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    • Robin

      Welcome!   03/05/2016

      Welcome, everyone, to the new 910CMX Community Forums. I'm still working on getting them running, so things may change.  If you're a 910 Comic creator and need your forum recreated, let me know and I'll get on it right away.  I'll do my best to make this new place as fun as the last one!

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I have a mild migraine, which is responding to medication well, plus the tea I a drinking is helping a lot.

On the other hand, I'm sweating like crazy, so I have the A/C turned up, enough that my ears and nose are feeling it, and I need wool socks on my feet, yet my torso is still, even as I type this, "pigging like a sweat". This is less than optimal and I do not feel gruntled about this.

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The pre -release of the magic smoke ozone smell started to come out of one of my portrait mode monitors, then it started blinking on and off, so I took the portrait mode monitor off the iMac and put it on Godzilla.  Problem is that it's 1600x900 which when in 900x1600 mode isn't really wide enough for letter size documents.

I am less than fully gruntled.

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I am, to put it lightly, computer and web literate.    The amount of hassle that both the Social Security web site and the Medicare website are to use is beyond the pale.

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Bleah.  Yesterday, I was going home at lunchtime, and got rear-ended at a stop sign.

The corner in question is at a rather sharp angle to a larger road, which also curves, and due to trees and creekside weeds, the view to the left is not great.  You have to stop at the sign and then pull forward slowly, and often doing so reveals one or more cars coming from the left, previously hidden in the curve.  Such was the case, so I came to a stop again, only to be thunked into by the young woman behind me, who apparently assumed I would keep moving forward and looked away (I heard her saying as much to the cop afterwards).

I had a trailer hitch installed on my car specifically so I could put a bike rack on it, because when I'd tried a bike rack that attached to my trunk, it left small dents and scratched the paint.  Monday, I took my bike in to REI for a general check-up and tune-up (turned out the tires were old enough to need replacing).  The bike rack was still on my car in anticipation of taking the bike home Friday night.  Her impact seems to have hit the upright post of the bike rack first, bending it forward -- and into the top of my trunk, denting it and scratching the paint -- then impacting the left side of my bumper as forward momentum met a single almost-central point.  There's now a bit of a gap between the top of the bumper on the left side of the car and whatever you call the piece above it.  The bike rack is also tilted forward, although it did rebound partway so the trunk is not wedged shut by it.

No one was hurt, other than feeling a bit like I did the one time we tried to ride all the roller coasters at Great America in one day.  All better today.  I had to get my insurance card off of my email over the nearby WalMart's WiFi.  Cop took our info, gave us forms to send in, and I called my insurance.  I'll have to take the car somewhere to find out how much the damage will be to fix; not sure if slamming into a tow-hitch bar from behind could result in structural damage where the thing is attached underneath, but I'll let someone else look and see.

Not sure how big a deal the bike rack being angled forward 20-30° is, as the knob to allow it to swing back when you need to open the trunk still works, but before I could open it without doing that and now I won't be able to.  Gotta put the estimated damages in the accident report form, as well as giving the info to the insurance company.  I'll have to take a better look at it later, make sure things like the pin to attach it to the tow bar aren't also bent or cracked.

Poor car.  This is the second time she's been rear-ended, the first being when I stopped when railroad gates started coming down in front of me and the lady behind me didn't notice.  Definitely could have been much worse.

Oh, and I got a voicemail message from the driver's father ;and owner of the car she was in) last night, saying she came home with a ticket, told him she'd hit my bike rack, and he hoped it wasn't damaged, she wasn't very specific....

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I have a fairly mild headache, but it is NOT responding to my normal drugs.  It's not bad enough to go to the knock me out stuff, but it's enough that I don't like it.

<bad thought - checks lists of "call the doctor" side effects of my new medication>

Great.  Headache is a possible side effect.  Grrrr....

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4 hours ago, mlooney said:

I have a fairly mild headache, but it is NOT responding to my normal drugs.  It's not bad enough to go to the knock me out stuff, but it's enough that I don't like it.

<bad thought - checks lists of "call the doctor" side effects of my new medication>

Great.  Headache is a possible side effect.  Grrrr....

It's not getting any better.  

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The Mega.nz "MegaSync" client for Linux is normally rather well behaved, however if you make a change to a file, triggering the upload que, but the file gets deleted before the client gets to it, the damn thing will hang -forever- waiting on that file to come back.  Not a file with the same name, it wants that inode.  Normally you can stop the client and restart it, but sometimes you have to use a `kill` command line command on it.

 

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Time seem to run extra slow on the 2nd of the month.

Waiting on Midnight, and I already have my snack run planned.

With a convenience store right across the street, I'm dropping my "payday pizza" for "payday junk food".

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I just had the unpleasant experience of opening up a HP ENVY 15t laptop.  I needed to upgrade its hard drive from 1TB to 2TB and it was priority work.  The 15t is a few years old.  My lab maintains a backlog of laptops going back about 7-8 years. The 15t looked to be built intentionally to frustrate, as if the designer took a sadistic joy in making the laptop hard to work with.  And it's not like it's a thing with HPs from that era.  I got a HP 14t in the same order and it's easy-peasy to open up.

  1. First you get at the guts by popping up the keyboard.  That's never good.  If there's one thing you don't think about but should when buying a new laptop, this is it.  You always want to take the back off to get at stuff like drives and memory. The best case is only needing to remove a relatively small access plate on the back.
  2. HP secured the back with no less than 15 screws.    The back is a shotgun blast of screw holes.
  3. Some screws are hidden.  Two screws sit under the back two rubber feet.  You have to pry up the stickyback feet themselves. The feet come off revealing two more screws to be pulled off after that.  There's yet another screw hidden under a thin stickyback piece of plastic and one final screw you can only get at by popping open the optical drive.
  4. But that wasn't enough.  Several of the screws were a wide short flat-head design which had an unnecessarily tiny Phillips screw slot.  My fine-work screwdrivers don't give me the grip to move them and the screwdrivers that do are too big.  I managed to find one that did both and the screw didn't budge.  I had to wiggle the keyboard back and forth while attached to the case to loosen up the screw and broke part of the case doing so.  But I was able to remove the screw.
  5. This is all before we find out that the keyboard is inset into the laptop body.  Most keyboard deigns have it flush to the back, not dropped that little bit into the back.  Prying the keyboard up just got to be extra fun and I never got it entirely free.  A part of the keyboard and the broken case just wouldn't separate.
  6. The hard drive had an unrelated ribbon cable running right over top of it.  The cable had to be detached, which is easy to do but something you really shouldn't have to do.
  7. The hard drive itself was connected by a really narrow ribbon cable which came out because the SATA power + data plug did not want to come off the old drive or go on the new drive easily.
  8. The  final touch came after I tried to power the lap top up.  Nothing.  HP gave the power button its own ribbon cable and it had come out of the connectors on both ends.  the motherboard connector was easy enough to do but because I couldn't entirely detach the motherboard, attaching a narrow ribbon cable to the back of the keyboard was especially annoying.

This was the single most annoying laptop I have ever had to take apart...and I've worked on 30 or 40 machines.

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Update day. Multiple update day, from multiple vendors.

The day started off with an e-mail that Yahoo! somehow routed to my spam box from G DATA, concerning an update to G DATA Antivirus 2018. Said it was being rolled out to systems on a gradual basis. Well, guess what—all three of my systems got the roll-out notice. I had to hurry and update things before Mrs. Prof got on her system, otherwise I'd never get her off.

That completed, the next notification I got was of an update to Win10 on my laptop. I sat through it (haven't checked the other machines yet) and let it finish.

Finally, I got an update notification about Irfanview, with it updating from 4.4x to 4.50. WARNING: unless they've fixed it, the plugins download from FOSSHub is corrupt. Grab your copy from BetaNews/FileForum instead.

All of this is going on while I'm waiting for an air conditioner guy to come out and give our system a checkup. Urrgh.

EDIT: now I'm running Windows Update on my other two machines. I just hope it finishes before Mrs. Prof gets home.

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1 hour ago, ProfessorTomoe said:

EDIT: now I'm running Windows Update on my other two machines. I just hope it finishes before Mrs. Prof gets home.

Good Lord. Talk about a deluge of updates. :/ I have often been hit with updates at inconvenient times but this takes the cake.

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18 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

Good Lord. Talk about a deluge of updates. :confused: I have often been hit with updates at inconvenient times but this takes the cake.

It still hasn't ended. I'm updating part of Native Instruments Komplete 11 now (a monster of a music making program), and then I'm going to have to update the VST listing on my music machine's copy of Adobe Audition. I swear, I spend more time updating things than I do creating things.

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52 minutes ago, mlooney said:

I have a right side migraine that isn't responding to my meds.  I am less than happy about this.

Pain meds are working now but only just working.  

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1 hour ago, mlooney said:

I'm in postdrone, however I took enough caffeine that I'm most likely up for the day.  Going to be a weird one.

Trying to avoid that.  

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2 hours ago, mlooney said:
3 hours ago, mlooney said:

I'm in postdrone, however I took enough caffeine that I'm most likely up for the day.  Going to be a weird one.

Trying to avoid that.  

Out of curiosity, how much caffeine would that be for you?

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