Slogging blogger haunted by HTML

If you're reading this right now, which I'm pretty sure you are...you can see my blog has an interesting format change, one that has consumed me for the past two nights. Ever since creating my blog, I have been frustrated that the format so kindly provided by Blogspot only showed my content in a strip down the center of the screen. I'd admired blogs that lavishly used the entire screen width available, and longed to have the tech savvy to make the look of my blog more individualized and professional.

Finally, I asked a fellow blogger who hosts just such an expansively attractive site to help me. I'd already played with all the menu toys Blogspot offers but no tab said "make blog fatter" or even "fill up the screen width." So my friend took me for a (limited by his knowledge) foray into html.

The html jungle is filled with strange symbols, carets, dollar signs, lots of semi-colons, curly enclosures and a few recognizable words. That have strange meanings. Wrapper is not what your groceries come in. Padding is not what you end up with after a month of gluttony. "Startside" and "endside" are not the before-and-after of a political campaign. Nor are they at the "start" or the "end." They are, however, at the "side."

Now you know why I've had time for little else.

In my quest to get the background box from which my posts bleed to actually encompass the entirety of my posts, I have spent many an hour reading. The help button for Blogspot led me to many time-leaching sites, and the blogosphere is filled with an interesting plethora of pleas. (How someone got away with repeatedly posting a screaming all-caps ad for "BANGLAORE ESCORTS FEMALE ESCORTS IN BANGLAORE CALL GIRLS..." in the Google Blogger Help website is, however, beyond me.) But mostly there were questions like mine, with answers by programming stars who each had their own followings and websites and awards. It's a fascinating world, down in the darkened cellar of computer-dom. I nearly said "windowless cellar," but I suppose a majority of these programming moles do use Microsoft.

Unfortunately, even after scrolling through 300 desperate posts asking for help, I never found exactly my dilemma. Lots of people, however, seem to have the same aim as I do--to expand their blogs to fill the width of the screen. I spent time reading html tutorials, trying to extrapolate how to apply these plumping suggestions to the box behind my posts. I learned that "em" is better to use than "px," and why (just ask me!), and that one must be extremely cautious to insert semi-colons and spaces just so or risk a common complaint seen in the Google Bloggers' queries: "Help! I lost my blog!"

Made me rather grateful that mine's still here, even with the awkward-looking background border ending three-fourths of the way through my text. I'm hoping that maybe by tomorrow, if help comes through, I'll have a broad blog with big box.

Losing Sleep over My Broken Computer

We are too dependent on our computers.

I'm awake this very minute because I'm filled with anxiety over possibly losing all 20,000 of my photos. Oh yeah, I've also got anxiety over possibly losing the chapters I've done on a book....just telling you about it makes me go AARRGGHH.

In the middle of working, after about six hours of tedious research and writing, (I did hit "save" every few minutes), my desktop computer died. Just stopped. It gave a heavy "click," and the monitor went black and my cpu went off. Now, occassionally this happens, and I just hold down the power button on my computer ten seconds, and voila, it starts up and my dear Microsoft Word auto-recover gets me going again. But this time...nothing.

I'm thinking, well, at least I have everything saved on my external hard drive! Smart me! And I got out an auxiliary laptop and yes, there was my stuff on the external hard drive, but...it was from its regularly scheduled backup three days before--everything I'd done that day was not there.

OK, don't panic, I tell myself. The hard drive is probably not the problem. It's probably the fan. These mechanical parts go, and so, I'll just get a new fan. I seldom vacuum inside my cpu, and it probably up-and-died of eating too much dust.

The next day I spent the usual wasted hours trying to find somebody to come out and bring a new fan and repair my computer. I found a repair place that could send someone the following day. This was last Thursday.

He came (late, okay, but he did come) and said no, it was not the fan but the power source and he'd have to take my computer back to the shop. The next day he said he could send the chapter I was working on by email...great! It was Friday afternoon; I was cooking all day and didn't have time to check my computer, given that Shabbat came in at 4:10.

After Shabbat, I eagerly went to the laptop I was using as a substitute computer...and, no, there was no emailed chapter. And...what's THIS??? My external hard drive had autosaved the unimportant and minor contents of this laptop--and ERASED everything it had saved from my main computer!

I sometimes use the term, "aarrgghh." This time everyone in my house heard it. Repeatedly.

And the computer place is closed today, Sunday, and I cannot sleep. Twenty thousand photos represents my life since December, 2003. Losing the work I've done on the book chapters is arrggghh-worthy beyond belief.

I have a dear teacher who recently lost everything on his computer, too--including books he'd written ready to send to his publisher, needed for his family's sustenance. A friend of his was going to investigate why it was slow on the internet, but the computer fell off the friend's motorcycle on his way home, and was immediately squashed by an oncoming truck. THAT is even worse than my situation.

I know that anyone reading this has also suffered with computer losses. Maybe you have lost sleep over it, too. What to do? External hard drive (don't leave it plugged into a substitute computer) and uploading to internet servers (I know, they charge $50-100/year) and backing up on CDs and sending important files to others as email attachments. But do we actually do all of that? For personal stuff like photos and email that you use all the time?

Anybody remember organizers and typewriters? Oh yeah, I do...guess THAT'S why we still depend on our computers. Our lives are so much easier and more efficient and even more connected because of them. And because there's so much more we create and share, there's also a lot more to lose.