Shaka, when the walls fell...

Zinda, his face black, his eyes red.

I fucked up.

Yeah, upgrading to Windows 10 was risky, but I understood the risks. I've dealt with computer meltdowns before. And 10 had been tested for quite a long period before rolling out. So I backed up all my files and forged ahead, making the leap from 7 to 10.

For a few days it was wonderful. Fast. Smooth. All positive. Worked on a few prints. But then there was an update among other things, like being prompted to update a few drivers. Cool. The next time I turned on the computer it froze a few minutes after startup. Not your average freeze. A deep freeze. Solidly unmoving and unresponsive and silent. Okaaaaay...

This became a pattern after a few days. Hard freezes intermittently. Sudden restarts out of nowhere. The tower starting to shower beeps at me, unable to start again. More and more hard shutdowns, like pulling the plug on a loved one. Worse and worse.

Scrambling to use the brief uptime to figure out the problem. Rolling back recoveries. Killing problematic programs. Dumping drivers. Scanning all the things. To no avail. Days passed. Worse and worse.

Last night I threw in the towel. Time to restore Windows 7 and pray. Restored it today. Froze at one point, but continued on restart. Windows 7 happily returned. FreeCell in all it's ad-free glory. Got an hour out of it. Doing all kinds of scanning and updates to get everything rolled back.

Freeze.

Oh no.

And again the beeps and struggling restarts. And a fucking cascade of awfulness. And it will no longer turn on. Tried to get it going one more time to backup those few files and do a system restore. But no. It won't turn on.

So, here I sit, pecking out this post via my tablet. Funny about that. It's always worked beautifully, but there was the recall due to battery overheating. I received my replacement tablet a few days ago. It's waiting, mostly untouched. Couldn't stand the thought of activating it and there being some problem. Then I would be computer-less and tablet-less once the kill-switch was triggered on this one. Not about to deal with that potential technology failure after the last week of Windows hell.

Just feels like it's all hanging in the balance right now. I would feel relatively fine reformatting if I could save those few files. But I may never get the thing running again.

Shaka, when the walls fell.

Been playing Fallout Shelter a lot while the computer has been shitting itself. So addicting. It's like the early Sims games before they got enormous and complex. Totally my jam.

Also had another horrible panic/anxiety relapse last week. Felt like a crazed reanimated corpse for a few days, but getting through it was probably good for me.

Kailash, when it rises. Sokath, his eyes opened.

The 100 degree temperatures and smoke haze have cooled and cleared.

Geez. It was a rough week. Lol.
 Don't know why Darmok came to mind, but... ya know, there's always more room for Darmok.

Actually, I bet watching Star Trek would vastly improve my mood right now. Netflix it is!

And tomorrow... tomorrow I duel with Windows...
 The Beast of Tenagra.

Blue moon...

Appropriate to make a 'once in a Blue Moon' post with a Blue Moon. Nothing like arbitrary and flawed human systems to make something special out of something entirely un-special. ^^

Got an e-mail this morning that almost all Nvidia Shield Tablets sold over the last year are being recalled for potential to overheat dangerously and start fires. Mine included. Figures. Rofl.
According the process I went through to register for the recall, I won't be required to send my existing tablet in. They're just shipping out new devices to everyone and as soon as we turn it on, our old tablets will become bricks. Killswitch engage! The fact they can do that is a bit alarming in itself.

Nice that it's so straightforward though. My current tablet has worked quite well. Love the thing. It gets super hot when I run certain games for a while, but I've just been gentle with it and let it cool when that happens. My main concern now is that the replacement tablet, with it's new battery, will have some other problem that my current tablet does not... and I'll be stuck with that or have to get that one replaced too.

Anyway, 2-4 weeks or so to see what I get. *fingers crossed*
Never had a smart device before and never been involved in a recall. Lots of firsts happening. Also the first time I've had my own computer for a big windows upgrade. I did the Windows 10 upgrade first day. Which I'm aware is generally considered to be a bad idea. Smart people wait a year or so for all the bugs to get worked out. 10 was thoroughly tested by the public before launch though and I read up on it a ton, so I just took the leap. Still getting adjusted to things, but I rather like it so far.

Finally some cooler temperatures after quite the brutal heatwave last week.
Going outside to water the tomatoes for 10 minutes maximum and I feel like my skin is frying on the spot. Ick. And the California drought isn't helping matters. Dead lawns are much hotter than living ones. And I don't think I mentioned that our neighbor's fig tree nose-dived into our backyard a while back. It's a sad sight and we lost a ton of shade (and an enormous amount of un-ripened figs). I'll make a post with pictures some time.

Poor figgy. ;__;

Sh*tpost : Macs are evil

A brief rant.

My mom uses an iMac. I've troubleshooted for her a number of times and it's always a shit-show. It often ends up being some massive update that you have to dig for because the 'automatic updates' system doesn't actually do what it says it will.

She was trying to import videos/photos off her camcorder into iMovie, which she has done multiple times before. Took me way too long to determine that the computer was recognizing the camera, but iMovie was not. Made me massively appreciate how 'manual' PCs are. Far easier to diagnose a problem if there is one. Anyway, eventually GoogleFu-ed myself to a single support page that mentioned a recent iOS update might cause this importing problem. SHOOOOOCCCCKKK.

Then had to jump elsewhere and drill down a dozen pages to get the necessary update for iMovie. Taking all the least obvious routes to get there. It's downloading right now... more than a gig 'update'. Geez louise. Fingers crossed.

Not to mention that my mom uses totally different mouse sensitivity and I was on her Mac so long that movement on my computer is catastrophically off now. Lmao. AND that recent update had suddenly reversed her scroll-wheel action, but she didn't know how to fix it. So had to dig for that as well.

The amount of flaming hoops you have to jump through with iOS... lawd ha'mercy!

I suppose if I had grown up with macs instead of PCs it would come easier, but yeeeeeeesh.

Almost afraid to go check... brb.

Nope. Only halfway. OTL...

Hour later: Ohhhh gooooood. Can't install that without the previous update. And if that's the case it looks like I'll be dl-ing every update between 8.0.6 and 9.0.9. Faaaaaantastic. FFS. There must be a better way.

30 more minutes: Nope. Can't do that either, because you need a fresh download of 9.0, which is no longer available through the app store... because they're up to 10.something now. Aaaaaand the reviews on the 10.something seem to show this importing problem STILL EXISTS. Unreal. Never fucking mind. Just gonna straight download her stuff to the computer and go from there.

SO DONE.

RAINBOWS... RAINBOWS EVERYWHERE!

YEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!

This straight woman who has zero interest in marriage herself has been giddy, smiling, and crying all day from sheer happiness. Today the world became a bit less sucky!

YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!