Death of a motherboard

Here at Hugs, it's not all knitting and painting and box unpacking and looking longingly at the bag that has the loom in it - I wish!  One must also be a technological whiz, if only intermittently.  And today is the intermittently part because a few months ago my motherboard... died.

Reader alert: this creatively barren post will be illustrated by random arty photos

Thankfully when it happened I had access to a second computer, which is where as you may recall I have been conducting all my various online tasks for the many weeks it took for my computer repair shop to determine that the problem is not fixable, and for the many weeks since while I have been deciding whether and with what to replace it for reals.   This process is still ongoing.

I wonder whether it was a mistake to clean the keyboard of the original laptop with a Swiffer cloth?  (answer: almost certainly.)

Anyway, I miss my beat-up old laptop SO MUCH, right down to the painter's tape holding it together and the super worn down keys.  And I also miss all the stuff that was on its hard drive (especially every single detail of the itinerary I spent about 50 hours mapping out for our summer trip to the UK, which I forgot to back up), and in its browser software, which was remembering all my passwords for me.

Do you use the same password for every site?  It's so tempting, only needing to remember one!  But it's not a good idea security-wise, so I try to be imaginative and come up with a different password every time.  Sometimes I can even remember them all by myself, which is helpful for super-security-needing sites.

I still love stripes.  Here are some vertical ones on linen to balance out the horizontal ones on glass.

I also have multiple e-mail addresses just to make it all more complicated.  But I am juggling so many tasks these days, and so many sites also require usernames that are not your e-mail address, that even though it is easy to reset a password... it's not at all easy to renew access to every site you have to use (I'm looking at you, Presto, keeper of my public transit fare card.)

During a brief lull before Christmas I realized I also don't remember any of the details for accessing my websites to upload and prune files.   Huzzah.  Thankfully I do remember the details for my web hosting service, so I asked them to let me know the server settings I need for that job.  Today, or this weekend, or else Really Really Soon, I am totally setting aside time to make use of that information.  After I finish shopping for new software to allow me to transfer files up to the web and back down to oblivion.  My tech support friend recommends WinSCP, which I notice also has a portable edition... and that seems smart because if I have all the necessary server information on a thumb drive, it won't matter if my computer busts up again.

Well, it won't matter quite so much as it did this time.  I'm sure it will still matter at least a little.

Ugh technology, right?  But on the upside: the fact that I finally have time to address this issue plus the fact that Ray is remodeling somebody's bathroom on Monday means that our giant renovation project is pretty much done.  Whooo hooooooooo!

(except for the outside, which has to wait till spring.  oh well: more time to plan right?)

Closing with both kinds of stripes: plaid for the win!

Have a great weekend and I'll see you on Monday.  So glad to be able to say that with confidence after a whole week of posting every day - MAN I have missed Hugs.