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 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.

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