Day: August 3, 2012

Three days in New York

Three days in New York

I’ve just returned from three days in New York, mostly spent in the very comfortable Library Hotel.

When booking the trip, I just couldn’t resist the temptation to stay there. It was a good temptation, as the hotel is organized as a library — each floor is referenced by the Dewey Decimal number. So, as I was on the 12th floor, I was in Religions. As I was in Room 1204, I was 1200.0004 in the Dewey Decimal system — Germanic Religions.

The room was cozy but the lounge was awesome. In fact, I got in early — having taken a red-eye — and my room wasn’t ready but they directed me to the lounge where I was able to get a continental breakfast and remain all day.

My agent came over and we stayed in the lounge working on outlines and discussing futures until 3 p.m. We repeated that the next day and again on Wednesday, ending at about noon. We got a lot of brilliant work done, including a brand new project about which we’re both very keen.

The hotel itself is just two blocks west of the main branch of the New York Public Library — the one everybody thinks of when they think of libraries in New York City — the one with the lions, Patience and Fortitude. I managed to get over to it Tuesday evening and just about decided to move in there for the rest of my life! Wow! I could plan a trip just to stay there writing for a whole week!

I also went uptown on 5th Avenue to the Empire State Building because when we were there in 2009 we ran across the Heartland Brewery which not only serves up mighty fine microbrews (brewed on site) but also fresh-brewed root beer. Now I love a good beer but I have to say that the root beer alone is worth the trip.

On Wednesday, I went further afield and saw Harvey at the Randabout Theatre with a great cast including Jim Parsons (of “Big Bang Theory”) as Elwood P. Dowd, Jessica Hecht as Veta Louise Simmons and Carol Kane, whose voice is just brilliant for her role as Mrs. Chumley.

Harvey is a difficult role for the lead, particularly as Jimmy Stewart did such a masterful job in the film version. I think that Mr. Parsons did a credible job but, sadly, didn’t quite make me believe that Harvey was with him. He was quite brilliant at sharing the stage, as were all the actors, and I think that’s very difficult in this role.

I thoroughly enjoyed it and then it was rush back to the hotel to pick up my luggage, trundle back to Grand Central Station, catch the 4 down to Fulton, the A out to Howard Beach and the Air Tran to my terminal.

A great and productive trip, next stop — Dragon*con!

Adding to woes

Adding to woes

So another week after Comic-Con, the week after my backpack was stolen from my car by someone who smashed the window, I decide to treat myself by installing solid state drives on my main computer.

Great idea, poor execution.

Somehow, I ended up without a decent clone of my disks and, when I tried to go back to my original installation, windows decided it wouldn’t recognize the pair of disks that formed my D: drive — naturally enough, the drive with my home directory and all.

The end result is that I found myself with about 2 files in every 3 corrupted and useless.

The good news is (with few exceptions) that I keep my working files backed up. That is: novels, novellae, novelettes, short stories, plots, et cetera. The bad news is that I don’t back up my art, my business folders, my (sigh) QuickBooks Pro files — so all that’s lost.

On the other hand, I think that Windows is probably correct in suspecting one of my hard drives, particularly given that I couldn’t fully restore them, and so I’ve come to the conclusion that a computer system should be replaced about every three years. I’ve also come to the conclusion that I really, really need to be religious about backing up everything on a regular schedule.

(In my defense, the pair of drives that formed a Striped RAID were supposed to be 3 drives forming a RAID 5 — Striped and Mirrored — configuration only the 3rd drive was bad out of the box and I couldn’t at the time afford a replacement.)

If you ever do have similar problems, I recommend Ease US Data Recovery Wizard — it’s free and seems to do a good job.

Smash’n’Grab

Smash’n’Grab

Sigh.

It’s been a busy several weeks since Comic-Con.

My car was broken into, the rear passenger window smashed and my backup stolen — complete with laptop, camera, spare reading glasses, signed copy of Year Zero by Rob Reid, Sony digitial voice recorder, earbuds, steno pad with irreplaceable notes, various pens and, worst of all, the laptop had 1800 words on it that I hadn’t uploaded to Dropbox because I couldn’t get a network connection at Comic-Con.

I’ve managed to replace most everything and my renter’s insurance covered the physical loss, the car insurance deductible was too high to cover the window ($204) but the sense of violation — the theft was right in my apartment parking lot — really won’t go away.

Lesson learned, of course, is to never leave something of value, no matter how innucuous-looking, where someone might decide to steal it.

I guess the second lesson learned is that one can’t assume security through obscurity.