Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
P.S.  DanGuy: As much as I sympathize with your desire to get back to
England, I have to tell you that I'm really relieved that they're not
going to light you on fire.  

Happy GF day to you.

-Pam
who made a little squeaky noise when she read your post about the fire
suit
  

    
Rebecca <nefertiti> says hi, by the way...

and she asked me to pass it on.  She's been adjusting to new
medication and job hunting, and is trying to avoid the Evil Temptation
of online distraction.
  

    
Mike - My favorite actual Brecht quote is "The best thing a playwright
can do for a director is die." ... of course Brecht never knew Martha
or Neil... 

I still can't figure out why Chekhov thought he was writing comedies,
though... 

Kelly - pretty and desireable are good things to feel! Shame they came
with exhaustion, though.

Squeaks - Well, I *do* live in a really nice part of Oakland. It's a
BIG town, after all. 

I love your solution to icky frat boys, btw... 

Linda - that cemetary is so incredible. It's a crime that I live so
close to there and never go there to hang out. I see a writing trip in
the near future, though, now that I have my iBook.

Neil - I have to wonder if Warren Beatty could tell them apart...

Adriana - My thoughts to you. My own grandmother is clawing
frantically at death's door.. but she just doesn't know how to let go.
It's really hard... She's so tired... I fear growing old far more than
dying. The body is such a frail thing it seems...
*shudder*
Ok, I'm going to stop that for a while and think some happy thoughts.

Dan
  

    

I'll be giving a tour of that cemetery in April, and I know the perfect
place to hang out with an iBook.  Personal tour could be arranged before
that, too...
  

    
     "Bialystock and Bloom, it's your nickel."
     "Hello, my name is Chekhov, and I have some plays --"
     "Chekhov?  Not Sulu?"
     "Who?"
     "Never mind.  We're only looking for comedy right now."
     "But these are comedies.  There's 'How's Your Bird?'  It's about
a seagull, and --"
     "We did that as a musical.  Lyrics by Rod McKuen.  It was big in
Pomerania.  Anything else?"
     "Well, there's 'Shake My Cherry.'  The defoliation scene --"
     "Next?"
     "Uhm, 'Are You Being Vanya --'"
     "Not really."
     "'Ivanov and his Johnson' --"
     "Is that a musical?"
     "'-- and his Musical Johnson?'"
     "Could Magic play it?"
     "[pause]  Okay, okay.  'My Sister Olia and my Other Sister
Masha.'"
     "Hmm.  Okay, there maybe you got something."
     "You want it to be a musical, right?"
     "Chekhovnik, what else is there?  I see it a s vehicle for The
Alan Parsons Project's Greatest Hits Album.  Like that ABBA thing, but
spiritual.  Except the Poe ones, we did that already as 'Raven on a Hot
Tin Roof.'  My people will call your people, okay?"
     "I don't have people --"
     "We'll get you some.  And, Tony?  The gun.  The mantelpiece.  I'm
thinking, Peking Opera Goes Moscow.  Chow Yun-Fat on Broadway.  If we
can get Linda Hamilton, it's a done deal."
  

    
Mike, you *did* say "The defoliation scene --" and not "The
Deflowering Scene", correct?
  

    
Fabulous Mike!
<grin>

wanders off to find a tea-mopping cloth
  

    
Adriana - fingers crossed for your grandmother.

A nice tech support man at the place I got the Libretto from talked me
through using a Windows 98 startup disk to get into Win 2000, so it
looks like I'll be able to get everything off it -- several hundred
unanswered e-mails, all the FAQ stuff, and all... "They don't like you
doing this," he said, "but it works just fine." And indeed it does.

And I weas shocked to find -- and immediately rescue -- several pieces
of writing that I hadn't backed up.

Johanna -- nope, everything should be findable. It just takes time.

Mike -- god, you're good.
  

    
oops. Spoke too soon on the FAQs. Does anyone know how (in Dos) to get
stuff out of a directory path that's more than 66 characters long? It
stops working a directory or two away from the outlook express inbox
directory I need...
  

    
Are you doing this from the root directory?  You can change the directory
you're in and then the commands get a lot shorter to type, as in:

You're copying a file from C:foobaronetwothreeexample.txt to the new
location C:foobarstuffnonsense

Instead of

copy c:foobaronetwothreeexample.txt c:foobarstuffnonsense

you can do any of these choices:

cd foobaronetwothree
copy example.txt c:foobarstuffnonsense

cd foobarstuffnonsense
copy foobaronetwothreeexample.txt .

cd foobar
copy onetwothreeexample.txt stuffnonsense
  

    
Hmm... good try, Michael, but I still can't get to 
C:foobaronetwothreefourfivesixseveneightnineteneleven

if I CD to C:foobaronetwothreefourfivesixseveneight and then
try and cd nine -- it'll just tell me it can't get there...

(having got there one directory at a time).

Thought I'd got it sorted with an elderly copy of Laplink -- but I was
too optimistic, as even that can only get down to 7 directories and
then gives me a "path has too many characters" warning... so DOS
doesn't seem to be able to get to it. (As an experiment I'm trying to
copy one of the subdirectories to the root directory, and I'll see if
it takes its own subdirectories with it).
  

    
Nope -- still just "path has too many characters". Sigh. (Sure I can
figure this one out if I just think laterally enough.)
  

    
Um, Michael, Neil isn't that FUBAR rather than foobar?
As in Fucked Up Beyond All Repair?
  

    
I meant to psued as "oopsie, I said the "F' word. On the last one.
  

    
JaNell -- I don't think so. For example, if I can get any version of
Windows to actually look at the disk, I can get the files off it. 

(Neil, damning Microsoft's "we haven't been able to reproduce this
error and have no idea what causes it" help pages.
  

    
Neil, try: copy BeginningOfDirectoryName* DestinationOfCopiedFolder
(Use first two or three letters of folder name*)

I'm rusty at this, it may be wrong.
  

    
That's one reason I Mac. Not iMac, G4.

You might be able to use another computer to go to your mail account
server and get any mail not put on a local folder.
Calling Arlene the programmer now...
  

    

I've lost data in the past to the "too many characters in path" problem. THe
data was minor and I didn't care enough to try to find a solution, so I
don't know what to tell you.
  

    
Arlene says you can't reformat...
(She worked for Toshiba for six months.)
Once you reformat you can't boot it off the floppy drive; there'll be
no way to get a file onto it.
With no operating system, it can't see the driver for the PCMCIA
Floppy drive.
If you reformat it, you'll have to send it back to Toshiba.


1) Have you tried to boot it up in safe mode?
2) Do you have a PCMCIA Floppy drive?
3) Have you tried: copy *.* from the folder?

If you don't have Outlook set to download your mail automatically, you
can retrieve it from the server, usually.
  

    
Neil:
If you
copy *.*
get a LOT of clean floppies at hand first.
  

    
No plans to reformat until the needed files are off there.

I've tried booting in safe mode, and in all other windows 2000 modes,
but each of them ends in the blue screen of doom. Booting from the
windows 98 setup disk in the A drive (USB) gets me into DOS, at least.

DOS can't see any directory more than 66 characters long, so no DOS
copy commands will actually get anything out of the incredibly long
directory tree that windows puts its outlook express stuff in by
default: it can't see it.

The Libretto help guy at Dynamism dot com got me some of the way out
of trouble today. He may be able to get me the rest of the way out
tomorrow...
  

    
Neil:
Have you tried the 
copy *.*
?
The asterix is a wildcard; it doesn't need to read the file name, it
just copies all of them...

I do hope the Libretto Help Guy works.
  

    
JaNell -- but "copy *.*" won't copy subdirectories and their contents
over. If I remember my Dos (and it's been a while) "xcopy *.*" would,
but it's all moot, as DOS simply can't see anything further than 66
characters away down a directory tree, so at that point it stops. It
cannot perceive those directories or their contents. 

And the files I need are another two directories away down the tree...
  

    
See, but Arlene programs for a living, so I was just passing on what
she said...
And the folders holding the files 66+ charecters long wouldn't need to
be opened, just copied, including the contents filed further in... I
think.
Maybe I should just get Ar in here directly, but she's in bed.
Where I should be, I guess...
  

    
Pamela -- Thanks.  It's always hard to know how to jump into a new
social situation, especially when it's virtual.

Neil -- Relaying for a friend on the computer issue:
I might try using "subst"
if you type
subst j: c:onetwothreefourfivesixseveneight
where j: is some drive name that is NOT currently in use, and the path
is as much of the path as you can fit in sixty characters (with a
whole directory name), then you hopefully will be able to do
cd j:nine
and get to the next level.
It might not circumvent your problem, but it's worth trying.

And on an entirely different note, the bass player in my band would
love to know if you have ever heard Hitchcock's "I often dream of
trains" and if so, did you like it?

Johanna (who thinks she's talking an awful lot today.)