12:32 – I’m back, hitting on two or three of eight cylinders. Our Internet service is working fine, as is Barbara’s Windows notebook, but that’s about the only technology I have working at this point.
I’m typing this on my Dell notebook, which until this morning was running stock Win 8. I tried to create a set of emergency restore discs last night so that I could restore Windows to this notebook if I ever wanted to. The backup created the first disc and then died on the second disk. It did that twice, drawing down my supply of DVD+R discs from the 10 I bought locally yesterday. I finally decided to write off Windows. I downloaded and burned the new Linux Mint LTS version late last night. This morning I installed it, blowing away Windows. I was fully aware that it might be difficult or impossible to get the wireless adapter working under Linux, so I just plugged it into an Ethernet port on the router and am sitting downstairs a few feet from the router.
That router, incidentally, is the original one and is working fine. My problem getting the Roku 3 to connect to it is entirely down to Roku’s completely inept implementation of wireless networking. Every other device we have sees and connects to the router with no problem. So I carried the big TV downstairs this morning and put it next to the router. I’ll run an Ethernet cable to the Roku and everything will work fine. We’ll just have to watch TV downstairs until I can get around to running wired Ethernet upstairs.
I need to get in position to ship kits. That means getting a printer connected to this notebook, not to mention locating all the miscellany needed–tape dispenser, packing material, labels, etc. etc. Fortunately, customers have been understanding when I explain that their orders caught us in the middle of relocating. I WILL get all outstanding orders shipped well in time for Christmas.
The woodstove was delived yesterday. The HVAC guy is coming tomorrow to give our heat pump a checkover and will also install the stove. Barbara left early this morning to make a run down to Winston-Salem to run some errands, buy some stuff we need, and stop by the house to grab some of the stuff we didn’t get moved last week.
Computer-wise, this move has been a disaster. My main desktop system won’t boot. I just tried to restore my data and Firefox/Thunderbird configs from two USB thumb drives. The zip files are on the thumb drives and appear to copy normally to the notebook hard drive, but attempting to unzip them just gives an unhelpful error message. I have more backup copies on other thumb drives and two other hard drives, including copies that weren’t compressed, so I should be able to get a reasonably recent copy of my data back.
So right now I’ve got much more to do than I have time to do it. Still, the move was worth it, and this too shall pass.