Saturday, July 25, 2009

Sleep? We don't need no stinking sleep.

Last night I tried to open iTunes and got all kinds of warning messages from AVG anti-virus. So instead of watching one of my downloaded Ghost Hunters, I had the fun of cleaning up my system. Actually, since I also got a message that some files were missing and iTunes couldn't open, I suspect the issue was corrupt files and not a virus at all--AVG is bad about giving false positives. But to be on the safe side, I uninstalled iTunes, deleted it and emptied the trash, ran a full virus scan, then did a disk clean-up and defragged the computer, which was overdue anyway. Now I'm running another full scan, just in case. If it catches anything, then I'll panic. I don't know enough about computers to do any more than I already did.

I stayed up last night because I was reading a good book, Alex Bledsoe's The Sword-Edged Blonde. When the defrag finished around 12:30 am I intended to go on to bed--but I wasn't done with the book. So I stayed up until 2am to finish, and it was excellent and worth the loss of sleep. Also I don't have to work today, although I woke up naturally at eight and decided to get up.

I've been wanting to read The Sword-Edged Blonde for a while, ever since I saw some really positive reviews online. It was originally published by Night Shade Books in 2007, but Tor picked it up and republished it this summer, with a sequel coming out in September. That's as close as I'll get to reading a NSB release, since the last one I read was so full of grammar and punctuation errors, particularly homophone mistakes (including the infamous "fowl breath" episode) that I swore I'll never buy one of their books again. Copyeditors are important.

11 comments:

Jamie Eyberg said...

Sounds like I should do that type of work on my computer as well. it has been far too long. Glad you got to read a good book. Sound interesting.

Jamie Eyberg said...

speaking of copy-editors.

K.C. Shaw said...

Jamie--blog comments don't require copyediting. Unless you collect your blog comments into a book. :)

Alan W. Davidson said...

Ha! "Fowl breath". Those sorts or errors really take you out of a story.

K.C. Shaw said...

Yeah, and that one happened at the climax of the book. I couldn't believe it.

Aaron Polson said...

Ha ha! My students can all sell manuscripts to NSB then!

Fowl indeed.

K.C. Shaw said...

They could even get jobs there as editors. :)

Danielle Birch said...

Ahhh, waking naturally. More pleasant that waking at the hand of the dreaded alarm clock.

K.C. Shaw said...

Yes, the alarm clock is not my friend.

BT said...

I'm impressed with your computer savvyness - way too many people either panick, pay way too much for 'computer experts' or, if they're related to me, phone me (I almost wrote fone me then...).

An excellent and logical procedure for sorting glitches.

K.C. Shaw said...

I'm glad to hear it--I always assume I'm just flailing around uselessly. At any rate, it seemed to work, although I need to download and reinstall iTunes.