08:31 – When Barbara mentioned to her physical therapist yesterday that she planned to go back to work four weeks after her surgery, he said that just didn’t happen with knee replacements. At least six weeks, he said, and often eight. Four was unheard of. She told him that she’d gone back to work four weeks after her first knee replacement in October 2011, and he was very surprised.
The refrigerator is doing fine, so far. Of course, it hasn’t had time for much frost to form and for the auto-defrost function to melt the ice and let it run down into the refrigerator section.
I read a short article on Obama’s proposed $4 trillion budget. I think he needs to simplify things considerably. What if everyone’s paycheck, dividends, interest, profits, and so on just went directly to the federal government, which could then just give each person whatever it thought they deserved? That would eliminate the “income inequality” that progressives are so concerned about, because everyone would have nothing.
12:35 – Well, I’m now running Linux Mint 17.1 KDE, which is an LTS version. The system had been acting hinky for several days. Yesterday the power failed for an hour or so. When I tried to reboot the system it gave some disk errors before it finally booted. I made backups of all my data while it was still limping along. This morning it died completely. The drive was a Seagate Barracuda 1.5 TB that had about 18 months of run time on it. I wish I’d had a Hitachi spare, but all I had was an unused Seagate Barracuda 2.0 TB drive, so that’s what I installed.
I had been running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS because Linux Mint didn’t have their LTS version available when I installed Ubuntu. I checked and found that their 17.1 is an LTS version based on Ubuntu 14.04, so I went ahead and installed the 64-bit KDE version. It’s updating right now. I’ll get my data restored to the new drive this afternoon.
All of which reminds me that I need to do a section in the prepping book on using Linux on desktops and notebooks. In a situation where the Internet may be down, the last thing anyone needs is a computer running Windows that decides it has to phone home to Microsoft before it’ll work.