Potluck

Sudoku: for those times when you have the urge to work math problems.
I saw a Do You Sudoku? puzzle book and the thought hit me that basically it's a book of math problems disguised as entertainment. Of course, one of the holy grails of education is trying to make it fun so people will enjoy learning things. I wonder if the people who do sudoku puzzles ever have the thought that they're voluntarily doing something they probably hated in school. I think that's funny. I bet they won't come out with a word problems puzzle book.

If sudoku puzzler A can work one puzzle in five minutes, and sudoku puzzler B can work a puzzle in ten minutes, and puzzler A is on a hyperloop train from Chicago to Atlanta traveling 400 mph while puzzler B is on a hyperloop train from Atlanta to Chicago traveling 550 mph, who can solve the most puzzles?

That's the kind of puzzle they won't have in the word problem book. Why? Because it's a double trick question. There's no hyperloop between Atlanta and Chicago. If there were, it would travel closer to 760 mph. I didn't even give the distance. bwahahaha

So, John Boehner announced his resignation today. He'll be quitting his speaker of the house position, and next month he'll be quitting congress. All this after meeting with the pope yesterday. Apparently, that was the tipping influence in the decision. My first thought was that something happened in the spiritual realm, and it can't be good. I don't really care for Boehner. Both parties are corrupt. 

Anyway, the pope has been turning Catholicism from a religious organization into a political one. As I've mentioned before, he's been running around the world like he's campaigning for something. Now he's in the U.S. making political speeches that insult America. ' "selfish and boundless thirst" for profit' '"selfish and boundless thirst for power and material prosperity"' The last quote was from something he said in Paris but was in the article. I have an idea. If he really believes all that, then he should stop the Catholic church from accepting donations, because the people giving them probably aren't working out of boundless, selfless enjoyment. He should also stop wielding political power and go back to Rome and read the Bible some. If he really believes what's he's telling other people to do, that is. He probably doesn't believe what he's ordering others to do applies to him, though.
Anyway, the pope is a force for darkness in the world. The Boehner thing is disturbing.  Something happened spiritually, and it can't be good.

On the computer front. Last night I hit the power button. The computer started to come on then just stopped. I tried again with the same results. I thought maybe I didn't depress it all the way. I was standing up bent down. I had a piece of cork board overhanging the button a little. I moved it back, and pressed the button firmly. The PC started normally and worked fine all evening. Today it didn't start the first time I pressed the button. Does it make me want to cry? Kind of. However, there was an emergency Windows patch today that forced the computer to reboot. I've never had a patch that did that. Maybe that will fix it.

Things have been slow on the writing front, but I got a lot of research done.

They're Back

Work on the next book continues, though it feels like progress is barely creeping along. I can almost see the light at the end of the tunnel. In other news, I bought a Tesla this week. Not the super-expensive electric car, the Hot Wheels toy. I'd like to have an electric car one day. Not because of the environment, which is doing fine, but because of future oil prices. We've been seeing a nice downward move recently that can't last forever. At some point demand will skyrocket, and gas will be exorbitantly priced once again. The toy is on my desk as motivation and a symbol of the goal.

Something disturbing is back.

What do you suppose is two aisles down from this? The Halloween aisle. And on the other side of the Halloween aisle is the Thanksgiving section. Will there come a time when holiday things will be on sale year round? Only 97 days until Christmas.

Something else arrived this week that I haven't seen in while. Lynx is back! He's a stray cat that I was feeding for a while until he disappeared in June or July. I've been wondering if he was dead. Last Friday the weather turned cooler and less humid after a mini heat wave. Fall is firmly here. Maybe mice are becoming fewer and farther between. Some call cats like Lynx feral cats. I call them kitties who have fallen on hard times.

Blessings

I've had a couple of blessings lately.

There's a new dollar store about five minutes from where I live. The size is a little larger than usual. It's almost a miniature version of Walmart and carries all kinds of things with shelves so tall they have signs on them saying to get an employee for help. The cheapest "grocery store" here is Walmart, which is about 30 minutes away. Even if the dollar store is 5 or 10 cents higher on some things, the $4+ savings on gas covers it. Some items area actually cheaper. It doesn't make sense to grocery shop there, but for certain things it saves a trip and makes life a little easier.

I've mentioned my cell phone woes before. I finally have a new cell phone that works indoors at home. I was with someone at the new dollar store who insisted I look at cell phones. They don't carry phones for my cell phone company. It seemed like a waste of time, but I looked anyway. Apparently they were dumping inventory, because they had an LG Optimus Fuel for $9. I didn't know if my company would let me use, but I took the chance and it worked. Though not uber, the stats are decent. Android 4.4, 1.2GHz dual-core cpu, 3.5" screen, 1.79GB internal storage, camera. For $9 it's awesome.

I've been a little sidetracked doing some genealogy. I had my DNA tested a while back and have discovered several branches of Jenkins that didn't know about each other. At first it was two of us. The others slowly showed up over time. A researcher from a newly found branch in the Ohio/Indiana area made a breakthrough on the Kentucky/Tennessee branch that puts them living the same place on the South Carolina/North Carolina border as my family around 1800. Based on that and the DNA results we already had, I was able to infer that my Jenkins were much more Jewish back then than I thought, although I'd feel more confident if the paper trail would catch up to the DNA. DNA's nice, but sometimes you have to see it in writing.

Despite the sidetrack, I've combined the chapters I wrote while the computer was down to the rest of the book. The minor character's name in the beginning of the book that I couldn't remember to save my life? Vicky. That was bugging me so much. I've gone through the whole thing now and am ready to push on to the end.

All my books are exclusive to Amazon right now. I don't know if this is a big announcement, but that's got to stop. It's getting me nowhere. I made a Smashwords account. If I can get the books converted to how they like it, that would put me on Apple, Barnes and Noble, etc., and I'd still be on Amazon. My exclusivity period ends in November. I have plenty of time to learn what I have to do, get the books formatted and think about what I'm doing without rushing into it. Once that happens, I'll talk more about it.

Hey, Cortana

Remember that Microsoft program I had to uninstall Windows 10 for the first time, because it required IE 6 to run and wasn't compatible? I was looking through the program list and saw it. I clicked it. It works now. Mostly. It starts up and runs, but if I close it and try to restart it, for a little while it says it's still running. During the time my computer was down, they fixed it. After I bought software to replace it. mmhmm

Windows 10 is unfinished. The core is there, but not everything works yet. It's kind of a beta and certainly a step down from Windows 7. Why get it? Because it's free now but only free for a year. After that I guess it's $199. If you don't absolutely have to have it, it might be better to wait a little while for them to bring it up to speed.

However, Windows 10 has one redeeming feature: Cortana. It's an artificial intelligence program kind of like Siri or Amazon's Alexa. I wish it was named something besides Cortana or that I could change the name. Now that the computer problems have settled down, I activated the program. I have a lapel mic I bought a while back to make YouTube videos with. I use that to talk to it, although I may get a cheap desktop mic.

I asked it, What's your favorite color? It said, Right now, it's coffee. With Cream.
I asked it if it likes cats.

It's not so much what it said but how it said it Same thing on the coffee answer. Microsoft used a voice actress for the voice. So far, it tends to be emotionally neutral unless you ask it something silly. Then it has some personality and a sense of humor.

To use it, I have to say, "Hey, Cortana," followed by a command. I imagine that could get old after a while. I think people with Amazon Echo just say Alexa and the command.

I've barely started using it, but I like it. I have it open programs for me. It's faster than digging through the Start menus trying to find Calculator or Windows Update. That thing buried in Control Panel you need? It can find it and tell you the formal name of it. It opens the programs in the background. If I have my word processor open and want to search for something, I can say it, and it's out of sight until I need it.

I use it to go to web sites instead of typing in the address. It does web searches, too. It's pretty good about understanding me. A few times I've gotten in a hurry and mangled the pronunciation of a word. When I've done that, it knew what I meant anyway. From the context, I suppose, which is a nice level of sophistication. The only problem with searching is it uses Bing instead of Google. Sometimes that's okay, but Google is so much better.

I tried to make it go to duolingo.com. It sent me to eidos.com the first time. When you talk to it, it shows you at the bottom of the Cortana window what it thinks you've said. When I said duolingo, it showed duolingo but sent me to the other site instead. The next time it got it right. That was after I went there manually. I don't know if it "learned" from me or not. It's supposed to do that and become more tailored to you over time.

I don't use the Reminders feature in Windows. Cortana makes it easy. As a test, I set a reminder yesterday to watch the Georgia Tech game. They won. You're supposed to replace your toothbrush every three months, but three months later I usually don't remember it exactly on the date. I just got a new one. Cortana made me a reminder for December 1 to buy a new toothbrush. :)

There's a Cortana phone app. Something I'm interested in is using it to turn lights off and on. During the winter when it's dark, it would be neat to tell it to turn on the lights when I get home. It's supposed to learn your schedule and do things like that for you.

I guess I'm kind of rambling. Except for the name, I'm liking Cortana. I can't wait to see what features they add to it. There's a Messengers book set in the future about the time Kayley went to to save the miners. In that book everyone has a personal AI. They say its name and give it commands. Cortana's like a primitive version of that. That book has some spoilers about Aethan Lightbringer, so it'll have to come out later. Plus, it's not finished.

PC Update 5: The Empire Strikes Back

Last night
So, it looked like the computer was shipshape. Everything was working fine. But I noticed that Windows wasn't "Activated". I had my product key. I wasn't concerned and ignored it at first. However, one of the updates to Windows 10, since my PC crashed, was supposed to be(It's not ready yet.) the ability to change the window colors from white, #windowsalbino, to something real. I tried that. It wouldn't let me because it wasn't activated. The activation thing suddenly became serious. I put in my product key. Windows 10 doesn't accept Windows 7 keys, I guess. It said the product key was blocked or something like that. I didn't know if it was really blocked, or if it was just blocked from use on Windows 10. I did buy the computer used after all. It really could think it's blocked but hopefully not, since I now own the original equipment. The Microsoft solution? Ask me for $199. No. No. No.

It turns out that if you change the motherboard on an OEM installation Microsoft wants you to buy Windows again and deliberately breaks the installation. They consider you to have a "new" computer. Unless...the motherboard is defective. Which mine absolutely was, right? Totally, no doubt about it. That little stinker was bad from the factory. I could feel it. And a Google search found there actually is a known manufacturing defect with my motherboard. Case closed.

I contacted Microsoft and explained my situation to Kapil via online chat. There was a long pause every time after I hit the enter button. After a few times of that, I could sense Kapil copying and pasting my comments into Google Translate, which is an awesome service by the way. I use it all the time for French when I drift out of the shallow end of the pool. It knows more words than my Larousse French dictionary.

Kapil couldn't help me. He suggested what I'd already searched and found. I needed to uninstall Windows 10 and reinstall Windows 7 from scratch, preferably on a clean hard drive. What he was supposed to do was give me a new key because of my tragically defective motherboard. Unfortunately, by the time we got to the end of the conversation, he couldn't remember what I'd told him at the beginning. I thanked him and left.

I decided to uninstall Windows 10 and see if I could sneak my product key into Windows 7. It's not supposed to work but why not try? All roads seemed to lead to uninstalling anyway. Something bad happened. When I uninstalled 10 before, it was pretty smooth because of a bug. It got stuck, and I had to restart the machine. It was very fast. This time it took forever, and Win7 defaulted to the old motherboard settings. It wiped all my internet connection info and my monitor info, etc. All my programs seemed fine, but I couldn't get online to run an update.
And Windows 7 was really giving me a hard time about not being activated. It started at a black screen demanding I access the internet through this special browser window and kept me there a while before starting Windows. How could I connect to the internet to activate if it wouldn't let me access my settings? Even if I'd been online, Windows Update won't work on an unactivated computer.

I tried to set up a new network connection. Nothing. Somewhere along the way while trying to get the settings right, I went to the activation page and put in my possibly "blocked" product key. Since I was trapped offline, it wasn't blocked at all. heh heh heh Is the key somehow claimed by the corporation that leased the computer before I bought it and actually is blocked? I guess we'll never know.

Remember that wifi hotspot I bought in case I lose internet connection again? I also got a cheap USB wireless adapter at the same time. I didn't need the hotspot, but I was able to use the adapter to get online wirelessly and get the network settings I needed to get my normal ethernet connection working.

I was back online. Windows 7 said it was truly and properly Activated. I downloaded Windows 10. For the third time. It took forever, another wasted night fighting Windows. Since 7 was activated, 10 updated with no problems just like it did before I replaced the motherboard. It says it's activated. I'm anticipating good things.

PC Update 4: The Final Chapter

In the last computer update, I forgot to mention that the emergency computer didn't want to start over the weekend. At one point I had to restart it several times to get it to load Windows.

The last part, the heatsink/fan combo, arrived today. I had a little anxiety with the new motherboard. It didn't have a connector for an EIDE HD, just SATA. I couldn't remember if the one I'd bought for the sick computer was IDE or SATA. Fortunately, it was SATA.

I got the HD and DVD burner transferred from the sick computer to the new case and all the cables hooked up. After all the failures, I took a break and prayed for it. I came back and hit the button. The lights came on. The fans started up. They're exceptionally quiet, especially compared to the jet engine sound of the emergency one. I breathed a sigh of relief. Then the fans stopped. It was so much like when the sick computer tried to start up but never went to POST.

Shocked. Flabbergasted. Bumfuzzled. I tried to get my brain to figure out what in the world could possibly still be wrong. It didn't make sense. Then the fans restarted, and it booted up. I looked at the BIOS and then let Windows 10 start. Remember in the last post I mentioned that a foreseeable problem would be Windows freaking out about the new motherboard? It didn't happen. Windows became cautious but was able to deal with it.

Updating Windows took about 2 hours. Running through 2.5 weeks worth of email took a long time, too. I still have some I haven't opened. I had to update and balance my checkbook. I'm pretty much caught up.

I'd planned to uninstall Windows 10. However, since it didn't fry the new motherboard and seems to be behaving except for one bug, I've decided to allow it to live. For now.

Yay! The computer's working again!