Weekend!
I am blessed to say that if we spent every weekend making up for “we haven’t seen so-and-so in forever!”, we’d never, ever have a weekend that wasn’t spent catching up with people we love very much.
The problem (and there’s always a problem, isn’t there) is that introversion turns this into a choice between two mutually exclusive good things. Do I want to catch up with people I miss and haven’t seen in forever? Do I want to sit in the darkened basement and sing songs to the kitties and recharge my proverbial batteries?
Usually I try to catch up… but the basement calls like a siren and I can make educated guesses about next week based on my relationship to the rest of the boat.
I am lashed to the mast this weekend. Sadly, wax doesn’t work.
So… what’s on your docket?
Good gravy, buying a house is a lot of work. It’s really kind of all-consuming.
There is a music show on Sunday we’d like to go to. It’ll be a night out without the peanut, which we don’t get very many of.
But mostly… radon guy tomorrow, bank tomorrow, plumbing guy either tomorrow or Saturday, and deck guy on Saturday or Sunday, and all of the time in between trying to figure out which and when.Report
We’re probably going camping again, this time fairly close to town but far enough out for dark skies. There’s supposed to be a meteor shower.
My wife may try to get tickets to a folk music festival for Sunday evening, which would affect when we return to town.Report
Looking for new places to live 🙂Report
@damon
Someplace without a government this time, right? 😉Report
@james-hanley
Sadly no. Looking at a different county though, with less gov’t. ROM suggests housing costs 10-40% less in housing costs, lower income taxes, and closer to work.Report
Insofar as I understood it, what Jaybird said. 😀Report
This past week has been nothing more than one first-world technological problem after another, and I suspect it will continue into the weekend.
First, I relocated my router so I could get some wifi on one side of the house (it’s an old house, and wifi just doesn’t go far, and my experiences with a repeater were mixed at best).
That worked out fairly well, all things considered (YAY!), and I was able to pretty much confirm some Netflix streaming issues are probably FIOS-related (BOO!) and not due to my own network (YAY!)
BUT, that router move left me almost entirely without wifi in another room (BOO!)
Luckily, that room has a powerline adapter into it, so I took an old router I had sitting around and configured that as a wireless access point, and now I pretty much have awesome wifi signal everywhere in and around my house.(YAY!)
BUT, when I moved my desktop computer into that room, the internal HD gave up the ghost(BOO!)
So it was into the shop (it’s a Mac, I am not attempting that switch myself) and 300 bucks (BOO!) and 3 days later I was back up (YAY!)
Since all my data was on an external array, I wasn’t too worried: but I WAS worried when it took iTunes about 48 hours to rebuild everything the way I had it (it’s a pretty massive library).
Still, it eventually seemed to do so (YAY!); but now the computer’s OS doesn’t always see the external array as read/write (it sees it as read-only) when it boots up (BOO!)
This is a problem because iTunes won’t deal with the array unless it’s read/write. Unmounting/remounting it (or physically disconnecting/reconnecting it) usually resolves this, but that’s a hassle and so far I haven’t been able to resolve the intermittent issue despite some deeper forays (well beyond my expertise) into trying to resolve the permissions permanently.
Basically, the problem is that the volume’s permissions themselves appear to be set correctly, so I can’t figure out what is causing the OS to sometimes think that they aren’t.
I’m starting to suspect that there’s some slight speed increase or boot order difference (the computer got an OS upgrade along with its HD replacement) that’s causing the OS to mount the array *just slightly* before it’s totally ready (dammit man, foreplay is important!) and am actually wondering if downgrading the interface cable from firewire to USB might compensate for that (but then wonder if the USB will still be a fast-enough transfer for the array/computer to serve its media to elsewhere in the house.)
If you think this was all annoying and boring to read, just imagine how it feels to live it.Report
I switched out the HD on a first-gen Intel iMac. The instructions were like 32 steps, one of which was to remove 35 or so tiny little screws. Another step was something like “Take a deep breath. You can do this.”
To switch a hard drive. What the heck!
Then I couldn’t find the install disk that came with the computer to get the OS onto the new HD, so I tried the one that came with my wife’s laptop, and it booted up and was all ready to install but objected because this was a desktop. I was getting all ready to find a torrent of the OS, and trying to figure out how I could feasibly virus scan such a download, and then I thought “There are people who actually want you to download their OS for free, and go out of their way to make it easy. Fish this, I’ll just install Linux.”
When Mac users are driven to install Linux because it’s the approach with the least technical hassle, something has gone wrong at Apple.Report
Linux has made installation ridiculously easy. It’s the part after that where I start running into roadblocks.
32 steps*… yikes. I don’t think there were 32 steps to my open-laptop fan transplant.
* – And now I have TMBG stuck in my head.Report
I may have exaggerated the numbers slightly. There were a lot of little tiny screws. I had some left over when the thing went back together.
I did not exaggerate on the fact that there was a step just devoted to steeling yourself for the next few steps.Report
Macs. Heh.Report
@slade-the-leveller – For personal use, I’ve switched back and forth every few years between Macs and PCs pretty much since college, depending on how much cash I had at the time and how frustrated I currently was with whichever one I just had (for work, it’s pretty much been PC all the way).
I’m not particularly partisan towards one or the other; I find that both have advantages and disadvantages.
If I had to thumbnail it, I’d say I’ve had more problems overall on the PC side, but the Mac problems often tend to be more intractable/expensive when encountered.Report
itunes is the worst. i thought everyone knew that. even god says so in the bible. on the 11th day he’s trying to reorg his podcasts and when he moves too many things it becomes a hassle and he’s all “fuck it, itunes sucks”.
i use foobar for everything, but i am #pcmasterraceReport
Eh, it’s not an iTunes problem (sure, iTunes took a while to re-map everything, but it was a lot of files, and a lot of smart playlists). iTunes generally seamlessly does what I need it to do (not really a podcast listener) though it’s certainly got some quirks.
Way back when when its main competitor was Windows Media Player, possibly the most awful interface MS had ever come up with (and that was saying something), it looked pretty great, and I just stuck with it.Report
My favorite thing about WMP was that it had replaceable “skins”, so people could (in theory) customize it and make it look cool, and that because Microsoft was Microsoft and Windows was Windows, this became yet another vector for viruses.Report
Work Saturday afternoon. Party Saturday evening with some college friends I don’t see nearly enough of. Sunday leave for Mount Royal and parts north.Report
Jaybird very accurately sums up most of my weekends for me. It’s always the Fun Thing Outside the House verses the Fun Thing Inside the House and the latter means I can have snacks close by and it’s way more comfortable but then I feel guilty because the Outside thing is usually something fleeting that I can only do within a certain time window. Ugh. First world problems.
Big weekend in our house. School starts back next Wednesday which means this is our last weekend to prep. While my wife and youngest daughter are dreading the day (it’s also back-to-work for my wife) I am counting the minutes. School brings back routine and order to our lives. It means everyone will be back to reasonable bedtimes. Eating schedules will be back to normal so we can resume family dinners. High school football games to attend. Autumn approaches. It’s fantastic.
I have a few side items to attend to as well. Today I am volunteering at the St.Joe’s Orphanage Picnic which is a huge event (weather-permitting) that brings all the Catholics in town together for gambling, beer and fried chicken dinners.
I also have to make my two culinary entries for the state fair, which have to be dropped off tomorrow. I am entering Benedictine spread, which I will assume no one outside of Kentucky will have ever heard of, and a shrimp and chorizo spread that I am literally going to invent on the fly. Should be fun.Report
This weekend I went to an honest to goodness “in someone’s basement” punk rock show, which I haven’t done in like 20 years. It was quite a thing.
Since last I rocked out, punk has turned helluva queer. I mean, seriously, I’m pretty sure the queers outnumbered the straights 2-to-1 in this group, and even the straights were pretty out there with gender. This was not the punk rock I remember (which involved lots of skinheads, toxic masculinity, and fights).
(But then, the whole thing was organized to help pay for this one girl’s orchiectomy, so maybe that made a difference with who showed up.)Report