In Like a Lion

Our weather today reminded me of a little poem that I read somewhere a long time ago:
"First it rained, then it blew, then it friz, then it snew."
That pretty well sums it up. It rained all night, started snowing and blowing around 8:00 AM and, last I checked, it was still snowing and blowing. We had about a foot on the ground by this afternoon, but we have only added a couple inches since then. It's supposed to be over with by 1:00 AM. I'm not complaining, you understand, it could have been worse. At least we didn't get any tornadoes.

It didn't take all night to install that stuff, I just went to bed and let it run unsupervised. I woke up a few hours later, it was finished, and I shut off my computer. It wasn't until the next day that I checked around to see what I had gained. I haven't noticed a lot of difference, except that I seem to be getting more messages lately. Some of them are helpful, and some of them are not. When I get my book I will see if there is some way to selectively uninstall the things that I don't want to see. I suppose I could ask Cortana, but she is starting to make a nuisance of herself as it is and I don't want to encourage her. She keeps trying to worm her way into my real life, offering to remind me of appointments, give me weather and traffic reports, recommend movies to watch, and update me on news and sports events. I'm sure she means well, but I don't need any of that stuff from her. My needs are simple, and I'd like to keep it that way.

I don't know whether or not I can transfer data from my old computer to my new one. When my first computer died back in 2008, it wouldn't even turn on anymore, and the guy at the tech shop told me that it wasn't worth fixing. When I upgraded from Vista to Windows 7 I had a different guy at a different tech shop do it for me, as the other tech shop had since gone out of business. He said that I might be able to do it myself, but he could do it faster and he would transfer all my files for me. All that stuff is probably still on my old computer, but I can't run it for more than a few minutes before it goes down on me. I have everything I care about, mostly photos, on CDs anyway. I don't plan to load them into this computer. If I ever want to look at them, I can just read them off the CD.

I forgot to tell you, the first sign of trouble I had with my old computer was that the CD player quit working. One time it went down on me,  and I got a message that there was some strange software that was preventing me from starting back up. When I took the CD out of the machine, everything else worked fine for awhile, several months I believe. Every time I would put a CD, even a blank one, in the slot, my machine went down on me. I haven't been doing a lot with pictures lately, so it didn't bother me too much. Then it started going down when I watched a video on You Tube, then whenever I went on Face Book. When it started going down when I was on the Institute, I decided it was time to pull the plug.

About the time Uncle Ken was teaching computers to his colleagues at work, I was learning about computers at work. I resisted it at first, we all did. Those young managers, fresh out of college, couldn't understand how we managed to live our lives without those things, and we couldn't understand why they seemed to need them in their lives. I remember at one of the early meetings, one of them said, "You know, it's not so different than programming your VCR." There must have been a dozen of us old timers there, and the only one who even had a VCR said that she never messed with it herself. The only reason she bought it was for when her grandchildren came to visit.