trying again, with my desktop PC

I purchased my current desktop PC back in 2010. And my last serious effort to upgrade it to Windows 8 was in 2012. I’ve never done any upgrading on this PC, as far as I can remember, and I’ve never done a wipe & reinstall of Windows on it either. It’s still working reasonably well, but it’s pretty slow to start up now.

It can get to the login screen in a reasonable amount of time, and from there to the desktop reasonably quickly. But, then it takes a long time before it’s really “ready” to launch any non-trivial applications. I’m not sure I have a terribly good explanation for that, but I guess there’s too much random background stuff starting up after login.

My current plan is to clone my boot drive over to an external USB drive, then do a format & clean install of Window 8 on the boot drive, then reinstall apps and copy data back from the USB drive to the boot drive. Well, I tried the initial clone today, and that failed, probably due to a hardware error on the external drive. So, now I’m trying a full format of the external drive, just to see if that works, or if there’s a real problem with the drive. Well, it turns out that it takes a very long time to format a 1 TB external USB drive. I’m not sure why. But, either way, I’m stuck until that’s done. So tomorrow, if the format works, I’ll try the clone again.

I’m not sure at what point I should just cut my losses and buy a new PC, with Windows 8 pre-installed. But I’m definitely not ready to give up yet! If it turns out that the external drive I’m using is no good, I’ve got others I can try.

Spirit Gate by Kate Elliott

Spirit Gate (Crossroads, #1)Spirit Gate by Kate Elliott
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It took me quite a while to finish this book. In fact, I think it may be the only prose novel I actually finished this year (2014). While I enjoyed it, it was a bit too long, and the ending isn’t terribly satisfying; it’s mostly just setting things up for the next book.

If you’re a faster reader than I am, and/or you have more free time than I do, then I’d recommend this as a good start to an epic fantasy series with good characters and an interesting world. But, for me, I think I’m not going to continue with the next book in this series. I’m going to stick with some shorter stand-alone novels for the foreseeable future.

View all my reviews

Dynamics AX silliness

How’s this for a post title?

Compare Tool causing a failure, forcing an element restore which results in negating the changes made on the element

Yes, in Dynamics AX, the ERP system I work in every day, using the “compare” tool can destroy your code! Admittedly, it’s an edge case, and it’s not likely to happen terribly often. But still. Compare tools should not actually mess up your code! (Merge tools should, maybe, sometimes. But AX doesn’t even have a merge tool. Don’t get me started…)

Dinah and other WordPress stuff

Well, I just updated this blog to WordPress 4.1 “Dinah”. So far, so good. The new distraction-free writing thing is kind of cool. I’ll probably leave it turned on. Other than that, there’s not really any other obvious UI changes that will affect my own use of WordPress.

I’m getting better at doing updates through wp-cli. (I don’t have to search through Evernote to remember the syntax anymore.) And 1&1 seems to have ironed out whatever was causing their install of wp-cli to throw a bunch of PHP warnings every time I ran it. So that’s good.

The big security scare this week shouldn’t affect this site. Still, it’s got me thinking that maybe it’s time to install something like WordFence.

Poor old RPI

This article from Vice News does a pretty good job of showing how my old alma mater, RPI, has become an almost perfect example of all the things that have gone wrong with college education in America. Overpaid executives, growing tuition, growing student-to-faculty ratios, growing administrator-to-faculty ratios, and so on.

If I was a high school senior today, coming from a fairly modest middle-class background, I really don’t think I would want to even consider RPI. And if I did want to go there, I don’t think I could afford it, without taking on some crippling student debt. Which wouldn’t be worth it, since the quality of the undergraduate education really isn’t good enough to support that kind of high tuition. I’d likely get a better education at Rutgers or NJIT.

Farewell, Dr. Dobb’s

Sad to see that Dr. Dobb’s is getting shut down. I had a subscription to the old print magazine for many years. They had some great, useful, well-written articles and columns, from people like Michael Swaine, Jeff Duntemann, and Al Stevens.

There are a lot of great programming resources out there on the internet, of course, from Q&A sites like Stack Overflow to podcasts like .NET Rocks. But I don’t think there’s anything else out there that’s quite like Dr. Dobb’s was, in its heyday.

WordPress security woes and Jetpack observations

For anyone who might be wondering: nope, I’m not using the plugin that got hacked today.

Also: interesting to see the new stuff in Jetpack 3.3. I only have the one site, so centralized multi-site management doesn’t help me much, but it’s interesting how much stuff they’re building into Jetpack that ties back to WordPress.com. Though I don’t want to give up basic control of my site, I actually like the ability to pick and choose a few things to “offload” to WordPress.com, as long as it’s still possible to disconnect it all without actually losing any content.

Office 365 Home Premium

I’ve been going back and forth for a while now as to whether or not I wanted to sign up for an Office 365 Home subscription. I’ve been using a retail box version of Office 2010 on my desktop PC, and a HUP version of Office 2013 on my ThinkPad, so I’ve got both of those machines adequately covered. And I’ve never bothered with Office on my Mac. But the only office suite I had on the Mac was iWork ’08, which is obviously out of date. I’ve occasionally thought about updating to the new Mac App Store versions of Pages and Numbers, but I couldn’t talk myself into spending $20 each for them.

So instead I bought a key card for Office 365 Home for $60 from a sketchy third-party seller on Amazon. It worked, so now I have Office for Mac for a year, plus I can upgrade my desktop PC from Office 2010 to Office 2013 if I want. (And a bunch of extra space in OneDrive, and some Skype minutes.) I don’t know if I’ll want to renew it next year or not, but it should keep me out of trouble through 2015.

I’ve never actually used Office on the Mac. I’ve always relied on iWork, and before that, AppleWorks. I don’t do much word processing or spreadsheet work on the Mac, so that was always good enough. But it’ll be nice to have a “real” install of MS Office on my Mac, for those occasions when I really do need to work with an Excel file or (less likely) a Word or PowerPoint file.

I’m not really tempted to move away from Apple Mail to Outlook for my personal e-mail on the Mac. But I do have my company e-mail set up in Apple Mail too, and that’s an Exchange account, so maybe I should delete that from Apple Mail and use Outlook for that. It would make some sense, and certain things would probably be easier, but then I’d have to check two different mail programs. So I’m probably going to ignore Outlook for now.

I need to think about whether or not I have any use for the copious OneDrive space or the Skype minutes. Right now, I have DropBox and Google Drive installed on all my computers. I’m not sure I want to add the OneDrive client in there too; I don’t think it gives me much that I’m not already getting from Google Drive, except just more space. And I never come anywhere close to using up all the minutes on my Verizon plan, and I don’t need to make any international calls, so I’m not sure what I can do with those Skype minutes.

Take Control ebooks

I just finished reading Yosemite: A Take Control Crash Course. And, prior to that, I read Take Control of Upgrading to Yosemite, both of which I bought just before I upgraded to Yosemite. I thought they might come in handy. I’ve generally found that the Take Control books are well-written and edited, but in this case, I didn’t find much content in either of these that was all that useful for me. (Your mileage may vary, of course.) Which isn’t to say they weren’t worth buying and reading. They were both quick reads, since I skimmed through the stuff I wasn’t interested in, and they didn’t cost much.

I also recently bought Take Control of LaunchBar and Take Control of TextExpander. Both LaunchBar and TextExpander are programs I use all the time, but I don’t think I use them as well as I could. I know both of them have functionality that I’m not using at all, and that would probably be helpful. So I’m hoping these two ebooks help me figure out how I could be using these programs better.