Always "Getting Ready," Never Actually There

Why is it that lately I seem to be spending half my life waiting for Windows to update?  And is it ever going to decide it's finally up-to-date enough? These are the burning questions in my mind as I watch my laptop reboot itself for the umpteenth time.

As for its promises to take care of business during an "inactive time," I can only laugh. Windows, I guarantee you're not smart enough to figure out when I'm likely to be awake and wanting my computer. Even I am barely smart enough for that.

Windows And Driveways

Oh, right, I forgot that thing Windows 10 did the last time it upgraded, where it kept constantly telling me I had to re-enter my "most recent credential" for my Microsoft account. I'm trying to remember how I dealt with that last time. I think, after trying everything the internet told me to try, I just finally told Windows to ignore the message. Oh, Windows.

In other news, I now have an estimate for my concrete work, and I'm possibly more surprised than I should be by just how close it is to my own rough guesstimate for how much this was gonna cost me.

WTF, Computer?

After all the wailing and gnashing of teeth that Windows 10 caused me last time, until I finally gave up and went back to 8.1, my PC has suddenly decided, with no permission and no warning, to "upgrade" itself again. What the hell, Microsoft. What. The. Hell.

Sigh. Dare I hope it'll behave itself better this time? Dare I?

Random Things I've Been Up To

Some random things I've been up to:

Our team won the pub quiz last night! Apparently our perfect knowledge of fictional orphans made up for our pitiful inability to name more than three Denzel Washington movies from the last decade.

I watched the season finale of Better Call Saul yesterday, and it was fantastic. You know, on one hand it's not remotely surprising that a Breaking Bad spinoff, brought to us by the same people, would be really, really good. On the other hand, though, elevating your comic relief to the status of tragic anti-hero in his own prequel drama (even one that also features a lot of humor) seems, on the face of it, insane. So I'm still impressed that it works as well as it does.

I had to go into work today, on my day off, for a lecture on cyber security, which they require us to do periodically. So now I can warn you all: don't pick strange USB drives up off the ground and stick them into your computer. You're welcome.

Not A "10"

So, my verdict on Windows 10, for the record, is that it'll be pretty nice if they ever get it to actually work. In the meantime, my desktop is now back to Windows 8.1, and Microsoft owes me back the day of my life I spent dealing with that crap. Gaah.

Like The Cybermen, I Have Been Upgraded.

I just upgraded my desktop PC to Windows 10. I hadn't actually intended to do that just yet, but I found out the hard way that when you click on "Upgrade Later," that doesn't mean, as I had assumed, "download the files and be ready to upgrade later, whenever I feel like telling you to," but rather, "you must now schedule your upgrade for sometime in the next few days, and then you will be irrevocably committed to it, bwahahaha!" Oh, well. Except for the fact that I was sure I'd scheduled it for 2 AM and it instead happened at 8 AM when I was actually trying to use the computer, it seems to have gone remarkably smoothly. And I no longer need those third-party apps I had installed on Windows 8 to bring the Start menu back and enable me to use the "modern GUI" apps in resizable windows.

All of which mostly just means that I'm still waiting nervously to find out which part of it I'm going to hate. But, hey, so far, so good!

Hardware Upgrade!

I am writing this from a brand new computer! Yay! The PC I was using was seven years old, which, in computer terms, qualifies as advanced dotage. And it was getting increasingly annoying in various ways. Plus, it was running XP, whose lack-of-suportedness was starting to reach the point of actually being dangerous. Like, I couldn't install the latest version of Java. Or not without it giving me dire warnings about how it probably wouldn't work, anyway. Since I'm not yet ready to switch to doing absolutely everything via laptop -- I know, I know, I haven't given up my landline, either -- I figured it was finally time to replace the thing. Basically, I got a newer model of the same machine -- the Dell Inspiron -- because the old one worked fine for years and I'm far too lazy to research my zillion possible options and pick the very best one. (Hey, psychologists will tell you that doesn't make you any more satisfied with your choices, anyway.)

But, oy, why is something like getting a new computer up and running always so ridiculously complicated? Even just getting my hands on the machine was a frustrating process. First, the FedEx person left a "you weren't home" tag on my door, even though I was home. (I think I was on the treadmill, which is kind of noisy, and they didn't knock loud enough. Or, y'know, ring the doorbell.) After that, they'd only try to deliver it after 3:30, when I needed to leave for work. I ended up having to be an hour late for work just so I could wait for the thing on Final Delivery Day, because otherwise I would have had to drive all the way to Albuquerque to pick it up. I'm just glad someone was able to cover for me. I've had to make entirely too many trips up to ABQ lately.

And, then, of course, there's all the setting things up, and updating and registering and downloading and installing and file transferring, and beating Windows 8 with a stick until it behaves. Which you expect to take quite a while, but which somehow always manages to take longer than you allow for, ever after you try to allow for that. ("Oops, I didn't copy those game save files off the old machine! Guess I need to hook it back up and turn it back on... Wait, why is the mouse suddenly not working on it?!")

My big mistake, of course, was trying to set up a new printer/scanner at the same time. It's a wireless printer, which I figured would be nice. Fewer cables in the tangle behind the desk, and I'd also be able to print to it from my laptop or even my phone. Gaah, what an undertaking setting that up was. It went something like: "Wow, these installation instructions are confusing... Why is it not seeing the printer on the network? Oh, wait, there it is. Wait, why is none of my other stuff able to connect to the network now? How did this change my WiFi password?! Crap, what's the admin password for the router? Aaargh! OK, changed it back. Now I need to figure out how to give the printer the WiFi password. Clearly I'll need to plug it in for that. OK, now how do I... Man, this is the least useful help function ever. I'll just keep trying things that look vaguely like they might do setup stuff until I find it. Ah, there we go! Wait, the printer needs an admin password in order for me to give it the WiFi password? Were the hell do I find that?! This manual ought to win some kind of Most Craptastic Manual award. Half the entries say 'see instructions!' I thought this was the instructions! What is a manual if not instructions?! Oh, there we go. OK, and... It works! Wait, no it doesn't work. Oh. It's working now. I don't know why it's working now and it wasn't before. Or why the printer is listed twice on my devices list. But maybe I don't care anymore."

Inevitably, of course, you reach a moment where things finally seem to be more or less working, and then you suddenly realize that it's 1:30 in the afternoon, you've been at it since 9:00, and you haven't had lunch or, for that matter, breakfast.

But! Everything does seem to be working now! Yaaaaay!

And my brand new keyboard already has cat hair in it. So clearly everything is back to normal.

I'm Surely Not The Only One Who Gets A Little Freaked Out By This Sort Of Thing. Am I?

The latest interesting trick from my new phone: it told me what my travel time would be between my home and work, and offered me a traffic report for my commute. Which is a bit silly, as I walk to work, and my travel time is always exactly the same. But that is not the important point. The important point is that it figured out by itself where I work. My phone is stalking me. I'm guessing the app tracked the phone's location and decided, correctly, that that place I've gone at the same time every day for the last six days must be my place of employment. Truly, this is an awesome and terrifying science fiction future I am now living in.

No One Understands Me But My Google

My new phone came with this app from the All-Knowing Google, which, when opened, automatically provides information it believes you will want. Last night, it reminded me that today is Yuri Gagarin day, and that there's a new episode of Once Upon a Time. That's a level of relevance-to-my-interests that's almost disturbing. Truly, 21st century technology is a wonderful and terrifying thing.

Also, happy Yuri Gagarin Day!

I Got A New Thing

I sort of have this mental list of Things That Really Need to Be Replaced, Except I Don't Want to Spend the Money, and for quite a while my laptop had been steadily creeping up towards the top of that list. My mother bought it for me, used, several years ago. It was a bit obsolete, even then, but perfectly adequate for browsing the web, processing the words, and playing the occasional game of Spider Solitaire. But, increasingly, it'd been struggling with even that kind of basic stuff, and I think the last Firefox update was just more than it could gracefully handle. I may have kept on limping along with it, anyway, slow and stuttery as it was, but then, a few days ago, the power button broke.

Actually, it was sort of half-broken for a while, kind of mushy and loose in its socket. But then, finally, I went to turn the computer on, and it just sort of collapsed into the casing, and all my efforts to get it back into place availed me not. You could still power the machine on, but you had to stick a pen or something down into the hole to do it, and that was just... stupid.

So I broke down and bought myself one of these. (Well, almost, anyway. I got the version with the DVD drive.) It's another basic, inexpensive machine, but hopefully it will manage to keep me going at least as long as the last one did. And it has the advantage of not weighing eight pounds. The only annoying thing about it is that it's running Windows 8 -- well, OK, 8.1 -- and it took entirely too much effort for me to get the damn thing to stop behaving like an overgrown smartphone. (I'd do the "Honestly, Microsoft, what the hell were you thinking?!" rant now, but you've probably heard it all before from people no doubt more eloquent on the subject that I am, so I'll forbear.)

Still, yay for shiny new technology!

In Less Pleasant News...

I think something is wrong with my computer. A few days ago, I tried to install an update for The Sims 3, and it didn't work. It kept giving me error messages about corrupted files. Yesterday, when I updated Malwarebytes, it did the same thing, although reinstalling it worked fine. Today, I ran a full Norton antivirus scan, which found nothing but the usual tracking cookies... but when it finished it gave me an "encountered an unexpected error and had to close" message, and I had to reboot to get it to come back up. My mind has been going through various unpleasant possibilities -- Is my hard drive going bad? Do I have a virus Norton isn't detecting? -- but my vague, half-informed guess is that maybe there's some kind of problem with my registry. Which worries me, since in my mind registry cleaners are mostly things that shady websites try to get you to download so they can infect you with nastiness, and messing around with registries is something not to be done by the uninformed, lest you accidentally screw your machine up beyond all repair. Hell, if I'm honest, I have no idea how the whole registry thing even works.

I don't suppose there are any Windows experts in the audience with suggestions? (Yes, any suggestions other than "Get a Mac!" or "Switch to linux," thank you.)

Sigh. The way my luck has been going, I almost expect smoke to start pouring out of my PC at any moment.

Even If It Is For Science...

Man, I so want to get Portal 2, but based on my experiences with the first game, I really, really don't want to do it while I have a) a bedtime, or b) anything else whatsoever that I need or want to do with my life.

Sigh. I hate being sensible.

From The Department Of Eerily Convenient Timing

I went out to get the mail this morning and nearly tripped over a package containing the new UPS battery I'd ordered after being bugged by my UPS software for a week or so that it was time to replace it. Then I went to turn on my computer and couldn't, because the UPS was off. So I turned the UPS on, and got panicky beeping and light-flashing that is pretty much the battery equivalent of flailing arms and spurting arterial blood.

Wow. That's not quite like those Star Trek episodes where the computer informs us that everybody is suddenly going to die of radiation poisoning in 13.47 minutes, but they really do have this battery lifetime thing down to a science.

21st Century Afflictions

There really ought to be a word for that annoying feeling you get when you sit down at your computer and suddenly realize that you've completely forgotten what it was you wanted to google.

RIP, Mousie

So, when your mouse breaks, that should be taken as a sign from your computer that you've been playing the damned Sims game too long, right?

Thumbs UPS

I try to maintain a tradition of balancing my occasional rants about bad customer service experiences with a recognition of the good ones, so I just want to say that APC's customer service, based on my experience, is pretty freaking amazing. I've been having some problems with my UPS, so I sent an e-mail to their customer service/technical department asking for advice on what the problem might be, and, in particular, if there were any troubleshooting steps I ought to take to figure it out. The website said to expect a reply by the next business day, but they got back to me inside an hour with a long e-mail offering specific, non-boilerplate troubleshooting advice and asking several relevant questions. And then the same person proceeded to reply to each of my follow-up e-mails almost instantly.

It looks like the problem most likely is simply that I've got too much crap plugged into the thing for it to handle properly, which perhaps does not surprise me all that much. But it's very good to have that verified before I tried something expensive, like replacing the battery. I may decide to upgrade to a more powerful model, which is something I'm willing to consider only because nobody put any pressure on me to do so.

Truly, They Would Rule The World If Only They Had Opposable Thumbs.

The intelligence level of my cats is really starting to worry me. Twice now -- twice -- Vir has expressed with meows and the placement of paws on my legs that he wishes me to pay attention to him instead of to The Sims 2[*], and, when this wish failed to be fulfilled, he's gone over and stepped on the off button on my UPS, thus instantly shutting down the computer[**][***]. And, yes, OK, once could easily be coincidence, and even twice could be attributable to the fact that, well, he's flailing around at my feet and could possibly hit it by accident. But I can't deny a strong suspicion that he actually knows perfectly damned well what he's doing. Gaaah! Cats!

[*] Sadly, I have fallen off the Sims 2 wagon. I was doing so well with going cold turkey for many months, but, well, there was this one week where I really needed to try to keep myself awake late in order to switch onto the night shift, and it's so useful for that...

[**] And, of course, he had to do it when things were going well. No, we can't lose an unsaved game when somebody's just set their kitchen on fire. It has to be right after they've unexpectedly won $7,000 or successfully potty-trained their toddler or something. (For I am a benevolent god this go-round, and am striving for happiness and fulfillment for my simulated playthings. Mostly.)

[***] And my router, which then got confused and started handing out duplicate IP addresses, thus denying my PC access to the internet when I turned it back on. Fortunately, rebooting the TiVo took care of that problem. Go, me, fixing minor computer issues!

I Aten't Dead. Also, Stuff.

Um, apparently it's been long enough since I actually posted anything here that people have started e-mailing me to make sure I'm not dead in a ditch or something. Well, no, I'm fine, just apparently deep in winter hibernation mode, in which my body moves slowly, my brain partly shuts down, and my blog goes sadly neglected.

But let's see what miscellaneous stuff has been happening in the last week that I can talk about...

1. We lost Ricardo Montalban, Patrick McGoohan, and now Bob May, the guy who played the robot on Lost in Space. It's been a bad week to be someone who's appeared in a genre TV show. I was the most bummed to hear about Montalban. I've watched The Wrath of Khan a truly disturbing number of times, and I never, ever, ever get tired of seeing Montalban doing his villainous thing.

2. Thanks to a $25 software upgrade, I can now send videos from my PC to my TiVo and watch 'em on my TV instantly. This came in really handy when the TiVo missed Sunday's episode of The Mentalist thanks to a stupid football game running long. I love the internet, and I love finally being all WiFi'd!

3. I watched Wall-E on DVD yesterday. It's cute, beautifully animated, and features a nice environmental message, so I definitely enjoyed it. But, y'know, while I like Pixar's stuff a lot, and while it's fascinating to watch their animation improve over time, I still don't think they've ever surpassed Toy Story for quality.

4. I'm basically keeping 26-hour days right now, in an attempt to switch over from last week's night shifts to this weekend's day shifts. Today I went to bed about 1:30 PM and woke up a little after 9:00 PM. Sometimes, this works incredibly well, and I feel great, if a little out of sync with the world, and never suffer from a lack of sleep. Other times... Well, let's just say it doesn't combine all that effectively with aforementioned winter hibernation mode. I'm feeling really drag-ass this week. Also, I've gotten to the point where I'm suffering a noticeable sunlight deficit, which, considering what a night person I am, takes some doing.

5. It's Martin Luther King Day. I feel as if I ought to say something meaningful about that, but all I can think is, man, it's Martin Luther King Day, and tomorrow we are inaugurating a black man as president of the United States. King was a dreamer and an optimist, but I'm not sure even he would have believed it. It's a very warming thought.

And, uh, I think that's about all I have to say at this point. Here's hoping it's enough to tide you over if I randomly disappear for another week.

I Am Wired!

Well, after many, many months worth of delays (which were to a large extent my own fault, as I kept saying, "Eh, I'll call them about it later" for month after month), I now finally have wireless networking set up at my house! I can surf the internet in bed if I want to! And I was at last able to remove that unsightly telephone wire connecting my TiVo to the phone jack in the kitchen. Huzzah!

I Can Haz Internet!

It seemed like a simple, five-minute exercise, involving installing one piece of software and getting one piece of information over the phone. And then, it seemed like it had broken my computer. And then, after I carefully unbroke the computer, it seemed like it wasn't working correctly, and then after that, I started randomly poking things, and then it wasn't working at all.

But I kicked it one last time, and, lo, I have wireless! And there was much rejoicing!

Except now in a couple of weeks, they're going to come and replace my old PCI card with a radio that should allow me to actually get some networking going on in here, finally. Which will doubtless break stuff all over again, because that's how this sort of thing goes.

Never mind! I has internet! Not that I really ought to be typing right now, since I was up working all night, spent all morning mucking about with the computer, and am starting to get punchy. Of course, at this point, I might as well just stay up...