Browser Shenanigans …

My online world broke this morning, like this tile broke … and was rethought in the way that I’m having to rethink my desktop …

I was glad to hit on a familiar page at last with this one … my WordPress dashboard. Thankfully, it was the same as it’s always been. I heaved a sigh of relief when I arrived.

It was then 2.30 PM and I’d struggled since I sat down after breakfast and chores to get back to my familiar scenario. My troubles began when suddenly my online bank was unavailable and the helpline operator and I thought at first that I’d been hacked.

But no, my then-browser updated overnight and apparently threw up a firewall that kept me out of my bank as well as several other places. Well I thought, away with that browser. I de-defaulted it and all my problems began.

Who knew there’d be 500+/- settings, and that there’d be a whole different architecture to accustom myself to, and that there’d be a bunch of new rules? One good thing about the new old browser is that everything is easy to find. I learned more about browsers in a couple of hours than I’d learned the whole year with the de-defaulted one.

I hope all the new stuff sticks in my head, as do I hope that all the stuff I have open on the desktop stays on there when I close the laptop. That I don’t have to find it all from scratch again next time I open the lid.

And although I enthusiastically welcome the password app, I also wrote down a bunch of them. You never know when you might be shut out, and at what level.

I managed to retrieve the situation without the help of an AI assistants, I’m glad to say. What FB AI assistants are doing beggars belief.

Cat Diary 37

We have started training. Apparently it’s a good idea for me to learn the meaning of some human words. This week we’re tackling “Sit” and “Come”.

When the old woman says “Sit” she means for me to go sit beside her on the couch. When I get there, I usually get some kibbles on her lap table, which is the board she lays over her knees to eat her dinner off or use her laptop on. “Sit” is easy.

“Come” is hard. She wants me to come right up to her feet before she puts the kibble down. When I have finished the kibble, she walks to the next place where she can perch on a chair or a bed, and says it again. “Come.”

I so don’t see the point. I’ll sit down and wait for the next kibble right where I am.

So then, next time we did “Come” I was really hungry, and it was worth my while to just follow her around the house, and be there before she even said the word. Too easy!

Probably she’ll make it hard again next time.

PS, I’m also learning to take selfies …

Earth Fall, 4

This story was written well before the no-no thing started about dogs dying in a story.

[I realize dogs are our best friends. I’ve owned a dog myself and it was a wrench to let her go when that became necessary. She was only nine years old when she developed a brain tumor and could not be saved.]

In this story one of the dogs briefly dies. So, I guess, you can take this as a spoiler alert.

4. Claire Steels Herself Download

Cat Diary 36

I’ve started learning to put my head in things to get the kibbles out. For a long time I didn’t like my whiskers to be bent backward. Now, because I know there’ll be a kibble at the end of my hunt, I can bear it.

It proves that we cats are just as good at delayed gratification as humans are, don’t you think?

The old woman craftily loads kibbles into my catnip pillow case … I swear I don’t know when … in between me looking here there and elsewhere it must be.

When I walk by the bundled up pillow case and I can smell a kibble or two, that’s when I pounce.

I can even get the kibbles out of a crumpled piece of paper now. We had a lady visiting last night. She said, “My place is much tidier than yours!”

The old woman laughed. She said, “Tthat shouldn’t be hard!“

It’s true that the whole floor is busy with activities, is that necessarily untidy?

Just having a nap here, waiting for my bedtime kibble storm. Once I’ve eaten them, it’s time for me to encourage the old woman to go to bed. She complains it’s too early, but when I bite her ankle she soon goes.

Night times I play with the toys the old woman has put on shelves. Which I can reach now, except for my bird. It lives high on a bookshelf.

The old woman says I can have it back when she’s taken its voicebox out. Apparently there’s a nasty battery in there that’d kill me if I chewed on it.

Earth Fall, 3

3. Nene Download

Earth Fall, 2

Tracks in the swamp …

2. Nalbo Download

Earth Fall, 1

At the time when I started writing Claire’s and Nalbo’s stories, I titled the manuscript Earth Fall for a working title. History soon caught up with me and there have been a novel, a film and a four-person shooter video game published by that name, and I thought for a while that I would change the name, the way that I renamed the story that became Lodestar.

But Earth Fall still makes the most sense for this story of the alien engineer, in an Earth-centric orbit for fifty years in his spaceship, comes down to Earth for an as yet unknown reason, leaving the majority of his alien and human support system to keep his spaceship in orbit.

His arrival in Earth’s neighborhood caused all sorts of distress to electronic communications and transport, as apparently his spacecraft grazed over the fields of electrical pulses. Communication satellites stopped working on day one, and humanity teetered at the brink of collapse for a decade before things stabilized, minus electronics.

Sounds like a fairly weak set-up in this day and age, though many a film plot has got up and run with much less originality. But it’s Claire’s and Nalbo’s meeting with the Lotor-alien’s life-support system that’s of interest here.

Claire and Nalbo are a pair of fairly ordinary Australian retirees whose lives intersect with a bunch of completely unordinary alien beings. The things happening as a result are necessary knowledge (for you) if later on I decide to also serialize MELD (Part 2 of the Doomed trilogy). They are a prequel, if you like.

1. The Dye Workshop Download