January 4: Ducks, Lagoon, P.O..E.T.S. Day Mess, Firefox

The funny thing is, though, I was sort of thinking of something else while I shot the bull.  I live in New York, and I was thinking about the lagoon in Central Park, down near Central Park South.  I was wondering if it would be frozen over when I got home, and if it was, where did the ducks go.  I was wondering where the ducks went when the lagoon got all icy and frozen over.  I wondered if some guy came in a truck and took them away to a zoo or something.  Or if they just flew away.

Holden is still speaking with his teacher, old Spencer, in this passage.  However, he is allowing his mind to wander.  Old Spencer is lecturing him about his failures at Pencey Prep, and Holden is worrying about the ducks in Central Park.  He keeps coming back to those ducks as the story continues.  He talks to a taxi driver about the ducks.  He imagines the fish in the lagoon frozen solid in the ice, waiting for spring thaw.  Instead of worrying about his own life, Holden focuses on the plight of ducks and fish, wondering how they survive the snow and ice of winter.

I wish I could have been like Holden this morning.  I wish I could have worried about ducks on this P.O.E.T.S. Day.  Instead, I spent three or four hours trying to solve an issue I was having with Blogger.  Last night, I tried to upload an image from my computer.  I couldn't do it.  No matter what I did, I couldn't get the Upload function to work.  This morning, I tried again, with the same results, so I spent the entire morning trying to troubleshoot the issue.  Now, I may have a minor in computer science and two advanced degrees, but none of those helped me.

Eventually, I started deleting images from my Picasa web albums.  (Don't ask.  I have no idea what they are.  However, some genius on Google suggested that it would solve my issue.)  Well, all that did was eliminate images from a whole bunch of old blog posts.  So, on top of still being unable to upload images, I now had to go back through over a thousand posts to figure out how much damage I'd done.

Eventually, I stumbled upon another user forum on Google where hundreds of people were posting comments like, "What the hell is up with Blogger?  I can't upload any images."  I wasn't going crazy. However, I was the only moron who had unwittingly eliminated dozens of pictures from his blog.  The solution to the problem was pretty simple:  don't use Internet Explorer.  I switched to Firefox, and my uploading issues vanished, just like Holden's Central Park ducks.

Now I have a whole lot of repair work to do.

If you're looking through some old posts on Saint Marty and stumble upon a blog that has a caption without an image, that's just Saint Marty being a moron.

Even these ducks think I'm a moron