General, History, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Space

Happy Thanksgiving

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I’m posting this from Windows in the new computer (I ended up using the Microsoft tool to build a boot drive). I’m loading software on it now, while following my Thanksgiving tradition of watching the Lions lose.

Given the events of the past year since the election, it’s hard to be thankful, but I’m guessing that we’ll have a lot more to be after the election next year, if the country survives the lunatics currently running it that long.

But we have our health, and we’re financially comfortable. I’m continuing to look forward to the next year, and years in space, and feel like we are finally on the verge of achieving the things I’ve been hoping for for decades.

Here are some interesting links: Why we should be thankful for the Pilgrims, and no, we didn’t steal the land from the natives. The latter isn’t a new piece, but it’s a useful corrective to those who oppose the settlement of space because it’s “colonialization.”

I hope that all of my readers are having a good day as well.

[Late-afternoon update]

It’s the four hundredth anniversary of the first Thanksgiving.

Administrative, Technology and Society

Computer Woes Continue

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OK, things get worse and worse. I got the MSI motherboard, and installed it yesterday. The build went fine, except it still refuses to issue video output. Fans are running, no debug LEDs are lit, but I’m in the same situation I was with the ASUS board.

I tried swapping out video cards again, with no joy. I swapped memory with my own desktop, and not only did it not work, but when I put the stick back in the computer, it gave me a DRAM error, so somehow I managed to damage half of my 32G of RAM. Plus, now my computer won’t boot. It just dumps me into rescue mode, and I don’t see anything obvious in the journal.

I’d be pulling hair if I had any to spare.

[Friday-afternoon update]

So we had a power failure in the middle of the night, when a high-speed police chase through the neighborhood resulted in the perp crashing a stolen BMW into an Edison pole and breaking it (both the pole and the car, apparently). It lasted almost twelve hours, and just came back up (I wandered over around the block a couple times and watched SoCal Edison replacing the pole and reattaching lines).

No status update on the computer. At this point, I’m just going to load it all in the car and take it to Colorado with us, because I’m out of time to fix it before we leave tomorrow. I’ll be there until next weekend, but it was intended to go and be left there anyway. Worst case is I’ll take it to Best Buy (since I got the motherboard there) and see if they can figure it out.

[Thanksgiving Eve update]

So I took it to the Geek Squad yesterday (because I bought the replacement mobo at Best Buy), and with their test GPU, we determined that it was in fact the video card, so the original mobo was probably OK. I went to Micro Center to get another one, and the machine is finally running.

Now I’m trying to install Windows on it (I know, I know, but it’s not my machine…).

It booted into Linux with the SSD that I use to boot into my laptop, so I made a boot disk from a Windows 10 ISO on a USB stick. But it won’t boot from that stick. I just get a message to put in a proper boot device and hit return, but there is no way to do that. And when I hit return, I just keep getting the same message. I’ve booted back into Linux whence I am updating this post.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!