09:57 – Not much interesting going on around here. Barbara is upstairs washing out more 2-liter Coke bottles. Once those have dried, we’ll transfer 100 pounds of bread flour to them. We need to get the steel shelving set up in my office and the unfinished basement “natural area” if only to have shelf space for all these bottles we’re filling.
Although I’ve been calling this long-term food storage, it’s actually medium-term in the sense that these are the containers we use routinely and cycle through. The next time we buy bulk sugar, flour, etc., it goes into the 7-mil foil-laminate Mylar bags sold by the LDS store. I have a box of 250 of those bags on the shelf, along with enough oxygen absorbers to add one per bag.
I also need to get my new desktop system set up, although I’m not happy about running Windows on it. Once I get it set up, I’ll probably pull a couple of backups of the Windows installation and then pull the hard drive and stick it on the shelf. I’ll install a fresh hard drive and install Linux Mint on the system. Now that USPS Click-N-Ship again supports Regional Rate boxes at the Commercial Base Pricing rate, I no longer really need Stamps.com, which was the reason I needed a Windows system in the first place. Not that the new desktop will go to waste. My little notebook system, with only 4 GB of RAM and a slow hard drive simply couldn’t cope with the load I was putting on it. The other day, I had so much stuff running that it simply locked up. The cursor would move, but I couldn’t even quit any of the running programs, let alone start any others. I’m pretty sure the system was using 100% of the available RAM and the processor was 100% occupied trying to swap stuff out of RAM to disk and back. A hard reboot solved the problem temporarily, but the long-term solution is simply that I need more capable hardware to do what I do.