Not a lot to talk about here. Been super tired.

In the time since I last posted, we have been sorting and clearing out our closets for stuff to donate/save/toss. Finally dumped a few boxes of e-waste that was sitting around our house for almost a year. Cleared out half my wardrobe because I don't really use much in the way of shirts and pants (I am incredibly simple) which are now probably getting sorted with all the other college donations at a catholic charity sorting center somewhere.

Our working process right now is to clear the small stuff; anything we save is either stored here or in the storage space we have. It'll make some of the larger things we have easier to deal with. It's been relentless but productive; donation one day, storage next day, dump another day; In a week and a half I think we're about a quarter through.

Last few days were me sorting through old drives.

I want to say you should NEVER get multiple hard drive enclosures unless you get the same type by the way.

Why? Because almost all of them have different AC adapter formats, meaning you are going to have ten to twenty adapters in your house and you have to figure out which one is for which and even if it fits, it might not have enough power or too much power for your unit which makes your drive not operate properly.

I had to get a new dock device as a result of all this. Every single drive that I thought was dead? Only one was actually a goner. This included a 2TB drive that I visibly fried the interface circuit from because of a poor fitting connection (I replaced the board but it refused to initialize on my enclosures and I figured it was a lost cause, so finding out replacing the board really fixed it is a big W on my end).

This is a big win because I managed to harvest gigs of old things that I thought I lost. I had like 2k mp3s from artists I completely forgot about or rebought several times because I lost this data and now it's back. I have a semester of writer's workshop projects I couldn't access now in my main drive. I also found some of the oldest photos from my archives, like stuff I took back in 2006 as well as all this old MST3K and Rifftrax stuff. It's amazing.


The photos are shit, but they're there, I have them.

All the drives are going to be donated or scrapped. I left them in enclosures. Debating if they're worth either? IDE is so old that the only thing it's good for is backups anyway and the storage space feels small (biggest one is half a terabyte) lol

I guess I should just scrap them. At least I wiped all of them properly so no personal info can be pulled from them (I hope).

I do wish I cleaned this place more, but this pretty much recovered a ton for me, so I count this as a big win. I'll try to make up for it tonight by hopefully clearing out my cabinet and all the closet stuff in my room. Might be a lofty goal but it'll be good if I can do it.

Michelle's grandmother had a 90th birthday and they made a big thing out of it for obvious reasons but we set up a backdrop made by her sister, took photos, did the usual necessities. It made me realize that I had photos from her 80th as well so I put that up too since I was on a roll with finding old images.

Speaking of which, back to work.

The leak situation continues to be something that looks worse and worse each time I look at it. Initially, the hole in front of our property was something, now it expended several times over. They dug into our neighbor's driveway to get at a pipe. They dug into their neighbor's driveway to get at that pipe. This has been going on for about three weeks now. The plumbers are stressed out about this and they're using power from our unit to make this happen while parking their equipment in our driveway without any form of advanced warning. It's miserable.

My boss is aware of the situation here and was told I can work from home until this is done after I took a second day off in annoyance at how impossible it is to go to work while they're parked in front of our garage, so there's that.

So based on this, does it mean that they're done? Nope. They're still outside as I type this.

Since this problem has been happening since November, we discussed it more and how things keep breaking down and at this rate they are probably creating a sinkhole, so out of curiosity I looked around for another rental and we found one. Better unit, outdoor porch, only 30-40 less square feet and 50 more in an area with a stronger HOA so is better maintained (I probably will regret it but still).

So we're moving. Signed the lease, starting to go in May. We'll do the slow transition in a monthly overlap.

This year is going to stay a busy one for us. We didn't even have time to do much in the way of outdoor activities. Michelle's grandmother did have her 90th birthday though so both me and Michelle were taking photos through it. 1200 shots. Took care of it all yesterday.

We need to work on clearing stuff we don't need, storing things we like, and then crating things that will be part of our first move which is honestly not going to be hard early on. It's literally three blocks away, so doing this by ourselves early one is not going to be difficult. After that, we also need to plan to clean up and fix the home.

Need to point out after this we're going to also be dealing a bachelorette party for Michelle's friend, a few birthdays, a bridal shower, and of course the trip to Iceland.

Busy months to come.

I keep forgetting to post about this: we've been troubleshooting the "missing notifications" problem for the past few days. (Well, I say "we", really I mean Mark and Robby; I'm just the amanuensis.) It's been one of those annoying loops of "find a logical explanation for what could be causing the problem, fix that thing, observe that the problem gets better for some people but doesn't go away completely, go back to step one and start again", sigh.

Mark is hauling out the heavy debugging ordinance to try to find the root cause. Once he's done building all the extra logging tools he needs, he'll comment to this entry. After he does, if you find a comment that should have gone to your inbox and sent an email notification but didn't, leave him a link to the comment that should have sent the notification, as long as the comment itself was made after Mark says he's collecting them. (I'd wait and post this after he gets the debug code in but I need to go to sleep and he's not sure how long it will take!)

We're sorry about the hassle! Irregular/sporadic issues like this are really hard to troubleshoot because it's impossible to know if they're fixed or if they're just not happening while you're looking. With luck, this will give us enough information to figure out the root cause for real this time.