I did yesterday. Go ahead. Guess.
If you guessed "none", you guessed right.
And did ya hear me screaming? And dropping eff bombs all over the place? You didn't? Are you sure, because I was most certainly doing that. Until about midnight.
It was one of those days when the hits kept coming. Nothing really bad, but nothing I could walk away from either. Well, I could have, but that's just not in my DNA.
So, here's what happened. Way back when in the dark ages of my internet presence, I used an email client (fancy way of saying program) by the name of Eudora. It was Qualcomm software. I really like it and upgraded as they upgraded the software. Then they quit working on it. But it's still a most excellent piece of software, in my opinion. It still runs. And it's really super simple to move and install. I have all of my old emails, back to 1998. Neat, huh?
Now, the majority of those emails are license codes for software I've bought through the years, which come in mighty handy when transferring your files and software to a new computer. If you've saved the install or setup files, you will most likely need those codes to get the program to run and to get rid of the nag screen. Some of the stuff I have is so old, the companies who sold the software no longer support it, or are out of business. So....
Although I've had Eudora on my systems, I haven't used it much for email. The reason? I can't get it to send. I dunno what I'm doing wrong, but every time I try to send an email, I get an error message. Not fun. So, I just started using my Gmail account. And I started saving emails on my Gmail account, instead of downloading them to my hard drive. No biggie, right? But I would occasionally do the download thing and I had my Gmail settings so that all the email downloaded would be deleted off of my Gmail account.
See where I'm going with this?
Yeah. I downloaded all of my mail from Gmail. All of it. There was nothing left. It was all on my system.
And I kept playing around with the settings for sending mail and not having any luck and actually having really screwed up the settings to where I couldn't even download mail, I went to the old Eudora files and copied them over to the new one.
And my inbox? All mail that I had downloaded less than an hour previously, was gone. Disappeared. Written over. Not merged, not added to, but just gone. The last new mail in my inbox was April 18, 2017. Let's see, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December (counting on fingers), eight months of mail. Gone.
And it wasn't in my Gmail either. Because I had it set to automatically delete the files when they were downloaded! Isn't that just great?
So, I re-installed one of my recovery programs, hoping it would find some snippets of mail. Nope. I tried another one, a trial version. Let it do a deep scan. Oh, you want to reinstall the data? You have to buy the software for the low, low price of $69.95.
Eff bombs. What can I say?
So, doing more research I did find a page with a way to contact Gmail about missing mail. It's for people who've been hacked, not dumbshits like me, but yeah, okay, I'll try it. I was honest about what happened when I filled in the form, so... It doesn't always work, but it did for me. They were able to restore the mail that had been in my Gmail box when I trashed it all. There were almost five thousand pieces of mail in the trash alone (the restored mails did not go into the folders I had originally save them to). Mail that had license codes and download links. Yeah, I still save them. The first thing I did was go through that trashed mail and moved it to other folders in Gmail.
It's going to take a while, but I'm pretty sure I've gotten most of the stuff I needed. And I changed the settings for when I download to just keep them in my Gmail. I think that will be a lot safer than going through this again.
So, getting that done took pretty much most of the day.
While waiting for the recovery to do its job, I checked out the various streaming movie sites for great deals. Amazon has some great savings on buying movies, Vudu also has some good pricing. HDX movies, two for $9.99. And Google has the offer out again that they had in November, you can buy one movie for half price. I got seven streaming high def movies for less than forty bucks. Cool, right?
So, we're done in the office around seven, head out to the family room. I ask him if he wants to watch a movie. Sure.
The Roku isn't seeing the internet. The repeater isn't repeating. More eff bombs. We have repeaters because the way this house is situated, there are walls between the router and the various devices. I have a repeater in the extra room and one in the dining room. The one in the dining room isn't working. I almost got it reset, but working on a little, tiny tablet, things don't always work the way you want them to. Especially with those little tiny radio buttons. I was afraid I'd bricked it, trying to do the reset thing.
Just to be sure, I got the repeater from the extra room and was able to set that one up. The Roku saw it. Okay. So, it's not the router (which had been reset multiple times during the computer switch over). It was getting later and later and Brian was asleep on the sofa and I'm nothing if not persistent. I got the other Roku and tried again, to set it up.
I almost had it, then the setup stopped. I ended up searching for help on the laptop in the family room, found another way to set this repeater up. You need to actually connect it to a computer with an ethernet cable, it won't work wirelessly. I had an idea that my netbook was in the hallway closet, deep under piles of stuff. Seeing as it was after eleven, I didn't really want to mess around looking for it. I went into the extra room, grabbed the old laptop out of the carrying case, found the plug, took both of those, along with the repeater and an ethernet cord and a wired mouse, into my bathroom.
I shut the door and got everything connected. Unfortunately, while I was trying to get the repeater set up as a router, the stupid laptop was trying to install the drivers for the mouse and I kept getting a bunch of annoying popups about the status of the installation. But, I finally had success. I disconnected the ethernet cable from the router and turned on the Lenovo tablet I had bought for my mother-in-law way back when so she could read her granddaughter's blog entries on her trip across the Pacific Crest Trail. She never did use it and it came back here.
And it came in handy last night. I was able to get the repeater up and running. Took it out to the dining room, switched it out with the one from the extra room, changed the wireless connection on the Roku, and there it was, it saw it! Success!
I took the extra room repeater back to the extra room, left the laptop on my bathroom counter (still there) and shut down the laptop in the family room and settled down on the sofa. Played a couple of games of Candy Crush, then turned everything off and dozed off. I was in bed by midnight.
And, I got no paperwork done.
And, I still can't send mail from Eudora. But I'll get it. I'll get it set up right one of these days. Just not today.
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