Bad Boy Gone Missing

[Rutabaga]

Chapter 5 does not, in fact, appear to exist.

R

[Cole Parker]

Do you mean it's gone missing?

.

[Lugnutz]

I let Colin know this this morning. At least I'm not alone here. Give it time. It'll come.

[dude]

OK… here’s the story. Colin – who runs Codey’s World website – does his own story posting. He updates the CW site, and his own page and stories at the AwesomeDude site, from his remote log cabin near Silicon Valley, which we all know is the Appalachia of California.

As I update the site at 9 p.m. local time on Tuesdays and Fridays from my palacial 450-square foot residence here in the upscale Coachella Valley in the arid California Desert, Colin is often updating some hours after I do… -something about an over-amorous husband or drinking and debauchery.. I don’t know which – and when he notifies me he’s going to post as he did on Friday – I put up the link on the AD Home Page. If for some reason the story doesn’t get uploaded by Colin it’s the dude with egg on his face.

Well, it turns out that two of the recent three times this has happened it turned out to be failures of his four hundred dollar a month broadband service and that happened again this weekend. I realize that Silicon Valley is an impoverished area, but you’d think they could keep at least a trickle of bandwidth going.

When we spoke about it on the phone Saturday morning we were hopeful he could upload the story chapter from a Starbucks or MickeyD but apparently those too were suffering from Internet out®ages.

After waiting all day -with no posting of the story and with 493 protest emails in my inbox- I finally gave up and changed the latest available chapter back to Chapter 4.

An insider –however- indicates the reason Colin might not have used Starbux or McD’s is because they both have strict No Shoes – No Shirt – No Service policies. Any of us who have used student loans know that ‘payback is a bitch.’

So please be patient about Chapter Five of Bad Boy Gone AWOL!

Mike

[Cole Parker]

Rustic cabin in the woods? Colin? No, that doesn't compute. Wait, I know. Here's what happened. He was cross-country skiing with two laptops in his rucksack on his back and hit a thin spot of snow and one ski stuck while the other glided on and, while doing the splits, the sack popped open and both the story on one computer and the backup on the other went flying into the pine trees.

Now it's a little-known fact, one I shouldn't be revealing without permission, but, in the interests of transparency, let it be known that Colin has a morbid dread of Sasquatch. He cross-country skis with one eye on the trail in front of him, one eye behind to make sure nothing's back there gaining on him, and one on the trees to the sides of the path. Maybe I wasn't supposed to talk about his third eye, but it's too late now. Anyway, he started after those computers but couldn't bring himself to enter those trees. He could only bring himself to get within five yards of them, leaving a wide band of no-man's land between him and the woods.

So in fact it was a band width problem, but had nothing to do with MickeyD's or coffee emporia. Why Mike wanted to mislead like that, I have no idea. What it was about was Abominable Snowmen and atavistic fears.

C

[Rutabaga]

Even more impressive is that, with our current drought, Colin was intrepidly skiing on rocks.

R

[Nigel Gordon]

I don't care what the reason is, I just want Chapter 5,.

By the way I can believe a major internet outrage in Silicon Valley, it is just a variation of the 1st Law of Computing i.e. the more important the person to whom the demo is being shown the bigger the bug that will make itself known. The 1st variation of this is : the more important the customer the bigger the bug!

[Rutabaga]

It has arrived.

http://www.codeysworld.com/colinian/bad-boy-gone-good/bad-boy-gone-good-05.php

R

[Lugnutz]

Thank God. I needed a fix.

[colinian]

I've been using... correct that, trying to use Scrivener. The approach they recommend in their manual, which is repeated in the third-party e-books on Scrivener that I've acquired, is that as you're writing and you think of something that needs to be included you create a separate snippet (my term) entry with that thought/idea/requirement/whatever then continue with what you were writing. So, I was working on three chapters of BBGG (4, 5, and 6) and bouncing back and forth between them because, hey, this story has lots of interactions between the chapters, and since I'd more-or-less finished chapter 4 and I'm writing chapter 5 and some things came to mind that were needed either in chapter 5 or maybe even better in chapter 4 and I created a snippet with that section drafted and some notes about it to remind me about them. So now it's time to post chapter four so I copy the files and (here's the problem) all but one of the snippets that were chapter-4-related into Word because a Word file can be imported into Dreamweaver much more successfully than one from Scrivener. And chapter 4 was successfully posted on Codey's World and announced on the AD Forum. Sans the missing snippet.

Somewhat later I'm finishing up my final edit on chapter 5 and I'm ready to post it. But then Doug came into the room we use as an office and said, "The TV is out." Actually everything on the cable was out. Including the internet connection. This, I learned after phoning Wave Communications (on my cell), was a down situation whilst Wave replaced a temporary fiber cable fix they did a couple weeks ago (as the result of an SUV crashing into one of those big green boxes on a street corner that happened to be Wave's local node for our neighborhood) with a permanent fix and while they thought everything would stay up it didn't and thus the internet was down. Along with TV and our cable-based land-line phone service. So I couldn't post chapter 5.

I phoned Mike (a.k.a. Mike the Magnificent of AwesomeDude fame) on Saturday morning and told him I couldn't post chapter 5. He graciously recommended I copy it to my laptop and get my butt to a Mickey D's and climb onto their free WiFi and download from there. I gave that some thought but was interrupted by our friends arriving from Sacramento and Mickey D's was not on the table any longer, which was something Doug impressed on me by yelling "Get ready, Colin, we have to leave for lunch at Havana (a local eatery) NOW!!"

That gave me the opportunity, between being a gracious host for our visitors from Sacramento and then on Sunday hosting the "Easter 11" (the both-sets-of-parents-and-siblings) for dinner at our house, to reread chapter 5. I found a few minor typos (like a word that should have been plural, and so on) but I suddenly had a nagging feeling that something was amiss, not in chapter 5 but mayhap in chapter 4. Where the f**k was Jado's meeting with the police to report Pete beating the s**t out of him? Aha! there it was, hiding in one of those wonderful snippets in Scrivener that I'd missed. I retrieved it, pasted it to the top of chapter 4, did a quick edit pass then read my notes in the snippet and made a few other minor changes to chapter 4 so it all fit together.

And, glory of glories, our phone and TV and internet came up, which I discovered when the land-line phone rang with a call from a friend in SoCal.

Thus, I posted chapter 5 AND a revised and updated version of chapter 4, with the addition occurring from the first word of the revised and updated chapter to the first section break (marked with a ~~~<<>>~~~ ).

So, if you're reading BBGG you can read this added section at the beginning of chapter 4 even if you've already read chapter 4 or even chapter 5. It can be read out of sequence because the content still works and fills in something necessary to the story. And I apologize for the chapter 4 screwup. And Wave Communications apologizes for the lack of internet connectivity and no TV (thus no basketball playoffs) and no land-line phone by giving us a rebate for one week's worth of billing.

Thank you for reading Bad Boy Gone Good!

Colin

[Bruin Fisher]

What a pity we don't have Wave Communications over here. Most of our service providers are incapable of telling us what's wrong when we phone them (mostly they won't even admit they know about an outage) and they're legally obliged to give a rebate but only pro rata for any time your service is down beyond 48 hours. So if your service is down three days, you get one day's service charge refunded, which for me would be about $1.50.

[Camy]

Colin, probably a case of grandmothers and eggs, but you can compile from Scrivener direct to html, rather than going via Word to Dreamweaver.