About where I ought to be...

I've just a tad over 1,000 words left of the coal piece and I've completed the first chunk of the book project.

This is not bad for Mother's Day, especially considering the fact that I was invited to the kids' place for a celebration that combined Mother's Day, Drew's birthday, and Shannon's birthday.

Shiloh came along for the ride, and I wish I had had the presence of mind to record a video of Shiloh soon after we arrived, as she tried to avoid the attentions of Mocha, the kids' new puppy. I suppose it's not nice to laugh about it (and it probably betrays less-than-optimal "socialization" efforts on my part), but Shiloh is easily intimidated by other dogs, apparently even puppies. Interestingly enough, however, after a few minutes, Mocha lost interest in her visitor, and Shiloh—well, it's not as if she reciprocated, as she never had any interest in Mocha to begin with. Peace prevailed, at any rate.

So the plate for tomorrow consists of the rest of the coal piece (along with what looks to be a pretty impressive despeckle, especially the list of terms I need to disambiguate), a despeckle of a completed item due in the morning, and a translation of about 1500 source words due Tuesday morning.

* * *Soon after returning from New York, I noticed that the Backblaze software I had installed to back up the data on my "main computer," was no longer doing its thing, as nothing appeared to have been backed up since April 20 (the site maintained that I had not backed anything up since April 7). So I hit up the Backblaze technical support link, and over the past 9 days or so, I've been exchanging one email per day with a support tech, who's been trying to convince me that something in my environment—my antivirus or firewall—was keeping Backblaze from operating.

I must admit, the one email per day sort of gave me the feeling that there wasn't much enthusiasm on the part of Backblaze tech support to actually solve the problem. But last Friday's email did point me in an interesting direction, which was a subdirectory that included a folder with log files. Eureka!

This morning, I took a good, hard look at the log files and found two lines in one of them that reported errors. I managed to fix one of the problems by editing a data file (after making a copy in another directory, just in case, so I could restore the original if needed).

The second problem, had to do with a file, the contents of which comprised a single string on a single line, that could not be written to. Reasoning that the routine attempting the write would create a new file if there was no file with that exact name, I changed the name of the file and clicked on "Backup Now."

Whereupon the whole kit and kaboodle fired up like Gangbusters (admittedly, a show I had never experienced, but I digress...), and is right now merrily attempting to back up about 60 GB of data. (I suspect the service's most recent date of 4/7 is controlling here, as a 30-day backup hiatus will cause data backed up from removable drives to go bye-bye, and there's no way I've otherwise created 60 GB of "new" data in need of backup.) I dropped a note to tech support, suggesting that log files be among the first thing anyone looks at when a problem, such as the one I reports, is encountered. It's a "lessons learned" for me, too.

* * *It's not terribly late, but Shiloh has learned to wake me up to let her out in response to imminent dawn, which these days occurs somewhere short of 5 am in these parts. I really don't mind, but I do then need to be mindful of the time at which I must retire.

Which is soon.

Cheers...