Updates, cleaning and decluttering, and a new coffee pot

This weekend I spent a lot of time inside my house. A mood overtook me Friday night and I didn’t really want to do much of anything. Originally, I had several plans in mind, including a motorcycle expo I’m glad I didn’t take the family to (biker gangs decided to fight, stab and shoot it up), getting breakfast burritos at Santiago’s (which would mean getting cash from the ATM (they don’t accept cards) AND getting up early, so, no…), taking my brother to either play golf somewhere (also getting up early) or go to Top Golf (can be expensive sometimes). None of which appealed to me, so I didn’t do any of them.

This post will end up being longer than I intended, so, bear with me…

Friday
My laptop is a Macbook Pro circa 2008. We’ve been through a lot together and she is a fantastic machine. I’m writing this blog post on her right now. She’s had to have a couple things replaced over time, including her logic board and battery, but still does what I need her to do every day.

I’ve avoided updating to Mac OS El Capitan out of fear. My iMac, circa 2007, was upgraded (mostly without my permission) to a newer OS X version and didn’t have enough ram to run both the OS and any programs. This pissed me off. I had to buy more ram, maxing the machine out, but since it’s one of the first intel-based Macs, it couldn’t really handle a lot of ram in the first place. Long story short, she works, but nowhere near as well as she used to. And if I downgrade her OS, I lose browser support.

Anyway – all of that has kept me from upgrading to El Capitan. Until Friday.

My iPhone has also been giving me fits. I’ve got a 4S and the iOS9 update screwed the proverbial pooch for me. Things weren’t working right for me immediately upon doing that update. Started having issues with email, with apps being slow, and kept getting pop ups with everything I did on the phone, to sync it to the cloud – which I don’t want to do (for a lot of reasons which would probably be a whole ‘nother post).

Under normal circumstances, this wouldn’t be an issue. Having problems with an update? Roll your phone back to the last backup you did. Just plug it into iTunes and hit restore. Well, that was the other great new ‘feature’ – iTunes would no longer recognize/access the phone. It said I needed a newer version of iTunes. Well, iTunes was up to date and there wasn’t another / newer version. So I couldn’t sync my phone, couldn’t move music back and forth, and, alas, couldn’t restore it to the previous version.

A couple of other updates have been released since then, and didn’t fix the sync issue.

Which brings me back to Friday. I’d been doing manual backups of my laptop data to DVD. Why? I have external drives, but they filled up with audio files and backups of the podcasts I do. So I ordered a new 5 TB drive, did some shuffling around, deleted some garbage, and cleaned up all my external storage. This made room for me to use Timemachine again. Friday, I did a full Timemachine backup, then I downloaded El Capitan and started the update. That was at 10 pm. It restarted my laptop and a message said it estimated 30 minutes to complete the update. Cool.

An hour later, it said it estimated 29 minutes to complete the update.

Sigh.

I let it run all night. At 10 am Saturday morning, it finally finished.

Meanwhile, I was cleaning and decluttering.

Started with the bathroom – my bathroom off my bedroom. Scrubbed the toilets and the floors, the shower, the sink and mirror. I’ve talked about this before. It’s something I do from time to time. Different folks have theorized that one can time travel within ones own lifetime that it’s about control and order, that it’s something I can control and accomplish, however small a thing it might be. I also folded the laundry I hadn’t folded, and put stuff away. I cleaned off my desk, which had become a nightmare of piles and clutter. I have a glass top desk with no drawers, which looks cool but isn’t very practical because it has no storage space whatsoever. So I bought these cheap plastic drawers/organization things and used them to get some storage and declutter.

I was also cleaning out my DVR at the same time. Just running through some stuff in the background while everything else was going on.

Kind of an action packed Friday night at casa de ATFMB…

Saturday
The update finished at 10 am, but that wasn’t the end of it. Just the core update. Now a bunch of other stuff had to be updated, too. As John Anealio predicted, I lost WireTap Studio and Levelator on the Laptop, but I mostly use them on the iMac now, so that’s ok – not great – but ok. The laptop was slooooow, and all because of the updates running in the background, everything from Google Chrome to the Photos app was trying to update at the same time. I mostly had to just let it do it’s thing.

Continuing the update theme, I updated Scrivener (finally) to the latest version. I’d been holding off on that one since a lot of the changes/updates to the software were El Capitan related, and, truthfully, updates to anything that touches my writing folder scares the shit out of me. I’ll write another post about the Scrivener update.

Now, here’s something interesting. With the El Capitan update, suddenly iTunes recognized and would sync with my iPhone. Isn’t that interesting? One would almost think it was on purpose to force an update. Clever, Apple. Clever. So I did the iOS update, too. That went quickly. I can sync things again – which is good.

This was also the day my new coffee pot arrived!

It’s funny. For years, I didn’t drink coffee. Growing up, my mom used to give me either hot tea or coffee in the mornings to wake me up. I’ve always been a heavy sleeper, and not at all a morning person. She used to have to drag my ass out of bed (literally) to get me to school. She’d also shove a mug in my hands on the drive and I would drink it to chase the cobwebs away. It wasn’t strong coffee by any means, and probably mostly milk and sugar, but still. My friends at school (I’m talking elementary school here) hated the way my breath smelled. This translated to me not drinking coffee for many, many years.

When mom was in the hospital last year, I was really burning the candle at both ends and in the middle. I would stop at Starbucks a lot, and that has continued to this day. I usually stop every morning on my way into the office. Which is costing me who knows how much money (I could do the math. But I don’t want to.). So I decided to do something different – hence the new coffee pot. It’s a Kitchenaid ‘single serve’. You brew a cup at a time – 6, 12, 18 oz. It doesn’t use any of those k-cups, so there isn’t the waste. In fact, it has a reusable filter, which is nice. And it comes with an 18 oz travel mug. Not a fan of the mug so far. It has a rubber lid/lip, and, oddly, I can taste it. Which is gross. But overall, I’m happy with it. Just need to find the right coffee beans. And yes, I have a grinder.

I’ve come a long way since elementary school. 😉

EDIT: After writing, and editing this post (well, editing is a strong word – let’s go with ‘scheduling’ instead), I sat down to edit some podcasts. Opened up Amadeus Pro, the software I use for just such occasions, and was greeted with a ‘your software is unregistered’ message. I was offered the choice between shutting it down, entering my product key, or purchasing a new license. I looked up my old license key and plugged it in. And was greeted with a message saying that my version of Amadeus Pro had been tampered with. Um. I didn’t really have time to dick around with it, so I bought the latest, El Capitan approved version of the software and got on with the days work of editing podcasts…