Bill Roper's Journal

It was back to work this morning. With some help from one of my coworkers, my new Linux VM is *almost* correctly configured. It is, at least, capable of being used to do work. :)

I have now posited that there is an "escape room" theory of computer user-interface design. The object here is to hide the controls that are required to perform a particular function so that you must carefully search the entirety of the user-interface to find the correct menu selection or button to press to get your work done.

I am not sure why this is a good idea.

Today, the pain from my kidney stone went away (happily!), but my lower digestive tract decided that it wanted to get in on the fun. And I think I am *still* trying to pass some more small stones. The net result was that I got less done than I had hoped to today. The bills are paid, but the taxes still aren't finished. But I don't have that much to do, so I should be able to finish them up in the next couple of days.

Except...

The wired network connection to the office has gone down. Now the work computer (on which I am typing) has Wi-fi, so I have fired up the Wi-fi, gotten on the VPN, and will actually be able to work for work tomorrow.

The old desktop computer (which I still have not finished moving off of) does *not* have Wi-fi. The new one does, but this isn't much help at this very moment, although it's giving me a strong incentive to finish moving everything over.

In the meantime, I have ordered a new Wi-fi dongle for the old computer. It should arrive tomorrow.

And then maybe I will be able to get some work done while I figure out what has to be done to fix the wired connection.

(The wired connection looked ok in the basement when I investigated there. The network socket on the upstairs end has been under a lot of strain for some years. I got K to get down and unwire the socket from the wall. I eventually managed to get the socket out of the plate (where it had been misinstalled in a way that was creating the strain), but I think I killed the socket in the process, so that is going to have to be rewired to see if it was the source of the problem.

I *think* there is a spare socket in the basement. However, there is no time to do the wiring now, so...)

I got less done on the taxes today that I had hoped, but made some progress. One of the sources of delay was that I had promised Julie to clean the dust out of her computer. She was concerned about the amount of noise that the computer was making and believed that the dust was the problem.

She was quite likely correct. The machine was choked with dust in many places, including the case fans, the fans on the video card, and in the CPU heatsink. I cleaned essentially all of the dust out using damp paper towels for non-sensitive areas, while a tweezer and a needle got some of the trickier dust and hair out. And, of course, there was the occasional puff of breath into the case, sending dust flying everywhere.

My sinuses may forgive me someday.

The computer is still a bit louder than I might like (although not that loud for a gaming machine). If we don't like how it's behaving, I can replace the heatsink (which is probably the most useful thing) and also consider replacing the case fans, as those are cheap. In the meantime, I noticed that it is running Windows 10 and is eligible for the free upgrade to Windows 11, so that is now in process. Julie does not care much for change, so this will be temporarily disturbing, but I should be able to neutralize most of the major Windows 11 annoyances without too much trouble.

Tomorrow, I will get back to the taxes. This will be aided by having to have someone up early and awake at all possible hours so that FedEx will have no excuse for not delivering my delayed package this time. Remembering, of course, that they had no excuse for not delivering it on Friday -- they just decided to lie and say that no one was home...

I was explaining to K the other day how there is something to be said for my basic approach of postponing decisions until it's obvious what the right answer is. Now, given that Microsoft is going to be supporting Windows 10 with no extra pain or expense until October of next year, this means that I could put off putting together a new computer until then.

Of course, I didn't. I was tempted by the sales as Black Friday approached and I jumped in, bought a new set of parts, and put the new computer on Wednesday. And it's coming together nicely so far.

This morning, I woke up to a headline in my Google feed that indicated that Microsoft had decided to officially relax the CPU requirements for running Windows 11. Aargh! *Three* days after I assemble the new computer and I could have sidestepped the whole thing without having to dance the hokey pokey.

This afternoon, I went online to check things out. It turns out that the article was an AI written piece of crap with no actual relationship with fact. Oh.

I will still need to figure out exactly how to deal with the two machines in the household that don't support Windows 11 -- one of which is thirteen years old, the other nine years old and only disqualified by the CPU requirement now that I've installed a TPU 2.0 module on the motherboard. The latter should be easier to deal with. The former is going to need a new motherboard, CPU, and RAM to keep going.

Ah, well. It keeps life entertaining.

I got the last couple of wires connected on the new computer and brought it upstairs today. Unfortunately, I only have two connections on the KVM switch, so I've temporarily disconnected the work computer so that I can get busy with the new one for a bit.

After a bit of entertainment, Windows 11 is now installed on the new box and I am in the process of neutering what Microsoft thinks is "good for me". OneDrive has been uninstalled and now I can go back to copying data from the old machine again with things arriving on the local disk where I want them and not in Microsoft's cloud storage.

And drivers! Oh, my, there are driver updates.

I will have to set this aside, having demonstrated that things are working, because I have a lot of things that I need to get done this weekend that don't involve setting up the new computer. But maybe I can make some progress.

On lots of things. :)

I had not planned to build a new computer now. And then the Black Friday sales dropped and the bundle price of CPU and motherboard went down by a lot at Micro Center. Oh.

So I pulled together an order in my cart there, but Micro Center doesn't carry the type of case that I like, which is the Antec Silent series. But I knew that Newegg had a suitable case in stock -- the same one I used for the studio computer rebuild two years ago, so that would be just fine. I ordered up the case and went back to Micro Center to place my order for the rest of the parts.

It wouldn't go through. All of the parts were in stock, but the website kept telling me that one of the parts was out of stock, was highlighted, and needed to be removed from the order. None of the parts were highlighted, so following the instruction was going to fail dismally. Huh.

At this point, I started a chat with customer support. They suggested clearing my cache and using another browser to see if that worked. It didn't. Apparently, I would need to go to the store to place this order.

While waiting around for the chat representative to show up, I ducked into the bathroom briefly. It was at this point that the zipper on my jeans decided to jam open, despite my best efforts to unjam it. Malfunction was apparently the order of business.

Anyway, I made a list of everything that I would need to pick up and decided to head to the store tomorrow. With any luck, I will be able to pick up the remaining parts.

And I changed my pants and threw them in a load of laundry. Maybe the zipper will unjam after they are washed. In case it doesn't, I have ordered two new pairs of jeans.

I also ordered two USB hard drive enclosures to put the drives that I removed from the old computer into, because they should make perfectly reasonable backup drives for various uses around the house.

All this and it isn't even Black Friday yet...

Today was primarily spent doing laundry and mixing. I think both are done for now.

Oh, and we unloaded the Dodeka stuff from the van. We should have done this sooner, but before we got to it, the rains started and unloading boxes in the rain is way less fun than you might expect it to be.

In any case, I have spent enough time in the studio lately that my Cubase credentials are getting back up to snuff. This is good, because I have some recording to do.

Soonish. :)

I got up early this morning, because one of Gretchen or I needed to take K off to rehearsal this morning, as we're less than a week from the opening of the fall play over at the high school. I grabbed the short straw without a drawing, because I *also* needed to be up to write the deposit check for the massive upcoming work on the fence. Nothing will happen there until Julie shows up to mark the utilities and I am told that they are not moving quickly at the moment, partly because the request went in on Friday and partly because Monday is a holiday. (Not for me, but for many people, including the kids.) But I am looking forward to a better fence.

Meanwhile, since I was up early, I decided that it was time to swap in the new 4K cable box. I pulled out the old box, getting covered in dust myself, plugged in the new box, and discovered that the new 4K cable box was an HD box, which is functionally identical to the box I had just dustily unplugged. I got back on a chat with an Xfinity rep and suggested that when I request a wired 4K DVR cable box that I actually need a box with all of those attributes. I have been promised that the next box that I receive will be correct and have been given a small discount for the next 12 months in compensation. This would not be nearly so irritating if I hadn't had a similar problem when trying to replace the cable box in the bedroom when we put a 4K TV in there.

Laundry, in the meantime, had been set in progress and Gretchen joined me for a quick lunch over at Texas Roadhouse. When we got back, I headed off to the basement to swap laundry and download the new plugins that I'd picked up with the Ultimate 13 upgrade from Universal Audio. I got everything installed, fired up Cubase, and Cubase refused to talk to the Apollo's Thunderbolt interface, although everything *else* was seeing the Thunderbolt connection.

*sigh* I read assorted webpages, followed the suggestions, uninstalled the software, reinstalled it, rebooted the computer, and eventually got the connection working again. Thunderbolt! It's not just an interface, it's an adventure!

But I finally managed to pull up the scratch track that I've been using to play with lately in Cubase and start auditioning the new plugins. There were some nice amplifier plugs that may be useful in some environment (although not so much with this track). The new Topline Vocal Suite might come in handy some time, but not at the moment. I was ready to button everything up when I remembered that I had the new SSL 4000E channel strip that I should check out.

Oh, my! I started fiddling with this and quickly found that it likes my voice. I mean, it likes my voice *a lot*. I am going to need to get some other people to listen to it to see if they like what it does with my voice nearly as well as I do, because it's always suspect when you are listening to your own vocals, but wow.

Now, I just need to get all of the CD orders placed for OVFF.

And I also now know who my rooting interest is for the rest of the baseball postseason. That would be Cleveland, as the remaining teams are all from New York and Los Angeles. It's been a long time since they won a World Series.

They'll do. :)

One of the things I've learned about complex software is that the best way to describe what it does is that it has behaviors. The behaviors of the software are controlled by the rules that are programmed into it.

If you write the rules correctly and the interactions are nice and tight, then your software will be well-behaved. If you write the rules badly -- or, God forbid, fail to initialize parameters for the rules through one or more species of programming errors! -- then the software will be badly behaved and unpredictable.

All of this turns out to be harder to get people to do than you'd think. :)