What a Sunday!
Yeah, I know I haven't posted at all this year. Bad Aeärwen! I'll make that up to you now by yakking, complaining and ranting about my New Year so far.
My old desktop system has been slowly dying, so I ordered a new one - which ended up being a newer model of the same thing I had before: an HP Pavilion. And I bit the bullet and got the one with Windows 8.1.
I have to admit I have a love/hate relationship with this OS, as it is IMHO a supremely schizophrenic one. It thinks it can behave like a *real* computer on the one hand, and on the other, it wants to pretend to be a cell phone. Some things that work on the "Start" menu refuse to transfer to the "Desktop", and vice versa - at least as far as I've been able to figure out so far.
And into this mix, we now throw a POS bit of software called "HP Support Assistant", which Saturday night told me I needed to update my video driver. Being a good little sheep, I let it do its thing. BAD IDEA!!! When I went to boot the system in the morning (yesterday) it was beeping at me every second ad nauseum, every second the mouse cursor would re-center itself of the screen no matter what I wanted to do or click on (making it nigh on impossible to do a damned thing,) and even the icons within my word processor were flickering in rhythm with the beeping and cursor movements.
So, I called HP customer support. Of course, I ended up talking to a very nice lady in India - which I really didn't mind, because (a) I could understand her completely; and (b) she seemed to know her "stuff". At the end of two hours, however, I'd had to reset my system back to factory defaults, doing so only because the important data was saved to Dropbox. Needless to say, after the thing was finally working properly, I was madly trying to re-install all my software and put things back to the way I want them.
The last piece of that was this morning, when I said a quick prayer and plugged in the bluetooth unit that sends info to and from my wireless trackman. When I set the system up the first time, the thing simply refused to work - and it took my guest computer science graduate to figure it out. THIS time, however, it behaved like a proper plug-and-play component, making my Monday morning a whole lot happier than my Sunday!
Yesterday was stressful for another reason. Starting about Christmas time, my little Bengal cat Sadie began to develop a lump on her right hip. Well, it simply exploded in size after the New Year until it was the size of a golf ball. Yesterday, she had surgery to have the thing removed, and late yesterday afternoon I picked up a very groggy, very tippy kitty whose response to the entire day was to growl and hiss at everybody - and then demand to sit on me for cuddles. She has to wear a "cone" - otherwise known as an Elizabethan collar - for two weeks, until her stitches come out. She has most of her hind right quarter shaved, and her incision is about four inches long! I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this sees the end of THAT issue for her.
On the subject of health care, I now have health insurance - or, at least I will have when Anthem Blue Cross sends me my packet since I've paid my first month's premium. Regardless what anybody claims, I never did get the website for Covered California to work properly, but I did find a customer support number at which a nice lady walked me through the application process and read me the options available to me. So I suppose, once I have my card as an honest-to-whatever insured human being, I'll have to sort through the options (Anthem is a PPO) and find myself a new doctor. My daughter told me she'll bug me until I get a physical and get checked out.
Last but not least, especially for those of my f-list who follow my LOTR fanfic writings, I've signed up for B2MEM this year. I admit I have been tinkering with my LOTR fics, even starting one that happens rather late in my IDD!verse timeline, but this will make the first challenge in that fandom that I've accepted in well over a year. But the visual prompt was simply irresistible: a pic of a spider's web with dew drops on it. Those who are familiar with my writing can imagine where I may go with this - but I have two options on stories to write about it, with an interesting "twist" to the tale to boot. So this is just notice that I'm intending to post something new for a change.
So there you have it. My 2014 so far. Never a dull moment around here, I swear!
Have a good week, folks.
My old desktop system has been slowly dying, so I ordered a new one - which ended up being a newer model of the same thing I had before: an HP Pavilion. And I bit the bullet and got the one with Windows 8.1.
I have to admit I have a love/hate relationship with this OS, as it is IMHO a supremely schizophrenic one. It thinks it can behave like a *real* computer on the one hand, and on the other, it wants to pretend to be a cell phone. Some things that work on the "Start" menu refuse to transfer to the "Desktop", and vice versa - at least as far as I've been able to figure out so far.
And into this mix, we now throw a POS bit of software called "HP Support Assistant", which Saturday night told me I needed to update my video driver. Being a good little sheep, I let it do its thing. BAD IDEA!!! When I went to boot the system in the morning (yesterday) it was beeping at me every second ad nauseum, every second the mouse cursor would re-center itself of the screen no matter what I wanted to do or click on (making it nigh on impossible to do a damned thing,) and even the icons within my word processor were flickering in rhythm with the beeping and cursor movements.
So, I called HP customer support. Of course, I ended up talking to a very nice lady in India - which I really didn't mind, because (a) I could understand her completely; and (b) she seemed to know her "stuff". At the end of two hours, however, I'd had to reset my system back to factory defaults, doing so only because the important data was saved to Dropbox. Needless to say, after the thing was finally working properly, I was madly trying to re-install all my software and put things back to the way I want them.
The last piece of that was this morning, when I said a quick prayer and plugged in the bluetooth unit that sends info to and from my wireless trackman. When I set the system up the first time, the thing simply refused to work - and it took my guest computer science graduate to figure it out. THIS time, however, it behaved like a proper plug-and-play component, making my Monday morning a whole lot happier than my Sunday!
Yesterday was stressful for another reason. Starting about Christmas time, my little Bengal cat Sadie began to develop a lump on her right hip. Well, it simply exploded in size after the New Year until it was the size of a golf ball. Yesterday, she had surgery to have the thing removed, and late yesterday afternoon I picked up a very groggy, very tippy kitty whose response to the entire day was to growl and hiss at everybody - and then demand to sit on me for cuddles. She has to wear a "cone" - otherwise known as an Elizabethan collar - for two weeks, until her stitches come out. She has most of her hind right quarter shaved, and her incision is about four inches long! I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this sees the end of THAT issue for her.
On the subject of health care, I now have health insurance - or, at least I will have when Anthem Blue Cross sends me my packet since I've paid my first month's premium. Regardless what anybody claims, I never did get the website for Covered California to work properly, but I did find a customer support number at which a nice lady walked me through the application process and read me the options available to me. So I suppose, once I have my card as an honest-to-whatever insured human being, I'll have to sort through the options (Anthem is a PPO) and find myself a new doctor. My daughter told me she'll bug me until I get a physical and get checked out.
Last but not least, especially for those of my f-list who follow my LOTR fanfic writings, I've signed up for B2MEM this year. I admit I have been tinkering with my LOTR fics, even starting one that happens rather late in my IDD!verse timeline, but this will make the first challenge in that fandom that I've accepted in well over a year. But the visual prompt was simply irresistible: a pic of a spider's web with dew drops on it. Those who are familiar with my writing can imagine where I may go with this - but I have two options on stories to write about it, with an interesting "twist" to the tale to boot. So this is just notice that I'm intending to post something new for a change.
So there you have it. My 2014 so far. Never a dull moment around here, I swear!
Have a good week, folks.