Housekeeping – Page 3 – Splendid Isolation

Still Bricked

August 19, 2025 Kim du Toit Housekeeping

Here’s the back story, and it’s time for an update.

There is no update. The fucking ASUS is still dead, unresponsive to all blandishments and tricks (such as suggested in Comments originally) and a trip to Geek Squad up the road to see if someone perchance could go “Aha! We know that problem!” and fix the thing (Best Buy does sell ASUS laptops).

I have a warranty — and an extended one as well — except that the details thereof are safely installed on the hard drive of the ASUS itself. So I’ll have to contact ASUS through their website [groan] and try to get the situation resolved that way, somehow.

In case you’re wondering, Best Buy does do warranty repairs on ASUS laptops… but only on machines purchased from Best Buy.

Doubleplusfucked, I am.

As I said in the previous post, blogging is going to be light because trying to function on the old HP laptop is akin to taking a covered wagon from coast to coast instead of flying the friendly skies NYC-LAX. There was a reason I quit using it, after all, and replaced it with the shiny new… brick.

Raw, unadulterated suckage.

Wish me luck as I try to get this issue taken care of.

Bricked

August 14, 2025 Kim du Toit Housekeeping

On Monday morning, just as I was starting a fresh round of posts, the new ASUS laptop bricked. Black screen, no response to the power switch. Tested the power cord (I have a spare), but nothing.

So I took it to the Geek Squad, who took two days to tell me that the problem was not the power cord. And I was out of town for those two days on personal business, which is why I only got this thing back in motion last night.

Aaargh. So now I’ll probably have to send the fucking brand broken new laptop to the ASUS service center or some damn place, while I revive the old HP and press it back into service one more time — you remember, the old machine held together with duct tape, with the touchpad masked with cardboard and the letter “o” which doesn’t always respond to a finger’s touch.

Hello, Windows 10 my old friend.

Of course, I don’t know what the real reason for the bricking can be — broken motherboard, some other problem from a cause I know not what, it will all be revealed at some point.

Fortunately, all my data is backed up, but there is a distinct possibility that I’ll have to rebuild all the apps and programs and such from scratch, as I did when the ASUS was fresh out of the box.

Fuck.

Bear with me while I go through the travails of the modern digital world, again.

Posting may be light for a few days, I’m sorry.

Fair Warning

August 8, 2025 Kim du Toit Gratuitous Chick Pics, Housekeeping

The general theme for all today’s posts will be “unrestrained boobage” (gratuitous sample below the fold).

If you are of gentle disposition, or of a censorial nature, you may want to skip today altogether and come back tomorrow.

The Elephant In The Room

May 28, 2025 Kim du Toit Housekeeping

Folks, it’s time to approach this topic head-on.

I refer here to the issues that several Readers have had with the Comments on this website — i.e. email addresses blocked, unable to re-register, etc. all with the end result that you are unable to post comments.

The problem appears to be with WordPress (hic delenda est), and neither I nor Tech Support II have been able to fix it.

I can only surmise that this is being caused by the old version of WordPress that I currently have installed, but I have to confess that I’m really nervous about upgrading because the last time I did so, all sorts of things changed and it took me about a week to fix it all up.

Nevertheless, I’m going to do the upgrade sometime over the next weekend in the hope that this will fix Comments, but I’m not too sanguine that it will. If everything gets fucked up as a result, please be patient with me.

In the meantime, if you absolutely want your comment published but your access has been nuked, please email it to me and I’ll pop it under the relevant post. Just put in the Subject line: Comment for post [title] and I’ll get to it as soon as I can.

I really miss my old website, but that software was compiled from scratch and maintained by Connie, and there’s absolutely no chance that it can ever be resurrected, more’s the pity.

Anyway… wish me luck.

Long Waits

May 7, 2025 Kim du Toit Housekeeping

Every so often I come across a meme, cartoon or expression which makes me chortle… except that it is extremely date- or time specific, and can only be posted at a certain time or on a specific date, e.g.

So I have a folder on my system called “Date Specific” which contains all of those, and inside are sub-folders with names like “Tax Day 04-15”, “National Ammo Day 11-19” and so on, in which I keep said objects.

So a couple days ago (May 5) Reader Steve D. (who is, I think, Hispanic) sent me an email which contained the following:

Bravo, Steve. It took me a minute, of course, because Sinko Da Mayo is amazingly not a date which resonates with me, particularly as it isn’t as relevant to me as dates such as a former South African client’s daughter’s birth date (don’t ask, I never even met her) or the day I first French-kissed a girl (December 17, 1968) and so on.

Anyway.

The only problem (for me, anyway) is that I have to keep a mental note of annual calendar dates so that I can post the appropriate entry — and given my advanced state of age-related mental diffusion, that’s becoming increasingly difficult.

Which sucks, because if I happen to miss the date and fail to post the thing, I have to wait a whole damn year before it becomes relevant again.

Here’s one I missed last July 4th, for instance: