Monday 11/16/2020
Checked around the apartment in a few more places. Somehow my memory of the keys is linked to when I picked up about 3 day’s mail on Saturday morning. Certainly that’s the last time I had them. So on the way out for a walk, I asked at the desk and… the Ethan handed me my keys.
They had been found hanging in the lock of my mailbox. Apparently there was so much mail and I was trying to sort out the trash from the actual bill or two, both hands full of mail, I just walked away from the keys hanging in the mailbox door.
Walked the full jogging route without stopping, which is an improvement. Then met with Margaret in the dining room to deal with problems with her Time Machine backup. She has an external drive that was being her Time Machine until it came up with a hard error last week. I’d pointed her to the inexpensive external drive I’ve been using, and now she’d bought one.
I took my laptop thinking that I would set it to work running Disk First Aid on the old drive, while on her machine I formatted the new one and started a new backup going on it. But the old drive was unrepairable, Disk Utility couldn’t do anything with it (fsck exit code 8, trashed file system). Later I took it home and continued trying to access it, but it appears to be toast.
So got the new one going and then talked about her problems with photos. She has a lot of digital photos and at some point, they got disorganized. Prior machine, hard drive failure, Apple restored her data but the photo organization was lost, or something. She promises herself she will spend an hour a day reorganizing photos but never quite gets around to it. (Been there…) At some point one of my colleagues (she declines to name names) thought it would be a good idea to make backup copies of her pictures so now she has two, not quite identical, folders of photos on her desktop. Which at 15GB each are a bit of a space problem — considering all the same pictures are also being held by the Photos app.
We decided that, since we were taking a brand new complete backup onto a new drive, she would wait until it was finished, and then delete the two folder of (hopefully) duplicate photos. If she ever needs them back, they can be restored with Time Machine!
Since I don’t know Photos, I got her a copy of the latest edition of Take Control of Photos. Possibly if she reads it she will be inspired to do more.
Back at my room I had an email from the tech squad, could I help Randy who has a problem accessing the SF Chronicle e-edition from Safari on a Mac. Unfortunately I couldn’t. I spent ten minutes on the phone with Randy and got nowhere. I wanted to try logging in with his subscriber ID but that didn’t work. I strongly suspect he once set up a unique password for the Chron, and has since forgotten it but the Chron lets him in using Safari. Whatever, I couldn’t get in to replicate (or not) the problem.
Which brought me to lunchtime. Busy morning!
Afternoon was much quieter, so quiet that I was going stir crazy. I determined that from now on, I must get out of the building in the afternoon as well as the morning, even if only for a short walk to nearby park to sit on a bench and read.
Codgerville 