I was going to write a post today about how I failed, yet again, to get tickets for next year’s San Diego Comic-Con. But then I saw the news about John Rogers passing away. I hadn’t ever met him, but he’s been president of Comic-Con for the whole time I’ve been going to it (and/or trying to go to it). Thinking about it now, he seems to have kept a pretty low profile over the years, considering his position. So there’s not much I can say about him. But the con has brought me so much joy over the years, and I’m sure his work was a big part of that. So, thank you for your work, John, and rest in peace.
Windows grief, part two
TL;DR: I got through all the steps in my previous post, and now have a semi-functional Windows install.
After getting all the data off my desktop PC SSD, I re-mounted it in the PC, using a different SATA cable, and tried some stuff. The drive was still not bootable, and attempts to repair it were still completely unsuccessful. I did manage to boot from a recovery USB drive that I created via the Dell site. None of the repair options that I could run from that worked, but doing a fresh install of Windows 10 does seem to have worked. At least, it’s working so far.
I’m copying some files back to it right now, while also letting it download Windows updates. That’ll keep it busy for an hour or two. Then, I’ll see if I can reboot and install the updates. If that works, then I’ll look into copying more files back and installing some software. Getting it back to where it was will probably take all week, assuming it holds together and doesn’t start blue-screening again.
If it does keep working, then I have to say that I’m not at all sure what was wrong in the first place. It almost has to have been a software problem. It wasn’t the SATA cable, or the port. If it was either of those, I would have had more luck with it prior to the nuke & pave reinstall. There’s probably no point in speculating too much at this point. I’m just going to keep pushing forward with it, and see how far I get.
Windows grief
The SSD that I installed in my desktop PC a couple of months ago has been working fine. Up until yesterday.
I got a random blue screen error yesterday, while working on the PC. I’ll leave out most of the details, but things went downhill from there. I tried a bunch of stuff, including a chkdsk /f (which didn’t help and probably didn’t finish), SpinRite (which crashed), and various Windows 10 recovery options. Nothing worked.
And I’d recently reformatted the old drive that the SSD replaced, since the SSD was working fine. And I had deleted the old backup of that old drive, so I could make room to do a full backup of the SSD. Which I tried, but couldn’t complete. So I don’t really have a good, full, backup.
This morning, I pulled the new SSD from the desktop computer and mounted it externally on my ThinkPad. It’s been working fine there, and I’ve been copying stuff off it with no problems. Of course, the ThinkPad drive is 500GB and is about half full, while the desktop drive is 1TB and there’s about 400 GB of stuff I need to copy off of it. So I’m shuffling around some old drives so I can copy the files off of the SSD. Copying everything might take up most of the day today.
Since it looks like the drive isn’t actually dead, that probably means that either: (1) the drive cable in the PC is bad, or (2) there’s something wrong on the motherboard of the PC. It’s also possible that there’s some other weird problem that I can maybe fix by doing a full reformat of the drive and reinstall of Windows 10. But I don’t think it’s a Windows problem; if it was, SpinRite likely wouldn’t have crashed, since that’s running from a boot CD. If it’s the drive cable, that’s an easy problem to fix. If it’s a hardware problem on the motherboard, then I need to figure out if I want to try to repair an out-of-warranty Dell desktop PC or just punt and buy a new one.
So my next step, after making sure I’ve got a good copy of all the data off the drive, is to mount it back in the desktop PC, with a new drive cable, and see what happens. If it works, I’ll probably try another chkdsk /f and, if that works, then I’ll breather a sigh of relief and get on with my life, I guess.
If it doesn’t work with the new drive cable, then I’m not sure what I’m going to do. I’ll try a few hardware troubleshooting ideas, and maybe I’ll get lucky. If it’s just a bad SATA port on the motherboard, then I can just use a different one. But if I can’t figure it out, I might decide to buy myself an Intel NUC kit, and transfer the drive and (maybe) memory to it. If I do that, I’ll have to buy a Windows 10 license too, I guess, but overall it should still be more affordable than buying a whole new PC.
Blog posts like this one might not communicate a lot of useful information to anyone, by the way, but I find them to be worth writing, since they allow me to organize my thoughts more than I would otherwise do. I was listening to a podcast yesterday that mentioned rubber ducking, and I guess that’s what I’m doing here, basically. So I don’t know if this post will ever help anyone else, but it helped me.
The Great American Read results
The Great American Read PBS series wrapped up a couple of weeks ago, with To Kill A Mockingbird as the number one book on the list. Here’s a link to the results page for the full list. When the series started, with a special back in June, I joined a Goodreads group related to it, and set myself a challenge to read 13 books from the list, before the show ended. I didn’t quite meet that challenge, but I managed to read 12 books from the list.
Here’s a list of the books I read during the challenge:
- Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
- The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut
- The Martian by Andy Weir
- The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
- Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
- The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
- Ghost,
- Patina,
- and Sunny, all by Jason Reynolds
- The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
- 1984 by George Orwell
- And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
So that’s not bad, for my summer reading this year. Several of those books are pretty short, but there are a few longer ones in there too. And a few of them were re-reads. (And I’m not sure if the whole Track series by Jason Reynolds counts as “on the list”, or just the first one, Ghost, but I’m counting them all.) I would have hit my 13-book goal if I hadn’t decided to read Lonesome Dove with the Goodreads group. That’s 900 pages long. (I’m about two-thirds of the way through that.) And I’ve been slowly working my way through Catch-22 at the same time. (I’m about a quarter of the way through that one.)
The Goodreads groups is continuing, and will be reading The Lovely Bones this month and To Kill A Mockingbird next month. I’ve purchased copies of both of those, and plan to read them with the group, though I really want to finish either Lonesome Dove or Catch-22 before starting a new book.
And since I’m posting lists, here’s a list of books from the main 100-book list that I’d like to read, but still haven’t read yet:
- Great Expectations
- Frankenstein
- Game of Thrones (series)
- The Picture of Dorian Gray
- Invisible Man
- Gulliver’s Travels
- Ready Player One
- The Intuitionist
There are others that I’d probably find interesting, but this is the short list I came up with, after watching the series and reviewing the list again.
Lately, I’ve been going back and forth between reading physical books and ebooks, and between buying books and getting them from the library. All other things being equal, I’d almost always prefer to read the Kindle version for most novels, but I balk at paying the prices that they charge for some Kindle books, especially for older book that (in my mind at least) shouldn’t be priced as high as new books. In cases where I can get the ebook from the library, that’s always the best option. I get the benefits of reading on my Kindle, for free. When I can’t, I’ll often buy a used copy from eBay or Amazon for $4.
Instapaper Premium
Speaking of changes in paid internet services, Instapaper’s new owner has started charging for premium subscriptions again. When they were acquired by Pinterest, they discontinued premium subscriptions and made all features available for free. But the new owner needs to make some money off the service, so they’ve re-instituted Instapaper Premium. I went ahead and signed up for it, at $30/year. As with Flickr Pro, I don’t mind paying for a service, if it means I don’t have to put up with ads or spam or having my data sold off, and if it means that the service has a sustainable business model that will keep it from going under.
more Flickr changes
I’ve been a Flickr user for quite some time. They’ve had some ups and downs over the years, but I have a whole lot of photos there, so I’ve stuck with them. I was happy when they were bought by SmugMug earlier this year. Not much has happened with that, but it looks like some stuff will be changing soon.
First, they’re finally ditching their tie to Yahoo’s login system. That’s long overdue. I’d really like to nuke my Yahoo account, but I’ve had to keep it a lot longer than I’ve wanted to, since my Flickr account is tied to it. They’re also making some other changes, which all sound good, but honestly, just getting off Yahoo’s login system is my main concern.
I’m pretty hopeful about Flickr’s future. The SmugMug CEO is saying a lot of the right things:
Unlike most photo sharing services, SmugMug is photographer-focused and has been for more than 16 years. We are privately owned and operated. We never raised venture capital to grow our business and we don’t make money selling our customers or their data to advertisers.
And:
At SmugMug, we also charged a fair price when others were pretending “free” was actually free. We work for you, not investors or advertisers. We don’t mine you or your photos for data to re-sell or advertise to you. Your data, and your photos, are yours. You’ve entrusted them to us to keep safe. We take that responsibility very seriously and so does Flickr.
That’s what I’m looking for. I don’t mind paying for Flickr Pro. I just want someplace safe and stable to put my photos.
Batman: TAS on Blu-Ray
I’m tempted to pick up the new Batman: TAS Blu-Ray set, but it’s a bit expensive, and I probably won’t get around to watching it anyway. I have the first season on DVD, which I bought many years ago, and probably haven’t watched that yet. (Of course, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen every episode of the series, more than once, back when it was on TV.)
broken links
I installed the Broken Link Checker plugin on my site today, and spent probably too much time fixing broken links. Doing blog maintenance like this feels like productive work, but really isn’t. But it’s kind of fun, and lets me stroll down memory lane a bit, rediscovering stuff like Get Your War On, which I’d forgotten about.
A lot of dead links can be easily replaced with ones from the Wayback Machine, and the plugin helps with that. But some of the links on this blog seem to have completely disappeared from the internet, which makes me a little sad. Nothing lasts forever, I guess, even an interesting review of The Two Towers from a newspaper in Las Vegas that apparently only existed from 2003 to 2005. Oh well.
I’ve been linking to Wikipedia, the NY Times, and Amazon a lot lately. I think (and hope) that those sources will be around for a while, and that they won’t mess with their URL schemes in a way that breaks old links. (For the most part, they haven’t, at least recently.)
The plugin has found more than 600 broken links so far, and I’m not even sure if it’s done crawling the site yet. I need to be careful about getting too wrapped up in this, or I’ll be doing it all day. (Or maybe all week.) I’ve actually talked myself into deleting some old posts, where the links are dead, and I didn’t really say anything interesting about them. That’s always been hard for me to do, but I’ve got more than 2000 posts on this blog, so it makes sense to cull some useless ones out occasionally.
Meditation progress update
I’ve been doing pretty good with meditation since my last update. I’ve been meditating for about 10 minutes, 3 or 4 times a week, usually with just the plain timer from Insight Timer. I’ve tried a few guided meditations, but haven’t found any new good ones, really. I was feeling pretty good about this, but then I saw the Kickstarter for The Every Day Calendar by Simone Giertz. In the intro video, she mentions that she meditated every day for a year, except for the day she went in for brain surgery. So, heck, if she can meditate every day while dealing with a brain tumor, I should probably be able to meditate every day while dealing with my significantly less serious life problems.
Her Every Day Calendar is pretty cool, but I don’t think I want to spend $300 on it. I’ll stick with tracking stuff on my iPhone. But I have a lot of respect for her, both for making cool things and for handling her brain tumor so well. I’d be a mess if I had to deal with that. (Heck, I’ve been dealing with a relatively minor car problem for the last three weeks, and that’s almost broken me.)
Uber and Lyft
This is probably going to be a rambling, incoherent, post. I woke up at 4am this morning, and couldn’t really get back to sleep. Now it’s almost 7am, and I’m trying to have a normal breakfast and proceed with a normal weekday. It’s a little abnormal already, since my car is acting up and the dealer can’t look at until Monday, so I’m probably working from home today. I used Lyft to get to and from work yesterday, and I could do that today too, but I don’t know if I really want to spend $40 just to sit in a cubicle all day and not talk to anyone, which is pretty much what I did yesterday. (It was a productive day. I got a lot of programming done. But zero interaction with coworkers.) On the other hand, if I spend all day alone in my apartment, I might go stir-crazy.
I’ve used Uber several times recently, in New York, during NYCC, and back at home, due to my ongoing car problems. It’s convenient, but a bit expensive. Uber has a pretty bad reputation, of course. I was just looking for a link to include here, but there’s so much bad PR for Uber, you can just search the NY Times and find a bunch of examples. (Here’s one at random.)
I installed the Lyft app on my iPhone a few months ago, but never got around to trying it. So I gave it a shot yesterday. There aren’t as many drivers working in my area as there are for Uber, but there were enough to get me rides back and forth to work yesterday without any hassle. And if you search the NY Times for Lyft, you get mostly financial articles, and none of the bad PR stuff that you see about Uber. So maybe Lyft is a better option, at least from a moral standpoint.
There are a lot of “Uber vs. Lyft” articles on the web. Here’s a pretty reasonable one from How-To Geek. From a user’s standpoint, they’re really similar.
Either way, I feel bad for the drivers. They’re not making a lot of money. Most of the drivers I’ve had recently, when I’ve talked to them, say that they’re working multiple jobs. And, in many cases, I don’t think any of those jobs are providing heath insurance.
UPDATE: I was afraid to hit “publish” on this post this morning, given how loopy I was, but it’s now 7pm, and I’m rereading it, and it’s not that bad. I did decide to go in to work this morning, using Lyft to get there and Uber to get back home. I think I’ve decided that Uber drivers, in this area at least, are a little better than Lyft drivers. Anyway, it’s probably for the best that I didn’t drive today. I was pretty tired in the morning, and again in the evening. I think I was fairly productive at work, at least. But again, I really didn’t have much human interaction and could easily have worked from home.