Filed Away

I’m a Windows Administrator by profession and there’s always a healthy, if sometimes strident, level of competition with the UNIX side of the house. Recently we had a 2003 server go black on us. The server was up and functioning, but any attempt to RDP or logon to the console was met with a black screen. You could tab around and get things just right and it would let you in then it was okay, but it was a pain in the butt and scheduled for a rebuild.

Now mind you we search Google and the knowledge base and the Technet forums and found nothing. Then one of the Unix guys reveals an obscure little article where it appears when a server runs out of space sometimes a 2003 server will loose it’s color settings and default to black. Remote to the registry, open HKEY_USERS\.Default\Control Panel\Colors and lo-and-behold all the settings are all 0.0.0.  Go to a working server, get a copy of the key, import it and PRESTO! all is well.

I’m going to rebuild it out of spite:).

Okay, no actually I’m going to rebuild it because lots of people who had no business farting around with a server had their hands in it trying to fix it and who kn ow what they broke in the process, but still, it’s a nice piece of information to have in your book.

I’ve been laying low for quite a while, what with the kids out of school and all, plus I built a new office in my basement… which led to a strained Achilles tendon and a bad ciatic nerve. It sucks getting old, don’t let anyone tell you different.

Anyhow, I’m going to clean up 3500years.com and make it all Zsallia’s blog again, which means I’ll be placing a page on this site with the full text of the Third Edition of the novel here. I’ll probably leave to old pages up as well, but I’ll hide them from the main page- that way the numerous links I’ve made from here, Weekend Pundit, Dean’s World and those links made by others will still work.

Once that work is done I have to finish the formatting of the new edition of the novel at Lulu- I’m going to low ball the price as far as possible, and the PDF download will go for a buck. I’m really just interested in having people read the book- as a financial exercise it’s been a real money loser, but what the hell, at least I did it… and for some reason I want to do it again.

I just hope it doesn’t take 3 years to write this one.

I think I’m finally over the hump with this writing thing- I’ve been putting it off and putting it off, but I really do want to go back to daily posting and getting my head around the second book. I talked to Dean and he’s up for taking on an editing role- he’s still not sure about putting in the effort for another novel and I don’t blame him. For my own reasons I just want to do it.

Just a bit of what’s been reverberating in my skull cavity lately.

I like splitting wood, I always have. Since the day I turned thirteen I’d made a habit of putting in some time with the wedge, hammer and axe- first because my old man told me to, later because it just produced a kind of peace inside me. “Zen”, some people would call it. It felt good exerting all the energy of hard work, turning it to fuel for the fire on cold winter nights. There was this old oak tree, must have been a hundred years old when I was a teen, and we always did the work under its branches, enjoying the shade it provided while we sweated away.

We’d lived in a cabin at that time, when I was a kid on the verge of becoming a young man, and I’d chafed at everything I’d been denied by my father’s insistence on such a Spartan life. At one point I even hated him, but I got over it. Maturity has a way of doing that, making you look back and see all that conflict and resentment in a new light. Growing pains, nothing more. And through the last five years before that stupid accident out on the Old Fisherville Road, my father’s task to me had always seemed like a break rather than a chore. I know now as I’m standing on the brink of a half-century of life that it was more than a chore. It was a way of understanding the value of an honest effort. It taught me to comprehend the way hard work and survival could go hand in hand. It showed me the inner peace that could be mine by simply taking on a task and seeing it done.

I miss my father. I remember the day he died- I was out there under that old oak stacking the freshly split pieces when sheriff Lavery trundled up the path in his old Jeep to deliver the news, first to me, then to mom. I know dad would have been heart-broken to see her tears that day. Sometimes it just doesn’t matter what you want or what you meant. Sometimes life is sad, even ugly, but you have to go through it. Even in death, my old man had something to teach me.

Continue Reading »

I tried to like it, honest I did. But Christ, what waste of good bandwidth. I don’t care that much what you’re doing minute-to-minute, honest. Nothing personal, just don’t need to know. I tried filtering out the most prolific of the folks I was following… and if anything that made it worse.

Sorry, that much a social animal I just am not.

Good-bye, Twitter. Don’t let the door slap you in the ass on the way out.

Friend, co-author and close-as-a-brother Dean Esmay celebrates six months of sobriety. One day at a time, my friend. One day at a time.

I’ve been kicking about, considering all the possibilities since deciding to put my infatuation with Methuselah’s Daughter to rest. I still have a few stories kicking around that really should be finished, a few others that are mostsly finished and should be posted- all this if only to start putting up some content on a regular basis. In the blogging world it is post or die- Zsallia went from 400 daily hits to 5 in a matter of weeks once she stopped updating.  This place has never seen more than a few hits other than when I finally posted those two  deadly chapters we eliminated from the book.

I have the proofed copy of the novel finished.  I was going to flesh out the epilogue, but now that I’ve decided to put it to rest I don’t see the point so I’ll probably have it buttoned up and uploaded to Lulu within a week or so. At that point I’m done with it- this version will never be “published” in that I’m not going to drop any money into getting an ISBN number or Amazon listing. Wasted money, in the final analysis.

Dean and I never got off our asses and tried to sell the book. In the end we sold about 105 copies, roughly half of which we bought ourselves just to give away. This leaves me about $500.00 in the hole on the entire project.  Not a lordly sum, and not money I regret spending, just not something I’m willing to do again.

I’ve been dithering on the writing front for a few months now. Little bits here and there, plus the proofing of the novel, but nothing substantive. It’s troubling because I want to write more than anything else in this world.

The problem is Zsallia. I need to give her up as a character and move on to other things.

Zsallia Marieko celebrates her 3534th