Dreams and Nightmares

DREAMS

I ordered some items I need for this year's holiday cards and they are already on their way to me. If they work out the way I hope, then I'm one step closer in my design process and one step closer to being able to actually begin the work. But one part has been eluding me. I want to include a small piece of permanent artwork for each of you. It has to be small, portable, lightweight but sturdy, and something that will easily go through the mail, both domestically and internationally.

Things can work themselves through in my dreams. Often
I've worked my way through techniques or projects in
my dreams before attempting the actual physical deed. 

I had an idea of what I wanted after a class I took in June, but wasn't figuring out how to streamline the process to successfully make 50 of them easily and quickly. Dreams are where I work out issues like this. My dreams from 1:30 am until my alarm went off at 3:15 am consisted of looking at the project from various angles. Rather on the order of, "If I do A, I would have to set up X supplies and it would take Y time; but if I do B, I could use R material and S equipment and my time would be cut down with the same basic result." Needless to say, plan B won, and that's what I'll be doing for the enclosure portion of my cards.

This wasn't the picture I originally had in mind for the Nightmares section
of my blog, but just look at it. So beautiful, but still, nothing I want
to see either in reality or in dreams. A true nightmare. 

NIGHTMARES

On the other hand, my computer system at work has turned into a nightmare. My inventory system is REALLY OLD and it is a proprietary program that I purchased in 1992, then upgraded several times over the years. It still runs on Win 98 systems that operate closed - no internet access to them at all, just in-house communications between the computers. That keeps things like security issues at bay, but also means that when something goes wrong, it can be very hard to fix.

Yesterday, turning on the computers for the day (which I always do unless I'm out of town), I discovered that the keyboard problems of the day before had migrated into systemic problems. Now my two computers weren't recognizing each other or acknowledging that they were even on the same network. The keyboard was coming up with a code I had never seen before, and basically, I was SO VERY unhappy.

After an hour of working at them, I gritted my teeth and re-installed the software - last updated in 1995! Very scary. But it seemed to work. I left for the day with the computers operational, but came back to shut things down last night - no faith that problems still wouldn't crop up on the back end. Sure enough, I'm still getting one code I'm not happy with, so first thing this morning I'll be trying to isolate that and make sure it won't impact the system negatively. This could be VERY BAD.

"Why doesn't she upgrade," you might ask (legitimately). Well, I checked into that a few years ago and to get this program in their new format would be $12,000 and none of our data would move over from the old system. We would need to re-key more than 30,000 individual products that we sell. Just hand me that noose and tell me where to stand, please. No - I'll keep limping along with computers that operate on a band-aid and a prayer for as long as I possibly can.

Happy Thursday to all. If I can get things going well again, there are a couple of memes going through LJ that I think I want to play with and I have Project Runway tonight, so it may not be a total loss of a day.