Nerdy Stuff, Trailer Hitches And Small Town Mayors

by bill - 2024-12-24 06:25:19 ( in culture, writing, blog, family) [php version] rebuild

It's been an interesting past several days. 1) My new 2-terabyte external drive went bad after I'd moved all of my music, pictures and videos to it from other drives; 2) Tara needed my help printing a PDF document, which is always exciting; 3) she also needed help at her mother's house to clean out/organize the garage; and 4) Elizabeth had a meeting with the mayor and a few city council members.

For the failed hard drive – once the panic and cursing had subsided – I bought the latest version of Active File Recovery, which I highly recommend. And, no, I don't get a commission. I had an older version from a similar situation years ago, but spent $25 on the latest. Thankfully, it looks like I've recovered everything. Crisis averted.

On Friday, Tara was trying to print out the PDF of a talk she'd be giving at church the following Sunday. It was not printing, so she asked me to take a look. She'd clicked on that Network icon on her Windows desktop and only two machines, "Entertainment" and "Yousef HK," showed up there. A printer won't show up there unless it's a "shared" printer, which this one is not, so that was no surprise.

Who was Yousef HK? I was afraid the network had been hacked. I'd been having problems with my main PC, thinking it might be infected after I'd replaced the antivirus with Microsoft's built-in program. I had also allowed it to "upgrade" itself to Windows 11 a few days prior. So, I was not sure if the problem was nefarious hackers or "legitimate" hackers a.k.a. Microsoft programmers. Entertainment is what I'd named an abandoned in-home streaming project PC that I'd reconnected to try and repair my failed drive while I wiped the main computer's hard drive and reverted back to Windows 10.

Worried about Yousef HK, I logged into the upstairs router and set it to block any machine whose name I didn't recognize. Unfortunately, that blocked Tara's work computer -- she works from home -- and my main PC, too, because it had a new name after the Windows reinstallation. Luckily, Tara could switch to the downstairs AT&T router WiFi. I only regained network access upstairs after resetting that router back to factory settings. That alone took several tries because I was not holding the Reset button down long enough. It has to be seven seconds, FYI, not just three or four.

Yousef HK, it turns out, was the name of Tara's personal laptop. I guess it's always been that. I just never noticed. Probably named after the tech who refurbished and sold it to me. I don't know. Still, Yousef could not print, so I switched it and the printer to the AT&T network. That made more sense, anyway, since she and her computers are always downstairs.

I finally heard her document printing from the other room. Yay! Unfortunately, only blank pages were coming out. It was out of ink. Geez. So, I copied the PDF to a thumb drive and said she'd have to stop by a FedEx/Kinko's or whatever and print it there.

At Tara's mother's house, most of the heavy lifting had already been done by Tara and her siblings, but on Saturday she and I took another swipe at it… in the freezing cold for over an hour. It was warmer on Monday and is supposed to reach the 50s this week, but it was "freeze-ass cold" (as they say) on Saturday and we needed the garage door open. We were taking things out to our cars or tossing them into one of three piles in the driveway: donation, trash or recycling.

Once we made room for it, I brought the wheelchair-carrier hitch into the garage. It'd been sitting outside, and I was afraid someone would steal it. Her mom said it'd been out there several days and nobody had messed with it, but I said it was only a matter of time. People will steal an empty box.

That reminds me of an Amazon box I saw during all this, saying "If you think you're excited, wait until your cat sees this box!" I thought that was great.

Anyway, that hitch (a lot like this one) weighs over 300 pounds, and I had to move it twenty feet into the garage. It wasn't easy, and at the very end it crashed to the garage floor – which looked and sounded a lot worse than it was – but it and I were not damaged... much. I got a bruise on my thigh where it hit me. Don't worry, the hitch was fine.

I left soon after that because our cars were full and there was nothing much left for me to do. After I got home, she called to say she'd be able to print the document on her mom's printer but was having trouble with that thumb drive. The PC wasn't recognizing it when she inserted it into the computer. I walked her through the process over the phone. Tech support. She's smarter than me about plenty of things. She wouldn't have locked herself out of the network. But, in this case, she'd put it in the wrong hole. It was all I could do to not make a joke.

Last but not least, our 19-year-old daughter is hanging out with local politicos these days. She was invited to meet with the mayor, et al., of the nearby town where she works. It was an HR-related thing – not about her – so I can't go into detail. Not that I know much, but that never stopped me.

After Elizabeth said her piece, one of the council members said, "You're educated!" I would've said something like "Don't sound so surprised," but Elizabeth said everyone was very nice. With her being so pretty, though, he was probably flirting with her.

"That's why I get onto you about good grammar," I told her later. "If you don't talk right (yes, that's bad grammar), people will think you're stupid even when you're not." She said she knew how to speak properly, just doesn't always do it around family and friends.

Tara's document finally printed, by the way. Hallelujah! Speaking of which, her talk at church went well, too. Huzzah! I love that word.

And then this floated by the house. Merry Christmas!