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Month: February 2024
This past week my writing study and reading intersected in a way I didn’t expect.
I’m coming to the end of a nine-week class on dialog, and wow, has it been illuminating. In parallel, one of the fiction books I was reading was Beyond – the first of Mercedes Lackey’s trilogy about the founding of Valdemar.
I enjoyed the book but something felt off, and not quite right. I couldn’t pin down exactly what it was. Not then, but later when I finished working through the lectures on the dialog class, I had a glimmer of an idea.
This week’s topic was narration, and how a writer can use it to give the reader information, and to paraphrase, there’s light narration, heavy narration, journal narration, and whole book narration. The assignment was to find examples of each type.
And there was my answer. Beyond isn’t just heavy narration, the whole book is mostly narration, and that was what disturbed me.
The thing with whole book narration is it tends to keep the reader at a distance, and I wasn’t expecting that from Mercedes Lackey. When you read the other Valdemar books you are deep inside the character’s head feeling their thoughts and emotions, and I kept waiting for that in Beyond.
I read the book almost in one sitting and know I’ll go back and read it again, so although I wasn’t expecting this approach, I suspect the next book in the series – Into the West – will have the same style.
This time I’ll be ready for it. And probably read the book in one session.
Back in July of last year (System Upgrades – Richard Freeborn), I detailed the results of changing out our router and the improvements we had as a result.
Since then, I’ve been working around increasing issues with my MacBook Pro. The speakers died some time ago, and plugging in an external speaker wasn’t too much of an issue, especially as the general sound quality was much better.
The track pad and bluetooth were another problem. The track pad developed a mind of its own, sending the cursor all over the screen, or just not responding. That meant a separate wireless mouse. Again, not a big problem. What did bother me more is that the bluetooth keyboard would for no reason stop working. When I investigated further the MacBook had turned off Bluetooth, and the only way to get it back was to shut down and restart.
And then there were the software updates. About a month ago, Microsoft informed me they couldn’t upgrade Word and Excel because the operating system was too old. Can’t be, was my first thought, and then I did some research.
The MacBook Pro was nine years old, which explained the pieces failing every so often. I really didn’t really want to buy more hardware at the moment, but hardware has a mind of its own, so I was back at the Apple store looking at options.
My first thought was an iMac, but it looked to be older Apple technology. I didn’t want to bite that hook, and a few months later see the release of a whole new iteration. I’ve experimented with using the iPad on travel trips, and it works well, so I didn’t see the point in another laptop, which led me to the Mac Mini.
The immediate drawback appeared to be no keyboard, mouse, or monitor. Wait – I’ve already added those onto the laptop, and one thing we have in the house is plenty of spare monitors. No camera? Again, we have those sitting on a shelf not being used. So I ordered the Mac Mini. It arrived two days earlier than scheduled and as soon as I plugged in the keyboard, mouse, and monitor, it asked me if I wanted to connect to another Apple device and copy from that.
Now, Apple has tricked me before this way with my iPad, but I was prepared to give it a try, and surprisingly the Mac Book and Mini talked to each other and about five hours later everything was up and running on the Mini. I had some problems with license counts on some applications, and the Mac Book Pro NTFS app doesn’t work with the Apple M2 chip. Both took a little time but were easily resolved.
Total time to upgrade and iron out the kinks? Less than a day. It’s the easiest upgrade I’ve ever done.
This past weekend was a catch up on the many admin tasks put aside while we were out of town for most of January. One of those catch up activities is to scan and shred documents. I moved to electronic storage for copies of bills and invoices about ten years ago and managed to retire and remove a full four-drawer filing cabinet.
Despite this, and having multiple backups, both on a physical hard drive and in the cloud, I still keep hard copies of some documents – contracts, and the final versions of manuscripts spring to mind immediately.
As you’re probably suspecting, there was quite a pile of paper to scan, and as I got through the pile, the Epson printer/scanner barfed. That’s not unusual as pages get caught and jammed every so often. This was different though. There was no paper jam icon. Instead I had an Epson error 100069 and a message telling me to restart the printer. Easy enough, and for good measure, I checked nothing was caught in the scanner feed.
Restarting went straight to the same error message and a suggestion to contact Epson technical support. So straight to the browser and a search, and a discovery.
There is nothing on the Epson site that acknowledges printer error messages, let alone a list of what they might be, and how to resolve them. Buried deep in the results of another search I found the title Epson’s triple secret error codes. Now that seemed promising.
And it was.
The 100069 message essentially means the scanning function has serious issues. It could be the scanner motor pulley (checked it and looked okay), or a failed scanner motor or scanner sensor or . . . Given the amount of scanning I do, my guess is it’s the sensor or motor, which almost certainly means a new printer.
I don’t begrudge the cost of the new printer (actually, yes I do 🙂 ). What does frustrate me is how hard it was to diagnose the problem. I love the printer, and will replace like with like, but come on Epson, you’re better than this.
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