2009-10-07:

One PC and two Macs today, none with any serious problems, but the Mac users basically just had questions. Spent the morning working on the comic I needed to color. Got that done, got one call before I left at 1:00. Figuring at that rate, I would have few indeed when I returned. But let me not get ahead of myself. At 1:15 I stopped in to see Lou. Something about balloons. "Balloons?" I thought? "He's finally lost it." But they were really a kind of balloon. It was actually very interesting. It was an almost piece of paper sized cardboard (thin cardboard) with a plastic balloon that could be "punched out" of the perforations around the edges. Then you blow it up from the bottom with the straw that serves as the base, and stand it up. It worked out pretty well, but I was late (sigh) to my 2:00, arriving at 2:25. Her antivirus expired, needed things updated, and she had gotten some pictures in the old Mac .hqx format. Huh? We haven't used that in.. forever! So how did that happen? Had to get the PC version of stuffit expander, which said one was corrupt... (double sigh) But I was on time to my 3:30 which was just a general ask-and-ye-shall-recieve session with a G5 user. Had his Time Machine hooked up wrong, through firewire 400 rather then 800. Well, not "wrong" exactly, but not exactly correct, either. Gave him some good info, nice guy. Over to my 5:00 which was a bit tricky. He was using an old (version 5) copy of Appleworks to write his memoirs. But no publisher on earth is going to be able to work with that format. So I tried, in vain, to transfer it to a more modern program and keep all the formatting intact. But he didn't have word on the new machine, just Pages. And pages wouldn't open the word doc I carefully created with the copy of Word he did have downstairs. Very frustrating. So in the end I just made him a PDF to send to the place he's sending the abridged version to (for editing?) and brought it back home. I don't have a very recent copy of word myself, but it's better then no version at all. Hopefully I can scrounge up my copy of Appleworks and get it moved over somehow for him. (Without doing hours of reformatting work, I mean) That took till 6:30 (I answered some other questions as well) so I got home just in time to... make phone calls! Which I had 7 of, by this time, of course. One was to cancel saturday, so that's 6. One was the lawyer's office with a new printer, I'll just head over there, that's 5. Didn't reach 3, but did book part of tomorrow. Got a call from Leslie, who I can't get off the phone with, so finally ate dinner around 8:00. Wrote my BFF, twice even, to make up for no message yesterday. Got ready for tomorrow, etc. Looks like nothing in the afternoon, I'll have to work on the comic, I should have penciled one today for coloring tomorrow, have to do both. I just had.. some thinking to do. Friday is Gaffigan at RIT, looking forward to that! He's a pale fellow! But he sure does love him some hot pockets. Current Mood: Pondering. Icarus fell after flying too close to the sun. His downfall was hubris. But what if he had shined as brightly? Could he have flown with the sun, then? But how could he know how brightly he shined? Only another could tell him that. If there is a person who shines so brightly with life, like the sun, is flying towards or away the proper course? What if Icarus fell not because he flew too close to the sun, but because the sun rejected him for his pride? I suppose Icarus would say to let the sun decide for itself and risk the fall. But what if the sun didn't reject him, but then found he couldn't keep up, and was thus only held back? That's not fair to the sun, is it? Too many ifs.