Day Late, Dollar Short

Yesterday I had a very interesting entry for this thing, and I would have entered it if not for my inability to remember the word vindicated. That happens to me ... regularly, that wanting a word but not being able to recall it, but I don't chalk it up to senior moments.

I'm far too young and good looking to have that sort of problem, but it is annoying.

I blame it not on a lack of ginkgo biloba in my system, although it's hard to believe I have enough of it coursing around in my bloodstream to do much of anything, but on the size of my vocabulary. We all know many words than we use, but I've always strived to use every last one, just to make me look smart.

I considered, as I often do at times like that, getting one of those definition dictionaries that are supposed to solve precisely that problem, but I have my doubts about them. The biggest drawback isn't the expense, although it's not to be taken lightly, but rather I'm not sure that the definition I have for most of these words is adequate or popular enough to be the one listed.

What I could think of yesterday was the word justified, but I knew that wasn't it. I knew the word I wanted was more than that and carried with it the notion of having been doubted in the past and eventually come out on top, but it would have taken a very remarkable dictionary to have let me get from there to vindicated.

In the end, it came to me while watching Olympic boxing and hearing those two guys go on and on about scoring irregularities, as they have for the past week and a half. The only Olympic coverage that isn't focused exclusively on American efforts and shows the countries that NBC made such a big deal over during the opening ceremonies, and all they talk about is what a shame it is that the judges don't see the bouts the same way the announcing staff does. Still, it beats the rest of the "rah rah" coverage and I'd mute it but I want to learn how to pronounce the names.

What I should have done, instead, is get some of that ginkgo biloba stuff or done a sedoku. I've tried one, have no interest in the other, but both claim to keep the mind active and alert. It's just too bad that I can't get those results from doing something I enjoy such as, you know, thinking.

...creak...

That sound you just heard is the noise my brain makes when I learn something new and it expands to include the new information. I'm, naturally, pretty used to it by now, but it sometimes frightens children or disturbs those right next to me.

Today, thanks to the Olympics, I actually watched part of a game of field hockey for the first time in my life. Although I'd heard about the game quite some time ago and knew it existed, I'd never seen a match or game or whatever it's called. Now I have, and I must admit to being underwhelmed, if not bored.

My ten or fifteen minute exposure showed me all I need to know about the game, which is that it's soccer (or football or futbol) played with shepherd's crooks and what I suspect to be a harder, solid ball. The main thing I took away from the experience, and the first thing I noticed, is that the game looks to be an exercise in torture for the back. There's a great deal of bending over, which I suppose would make it a natural for anyone who works all day picking fruits and vegetables.

The only reaction I had while watching Germany win the Gold Medal over the Netherlands was ... ouch.

Me, Lawbreaker

Yesterday, during my drive home, a cop asked me to break the law. This was a first for me since, while I'm no stranger to ignoring legal boundaries when they stand between me and something I want or feel like doing, no one sworn to uphold the law had ever before asked me to break it.

So, I did, and I have to admit it was a little thrilling. Not as exciting as breaking it on my own, but not as boring as following it mindlessly, either. Then again, it was only a traffic law, so it's not as if I was asked to assassinate some foreign dignitary or head of state or commit mayhem.

What happened is this:

I was minding my own business waiting patiently at a red light and reflecting on how cool I am or something when a siren in the distance grew increasingly louder. I was sitting on a two lane street with a left turn lane that was separated from oncoming traffic by a traffic island, and there were two cars alongside me, one who hoped to turn left and someone in the lane nearer the sidewalk. I, of course, was in the fast lane because that's how I roll.

There were only the three of us sitting there, waiting for the light to change, when this cop pulls up behind me with his siren blaring and all his lights flashing. While he may have been in hot pursuit of some crime, it can't be ruled out that he was heading back to the station because his shift was over or maybe he was just hungry. In any case, after appraising the situation as only a highly trained law enforcement person is capable of doing, he must have realized that he was stuck and that his girlfriend waiting at the motel for him was becoming increasingly impatient.

He switched off his siren, which pleased me, got on his loudspeaker, and said, "Pull over to the right." Well, of course, I couldn't do that, not without moving, and he was blocking me from behind, so I had no choice but to drive forward, through a red light, disregarding my personal safety and the laws under which we operate, all for the greater good. The woman next to me, in the slow lane, broke the law the same as I did, and the two of us drove through the intersection without incident and actually began easing over toward the curb when the cop took advantage of the opening we created and turned left.

Nothing for me to do but proceed, which I did with not a small smile on my face.

Lest you think I make a practice of this behavior, I wish to let you know that I'm among those who normally, actually, pull over when a siren approaches. I like to do it, mostly because it pisses off the other drivers, who all have to admit that I'm doing the right thing. Still, unless my car is moving, I can't do that, but this is the first time I've had this particular situation.

The good news is it wasn't a trap. The cop didn't ask us to move through the red light only to give us a ticket, so I have to give him credit for that. I also don't know what became of the cop, the woman, or the guy in the left turn lane who stood his ground, but I hope they all had a pleasant evening after the afternoon's excitement.

I know I did.

Me, Again

Every time I get all excited about updating this thing and keeping it current, unexpected forces of nature stand in my way.

This latest iteration of annoyance is one I'm blaming on the host of this site. For reasons I can only imagine or guess at, some host information changed that prevented Wordpress from getting in touch with the database that holds all of these very valuable Crenellated Flotsam entries.

Worse, I've been unable to get to the admin functions for my site, which pretty much prevented me from doing anything in the way of maintenance. Now that I've learned how to fix errors in this database, the least I hope for is being able to access it.

Since I'm now using a fancy new computer, I didn't have a working address to administer my site. Oh, sure, I thought I knew what it was, but sometime following the last time I had to get in there and do things, the address changed. It's not likely that I didn't get word of this, but it's certain that I did nothing with the information, feeling it was no big deal and just more spam.

As you can see, I have things working again.

After contacting my host provider through their helpful support and contact us page, the one that goes to a faq and searchable database instead of, you know, letting you contact them or ask a question, I was faced with one of those username and password pages before I could do much of anything.

There's a very good possibility that I had that infomation somewhere, but I was in Santa Monica and didn't have it with me. What I did do was ask them to reset the password and send it to the e-mail address on record. I was pretty sure I knew what that address was, but it wasn't until I got home that I was able to get the e-mail, reset my password, and remember what username they'd assigned me.

And now, for the nonce, I have a whole new set of passwords to remember. One to access my site administration page, which isn't at all where I remembered it being, by the way, and several more to administer MySQL and the databases I've established.

I think I made notes of them all, but confidence is mediocre.

The good news is ... if I stay this excited about posting things, I may get some readers who stumble on me through Google! I say such interesting things...

Six Hours of Panic

...and some people have progress thrust upon them.

My old computer, tho not my oldest one, died recently and I was without much of anything in the way of information technology for about a week. In that time I tried, unsuccessfully, to resurrect it for maybe the third or fourth time in its little electronic life, but to no avail.

In the end, the motherboard had passed its final bits of instruction and I was left with a box that would, at best, present me with the bios screen. After exhausting my admittedly limited bag of tricks, I sulked, fidgeted, advanced through two or three stages of grief, and finally bit the bullet and drove over to Fry's to pick up a cheap replacement machine.

One that runs Vista and came with something like two hundred times as much ram as my first PC had hard disk storage. To be honest, it doesn't run much quicker than that old one, but it's prettier.

I then was faced with a fresh, clean machine that lacked every application and feature I wanted, so I burned up the Internet downloading utilities, malware detectors, programs, fonts, and drivers. And, because it's a Windows box, spent a lot of time waiting for it to reboot.

I ended up buying, also, a new interface that would let me access hard disks in the old machine because the one I had inexplicably wouldn't work. During the days of reconstruction, for reasons I wont' get into, I also killed my laptop, which is now useless, all in a vain attempt to recover some missing data. I can now read everything from that old drive, but of course, I can't just copy things over like in the good ol' days.

This new (to me) Vista is quite painful to deal with on an extended basis, but I'm giving it a shot. There seems to be even less that's easy to find than ever before, but that's the reverse side of the "user friendly" coin in every situation. The worst thing about Vista, for me, is that I don't really see any benefit to it over Windows XP, but I'm sure there is one.

I did install Rocket Dock, which I think is pretty neat, and I suggest that everyone using Vista give it a try. I like it much better than the start button or the quick launch tray, and it's a good way for me to keep the desktop free of all the clutter.

In the midst of all my updating, when I was checking my e-mail, I froze. I had to enter my password, and although I had no trouble putting it in three or four times previously and had even adopted that password for my login to the machine, I forgot what it was. Well, not entirely, only everything after the first four characters.

I'd drawn a blank about what it was once before, a few years ago, and made a note of it somewhere, but I had no idea where it was. It's also the password for my Password Safe password remembering program, and I began to panic. I'm pretty good, I think, at remembering these things, and this particular password was one that I was given by an old Internet Service Provider over fifteen years ago. It's eleven characters long (I now know), has all that mixed case and other crap, and I've used it two or three times a day for all that time.

Still, I looked at the screen, and couldn't remember the whole thing. Not even with body memory.

Years ago I stood in front of an ATM and had a similar experience. I didn't know my PIN, even though I'd used it several times a week for a few years, and in that instance not only did I not remember what it was, I could sense the hole in my mind where it should be and knew that I would never remember it, that the PIN's spot was, indeed, empty.

I panicked when I considered that might be the case with my password, so I immediately ran away from the computer to watch some Olympics in hopes that the password would pop into my mind. I refused to believe it was gone for good, like that PIN, but the possibility nagged at me. Sure, I'm getting older, but I'm far too young to be suffering early dementia.

For the next several hours I tried, unsuccessfully, to avoid trying to think about what my password might be. I couldn't shut down the computer for fear of never getting it back running, and I was in no mood to do a restore and use a different password since that would undo the past couple day's work. I don't think I spent longer than a minute watching women's volleyball and boxing without thinking of the lost password, and the more possibilities I came up and tried, the more desperate and dismal I became.

In the end, I remembered it. That's how I know how long it is. Everything works now and I even wrote the password down on a slip of paper and put it in a safe place I'm sure to forget. But, in the meantime, I can compute, surf the Internet, and do many of the pastimes I enjoy. What I can't do is keep from wondering what I'll forget next.

Better Than Advertised

I can't explain it, but I seem to have a knack for attracting various food martyrs.

It wasn't worthy of being called an epiphany or anything like that, but the other day it struck me that, throughout my life, people who refuse to eat meat seem to gravitate toward me. I have no idea if this is actually true, but I read or heard something the other week that at some World Championship of Barbecuing or other there were over 100,000 people in attendance, a number that dwarfed some similar Vegetarian Convention that drew, maybe, 1,500. If ten percent of the population is vegetarian, a number that sounds reasonable, I'm getting more than my fair share.

It may be because I enjoy them. Not only am I fascinated by the whole concept of living a life of deprivation, but it's also fun to find out about them. Most, of course, do it for political reasons, and those can range from sincerity to hip parroting of bromides generated by peer pressure. A large number of them refuse to eat some meat or other for religious reasons, a notion I must confess to finding quaint. It was a challenge, when I worked with both a practicing Jew and a Hindu, to find pizza toppings acceptable to both.

The huge majority of these people in my life, at least those who stick around for longer than a week or so, do so without preaching to me about the horrors of my diet. Oh, sure, they make their points known in subtle or not-so-subtle ways and often find excuses to bring up how much better they are than I am, but I try my best to be agreeable. I don't propose the wholesale slaughtering of anything, but I have to admit it's hard to get as worked up for a pasta bean salad as it is for, say, a ham and cheese omelette. I don't think we'd be having so many of these problems if meat didn't, fundamentally, taste better than just about everything else on the planet.

Anyway, what struck me the other day is I may not be as bad as these people think I am. Sure I enjoy eating meat and I have no plans to stop, but a few times a week I'm a vegetarian. Some say this doesn't count, but I think it has to be taken into the mix (or the masala). While some mistakenly call me a carnivore, I can't remember my last meal the consisted entirely of meat.

In fact, as I thought about it, I shouldn't be feeling guilt at all. Out of the hundreds of animals on the planet earth, I regularly only eat about three or four of them. That's a very low percentage, and I believe I should be given a great deal of credit for my consideration. In fact, I don't think I've eaten more than a dozen animals in my entire life, many of them only once or twice.

Instead of picturing me as a ravaging, blood-soaked madman intent on murder, I'm actually quite moderate. Chickens and pigs can no doubt fear me, but giraffes can continue to graze in peace. Out of the entire bird population, only chickens and turkeys have any reason to look around with trepidation, and I'm not even sure I've ever eaten one of them that wasn't specifically grown for the purpose of ending up on a dinner plate or between two slices of bread.

Eating just four animals regularly isn't bad at all, especially when you consider the number of plants I consume.