Intersection Logs

Today I took my old, thoroughly retired Behemoth laptop back to the store from whence it came, and they gave me nearly $50 in trade-in for it. Which is ... about three per cent of what I paid for it in 2004, but better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. I feel at least ten pounds lighter with it gone -- it always was an unwieldy lump of a thing, even before it succumbed to WinXP-rot and slowed to a crawl.

Then I put the trade-in gift-card towards a basic e-reader -- a Sony Pocket Edition, which lacks a lot of the bells and whistles of more recent gadgets -- it doesn't have a touch screen or wireless or even an expansion slot, but it works fine for what I want. This way, while my dead trees are in transit I can read without being dependent on the Palm's not-so-great battery.

Time to pull 6Gb of files off the Butterfly laptop onto a new 1Tb portable drive: about three hours.

Time to copy the same files from the portable drive to the Dragonfly laptop: about ten minutes, including time to change the permissions and ownership on the files.

I'm not sure how much of the discrepancy was read vs write times, and how much was the difference in the laptops, which is three or four years and a couple of Gb of memory; I'll get more idea of that when I finish copying the other 10Gb or so of files I want, and run a backup.

Because I dislike the "My Documents" nomenclature MS foisted on us from Win95 on, and particularly dislike the way they resurrected it in Win7 after killing it in Vista, I rename those folders back to just "Documents" and so forth -- which is what the DOS paths are anyway. Then I rename the "Favorites" links in the Explorer navigation pane to ~Documents etc., because it won't let me have just Documents (that being reserved for the Documents Library, which as far as I'm concerned is just a completely unnecessary layer of imaginary folders). That all works fine -- until a Windows patch changes them back and disappears the links. That's happened twice now -- the second time yesterday.

I witnessed a small computer weirdness today, not on my own computer; Firefox was refusing to bookmark anything on Blogspot. Or maybe anything; it wasn't demonstrated in my presence that it could bookmark non-Blogspot things either. I suspect a reboot might have fixed it; the latest FF update might have been one of the ones that really goes better with a reboot, but I've been pushing my work laptop pretty hard lately and it might have been coincidental that soon after the update it just decided it couldn't cut and paste from a PDF open in Firefox to an Emacs buffer.

And today it was in the 80s again -- warm enough for sightings of short-shorts on campus, though I think myself that's a little premature. To my mind, in these parts, the cut-off point for winter-weight long pants is somewhere around a high of 75F, and I don't go for full-bore summer attire (which in my case is lightweight but long dresses) until the highs hit 90 or so, which comes soon enough as a rule. (Part of this is that we get big ranges, often thirty or even forty degrees in the course of a day. It makes dressing for the weather challenging, sometimes.)

Today I finally had a chance to take the Dragonfly laptop to Best Buy to see about the ethernet cable that got stuck at the end of November. The Nice Young Man (TM) took it in the back for a couple of minutes and came back with cable in one hand and laptop in the other, much to my relief; I was afraid they'd take it away for weeks and give it back with a different hard drive, or something similarly stupid. And yes, I still have a working ethernet port.

The silly cable had been in there so long that the machine looks and feels oddly incomplete without it, now.

And now I'm all the way home (a couple of hours ago, actually.) It was nice to see clear sky again in the hour or so before night fell.

( Passing on a security advisory about Acrobat: )

Customizing with extreme prejudice, part 5 Now that's what I call a Start Menu!

Win7 has something called "Homegroups" which is supposed to let you share your files with other Win7 computers on the same home network, with a special password. The stupid thing about this? At least for my situation (one person, many computers of various vintages and operating systems) good old-fashioned filesharing on the network works just fine for that. I'd got[ten] used to the convenience of having (password-protected, but that's mostly transparent) write-access to the files on the desktop from whichever laptop happened to be in use in the living room. (Except the little Eee, which was so intermittent and flaky about it that I eventually threw in the towel and resorted to what we used to call "sneakernet" at work, though in my case it was usually slippernet or barefootnet; put the file on a removable medium and walk over to the destination computer with it.)

Homegroups, it turns out, doesn't let me do that. Once the silly thing was set up, I suddenly found that I could only see the files on the desktop that Windows thought I should be allowed to see -- and only with read-access, and organized by libraries. (I told you libraries were evil.) The XP machine, meanwhile, could read and write everything just fine.

The solution? Leave Homegroup, on both Win7 machines. Then I'm back where I was before, with full access to all my own files, not just the ones in stupid "Libraries." (ETA, with added growling: but I had to share the printers manually, and add them again.)

So what exactly was the point?


I'm a PC, but Windows 7 I'm having second thoughts about.

Am embarked on the process of en-Sevening the HP laptop. At the point where it asks you to stop and uninstall iTunes (and some other things that there doesn't appear to be an uninstall path for) it decided the driver for the DVD drive was corrupt, and a reboot didn't fix it. I tried a system restore, which claimed to have failed, but the drive came back to life. So now we are at 94% on Copying Windows files, and we'll see how it goes.

Also, I grabbed an ethernet cable to connect it to the router, in case the wireless went down during the process, and now it seems to be inextricably stuck in the port.

Sigh.

Also, I probably need new glasses again, but I was too stressed and sleep-deprived earlier in the week to do anything about it. Last year I did it early in my November break, on too little sleep, and flunked the visual field test, which ended up costing me an uncomfortable morning and my insurer several hundred dollars for a glaucoma exam. Not risking that again; I'll probably leave it until after the February trip (if it happens) is over.

I know I'm trying to do too many things at once when I pour myself a cup of coffee, put it down, and ten minutes later wander past the kitchen and do the same thing again -- only to find the earlier, undrunk cup sitting looking reproachfully at me.

This afternoon's mission is chaos reduction and de-grungification, with particular focus on the bathroom. Now that the tub is no longer filling with other people's dubious waste water on a daily basis, I am somewhat more motivated to try to do a decent job on it. I have also acquired a nice new shower curtain, liner, and mat. The old mat was pretty much past it anyway, the rubber backing having gone the way of all rubber that sits around for long in the desert, but the workmen completed its demise. As soon as the floor and fixtures are clean, the new stuff can go in, and I'll have a respectable bathroom again, albeit still one with a messy book-sized patch on one wall.

Yesterday's big project, which wasn't meant to be, was the backing-up of the newly-Sevened desktop computer. I can't tell now whether my initial hypothesis that Win7 was being pickier about mixed-up permissions than Vista was correct, or whether it started with a bit of corruption on the destination drive; I just know that laboriously making everything in my personal directory inherit the top-level permissions didn't help, and CHKDSKing the drive (which found ONE 32kb spot of trouble) finally let it finish. (The other grump about 7 is that there isn't a working driver for my HP laser printer yet; otherwise it seems to work fine.)

And I can't find my small straight-nose pliers.