Category: Housekeeping

Oh FFS

Housekeeping

Late Sunday night I saw a message in my “Notifications” that my Windows 11 needed an update, in that the “Security” was old or some damn thing.

I’d missed it because I’d ported a whole bunch of files onto my new laptop from the old, and over the past week or so I’ve been updating many, many files — deleting old ones, refreshing others, downloading newer iterations, you know the drill.  For ease of access, I’d stored most of the files on my Desktop

So I clicked on the “UPDATE” button, and seeing as the thing as going to take ages to complete the task, I went to bed.

When I logged on this morning, my Desktop was completely empty except for the Recycle bin, and I cannot find those files anywhere.

RCOB

All that work… vanished into the ether.

I actually don’t know what to do now.

Try to imagine that you have done a whole lot of research (back in the day before computers), and all your stuff is stored on bits of paper, some filed away, some properly typed out and filed properly — you know, the  way we used to do stuff.

Then some cleaning service offers to tidy up your room, and when you come back the next day, all the stuff you’d not yet filed away has been shredded.

I’m going to take a day or two to process what’s happened, and maybe try to re-create some of the work.  But if this is going to happen each time I subject myself to a Win11 upgrade, I’m just not going to do it, ever again.

I am so angry I could bite the head off a puppy.

Oh, and by the way:  OneDrive was re-installed.

Also, posting will be light for a couple of days.  Sorry, but that’s where I am right now.

5 Fings Wot I Done

Guy Stuff, Housekeeping

In keeping with the Musk Activity Report, allow me to list the five things I did last week — almost all of which, I’ll agree, I do every week.  Bearing in mind that I’m actually retired and not therefore required to do anything, here they are:

1) Prepared and posted about 30-odd articles for this here blog.  Some require little preparation — such as the Caption Competitions, Sunday’s Classic Beauty and Random Totty categories, of which I typically do a month’s worth in advance.  Others such as the Comment Of The Day also require little preparation other than formatting, but I typically do those as I stumble on them.  The heavy hitters (e.g.  Gratuitous Gun Pics, political analysis and social commentary) take a lot longer because in many cases they concern subjects with which I’m not familiar and require that I delve into the topic at some depth.  Reports on daily news take very little time, but commentary thereon does involve at least a little contemplation if not ancillary research, as does the weekly News Roundup.  As I’m committed to publishing at least four posts per weekday and one each for Saturday and Sunday, you can see how this all adds up, timewise.  And I count this as only one thing I did last week, and pretty much every week.  No doubt some Gummint bureaucrat would spin those out into at least a dozen things — such is the nature of make-work Gummint activity — but for me, it’s one.

2) Reading and answering mail.  I get upwards of two dozen emails a day from Readers.  Some require a response, some are FYI.  Whatever, thank you for all of them — regular correspondents know who you are —  and I value every single email.  (I don’t get much if any hate mail, but that’s fine.  If I wanted that kind of thing, I’d get a Twitter/X account.)

3) Grocery shopping.  Because New Wife works a day job (more on this below), it falls on me to keep the household running, and typically this involves about three separate trips per week (because I prefer to eat fresh foods rather than canned or frozen).  Once again, this I count as one thing not three.

4) Meal preparation.  There are two such activities.  Firstly, each night I prepare a “brown-bag” lunch for New Wife’s consumption the following day.  It involves a fresh garden salad, some kind of meat and a dessert (pitted cherries and full-milk yogurt).  Secondly, because she works five days a week, I see no reason why she should come home exhausted and then have to prepare us a meal;  so at least three nights a week, I prepare dinner for us both.  Friday nights we’ll either share a frozen pizza or whatever.  We don’t do takeout unless we’re desperate.  Weekend meals are an ad hoc  kind of thing — cheese or chicken toasties — unless we decide to treat ourselves to a roast, beef or lamb) which I typically do while she does household stuff like laundry.  (In passing, I keep the apartment tidy, bed made and the kitchen spotless because I loathe the alternative with a passion).

5) Range trip.  I view this as part of my civic duty.  Choice of guns depends on my mood or “rotation” (“damn, I haven’t shot Gun X for a while, it’s time”).  5a)  Maintenance.  I also clean and oil my guns once a week — not just those I fired at the range, but also one or two others on a rotation basis.  (I’m not compulsive about this because I don’t have to be.  While I have the cleaning kit out, in other words…)

Those are the five things I do every week, which I consider cumulatively as my “job”.  I didn’t include the voluminous reading  (paper and Internet), because that’s recreation.  Ditto the many WhatsApp messages to friends and family.

6) Ad hoc jobs.  Last week, I also fixed the headliner on the Tiguan — after only 135,000 miles, the glue weakened and the liner started flopping down, don’t get me started on quality control nowadays.  I also re-glued the gearstick shroud in New Wife’s Sputum (which had worked loose after only 26,000 miles because Fiat), and took it in for an oil change.

In government-worker terms, that list would probably exhaust most of them and require some time off.

On the other hand, I can’t get fired.

Progress Report

Housekeeping

I thought I’d just give y’all an update on the new laptop, which came preloaded with all sorts of shit from Microsquish that I neither wanted nor needed, and most of which has been banished to That Great Trash Dump In The Ether.

Sadly, one of the preloads was Windoze 11, which is a pestilence on the face of the Earth and whose creators deserve to be flayed alive and dunked in boiling oil.  Fucking hell, talk about “counterintuitive operations”.  It’s like learning a whole new program, and the easy functionality of #10 (which took me almost no time to learn lo those 8 years ago) has turned into a nightmare of different buttons to push and strange, inscrutable ways to see what’s actually on my system.

And WTF is “OneDrive”?  If I wanted to store stuff on the Cloud or whatever it’s called, I’m perfectly capable of doing so by myself and by my own choice, thank you, instead of having it forced upon me.  Needless to say, it’s been uninstalled (I think) but every so often I get to see yet another of its multitude of folders, which needs deleting each and every time.

Thankfully, the meme- and smutty pics files (i.e. the important stuff) are intact, which is more than I can say for my bookmarks, may the developers of Firefox join those of #11 in the boiling-oil cauldron.  (I followed the “Save All Bookmarks” routine — as explained in Mozilla’s [no-]HELP section — to the letter, and yet only a few bookmarks made it over to this machine.  Which means I have to re-create a shit ton of them by hand.  Don’t get me started.)

Then there are the MS programs which I use constantly, like Paint and the snipping tool, which have changed for no good reason I can ascertain (and not for the better, let me tell you).  I also like to have my Active / Open Programs tool bar running vertically on the right hand side of the screen rather than strung along the bottom of the screen, but apparently #11 doesn’t have that facility, FFS.  Why is this important?  Because my nice new wide screen has room to house said RHS toolbar, which would leave more visible vertical space to hold text articles;  but as it can’t, I find myself having to scroll up and down more often.  Fortunately, I could afford to buy a brand new Logitech ERGO mouse so that, at least, is less onerous a task.

On the other hand, it’s rather nice to have an “o” key which responds to a light finger touch, and the battery which lasts 6 hours instead of 30 minutes.  And yes, at last I could permanently disable the horrible touchpad (unlike on the old HP laptop), and I no longer have to duct-tape the power cord to the system to keep it from falling out like some post-coital limp penis.  And I can actually close the screen without all those dreadful creaking and snapping noises from the chassis and hinges.  And the keys are backlit so I don’t have to have the light on whilst I type.

All good stuff, that last paragraph.  Although I do miss having a DVD player in my laptop… but I have a spare multi-format DVD player which I can hook up to the system when New Wife is watching Great British Bake-Off  and I feel like (re-)watching Casablanca  or Foyle’s War  instead of plucking my eyeballs out.

Anyway, the migration process continues apace, and should be more or less completed in a week or so.  Next up:  installing Thunderbird for my email.  This should be fun…

There are (a very few) times when I enjoy using new technology.  This, however, is not one of those times.  It’s like having to buy a new car because the old one conked out, only to find that the pedals have been switched around and the steering is now performed by some new-style gaming controller instead of the familiar old steering wheel.  I know that in time one gets accustomed to the New Way Of Doing Things, but why the fucking fucking fucking hell should I when the Old Way worked perfectly, for nearly a decade withal?

I’m just hoping that this is the last laptop I’ll ever have to buy before I Shuffle Off This Mortal Coil;  but then again, I thought that about the last laptop I bought, and look how that turned out.

Rude good health, it seems, does have its drawbacks sometimes.

Misplaced

Housekeeping

Sorry about the paucity of posts today — for some reason, they got scheduled for next week instead of today.  (Whether that’s some quirk of WordPress or just idiocy on my part… well, take your pick.)

See below for the update.