(no subject)

[melannen]

So it's been a WEIRD week. First we closed my workplace for most of a week because the heat was broken (the head had been broken. the heat will be broken. but they finally decided that we couldn't keep going with the terrible space heaters in a building that size. So they closed us for four days while they... sourced some better space heaters rather than fixing the boiler, apparently.)

Anyway, that meant I had an unexpected day off and then spent several days working in a completely different building with a different group of staff than usual, and then spent today back in the regular building doing five days' worth of accumulated stuff. So that was fun.

Then on my unexpected day off I decided to finally wipe & reinstall Windows on this laptop. It was doing a thing where whenever certain programs tried to open the save as/open file dialog, it crashed the program, and the best we could tell was that there was something screwy somewhere in Windows. LET ME TELL YOU how fun it is to attempt digital art when you can't Save As without crashing the program. Anyway it had been doing the thing on and off and then it started doing the thing every time, so I finally go annoyed enough to fix it. Theoretically I probably could have tracked down the specific file with the error but I figured just reinstalling from the restore partition would be simpler, since it had gotten pretty crufty anyway.

BOY WAS I WRONG. I spent Wednesday afternoon to Friday evening just running Windows Update and then restarting over and over again. And then I tried to reinstall all my programs. Here is the list of programs I consider essential: The ones that have stars are ones that required some kind of substantial messing around before they would consent to working properly:


cdisplay
vlc player
audacity
filezilla ssh
foxit pdf reader
calibre ebook reader
7-zip
*wacom tablet drivers
printer setup
*lame
winamp
avast virus check
*opera
***firefox
scrivener
mirc
*thunderbird
gimp
f.lux
*xkit
ghostery
libreoffice

So all in all could have been even more frustrating but I am glad to be DONE. (And we are setting restore points this time, yes precious.) Hopefully I can get back to more normal sort of computer use now that that's done, and finish up the DW posts I'm obligated to while I'm at it. I'd still like to organize my own files better but like that'll ever be finished, and I'd like to set up torrenting again but it's been so long I bet everything's changed, so I moved that to a secondary list.

Or, you know, they will have to close work again and we'll have another snowstorm and I'll spend three days curled up in blankets. I'd be okay with that too.

(I'm still ticking stuff off my massive to-do list from three weeks ago. Maybe I will actually finish it someday...)

Comments

[stellar_dust]

to-do list things like iceland plans? :D

[melannen]

It's on there! Sort of!

...how are your iceland plans coming

[stellar_dust]

Nowhere until somebody throws money at me. :(

[zlabya]

Of course source new heaters instead of fixing the boiler. Short-term solutions are better than long-term ones. I'm sure the budget has something to do with this; corporate employees must be shocked when they hear what small-company and nonprofit employees go through.