Wednesday November 8th 2023

It was another nice Florida fall day with the high temperature reaching the low to mid eighties. Once again the day began with the overnight temperature in the very comfortable sixties. There was only a scattered covering of clouds throughout the day.

All day yesterday I was waiting for a notice that a couple of packages from Amazon had been delivered to one of the nearby lockers. That notice finally came in about 8PM last night. My first task after breakfast this morning was to go pickup my packages from the locker. Other than dealing with the expected traffic that was an easy task.

One of the purchases I was waiting for was a USB Wifi device for my laptop computer. The built in Wifi on my primary picture editing and blog writing machine stopped working last week. I bought the thirty dollar replacement part to get back on the air. While it was broken, I had the added task of moving the files via SD card to my Chrome book computer to upload and publish the blog every night. The added step, while not difficult, added another ten to fifteen minutes to the task.

Once I got home with the new Wifi device, I plugged it in and turned on the computer. Nothing changed. The new device was recognized, but it was not operational. I started to dig into the issue in more depth. My intuition was telling me that it probably wasn’t a hardware problem, but rather a software problem. Digging into various menus, dialogs and using a few command line tricks I remembered from way back, I found a software switch that wasn’t thrown. Once I toggled the switch the original interface started to work and the new one complained that it wasn’t unique. How everything got fowled up in the first place is a mystery, but I had Wifi again. I’ll put the device away as a backup and keep plugging along with the nine year old computer’s original part.

It was very satisfying and kind of fun getting the laptop back up and running, but my computer tasks weren’t done. During the time my laptop was off the internet a backlog of updates accumulated. There were so many that I decided to make sure my data backups were all up to date before allowing the accumulated updates to be installed. The primary things that needs backup on my computer are all blog related. I keep two different backups of all of the pictures I take and the blog text. I don’t usually have enough internet bandwidth to make cloud backups of all my pictures, so only select pictures get cloud backup. External drives and USB sticks get all of the data.

All of the computer maintenance tasks took several hours. During the backup and updates there was a lot of time I could do other things, but I had to be available to watch for problems and kick off the next part of the process. My original plan for the day was to go to one of the Disney theme parks late in the afternoon into the evening, but I got lost in my computer maintenance task. There is always tomorrow and I get to use only one computer to create and post my blog tonight.