How I spent my Thanksgiving vacation

The week of this Thanksgiving I visited my family up in Long Island. It happened to be the final week of NaNoWriMo (or ShoStoWriMo, in my case), with me planning on busing back to Maryland on the 30th, meaning I would have to either hit 50,000 words a day early (unlikely) or cross the finish line in transit. I would be getting home so late that trying to get in a day's writing after I arrived would surely tempt the wrath of the muses, and possibly defy logistics outright.

The day before I left--a day which I had earmarked for a long push in an involved freelance project--my laptop began acting sickly, clicking and stalling and generally toying with the idea of becoming a brick. I was able to do some necessary work in Safe Mode, and then I spent my first day with my parents like this:

I didn't intend this picture to be a selfie when I took it, but there I am. As might be gathered, I was not feeling too great myself at the moment, a heating pad wrapped around my neck like a brace. The bus ride up north was pretty nice as these things went, but it had left me pretty sore and I probably had a cold too.

What my computer is doing in this picture is mostly magic to me, but I did find a way to conceptualize what I think it was doing and explain it to my parents:

Inside my computer lives a cloistered monk, in the medieval style. He sits at his table with a quill and ink, and a massive tome containing all the information on my computer. When I ask my computer to do anything, this monk finds the information I want through a convoluted series of cross-references, or else writes whatever else I want to record wherever he can find enough white space on the nearest page.

In the centuries of computer time that have passed since 2008, this tome has been through a lot. Some of the pages have been marred by water and others by fire. Vandals got in on a few occasions and their additions have been meticulously crossed out. But in all that clutter lately my dutiful monk has spent more time squinting at certain hard-to-decipher passages than he has actually doing what I ask him to do.

So the work my monk is doing here, if I understand the process correctly, is to go through the entire book, from one end to the next, and wherever he finds a page or line that is hard to read, to figure out to his satisfaction what it actually says and then re-write it clearly on the blank pages in the back of the book.

Anyway, that was how I described the process to my parents and to myself, and it made me less likely to rail against fate for how long the process actually took--four or five hours. There's a lot of data in this computer but that monk can scribble pretty fast.

Whether or not I had it right, the process revivified my computer. I still kept the computer in Safe Mode while I worked; I was walking on eggshells. (And if hearing that makes you want to bang your head against the wall, rest assured I suffered for my ignorance... I think. Read on?)

So in the last four days of November I put out almost 15,000 words. Ironically I think these were some of the best words I had gotten down the whole month. My graph, courtesy of Nanowrimo.org, ended up looking like this:

With the highlighted part happening at my parents' house. The days on either side were spent on buses. The day in the middle was Thanksgiving.

It seems a shame not to mention Thanksgiving itself, but the day was not the stuff good stories are made of. My extended family was good company and all the food turned out well. I discovered that my father actually prefers marshmallows on his sweet potatoes, which I had previously dismissed out of hand as a barbaric custom, but beyond that what's to tell?

When I got on the bus to go home and settle in for my final lap of the month's writing, I discovered that the last 10,000 words or so of the project were gone.

Why? I'm not certain. Did they refuse to save because I had been working in Safe Mode? Perhaps, but that doesn't some things that didn't disappear but should have. I don't have a better theory, anyway. Maybe the end of story number 4 and the beginning of story number 5 are still knocking around inside my computer, but they are beyond the reach of my own feeble magics. To adapt an old saw, God and I were both there when I wrote the first draft, but I fear that now God has the only copy.

But I'm taking credit for the words because dammit, I wrote them.

As I said, this was intensely frustrating because I think what I lost consisted of some of the best writing I had done that month, including several thousand words of Robert E. Howard pastiche that felt (I'll probably never know how they stand up to rereading) pretty spot-on. Luckily, I do think I remember enough of the content and the feel that the stories themselves won't be lost to the world.

The five short stories, for the curious, are as follows:

1 - Three Go players try to slip out of human space to play a game with an enigmatic race and prove that human beings have souls.

2 - In a world crisscrossed by traveling storytellers, one boy in a village that executes them as blasphemers becomes obsessed with what he's missing out on.

3 - Humans develop humanlike AI and promptly find a way to have sex with it. One programmer wants more.

4 - When a nigh-omniscient computer takes on the utilitarian calculus of governing a country, its citizens come to worship it as God and set out to conquer the rest of the world. An ambassador visits their capitol to sue the computer for peace.

5 - An author with a telepathic link to a sword-and-sorcery hero tries his darnedest to kill the character off.

Anyway, it was a fun month and an... exciting last week.

Cooling issues

It's gotten to the point where you could fry an egg over my laptop's hard drive. I'm considering renaming my power settings "Over Easy," "Over Hard," and "Bacon."

It all started when... well, it all started when I bought my laptop five years ago, but this isn't that kind of story. (Anyway, if the moral of this story is that HP laptops have a five-year life cycle, I really want to punch someone.) So let's say it started when the fans of my laptop cooler died, and soon thereafter I developed an urge to play Guild Wars 2. In the fullness of time my money was gone, and GW2 was on my computer.

Now, back in the day, my laptop would overheat playing the original Guild Wars if I wasn't conscientious about propping it up properly, so it seemed reasonable that the sequel might run hot, too. Additionally, I recalled that I had never, in the machine's five-year life, removed any dust from it. Now that I look into laptop maintenance, I find that going five years without cleaning your laptop is like going five years without cleaning your baby, if dirty toddlers caught fire. (They don't, right?)

I went to the internet and found people with similar problems being advised to blow compressed air into the vents in their laptop to get the dust out, so I did that.

Perhaps the impertinently directed blasts of cold air angered the fire elemental which animates my laptop. (They have those, right?) Anyway, things got hotter instead of getting colder.

I revisited the advice I found on the internet, and found other people issuing dire warnings to never just blow air into your laptop at random, you crazy fool. It just makes things worse. So now I know that.

Apparently what you have to do is open your computer up and get at the heat sink assembly and, if you've treated your laptop like I have, remove the rodentlike mass of dust with tweezers. So I unscrewed the panels on the back of my laptop. I found hard drives. I found a battery glued to a circuit board. I had to go back to the internet to figure out how to get at the heat assembly, and what I found, everywhere I looked, was that for my type of laptop, the HP dv6700, in order to access the heat assembly you have to disassemble the laptop entirely and detach everything from everything else. The inner workings of this machine are encased in layers of armor serving no apparent purpose except to keep dust in, and non-HP-employees out.

If my livelihood did not depend entirely on this machine, I might make the attempt. I have spent hours finding instructions for how to do it, with all the different kinds of screws labelled. In the mean time, I am playing Guild Wars 2 while soothing my machine's fevered brow with medical ice packs (and also a new cooling stand). Otherwise, the game just doesn't play.

The other day my laptop opened up a seam and spat out a screw--literally spat, with allowances made for the lack of literal lips. I think my laptop is daring me to crack it open.

As if to inflict empathy with my laptop's plight, on Wednesday I was afflicted with a miserable fever. It took me a while, but through trial and error I discovered that if I got too hot, I threw up--this while my body was shivering, begging me for blankets, mind you. Vomiting at least made the chills go away, but I learned that I could choose between being cold and being ill. So I started applying the ice packs to myself instead of my wretched computer, with similar success--that is, limping but very real success.

Anyway, that got steadily less terrible as the week went on. I have to profusely thank Girlfriend, who dealt with me like a saint no matter how pathetic I got or what I threw up on, and all while suffering through a less violent incarnation of the same disease.

Looking back on this post, I have to say that if you knew about some of the turns of phrase I came up with but didn't use, you would thank me.

Update: Girlfriend's parents are coming to visit today (imminently, in fact), which means someone has to vacuum. Luckily, we bought a vacuum a month ago for just this purpose, after the old one died a slow and ineffectual death--but we hadn't used it until today.

Guess what safety feature our new vacuum cleaner has. Guess. Yes: a thermal shutoff. And to further protect me, the thermal shutoff is on a timer, so the vacuum can't turn back on for 30 minutes, regardless of the temperature.

I don't know why the damn thing shut off after three minutes of use, or again 33 minutes later, but clearly Hoover thinks that I am too dumb to vacuum a carpet without burning my house down.

Good thing I had a broom and a dust pan, because who doesn't like frantically trying to sweep a carpet?