07:38 – Only one more day until Barbara gets home. She called yesterday around lunchtime to remind me to fire up Thunderbird on her notebook and download and delete all the spam so she wouldn’t have a ton of it to deal with when she returns.
As I was doing that, a message popped up telling me that the system was going to reboot automatically in 14 minutes and 50 seconds and suggesting that I save any unsaved work. I canceled out of that window, finished what I was doing in Thunderbird, and clicked on the MS icon in the taskbar. Turns out it was about to upgrade Barbara’s notebook to Windows 10. I called her back and we decided to discuss it after she gets home.
She’s using a low-end Dell notebook. I bought two identical ones when I was having problems getting postage labels printed on the USPS site. I signed up with stamps.com, which has Windows and Mac clients, but no Linux clients, so I needed a Windows system. Two, actually, one for backup. But USPS has been rock solid for months now, so I finally canceled my stamps.com account and no longer need a Windows system, let alone two.
I think I’m going to suggest to Barbara that we upgrade her system to Linux Mint. I’ll pull the Windows drives from both of our notebooks and replace them with SSDs for better performance. While I’m at it, I’ll also upgrade the RAM from 4 GB to 8 GB or more.
I finished watching Heartland series 7 last night. I couldn’t find the series 8 discs, so instead of burning another set I just started re-watching Jericho on Netflix streaming. It’s by far the best of the PA series I’ve seen. Yes, there are a few howlers–like the doctor telling someone who’s been exposed to fallout to take two tablespoons of iodine solution PO–but overall they get it right. And the doctor did at least tell the patient to take the iodine with some canned peaches. Those contain vitamin C, which would convert the corrosive, toxic native iodine to harmless iodide ions. The writing is tight, the acting is decent, and the scenario is plausible. Within the limitations of a TV series, they did an excellent job.