stoutfellow

I cannot begin to describe my frustration with Wacom. After a whole series of roadblocks to getting the tablet up and running, I asked to reset my password. I received an e-mail with a link to the password-reset page. I entered a password, repeated to confirm, and pressed "Submit". Nothing visible happened; when I went over to the login page, it rejected the password I had entered.

The e-mails suggest going to the Wacom support. All it has are links to a bunch of FAQs, none of which are relevant to my problem. There is no place to chat or state a specific problem.

Swelp me, if I have to fall back on PowerPoint with voice-over, I will be well and truly pissed. (Well, actually, I'm there already...)

My home desktop computer is apparently unable to access Dark Sky. ("Server Not Found".) I checked isitdown, and they report no problems; I am able to access it from my laptop and from my office computer. I suppose there's some "clear XXX" command in Options that might fix this, but I don't know which one. Help?

ETA: Problem fixed!

Learn something new every day... Apparently crushed walnut shells used to be used to clean jet engines (and are still used for smaller engines). They're tossed into the running engine, where they have the right abrasiveness to scrape off gunk, and they wind up being incinerated without causing further problems.

I may have mentioned that I have a large collection of backgrounds, and my monitors cycle through them at six-hour intervals. I have a lot of Astronomy Picture of the Day screens, a bunch of screens from one or another webcomic, a few TV-oriented screens (mostly from Buffy or Angel), and most recently a variety of famous paintings.

A few days ago my computer had another episode of catatonia. When I rebooted, Windows Media Player had once again forgotten all of my music - it had somehow recovered a while ago, but it's gone again - and my monitors were stuck on two backgrounds, randomly choosing one or the other every six hours. (One was a picture of the recent solar eclipse, in the background of a pagoda; the other was a closeup of Jupiter.)

I finally did... something, I don't know what, that kicked the display out of that loop, and I've got "The Blue Guitar" and an Angel screen up now. We'll see if this is back to normal, or just another tight loop.

:is hopeful:

The university requires us to change our passwords at least once every sixty days. We get a warning at two weeks out, and then daily reminders from one week out on.

My last change of password occurred on November 5; the next deadline, therefore, should be the 4th of this month. I should have started being noodged before Christmas.

Nada. I think I'll make the change on Friday, just in case; but I'm curious what's going on.

I may have made a mistake.

Last Wednesday, I posted the geometry take-home final. I just received the first submission, in .pdf form, from one of my best students.

I have not looked at it yet, and probably won't until the rest come in.

It's 14.3 MB. (Lots of images, and he wanted them to be clear...)

Something odd is going on with my Facebook account. When I log in, my timeline shows no posts, nor the field for entering a new post. When I shift to "Home", I get a shimmery I'm-trying-to-load image, but nothing comes clear.

Has anyone experienced this? I realize many people don't have FB accounts (and I don't need to be asked why I do), but I can't post this there, given the nature of the problem! Any thoughts or helpful (see previous sentence) suggestions?

TFW... you point the remote at the TV and press a button, only to be told "Not available".

"Not available? *Not available*? It's the freaking *off switch*, you bastard!"

(It took another couple of tries, but the TV did, eventually, submit.)

I just ripped my three new CDs - Sweet, Katy Perry, and Lou Rawls - to my hard drive, and have begun listening to them.

It is a nice coincidence that the process of ripping a standard-sized CD takes about as much time - a little less, I think - as a single track, so I get to listen to the first song while ripping.

Feh.

I use Thunderbird for my e-mail on my home computer. The mail passes through the university server, however, which uses MS Outlook. Somehow, the Notifications flag on the latter got turned on, giving Outlook permission to read my mail and notify me of upcoming events. "You're flying to Seattle tomorrow!" was not too bad; I just deleted it. But today, I received a message: "Your bill with :company: is due in a couple of days!" But a) I paid that bill a week ago, and b) if I had not paid it, :company: would have given me a noodge by now.

This service, I do not need. It took me a while to find the appropriate settings page, but I have turned it off. I think. I hope. I still don't know how it got turned on.