While I Was Away….
Being held prisoner for ransom is no fun at all.
Ask Dave Hardin. He barely escaped with his life and someone’s pink bathrobe.
Aside from my senile 15-year-old computer whining about having to work well past the age of retirement and my two spoiled brat cats Punkin and Emma, neither of whom appreciates the sacrifices I go to for them, my life has been quite placid up to now.
However, no bad deed goes unpunished and my forcing a wretched robot to go on past its normal life span resulted in the Olde Thinge going on strike with a blatant shutdown. So I called the Local Computer Geek, who took the Olde Thinge off my hands, moved all my SH & IT to a massive backup drive, wiped the HDD, and tried to reload the system – to no avail. When robots get stubborn, they get stubborn.
However, being the hoarder that I am, as I was cleaning out junk and polishing this & that, I pulled out the Photoshop CS3 disc box, the MSFT Office discs in their original jacket, and the recovery disc set for Windows XP, called the LC Geek, and asked if that was what he needed. He said “YES!!!” several times, stopped by to pick up the discs, and went on his merry way, a very happy person. He even admired my ridiculous hoard of floppies. Remember those?
I am no longer held hostage, and I did get my work space sorted out – for the most part. I also have two clean bathrooms and I (finally) sent my sister a “Thank you” for the fleece sweater jacket she sent me for Christmas. I also found some interesting articles about Obozo and Shrillary from 2009, what their “attitude” (Snrrtt!) was back then and found them to be verrry interesting stuff. Lots of paper is going to the bulk shredders. Lots of it. Now I can tackle all those books that I don’t want, which will go to the local library for their book sale room. I have a copy of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poetry – two volumes of it, the 1850 edition – and I may keep that because she addresses child labor in a couple of them. Where do we hear about that now?
So was I bored to tears? No, it snowed. Snow kept the whole neighborhood busy. It would have been nice to be some place on a beach, watching the waves roll in, but no, I was busy all the time. Texting by phone kept me informed. I got a lot of stuff done. My bad former Outdoor Kitty Emma decided that cold snow wasn’t her cup of tea, after all, and banged on the front door 8 minutes after she bolted to the outdoors.
Now I need a vacation.
So what were you guys up to while I was away? Anyone got any good bank robbery stories?
Category: "The Floggings Will Continue Until Morale Improves"
Butt scratching, kid taking care of, working from home and generating more paperwork at home than I do at work and TAH-ing.
Is that a verb? I think so.
More snow and rain coming.
Hibernate.
Cheers
C
Like Chip said, I’m at home cooling my heels waiting for the gubmint shutdown to end so I can return to work. I ain’t complaining at all as we need the wall built. I get to watch a lot of movies on cable and stuff. Cheers…
Yah, me too. I am now officially my wife’s chauffeur. can’t wait to get back to my office so I can relax!
I appreciate your patience and positive attitudes.
No, really, I do.
One must move ahead and leave the tired past stuff behind.
Welcome back Ex-PH2. We missed you. We were sweet puppies and good dogs.
Pay no attention to the past few days posts or any comments from Dave Hardin. You know how he is.
Ex, good to see you back. So did you break down and buy a new computer or fix the old one? When they get that old, it’s usually less expensive to replace.
The Old One can’t be fixed. It is toast. It is 15 years old which is about 150 years in human terms.
Fortunately, the Local Computer Geek backed up all my “stuff” before he tried to effect repairs, but he said today that it is dead and needs to be buried.
Even so, life goes on and my files are all there.
Nobody said nothin bad about nobody.
Lars disappeared.
Do not speak his name. It is how one summons his spirit.
Yes, I have noticed that major Berkley has not posted lately, nice, isn’t it.
He was using a bogus e-mail address to post here… maybe somene dropped the banhammer on his ass.
Or, the “Hammer and Sickle Soy Boi Cafe” changed the password on the wifi again…
Don’t you believe anything 5th/77th FA tells you, PH. These guys have been bad actors and negligent in their responsibilities. They need ‘counseling’ if you know what I mean. I did my best but to no avail. I don’t recall how long you have been gone, but I need to mention that I was the first, first of the year in the WOT. I believe that conveys certain responsibilities and I only hope I am up to the task throughout the year.
Good to have you back. Glad your puter is working. The Smithsonian is looking for it to put on display.
Computer is dead. It is gone for good. I’m moving on to better things now. If there is a graveyard for old, tired, dead computers, I can only hope that mine found a soft spot to land… or something like that.
There is satisfaction in setting such things on fire and shooting them. It’s a tradition here.
Welcome back, we missed you.
Thank you.
Now if only the weather will cooperate and not give us the 3 to 6 inches of fluff this weekend….
Welcome back! Just been sitting around here, minding my own bidness
Thank you, Street!
Welcome home.
Thank you. Good to be home again. Man, leave is never long enough, is it?
Welcome back. There are two 500 comment threads you missed out on, but nothing else exciting. 🙂
Thank you! It’s been fun throwing stuff out.
I see that the adult supervision is back. Welcome back.
Snorrrtttt! Adult??? Okay, sure.
We missed ya.
I missed all of you, but both of my bathrooms are clean… even if I don’t use them both.
Welcome back..wanted to gift you a Chromebook laptop. Still here if needed.
Someone sent me a laptop and I am making use of it. Thank you for the offer.
I’m thinking it’s just about time to be exploring tasty treats to keep you indoors if there’s a chance of being snowbound. Food, good books, all that stuff – you can look out of the front of the cave you inhabit and go right back to the fire and say ‘Glad I’m not out in that!’
Oh, have you been gone???
(OWB had the good sense to be ducked behind cover before uttering those words.)
Seriously, yeah, computers do need to be replaced occasionally. The ninjas didn’t misbehave too badly, but your absence was definitely noticeable. The misfits, miscreants, and dick weeds were showing signs of wear from the self monitoring.
Ssssphew. Glad that’s over.
Sounds like you are trying to suck up to the moderator here that tries to keep this wreck on the road.
Any appearance of sucking up would be a misapplication of your external suckometer. Please report for remedial training. Recalibration may be in order, so bring all the suckometer manuals with you as well as your suckometer. Reissue may also occur.
Documentation of previous training is on record. Someone may have some ‘splainin’ to do. That, and other possible, action will be carried out by or at the direction of higher authority, such as it is.
Direct questions to the appropriate division of outsourced work order command after Congress takes responsibility for somebody somewhere not being paid to continue to not work for whatever mythical agency coordinates hysteria next month.
Thank you, OWB. I missed being here quite a bit, but the break gave me a chance to get some junk out of my house into the trash and/or bulk shredding pile, and I found things I’d forgotten about!
Welcome home.
Thanks, Mailman Mouse!
Who is this Ex-PH2 everybody keeps talking about?
Oh, nobody important, Joe.
Welcome back Ex; I was on a short rest from commenting but I monitored some of the posts. This freezing 70+ temps have me sort of hibranating and not doing anything. Next big problem with my PC, will go into the lake behind my home to give it the float test.
Jeff
PS- I guess you missed my puns
It has been interesting. Not looking forward to a predicted snow coming up Friday.
As an IT dude, reading the equipment (and software!) you use just made me break out in hives. Now don’t get me wrong, I too still have a massive tower with 10 year-old hardware inside (mostly gathering dust these days), but at least it runs Windows 10. To put that in perspective, Windows XP was released in 2001 and Microsoft finally stopped developing updates for it in 2014. Using that OS to connect to the internet is like riding a horse-drawn buggy on a racetrack or going into a Tijuana brothel without a rubber.
Please, please, please let us pool some beer money and buy you something that won’t be infested by viruses as soon as it hits the internet!
Not necessary. Good refurbished computers are all over the place at about 1/8 of what I paid for that Ancient of Days computer. And someone sent me a laptop, which runs quite nicely. And the Local Computer Geek backed up all my “stuff” – and I mean ALL of it – on a one TB SSD that he gave me to keep.
Ex, if you’ll be looking for a replacement for the loaner laptop, a refurb machine to consider might be one I’ve had good luck with over the past few months. It’s a Lenovo Thinkcentre M93P “Tiny” about the size of a paperback book. IIRC, it was roughly $140 on E-Bay from a Silicon Valley recycler who was getting rid of a bunch of them. After a fresh install of Windows 7 Pro, it’s been rock solid.
It’s also hooked to a big flat screen, and uses a wireless mouse and keyboard. The keyboard is a Cherry MX-type which has a typing touch about like an old IBM Selectric. The big screen adds a whole other dimension to Photoshop.
For what it’s worth, one of my main beefs with buying new machines from big box stores is that they almost always come with an incredible collection of extra bloatware, crapware, and ransomware that tends to be more trouble than it’s worth. I also haven’t been compelled to move to Windows 10 both because it’s still apparently somewhat unstable, and because Microsoft is moving toward a subscription model for its latest software.
Thank you for the offer, Perry.
I’ve seen a bunch of refurbed desktops with Win10 installed and you add only the software you want, no junk “learner” software involved. A chunk of room on the Olde Thinge was taken up with those “learner” programs, but that was 2003 and the assumption was that people had to learn how to use a computer – which was ridiculous because I was on a mainframe at work.
I guess I should lift a glass of iced tea to the Olde Thinge, because it is now history, and I should probably have moved on a couple of years ago, anyway.
Oh yeah, Thinkcentres and Thinkpads are awesome, no-nonsense machines! My only gripe with them is that I don’t fully trust their chinese manufacturer, Lenovo. They’ve landed in hot water over malware shipping with their systems in the past. However, that can be mitigated by a fresh install of the OS and only installing the most essential drivers and software.
As for Windows 10, I’d consider upgrading soon, since support for Windows 7 runs out next year. You can still do it for free right now (https://www.zdnet.com/article/heres-how-you-can-still-get-a-free-windows-10-upgrade/).
Personally, I haven’t had any stability issues, even on a 2010 iMac and the aforementioned tower from 2009, but it does come with loads of crapware (candy crush, minecraft!) directly out of the box and likes to phone home a lot. You can uninstall most of the garbage and configure the settings to be more respectful of your privacy, but it will force updates and reboots on you regardless of what you do. :/
On the flipside, you do get a modern OS with major improvements over 7 and upgrades and security fixes for the foreseeable future.
Something to consider is that the M93P is pretty much Lenovo only because that’s the name on the chassis. Its CPU is an Intel i5 and the micro-atx mainboard is also Intel. Memory is Corsair; SSD is a Western Digital. Point being that except for assembly of components, Lenovo/China doesn’t have all that much to do with security. The machine is also easily capable of running Windows 10; I’ve simply chosen not to install it.
One of the things I find annoying is that ever since Satya Nadella took over at Microsoft, the company seems to have gotten very aggressive about boosting cash flow. What they’ve apparently wanted to avoid is having long-term deployment of stable OS variants such as XP or Win7. So we’ve seen a very fast cycle through Win 8, 8.1, and now 10. And those versions, for the most part, weren’t built for the sake of adding cool features and improving things. Mostly, they were to change things simply for the sake of change, and to force a new upgrade.
Ask yourself this: What is one specific must-have new feature in Win 10 that would make somebody want to junk an older Win 7 machine because Win 10 is so compelling? “A modern OS with major improvements over 7 and upgrades and security fixes for the foreseeable future” strikes me as mostly Microsoft marketing talking. It seems to me it would be more accurate to say that, for most people, getting Win 10 is automatic when their old machine dies, and they decide to get a new one down at Best Buy.
Lest it seem like I’m singling out Microsoft to beat up on, it might be mentioned that in my experience, MS seems to run at third place behind Apple and Oracle in the greed department. A couple of other close contenders are Autodesk and Adobe. YMMV
So what I heard there is that Microsoft gave up on XP before we gave up on Afghanistan.
Ha! That is probably true, too.
Well, by that time they had already released three newer versions of Windows (Vista, 7, 8/8.1) and had gotten tired of maintaining decade-old software. There is definitely something to be said about recognizing when to cut your losses and move on to better things. Then again, we are still flying planes developed in the 50s, so what do I know.
“planes developed in the 1950s” – Oh, lawsy, my brother has a taildragger that was built in 1946! And I see rebuilt warplanes every time there is an airshow now. The only thing that that is missing is Guy Lombardo’s ballroom dance orchestra!
Welcome back, Ex. You have been missed by many, including me.
I missed everyone, too. That bottle of Tuscana red in the fridge occasionally winked at me. But I have two clean bathrooms and found stuff I’d forgotten about.
Welcome back Ex! I’ve been trying to stay out of trouble, a week worth of classes helped, but now that I’m done with that, looking for other options like getting my barn built (anyone in Colorado is welcome to help), and getting back to my college classes…And yeah, as usual, snow is predicted for Sat, the only day I can get non-firefighters to help me…
Thank you, Fyreman. I still have floppies and a floppy reader. 🙂
We’re supposed to have snow (again) by Friday, and then nasty cold and more snow, and I will be happy to send it your way. Already had snow and a cold snap with an outage that lasted 30 hours, back in November.
Stay warm!
Welcome back.
DB is still a lawn dart and has not been resurrected.
Thanks! I believe the anniversary of something is coming up, isn’t it? We could all cough in that general direction, couldn’t we?
I have a couple of spare laptops, if you’re interested. Hit me via back-channel. One Dell, one Asus and one Toshiba, all running W7.
Hehe, yeah, I still have CS3 but never use it anymore, there are too many new products that have replace Adobe’s formerly fantastically great software.
Cats? At one time we had between 75 to 100 feral cats on the ranch in Arkansas. They kept the snakes out of the yard, as well as skunks…the Armadillos don’t give a fuck about nothin’ snakes, cats, turkeys, they just root around like Mueller, looking for something in the dirt.
Ketchup on meat loaf? Inquiring minds want to know.
“all running W7”
I like W7. It will run legacy programs from XP and search on line for a solution to make them work. Support is good for another year.
Hi, Beans! I’m done with XP.
Moving ahead into the Great Unknown, kind of like the debate over whether or not that Strange Object Oumuamua from last fall that whipped by the Sun, out of nowhere, is a piece of an ancient and long-gone civilization, or just a hunk of rock.
Sometimes it takes an “event” to move us along in life. Good for you looking forward to keep things working the way you want them to.
Nice to have you back. We could have used the extra firepower but the usual suspects stepped into the void.
Same here, 7 does everything I want to do and Msft has it running pretty well after 10 or more years of tweaking. I had to work on some folks machines running 8 and 10 and while the interface looks different, when you get down to the core they are not all that different from 7, just overly catering/pandering to internet stuff.
Thank you, Tallywhagger.
Someone gave me a laptop, so I’m good to go for now.
Glad to hear it and hope your system problems all stay in the background, hence forth.
Nice to have you back, Ex-PH2…
Thank you, Senior Chief.
Welcome back, The look the cat in the picture is giving, “Where are my chewy treats Human, I require them now or the wine will suffer” (say it in a Jeremy Irons Voice).
Thanks, Jack! He had one front leg wrapped around that bottle, and the pot of wheat grass was on the kitchen window sill the night before.
It was that look in his eyes. I asked him “You had a party and didn’t invite me?”
He said “Oh, baby, I would have called but the phone in the limo was broken.”
Welcome back!
Thank you, Doc. IT is good to be back.
Let’s see, some kind of sprouts, unopened bottle of wine, somewhat angry cat all in sink and let us not forget, 2 clean bathrooms. What is wrong with this picture and how do we fix it. Mmmmm, I know, water pistol, load with water, spray cat, throw away greens, open bottle and start sipping and soon will not care about condition of bathrooms, computer, very angry cat, greens or about anything else except relaxing. Problems solved.
There you go!
Glad you’re up and running again…I feel your pain about computer workstation areas as my basement is full of dead or nearly dead computers…for a time I liked taking them apart and putting better parts in to make them do interesting things for me…now for a few bucks some one else has made separate appliances that do all that, so all I need to do is build a basic infrastructure and buy these pre-made things (Thermostats, doorbells, lights, etc…) and the tech doesn’t require me opening up old towers and changing parts anymore…it’s less fun in some ways but a helluva time saver in others.
There may have been a few spirited debates and a little foul language while you were gone, but nothing totally out of control….to paraphrase Gillette we might not have been the best we could be, but we were also in no way the worse we could be….
I missed you all, too, VOV.
Welcome back ma’am. Don’t believe these reprobates. They’ve been running around with their hair on fire and everything….🤣
So I heard! 🙂 🙂 🙂
Welcome back. It hasn’t been the same without you herding the cats.
Thank you. It was a reminder that nothing is permanent, and that we take a lot for granted now without realizing it.
This isn’t exactly the place for this but, I just saved a bunch of money on my car insurance by canceling that shit, lol….. no, welcome back.
I understand your pain, but unless you are insuring a timeless, unflawed classic 12-cylinder Dusenberg, or a 1957 Mustang, you still need insurance, especially when there are uninsured motorists on the road more than ever now!
I was just joking…..
I know. If only we could just turn back time….
PH: Hard to tell if you have a replacement computer that is functioning properly and which you plan to keep.
Something to remember is that all honorably discharged veterans are now eligible to shop military PX/NEX online, not in the stores. That saves you whatever the area tax might be.
Also, all computer manufacturers have a website for selling refurbished computers. I was told that refurbished electronics are often actually ‘better’ than new items b/c they are more thoroughly checked out than is a new unit.
Also, Best Buy has an open box site on their web page that offers huge discounts. These are brand new items but the box has been opened and, for legal (?) reasons, the item can not be sold as new (although it is new). I think some of the items may be units that have been returned for whatever reason.
Hope these ideas are helpful and can save you some money.
Thanks, Doc! The laptop is good for now. There is plenty of stuff to choose from now.
Sorry to be so late EX…..been in and out health and weather wise. Off and on quiet spells these days, but still miss your banter. Especially mention of the cats. BTW….”Neither appreciate the sacrifices I make for them”…those are cats EX! It’s they who make the sacrifices just for you to have something to worship. Those eyes are saying, “Of all I do for her, look at my reward…a bottle of Chablis and some greens. Lady, get your a__ back in the kitchen and open me a can of cat food!”
Anyway, good to read you and the cats again.