Oot and Reboot

[captainsblog]

I am dictating this while driving, so you know how that goes in terms of typos. We’ll see how many I catch.

Weeks starting with holidays are always weird. Especially when the holiday itself has acquired such a tent to it. Taint, Siri. As in previous years, banks, courts and post office were all closed, although our library system was open, and my gym stayed on a regular weekday schedule instead of morning only. That meant they would not be doing the themed Columbus Day workout I imagined- where you show up late after the class has started, go up to somebody already on a treadmill, get them drunk, kick them off, and then stuff them in the supply closet and name a holiday after yourself. Must be some kind of liability insurance thing.

The other lawyers and staff in my office took the day off, but I was in there for most of it, catching up on things and waiting for one client (with a deadline only three days later) to get me some very important things. They finally rolled in at around 3:30, pretty much empty-handed. I didn’t wind up getting any of what I had asked them for until the end of the day Wednesday. That’s when they again rolled in at around 3:30, dropping off a small number of documents after I had already drafted a “best I can do“ response and emailed it to them. I knew I would still have to wait for them to get that back to me, and draft some other things myself today, to meet the filing deadline on that. I also have the shiva to attend at 2 p.m. which is what I'm driving to Rochester for, and an intervention with another client who’s been blowing me off to get that case back on track. Fun times.

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Across the border, of course, Monday was a much less offensive holiday. Their Thanksgiving falls on the same Monday in October, and I’m told it is not as big a deal as its US November equivalent is. I did have a meme I actually made myself (and went slightly viral) come back on my timeline the last time it fell on October 10, which is still as true today:




Canadians must be having similar feelings about the Blue Jays right now, who not only lost their first two playoff games at home to get kicked out of the postseason, but blew a substantial lead in Game Two  to do it. Much as Mets fans have been storming the gates with torches and pitchforks for the past few weeks, I suspected that Toronto fans were equally upset. I may have even seen a Canadian frown.

My biggest frowny face has been coming from the world of computers, though. I settled back into a full day of work on Tuesday, to discover I was not getting any email. There’s a long and sad story behind this, starting with a friend and colleague contacting me about one of his to me bouncing back to him as undeliverable.  This let me know that my incoming email from Roadrunner (aka TWC aka Speculum) had stopped incoming, catching the one from him, because I'd hit my mail storage quota on their server.

Which I didn't even know I had. 

RR/TWC/SpecU helpfully reports this only when it's full- with a weird email saying
ATTENTION: Bounced Message Notification, bytes in the mailbox!!

Right. That clears it right up:P

I have my R/T/S email downloaded into Outlook 365 on this newish laptop, as I always did with an older Outlook version on the previous one.. That previous Outlook 2003 on my molasses-slow previous one used to have a setting to clear messages off the server after ___ days. I can't find that setting in the 365 version, and I suspect they got rid of it for "our own protection"- from people bitching about clearing off emails they wanted to retain.

So my next step was to try to clear them off myself. I log into the R/T/S webmail client and see that, indeed, it's retained every email I received since installing 365 about a year ago.  That online email service has no one-click feature to "clean inbox" or mass-select all/most emails for deletion, like my free services with AOL and Yahoo and Gmail do. You have to do it one screen at a time. There are 367 screens and each takes several steps to select/delete/delete again from trash.

After about 10 of these go-rounds, hopefully enough to get my email for one day, I decided to bail, go home, relaunch Outlook 2003 on my ancient molasses laptop at home, have it download the 367 pages of emails and THEN tell it to delete all messages on server.


And if you're wondering why I was doing this on my own, it's because I knew that Speculum support would  be no help. Their store personnel have already told me that they have no interest in or incentive for support on their email program. The dude on Transit offered "get a Gmail account" as his solution. You think Imma gonna do any better with Microsoft support?  So instead I resorted to posting this for my computer to see:



Once I finally got the old molasses laptop to start, reboot, reboot again, repair Outlook, finally load, and connect to the server with that, my problem was finally solved when I woke up yesterday morning. Fully half my email quota had been restored! I just now have to remember to do this every six months or so until Microsoft and or Speculum figure their shit out.

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After the delays and frustration from all of that, I needed to get out of the office. Fortunately, I had a good excuse.

I rarely get out to music at night, between being tired after a long day of work and not wanting to be away from home,. On Tuesday, though, my friend Maria was performing in a lunchtime duo at our beloved local Americana bar, Sportsmens. I ordered up some wings and sat down near the bar, and enjoyed a good half dozen songs before she and Frank took a break.


 
I hadn’t seen her since early summer, missing a chance much closer to home right when the Covid got me, and I finally laid hands on her most recent CD. I also mentioned to her that on my way to the bar, I once again passed this local institution, which I’ve never gotten a chance to check out when coming to the venue at night.



Apparently, coming in the middle of the day does no better, because it was still closed. I told Maria how cool it must be for her to walk to work at that particular venue and pass the Hall of Fame that she is enshrined in, and she agreed, but did admit that she’d never actually been in there either, because she’s also never not sure if it’s ever open.

Schrödinger’s Hall.

Maria also posted a story, which I didn't see until after the gig, about why she's the kind of person that gets inducted into Halls of Fame- not only for music but for being a good person:
 

I played KO Bar tonight, but it was just one of those nights: four people when I walked in, two people after my first set, I decided to quit early. The pay is fair enough that I didn't feel right taking the whole amount. Even though it was a check, and it was already written, I gave 25% of it to the bartender and told him to give it to the owner. He insisted they would pay me in full, but I knew I'd feel worse if I had taken it than if I hadn't.

As I was packing up, four men came in who had just been at Sportsmen's. They did that thing that every musician knows where they ask if you're "Gonna play a SET?!?!" even though most of your stuff is already packed up. Then they started filling up my tip jar for me to just play them a song. I picked up my acoustic guitar and went in a better-sounding side room away from the hockey game and played some Bonnie Raitt bits. One of the guys asked if he could play my guitar and started playing "Angel from Montgomery" -- and we all stood there in a circle singing it together.

(Guess how much was in the tip jar? Almost exactly what I gave back.)

Btw, "Angel from Montgomery" is a John Prine song. That gig may have been on his birthday. Several other friends of mine celebrated that occasion, of a beloved musician no longer having birthdays thanks to Covid, at Sportsmen's sister venue in Rochester.  I'm sure he was looking down at all of them and was quite pleased:)

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I'm now back from all of that, but not without more tech fun.

None of the 347 printers in the Rochester office would print for me. The one printer closest to where I work, which I'm already set up to send to, was giving the dreaded REPLACE TONER code.  Which would be fine except they just replaced it. My laptop finally identified a Brother 5850 that it said it could print to, but nobody had any idea where it was. (I later saw one of that model sitting unopened in a box across the hall. Boy will they be surprised when they open it up and find I'd already printed to it.)

But two toners later, they finally got the original one going, and my things were printed. I borrowed a yarmulke from the Jewish lawyer in the office and headed over to the reform shul that was so liberal, when I lived there we called it "Temple Ham Sandwich." I was the only one wearing one. I hope it didn't offend anybody.

Other than that, beautiful building, caring people, and a life celebrated. I then celebrated it some more to run across the street to my old town library to upload the documents I'd been working on all day. From a building that my friends' late father designed 50 years ago.

That's kinda cool, too. And unlike Schrödinger’s Hall, it was actually open.