Matching Tracksuits

computing

Day 81: Frustration

Thursday 4 June 2020

Here are the specs for the order:

Notice: a 2 x 2TB hard drive for data storage.

Here are the properties of that drive (since it’s a raid, the two drives should appear as one 4TB drive):

That’s 2TB. Half of what I ordered.

I called so many people. I chatted with online help. Most of the conversations went like the online chat:

To say I spent most of the day alternating between laughter, fury, frustration, and resignation is a vast oversimplification.

This is the last time I will ever order a computer with customizations online. From here on out, I’m either building the machine myself or having someone else locally build it to my specifications.

All of that to say that we have this incredibly powerful computer that has a woeful lack of storage. I’m working on a short-term workaround, but the upshot is simple: still no pictures for today.

Day 80: Transitions

Wednesday 3 June 2020

It’s almost embarrassing how long we struggled along with the same old computer as our main computer. I was the main user: Chromebooks, laptops, and now Nana’s old computer filled the void for the others. We finally broke down and bought a new computer, though, and it’s a beast: Intel Core i9-9900 vPro (3.10GHz, up to 5.0GHz with Turbo Boost, 8 Cores, 16MB Cache) with 48GB of RAM, a 1024GB solid-state drive for programs, and a 2 x 2TB RAID hard drive for storage. It’s blazing fast. Lightroom work should be so much quicker. But there’s the problem: I have 126,000+ image files constituting 1.25TB to move before I even think about installing Lightroom and beginning to reconstruct the LR catalog.

And so for today, I have nothing more than the thought that transitions between computers are probably about the easiest transitions there are. After all, the computers do all the work…

Fathers’ Computer

Sunday 5 June 2005

This week Kinga and I finished getting DSL installed for my her dad’s computer, as well as a general overhaul of the whole thing — re-installing Windows (that basic computer admin hell known only to Microsoft victims), cleaning out old files, etc.

And teaching him how to use a webcam. Actually, much to his credit, he figured that out for himself. We’d shown him how to use Skype: for voice chatting, but it doesn’t include video chatting at the moment. For that, I reluctantly installed MS Messenger, and he figured out the rest while Kinga and I were at home Saturday morning.

He does catch on fairly quickly, I must admit — once you show him something, he remembers it.

But like many people new to computers, he’s not comfortable learning as I did: clicking around, thinking, “Hum, wonder what this does.”

It has, once again, shown me how relatively “ahead of his times” my father is. Our first computer was a TRS-80, with, I think, a staggering 8kb of memory. Those were the days — plugging your computer into the television as a monitor, and connecting it to a cassette recorder in order to load a program.

Next we had an IBM PC Jr. It was a waste of time, I think, and Dad quickly upgraded to “the last computer we’ll ever need.” It had a mind-blowing 40 MB hard drive.

Jan, Kinga’s father, didn’t touch a computer until Kinga bought one for university. But in his typical, admirable fashion, he bought books and magazines and read up on the world of computers, even if he didn’t understand it all.

Now that he’s got DSL, he doesn’t feel guilty sitting for hours at the computer, just wandering around the internet.