Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

My shiny new Macbook Air laptop has arrived, and so far I have determined that the packaging is well designed--both the shipping box and the interior box have obvious "pull here to open" tabs that worked smoothly. I'm pretty sure the box contains everything it should, but not entirely, because I have also discovered that they assume I have another computer, or at least access to one, with which to read the online-only "getting started" guide. They also assume I have a magnifying glass: the minimal printed information in the box is printed in an annoyingly small font.

Those are both valid assumptions, but it adds some friction to the process.

I bought a new computer now because I will be needing one moderately soon: this Windows box is old, I'm not sure it will support Windows 11, and I've been vaguely meaning to replace it for a couple of years. I wanted to buy a new computer before Trump's threatened tariffs affect the price and/or availabilitu of new computers. (According to DSL, my Macbook was shipped from Shanghai.) So I'm not in full "shiny new machine!" mode because I'm going to have to move a bunch of stuff from this Windows box to a machine running MacOS, and figure out in the process what I actually need or want to keep.

It's a Mac because I asked Cattitude's advice on buying a new computer, and this is what he recommended given what I use my computer for.

The new computer is a Windows desktop machine. It will be replacing a Mac. I suspect I am going to be discovering all sorts of interesting things about file incompatibilities, especially years of saved email.

There's at least one trip to Microcenter in my future, for speakers, a webcam, and a better keyboard, but that can wait a day or three. Tomorrow's plans involve going to a state legislature committee hearing (to show people care about a bill that will stop Massachusetts police from working for ICE or other federal agencies unless the feds pay for it. (Yes, it would be better to stop it altogether, but this might be easier to get through, and might have the same effect.) That's another political thing I've never done before, but the ACLU wants people there, I don't have conflicting plans, and the state house is now "take the T to Park Street" instead of a schlep to Albany.

Whether I shop for hardware tomorrow will depend on a combination of how I feel by then, and how annoyed I am by this keyboard in another twelve hours.

In the last few days, I have filled out two different "Parliamentary consultancy" questionnaires on same-sex marriage, both of which included questions about the role of religious celebrants. I'm not a citizen or resident of either Australia nor the United Kingdom, but neither form asked for an address or about citizenship, and they both wanted input from all "interested parties."

We saw a mourning cloak butterfly in the park yesterday. They tend to be one of the earliest kinds of butterfly, if not the earliest, but this seems early even for mourning cloaks. (I got close enough to get some pictures, while it was sunning itself on a dead branch.)

I finally installed the necessary software on our (moderately) new printer/scanner/fax machine, and configured it for wireless use, and cattitude has printed to it from his computer. (The device ships knowing how to make black-and-white photocopies.) Once I check them over, we can file our taxes. And then I made myself some hot chocolate, because dealing with printer software is like that.

I continue to be annoyed by people who have been warned not to say "like" instead of "as" so often that they now write "as" where they should write "like." And I probably couldn't code in Lisp to save my life, but I will be counting parentheses as long as I live. I get paid to fix both of these, but only one of them irritates me if I see it in print.

Having left my all-purpose cardigan at the gym on Friday, and lost an earring from one of my favorite pairs yesterday, I will probably be a bit cautious about carrying valuable things (valuable either in dollars or for sentimental or practical reasons) for a few days. I have earrings I like but am not strongly attached to, and they will do for the moment.

I'd just like to note that I like my ISP. Over the weekend, I couldn't upload email from my PC to the ISP's server. Download, yes. Monday morning, I logged into the Web mail program and sent a message to "staff," describing the problem. An hour or two later I had an answer, explaining it as a known problem for people using Verizon DSL lines, and including the solution, in both Mac and PC versions. I suspect there are ISPs that would have looked at it and just said "We don't support Eudora*," rather than telling me that that Verizon had blocked port 25 and here was what I needed to do in my Eudora directory so I could specify the port for outgoing email. Shortly after I sent a thank you, I got a second message, from porcinea, saying that while the workaround the first person had given me would work, a different port was more likely to remain good indefinitely.

Today, I went to the gym after work. I was trying to be gentle to my right shoulder. This goes along with being diligent about all the rotator cuff exercises through Sunday (which will make about ten days) and seeing if that helps sufficiently that I decide I don't need to see my GP about this. (I might call her anyway, for a general check-up and a tetanus booster.)
( Numbers, as usual )

*The vendor no longer supports Eudora, so it wouldn't be absurd or even especially unreasonable for an ISP not to, and to have just said "they're blocking port 25, use nnn instead" without telling me how to do that in Eudora. But this is Panix, my $HOME away from home, which doesn't like to tell people that their hardware or software is out of date when it can help solve a problem instead.

I am banged up, and my work PC may be sick.

I am banged up because, in trying to cross a platform to change trains this morning, I tripped and fell over someone's wheeled bag. Skinned my left elbow not quite enough to draw blood, and my left knee slightly. Also, serious stiffness in the left shoulder, upper arm, and hip. And now some in the right upper arm. (Yes, I am taking ibuprofen.) I was going to work out this evening. Feh.

I also switched the mouse at work back to right-handed, and discovered that I have lots of habits of where things are on my desk, and what I do with which hand, that were being confused. That's not why I'm leaving the one here alone; it's that I don't feel like rearranging the piles of stuff on my desk here to make room for right-handed mousing without knocking books or papers on the floor.

By late afternoon and on the trip home, I discovered more bits of myself seem stiff. If this had to happen, I'm glad it was now rather than Friday (because one of the things I did this weekend was help adrian_turtle move boxes and put a duvet away for the season and similar things that weren't a big deal, but might be annoying and/or difficult right now).

When cattitude gets home from work, I'm going to ask him to check me a little more thoroughly for scrapes, and maybe take a hot bath. I may also dig out a leftover vicodin from last spring's surgery before bedtime; at that point, the sedative effect wouldn't be a disadvantage, but added help.

There is some kind of virus on my machine at work, and a number of other people's (a quick look at symantec suggests Trojan.Bankpatch.D). I have talked to the IT guy, and he has installed an anti-malware program, which scanned my machine and found nothing. I would have more faith in that if I hadn't reported signs of the virus to the IT person, who agreed that yes, it looked like a virus. (IE should not start itself up and offer to download screen savers.) However, mine didn't misbehave other than show two suspicious offers of downloads; other people have had their machines freeze. Nonetheless, I am treating my thumb drive as known safe offsite backup; it has a version of my work from end-of-day Thursday, and is in my daypack.

[If you're reading this on LJ, it is crossposted from Dreamwidth and mostly an update of an entry from earlier today, partly to put the stuff on DW and partly to have a more current and complete note of things, since I do sometimes use LJ entries as references on medical matters.]

The last hardware for my computer—a combination floppy drive and USB card reader—arrived on Friday, and I installed it yesterday afternoon. cattitude provided instruction on topics like which cables I needed and what order to do things in, and I did all the physical stuff. This not only gives me a stronger feeling that it's my machine, it's stuff I might need to know sometime. We tested the drive and the install by pulling some photos I'd taken a month or two ago off the memory card on Cattitude's old camera. (I very much want to have a floppy drive, but had no immediate need for it; it's a combination of having stuff on old diskettes and a vague feeling of insecurity at the idea of being without one.)

I still need to install DVD-writing software, which is more practically relevant to backups and data storage here and now.

In the evening, we joined beetiger for dinner out as part of her birthday celebration (having skipped the perfume-sniffing and karaoke parts of the day). We agreed that we should see each other more often (I think it had been 3.5 years since the last time). Also there were her partners, bardbloom and lediva, their child, and two pleasant, somewhat shy-seeming women whose names escape me at the moment. We ate Chinese food and chatted, including some about Boston-area stuff, since lediva is from up there, and the couple whose names I forget live in Somerville; one of them recommended a place called Mary Chung's in Central Square for dim sum that includes a reasonable amount of vegetarian-suitable; I may try to take adrian_turtle there at some point. (I explained that the constraint there is no shrimp or pork, and she noted that it's not an explicitly vegetarian place, but one with a good variety of vegetarian stuff, and that they also have chicken.)