Drunken Owls and Other Delights

Weekending

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 00:11:48 GMT

Slightly different work schedule this week -- of course as soon as I mention that things have calmed to a regular schedule, it up and changes on me almost immediately, but not too much. And besides, I managed to somehow get my birthday off in the process, so that's a win!

On a different note, my printer seems to be not working for some reason and I'm not entirely sure why. I mean, it could be that one of the cats may have stepped on the USB wire and loosened it (or the jack) somehow, or that it's finally showing its age (I've had this one for so long I don't even remember when I bought it, other than that it's at LEAST a decade old). Either way, it got me thinking about how much I don't actually rely on printing nearly as much as I used to. We usually use it these days for box labeling and A's work-related things. Maybe it's time to look into getting a new one...?

Not much else to report other than that this weekend was too short but I still managed to sleep in this morning!

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WELP.

Wed, 06 Dec 2023 04:10:10 GMT

Quite annoyed right now as my PC blue-screened itself at some point between yesterday and today, and I have no idea how it happened. This is my new PC, by the way, the one I bought this past July and have had zero problems with. Originally the issue was that it suddenly stopped reading my externals, and after trying to fix that with no result, I turned the PC off overnight in hopes that it would clear things up. Apparently that was a bad decision, as it won't boot up at all now!! :(

Which means I haven't been able to write the last two days, and that to be honest is what's annoying me the most. The good news is that I've tested all the externals on my laptop and they're just fine, so no problems there. The bad news is that the USB hub no longer works (I've just ordered a new one) so I can't really access much of anything write now.

In the meantime I've pulled the old PC out of hibernation -- it still works fine, thankfully -- and hoping that Lenovo can fix the new one for me. I'm still under warranty so if I end up getting a replacement or have to send this one in, so be it. I'll just be working lo-fi and not having my Plex server available until further notice.

Here's to hoping...

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PC Updatery

Thu, 13 Jul 2023 23:26:01 GMT

First of all (and I mentioned this elsewhere), the keyboard and mouse are NOT wireless, so I'm trying to remember when I last had a pair with the actual USB wires plugged into the back and I'm thinking maybe in the mid to late 00s? Mind you, I can easily replace these with the perfectly fine wireless duo if I so choose, but as I had these plugged in for the initial computer setup, I'm just going to stick with them for the time being. At the moment I'm scanning my mp3s into the MediaMonkey library and that's taken a good hour or so (yes, I really DO have that many).

Which made me think: maybe now is a good a time as any to scale back my social media intake while I'm at it. By this I mainly mean Twitter and FB, but especially my habit if being so passive/reactive about it. How about *not* looking at what's trending? Or reading the comments? Or how about cleaning out the follow list and maybe even muting certain people's RTs? And how about not passively fucking around on YouTube so damn much? Among other things that actually *do* waste my time. I don't want to do it anymore anyway, yet why do I keep doing it?

It's a new PC, so why not some new personal guidelines?

Sounds good to me.

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Possible new PC in the future

Sat, 08 Jul 2023 22:52:21 GMT

According to my tags here, I acquired this recent PC -- a Lenovo ideacentre 720, which they no longer make -- about this time in 2019. I've had a few issues on this one as of late, starting maybe a few months ago when it started to slow up considerably and lose internet connectivity. I took the nuclear option and did a complete factory reset, which let me upgrade to Windows 11, and that seemed to fix things...for a bit. Lately it's been crashing and rebooting itself, usually overnight when something is running in the background, and the connectivity is showing up more often than usual now. This is worrying considering that I don't want to lose anything important, and it's hard to keep my Plex server up when it keeps disconnecting.

That said, this one's served me really well and for the longest period of time, so maybe it's time to retire this one and upgrade. I'll stick with Lenovo for now because a) aside from the current problems, I've had nearly no other issues at all, and b) they're having a sale and I believe A might be able to get a further discount! Not sure when it'll happen, but maybe soon. I'll figure out a place to store this one as an emergency backup, maybe move/toss a few things in Spare Oom closet so I can park it there. We shall see...

EDIT: We've just ordered a Lenovo ideacentre 3i, which is similar to the one I have minus the cd/dvd drive and slightly lower storage space but a slightly higher processor. I'm fine without the drive because I so rarely use it (and I have an external dvd/blu-ray/rw drive that takes its place), and the only in-PC storage I use these days is for software, and 1TB is more than enough space for me. Everything else is on multiple externals!

Here's to hoping this fixes all my current PC issues!

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PC Updatery (Again)

Sun, 09 Apr 2023 23:23:55 GMT

In case you didn't see my message on other blogs and social media, on Wednesday I decided to follow through with the nuclear option that I'd mentioned previously, and did a factory reset of this PC. It took some time, what with moving several important files elsewhere and taking all the steps to reinstall everything, but the end result was exactly what I needed! Spare Oom PC is now happily running at peak once more with no noticeable issues! [Also: the temporary fix of the sticky Bluetooth keyboard issue is plugging the USB thingie into the PC instead of the big USB hub, and away from whatever electrical stuff might be going on inside the PC itself. Hopefully that will help.]

It also allowed me to finally update to Windows 11. It doesn't seem to have been a major upgrade as it's mostly the streamlining of some things and sunsetting of other things, but it seems to work just fine for me. The only major things I've noticed are the placement of the task bar from the left to the middle, and a slightly different appearance of a few Windows apps. Nothing major or intrusive that I can tell.

This of course meant that I didn't get too much writing done over the last several days, but I'm fine with that because I don't have to worry about the PC acting weird anymore. In a way it kind of feels like I've bought a new PC without actually paying for one, so I can't complain there! Heh.

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Where was I...?

Mon, 16 Nov 2020 16:37:47 GMT

Ah yes. I was distracted yesterday (a pleasant walk in GGP's botanical garden, a drive to the garden center, laundry and so on) and completely forgot to post something here.

Also slightly nervous and distracted due to the fact that I'm running a scan on my external hard drive that contains my entire mp3 library in hopes that I can figure out why it decides to randomly go into sleep mode even when I'm in the middle of using it. I'm not *too* nervous, as I have it all (I hope!!) backed up on another external, but I'd rather not lose it just the same, thankyouverymuch. It's taking forever to finish because there's a LOT of mp3s to scan for issues and/or corruption. I had it running overnight and it's *just* nearing the finish of the initial scan as we speak. [Edit: it's now doing a slightly different deep scan of empty sectors and I'm not entirely sure how long *that* will take...] In the meantime it's made the entire drive inaccessible so it can do its thing. Hopefully there aren't any major issues... *fret fret*

Meanwhile, last week I began a slightly different approach with my writing (I go into it a bit more here at Welcome to Bridgetown) and it seems to be working, so I'm going to continue with this process and see how it plays out. I'm doing the work in smaller manageable chunks and narrowing the focus of the work in front of me in the hopes that I can process it all a lot easier. It seems to have cleared the view a bit, which is good.

Oh -- I should probably add that I've been having far too much fun sketching out a storyboard for Diwa & Kaffi!! They're rough thumbnails for the most part, but they're helping me get better at my art, which was the main goal in the first place! One of these days I'll post them up on the WTBT blog.

What else...we got a new Christmas tree? That was my doing, really. Our old one is fine but kind of looking a bit threadbare. The new one is a four-footer (the old one is a much shorter one made for a tabletop) so I'll have to plan out where to put it. The plus side is that I can hang a lot more stuff on it! Yay! Maybe I should revive my old habit of putting on a Christmas album while decorating....

Hope everyone has a good week!

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Weekend Stuff

Sun, 09 Feb 2020 23:12:58 GMT

So apparently February is UI Fail Month, because I've been encountering system and software crashes all around me lately. Granted, the Day Job crashes recently were due to a classic system test that...didn't go so well...and we've been cleaning up the pieces since. I've been trying to buy symphony tickets since yesterday and the site's refusing to accept a gift certificate number. I tried to order a FasTrak doowacky online and the site kept erroring out (but not telling me *where* it happened), so I said hell with it and bought one at Walgreens. I bought a USB plug for my mp3 player that *should* let me play tunes through the speakers (I mean, it's your generic line-in audio connection, right?), but it refuses to work.

Thankfully my PC ald laptop have been behaving quite nicely (knock on wood), so at least I have that.

In other news, It's been clear but ridiculously windy today! Apparently a window pane popped out of the Millennium Tower downtown (that being the slowly-sinking slightly-askew building that's been having issues since before it opened), and I wouldn't be surprised if there have been wires and trees down in and around the city. Very weird weather indeed. Oh! And they're filming the fourth Matrix movie downtown, mostly overnight, so this means that it may or may not affect my commute. Heh.

Other than that, it's been quite a nice weekend!

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