Category: Uncategorized

It rained, at times heavily, for most of the day today. I was thankful for it. The rain probably kept more people inside than if it were sunny. For the people that were out, an umbrella automatically enforces social distancing, so that’s good too. If I could have it my way, it’d be rainy every day until all of this is over.

Tomorrow is Friday, which means another work week is over. I will have worked from home for two and a half weeks now. I think a lot of work from home records will have been broken before we see the end of this.

Starting this weekend, I need to figure out how to get some more exercise. I’ve been pretty stationary now for almost three weeks. I have some weights here in my apartment I feel like cardio would be better. The other option is to walk down the stairs in my building and then walk back up. That’s great cardio but I’d have to go outside my apartment. I could minimize the risk but going late at night, there would be little chance of seeing anyone else in the stairwells with me. How big of a risk would that be? The fact that I’m not sure how dangerous it would be to walk down and back up some stairs really highlights what a difficult world we live in currently.

Exercise or not, I am looking forward to the weekend.

I went outside today and I hadn’t even planned on it. I had a package from Amazon arriving today and I was sure it would go to the post office and not directly to my building. What a surprise it was when the intercom went off on my phone this morning and there was a postal worker on the other end. They were downstairs with my package. Without thinking, I said I’d be downstairs right away. Downstairs!?!?! That meant going outside. I hadn’t left my apartment in about five days.

I quickly got dressed. I should have washed my hands before leaving my apartment but I forgot. My apartment building is now limiting a maximum of two people in the elevator at one time. Luckily, no one else was with me on the way down. It felt almost surreal to be in the elevator, to be outside. I got down to the lobby and saw a postal van parked right outside. The postal worker was waiting for me. I stepped outside in to the fresh air for the first time in what seemed forever. It felt odd and it almost felt wrong to be there. I quickly grabbed my package and went right back upstairs. Again, I was lucky to not have to share the elevator with anyone.

Once I return to the safety of my apartment, I quickly washed my hands thoroughly, even though I had used my hoodie sleeve as a barrier for any handle, switch, and button I had to touch. It felt risky to even just step outside my building for less than a minute. Life is so different now.

I will need to go outside again fairly soon as I need to get some groceries. I hope it goes smoothly and without incident.

I’m hanging in there but I am definitely hankering for some fresh air at this point. I’ll probably go out on my balcony tomorrow but what I’d really like is a walk outside. I feel, however, a twang of guilt every time I go outside now. I came up with the idea of going for a walk between midnight and 4am. To be safe as possible, I’d avoid the elevator and take the stairs down. I’d avoid touching any door handles and use my sleeves to manipulate them. Once outside, I’d be alone on the street, free to get some fresh air.

It’s after midnight as I write this and from my window, I can’t see a single person on any of the streets visible. Hell, I’d be hard pressed to even find a car right now. Well, it’s something I’ll consider some more in the next few days.

I didn’t leave my apartment all weekend. I’m probably one of many people who did the same as well. Some people don’t seem to have adhered to the program though. On Saturday afternoon, a beautiful and sunny one, I saw a group of young people, sitting on the grass just off the sidewalk. There were about four of them, sitting right next to each other, as if on a picnic. What were they doing? Do they all live together or did they eventually leave and then go back to their respective homes? The mind boggles.

Maybe it should come as no surprise, but my weekend wasn’t that exciting. I spent it cleaning, cooking, playing video games, listening to podcasts, and watching YouTube. On the topic of podcasts, there are some that I’ve just started to listen to and there’s more than a year’s worth of weekly episodes to catch up on. In the “before times”, I’d maybe listen to four episodes on a weekend at best. In the last week, I was able to listen to nearly 30 episodes of one podcast and now I’m all caught up. Just started another one this weekend as well.

I cannot imagine how this would have played out had this pandemic happened in the pre-Internet days. People would be on the phone a lot more. Information would come from the TV and radio mainly. Part of me thinks that might have been better. There wouldn’t be idiots spreading misinformation or stupid conspiracy theories. The advent of the Internet means that morons have an incredible ability to contact other morons, whereby they all furiously masturbate over their wild stories and twisting of the real truth. How did we get here?

Well, Monday is the start of another week. Another weird week, where I pessimistically think there might not be a whole lot of good news. Good luck to everyone out there, stay safe, stay inside, and wash your damn hands.

I’ve now worked from home for over a week. This is the longest I’ve worked from home continuously by a wide margin. I didn’t need anything from the outside world today, so I stayed inside all day and night. Out of all the days I’ve been working at home, today I was probably the most productive. That’s not really saying much though, all things considered.

During these last few days of surreal isolation I’ve noticed some interesting habits that I’ve developed. The first is that I’ve stopped letting my dirty dishes pile up in the sink. I’m not sure if it’s been a by-product of the necessity of being super hygienic and clean in these times but as soon as a plate and maybe three utensils make it into the sink, I’ve got the gloves on and I’m washing them. In the “before times”, I’d stack four or five plates on top of each other plus a bouquet of utensils in the sink before I’d even consider doing dishes. I might have also developed this habit because I just have a lot more time on my hands now. I’m home all day and I just have so many more opportunities to wash my dishes.

Since I basically see no one now, I will sheepishly admit that I might go a day or two before showering. It’s not like I’m getting sweaty and working out in my apartment (maybe I should), so going a day without showering isn’t that big of a sin. Also, this way I’m saving on soap, which might be a critical resource in the near future.

Well, it is time for bed. I wonder if this is anything like minimum-security prison.

Life has gotten tougher for most people now and I’m sorry we’re all going through this. I have tried to put myself in other people’s shoes and walked a mile in them. Other people are facing more challenges than I. I still have a job and my company has been wonderful in trying support its employees while we all try to work at home. In the last few days, they announced that most employees who are working at home are eligible to spend up to $265 CAD on office equipment or supplies to help them improve their work environment. We’re free to buy a new desk, chair, monitor, or even noise-cancelling headphones. That’s a lot of money to spend on us and I know many companies are going to take a massive hit on their bottom line next but they gave us the money anyways.

We’re schedule to work at home for about another two weeks and if I were optimistic, I would love to think we’ll be returning to work after that. There’s a part of me that thinks that’s not going to be realistic. We might be doing this for quite a while.

I wish I could do more for the people who are holding society together right now. That includes public health officials, governments workers from all levels, medical workers, people working grocery stores and supermarkets, delivery drivers, and basically anyone who is involved in keeping our supply chains running smoothly.

One day in the near future, I hope they’ll all get the recognition they deserve.

So, I discovered my recent computer problems have nothing to do with failing components on my end. A Windows 10 update that was pushed by Microsoft onto users is causing lots of trouble for a significant amount of people. I Google’d my problem today and found that many others were having the exact same issue. The issue even popped up on my laptop today. It was then I realized there’s no way both my desktop and laptop would have the exact same type of component failure. It had to be a software update.

I managed to uninstall the faulty update on my laptop but the issue is a bit more complicated on my desktop. I can start the process but removing the update requires me to reboot my desktop, which currently is very unstable at this point. Technically, if the update is remove, rebooting shouldn’t be a problem but I don’t trust Microsoft at this point. As my desktop is a mission critical piece of equipment since I’m working from home for the next several weeks, I can’t risk the procedure until probably the weekend. Even it succeeds, there one last step I need to do. I’m actually running Windows on a spare mechanical drive instead of my SSD, so if this works, I still have to clone the drive back onto my SSD, and put my SSD back into my desktop.

Then the longer term issue is how long before Windows fixes that update with a real fix. Or do they even bother doing that? Is my desktop going to work just until I’m forced to update again? I don’t really need these computer headaches, especially when a computer is vital link to the world during this global pandemic.

I didn’t leave my apartment once today. I’m doing my part and I hope many other people out are doing the same. The only human interaction I had today was through digital means. I only had to speak a few sentences all day and that was first thing in the morning during my daily standup with my co-workers. Otherwise, I talked to no one.

I can’t really say I was very productive at work. Even before all of this, I wasn’t enjoying what I’m doing, so with all of this uncertainty going around, I’m not exactly motivated to put in a 110% everyday. I could write a very long post about that topic by itself but I’ll leave it for another day.

As for not leaving my apartment, I think my record for not leaving my home is 48 hours. When I was in grad school, I believe at least once, I would come back to my room after dinner on Friday night, and then not leave my room until dinner on Sunday night. I was working on a pretty involved assignment or project and just didn’t feel the need to even step outside my room once. I had all the food and drink I needed for two days, plus I had the Internet, and of course, I needed time to work on school stuff.

Let’s see if I can break that record this week.

I did pretty much nothing on the weekend. That nothing included not buying toilet paper unlike some idiots out there. I think I have about seven rolls left. Since I live alone, I’m probably good for another week or so. As I mentioned though, I limited my outside activities. I had planned on visiting a breakfast place but chose not to. I was also going to shop at T&T to get supplies for hot pot but I decided against it. I was also going to buy a new SSD at a local computer shop but those plans changed as well. I need to go into detail about that.

In my last post, I wrote about how my desktop computer chose this perfect time to stop booting into Windows. I originally thought it was a faulty SSD because when I cloned the disk to a spare mechanical drive, my computer started working again. I went to bed on Saturday night thinking this was the case. On Sunday morning, I woke up and tried to turn on my computer. I was met with this new error: “Reboot and Select Proper Boot Device”. Essentially, this means my computer can’t find a hard drive where it can see an operating system. Restarting the computer would just cause the same error to appear again. Going into the BIOS, it could see all my drives but it didn’t know one of them had Windows on it. I swapped between the spare mechanical drive and my old SSD probably a dozen times on Sunday, and it didn’t seem to matter, I got the same error again. I tried several different solution I found on Google and none of them seemed to work.

On one of my last attempts, with the mechanical drive in, I somehow got it to recognize Windows on it and my computer started Windows properly. It was at this point that I realized that I could not shut down my computer as I probably wouldn’t be able to start it again without some random miracle. I did a test and I can confirm that I can put it to sleep but a complete shutdown or a restart is not possible. I also recognized that Windows updates can cause restarts, so I’ve paused updates for 35 days, the maximum allowable by Windows 10.

Obviously, this is not a permanent solution as a computer normally needs to be shut down or at least restarted for many different reasons. I just need this computer working while I’m working from home for the rest of this month. So, what is the actual fix? I’m not sure at this point. I’m going on the assumption that both these drives are working fine, so my next logical guess would be the motherboard. Less likely, though I can’t rule it out, would be the power supply. Replacing computer parts is a hassle even during the best of times but in these uncertain days, it becomes even more problematic, especially since it’s so crucial to my job now.

We’ll see how far I can get with a computer that cannot be shut off. It should be interesting.