You know those days, yes /those/ days.

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So, it didn’t seem particularly like it was going to be one of those days. You know the ones, the ones which I consistently try hard throughout them to believe that there is no such thing as bad luck, and the universe can’t have so much interest in me as to make any particular day suck that much. That realistically, just because A went wrong, B and C have no reason to go wrong too (although, invariably, they seem to?)

It’s not even like anything huge or major went wrong, but just endless minor irritations, including trying UPS’s ‘drop off at corner shop’ delivery thingie for shipping ebay items – and suddenly I realised that actually I’m not at all convinced that selling things via ebay is worth the hassle. At least, for the kinds of crappy old tech that I have. It took so long to list it and package up the stuff to ship, and answer the ‘would you please send this to kurdistan if I send you $1500 and you send me back the change’ e-mails, that actually I realised that I’d rather just do an agency shift. That said, despite my bitter griping, it’s about 60 quid made – and the things have gone to a home where they’ll get used. I assume.

Anyhow, the UPS thing? So they appear to have allowed anyone to be a UPS drop off point, which is handy in that there are several around Bristol, but less handy in that many of them seem to have no parking near them, and the shop I took it to instantly went ‘No, we can’t take that, it’s too big’ and then had no suggestion for where I should take it. Then, after I basically said ‘well, I’ll have to ring UPS and ask where to take it, since you can’t suggest anywhere’ decided that maybe they could take it. Then I found out that their storage location for UPS packages is… in the corner of the shop. So that feels secure and safe. Luckily it’s all insured. *sigh*

So yes, there was that, then there was the dismal grey rain which kept popping up…

…then there was me killing the XBMC install which would be only a mild irritant because I thought “I’ve a known good installation backed up on my harddisk” which I have copied across to my new install. However, having written it to the card, first boot it popped up and went ‘oh, I’m way out of date’ and then proceeded to update itself. Which would be fine. Except that…err, it wasn’t fine. It died half way through the update. I think that the slightly stroppy relationship it has with the USB audio card I’ve been trying to persuade into working, well, it may have upset it. I’m not sure. At any rate, it didn’t work.

So then, of course, I thought I’d reinstall it properly. Which means that I am suddenly without the video licence key. Which is in my e-mail. Which I’ve not imported yet. Because I’ve been waiting, optimistically for the Unibox beta. But it’s a limited beta and I suppose I should suck it up and install have some kind of mail application doing something.

So, I fish out the hard disk and copy across the mail thing and start it importing mail. But given that it’s every mail I’ve kept since 2001 that’s going to take a while (and you have no idea how frigging difficult it’s been to keep that mail across multiple mail clients).

So anyhow, I think ‘well, I’ll carry on’ and I manage to install it – but now the LCD display isn’t working, and frankly, for everyone raving about this USB sound card it does sound good… apart from the pauses whilst the Pi thinks about things. Like, y’know, every time I press a button on the remote. AND I can’t seem to set it up to do both HDMI audio out *and* USB audio out, which was the entire fracking point of getting it. It and the nice box to put them both in.

I also promised to help someone at work sort out an excel spreadsheet so it would produce a summary telling them who was due for mandatory training updates. Why I want to inflict this pain on myself I’m not sure, because almost certainly I’ll end up needing to do something exciting. Of course, I realised when I got home that I no longer have Excel installed, because it’s a shiny new OS. Also I couldn’t find the disk. I could find the dodgy copy of dubious origins that I had before I started down the straight and narrow path of actually owning all my software like a real adult. But I had no desire to install that on my freshly minted clean and shiny install.

And so that had to wait…and I killed time…and then asked Kathryn…and then suddenly it came back to me. It was in with the stack of CDs of waiting for ripping. Which I just had to find. Although whilst I was looking for that I came across my copy of Creative Suite 5.5, which was pleasing, because I’d been intending to hurt my poor laptop install it on here.

I have therefore spent the past few hours doing a festival of installation. Which, to be fair, I was intending to do after the install of the OS but having been sucked into the disaster that was the not-properly-seated memory (istr this happened last time I touched the memory on this laptop – it is now maxed out though, no more memory upgrades for her) I never actually finished. I mean, I installed a million applications – but they were all the nice, small apps that I like using. Not the big demonic lumps of lard that come on shiny silver disks (or used to). I am also rewriting xbmc version 12 to the SD card in hopes that this time the update will work. Because I like my little LCD, even if it is totally pointless.

KateWE

Kate's a human mostly built out of spite and overcoming transphobia-racism-and-other-bullshit. Although increasingly right-wing bigots would say otherwise. So she's either a human or a lizard in disguise sent to destroy all of humanity. Either way, it's all good.