vision returned

Thank heavens! I dug into the Kaspersky User Forum and discovered how to unlock access to the site stats for my blog. I can see them again.

I discovered how much I rely on being able to get a sense of how many people are stopping by (I can see only a subset of visitors, due to various security settings on people's computers, and so on). Writing posts without any sense of audience, I find, is hard: it's hard to get motivated. It's like performing in front of a one-way window, where people can look in but I can't see out.

Will this get me writing more posts again? Stay stuned...

awake

I'll quickly check in here. Again I got up in the night to do some reading. This is becoming a pattern. Part of the pattern is that when I return to bed (this morning at about 3:50) I lie awake, then eventually doze and have a dream that startles me awake again right away. The dreams are often about being intruded upon by strangers, or being spied on through windows by them--creepy.

However, there is no downside to reading as far as I can tell (if there is, I'm in big trouble). And time in the dead of night is truly free time.

A few days ago I updated my computer-security program (Kaspersky), and now, with better protection, I can't find a way to access the stats for who visits my blog--one of my main rewards for writing it. I'll try to puzzle that out.

Now: back to more research...

working girls (and boys)

Second mug of coffee draining down to the last cool swallows. We were up promptly after the alarm went off at 5:30, Kimmie wanting to turn over a new leaf and give herself more time in the mornings so she can leave punctually for work. Through my closed venetian blinds I can make out the bluish darkness still outside.

First thing for me, after I make the coffee, is to open up my big fat copy of Microsoft Windows XP Inside Out by Ed Bott, Carl Siechert, and Craig Stinson--an excellent resource. Sitting here at my PC, highlighter in hand, I make my way slowly through it, day by day learning more about the operating system I'm using.

Since Windows XP was first released in 2001, hundreds of fixes and improvements have been made to it. Most of these were bundled into two major updates, known collectively as Service Packs 1 and 2.

Well, I'm starting to think of the work I'm doing on The Mission now as my own Service Pack. Marooned on the sandbar of chapter 30, I'm finding that I want to circle back and look over the work as a whole. Recently most of my notes have been in a document I set up to write ideas for draft 2 of the book as a whole. I've been displeased and dissatisfied with aspects of what I'm writing, and I want to address these problems so that I don't finish my draft with those lame, arbitrary things left in it.

The specific problem, I believe, is arbitrariness. Everything in a story, from story events to points of characterization to specific images, should be organic: should belong to the story and help communicate its meaning. This is not easy to achieve, and requires careful, deliberate, and skilled effort.

On Saturday night Kimmie and I watched the 1988 movie Working Girl, starring Melanie Griffith and Harrison Ford (the movie actually bills Harrison Ford and Sigourney Weaver as the stars--an artifact of their greater contractual muscle and higher fees). The movie was written by Kevin Wade and directed by Mike Nichols (of The Graduate fame). It was about the 4th time I'd seen the movie, and I continued to find more in it to appreciate. One of things I appreciated about it this time was the unity of its elements.

For example, when Tess McGill (Griffith) is making her way to Manhattan via the Staten Island Ferry during the opening credit sequence, we learn that it's her birthday. Her friend Cyn (Joan Cusack) gives ger a tiny cake and sings "Happy Birthday". Her "birth" is being celebrated: and Tess, without yet knowning it, is indeed on a journey of birth to a new life. Soon she's working for a new boss, Katharine (Sigourney Weaver), a successful, ambitious, and supremely self-confident woman, who, it turns out, is also having a birthday--a week later than Tess's. They're both turning 30--a pivotal age--but Katharine is actually younger than Tess, and has apparently achieved vastly more. They are twins and mutual shadows: Tess is blonde, working-class, and struggling to gain a toehold in the business world; Katharine is brunette, of patrician stock, and seems to have had wealth and success hand-delivered to her.

With the birthdays come gifts. Tess receives sexy lingerie from her boyfriend Mick (Alec Baldwin)--yet another gift that she can't wear outside their apartment. Katharine, for her part, is showered with gifts when she breaks her leg in a skiing accident (including a near-life-size plush gorilla--a funny inside allusion to Weaver's earlier role as gorilla researcher Dian Fossey). But the more important gifts come from Tess's new associate and would-be lover Jack (Harrison Ford). When, now impersonating a high-powered deal-maker, Tess shows up at a meeting without a proper briefcase, claiming that she's "lost" hers, Jack gives her a beautiful briefcase, classic symbol of the businessperson. With this he sends the message, "you're one of us."

At the end of the movie, when Tess and Jack have gotten together and she has indeed made it as a wheeler-dealer, he gives her a final gift: a metal lunchbox, packed with lunch and other tenderly considerate goodies. The lunchbox is emblematic of her origins, and with this Jack is telling her that he accepts and loves her for who she is. As a high-powered executive she can carry a lunchbox so she doesn't forget where she came from--so she doesn't lose what is most important about herself.

My point is that these choices were made deliberately and carefully, most likely by Kevin Wade, the writer. They are not arbitrary. The result is that the movie feels unified--it feels as though everything in it belongs.

That's where I want to get to with my own story. But (big surprise) it's not easy. You need to know your world and your characters before you can really make meaningful, non-arbitrary choices. And knowing anything, I find, takes time.

Still, what else am I doing with my life?

restless and dissatisfied--just like the pros

Gradually I'm becoming acquainted with my updated computer. Except for the box itself, which is a new black tower resting on bricks under the table (on bricks because I'm in the basement, and there have been floods here before...), it's still the same old gear: same massive 19" Dell CRT (works great), same Harmon/Kardon speakers, same Microsoft ergonomic keyboard. Yesterday I did switch to a new optical mouse, but mainly it's the same physical experience sitting here--it's just that the computer behaves differently: it's very noticeably faster, snappier. Now, when I click a command, it executes--immediately! I feel more in charge again, instead of feeling that I'm asking the PC to do me favors all the time, which is how it felt before.

I'm now running Windows XP Home Edition, which means learning a new user interface. I've decided to take this more seriously than I did when I got the old Windows 98 computer. I see I still have the Windows 98 Bible in my nearby bookshelf, and a bookmark about 12% into the text. That's as far as I got with my read-through by the keyboard.

I enjoy this thorough method of learning from the ground up. My gaining of familiarity with a subject tends to be slow, but total. I notice it's different from the way most other people learn. Most people seem to jump into the middle somewhere, and start working their way around from there. With a computer, for instance, I think many people move as quickly as they can to achieving some particular result with it, and build out from that early accomplishment.

This approach gains quick but limited--although always growing--proficiency. Why isn't that my style? I think the reason is that in that approach, you never know for sure how much mastery you've gained. How much more of this subject is there to learn? Do I know 60%? 80%? If you don't survey the field beforehand, you might never know (and probably, of course, never care either!).

Another, more important factor is one's attitude to learning in general. For each of us, this is different according to what topic is under consideration. I recall reading in a Scientific American article about expertise that one important difference between the expert or master and the average practitioner of any subject is the point at which one is satisfied with one's level of knowledge or command. In any skill, we usually reach a point where we're satisfied: we can do what we want to do, and don't push to improve beyond that point.

An example might be cooking: if you're not a gourmet, you may achieve a level of proficiency with a range of dishes that you're content with. You may learn more, but it will be slowly, unsystematically. But if you have a passion for food and its preparation (as, say, Kimmie does), you won't rest content. You'll be on the lookout for new techniques and ideas; you'll tweak already excellent recipes using promising new tips; you'll keep reading up on your subject and keep practicing it often. You may never come to a point where you say to yourself, "okay, that's enough--on to other things".

The greats are never content, but are always obsessed with improvement, even when they're already the best in the world, or near it.

I've plateaued in most of my activities in life--chess, drawing, guitar--but there are two in which I remain restless: writing and what I suppose I could call general knowledge. I'm not satisfied with what I know, or with how I express it. In a sense I'm driven by a feeling of lack in these areas. So I keep practicing: I read, I write. In my own opinion, I don't do enough of either one.

Well then. I'll finish off this bit of writing, so I can go read a bit over breakfast.

a busy break

I'm back.

Getting new computers proved to be a bit chaotic. The local store, Lynx IT, where I bought the machines (one new desktop, built onsite by the guys; one used Dell desktop for Kimmie's sewing-room; and--a splurge--one "reconditioned" Hewlett-Packard laptop, my first portable computer, and not yet out of its box) tends to have surges of customers that divert their attention. In the midst of all that I walked away with less than my full purchase on Monday--and also brought home my old PC instead of the "new" used one, which looks very similar!

Plugging in the cables that form a rat's nest under my table, I discovered that I could not get online. Was it the used router my dad gave me? The unfamiliar operating system (Windows XP Home)? The extra cables? After half an hour on the phone with John at Shaw, my ISP, he concluded it must be the modem. Yesterday in the hot morning sun I made trips to Lynx IT and Shaw to swap and acquire the right gear and spent the rest of the day trying to make it work.

I was worried about the new cable modem, since John had discovered that the cable signal here is weak, and the new-model modem won't function with a weak signal. If it didn't work, then it would mean a service call from a Shaw technician, which might take a week to happen. But when I got it all plugged in, it worked excellently--and is working still. (The router works great--thanks Dad.)

One nice thing about buying from Lynx IT is that they configured the PCs for me and transferred data from my old box into the new one. They struggled with this awhile on Tuesday, having trouble shifting my masses of e-mails in Mozilla Thunderbird, the e-mail client I use. While I waited I zipped to the bookstore to buy a copy of Microsoft Windows XP, Inside Out, a massive (and expensive) text, but apparently thorough, and aimed at experienced computer-users. Following my customary practice, which is to learn everything from the ground up, I've started reading it systematically here beside the computer.

I've set up Kimmie's computer--it looks very smart (I gave her the new flatscreen monitor; I'll continue to use my massive but perfectly functional 19-inch CRT) on the new white Mikael computer table we got from Ikea on Monday (only $59)--but am having trouble getting her online. And, as I say, the new laptop still rests in its box.

What hit home over the two days I was offline was how much my life has become centered around the computer, particularly around being online. Without the Web or e-mail I felt cut off; I felt my solitude. Much of my day is built around computer activities.

The new computer is much perkier, much quicker; I notice a big improvement in performance. So mission accomplished as far as that goes. As for the rest of it, getting a household network set up, integrating a high-end laptop into my lifestyle--time will tell.

Even though I've been so busy, dashing around, feeling a certain edge of stress, I have also felt delinquent in having set aside my writing. This blog-post is my reentry into my proper function.

I want to believe I have time to do everything I want to in life, but it's not something I can take for granted. People die, often unexpectedly and early. I'm haunted by a phrase I read in the short story "The Wall" by Jean-Paul Sartre when I was 18. The narrator had been captured by enemies (I think in the Spanish Civil War) and was to be shot at dawn. He realized that he and his comrades, all suddenly on the brink of death, had been "writing checks against eternity".

Ultimately there is only one asset: time. We're all born with a stock of it, but we can't be sure how much. We know only that it's finite, and continuously being spent.

Time to pick up my burden again and keep lugging it.

summer delights--at last

Summer has belatedly arrived, with clear skies and sun bearing down. I seem to recall the first few weeks of school being that way. I never minded particularly, since I enjoy good weather from indoors as well as out, and I've always been at rather a loose end in the fine weather anyway. Even as a young child I looked off our back deck on sunny summer days over the dusty quiet of the neighborhood. Friends were on vacation, the park was vacant. There seemed to be endless possibilities, and yet--what to do? I recall a feeling of nervous anticipation, as though something were expected of me.

That feeling stuck with me on into young adulthood. The main summer feeling, for me, has been one of solitude. In my mid-20s, on days off work, I would launch myself from my basement suite or apartment on long walks through the city. I recognized the splendor and beauty of the swishing trees and the hazy greenish water of the beaches, but felt apart from all the summer barbecuing, sunbathing, and restaurant-going of the people around me. I felt alienated. It seemed that others knew how to enjoy summer fully, but I didn't. There was some kind of cosmic fun and relaxation that I was missing out on.

I no longer feel that way. For not only do I now have companionship in my life, but I do not envy others' seeming enjoyment of their leisure. I have come to realize that what most people find fun and enjoyable I simply do not. Beach parties, house parties, nightclubs, staying up late and getting drunk--no thanks. To me, all those things are more or less desperate attempts to have fun, or attempts to convince oneself that one is having a good time. I suspect that deep in many people's hearts is the nagging doubt that I've felt: that they are somehow missing out, that others are, somehow, enjoying life more.

Now I know what fun is for me. I ask for no higher, indeed for no other, form of entertainment than a good informative book, a fresh highlighter, and a quiet afternoon in my own house. If sunshine comes in to brighten the room, as it did yesterday as I read, then so much the better.

On Friday I bought new computers (yes, plural) at a store nearby where they build them from scratch and customize them, as well as selling used and "reconditioned" ones. Today I take in this old Dell box to have most of its contents transferred to the new PC. I will get online again as soon as I can.

Enjoy the remainder of summer.

due to technical difficulties beyond our control...

No blog-post yesterday, because I was unable to go online. After trying the usual tricks of unplugging my modem and plugging it in again, and restarting the PC a couple of times, I phoned the customer-support line of my Internet-access provider, Shaw Cable. Like all quasi-monopolies, they have an overly long telephone menu to step through before you can actually get to a person. But I made it.

In the course of the next hour I was helped by two men, who took me through all the tricks in the book that they knew of. Still no dice for me. At the end of it, Kevin, the technician I was talking to, said that under the circumstances I would probably have to reinstall my operating system (Windows 98 Second Edition), "although we can't recommend that." When I asked him what other options I might have, he confessed that there probably weren't any--just reinstalling Windows, "although we can't recommend that."

I had only one option--and that one they couldn't recommend.

"You mean I'm on my own?" I said.

"Unfortunately we've done all that we can do from here," said Kevin. "Is there anything else we can do for you?" I chuckled at this, and Kevin moved on quickly to: "Thanks for calling--and thank you for choosing Shaw."

With that he was gone. But I did find it funny, because he clearly wasn't comfortable with cutting me loose, problem unsolved.

Nothing for it: I put in an old backup disk of Windows 98 SE that a neighbor had made for us five years ago, and proceeded to reinstall my operating system. It took about half an hour. And when the moment of truth arrived (well, one of the moments of truth), and my Web browser and e-mail client launched, seeking connection, I was a bit surprised that they actually did get onto the Internet--I was online again!
My desktop settings were all preserved, all my shortcuts were still there--all my data files seem to have survived. I was delighted. I figured that I had finally reached the point where I'd have to get myself a new computer, after all.

A suspicion floated up in my mind. Checking my planetary ephemeris, I discovered that Mercury is retrograde, and has been since 15 June: communication mix-ups, commuting delays, office-equipment malfunction. Prepare for more of the same till 10 July.

For the few hours that I was offline, I realized how much I have come to rely on being online, how much more powerful and useful a computer is when it is part of a worldwide network. I felt a bit isolated and lonely, no doubt as people used to feel when staying at a cabin without a telephone.

So yesterday's interruption of service really was due to technical problems. Will there be more of them? Stay tuned.

garbage in, garbage out

It's cool and wet outside. Our building's garbage-box on the back lane has again been violated, this time through the rusted mesh of its roof, I'm sure by raccoons. Last night Kimmie woke me to say that someone or something was on our back deck. I padded in the dark to look out, fiddling to get my glasses on. Peering down through the blinds, I saw an animal thumping indiscreetly down to the little landing near the top of the stairs up from the patio. Looking out through the partly opened window, I saw it was a raccoon. It paused in its self-licking to look brazenly up at me. Ah well, better than finding a person down on the deck, as I have a couple of times in the past (once a burglar, trying to open the window that faces the deck). I locked the window shut at a narrow setting--raccoons can zip up the side of a building in seconds--and we returned to bed.

Last week, when I learned that animals were again getting in to our garbage-box, I discovered that the roof-mesh had been torn away from the sides in a couple of spots. At one of those spots, I found a large (two-fist-sized) granite rock lying on the mesh. I feel sure that this rock had been used as a tool to break into the box. While we know that skunks used to raid the box before we had it sealed, I think it's raccoons this time--and they have the brass and brains to be actual burglars, using tools to break in.

In my capacity as (outgoing) president of our strata corporation, I have arranged for a carpenter to come and patch the box again, but of course it takes days to arrange, even with a good nearby guy who actually shows up to do the work (most trades don't, in our experience, especially plumbers). Today is garbage pickup day, so I'll see what the collectors take away, and which animal-ravaged bags they leave behind for someone--likely the strata president--to clean up.

Writing these blog-posts has become more difficult and irritating for a technical reason seemingly originating with Blogger.com. For the past week or so, the characters do not appear as soon as I type them, but after a delay of a couple of seconds. They slowly appear, one by flashing one, in a stream after each burst of typing. It's strangely annoying, not being able to see what I'm typing as I type it, but having to wait until Blogger feeds me the characters. Each typo takes extra time to fix, since I have to wait for the characters to appear, then backspace to the error. In all, it has become an irritating process. Too bad. I suppose I could compose the posts in Word and then paste them in--but it's annoying that the process has become less good, rather than improving. Maybe it's an artifact of my old Windows 98 operating system, which no one really supports anymore. A new computer would mean getting Windows Vista, reportedly a crappy, bloated, bug-ridden mess.

Will faulty technology finally drive me off the Web?

the work behind the work

In the long march to the beginning of this project (the novel series I'm calling The Age of Pisces) I spent some time in the 1990s trying to develop my ideas, my beliefs, in the form of pencil notes on a long roll of paper I got, I think, at Ikea. I used to clear off the pine coffee-table (also from Ikea), set the roll on the floor next to it, and unroll the paper across the tabletop. I would then kneel at the table with my pencil, working on my notes. My cowriter Warren dubbed this thing The Scroll, and I still have it: now a bit yellowed with age, it stands against the blue wall of my office next to my wicker wastebasket.

Unrolling the first few inches on the table next to me, I see that I labeled it "Literary Mandala", and it's dated 4 Nov 1994. The idea of the scroll was to set down all my various thoughts and ideas in different areas, and then link them with lines and arrows. I used sketches and diagrams as well--anything that might express my thoughts.

Under the title of the scroll I wrote the heading "Factors or Realities to Relate", and made a bulleted list down the end of the paper (about 24 inches high--the whole roll was maybe, I don't know, 50 feet long):

• God, Satan, angelology/demonology
• mathematical-geometric dimensions
• "science": physics
• prophetic history: the Great Pyramid & the messianic mission
• the gyre of astrological history: the precessional ages of man
• extraterrestrial species & ufology
• gnosis: salvation thru knowledge (Gnosticism)
• Hermetism (alchemy): keys to gnosis?
• Vajrayana: ultimate reality & enlightened society
• spiritualism & channeling
• scientific revolution; paradigm-shift
• personal mythologies, projected mandalas
• Tarot journey
• the Holy Grail
• sacred alphabets
  

Then I listed a few book titles, and then started writing notes along the paper, mainly in printed majuscules, often putting them in boxes. As I got a few feet in, it started to look a bit like a flowchart.

Out of curiosity, I've just unrolled the scroll on my office floor. I was surprised to discover that I actually made it most of the way through the roll of paper, maybe 40 feet in, all marked up with small penciled notes. Toward the end there is more white space around the notes, and I mainly was drawing radiant diagrams of central concepts such as "the Holy Grail" surrounded by associated ideas (things like "coincidence of opposites", "symbol of supreme value", "transcendence of any single system of symbolism or imagery"), all connected by wandering strands of pencil-lead.

The scroll was a crude paper website. After I got a Windows computer in 1998 (jeepers, the same one I'm using right now) I got myself Microsoft FrontPage so I could build websites for my work. I made some progress with that, but gave up on it when I felt that I was spending too much time learning how to build and maintain the web and not enough actually thinking through my ideas, especially since the web was only for my personal use and not intended to be made public. I could progress faster, I thought, just by keeping my notes in Word documents on the PC.

"Faster" is a relative term, of course. Here it is AD 2007. But I do believe there is something special, and especially intriguing and authoritative, about works of art that have a great depth of preparation underlying them. Da Vinci's "Last Supper" was not something he just sketched out quickly; it was the product of much preliminary work and reflection.

I remember too watching a TV documentary about Canadian painters, back in the 1970s. I'm pretty sure the painter in question was Christopher Pratt. He was working on a painting of a boy and a girl picking apples in an orchard. He did many sketches, and came to represent the scene as having the boy putting red apples into the girl's skirt, the hem of which she held up to form a carrying-bag. The painter narrated the progression of his work. Eventually he came to feel that the boy was redundant. The finished picture showed the girl, facing the viewer, holding up the hem of her skirt, which was full of red apples--an intimate moment of sharing.

"Now the viewer is the boy," said the painter.

I found this to be striking and moving, and it deepened my appreciation of pictures and how a good artist works. The originality and specificness of the finished picture derives from the developmental process the artist went through to arrive at it; the picture is rich with its own history. It's fully evolved and complete.

A work that is thoroughly prepared always has more polish and authority than one that isn't. It also has more originality and personality. These are qualities that I'm seeking for my own work, and I'm willing to devote the time--a great deal of it--to do the preliminary work.

the best excuse

Yesterday when I came down in the afternoon, when I usually might write a blog-post, I found myself opening up my notes document for the next chapter (27) and working on that. In so doing, I was fulfilling an age-old plan to work in this way: write prose in the morning, and push on with notes in the afternoon. This is how a productive person would work, so why not me too?

I am productive. I'm not producing as much of what I would like, but I am producing a fair amount of material, mostly notes. Mainly what happens is that I get fed up with the project. I get bored with thinking about it any more, and want to push it away, with a feeling not unlike that which accompanies taking one bite too many of a wiener: a sense of surfeit and the first involuntary movements of the gag reflex. At that point it's my body rather than my mind saying, "No more wiener!"

The idea of working that way was that the afternoon note-making would clear the brush ahead so I could continue in the mornings building the road of narrative. It's a good idea and I stand by it. The problem is in implementation: the reality that in many ways, I'm lucky to get anything done, in any way, on this massive project, on any given day.

While I was washing the dishes just now I recalled a quote from the ancient slave-philosopher Epictetus: "We ask the gods for what they have not given, when they have already given us so much."

I should be grateful for the leisure I have still got to work on this project, and for whatever I manage actually to achieve toward completing it.

Anyway: that by way of excuse for not writing a blog-post yesterday. I came down today thinking perhaps to write just a short post of explanation before doing some more note-making, but I struggled to log on to my Google account: it is much more difficult now that I have opted to use their "improved" Blogger. The blame probably also lies with my security software: Trend Micro's PC-cillin, which seems to have massive amounts of code that hog most of my computer's resources, and interferes with my ability to load Web pages. The latest version of my old security provider, Kaspersky, would not install on my PC, despite being compatible with Windows 98 SE.

Yes, I need a new PC. And therefore...money. And therefore...a different career.

No--I'm not going to ask the gods. They have already given so much.

heartened

Well. I just wrote most of a post, only to have Mozilla Firefox lock up on me ("invalid page fault"), crash, and lose everything. What a way to return to the blog--strong negative reinforcement. I'll see what I can remember, but I feel frustrated and disappointed.

Even though I have not posted for about 12 days or so, I see from my stat-counter that people have nonetheless been stopping by--both my loyal readers, and the many one-time visitors, who often arrive after searching Google for things like "Pluto conjunct Saturn" or "Save-On Foods" or "outline for a historical novel". Many thanks!

It has been a time of low energy and flattened affect for me, so I have not pursued my commitment to the blog, which for the first year I felt I must write every day, whether I felt like it or not. But I have resumed writing again, not in a joyous way or a depressive way, but in a workmanlike way--maybe sort of like an inmate in a psych ward, heavily medicated and working on a craft. Unshaven, in terry robe (cotton sweats in my case), and full of lithium or chlorpromazine, he works with flattened affect at sculpting some plasticine. Maybe, if he has talent, it's even pretty good.

My reading has continued strongly; I pursue my inquiry into the mystery of identity. Lately, reminded by an illustration in Amit Goswami's The Self-Aware Universe, I pulled down my copy of a book I bought in September 1979, when I was starting university: The Origins and History of Consciousness by the Jungian psychologist Erich Neumann. When I opened the old, well-made Princeton Bollingen paperback, I was struck to find this verse by Goethe as an epigraph:

He whose vision cannot cover
History's three thousand years,
Must in outer darkness hover,
Live within the day's frontiers.

I felt energized and encouraged--maybe like someone stumbling through a dark mine, lost and alone, who finds a directional mark. Yes: I'm trying to get my vision to cover history's three thousand years--and more.

I felt heartened.

techie avoidance tactics

Time whizzes by. This morning passed mainly in trying to get myself up and running with Mozilla Firefox as my new browser and, in particular, Mozilla Thunderbird as my new e-mail client. The process was complicated by the fact that the Import command in Thunderbird brought only some e-mails from three or four years ago. I had to open up Windows Explorer and go hunting for the e-mail messages I wanted to import to the new e-mail program. Not so easy, since different filing systems had been programatically set up on my C-drive with the installation of different versions of Netscape, which I have used hitherto.

It all came about yesterday when Netscape 7.2, my browser for the past couple of years, suddenly couldn't remember where any of my bookmarks were: my hundreds of bookmarks were lost. I switched to Firefox, which I downloaded last year or so, and which had all the bookmarks from that time. I had to hunt down the missing bookmarks, again via Windows Explorer. Then I had to merge the bookmark files, and go through deleting duplicates--time-consuming.

I got Firefox set up to my satisfaction, but found myself having to launch Netscape to use Communicator, its e-mail client. Hm, might as well download whatever Mozilla's e-mail program is, I thought. That turned out to be Thunderbird, which I downloaded and installed. Very nice: I'm happy so far. It has a few features that Communicator doesn't seem to have. It took me a couple of hours to hunt down different folders filled with e-mails (each subfolder appears as only a single file in the folder, combining all the messages together) and try to get Thunderbird to use the right ones, without wiping out or otherwise losing years' worth of filed e-mails. Finicky, learn-as-I-go work, but successful.

Oh: and while installing Thunderbird I got a message that my C-drive had run out of space. I was able to wriggle through by letting the program delete some redundant files. But I saw that I would have to make my C-drive bigger. Not as bad as it sounds: I had partitioned my hard drive about four years ago into a few "virtual" hard drives using an application called PartitionMagic (very good). (I see that it's been bought out by Norton--used to be a company called PowerQuest. Too bad.) This was after my PC crashed--and I mean deeply, deeply crashed--in 2002. After a few experts tried to resuscitate it, unsuccessfully, it was a neighbor who managed to get it working again by changing some stuff inside and reloading the operating system (this was all while I was away at Gampo Abbey--Kimmie had to deal with it). I got PartitionMagic as a way of trying to keep chunks of the hard drive separate from each other, in particular the operating system, the other programs, and my data. Each of these now resides on its own virtual drive, theoretically safe from disasters in neighboring drives.

But C-drive ran out of space today. So I launched PartitionMagic and had it resize the drives, a bit spooky, since it shuts down Windows and does its operations in DOS--about a 20-minute process of laborious clicking and copying on the hard drive, moving gigabytes' worth of data to and fro. "If there's a power failure now," I thought, "I'm probably hooped." I sat there looking vaguely around for a while, or staring at the "percentage compete" counter slowly tick upward, before deciding to open up Communitarianism and Individualism to read further in that.

It worked like a charm. I am now a user of Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird.

Writing? Who's got time for that? Yes, with chapter 20 drafted, I'm finding it hard to ramp up for yet another new chapter.