The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
The crime:
The culprit:
Sigh.
Luckily, I have a surplus of USB-C cords for just such an occasion.
(Not that anyone asked, but my favorite brand for such items is Anker. I have several of their bluetooth speakers, their bluetooth earbuds, two of their portable chargers, and a whole bunch of their cords.)
You know how Germans always have the best words? The nice long words that they seem to make up on the spot, words specifically tailored to capture a hyper-specific feeling? I wonder if they have one yet for “That feeling I get when I encounter something that everybody thinks is brilliant but which I think is full of shit.” Case in point: comedian Louis C.K.’s almost instantly-legendary rant against smartphones. This thing lit up the Internet over the weekend; everybody was linking it, and one person I know cited that in her epiphanic decision to downgrade from an iPhone to a dumbphone. But when I heard the rant, I thought, “That guy is ridiculously full of crap”.
And I say that as someone who (a) has enjoyed Louis C.K.’s work in the past, and (b) who does not own a smartphone. So I don’t exactly have a dog in this fight, and in some ways, I’m a bit sympathetic. I’ve noticed that people spend an awful lot of time staring at their phones, absolutely. But are they really? Is that an accurate snapshot? As I write this, I’m sitting in Panera Bread. The dining room is mostly full; families, couples, and single parties abound. And off all the people in this room right now, guess how many people are looking at a glowing screen? Exactly one. Me. And I’m writing.
And you know what else? It’s not hurting my engagement with the world. I’m not shutting things out. A little girl at the table next to mine knocked over her drink, and I noticed enough to pass over a few extra napkins I had. I see another girl, an employee on break, using her smartphone. She’s not staring at it as she texts, though. She’s talking into it. Like a phone. While she does her homework, with a pencil.
When I see lots of folks looking at their phones, what are they doing? Are they really staring at it for long lengths of time? Stopping to think of it, I have to admit…not really. Most take them out, glance at them, and if they do anything at all, it’s to tap out a quick text and then put the thing away. Yes, I have seen folks who take it too far. I’ve seen guys who go into the restroom and text away with one hand while they use their other to…well, handle administrative details pertaining to urinal usage. (Ahem.) I’ll be blunt here: I ever find out that anyone texts me from the bathroom, I’m blocking their number. Or something.
Frankly, what I see people do the most with their smartphones is keep them in their back pockets, pulled up just far enough so that one corner sticks out, visible. Phone as fashion accessory. Well, why not? That’s why we have expensive wristwatches, and I remember an outfit from which I bought fountain pens back in the day marketing them as “jewelry for men”.
But back to Louis C.K.’s rant, which strikes me as just another version of the “Isn’t it awful what the kids are doing these days” thing, albeit more poetically delivered. But much of it is deeply, deeply misguided and/or silly. And that’s after it starts off with him saying something that stopped me in my tracks and made me actively hostile to whatever else was to come in his argument.
I think these things are toxic, especially for kids…they don’t look at people when they talk to them and they don’t build empathy. You know, kids are mean, and it’s ’cause they’re trying it out. They look at a kid and they go, ‘you’re fat,’ and then they see the kid’s face scrunch up and they go, ‘oh, that doesn’t feel good to make a person do that.’ But they got to start with doing the mean thing. But when they write ‘you’re fat,’ then they just go, ‘mmm, that was fun, I like that.’
Now, let’s break that down a little bit. To start with, “Kids don’t look people in the eye when they talk” is not a new complaint. Not by any stretch of imagination. I heard that all the time when I was a kid, and that was in the 1970s and 1980s. “Look at me when I’m talking to you!” is an admonition that is as old as the hills, predating cell-phone use by…well, I’ll bet they were saying this in Ancient Egypt.
But then there’s the bit about kids “experimenting” with being mean, and his notion that when they see how much it hurts a kid’s feelings when they call them fat, they’ll realize they don’t feel good or something.
Bullshit.
I have to wonder if LouisCK ever actually knew any other kids, or if he ever saw any bullies at work, because I remember being a kid, and I remember that even as the kid who was often on the receiving end of the bullying, if I managed to say something to someone else and saw hurt in their eyes, I wasn’t thinking, “Oooh, that didn’t feel good.” What I actually felt was, “Ooooh, that hurt him! I’ve got me a weapon!” And remember, I was the fat kid getting picked on a lot. How do you think the normal kids responded? Or the actual bullies? Seeing the hurt in someone’s eye when you say “You’re fat” is, for a kid, not a bug. It’s a feature. The actual reaction is, “Now we got ourselves a show.”
LouisCK is completely full of crap on this point, totally and utterly. It’s not a good start. But he keeps going:
You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That’s what the phones are taking away, is the ability to just sit there. That’s being a person. Because underneath everything in your life there is that thing, that empty—forever empty. That knowledge that it’s all for nothing and that you’re alone. It’s down there.
And sometimes when things clear away, you’re not watching anything, you’re in your car, and you start going, ‘oh no, here it comes. That I’m alone.’ It’s starts to visit on you. Just this sadness. Life is tremendously sad, just by being in it…
That’s why we text and drive. I look around, pretty much 100 percent of the people driving are texting. And they’re killing, everybody’s murdering each other with their cars. But people are willing to risk taking a life and ruining their own because they don’t want to be alone for a second because it’s so hard.
No. No, no, no, no, no.
First of all: why do we need this ability to just sit and do nothing? What’s so great about sitting and doing nothing? Where’s the virtue in that? And how is it desirable? Standing in line at the DMV, waiting at a doctor’s office, whatever – are we supposed to lament the fact that we’ve somehow lost the ‘Zen’ of such things? Well, I’m not sure there was ever that much ‘Zen’ there to begin with. Standing in line, just being there, just being “a person”…was boring. It was a waste of time. Now, I’m a bit less prone to boredom in such circumstances because I can always kick my Writing Brain into gear and start working internally on some stories. But I do that anyway, and I suspect a lot of people do, too.
More importantly, though, how is that being “a real person”? This seems to me just another example of the notion that online interactions aren’t real, that only physical world interactions are worth anything at all. I’ve long rejected this notion. You know what? If and when I become a published author, it will be with the help of an awful lot of people I’ve never met. Real people.
Which is why I think the rest of LouisCK’s bit here is just a bunch of goofy existential twaddle. Ultimately we’re alone? Meh, not really. And we’re using our phones as a way of pushing away that loneliness? Meh, not really. People aren’t texting and driving because they’re afraid of being alone. They’re doing it because they aren’t rationally and realistically appraising their abilities to do two tasks at the same time, both of which are complex tasks that only seem simple. There’s no need to appeal to Sartre here. People text and drive not because they’re trying to push away the intrinsic loneliness of life. They text and drive because they are idiots.
And then he tops it off with some more stupidity:
And I go, ‘oh, I’m getting sad, gotta get the phone and write “hi” to like 50 people’…then I said, ‘you know what, don’t. Just be sad. Just let the sadness, stand in the way of it, and let it hit you like a truck.’
And I let it come, and I just started to feel ‘oh my God,’and I pulled over and I just cried like a bitch. I cried so much. And it was beautiful. Sadness is poetic. You’re lucky to live sad moments.
And then I had happy feelings. Because when you let yourself feel sad, your body has antibodies, it has happiness that comes rushing in to meet the sadness. So I was grateful to feel sad, and then I met it with true, profound happiness. It was such a trip.
The thing is, because we don’t want that first bit of sad, we push it away with a little phone or a jack-off or the food. You never feel completely sad or completely happy, you just feel kinda satisfied with your product, and then you die. So that’s why I don’t want to get a phone for my kids.
Again: No. No, no, no, no, no.
This is another sentiment that’s been around forever: that people aren’t allowing themselves to really feel what they feel, that they avoid high flights of emotion, et cetera. Again, we don’t need to drag smartphones into this at all: many people are uncomfortable with those high flights of emotion. LouisCK is doing nothing more than taking old complaints and using them as a cudgel against something he doesn’t like, all by itself.
And besides, who is posting or tweeting or texting everything? Really, who is doing this? There are people who post more than we would, but that’s no the same thing as posting everything. This distinction seems lost on Louis, but even if not, so what? If someone posts that a certain song made them feel a certain intense feeling or set of feelings, you know what? I frakking love that. I do. I think it’s awesome. If someone shares with me something that gives them a feeling of some kind of passionate level, that’s great. It gives me an insight into them, and it helps me to find things that may create similar feelings in myself.
Sharing is not bad. I like sharing. I don’t share everything. Some folks share more. Others share less. And I know people who share a lot more than I would ever feel comfortable sharing, but that is, again, not a bug but rather a feature, because that’s the only way I ever get to know what is to feel certain things. When we complain about “Those people sharing everything on Facebook!”, it seems to me that what we’re really complaining about is “Those people who are sharing an awful lot of stuff on Facebook that I do not personally find interesting!” Which is, of course, a different thing entirely.
We are obviously more connected now than ever before. But I am not one bit convinced that this means we are more distracted now than ever before. Believe me, I have always had great ways of wasting time. In fact, I remember teachers occasionally castigating me for daydreaming. Which means I was just doing the simple act of sitting there, doing nothing, staring into space, not much paying attention to anything at all. That’s was LouisCK wants back. The wheel does turn, doesn’t it?
Finally, I also wonder if part of this isn’t born of my general sense – and here I’m mainly talking off the top of my head, with no real well-considered evidence to support it – that, aided by technology, a world which has been long-dominated by extroverted people is starting to tilt in the direction of the introverts, and that is making an awful lot of extroverted people really uncomfortable. But that’s a post for another day.
Roger wrote a post the other day about technology stuff, in which he name-checked me:
I don’t know what kind of typist Jaquandor is, but I’m sure that he is appreciating editing the text of his book or two, including Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title), on a word processor, rather than retyping every draft.
In his post, he is addressing the question of what technology he finds the most indispensable, and which he wishes would go away for good. Those are interesting questions, but his citing of me as an example of what’s cool about the development of the word processor is interesting to me.
First of all, there’s an implied question there: Just how good a typist am I, anyway? I’ve once in a while done an online typing test, just out of curiosity, but I haven’t done one in a long time, so let’s find out. When I Google ‘typing test’, I find that there’s a site called TypingTest.com. Isn’t that helpful! So wait here while I go there and test myself. I’m choosing the following test options: English, 1 minute, and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. OK? So hold on a minute….
[hum theme to Simon and Simon to yourself]
OK, we’re back. I was able to type 71 words in the one minute, and that’s with backspacing and correcting my errors as I went. I have never been a ‘fix the spelling later’ person, and I can almost always tell when I’ve mistyped something as I’m going — it’s like my fingers send a signal to my brain saying, “Whoa there, back up, we made a bit of a cock-up there.” So, I suppose that means I’m a passably-decent typist. Of course, I’ve known this for years; I have had many a person at various jobs marvel at how quickly I can dance my fingers across the keyboard. Yay, me!
Oddly, though, I am not an ‘official’ touch-typist, in that I never once took a keyboarding class in school of any kind. I have never been taught the business where you put your index fingers on the F and the J and use all four primary fingers to do the typing. In fact, now that I’m paying attention, I don’t think that either of my pinkies ever once touch the keys of any keyboard I use; instead, both just kind of ‘dangle’ up there in space, not doing much of anything. Frankly, I’ve never understood the utility of the ‘official’ method of typing or why it was taught in school, and I’m fairly certain that were I to try to force myself to learn it now, it would screw me up something awful. Kind of like how, in second grade, I ended up in a school that taught penmanship in a different manner than my first grade school had, and in my efforts to adapt, my handwriting turned to complete drivel for quite some time. (In first grade, we’d learned italics. In second, I was in a ‘balls-and-sticks’ school. That sucked for a while, until cursive came along and I was suddenly using a lot of what I’d already learned in first grade with the italics! Hmmmmm….)
Typing fast is a useful skill, but I struggled with it in my fiction writing for years, because I always had a terrific problem with my fingers being able to type faster than my brain could produce sentences to type. This tended to result in some spectacularly awkward prose when I would type my rough drafts, and I must admit that I’m still seeing evidence of that now, as I work my way through Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title), which is the first book-length manuscript I have typed in its entirety.
So, how did I learn to type so fast? By, well, typing a lot. Lots and lots, over the years. A whole lot of typing. Not just in the course of writing something like Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title), but in writing e-mails. Writing stuff for work in various jobs. Playing text-based computer adventure games. Writing lots of papers for the many writing-intensive courses I took in college. Writing research papers in high school. And, going back even farther, to typing on a typewriter.
We had two typewriters, if I remember correctly. One was an electric typewriter that I wasn’t really allowed to use; the other was a mechanical device in a shade of green that I would later see on our first Volkswagen Rabbit, and never again since. I got curious, so I Googled the words ‘green typewriter’, just to see if I could find out what that old typewriter was, and I believe I’ve found it:
I have zero recollection of the make and model of that green old warhorse of a typewriter, but this really looks like the one. I’d bang away on that thing for long whacks of time. I loved typing on that thing, even when I screwed up and had to deal with it by backing over my mistake and covering it with X’s. I loved the mechanical way it worked: you strike a key and one lever moves another lever which in turn causes an arm with a metal striker in the shape of whatever letter you wanted to swing up and smack the ribbon against the surface of the paper, causing an ink transfer in the shape of the letter you wanted. How cool was that! But, if you got typing too fast, you might hit two keys at once, and then both arms would swing up and try to strike the ribbon at the same time. This resulted in a jam.
I loved the bell that warned you that you were nearing the right-hand margin, and I loved that metal arm that you stuck up from the back of the machine to prop up your workpiece. There was just something awfully pleasing about the constant CLACK CLACK CLACKITY CLACK of that typewriter. I would use a number of electric typewriters after that, in various jobs and schools, but no electric typewriter — which used signals from the keys to make a motor strike a globe with the letters on it strike the ribbon — ever had that same physical appeal.
The typewriter had the same basic idea going on as the piano, and with that as your model, I suppose one could paraphrase the old joke about piano playing: Writing a good story with a typewriter is really very easy. You just have to hit the keys in the right order. I had a music professor in college tell me that playing the piano was terribly easy, as all you had to do was strike the keys in the right order, and the piano made the music for you. Heh.
What kind of things did I type? Well, I remember for a while I glommed onto the notion of Star Wars fan fiction, so I had some proto-adventures of Han Solo. At this time I was watching a lot of Star Trek, so I had Han commanding a starship with Chewbacca as his science officer. No, I do not have any copies of this stuff. Earlier than that, I recall a fascination with the Declaration of Independence, so I typed it out, drawing the text from an Information Please! almanac I owned. Why the Declaration? Who knows. And I didn’t really understand the thing. Original fiction? There was some of that, too. I recall chronicling the adventures of a superhero cat named Little Bootie, who flew around in a suit with a big letter K on the front of it. Why was he named Little Bootie? Hell if I know. Why the letter K on his super suit, which had nothing to do with him? Hell if I know. No, I don’t have any copies of those, either. In truth, I don’t think I’ve thought about Little Bootie since second grade, until Roger’s post set me to remembering.
So, yeah. Thanks for that, Rog!
I guess the question now would be, do I miss that old green typewriter? In all honesty, I do not. Being able to cut and paste, to move blocks of text around easily, and to be able to quickly search the text when looking up little details — these are all benefits that are too great for me to want to go back to the clackity-clacking. In editing Princesses, I decided to change one character’s name to something completely different; a decent word processor makes this change take all of five seconds. (Hell, even a crappy word processor makes this change quickly.) If I ever saw one of those old green typewriters someplace for sale, maybe at the Antique Mall, I might well buy it, especially if the price is right, just as a display piece. But I would never go back to it as a primary writing tool.
And what is my current primary writing tool? Here it is:
About the only drawback to this particular computer over my last one is the touchpad. I like touchpads, but this one is larger than the last one, and its shifted slightly to the right. In practice, this means that it falls directly beneath the ball of my thumb on my right hand as I type, which can result in me inadvertently moving my cursor to someplace else, as I’m typing. I’ve solved this by using the wireless mouse I’ve owned since I bought the last laptop, so that’s an easy fix. (Oh, and the touchpad doesn’t seem to scroll at all, which I found odd.)
By way of writing software, I’m a faithful user of OpenOffice (because it’s free, not because I have some desire to stick it to Microsoft), and an occasional user of Google Docs. I have Google Drive set up on my computer, and I make a number of regular backups to external drives. I’ve never even looked at this Scrivener thing I’ve heard tell about. Not sure I want to, either.
I do get a bit nervous when I read articles in tech publications touting the impending death of the PC and the rise of the tablet and smartphone as ‘gizmos that do it all’ for the future. Try as I might, I can’t get used to typing on my tablet’s touchscreen. Yes, I only have a seven-inch tablet, but I don’t want anything bigger, and the complete lack of tactile feedback is deeply off-putting, as is the fact that the touch-keyboard’s size makes using both of my hands the way I want to impractical, which in turn means that my tactile ability to trap typos as they happen is severely compromised. Sure, I could get a USB keyboard, I suppose, but then…why not just use a more powerful laptop? No, I think that I will be giving up on laptops only at the bitterest of bitter ends. That is the ground on which I shall make my stand.
Until, that is, they make a gizmo that can plug into my brain and transcribe the stories as I think them. As Keanu says: Whoa….
I’ve been resisting the whole e-reader thing for quite some time, but I have now weakened.
Then, for Christmas, I bought The Wife a Kindle Fire, which she still uses every single day. It’s a great gadget, and I knew that the writing was on the wall. I decided finally that I wanted some kind of similar gizmo; the only questions were when I’d be able to afford one and which one I’d get.
I had no desire for an iPad, for both reasons of price and because I just don’t want to become an Apple cultist. I also did not want a ten-inch tablet, because I find seven inches to be the preferable size for my hand. I was impressed with the Kindle Fire, but I didn’t really want to be locked into the Amazon way of doing things, and I didn’t really like how that device has no provisions for adding storage via a Micro-SD card. For similar reasons I didn’t want a Nook Tablet. So, in doing my homework, I settled on the Samsung Galaxy 2 Tab. After saving up my money for a bit, I finally had enough to buy the thing…and it’s been mine for about a month now.
And it is fantastic. I love it.
My main reason for buying it was to have my first e-reader, and for that, it’s a terrific device. It came preloaded with a Kindle app, so I can use the Kindle store for e-books without actually owning an Amazon device. I also added another e-reader app for other formats; this I use for things like Project Gutenberg downloads (such as my unabridged The Count of Monte Cristo, through which I am now making slow progress).
The tab is also great for things like Facebook and Twitter, except that I cannot seem to share items on Facebook — the ‘share’ button isn’t even there. That’s weird. And I haven’t yet figured out things like cutting-and-pasting text and URLs, so I still have that to do. I also added a comics-reading app, because reading comics on the tablet is something I wanted to try. How do comics render? Well, I had to try a couple of different comics viewers before I got to the one I like the best currently (which is called ‘Perfect Viewer’). Yes, reading comics on a screen this size is a bit tough, but I liken it to reading digest-sized comics when I was a kid.
I also love the tab as an audio device. I’ve put a lot of music on it (I added a 32GB card as soon as I bought it), and I can also stream on it from radio stations on the Web, so it’s great for listening to music and stuff when I’m working on something else, like editing a manuscript.
I have little notion of using this device for writing. The onscreen keyboard works well, but I find that I have a habit of hitting the ‘M’ key instead of the space bar, and going back to fix errors isn’t the easiest thing in the world. The thing that bugs me the most about this device? There’s a touchscreen icon at the bottom for taking a screenshot. The way I tend to hold the device, I find it hard to always avoid hitting that icon and taking a screengrab.
It’s kind of frustrating right now in the tech world for people like me. I’m innately inclined to buy a gadget and then use it until it dies, and the longer that is, the better. This is increasingly unrealistic, as newer and better gizmos hit the market all the time. I know people who buy the new thing and ditch it less than a year later when the new thing comes out; I know folks who upgrade their phones every few months. I have no idea how long I’ll be using this tablet. I hope it’s a while, though.
I’ve been a subscriber to WIRED for years — I know I started in the late 90s, at least. I’ve always been a big fan of the magazine. As a subscriber back in 1999 or thereabouts, I got a little package in the mail one day. It contained one of these:
This is a gizmo that they called a “CueCat”. It wasn’t invented by WIRED, but they distributed them. You plugged it into your computer, and the CueCat (get it? A ‘cat’ to go with your ‘mouse’?) is then a barcode scanner. The idea was that you’d be reading a magazine or some other publication, come across a special barcode, scan it with your CueCat, and then your computer would launch a special website only activated by that barcode.
It was a pretty goofy idea, really — who was reading magazines and scanning barcodes? The notion never got off the ground, and the CueCat has been synonymous with “idiotic tech idea” ever since.
But now…the newest thing is using one’s smartphone to scan a barcode-looking emblem on a product or advertisement, in order to launch the smartphone’s browser and bring up a special website accessible only in this manner.
So the CueCat was a good idea that was waiting for wireless smartphones. Every idea comes back, sooner or later!
My mother just stopped by with her Mac laptop to ask my help with something, and after an hour or so of futzing around and Googling, I couldn’t figure out the solution. Maybe one of you can offer some guidance!
The problem: there is a webcam from Hawaii that she likes to have up when she’s online. (Specifically, this one — apparently that’s the beach she and my father stayed on when they vacationed there last.) At some point recently, though, the webcam has stopped working. No image loads, no nothing. (The webcam does work on my computer, though, which gave me temptation to be able to say to a Mac user, “Get a PC!” Those types of situations almost never present themselves…and when one does, I can’t go for it because, you know, it’s my mom.)
Anyway, below the webcam window is a link to a Windows Media Player plug-in that you’re supposed to install if the thing isn’t working. So I go through the proper steps to run said plug-in — specifically, this plug-in — but when I restart Safari, still nothing on the web-cam. I restart the Mac, and still, no web-cam.
So I start tinkering around, and in the settings for said plug-in, I find an option that says something like “Use this plug-in for Windows Media Player content”. However, that option was grayed out, so I could neither check nor uncheck its box. Googling a bit more, I find that apparently when Safari is running in 64-bit mode, it can adversely affect the functionality of certain media-related plug-ins. A-ha!, thinks I, as I then look up how to set Safari to run in 32-bit mode instead of 64-bit mode. It turns out that there’s a simple way to do this: you access certain settings for Safari in the “Finder” thing, and then just check the box that says “Run Safari in 32-bit mode”. Only problem?
No such box exists on my mother’s computer. As far as I can tell, her version of Safari will only run in 64-bit mode. No other option is available. So, I’m stymied and unable to get her web-cam to show her pretty pictures of a beach in Hawaii. Anybody out there got any suggestions?
(And Justin Long said that things just sorta work on Macs. Yeah, right!)
On the way home from work today I was listening to the local Sports Talk radio station, and they were doing a brief bit with former Buffalo Sabre Rob Ray, who talks on the station on days when the Buffalo Sabres play. At one point, the conversation turns to athletes and their use of Twitter, and one of the hosts asked Ray if he had any plans to start a Twitter account.
Ray’s response was along the line of this: “No way, man! My phone is ancient and you can barely text with it! How am I gonna do Twitter?”
And I’m thinking, Geez, the cell phone has become so dominant in our culture that we forget that there are things called computers?
Every so often I read articles either online or in magazines like WIRED which predict the demise of the PC, the laptop, and pretty much anything bigger than an iPad. I’m clearly no Luddite, but I like my laptop and I have no desire for something like an iPad, which I’m pretty sure would be a pain-in-the-ass to write with. I want a full keyboard, a screen that’s at least 15 inches, and I’m not impressed with something that’s super-super thin.
Come to that, I’m not sure I like anything in which thin-ness is touted as a highly desirable quality. Super-thin pizza? Meh. Thin models are ugly models. Thin computers? Do not want.
Yeah. Give the fat tools, please. Give me your big, your bulky, your heavy masses yearning to generate lots of lap heat!
Well, the Tech Gods decided to suck up as much of my time as they could muster this weekend. Damn you, Tech Gods!
It began with the arrival of a trojan on the Main Computer here at Casa Jaquandor. (If my laptop is a tricorder, the Main Computer is the one that speaks to me in the dulcet tones of Majel Barrett.) This damnable thing — called “Security Tool” — is one of those trojans that takes the form of a fake security program, so it all of a sudden started popping up all over the place, giving me false “warnings” and refusing to allow me to run anything. After updating MalwareBytes and downloading something called SuperAntiSpyware and running both several times whilst in Safe Mode, “Security Tool” was still there. So I finally decided to simply pull the trigger on something I’d been meaning to do anyway: re-install Windows.
So, I re-installed Windows. Luckily, I keep things religiously backed up in a number of different places, so there’s no actual data loss associated with this other than Firefox bookmarks and The Daughter’s games, which can be re-downloaded and such. This, of course, did accomplish the task of ridding the computer of “Security Tool”. It did not, however, have the other hoped-for effect of restoring functionality to that computer’s CD/DVD drive. Thus I decided to start poking about inside the computer itself, wondering if possibly I screwed something up when I replaced this computer’s power supply last year.
Well, what I found was kind of odd, and I don’t know how to explain it, really. What’s been happening is that as far as the computer’s concerned, that drive doesn’t even exist. Not only will it not open or close to accept discs, when I open the Device Manager in XP, it doesn’t even show a CD/DVD drive there at all. So updating drivers wasn’t an option, as the computer believes there is no device there to have drivers for. But when I was poking about, I noted the drive’s SATA connections: one cord from the power supply, and one connecting it to the motherboard. I unplugged each one, wondering if the connections were loose somehow, and when I had the combination of the power supply cord being plugged into the drive but not the data cord, the drive made a couple of whirring noises. And sure enough, the drive worked — in the sense of having power, opening and closing and the little light flashing — while just the power supply cable was plugged in. As soon as I connected the data cord, however, nothing. Dead as old Marley.
So, what to do? Something funky with the connector? Something funky with the cable? Something funky with the motherboard’s connector? I decided to test that last, which was the only one I actually could test readily. I unplugged the data cord from the SATA plug it had presumably resided in since the computer was built, and plugged it into another.
And wouldn’t you know it: now the drive works. Kinda sorta. It doesn’t seem to recognize and play CDs, but it does recognize and activate CD-ROMS and DVDs. Very odd. (I only tried a single CD, so maybe it just doesn’t like that particular disc. Who knows…but I almost never use that computer for playing or ripping CDs, anyway; I do that on the laptop, which is working just fine.)
So, for the most part, the Main Library Computer is back on line and functioning normally. (Maybe even better for right now, until we start filling it up with crap again.) I just wish it hadn’t sucked up the better part of my Sunday to do it…but at least for once, I was able to do some computer work without having to go drop money at Best Buy on new parts. (Although I almost said “The hell with the drive” and went to pick up a USB optical drive. Thank God I decided to check the connections before I went that route!)
I’ve just discovered a cool feature in Chrome: if you do a “Find Text” search on a web page (using Ctrl-F), as you type the search text into the box, Chrome puts little markers in the scroll bar to indicate all the spots in the page where that text occurs. That’s neat! Thanks, Chrome!
