monday. That was itself an adventure, because we weren't staying in the city overnight and there was nowhere to store our baggage that wasn't prohibitively expensive, so we had to drag it along. With all this luggage-dragging, I didn't want to bother to take out my cell phone out just to click images into existence, even though we were going by Buckingham Palace Road, past Trafalgar Square. I could take pictures later, I figured. But that was not to be. Not only couldn't the theatre check our bags until an hour before the play started, but the phone insisted Android was installing something and wouldn't go to the main screen. (Gah, this is still taking a long time. I'll try to finish this later. There are other things I want to write.) I got into London on Sunday, I noticed that my phone wasn't starting. It kept saying it 220625 ... e_o_i (aaaaand last part not edited out) 220625 ... e_o_i I got into London on Monday, not Sunday, too. (incidentally the above was a sentence without e, r, or w) 220625 ... e_o_i cont'd: So I didn't get any pictures from London or the last full day in Oxford. As for the phone, David googled how to fix it, and a way to force a restart (on an Android) is to hold the side buttons down for a few seconds. It would restart, but then get stuck on the loading screen or the Samsung screen again. 220627 ... e_o_i On Saturday I took the computer and phone to a repair shop, to a guy Dad knows in NDG who sells things for fairly cheap. The phone he managed to revive, though at a price: total system reset, all my contacts and all my photos I didn't save on my computer wiped out. So no photo record of me being in Salisbury or of seeing Stonehenge. I'm aware Stonehenge has been photographed multiple times. But there was something special in capturing a moment when two crows both alighted on high points of those rock slabs. As for the keyboard, the store owner also blasted the upper-left-hand side of the keyboard with compressed air to see if cleaning the keys would help. He pried off the "w" key and couldn't put it back in. To apologize, he sold me an external keyboard for $5 instead of his usual $20. Today I went back, since that keyboard didn't work. He didn't want to make me pay for the new one but I gave him $20 for his time. There was the option to buy another machine, a sturdy little Lenovo, but a $400 decision seemed too big at the time, and I suffered from prejudice that it was uncool, that its sound wasn't as good as my Acer (and maybe not, but for online tutoring, headphones will mean the sound differences are negligable). Acer sometimes has a reputation for fall-apart-ability, but aside from the cord wearing out quickly (I bought a sturdy replacement from the same person four years ago), mine hasn't had many issues. Except now this. I'm writing with my new old keyboard. It's almost larger than my laptop surface, so it's in front of me while the laptop sits at a remove. Unfortunately, the space bar sticks. I kind of like the fact that the keys make noise - it makes me feel like writing is accomplishing something - but the set-up is too bulky to lug around, to put on tables in coffee shops. (If I use just the one machine, I can type the malfunctioning three letters on an internal keyboard, but it's laborious. I could go for the Lenovo, but I'd still use this system too, and some instinct cautions against that for me right now: too many objects to handle, much of an overload on the ADHD mind. I have to work around my own imperfect systems.) Anyway, I'm glad that it works. In the process, it shifted my image of the NDP repair guy from "guru who can fix everything" to "generally smart/nice person who can talk too much and forget to check things, and who doesn't magically have spare headphones on sale just because a certain puppy chewed the cord to mine." Which is fair. 220630 ... e_o_i Pah at that "to put on tables in coffee shops" as if I regularly write in coffee shops. It's usually Dorval Library, sometimes other libraries, less often the tea place Cha Noir if I feel fancy, and a couple of times Starbucks (the most coffee-ish, but not all that exciting). 220630 ... raze my thirteen-year-old acer has become a real jerk in its old age (i only use it for editing videos now, because i can't rely on it for much else), but not like that. i'm so sorry you lost those pictures you took with your phone, too. if it's any consolation, i know anything you might write about your memories of being in those places would be beautiful and evocative. just that one sentence about those crows is a painting. i know it's not the same as having a visual record of what you saw. but words have a sneaky way of bringing back some of what's been lost. and your words are strong enough to spin whole films out of remembered moments. 220701 ... e_o_i Apparently the whole Rogers cell phone network isn't working! Also, Concordia University is miserly with its WiFi. All that conspired to make me miss my online tutoring class today. This wouldn't have been a problem if I'd stayed home, but I went to the tutoring centre office downtown because I was supposed to do one or two phone interviews after my class. The door was locked - no one there - and I didn't have the new door code. I also couldn't call my boss. The phone blipped its lack of connection. So I hurried over to Concordia, just 5 minutes away, so I could connect to the online class. The WiFi wasn't working. At first I was afraid it was my computer. But after some frustrating conversations with security and library and IT staff, it turned out that only students who have classes THIS term (the summer term) can connect to the university WiFi. Oh, and also that some phones were having connection problems "all across Quebec and even in Ontario." Then I wandered into some sort of "tech sandbox" / meeting room downstairs, where a few people were having lunch, and asked, "I'm sorry - this is random - but I'm a student here and I'm wondering whether you have any WiFi I can connect to?" But it was also a university-affiliated one. It connected on my phone - briefly - but not on my laptop. I was only able to email my student and apologize for not being there. Finally, I got the idea to find a payphone and call my boss B., who gave me the door code to the office and got there himself soon after. I'm here now, but since I was an hour and a half late for the session, the student wasn't there (probably she has a Rogers phone, since it isn't working either). ...Okay, I have to go, because it turns out I have to do the phone interviews via Whereby. (WHEREBY it is resolved that I'd rather skip off to Cha Noir and write, but anyway.) 220708 ... epitome of incomprehensibility I did get half an hour in the tea shop, writing! The debit machine wasn't working, though, so I couldn't have a scone with my tea. "People who can afford scones" problems, yup. Anyway, I am thankful for the writing time, and that my boss didn't get upset even though I could have called him earlier. Hopefully the student will understand and want to reschedule the class rather than going "I WANT A REFUND!" (because she would benefit from another class, not just because I want more scone-purchasing money). 220708 what's it to you? who go blather from