Breaking Cat News by Georgia Dunn for January 15, 2025

Somebody moved!

Was it the Killer Roombas, again?

I moved. It was me. I did it.

Yeah, nevermind calling tech support…..She’s gonna need an exorcism for this one. It’s BEELZEPRINTER! or perhaps ASTAROTH’S INKWELL?

This…this is totally how our printer treats my wife.

It could be that I’ve read too many cat comics, but that printer reminds me of the way cats horks up hairballs. Just saying …

Yeah, electrical signals in a small area can be strange. With my parents, the TV will, occasionally, only respond to the remote control after several seconds…

If she calls tech support for the Printer, she may be told they NO LONGER provide support.

Or ink……or tech service.

It’s ALIVE

It’s ALIVE

It’s ALIVE

OT Moonshot!

Connection obliterated. Harsh.

She has my naptop. (It’s a powerful gaming computer, but I got it in 2017, and I can’t update it anymore due to its elderly status. The guys got me a new naptop – a Dell, not an HP – and we’re still installing my old files.) I can’t print from it. So, I e-mail hubby to print things for me.

(dial tone flashbacks) Nooooooo!

Careful, your dating yourself.

I should talk, I remember punch cards.

Another printout:

Abandon All Hope Ye Who Print Here … hmmm … :)

Depending on the Woman’s printing needs it might be cheapr and less hassle to just send it to the local print shop, and pay the 20c a sheet or whatever.

I’ve had several things sitting in the print queue for days now. I keep getting a message that the printer is offline because my Epson printer is always, always offline except when I go in the other room to see why it’s offline, it’s not offline. It’s fine. I unplug it, plug it back in, wait the required ten minutes for it to boot up and…it’s still offline. If it wasn’t 6 degrees out, it would be out the window in a flash but it’s too cold to open them.

That printer looks extremely strained !

With all the technological advancements… Sending machine missions and landing and getting pics and videos from Titan and as far as Pluto and getting data from that far away… All we gets is thees steenky preenters which no connect with physical cable connection also. Maybe ours revered philosoprofessor knows why this be and could this be why hoomins civilization be ultimately doomed?

Did the Woman not light candles, sprinkle holy water, perfume the air with incense, sing songs of supplication, intone prayers, and do the printer connection dance before trying to make the connection? Tsk, tsk. Now it’s going to demand a sacrifice.

Where’s Ora Zella with Baby’s C-4?

My first printer was dot matrix. With the continuous feed paper where you had to carefully tear the pages apart and the borders off.

Meanwhile, Back on the Nile

At the oPyramid Library with Beatrixia, Iggy, and Scribe Apprentices Tira, Ebonee, Akil, and Hapi

Beatrixia: Alrighty, everyone have their tea and scone?

Hapi: I’m really happy that we have such delicious snacks!

Bea: Yes. Thomios was able to put in a kitchen here. Meet the chef in charge, Obadiah Opossum.

Ebonee: Glad to meet you, Obadiah. My cousin is studying under your cousin, Patrice Possum and Floofnet’s culinary school.

Obadiah: Call me Obie. I think it’s time to pay a visit to my cousin from Down Under.

Tira: I was glad to do the scrolls for the Getting Better Kittens songs.

Akil: And I’m glad we’ll have another press. Even though moveable type isn’t supposed to be invented until 1040 in China and 1450 in Europe.

Bea: True. But I don’t believe in waiting until the last minute.

Iggy: And now it gives me great pleasure to summarize the plans with the Getting Better Kittens and Mallets Towards None! Hit it!

Something exciting, something inviting

Something for everyone, a new moveable type!

Something for reading, always succeeding!

Something for everyone, a new moveable type!

Everyone reads! No one left out!

Knowing the latest without a doubt!

Where’s the internet? Well, it’s not here yet

But a new development, alright!

Books, scrolls, and posters

Thanks to Moveable Type!

Put myself through grad school on a keypunch machine…and I also could “read” the holes. We sometimes used the bits punched out as confetti…it was the worst. The static electricity it held made it almost impossible to get off.

Call Burt! He can make it work.

I made a lot of money helping with printer issues. One tax man even paid me to simply change the print cartridge during tax season. Paper jams were my jam.

Next story arc: getting all channels to print … should be good (or bad) for a few weeks. Then they will block again next month because you didn’t use it and you can start again! Throw it at the recyclers, and get a laser instead. I did, and I’ve never looked back!

This is my kinda soap opera!!!

It shouldn’t be that hard to connect the printer and download the software to run it.

I really need to check and see if my new phone will talk to my printer. My old phone refused to. It was very frustrating!

Really good timing this week since we were just configuring a printer.

Printers do tend to do that. Mine constantly prints a single sheet and refuses to print anything else unless I fulfill the demands on it. Which sounds pretty ominous until you realize it’s the alignment sheet.

I’m almost totally paperless now, in work and in private life, but I had a method for dealing with a recalcitrant printer when I was in the office: Stand over it with a mug of water, tell it firmly that it had one reboot attempt to get itself together or there was going to be a new occupant in its place. It worked so well that I was frequently called over by others to threaten equipment into submission because IT took too long to appear.

Weird Dial Up Sounds was the worst ringtone I ever used on my phone.

Lol! I had the same problem, only with my PC! Tech support finally found the problem, and it turns out that a hacker tried to access my computer! The anti virus stopped them and isolated the corrupted, code! The Tech removed it, and my PC and printer are buddy buddy, now!

Our little monster has begun sending me a prompt which flatly refuses to be canceled/closed, that the wi-fi connection (which I never recall setting up) has failed, and it needs to run a 10-hour diagnostic check. As I am currently working on the fourth book in a series, AND proofing the narration of the audio book or the third one, there IS no ‘good’ time for these little chatty interruptions. By the tine I reboot and bring up Word again, I’ve forgotten the resolution of the scene I was writing.

So, in desperation, I fall back on the obligatory ‘raid by a thundering, rabid horde of caffeine-starved barbarian hamster accountants’ ploy. Works sometimes. Dropped into a romance scene, not so well.

I honestly hate the idiot thing. And don’t even get me started on the heaping piles of trollish gold and sixth mortgage you need for new ink cartridges!!

Yeah, back in The Jurassic, down in the basement of the “new” (in late ‘60s) computer science building at Rice U (Houston), I (hapeless/hopeless academ) learned how to play Bridge, late-nites (aka post theatrical rehearsals/performances/strikes), with a buncha scary hardware and/or software wizards, while everyone waited to see ’If Their Program Runs.’

Bring in a monk…

Good times!

My tech guys hated me. Every time they would come to fix something they would say, that’s odd! I became the queen of “If there’s something that isn’t supposed to happen, give it to Tina. She will make it happen!”

This wouldn’t be a problem if you do the Microsoft Connection dance while installing a new printer.

First stand on your left foot,

Stick you tongue out of the right side of your mouth,

Hop around in a circle while chanting

Registry error, Registry error, Registry error

And wave your arms wildly about your head.

If that doesn’t solve the problem, restart the computer, then go buy a Mac. They always connect to the printer.

I’m getting increasingly curious as to just what brand this printer is (or more accurately, what brand Georgia’s been buying to inspire this whole arc), because it seems like it’s being extra stubborn than I’d even expect in a worst case scenario.

weird dial-up sounds?

I have a multi-function unit. I never got a chance to use the FAX part of it since I got rid of my (POTS) phone line many years ago.

Most things I do go straight to PDF

For me paper = clutter

Punch cards and FORTRAN, when we did our computing in primordial darkness …

I’ve been ill since Monday. Spent yesterday asleep. Seem to be on the mend, but I’d appreciate any positive energy anyone cares to send.

the printer should connect to the server

We still can’t get my husbands’ laptop connected to either printer.

Seriously? Dial up sounds?

As an undergrad I took a computer programming class complete with FORTRAN and punch cards. The best part of the class was the professor. Dr. Chang had been a part of the Sun-Yat Sen government in China and he escaped to the US after Mao Tse-Tung took over. He had a PhD in Mathematics so he found a position as a mathematics professor. I thoroughly enjoyed learning from him. I will always remember his constant admonitions to be sure our cards were properly punched and in the correct order. He would say “if you do not do this the computer will say no and kick you back”. Which to me sounds an awful lot like “connection obliterated”.