arpad

What went before: Tuesday: So, that was no fun. Woke up sobbing sometime around midnight, apparently so I could buckle down and get the thing done properly. The cats piled on and did their best; Rook left at one point and came back with one of the floppy foxes he uses as wrasslin trainers when Tali don't wanna, and tucked it under my chin.

Long story short, I finally went back to bed around 7, woke up around 10, with a headache naturally, and all things taken up and tallied, I do believe that today I'm taking one of my banked Sick Days.

Do feel free to talk among yourselves.
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Wednesday. Sunny and going to be warmer.

Slept long and hard, assisted by coon cats. Woke up hungry, but haven't done anything about that yet. I'm thinking scrambled eggs and sausage are on the menu, as soon as I'm finished here.

Today, I need to go out and run errands. Notably, I need to take the Epson ink jet to the repair shop. The proposition that I do so was not met with Wild Enthusiasm, but an agreement that they could "look at it" and see if it was something simple. If not, printers being so twitchy and hard to fix and all, the advice is that I would be "better off" buying a new one. So, we'll see, I guess.

Also need to go to the grocery store and probably the post office. Then back home for some more reading of the WIP. Oh, and figuring out how to cancel Cook Unity, instead of just stalling it, which is what I did for this week.

I still have the lingering rags of a headache, and I'm inclined to call Foul, but, hey, maybe breakfast will help. EDITED TO ADD: Breakfast has been et. Feeling much more The Thing.

How's everybody doing?
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Ink Jet Printers: A Teaching Fable.

Once upon a time, printers were rated as to the number of pages per week they could be expected to handle without having a screaming breakdown. Those printers that could handle a heavy workload, week in and out, were called "office printers."

We here at the Cat Farm and Confusion Factory legitimately ran offices: we printed letters, and manuscripts, and flyers, and all sorts of things, and because we subscribed to the Asimov Theory of Typewriters (paraphrased): "Always have a spare, and a spare for the spare, because you don't ever want to be in a position where broken technology means you can't write" -- we each had our own printer and (usually) a printer that still kinda sorta worked, which had been semi-retired, and could be pressed back into service in case Catastrophe Struck.

We bought, in a word, for the Ages. At the moment there are two high-capacity printers in this house, both inkjets, both work horses, neither cheap. Both are, yes, more than 8 years old, because I remember Steve carrying them into this house like they were infants.

In comparison, back in 2012, I went to live for a month at the ocean, where I was going to be finishing the second Carousel book and making a good start on the third. Obviously, I needed a printer, but! I didn't want to schlepp my good printer to the ocean and risk getting sand in the workings.

So, I went to Staples and I bought, I kid you not, a sixty dollar inkjet printer, which came with two ink cartridges, guaranteeing, I think, 600 pages between them. Subsequent cartridges cost Approximately The Earth. Important Plot Point.

Off to the ocean I went. The Sixty Clam Printer worked flawlessly for the entire time I was away, and I did not stint it. When the month ended, I brought it home, and put it online as a "spare," mostly to use up what was left of the ink.

Two weeks after I got home, the Sixty Clam Printer died the true-death, without even finishing the ink in the second cartridge. I took it to the local computer recycling joint, and waved good-bye. Sixty Clams owed me nothing, and it certainly wasn't worth getting it fixed, not with what the home office was charging for ink, and I had a Good Printer at home.

Moral! Not all ink jet printers are cheap pieces of crap that ought to just be thrown away when they develop a glitch. Analysis is worth your time.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.