Views from the Reading Room

I know, I haven't written anything for months, except the occasional comment. I have been reading, but I'm about to be AFK for a while. Lots of things have happened since ... was it October? The latest is that the laptop is acting up and I'll have to get it serviced - I'll need to decide which shop to take it to (the nearby one, or the one I originally bought it from which offers quicker service), and hand it in either tomorrow or next week. Who know how long it'll take after that? Meanwhile, I'll be super busy anyway, to compensate for internet withdrawal symptoms.

Hello Dreamwidth, it has been ... mumble ... weeks since my last post.

This one is being written on my new (well, reconditioned) laptop, which I'm still trying to get to work in a usable manner. At the moment, if it's connected to the router and the charger, the router loses its internet connection. It's taken me most of a week to work out that those are the failure conditions, and I still don't know why. It wouldn't be so bad if the battery life was the 3 hours it's supposed to be instead of more like 1½. At some point I'll turn on the router's wifi and see whether connecting that way makes any difference; I know how to turn it on (in theory), but not what all the other parameters on that page mean. Any wifi experts out there?

Something I can recommend: DuckDuckGo. I've seen people recommend it on account of privacy, but the thing that persuaded me to give it a go was this:

Our intention is to not auto-correct searches. That is, we intend to completely respect the query you type in, and (in some cases) display a 'Did you mean?' link at the top when relevant.

In other words, I can search for "obscure thing that the poster expected readers to recognise" without wading through pages of "much commoner search term that happens to start with the same letters". Hurrah!

On Monday I woke up and there was snow on the ground. Not a lot, but enough to cover everything. The previous few mornings, there'd just been a heavy frost.

Also on Monday, the laptop I'd been having trouble with stopped working altogether (with a blue-screen message that doesn't stay long enough to read - something about the registry and a hive, whatever that is). I'm now using an old clunker that can't load up-to-date software, and feeling deprived. I got so spoilt having the laptop for 3 years!

On Tuesday, it snowed properly. Variously snow, slush and ice everywhere. Snow drifting down. I had a call from the person who was supposed to come round and advise me about benefits: did I still want to do that?

Perhaps an hour later, she called again: looking out of the window, it was snowing harder. Gist of call: not driving in this. Visit postponed till next week. We're assuming it will be safe to drive then...

On Wednesday, it was snowing. I had a call from my Tai Chi instructor: the class is cancelled on account of some people can't make it (we only have about 6 people most weeks). Next week we'll meet at the usual time and then merge with another class. ...if that happens...

On Thursday, I delayed going out shopping in the hope that it would stop snowing. It didn't. By the time I got to the Oxfam shop, they'd closed early on account of snow.

On Friday, my footprints in the front yard were ice. I spent several minutes clearing the path to the gate before setting off towards town, so I could (i) get the gate open and (ii) not have ice to negotiate when I got back. I'd been keeping the spade inside the back door instead of in the shed just in case this happened.

I wasn't sure the (first Friday) farmers' market would be happening, but it did. With about half the usual stalls and even fewer customers. Apparently the regular (weekly) street market in town was cancelled.

Then I got a call in the afternoon, that the social event planned for that evening was postponed until a date to be decided.

I wonder what's next ...

The machine I usually use to access the internet has been having a bit of trouble with the display recently, and this afternoon it will. not. stabilize (not even enough to shut it down properly, so I had to disconnect the power and wait for the battery to run down - it's an old battery and doesn't reliably hold enough charge to actually use). I can do some things, including log in here, on my old PC, but (i) everything's really slow (ii) it won't run recent software, and I don't have AdBlock on it, so other sites are annoying (iii) the things that are not just hobbies that I should be doing online won't work on here. Also, I don't have the software to do proper backups, so there's a lot of things I don't have copies of.

Will this stop me wasting so much time on the internet? Only until I get something I can use more easily back, I reckon.

I might have to buy a new one, which would be my first not-passed-down-from-a-friend-upgrading computer, and which I can't really afford at the moment.

So if I'm around even less than usual, that's why.