Metered

I got into the usual back and forth about the opening of the next scene. Couldn't resist an Eagles reference but decided to save most of the desert highway (dark or not) for the trip to WIPP.

I'd hit the references and I thought I picked out a decent Geiger counter for her. I didn't remember the references but I remembered the trail I took and pretty soon one model was leaping to the fore. Okay, good, but what did she learn about such things during her (as yet unwritten) museum trip? Did I have pictures of that cute little interactive exhibit?

I did. And what was in it?

 Yeah, that's clearly the same CD-V 700. Cool!

I picked it because it is still a good tool, if basic and lacking any modern logging capabilities. But also made of metal, painted in John Deere yellow, issued to Civil Defense and even has the triangle on one side. And we're still not done. The dial is marked for mr/hr (yeah, not even mR). And despite the manual claiming strontium, what is under the nameplate as a test source for most of them is depleted uranium.

***

So that was a tech success. Also this weekend, I finally found out why my gaming machine was crashing randomly. It wasn't Steam Cloud, it wasn't a bad thumb drive, it wasn't bad RAM, there weren't any bad sectors on the SSD and it wasn't even the old SSD transferred from the other machine.

It was the two-month old Samsung M.2 that was randomly disconnecting. I can't entirely blame them for not ameliorating; it is a rare issue, at least from the reviews. They could just put a tiny subroutine that would detect the drive was disconnecting and save those users all that pain, though...

...especially since when I'd finally figured it out (due to the boot being corrupt and the repair tools refusing to fix or reinstall Windows), it was too late to get my files off before it disconnected for good.

Yeah, don't talk to me about cloning the system. I can reinstall Windows fast enough. It is getting Python and the Nvidia drivers and everything back in order that's the pain. Oh, and over a terabyte of files that I also didn't have anywhere big enough to make it worth backing them up. 

Well, Steam is mostly back up. Maybe just as well my AI pipeline is gone.

Sigh. You'd think, four days off, I could get some stuff done. Clean house, take a walk, write more than a short driving scene. It is already Saturday evening and I've just got Penny standing in the dirt looking at a suspicious drum and wishing archaeology covered more nuclear physics than how radiocarbon dating works in practice.

I am dreading the end of the year. A short vacation for us; we take off Christmas Day and return the first full week of January. Seems like a lot of time, and when we get back everyone will be expecting us to be fully rested up and ready to work the next three months without a single day off (have to, since we have to burn our own vacation days for these mandatory days off).

Really, it is just over a week, and it will pass in an instant.