That Was Close! or Why You Do Your Homework Early

I’m in my third semester of Spanish. Homework is due at 9 p.m. on Monday nights. No late work is accepted. Ever.

That said, plenty of times in these three semesters I’ve been racing to get my homework submitted on time. I even installed StayFocusd on my favorite browser, Chrome, to make sure I didn’t do anything BUT work for three hours a night.

Except tonight when I tried to go to the voiceboard to submit my last assignment, StayFocusd asked, “Shouldn’t you be working?” and blocked the voiceboard.

You can’t disable StayFocusd when it’s on. It’s on from 6:30 to 9:30. Homework’s due at nine.

Stay calm. I went (ugh!) to Internet Explorer. My Firefox hasn’t been working lately, and I hadn’t taken the time to track down the problem, and NOW was clearly not the time…so off to IE I went.

IE loaded the entire page except the voiceboard.

AAHHH!!

Try Chrome again. Sometimes StayFocusd blocks something by accident. See if it–augh, no!

Close IE, reopen it. Look for popup blockers or anything else that might be interfering but damned if I know how to properly smack IE, seeing how I never use it.

Okay, desperation time. Uninstall Firefox, go get a hopefully-clean copy, re-install.

“Firefox is already running but is not responding.” No, it’s NOT running, I haven’t been able to open it in two weeks.

Google says “restart your computer,” but I’ve DONE that several times since Firefox stopped working.

Finally, a clue– Firefox may not have erased the “parent.lock” file when I last exited it. Search %appdata%/roaming/something or other to find it.

Not there. Search the whole computer for “parent.lock.” The only one that comes up is for Thunderbird. Close Thunderbird, delete it, try again.

“Firefox is already running but is not responding.”

All right, damn it. Go up from Thunderbird in the files, find Mozilla Firefox (not under Firefox, KD), drill down, and look–right in plain sight though my search couldn’t find it, “parent.lock.”

Delete file, hold breath, confirm I want to delete file, still holding breath, click on Firefox.

HUZZAH!

And that, dear friends, is why you never let your homework wait to the last minute.

In other news, NaNo planning seems to…not be happening. I’m hoping the muses are actually going wild in there and just not telling me yet, because man…feeling unprepared here. I’m trying to have faith, though. Even more than everything else I’ve written, my Hiro books in the past have come out of just about nowhere. It might be that all I have to do is close my eyes and type.

And stock up on NaNoWriMo High Test, of course. 🙂