ProfessorTomoe

We have finally taken the big step of ordering replacement pots & pans for our kitchen. The old, El Cheapo, Wal-Mart special KitchenAid open stock plus the OrGreenic stuff we bought at CVS some years later will finally be going the way of the dinosaur (or in this case, be recycled, if our city pickup will take aluminum pots & pans). In their stead, we have ordered a not-too-expensive matched set of pots & pans that use the newfangled ceramic non-stick technology (not ceramic like Le Creuset, mind you - it's not that thick and heavy, and Le Creuset's famous ceramic coating is not non-stick by default, at least not without help). What we researched and ordered was a set made by GreenPan. We got an 11-piece set that you can find at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07YD2KF4W , called the "GreenPan Chatham Black Prime Midnight" set. It's got two frying pans, two saucepans, a saute pan, a stockpot, and a steamer insert, plus lids for everything but the frying pans and the steamer insert. We also ordered a matching 12" frypan with a lid, seen at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07YD2KF4W . Basically, by doing that, we ordered the 15-piece set and omitted that set's 8-qt. stockpot. We wound up saving almost $40 bucks in the process. All told, we only spent $199.17 for the whole kit and caboodle. Not a bad deal, as long as it holds together and doesn't lose its non-stick properties. The wares should arrive on Saturday. Can't wait to try them.

The chore is done. It took almost 26 hours to transfer and bit-verify everything from drives C: and H: to drive D:, then another hour-plus to make Native Instruments KOMPLETE recognize the new locations of all of the libraries, one at a time. We're talking almost 950 Gigabytes of data moved, verified, and address checked. Whew! And it all works, too. I hope I never have to do that again.

BTW, the laptop got shipped on October 1st. It'll arrive on the 7th. It had to go UPS Ground, since we had to ship it with its lithium ion batteries still inside. Those aren't allowed to travel via air freight at UPS. 'Twas an expensive package to ship - something like $50, mainly due to the insurance on the $3k replacement value of the thing. One thing this event has helped motivate me to do is to get my installations of certain software on the Music Computer up to date. I'm currently updating - and moving - my copy of Native Instruments KOMPLETE 14. That one piece of software took up so much space on the system's C: drive that I nearly ran out of disk space, quite literally. That's one reason why I installed a new 2TB NVMe drive some while back as a D: drive. (Not to be confused with the new 4TB D: drive I just put into the laptop a few months back.) I'm now in the process of moving every single one of KOMPLETE's libraries from the C: drive to the D: drive. All 254,750 files, taking up 605,146.2 Megs of space. This has taken the better part of 24 hours so far (including verification after copy by Total Commander's copy process), and there's still an estimated 1 1/2 hours left to go. I'll still have some manual follow-up work to do after that, but it won't take nearly as long. Suffice it to say that my system should operate a lot more smoothly afterwards. I am wondering if I should find a standalone TRIM utility to release all of the sectors that were used by the moved data when I'm done, though...

Eee...no. Now, if you'd have caught me back in 1992, I'd have been close. My mailing address was in Kyle, TX (the place that keeps trying to break the record for the most people with the same name gathering in one spot). That's just a couple dozen miles north of New Braunfels and its treasure trove of Germanic Wurst goodness.

Mrs. Prof went to our Garland Aldi and looked in the hot dog section for Nuremberg Bratwurst, as suggested. They did not have it. Sigh. Guess we're going to have to wait for another German Day flyer mailout.

Received a mail order of 1 lb. of 7-year-old vintage Canadian Cheddar cheese yesterday. Almost had a disaster on my hands - the cold paks leaked, and some of the ice water got into the outer wrapping of the cheese. Fortunately, I managed to clean and dry it off and salvage it to make it edible. And boy howdy, is it ever edible! Wonderful, sharp taste, just the right amount of crunchy calcium crystal formation, and crumbly, but not to excess. It would almost be sacrilege to put it in a recipe, but I'm tempted to put some of it in with some soft-scrambled eggs. The thought of that is making me drool. Here's the link: https://sclydeweaver.com/product/cheddar-vintage-canadian-7-yr/ Yes, it's expensive. That's why we only buy it once a year. Also, BTW, we know they have older vintage Cheddars (10-, 15-, and 21-year-old varieties are up on the website at the moment), but to us there's a sweet spot at 7 years where the bang-for-the-buck ratio is best. The older Cheddars get more complex in their flavor, and maybe just a tad bit more sharp, but they seem to lose some of their calcium crystallization once they pass the 7-year-old threshold. That downturn plus the smallish uptick in complexity and sharpness just doesn't justify the price difference to us. (Prices for 1 lb.: 7yr = $28.99, 10yr = $49.98, 15yr = $78.99 (15 oz.), 21yr = $257.97 (15 oz.)) No way are we going to spend almost $200 extra for a pound of 21-year-old Cheddar under any circumstances.

There was a restaurant nearby that sold WeinerJägerschnitzel. Good lord, that was good.

We had another German Aldi dinner tonight. I cooked again. I made the same Nuremburg Bratwurst, this time with stove-top Cheese Spaetzle and some bottled German white asparagus that we heated up. Every single bit of that dinner tasted good. My son was still asleep after a long day (he's on an odd schedule), so I wrapped up a plate of the leftovers for him. I think he'll like them. Om nom nom.

Out of all this mess, some semi-good news. Way back in May/June, I submitted a pile of music to a publisher, all chamber works. All but one were rejected. I found out about the one that was kept for consideration in a roundabout way, back in the middle of August, when I got an email from the publisher telling me it was still being considered and that I should hear something by the end of the month. Well, I didn't hear anything in August, nor did I hear anything in September, so today I took a risk and wrote to see if it was still under consideration. Believe it or not, they wrote back: In other words, no news is good news. So far.

The laptop hasn't left the house yet. Mrs. Prof keeps on promising to get bubble wrap to wrap it per the recommendations of the manufacturer, but she never leaves the house. I'm about to start a major "bitch at the wife" campaign to get her off her ass.

I've got to the point where I can't take my morning medications without getting nausea from them. No matter how slowly I take them or how I space them out, I still get sick from them. To add insult to injury, I usually wind up taking Zofran to blunt the nausea, which knocks me out for a while. After that, the 6mg of Bumex uber-diuretic I take for the swelling in my legs kicks in, more often that not, and I wind up spending the day acting out the plot of "The Yellow River" by I. P. Freely, with illustrations by Willie Makeit and Betty Wont. Add in my left knee recuperation pain, and that means my physical life sucks right about now.

I can't have backup software running in the background. It'll cause my music to glitch, ruining the data that it's trying to back up. Even with as high-powered a system as the one I've got. No, I run full image backups.

One huge thing that bugs me about my laptop RMA is that the latest versions of my Bruckner arrangements are locked away inside the thing, with no way for me to access them. They weren't on the latest backup generation. I've spent a couple of hours tonight listening to a previous Bruckner arrangement a couple of times out of sheer guilt and shame for not having the others backed up. Can't play Terraforming Mars instead, since my son is working at the high school today doing viola sectionals for their orchestra. Sigh.

Pete Rose has died.

Why...do I get the strange feeling that there's going to be a Jay vs. Rhoda story line upcoming??? By the pricking of my thumbs...

Yep, that's what we had. Apparently, our Garland, TX Aldi doesn't carry it all the time.

Uncured Nuremberg Bratwurst that we bought on Germany day at Aldi, with Sauerkraut & Spaetzle. Nom.

My son and I finally managed to play a couple of games of Terraforming Mars up on Tabletop Simulator. This is the game we were trying to play when my laptop fried itself. Thankfully, my Music Computer didn't keel over on game start this time. Anyway, it's a fun board game, with lots of nice cards and Corporations under which you can play. I didn't quite pick up on things first time through, so he beat me soundly. The second game was a LOT closer. We spent over 6 hours on the two games, but that's because (he says) I'm a slow player. I can't help it that I don't learn the cards the instant that I see them, okay??? Sheesh. :-/

Consider what it has in it for a 2021 purchase. It's got an Intel i9 CPU, 32GB RAM, a 512MB NVMe SDD (upgraded to 4TB), and an NVIDIA 3500GTX (I think) GPU. That's still expensive in today's money, and it's needed for my music writing/mastering chores. What's brown and sounds like a bell? Didn't get the wombat reference, though...

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Oh hell no. I bought the thing back on June 1st of 2021. I think the warranty ran out either 90 days or 1 year after I received it. BTW, it cost me $2,844.00 back then. I've since upgraded the SDDs and the RAM to where it's worth over $3,100.00 now. It's going to be a bitch to insure for shipping. Mrs. Prof is going to shit bricks.

Sager's got a good reputation for post-sale work. I'm hoping this won't be the case.

Well, it's not CPU, since I'm getting the Win11 logon chime melody. I'm guessing it's the GPU, but you'd think you'd get a BIOS beep if that were the case. I don't know. I'm going to have to let Sager suss it out.

FUCK. Whilst in the midst of using my laptop, I heard a pop and my screen went blank. All further attempts to resurrect it came to naught. I couldn't get Windows to appear. I could apparently get into the BIOS (from the lack of the Win11 boot tune), but no text/graphics would appear. FUCK. I have since filed a tech support / RMA request (whichever) with Sager notebook support from the dusty Music Computer and am awaiting a reply. Something tells me I'm going to be shipping my laptop - along with a large sum of money - to City of Industry, California. Sigh. And FUCK.

The thing Mrs. Prof brought home was 88g. Don't know how much it cost, or if someone just gave it to her.