business

My brain has been hopping through business tasks all day. I spent much of the morning looking at possible Point of Sale systems for our business. We’ve managed at conventions with a sort of cobbled together system, but it would be nice to have an integrated one that tracks everything for me rather than me having to figure out bits and pieces after the fact. Unfortunately this sort of analysis and decision making wears my brain out. Then my inner financial squirrel starts to make noises about the expense and don’t we really want to hold on to the money anyway. The financial squirrel likes to keep as much money stashed away as possible. But the storekeeper and accountant portions of my brain like this Point of Sale system very much.

I’d almost settled on a system when Howard needed to talk through some business things for upcoming conventions, so that required me to switch into booth manager brain. We also discussed the need for new headshots, a contract negotiation we need to undertake without offending the other party, and a contract that I really should have written and sent a week ago. So I ran downstairs and pulled out my contract writing brain. I was not quite done with that when it got to be time for my scheduled phone call with a publicist. We’ve never been very good about advertising Schlock. We comprehend the principles of marketing and branding, but I’ve never managed to figure out where and when to send out review copies. So spending an hour picking the brain of someone who does know was a very good idea. But I had to pull out my marketing brain.

Then I had pieces of all these different brains all taking up space in my head. Wait, that sounds way stranger than I thought it would. Rephrase. I had fragments of thoughts about Point of Sale systems, convention set up, marketing tasks, and contracts. So naturally I took my head full of fragments and went to buy a replacement for my seriously out of date phone. I have a new now, though I have mixed feelings about having it. The financial squirrel is not pleased at all, and the nostalgic part of me feels sad to part with my old one, it was a good companion for a long time. Yet as I’ve been setting up the new phone, it works so much better, so much more smoothly, that I’m losing my sadness very quickly. I’m going to be able to work and communicate on the go with far more capability. This is a good thing. If it were only a personal phone, I would have kept muddling through. Now I have a fully functional work device that I can carry in my pocket. Which was the point.

Now it is bedtime and there are lots of loose thoughts to mop up and tasks to put to bed. Or maybe it is me I need to put to bed so that I can finish tasks tomorrow. I think I’ll go with that plan.

After my last post in which I talked about my computer crashing woes. I had a couple of really helpful responses suggesting that the problem might be bad RAM. This was quite useful because I’d been thinking that everything inside the box was cleared as good, when that was not the case. The symptoms pointed to a hardware issue. So this morning I took my crash log and my computer over to Mireya at JPL Computers. She opened it up and helped me test all the RAM inside individually. This mostly consisted of putting each piece of RAM in all by itself and then seeing if the machine would boot. We found one stick of questionable RAM and one slot that was dusty. We reassembled it and checked it twice. No troubles booting.

I brought it home, plugged it in, and it crashed. I pulled out all of the old RAM, leaving only the brand new RAM. It crashed. I tried to think what could possibly be different in my house from when it worked fine in the store. Then I tipped the computer over to lay on its side. We had done all the testing with the panel open and the computer on its side. I restarted the computer and it has run without crashing since 5pm.

I’m not done with the trouble shooting, but my current theory involves a short or loose part. This afternoon I hurried to get my accounting done. Every momentary pause in response made me fear another crash. So I plowed through, getting as much work done in the window of time while the computer had decided to work. I didn’t get through all of it. I ran out of brain, so hopefully the computer will also work tomorrow.

As a tangential note, this whole experience has taught me not to think of a computer as a magic box, but instead as a conglomeration of bits any of which might break. I feel more competent now, but I would like to move on to the part where my magic box just does the work I ask it to do without causing me stress.

Howard came home tired, so tired that he did not have the energy to feel despair over all the writing he intended to do during the retreat but then didn’t. He noted the existence of that emotion as one might note a pasture full of cows while driving past it on the freeway. Fortunately being at home, and watching a silly action movie, restored him long enough that he and I were able to hammer out a list of things. It is all the major things we need to do between now and mid-August when Howard departs for conventions. We’ve divided all the things into roughly equal parts. And I have saved the list under the title Oppressively Long List of Things To Do. Tomorrow we will do some of the things. The day after we’ll do the same. Piece by piece we will turn things to do into things done.

#1 on my to do list for every day between now and the end of August is to prevent anything from getting added to the list.