Skip to main content

 Has it actually been nine months since I posted last?!? Time must have gotten away from me. 

I suppose I don't like posting when I have nothing to say, other than the fact that I have been having the worst luck technology-wise. This is what I mean:

  • finally upgraded my 10+ year old laptop to a refurbished ~4 year old year laptop (I think). Good! Also, I don't think I can ever go back to non-business-grade laptops now. I think it's the matte screen.
  • Bad: the brand new external hard drive I bought to go along with the laptop (because it had a smaller hard drive than my older laptop) basically was near-dead the day I got it. After trying to make it work for two weeks, I finally send it back for a refund. 
  • Refund cost me $25 for shipping because they only do free UPS return shipping and the nearest UPS place is like over an hour's drive away. Not great. But whatever, it's out of my hands.
  • Laptop is fine for several months. Yay. I do Camp NaNoWriMo during this time, since I've been in a bit of a writing rut (it doesn't really pull me out of said rut, but at least I tried).
  • Linux Mint 21 is released. I decide that it's time to upgrade from 20.3.
  • I install it. Computer says no operating system. I install 20.3 on it, figuring hey, that's a weird error. No operating system. I do this back and forth for almost an entire day, at one point even getting the Windows 10 ISO just in case.
  • I finally catch one of the error codes (they go by fast!) and google it and... oh no, this is hard drive-related. I grudgingly do a hard drive test. 
  • Hard drive failed. Figured out that the refurbishment on this laptop was for the wi-fi card and the processor (it's one of those low energy consumption processors) and they probably just left the old OEM hard drive in it (wiped, obviously, from the previous user) or something like that.
  • Have to buy a brand new hard drive, which puts me back on the 10+ year old laptop for a few days. I do not buy said hard drive from the same place where the dead external hard drive came from, just in case. 
  • Get the new hard drive. Have to swap out the old one (which went pretty quickly because again, this is a business-grade laptop and is made for quick changes like switching hard drives. The panel for the drive is literally right next to the battery, almost no work involved). 
  • Decide against Mint 21, and go back to 20.3 because I know how everything works on that. Will upgrade to 21 after NaNoWriMo or when 21.1 is out (and when I can assume that most apps should be caught up to the newest Ubuntu version) because I do not need another headache after all of this.

So, suffice to say, all of this put quite the damper on my writing (trying to write on a slow tablet that I usually just use for watching television or movies? Not going to go well. And the old laptop has screaming fans and runs very hot, which was part of the reason why I replaced it in the first place). I am currently in the process of working on more of Supermassive which should be out in October sometime. Just want to get enough of a buffer done for November as well. 

So. There you go.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

 So, uh, early last month I started posting a serial again! Yeah, I just didn't want to mention anything about it before I got the ball rolling (look, I know how bad my own momentum is, and therefore, I needed a while). It's up on Wattpad .  Part of this is that I'm trying to fight my own perfectionism, which is why it's an early draft. This might all get cut or cleaned up a lot later on for an ebook release, but right now, it's a bit meandering and light on description. Some people might still want to read that, I don't know, but it's better than me having this sit on my computer/4thewords account and just fretting over how good or not good it is. Part of this is that I haven't been posting anything in public for three years, and it's like I have to get back on the horse, relearn how to walk, whatever metaphor works best, I don't know. It may or may not take me a while to get my footing, but I am also a bad judge of that.  If you've read The...
Post a Comment
Read more

One year after the pandemic began

Over here on my little island we're just coming out of level 5 lockdown. For the last month, we've been dealing with a massive cluster of cases along with one of the Covid-19 variants. It appears to be settling down now. We've had the longest provincial election ever (which still isn't over, by the way!). We have a vaccine plan now so the ball is finally rolling on that. I am genuinely not sure what day it is because of how repetitive everything has been. In fact, I started using a planner not because I had anything to keep track of, but because it's proof that something happened each day. It is not a very big planner, just an A6-sized one. I've also been spending a lot of time playing Stardew Valley. It's taken me three months to watch a single season of Supernatural (because I figured I may as well watch the entire show now it's over. Yes, I know it goes off the rails after like season five. No, I don't actually care. I don't watch television ...
Post a Comment
Read more