Caveat: an obsessive tinkerer tinkers obsessively…

At the risk of becoming boring, posting on the same essentially autobiographical topic for the third day in a row…

I continue to obsessively mess around with my computer, trying to figure out what happened to it. There is a component of my personality that is a compulsive tinkerer, and thus I somehow prefer to try to fix a clearly dying computer to buying a new one. I suppose partly I see it as an opportunity to "prove myself" and make sure I possess at least some of the skills necessary to be "self-sufficient" in the context of computers.

I made a very weird thing happen: when I gave my computer a complete "cold" shutdown (i.e. I removed the onboard battery, which forces the BIOS to reset), my USB bus returned to life! This seems quite weird and miraculous, but I can just barely grasp how this might work. If something happened that had caused my BIOS to break, which had in turn been the cause of the lost USB bus, by forcing the reset I recovered the original BIOS configuration.

Well, anyway, in theory this means my computer isn't actually broken, at the moment. But I have lost my trust in my computer – I'm working hard to make sure nothing would be lost if it should crash catastrophically. This is a useful exercise, which I don't resent.

I continue to tinker with Linux – it's interesting to me, at an almost obsessive level. I'm curious, now, to see if I can replicate ALL the functions I was performing on my home Windows machine – because my relationship with Windows was always a marriage not of love but of convenience. I had concluded 4 years ago that I could NOT replicate all those functions, but having solved the language issue yesterday, I feel optimistic that Ubuntu has progressed to the point where I maybe can do it.

There are some challenges:

  • getting my massive music collection (18000 tracks? – I didn't even know!) to be accessible and playable – every time I try to configure one of ubuntu's music players and point it to my music collection, it crashes;
  • configuring my  offline mapping tool (JOSM) that use for my geofiction hobby; this should be easy, since JOSM was originally written for Linux, but I'm running into problems;
  • replicating my "sandbox" database (postgresql) and coding environment (perl / python) – because I have a mostly dormant hobby of trying to keep my programming skills functional, in case this "teach English in Korea" gig falls apart, or if that worst-case-scenario related to my mouth health situation eventuates, and I experience a major impairment or loss of my ability to talk.

[daily log: walking, 7km]

Caveat: Nonnet #38

(Poem #63 on new numbering scheme)

I had let my nonnet-writing slide
during the last several days,
but I wrote this here nonnet
during a break at work,
just now, to have one
which I could post
on my blog.
It's not
good.

– a nonnet
picture

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