I received an email from a client this morning:
Subject: Fw: EarthLink Notice: You have 1 important alert!
Client message: Is this real or a scam ?? help!!
I thought I would share my reply here, for those of you out there who would appreciate some guidance. Continue reading
The Man with the Golden Gun
All summer
Gaddafi has sneered at me
from my bathroom
countertop
Sometimes I lay
my hairbrush there
on Platon’s photo
in a 2011 New Yorker
City Lights Bookstore
photo © 2010 by Eileen Ridge
So Much Happiness in the Poetry Room
The poetry room is upstairs
Sacred space in City Lights’ attic
I ascend the staircase
Holy holy holy
Touch each tread
With quiet feet
Each step feels
Like a pilgrimage
Temple Relic
phone books on the porch
appeared again today
i used to save them for when
my dad would come to visit
Canon support? Mostly not.
Here’s my big tip of the day: When you do Internet searches, look before you leap!
Look the picture here, taken from Google search results for Canon Support.
The blue underlined “links” are what you click to go to any of the results.
The green parts are how you look before you leap; they show the URL, or the web address, of each search result.
All of these may look like Canon Support, but only one of them is! Continue reading
We live in one of those places where people say, “If you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes.” I wrote this when my daughter was eight, and I think about it every year at this time.
Spring Storm
When it begins she runs to the window
Wide-eyed, she lingers there
a piston pumping up and down
I imagine other children around the city
moving up and down at their windows
parts of a giant engine that would
make this fluff fall faster Continue reading
The classic line: “Something came on, and I pushed it, and I didn’t read it, and now I don’t know what’s going on.”
What was going on in this case was a user dealing with Microsoft changing Hotmail to Outlook.com. He may have been a little less thrown if he’d read the message about the change.
When you see a message appear on your screen, read it. Think about writing it down, since you may not understand it, and after you click a button, you probably won’t remember what it said.
Whether you either (or neither) of these things, if you find yourself stuck, I’m happy to help get you unstuck.
Worthy Book
After buying Unworthy Lives, by Jason L. (“Les”) Atkins, 2004,
who died this weekend. Continue reading
A word of advice, folks: when you have a problem with your computer, nip it in the bud! Don’t let it fester and get worse and worse, because the worse it gets, the harder the problem is to solve. Promise me, okay? I love helping you, and I like to spare you the unnecessary heartbreak of a fouled-up system that can’t get fixed. –Eileen
© Eileen Ridge 1996
This is a piece about Hurricane Bertha, which came barreling up the East Coast in 1996. I was living alone in Nags Head, a bit north of where the storm made landfall (in the States) along the southern North Carolina coast. I’d just gotten my first laptop, and I marveled at being able to write on the computer, temporarily off the power grid. A week ago, Sandy devastated much of the East Coast (and parts beyond), while largely sparing us, reminding me of this old poem, which I wrote as a string of haiku in a sort of stream-of-consciousness fashion. Shortly after I wrote it, it was my joy to perform it with Mick Vaughn playing bass in a duo we called “Cosmic Leaf.” Continue reading
Many of you have heard my disclaimer for HP printers. It goes like this: If need my help for trouble with your HP printer, understand that it can take several hours (or more) to troubleshoot the problem, which may not result in a solution. I will be charging for all of that time, as I have given away too much time in the past, feeling like it shouldn’t take that long to solve a problem with a printer. HP’s printer software seems to get bigger and buggier every year. You couldn’t pay me to have one. Continue reading
Memorial Day, 28 May 2012
for Christopher Jobson @itscolossal
by Eileen Ridge
Perched, this morning,
pondering photos of our fathers
at sail on gunmetal ships
what it sometimes seemed
as the whole world were at war Continue reading