Good morning Gerbil Nation! I seem to have been successful in my attempt to flip my schedule to daytime for the weekend. It’ll make Church and some visiting much easier.
I wonder if I should change my profile pic? I was like 40 somethin’ when that was taken, or maybe late 30ies. Not sure. But I’m pushing 60 at this point so…. I look more than a bit different, especially if I don’t color my beard and hair--which usually I’m too lazy to do.
Sometimes, when I stream I put some temp color on because I think a bit of contrast looks better on the stream.
I had long dreds for a while a few years back, but I cut ’em off one day.
Why am I telling All Y’all this? I don’t really know. Just sharing stuff from ordinary life.
Ya know, I think my daughter took this picture so probably, I was not quite forty. Funny thing is I can’t find any more copies of this picture on the cloud except this very small low res one that I made for thumbnail/profile pics all those years ago. Not sure why I never uploaded a regular copy onto the cloud somewhere, but it appears I didn’t.
I looked in my collection to see if I might have it but no. I have a couple that look like they are from the same time, one even looks like the same shirt, but they are more from the side, with your hand to your chin.
I dyed my facial hair for a lot of years, mostly as my head-hair obstinately refused to go gray at all and I didn’t like the “mix”. At 63, still kinda mixed up top; I was hoping I’d go completely white-haired in my late ’50s like Dad did. Oh well…
You’re growing a mullet??
The last time I got anything resembling a haircut was a trim right before SackO’SugarK and I got hitched more than nine years ago. (And I’d been letting my hair grow at least a year before that august event.)
I’m really too lazy to dye my hair, but, as I often say on my streams:
I’m not particularly vain about it, but I do think that since I’m so pale, that touching up my hair and beard adds some much needed contrast, particularly when I use a green screen which can wash you out further.
Plus, my lighting setup isn’t very good. I really hate lights in my eyes, so I just have 4 walmart LED lamps shining at the wall in front of me which (barely) provide enough light to light the green screen.
That is quite a work station. Mine looks neat in the picture but when the depression sets in it becomes quite a mess, and I don’t let Elena clean in here. It can get quite bad until I get better.
Elena was always confused by the fact my desk at work was always neat and organized but I was chaotic and messy at home. I could function by focusing on what had to be done but most other things went wanting. It was how I functioned with depression in a job environment that did not make allowances. The price was high but it let me be effective.
The Roland MIDI keyboard is not as nice looking, but more functional with a software based piano sound (mathematically modeled “pianoteq”) but I also have this now.
Oh, it’s a Weber baby grand by the way,. It has lovely tone and action. The little light on the right of the keyboard is a climate control system which helps keep the piano in tune and in good condition in the strange Arizona climate.
I took off over 50 pounds in 2013 but put some back on in the next couple of years, still better than I was but certainly not even close to slender. It does help the feet and joints, doesn’t it? I tried hard to lose some more after the heart attack in 2016 but could not make progress. After reading up I decided the insulin shot at night was blocking me and cut it out, taking one only in the morning. It worked and I did start losing slowly. I have taken a few more off but have a long way to go. I am hoping for at least another 25 to 30 pounds but it will take time.
The pictures are from the last few years. The desk is about the same but I have a new chair. I spend most of my time there. Three desktop PCs and three monitors, plus a TV to serve the DVD player/VCR/Direct TV DVR. I can play streaming video into a DVR and burn it to DVD.
neato. It looks like a comfortable office. Mine is a bit cramped. Owing partially to my Yamaha Digital (the one that you saw me play in Portland) which I do not really have room for.
I want to give it to a young man who lives in Idaho who is currently on a Mission for 2 years, I’ve been spending some time trying to fine someone who might be going that way who can get it to his Dad. His Dad told me he can meet someone halfway in Utah, for example, but so far I haven’t come up with anything yet, and it is a bit too big and heavy to ship commercially.
But I digress, as per usual.
Anyway, I have this bunk bed desk (like a college student might have) and lots of shelves. The bed itself I use for storage unless someone comes to visit. Which happened fairly recently when an old high school friend of ours came out for a visit. Normally, it has the Costco stash sitting on a board on top of the mattress.
Elena and I were talking just this morning about how it must have been hard for you to move into less space. I do remember the beautiful Yamaha, of course. I am lucky here to have one room for my desk/den/ computer supplies, and one room for my library, the first time in years I could unpack all of my books. The library has been shifting more to DVD storage. I now have over 6,600 movies on DVD. We watch those together on a 50″ TV but I mostly watch movies on my PC. I have all of them in mp4 or avi format on a 10 TB hard drive connected to my PC. I use those for watching or for editing clips or stills from them. For those copies I use a program I think you or Harper told me about, Fair Use. It has been great. I use One Click DVD copy to copy DVDs. It has worked well for me, better than the others I have used.
David went through a Dickies phase and I was amazed by how easy they were to care for! Completely dry after 10 min. In the dryer with no wrinkles and perfect creases in the trousers. I think his chefs coat is a Dickies. I never thought to replace it from Amazon, thanks! You do look great in the pictures, my friend. I’d sure like a portrait of you and your sweet wife for the new house.
I have been wearing them for many years and they work well for me. When I was fatter I had to have the pants shortened as they did not offer them that short with that big a waste line, but after dropping a few sizes I can just order what I want. I have not changed in over five years.
Speaking of the new house, maybe I could get Little Mouse to venture out here for a visit if I mention that we have a grand piano in the living room. SQueAk! If your health would hold up for a trip we would love to see you again. I’d even dust teh living room!
Happy Caturday, Gerbil Nation!
Good day, dv8, Mac, and Fatwa!
I come to you courtesy of a new laptop. Yesterday morning, I got a notice that my hard drive was failing. I prepped an external hard drive to receive the back-up, but by time that was done, my computer crashed, then would not boot. I spend my spare time yesterday researching laptops that I could pick up today. I really hate rushed research. I know I could have picked up a new hard drive for my laptop -- Teh Older has a copy of Windows 7 -- but the laptop is 8 years old and has been slowing down and support for Win7 will halt in a week or so (or less).
My bookmarks and passwords have been restored, courtesy of Google, but my email and documents are probably lost. I bought an enclosure for the hard drive I removed from the old laptop, but the new laptop doesn’t recognize the old drive -- says I need to format it. I’ve put it in the freezer, in hopes of getting it to work long enough to pull off some data.
Yes, I’ve neglected proper back-ups [hangs head in shame]. I’m thinking I now need to set up some system to back up the whole family’s worth of computers. Mac -- I know you’ve got quite an extensive back-up system, what can you recommend?
I am sorry about the loss and hassles. I know it too well, which is why I am a bit obsessed with back ups. I have used Ghost since 2003 but was recently quite POed when they cut it off on the two copies I bought and used. They stopped support, which I have no problem with. I did not need updates or help, it was working fine on two windows 10 machines, but they both showed they were trial versions and a key was needed, but would not accept the proper keys. When I contacted them they said that was part of no support and too bad, buy something new. I did not rent these programs, I bought them. Imagine your car maker sending out a signal after five years that bricked your car so you had to buy a new one. So now I do a daily backup with the Windows backup facility, including files and a drive image. This is on my 500 GB SSD drive. My main storage is on a 4TB internal drive, and copied on a 6TB internal back up drive. This is easy to keep up with but would be vulnerable to a ransomware attack so I do an occasional backup to a large external drive I hook up for the purpose.
When I recently installed Win 10 Pro on my main desktop computer I was able to transfer my browser favorites and settings by using Firefox sync to transfer from my other PC which I had synced to my main one just before the change. I use Gmail and access through Windows live mail so I synced that through my Microsoft account but was dismayed to find my local storage folders did not transfer. I went into my Ghost image of the Win 7 drive and restored them from that, they were on my backup drive so they were accessible. I had to switch to Window’s new mail program as Windows Live Mail, part of Windows Essentials, was no longer able to connect with the Gmail outgoing server. I don’t like the interface as much but it works. I keep the Windows Live Mail just to access those storage folders, The new system could download all the emails from Gmail but these were 1 1/2 GB of old emails I stored on my computer to reduce server space use and protect them.
So I use Windows backup to take an image daily, starting over once or twice a month, and I make a drive image onto an external drive connected for the purpose once a month. I back up my main storage by using two matched drives, I think a syncing program or a RAID 1 array might simplify that but it does not take that long to copy things twice. Most places I often access I have a folder on my desktop with shortcuts to both drives. I just copy to both at the time and I am protected if either one crashes. I do a copy to an external drive once in a while just in case of a malware attack. I would lose some stuff but not much. My movies are on an external drive that is always connected. They are backed up to another drive connected for the purpose. Any new movies are copied to a folder on the movie drive and to a folder on one of the storage drives. When I have enough, a hundred to two hundred, I copy that folder to the backup drive and move the new movies from the “new” folder to the main folder on the main movie drive. I add the new movies to a spread sheet showing all the movies at that time. Everything is duplicated, long term or temporarily. Some things have redundant duplication.
It is easier and faster to keep up with than it is to describe, I liked Ghost and it was better than the Windows utility, but of course I will never use them again. I had already switched my security from Norton to Webroot over the NRA thing. That was last year. I have used Acronis True Image and it worked but I preferred Ghost and I read the new version was troublesome, so I am using Windows. Biggest fault I see is it restores all files rather than letting you go in and pick what to restore after looking at things in the image. Ghost was good on that. I will try one of the other drive imaging software if I don’t like this but so far it works well. The daily is automatic to an internal drive. I do the monthly to an external manually.
I tend to have a lot of extra large external drives, in 3TB, 4TB, and 6TB sizes from upgrading my movie drives and their back ups as the collection grows. I took a 4TB and 6TB out of the enclosures and installed them as internal drives but still have some. I now use a 10TB for my movies and a 8TB as it’s backup so I should be good for several years at least. I have the DVDs as backup for the movies but as the collection grew I realized it would take years to rip them all so a BU was worth having.
Sorry to ramble. That is what I do. I three desktop PCs, two with Win 10 Pro and one with XP Pro for running old hardware and software that will not work on the newer systems. Firefox Sync has been very handy.
Thanks, Mac. I’ll look into the Windows back-up utility. I got the old hard drive to work for a bit, but ran into permissions problems that I wasn’t able to fix before the drive went TU. So it’s back in the freezer and I’ll see if I can copy things over, then deal with the permissions problem.
I understand about the older hardware. I considered this when buying Win 10 for my PC. I paid extra for a retail or full copy rather than an OEM copy so I could reinstall it on a new motherboard if I had to replace mine. I hope that money is wasted and this PC lasts a lot longer. I don’t really have any reason to build a new box. I don’t think any new features would be important enough to me to justify it. This one works well for me.
Good morning Gerbil Nation! I seem to have been successful in my attempt to flip my schedule to daytime for the weekend. It’ll make Church and some visiting much easier.
I wonder if I should change my profile pic? I was like 40 somethin’ when that was taken, or maybe late 30ies. Not sure. But I’m pushing 60 at this point so…. I look more than a bit different, especially if I don’t color my beard and hair--which usually I’m too lazy to do.
Sometimes, when I stream I put some temp color on because I think a bit of contrast looks better on the stream.
I had long dreds for a while a few years back, but I cut ’em off one day.
Why am I telling All Y’all this? I don’t really know. Just sharing stuff from ordinary life.
Ya know, I think my daughter took this picture so probably, I was not quite forty. Funny thing is I can’t find any more copies of this picture on the cloud except this very small low res one that I made for thumbnail/profile pics all those years ago. Not sure why I never uploaded a regular copy onto the cloud somewhere, but it appears I didn’t.
I looked in my collection to see if I might have it but no. I have a couple that look like they are from the same time, one even looks like the same shirt, but they are more from the side, with your hand to your chin.
That was so nice of you. Thank you : )
It was fun to look through them. I was showing pictures of you and the Gentle Lady to Elena. Our visit was a high point for us.
Mac: Very cute Doggos
Happy Caturday But With Doggos, GN!
Hi, dv8!
Teh yay for flipping your schedule.
I dyed my facial hair for a lot of years, mostly as my head-hair obstinately refused to go gray at all and I didn’t like the “mix”. At 63, still kinda mixed up top; I was hoping I’d go completely white-haired in my late ’50s like Dad did. Oh well…
The last time I got anything resembling a haircut was a trim right before SackO’SugarK and I got hitched more than nine years ago. (And I’d been letting my hair grow at least a year before that august event.)
Catching-up on JimCo paperwork this morning; BBL.
I’m really too lazy to dye my hair, but, as I often say on my streams:
I’m not particularly vain about it, but I do think that since I’m so pale, that touching up my hair and beard adds some much needed contrast, particularly when I use a green screen which can wash you out further.
Plus, my lighting setup isn’t very good. I really hate lights in my eyes, so I just have 4 walmart LED lamps shining at the wall in front of me which (barely) provide enough light to light the green screen.
This makes me think of the “Mullets rule” t shirt in the movie “Blood Lock.”
I have pretty much gone white/gray.
Harper loved these pictures. Thank you Mac!
Here’s mine, sorry for the mess.
That is quite a work station. Mine looks neat in the picture but when the depression sets in it becomes quite a mess, and I don’t let Elena clean in here. It can get quite bad until I get better.
Elena was always confused by the fact my desk at work was always neat and organized but I was chaotic and messy at home. I could function by focusing on what had to be done but most other things went wanting. It was how I functioned with depression in a job environment that did not make allowances. The price was high but it let me be effective.
I understand all too well.
The Roland MIDI keyboard is not as nice looking, but more functional with a software based piano sound (mathematically modeled “pianoteq”) but I also have this now.
Oh, it’s a Weber baby grand by the way,. It has lovely tone and action. The little light on the right of the keyboard is a climate control system which helps keep the piano in tune and in good condition in the strange Arizona climate.
An incredible aspect of our new tech world.
Still dress in black though.
You seem quite slender now. Looks good. I’ve slimmed down a lot also. Much easier on the old bones, I find.
I took off over 50 pounds in 2013 but put some back on in the next couple of years, still better than I was but certainly not even close to slender. It does help the feet and joints, doesn’t it? I tried hard to lose some more after the heart attack in 2016 but could not make progress. After reading up I decided the insulin shot at night was blocking me and cut it out, taking one only in the morning. It worked and I did start losing slowly. I have taken a few more off but have a long way to go. I am hoping for at least another 25 to 30 pounds but it will take time.
Clothing selection is fast and simple, and cloths shopping is all on Amazon, Dickies work cloths.
Thanks for posing the pics, Mac Nice to see you working at your desk.
The pictures are from the last few years. The desk is about the same but I have a new chair. I spend most of my time there. Three desktop PCs and three monitors, plus a TV to serve the DVD player/VCR/Direct TV DVR. I can play streaming video into a DVR and burn it to DVD.
neato. It looks like a comfortable office. Mine is a bit cramped. Owing partially to my Yamaha Digital (the one that you saw me play in Portland) which I do not really have room for.
I want to give it to a young man who lives in Idaho who is currently on a Mission for 2 years, I’ve been spending some time trying to fine someone who might be going that way who can get it to his Dad. His Dad told me he can meet someone halfway in Utah, for example, but so far I haven’t come up with anything yet, and it is a bit too big and heavy to ship commercially.
But I digress, as per usual.
Anyway, I have this bunk bed desk (like a college student might have) and lots of shelves. The bed itself I use for storage unless someone comes to visit. Which happened fairly recently when an old high school friend of ours came out for a visit. Normally, it has the Costco stash sitting on a board on top of the mattress.
Elena and I were talking just this morning about how it must have been hard for you to move into less space. I do remember the beautiful Yamaha, of course. I am lucky here to have one room for my desk/den/ computer supplies, and one room for my library, the first time in years I could unpack all of my books. The library has been shifting more to DVD storage. I now have over 6,600 movies on DVD. We watch those together on a 50″ TV but I mostly watch movies on my PC. I have all of them in mp4 or avi format on a 10 TB hard drive connected to my PC. I use those for watching or for editing clips or stills from them. For those copies I use a program I think you or Harper told me about, Fair Use. It has been great. I use One Click DVD copy to copy DVDs. It has worked well for me, better than the others I have used.
Good day, fair gerbils!
I brought with us the movies that you so kindly sent to me. Thanks again for that thoughtful gift, Gentle Mac
My pleasure, my gentle friend. I don’t have a list of what I sent but if there is anything you want I may have it and would be glad to send it.
David went through a Dickies phase and I was amazed by how easy they were to care for! Completely dry after 10 min. In the dryer with no wrinkles and perfect creases in the trousers. I think his chefs coat is a Dickies. I never thought to replace it from Amazon, thanks! You do look great in the pictures, my friend. I’d sure like a portrait of you and your sweet wife for the new house.
I have been wearing them for many years and they work well for me. When I was fatter I had to have the pants shortened as they did not offer them that short with that big a waste line, but after dropping a few sizes I can just order what I want. I have not changed in over five years.
Speaking of the new house, maybe I could get Little Mouse to venture out here for a visit if I mention that we have a grand piano in the living room. SQueAk! If your health would hold up for a trip we would love to see you again. I’d even dust teh living room!
Happy Caturday, Gerbil Nation!
Good day, dv8, Mac, and Fatwa!
I come to you courtesy of a new laptop. Yesterday morning, I got a notice that my hard drive was failing. I prepped an external hard drive to receive the back-up, but by time that was done, my computer crashed, then would not boot. I spend my spare time yesterday researching laptops that I could pick up today. I really hate rushed research. I know I could have picked up a new hard drive for my laptop -- Teh Older has a copy of Windows 7 -- but the laptop is 8 years old and has been slowing down and support for Win7 will halt in a week or so (or less).
My bookmarks and passwords have been restored, courtesy of Google, but my email and documents are probably lost. I bought an enclosure for the hard drive I removed from the old laptop, but the new laptop doesn’t recognize the old drive -- says I need to format it. I’ve put it in the freezer, in hopes of getting it to work long enough to pull off some data.
Yes, I’ve neglected proper back-ups [hangs head in shame]. I’m thinking I now need to set up some system to back up the whole family’s worth of computers. Mac -- I know you’ve got quite an extensive back-up system, what can you recommend?
I am sorry about the loss and hassles. I know it too well, which is why I am a bit obsessed with back ups. I have used Ghost since 2003 but was recently quite POed when they cut it off on the two copies I bought and used. They stopped support, which I have no problem with. I did not need updates or help, it was working fine on two windows 10 machines, but they both showed they were trial versions and a key was needed, but would not accept the proper keys. When I contacted them they said that was part of no support and too bad, buy something new. I did not rent these programs, I bought them. Imagine your car maker sending out a signal after five years that bricked your car so you had to buy a new one. So now I do a daily backup with the Windows backup facility, including files and a drive image. This is on my 500 GB SSD drive. My main storage is on a 4TB internal drive, and copied on a 6TB internal back up drive. This is easy to keep up with but would be vulnerable to a ransomware attack so I do an occasional backup to a large external drive I hook up for the purpose.
When I recently installed Win 10 Pro on my main desktop computer I was able to transfer my browser favorites and settings by using Firefox sync to transfer from my other PC which I had synced to my main one just before the change. I use Gmail and access through Windows live mail so I synced that through my Microsoft account but was dismayed to find my local storage folders did not transfer. I went into my Ghost image of the Win 7 drive and restored them from that, they were on my backup drive so they were accessible. I had to switch to Window’s new mail program as Windows Live Mail, part of Windows Essentials, was no longer able to connect with the Gmail outgoing server. I don’t like the interface as much but it works. I keep the Windows Live Mail just to access those storage folders, The new system could download all the emails from Gmail but these were 1 1/2 GB of old emails I stored on my computer to reduce server space use and protect them.
So I use Windows backup to take an image daily, starting over once or twice a month, and I make a drive image onto an external drive connected for the purpose once a month. I back up my main storage by using two matched drives, I think a syncing program or a RAID 1 array might simplify that but it does not take that long to copy things twice. Most places I often access I have a folder on my desktop with shortcuts to both drives. I just copy to both at the time and I am protected if either one crashes. I do a copy to an external drive once in a while just in case of a malware attack. I would lose some stuff but not much. My movies are on an external drive that is always connected. They are backed up to another drive connected for the purpose. Any new movies are copied to a folder on the movie drive and to a folder on one of the storage drives. When I have enough, a hundred to two hundred, I copy that folder to the backup drive and move the new movies from the “new” folder to the main folder on the main movie drive. I add the new movies to a spread sheet showing all the movies at that time. Everything is duplicated, long term or temporarily. Some things have redundant duplication.
It is easier and faster to keep up with than it is to describe, I liked Ghost and it was better than the Windows utility, but of course I will never use them again. I had already switched my security from Norton to Webroot over the NRA thing. That was last year. I have used Acronis True Image and it worked but I preferred Ghost and I read the new version was troublesome, so I am using Windows. Biggest fault I see is it restores all files rather than letting you go in and pick what to restore after looking at things in the image. Ghost was good on that. I will try one of the other drive imaging software if I don’t like this but so far it works well. The daily is automatic to an internal drive. I do the monthly to an external manually.
I tend to have a lot of extra large external drives, in 3TB, 4TB, and 6TB sizes from upgrading my movie drives and their back ups as the collection grows. I took a 4TB and 6TB out of the enclosures and installed them as internal drives but still have some. I now use a 10TB for my movies and a 8TB as it’s backup so I should be good for several years at least. I have the DVDs as backup for the movies but as the collection grew I realized it would take years to rip them all so a BU was worth having.
Sorry to ramble. That is what I do. I three desktop PCs, two with Win 10 Pro and one with XP Pro for running old hardware and software that will not work on the newer systems. Firefox Sync has been very handy.
Thanks, Mac. I’ll look into the Windows back-up utility. I got the old hard drive to work for a bit, but ran into permissions problems that I wasn’t able to fix before the drive went TU. So it’s back in the freezer and I’ll see if I can copy things over, then deal with the permissions problem.
Good luck, Paddy. That is frustrating. I hate losing things like that.
You don’t use an email service like Gmail or Yahoo where they would have them on their server?
I understand about the older hardware. I considered this when buying Win 10 for my PC. I paid extra for a retail or full copy rather than an OEM copy so I could reinstall it on a new motherboard if I had to replace mine. I hope that money is wasted and this PC lasts a lot longer. I don’t really have any reason to build a new box. I don’t think any new features would be important enough to me to justify it. This one works well for me.
Good luck with the freezer gambit. I’ve been lazy about backups since cloud storage.
There is also this open distributed cloud thing that I’ve been looking into. I can tell you more about it once I study it some more.