Coming Up For Air, Monitor Dying

OK, I'm not dead, I've just been overworking. WAY too much eBay stuff lately. Out of town guests, who were lovely BTW. I've been getting hit really hard with both comment and email spam lately, I had to compact my Entourage database last night because I started getting phantom invisible emails in my Delete box. Macs rarely get viruses but I've had other email programs get corrupt databases before (Netscape scrambled all of my mesages together like three times, that was fun, let me tell you) so I freaked out when the invisible message count went from 1 to 10 within 24 hours. I had never compacted my 250 mb of emails before, but it worked and the phantoms went away.

And having other weird computer problems... Why do things have to start acting up when I want to buy something else, dammit? My printer I use for my massive amounts of eBay paperwork (which I thought I was replacing when I bought my HP Photosmart, but it's too slow!) has been shorting out regularly enough that it was at the top of my "to replace" list, then my external hard drive started freezing and causing finder problems, so I started looking at hard drives. Sparky even agreed to buy me a new one.

BUT the last week or so my monitor has been flickering so the price of poker just went way up. When my last monitor died it just went black one day and that was it. My lovely 19" NEC monitor has been jittering and flickering so I'm guessing it's on it's way out. I can't remember when I bought it but it wasn't too terribly long ago. So of course, I want a nice flat screen LCD monitor to replace it. And the ones I'm looking at start at like $600. I really don't want to go down in size, bigger would be easier on my screwed up vision, and the LCD monitors are supposed to be much sharper (as well as giving me half my desk back).

Then I made the mistake of looking at the new Apple Cinema Display monitors (which start at $1300, gasp!). I remember when the wide screen Apple monitors first came out and I thought they were just odd looking and overpriced, sigh. But then I still had most of my vision back then and could read without glasses, and didn't have double vision. My poor husband, he's going to kill me when this thing goes out. I actually hope it does just die peacefully instead of blinking on and off for months, it's giving me headaches already. I've mentioned the flickering to him several times, I need to get him to sit down and look through eBay for an hour or so to actually see how bad it's getting.

What else... (outside news in the next entry), kitty Phoebe has finally discovered how comfy the bed I bought her a year ago can be. She never got in it, I guessed it was because she didn't like the fake fur stuff, and had put a pillowcase over it, towels in it, but no go. I was going to use the old torn fitted sheet from our bed and sew a little cover or something for it, but I just folded the sheet and laid it in the bed and she jumped right in. OK, whatever works for the kitty works for me.

I've also been trying to find a replacement for my discontinued eBay management program (AID), which is nearly impossible for us Mac people. I downloaded a trial of Auction Genie, which is the closest I've found to what I've been looking for, which is basically a desktop database program, and have been playing with it, but the detail page is tiny and hard to read and I haven't been able to get it to do everything I want. The online instruction manual is 90 pages long! It's not terribly difficult, but it doesn't feel at all intuitive. I'd really like to simplify my job, not make it even more complicated. I know I'm just too picky, but it would be nice to have more than one program to choose from. And eBay's own programs they are pushing don't support Macs at all.

And with all the problems going on, and a bad case of PMS (my pharmacy substituted my generic BC pills for a different brand so I've had a really uncomfortable month), I decided to upgrade to the brand new version of Movable Type tonight. I know I shouldn't do anything that requires real thought when I'm PMSy but I like nice repetitive tasks, they calm me down. And all went well so nothing to freak out about.

Posted by Morticia at October 21, 2004 02:48 AM