I got fiber internet back in 2021. Well, I thought it was fiber. It turns out it was something called copper, or something like that, but it turns out it did a more than good enough job. I wasn't planning to update it, but AT&T finally ran fiber to my neighborhood recently and offered a number of specials to convince people to shift. When they ( Read more... )

On Saturday, my new laptop, a mid-grade Dell Inspiron 15 arrived. Today, I turned it on for the first time.

You might reasonably ask why purchasing a brand new laptop was a top priority after getting laid off. The sad truth is that since my last desktop died five years ago, I haven't needed to buy one. Once I brought my work laptop home, that ( Read more... )

An idea that I've had for a series here on LiveJournal is to take each of the baseball games I've ever attended and examine the box score to see what notable things happened at that game. While I certainly know the big highlight items already, it might be kind of fun to dig in and identify things like "Hall of Famers seen", "MLB Debuts seen" (I ( Read more... )

Birdie isn’t really talking at this stage. Although she makes plenty of fun noises, most of the time it doesn’t make much sense. She pretty consistently says “da” for me and “mimi” for M, but otherwise she’s mostly acknowledging what we say (e.g. “no” and “come here”) and not talking intelligibly on her own. It is super fun to hear her yell “da” ( Read more... )

Early in the pandemic we had someone from AT&T out to try to resolve some internet issues we had. When our DSL worked, it worked fine. The problem was that it had intermittent moments when it didn't work at all. That repair guy made some tweaks which improved things, but we still occasionally had intermittent problems. As the pandemic continue, the ( Read more... )

It's been more than two years since my old desktop computer died, but I hadn't bought anything to replace it. The combination of my magic phone and M's old laptop handled all of our computer needs. Extremely rarely (like twice a year) the old laptop, which runs Vista and stopped having updates years ago, fails to handle a newer website that doesn't ( Read more... )

Way back in 2007 I got a brand new Dell box running Windows XP, which I kept using for more than three years after Windows XP was killed by Microsoft. Alas, all good things come to an end. Last month, the fan on the video card died. I found a replacement, but all indications are that the heat from the dying card damaged the motherboard beyond easy ( Read more... )

I am in California. This is not inherently unusual given my stated baseball plans, but what is unusual is that this post is not pre-recorded. Instead, I am pecking it out on my new iPhone 7. Yes, 21 years after I first recall meeting someone with a phone (Kip, a quad mate freshman year, used the free late night calls to talk to his girlfriend) and ( Read more... )

Today is a red letter date in operating system history. Windows XP is by pretty much any measure the most successful home computing operating system, and today the final set of security updates and patches for it were pushed down. Extended support is finally over, and now Windows XP is released into the void of unsupported software even though by ( Read more... )

New modem has arrived. I temporarily misplaced my modem login, and once again had to call them. And once again, I still don't know the name of my childhood best friend. This, despite the fact that I changed the security question after the last time. Feh on them. Fortunately, I unmisplaced (?) the login and got us up and running again ( Read more... )