Found 4 super cool books in 3 different street libraries! Did I need those books? No because I have 12 in my room that are just living on my desk unread! But I took em anyway because they're older than me and its less stressful than all the choices at a real library. When I read through them I'll either return them or put in some of my own (or dad's!) books :D

Well, today's forecast calls for another storm.

I can only hope in positivity that it's a 2 out of 3 chance that it won't try to rip up our area, especially after last Thursday.

I really can't afford to let my food rot in the freezer when the power company doesn't get it fixed to be considered a blip like yesterday.

I lost a bag of Alaskan Pollock Filets and Potstickers dumplings in the freezer and milk in the fridge from the Thursday storm.

Either way, I will attempt keeping you guys posted. They were right about summer being hot and stormy.

I don't know if this will be useful to anybody, but if it saves a person a couple of hours of headache, then it will be worth it.

My POS, off-the-shelf, Dell laptop I bought 5 or so years ago is crapping out. It died on me three times this morning. These issues have been going on for 6 or so months, so I decided to replace it with the cash I've been saving via doing a no spend month and the penny challenge I've been doing.

This morning we went to Best Buy for a new laptop. I didn't buy anything expensive as I don't use my laptop for much. I use it to watch Youtube, check the weather if for whatever reason we don't have power, ect. If and when I play my game, I play it on a desktop. I found what I wanted, paid, laughed at the dude trying to get me to sign up for a Best Buy credit card and left.

It took about a half hour for the laptop to update. After that I thought I was good. It would have been another hour to install Waterfox, the extensions I wanted, blah, blah, blah then go about my day. I spent 2 hours trying to get the stupid thing out of S-Mode. I tried every tutorial I could find as this is a well-known problem with Windoze 11. I stopped short of playing around with the registry. I just bought the f-ing thing a couple hours prior, why should I have to mess around with the registry. Then I called Best Buy. I got stuck talking to somebody that spoke broken English who put me on hold for technical support. Yeah, no. I packed up the laptop in the box it came out of and brought it back to Best Buy.

Long story short: They've been busy all day re-installing Windows 11 on various systems that have been purchased recently because of this bug that Microsoft has yet to fix. Geek Squad is known for poking around in people's computers, but since there is nothing to poke around in as there is nothing on it sans that crap it came installed with, they can have fun trying to find anything interesting. Whatever this new bug is has happened not all that long ago. I haven't had this problem with other Windoze 11 or Windoze 10 systems.

If anyone buys a off-shelf Windoze 11 system and can't shut off S-Mode, bring it back to wherever it came from. I don't know what the advice would be for anybody that has a system shipped. I don't trust Fed Ex, UPS and so on with anything these days, so trusting them with a computer wouldn't be something I'd be okay with.

EDIT: The new Windoze 11 install worked. However, when I turned the laptop on this morning, I got a warning that I was out of space. I installed Waterfox, FireFox, Revo Uninstaller and Bleach Bit ( I use this to clean out the junk files left behind) none of which use 86 gigs of RAM / space.

Geek Squad did the install, but didn't remove all the files left behind from the factory install of Windoze. All of those are now removed, then I spent over a hour trying to figure out how to delete or permanently shut off widgets a those act like a vampire for RAM usage. After trying several things which failed, I ended up downloading a tool / file that took care of that.

Another vampire of space is One Drive which was also removed along with any other bloatware I came across. I understand Microsoft tries to make their systems idiot proof, but ugh. Locking people out of completely disabling widgets because they are a resource hog is ridiculous IMO. Windoze 10 is nothing to write home about, but Windoze 11 is the worst. The only good thing I can say is the system didn't come with apps for games ridden with micotransactions, ect...

Moral of the edit: If you bring a system in because of S-Mode and have Windoze 11 re-installed via Geek Squad, be prepared to do some clean up. I went from having no space to bringing the system down to using 30 gigs which isn't great, but I cut the RAM usage by more than half, so I'll take it.

I'm tutoring a friend in a computer science class. For some reason, my Visual Studio Code can't run the debugger without bugging me (heh) to place a random string of text somewhere to make it happy - I can't bother.

I installed CLion which is free if you're a student. Wanted to see if I had WSL version 1 or 2 installed, for performance reasons... - the Windows Terminal app doesn't start. Just crashes straight away. Well, half an hour went into figuring out that I just had to uninstall Windows Terminal because it has this bug related to self-elevation? Whatever.

Back to CLion - as soon as I started it and opened my friend's code - the program highlighted the (quite convoluted) logical mistake in the code. What a relief!

The tree is suspected to have hit the roof. Where my room is. So I have to inspect my room for possible water damage tonight.

My house is falling apart due to outside forces.

Fan-frigging-tastic...

Lucky that my grandfather can set up an insurance agent for this emergency.

A day filled with a LOT of waiting and a LOT of nagging. For the most part both simultaneously....
Last hour of waiting more or less saved my sanity, though (no nagging).

We didn't have a storm in my town last night, but going North, they got the brunt of it. We got that from the repair people from what happened yesterday in an emergency call.

Only half the job is done repairing the house.

The tree is gone and roof has a temporary patch so the roofer can get a better estimate to my family.

The plumbing and HVAC are still in need. They didn't show up today, unfortunately. I guess I will be using my parents' bathroom at night and have to be careful not to overheat until further notice and update.

So, my allowance came early, spent it mostly if not the majority of it on food, drinks and healthcare.

I also did scheduling of two doctor appointments and received a bike from United Way, whom I have been seeing since I came back to New Jersey about 8 years ago.

I have placed my orders, got the prescription refill processing started and received my bike after much time had passed since I became eligible.

I should see my emails for any shipping updates.