fribble
1d ago
Thank you for the input. As not-a-gamer it's really hard to tell how far babying the gaming rig goes. Y'all spend hours with these things! And care deeply about even peripherals like the perfect mouse and keyboard.
It is a nice keyboard. It's got a nice thunk to it, like the old IBM keyboard. Modern keyboards are garbage.
fribble
1d ago
It was his primary windows system, so it has art and photos on it. We're talking ~15TB if not in a raid. A lot of that would also be dev work, games, and just junk, which I don't need to save, but I want every bit of his photos and art I can save. His first retirement project was going to be making more prints of his favorite digital art & photos, and I expect over time my daughter and I will do just that.
Thanks for the data point. I'm keeping memory in mind, too. If it's the motherboard and the drives are in a raid, I'm SOL for this system. I've gotten backups of all the NAS and external raids, and I've got the SD cards for his cameras. I think without the drives on his computer I'll mostly be losing his newest artwork, which is most likely in an unfinished state. And maybe I'm just making myself feel better.
fribble
1d ago
I am fortunately not having to worry about money. We'd been planning for his retirement so we were already financially set up to not need his salary, and I have always intended to work until they cart me out of the building kicking and screaming. But everyone should plan for these eventualities. I won't qualify for the social security widows benefit until I'm 60, several years from now. If we'd been a single income household (or if I'd only had a pin money job) and not planned for a potential early death (our daughter's over 20, so if we'd done a 20 year term life insurance policy on him when we had her, it'd be done by now), things could be rough right now. And tough even were I 60, bluntly. If you take it at 60 you're cutting your monthly pay by something like 28% and if you needed to take it at 60 the odds of you having a better benefit to swap to once you're at FRA are pretty low.
Thank you for mentioning the built in raid - that's a feature on his system. I was thinking of a repair company, mostly because we're old enough that most of us who played with hardware haven't in ages beyond bespoke gaming rigs, and we've all been down sizing which means our piles of spares have been whittled away. But since asking anyone else (friends or repair service) to work on the system comes with the non-zero possibility that it gets hosed, I want to do every (non-destructive) thing I can think of first.
fribble
1d ago
Not at all worried about anything I might find. I was married to him for 30 years. I know everything important about him and there's nothing I would or could find that would diminish my love and respect for him.
FWIW, I appreciate that my husband named his directories rationally so I just have to delete "porn" and won't be accidentally running into it when I'm trying to save family photos from loss.
fribble
1d ago
The specs say the motherboard system has a built in raid. But I'm not clear if it was required, and he did use this system for gaming, and he typically used raids for redundancy not speed. OTOH he also did a lot of graphics processing ... yeah, betting going with a drive enclosure isn't going to solve my problem here. Still, worth a first pass.
fribble
1d ago
I can't get completely through a boot cycle, which is why I'm leaning towards flakey power supply. It's a dual CPU, wouldn't a low watt psu put stress on that? Sorry, I haven't really played with hardware since I had to put the IRQ jumper on my soundblaster. Swapping out memory is easy, calculating power needs is harder.
I'll dig through the boxes of spare bits and see if there's a power supply in there. Oh! Somewhere in his building o junk there's a fluke. If I find that I should be able to narrow down issues. Thanks for putting me on this line of thinking.
fribble
1d ago
I've been told (by real life lesbians) I have a dyke aesthetic but that's as gay as I get.
Excess computer gear is definitely getting donated. We have the makings of a Very Nice homelab, especially if someone's interested in playing with VOIP and anything telephony. I'm pretty much all cloud these days and it's going to be hard enough to find someone who's interested in a few full size racks and a mix of equipment that includes 2U servers. I hate to think of this stuff going to scrap, but it may end up that way. (The kid's not interested in hardware & I doubt that'll change. So no need to hang on to it for the inevitable flip back to on-site data centers when everyone realizes VAX, oops, cloud, isn't the end-all.)
Thanks for the input. I'll try for the data on the drives as a first pass.
fribble
2d ago
In defiance of the typical advice to avoid making any decisions for a year, my husband's desktop died while I was getting a backup of the data.
I have gotten the external raids mounted on another system to get them backed up. That leaves me with the internal drives. I don't see a raid card in the machine but I could be wrong. The symptoms of the machine are getting stuck in a boot loop. It dies/restarts at different points so I think it's the power supply. A drive enclosure is significantly cheaper than a replacement 825w power supply. It could be memory, but there's only one module so I can't do the easy test of swapping out memory/sockets to see if the problem goes away.
I don't exactly want to decide to let his system be dead. He was a gamer & also did tons of graphics processing and he babied this thing. But neither my daughter nor I have his use cases and resurrecting this just to shut it down after I get a backup seems pointless. If the internal drives are in a raid my decision is made for me. But if they're not...
This is why they say to not make major decisions for a year. Not just because it's too easy to decide something in the throes of madness, but also because your ability to think just flat out goes out the window.
So. Would you rebuild it? Play one last game of Half Life 2 since he'll never get to play 3 (like there will ever be 3) with his daughter? Or focus on the data and get backups of his photos and digital art and leave the hunk of metal dead like its owner?
fribble
11d ago
To back this up, I bought a low mileage 2010 Honda Fit in 2016 for 9K. I just sold that car to carmax for 3.5K. While I had it, I only had normal car maintenance costs (oil changes, brake pads, the occasional tire). 5.5K for 10 years of car ownership seems reasonable to me.
And I probably could have bought it cheaper if I haggled - I don't, I'm bad at it. And I probably could have sold it for more if I'd done private sale, but I'm dealing with other things and couldn't be bothered.
fribble
30d ago
If you completely fall apart, come back here. I can listen and maybe help you find some handholds to claw your way back out.
I'm pragmatic, so all the stupid logistics that have to be dealt with are keeping me on track for now. Can't fall to pieces today, have to sell the now-extra car. Can't fall to pieces during the week, have to pretend to be functional at work. Can't fall to pieces on Friday, have to open the estate... I expect the practice of just putting one foot in front of the other will start to feel doable without the "have tos" soon. You're, fortunately and unfortunately, getting plenty of practice with this now through caregiving - you're not falling apart so badly you can't pull it back together. That's a skill. Trust yourself.
fribble
1mo ago
I am so sorry for what you're going through.
My husband just died suddenly. Went from going to the ER because he wasn't feeling right, to diagnosed with cancer, to being told it was terminal, to dying, in under a month. My daughter (new college grad, in first job, so a few years older than your brother) flew back to the east coast once we got the cancer diagnosis, so she got about 2 weeks with him before he died. Those were incredibly important weeks.
She's quit her job and is currently in the process of packing out her apartment to come back home. Even as her parent, I feel very limited in what I can do - grief is so intensely personal. I hate to think she's blowing up her life. But I remind myself that's catastrophizing - she's young. Even if this makes it harder to find another job, and she has a bit longer path to follow to ultimately get where she wants to be, that's ok. There is time. And I'd rather she manage her grief in such a way that she has a future she wants, than that she succeeds-for-the-goal-of-succeeding and loses herself in the process.
So I guess, from also being in the middle of this, I'm letting you and me know that there is no out but through. If through looks messy or hard, well, it often is. Be patient with yourself and your brother (and your dad). Don't let your focus on taking care of them prevent you from taking care of you. All of you are likely to make decisions that look suboptimal from the outside. They might even be suboptimal. But when you're living in a horror show, you can only do what you can do.
My thoughts are with you.
fribble
6mo ago
Culturally I am suburban middle class. Economically upper-middle. Though I live in a working class neighborhood which isn't particularly a suburban middle class thing to do; I should live in the nicer neighborhood. But I am cheap and not at all into conspicuous consumption (and my husband is culturally working class and distrusts the middle class, especially suburbia). Paul Fussell would argue with where I place myself culturally.
fribble
6mo ago
I am trying to convince myself that I can recover from a hysterectomy in a week. Two if I am a complete wuss. I need to start doing planks like a crazy person I think. And make sure my surgeon does the surgery in a surgical center because I will lose my mind if I have to spend any time in a hospital. I hate being "sick."
fribble
7mo ago
I second the 80's Cricket magazine. Also the old Analog and those sorts of magazines. The old Boys Life magazines were also good if she's not sensitive to the title. Used bookstores used to have them.
Around that age my modern kid read/we read with her the Little House books, Boxcar children, Trixie Beldon, Three Investigator, (the old) Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Chronicles of Narnia, Madeleine L'Engle, Ursula K. LeGuin, Roald Dahl, Lewis Carroll, E. Nesbit, Susan Cooper, Peter S. Beagle, the color Fairy books, Edgar Eager, Wizard of Oz books, Chronicles of Prydain... So I guess I am saying if you can't find some easy subscription thing like Cricket, do a do it yourself book subscription and send a "keeper" book or 3 every month. (In contrast to the Magic Treehouse and Rainbow Fairy books which will slowly drive you mad and you will gleefully pass along to another child as soon as your kid lets you.)
fribble
7mo ago
- Under 10 miles.
- No idea. Women's fashion shops with custom alterations under 15 miles.
- Nearest I don't know. The one we get our dairy from around 30 miles and same distance for a different one we get fruit from. Vegetables... Probably further away but they have a drop off under 5 miles away.
- Around 5 miles.
- 1 mile, but I preferentially go to the one around 8 miles away.
- Around 5 miles.
fribble
7mo ago
In your position, I would pursue it. You can gather information without doing anything. You can take the babiest of steps as you want to. It can be really weird what works with kids.
Does your kid react to all demands in the same way? If I told my kid she had to put on sneakers before we could go to the park, she would lose her mind. But if I said we could go to the park but "the rules" said we needed to put on sneakers, that was different. She also loved racing, so we would both put on sneakers and see who could do it the fastest. Or race against a timer.
This sounds like a real tough situation. FWIW, ADHD meds worked wonders for my kid and in retrospect I wish I had gotten her started on them sooner. I waited til middle school, figuring scaffolding her environment and plenty of physical activity were working. They weren't. Her self esteem took a beating.
fribble
7mo ago
I loved Agatha Christie as a kid and she's how I learned-and-it-stuck that adults really under estimate kids. I was in the gifted and talented program and my 4th grade teacher still publicly accused me of plagiarism for my book report on one of her books. Not that he ever explained who he thought I was cribbing from, but apparently 8 year olds aren't supposed to be reading and writing coherently. After he quizzed me, right then, in front of the class, he stopped. No apologies were made.
It amuses me that 3? Of my foundational childhood memories involve her books as a critical element.
fribble
8mo ago
How does one get better at riding a bike as an adult?
I rode my bike a lot. It became my primary mode of transportation over COVID. I rode it to the store, for exercise, anywhere that was less than 3-5 miles away by roads that didn't completely freak me out. And I had a couple mile route that I did pretty much every day I didn't have an errand to run. I still wouldn't say I am comfortable in terms of riding in traffic or on unfamiliar roads (identifying and dodging road debris or potholes at speed makes me nervous) but I am comfortable with signaling and stopping and starting. I don't feel like I am constantly at risk of randomly falling off my bike. OTOH there is no way I would ride on a mountain bike trail or even do a more than 10 mile ride on a nicely paved surface, so you may be looking for different advice.
fribble
8mo ago
We label turn off valves. For us, this has been sharpie on walls, but I would go for a nice label option in a home I built. When the house is flooding a nice label with an arrow pointing to a handle you last looked at when you moved in 5 years ago is a good thing.
When we do repairs we add turn off valves if possible. I would rather turn off the water to one room than turn it off for the whole house, if possible.
When I was a kid my parents tried to build but there was weird neighborhood approval of plans required and they eventually gave up and sold the land. Hopefully you don't run into anything like that.
fribble
8mo ago
"having a kid out of wedlock is a bad idea" is left-coded
... when it presupposes one is having lots of sex with lots of men outside of marriage.
I'm going to make the wild suggestion that both sex and children should be within a marriage.
fribble
8mo ago
My kid is an only who started daycare at 3 months old. If she tried to be a trad wife she would be figuring it out from scratch. I bet that's the position a lot of them are in. Toss in a tendency towards perfection or desire to compare your life with someone else's social-media-curated version of their life and you get a mess.
fribble
8mo ago
Getting pregnant is not that big a deal. While I am glad my daughter did not have a baby at 16, there are so many other things that would have been worse. Her getting sucked into the alcoholic party culture was something I was significantly more concerned about at the time. Given a choice between my kid being an alcoholic or a teenage mom I am choosing the latter. She declined both.
fribble
8mo ago
Why would natural family planning mess up my daughter's life?
Setting aside the apparent assumption she would be having sex out of wedlock, if she came up accidentally pregnant she would deal. (But if you're having sex pregnancy is a known consequence so it's hard to think it's accidental.) Just like if she lost a leg. Or had some other things happened that threw a spanner in her life plans. She's already dealt with things not going as she might have chosen. Pregnancy and children aren't some uniquely awful thing that destroys your life and it's weird to act like they are.
And I say that as someone who was one-and-done. Had I had subsequent pregnancies/kids I would have dealt. Life happens to us all.
I have tried to catch it in a boot to get to the bios, so far no luck. I found an external enclosure and the drive didn't mount/wasn't recognized. I'll find another and then check a different drive, too.
I think the system was working previously, but it's a guess. He'd been feeling a bit under the weather before things got bad, so it had possibly been late November since he touched the computer. He asked me to turn it off once he went into the hospital, which was late December, and then it was late January/early February when I first tried to get a backup of it and at that point it didn't boot successfully. The UPS it was on also died sometime during this time period, which is probably also influencing my desire to blame the power supply. Even though all other electronics in the house are fine so I don't think we got hit with a power surge, which even if we did, the UPS should have absorbed it. I'll run through the things I can do, then see if there's a repair company that can do something other than what I've done. And based on the input I've gotten here, I'll consider that good enough.
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