2015 — 20 March: Friday
Much to do today1 so just this simple placeholder diary entry for now. "I shall return."
[30-minute pause]
Right! Tea, next, methinks. It's quite chilly out there, and can only get even gloomier as 'totality' (or should that be 'partiality'?) gets closer. The first solar eclipse I can actually recall "as a lad" was somewhat over 50 years ago. Not being ocularly-corrected at the time, I literally couldn't see what all the fuss2 was about until seeing photos taken by Big Bro (?).
Off I go again
I feel completely confident this is the very last time I shall have to register the death of one of my parents — if only because I somehow seem to have mislaid the last of them somewhere :-)
Rather later in the day...
... I'd no sooner returned from Trip #3 — taking the all-important "Green Form" (obtained as part of Trip #2) to the Funeral director — when along trotted Mr Postie. What's he got there? An annual bonus statement for mother? About one of her investments?3 Fair enough, though (of course) I must now tell them about her, get them to shut this investment down, and pay whatever funds are due from it into her estate. That will see off the first of my £4 "Death Certificates" (Trip #2 again) in due course. Still, "Ev'ry little helps" as dear ol' Dad used to say.
I could then...
... finish reading the fascinating tutorial on Latex in the latest issue of Linux User & Developer magazine.4 That done, I switched my focus to my simple lunchtime tuna and tomato sandwich snack. At that point, I had a clear conscience, given the sheer quantity of bureaucracy I'd hurdled. That "Tell Us Once" (aka Department for Work and Pensions [DWP] death notification service) malarkey notifies potentially seventeen different guvmint and local authority departments. In my mother's case, only four seem to have got in on the act, but it still saves me the major brainache of sorting out which four I would have needed to deal with.
They even retrieve your Library Services card. I don't recall mother ever setting foot inside a library, though her elder sister (Mad Aunt Peg, with whom I enjoyed a relaxing annual fortnight's holiday as a kid) would happily take me along to her local library three times a week. Even unto the Adult section, too, bless 'er!
What's next?
Well, as it's Friday, and the sun was shining, I'd initially planned to toddle across the village to see Roger & Eileen for a cuppa and a chat. But (being an idiot) I thought "Might it not be fun to update the Linux Kernel first?" Silly move... something I very quickly realised when it all fell over in a smelly heap complaining of no more room on the disk. The /boot partition was down to its last 4MB (!) because someone who shall be nameless (who, to give him his due, very kindly drove over here to dig me out of my entirely self-excavated hole) admitted the partition had been set up with considerably less room than he'd intended.
Happily, the Mint Update Manager seemed able to undo that which I had tried to do. Then, while the patient, as it were, was still on the operating table we decided to have yet another crack at getting the new GTX970 graphics card to produce anything, by any means necessary, on my monitor. We had in mind an experiment or two involving fresh installation with the graphics card already in situ, and with the motherboard's BIOS set to point to it from the word "go". But the word "go" isn't on the known vocabulary list. Thus sped by another couple of hours of puzzling failures.
The GTX970 is now temporarily absent from Technology Towers and exiled to Another Place, where it will in due course be given a chance to strut its stuff when fitted to a different motherboard, and run under a different OS (Windows 7, to be precise). I shall be quite interested to hear how it acquits itself, but it's safe to say this card is no longer my best friend. [Pause] Actually I am, it seems, not completely alone in having these problems. Recent (?) Gigabyte motherboards are reported to be less than happy with a whole slew of (recent?) GPUs. Some people report having managed to fix problems by applying a BIOS upgrade. Switching from UEFI to Legacy may also do the trick.
Ain't I got fun? I've never actually flashed a motherboard BIOS before. And Legacy 'mode' would leave me unable to fit disks of more than 2TB or so (without a struggle, at least) but I suspect I can very easily live with that.
Suddenly...
... even my evening meal is now a thing of the past. It's already past 20:32 and clearly must be time for a refreshing cuppa. My next job will be to keep Big Bro up-to-date on today's progress through the pre-Probate part of the process. I mustn't ever forget Betty was his mother too! I'm pleased he agrees with me on the total pointlessness of crossing the Seven Seas just to say "Hail, and Farewell" to a dead body in a wooden box.