10th April 2024 - Nostalgia Meets the New

 You will all be delighted to hear I have stuck to my hourly exercise regime. I will keep doing it again today, and in a few weeks time I will start to see some visual benefits.

Today was filled with a lot of nostalgia and doing work for organisations I have been helping for years. It started off with an email from a charity in Sunderland, whom I manage their email system for. With only 4 members of staff, and none of the staff looking likely to move on for a few more years at least, it is very rare I hear from them. It must have been 4 years since their last message. They had a new staff member joining them and needed a new email address setting up!

That was a nice easy start to the day. I logged into their Microsoft 365 Portal and added a new user. Job done.

Even more nostalgia followed.

My mum is moving home soon. She is moving to the same area as her mum and sister live, and has found a bungalow within walking distance of them both. My step dad passed away last year, and my mum had to have a knee replacement at the same time. She was extremely brave through it all, but having recovered from her operation and not being able to afford to stay in a 3-bedroom house on her own, she has taken the sensible step to downsize and move closer to her family.

Downsizing meant I needed to grab the last remaining remnants of my possessions from growing up there! 6 years ago I left to become a dad, and since then my mum kindly preserved all of my items in preparation for me taking them some day. That day was today!

CD’s, DVDs, Video Games, Books, Models. All of it came to my home at long last. 6 years after getting this house I have finally finished moving in. It gave me the opportunity to go through my old treasured items, relive some happy memories, and absorb myself in items that mean something to me.

I’ll probably spend the next few days going through all my ‘old stuff’ and use them as a means to inspire me to push on with my life. For now I am happy listening to terrible pop music from 15 years ago, which I not-so-secretly love!

Yet more nostalgia followed, which rather slowly grew into a horrible nightmare for me. A charity I helped with around 7 years ago got in contact with me unexpectedly. The laptop I set up for them 7 years ago, and is still going strong, had crashed at last! This was interesting in itself as I had handed over responsibilities for IT support to a business that had more availability than me. Turns out they left several years ago, did very little while they did support them, and this charity has retained my contact details for when things got bad.

Things had, indeed, got bad. The 7 year old laptop, running 9 or 10 year old technology was the Managers laptop. They could no longer open their emails.

I felt both obliged and somewhat humbled to be asked to come back to have a look at the issue, so I jumped in my car, with personal possessions from mum still in the boot, and journeyed to the charity to see what was going on.

It was awful!

The laptop had not been installing security updates for months, and now it was trying to install all the missing updates at the same time, killing the processor and not leaving any resources left to actually use the computer.

I managed to use Task Manager to close some processor intensive tasks, but I needed to get these updates installed otherwise the laptop would remain unusable for quite some time. I waited half an hour to try and assess how long it would take to install them, but even after the 30 minutes it hadn’t even hit 1% complete.

With the charity's blessing I took the laptop back home with me and plugged it into my router with an ethernet cable. I had no choice but to force a shut down by holding in the power button, and then I booted it back up again, using the short window of opportunity I had to prioritise the ethernet connection, and left the laptop running to download, install and configure the updates.

I had the laptop in my possession from around 1.30pm. It didn’t finish installing updates until 5.30pm. And to make sure the job was done I ran a Disk Cleanup, cleared all the updates files, checked for more updates, and updated the computers antivirus software. The laptop was awful, but I managed to get it into a workable state. 60% of the computer's 10-year old technology resources were being used to keep it working, so only 40% was available to be used by the user.

The laptop was working, and emails could finally be accessed again, but I have also recommended it may be worth considering getting a newer laptop.

I had a couple more board games finished on eBay, so I got those packaged up and posted while the laptop was sorting itself out.

And in the evening I had a Freemasons meeting to take part in. I have been a Freemason for 3 years now, and my current role is Senior Deacon. When we meet up, every month, I have the pleasure of walking people around our venue, known as a Lodge, and having an integral part in the monthly ceremonies we do.

The big draw for me though is the people. The group we have in my Lodge is a perfect fit for me, and I couldn’t have wished to be in a better Lodge than this. I knew no one when I joined, but I consider them all my friends now. Plus, the meal we have after the ceremony is always fantastic. This month it was a huge All-English Breakfast.

The only thing left to do at the end of the day was to check out some of these CD’s from my nostalgia collection. Before heading to bed I listened to a couple of songs and immediately felt happy.

Nostalgia

It is a wonderful thing.