Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"Many people think that they're good at taking criticism. What they mean, however, is that they're good at taking criticism on things that they have already decided are wrong with them." -- theferrett, 2003-12-07

"Drive-by" post for now; hope to write something more substantial later...

Yesterday was one of those days that starts out looking promising and then turns crashy -- wound up two days behind on LJ by this morning 'cause I didn't read my flist before I started slowing down. Crawled into bed all headachy and tired but didn't sleep much until late ... and then pain woke me again after an hour and a half. Wheee.

I expect to be at the Maryland Renaissance Festival on Sunday (closing day). I will be performing with The Homespun Ceilidh Band in Frederick, MD on Saturday.

I am experiencing a new and different set of problems with electronic communication (this time involving difficulty reaching customer-support for a prepaid-wireless phone-card), which I hope to have resolved soonish.

My VCR glitched sometime before Smallville this week; was it an episode I need to beg someone for a copy of before watching the next one (for continuity reasons), or can it wait until rerun season?

Dammit. Once again Opera is wedged, I'm getting inconsistent numbers from WinNT Task Manager, and I really wish I knew what it was doing. If I zap it, it'll remember how many windows I had open and remember how to restore about two thirds of them, but I'd rather not try to reconstruct the rest of my session; if I go to bed now, it may or may not unwedge itself by the time I get up again. Task Manager says Opera has 87% of the CPU but the performance graph shows a green line at 100% and a red squiggle around 50-ish and I don't know whether the red (I presume that's "system" activity as opposed to "application" activity?) gets counted against the app it's on behalf of, so I don't know whether that info makes sense or not (it probably does) ... but it's also reporting 192 MB of memory used, whereas adding up the amount reported for each process only shows about 50 MB -- enough to all fit in physical RAM.

I wanna know what it's doing when it gets stuck like this, and why. Gimme the goddamn blinkenlights (uh, and a single-step switch 'cause I don't read LEDs at a couple hundred MHz)! Opera should be idle right now, since none of the open windows are still working on downloads (the main reason I open so many at once is to let a bunch fill in the background over the 56K while I read a couple others, and so that I don't have to wait for the browser to re-render the page I linked from when I go back). I'd love to be able to see what causes this state so I could avoid it. (It's not just the fact of having so many windows open, 'cause that doesn't consistently trigger it.)

I'd love to know whether the problem is within Opera or a bug within NT that Opera triggers. But this seems to be one of those "No User Servicable Parts Inside" situations.

*GRUMBLE*

Okay, I'm done for now. Just had to vent. Figure this is a "gotta live with it" deal, but still need to scream in frustration once in a while. Fortunately all my telnet windows are still being responsive and X is still being reasonable (I just fired up 'gv' on one of the Linux machines from here), except for a half-drawn Opera dialog box that's stuck in the foreground on top of everything else.

So much for my hypothesis that the problem was my virtual memory settings.