Archives for March 2018

But things are looking up. There was a minute there, yesterday, where I even thought of something else than computers.

The new computer is mostly functional, and I managed to move my whole music library over, And my email. And I got the nice people at Scrivener to send me my serial number again. Turns out they still had my old email address, the one that doesn’t exist anymore, so I never received the receipt. Duh.

I didn’t write yesterday and went to bed around nine. I’m still pretty exhausted and tired. I tried to write but only managed eighty words, not good.

Today will be super-busy Friday, I want to clean all.the.things, and make pizza from scratch, and teach all.the.students, and maybe squeeze in some piano playing and such, and strength training.

Tonight we might even watch a movie all three of us together which never happens. (My mother-in-law has guests for dinner which means my husband won’t be allowed to play drums and guitar tonight.)

I guess that will be it, the day is full enough as is.

I’m still hoping I will manage to write about 1,500 words. Ahem.

But first it’s time to get up and have breakfast.

Phew.

And the best thing is that I actually have two working laptops right now.

There was a moment yesterday when I felt really guilty about spending the money on a new one but I think I’m over that now. It is pretty. And shiny. And doesn’t have the things on it that I really need, of course.

So I started yesterday by restoring the older laptop from an older backup. I was hoping that that would eliminate the bug. Losing four weeks of data would be an acceptable price for having a working computer. Especially since all the really important things like the novels and the budget were in the cloud. (Hurray for multiple backups!) It was interesting to note how much I don’t care about photos, by the way. Also a lot of the family photos are still on paper, and my husband has some on his computer as well.

Then I decided to go and buy a USB-C to USB-A cable and a new USB drive. (I have a 32 GB one that the boy lost somewhere, argh.) I rode my bike for ten minutes through the freezing streets. Good thing they were clear.

Then I came back and tried to use the new laptop in target mode with my husband’s computer, but no luck. Then I made a bootable USB drive with Sierra on it – no luck again (someone on the internet said that that had worked for his computer but I guess his came with the Sierra OS in the first place), and then I made a bottle USB drive with High Sierra, and – 

I managed to start the new computer from that drive, and to format the hard disk, and then it was perfectly usable.

Cue snoopy dance, and pompom shaking and overwhelming relief.

I have decided for the first time in decades to not migrate all my data from the old computer to the new one on auto-pilot but this time I will just hand-transfer what I need.

It is interesting to see what is important to me in my digital life. The first app that I installed was Firefox, even though there was a perfectly serviceable browser on there. Next was Thunderbird but then I shied away from configuring all my email accounts by hand. I will try to transfer the preferences file from the old computer later. Then I installed Scrivener (the program I use for writing) and then I spent about half an hour trying to find my activation key with no luck. I found the one for Scrivener 2 which I bought in 2015 but not the one for the current version. Will have to do more digging.

I installed GarageBand and realized that all my podcast files are still on the old computer (but that one is working, so phew), I installed my budget software right away (which was completely painless), and dropbox, and all kinds of things.

I’m waffling about installing Office. We’ll see.

Then I went to bed rather early, and slept like a log for eight hours.

Today the boy is going to the orthodontist to get his braces out. Yeah! I decided not to go with him because I don’t think he really needs his hand held through this, and riding on a bus for 45 minutes, and then sitting in the orthodontist’s office for an hour is a little pointless.

So today I will run (brr, cold), and then take a hot shower, and help making lunch, and I will only teach two students, and in between I will probably transfer all the files from one laptop to the other.

When I told my husband that both computers were working again, and that I was feeling bad about spending all that money he said not to worry. Then he said, „Well, since the old on is working again you can sell it, then.“ Which I really don’t want.

For one I’m somewhat attached to that machine which has been working for me for more than seven years already, and also I think it’s a good idea to have a spare computer in the house. My husband is using one for recording that’s even older than that, and I don’t know how long that one will be working. Also there is 750 gigabytes of data on that computer that I don’t want to lose. Of course I could pull the hard drive out and out the old one back in again that came with the computer when I bought it.

Nah.

Oh, and I have a new student as well. She starts next week, yeah!

I think I’ll go and sleep for a week now. And then I’ll think about how not to get all emotional and tense every time something like this happens.

I did meditate yesterday and read my daily stoic essay, so that’s something.