Some changes, Dear Diary

Dear Diary,

Before I get to today's hike (which was actually mostly on buses), I should tell you a few things that have happened these past few months I've been neglecting you.

Most importantly, your next page, dear Diary, will contain the first photos I've taken for you on a phone I own myself.  From 2017, that is, before you were born, dear Diary, until this past weekend, I've only had phones supported by my eldest brother.  First, an LG phone with which I was very happy, but which was stolen early in your life, dear Diary.  So most of the photos I've taken for you, and most of the pages I wrote on either phone, were on a Samsung phone I was much less happy with.

However, finally last week Samsung put its foot down, demanding my obedience, and meanwhile denying me the chance to use or even charge the phone.  Well, I still have some money left from last spring's work, and I knew my brother would retire next year, so that choice was pretty easy.  Bizarrely, once I got home from replacing it, the Samsung phone started working again.  But anyway, now (having learnt, to my sorrow, that LG no longer make cell phones) I have a OnePlus phone on which I'm reserving judgement, but they'd have to go pretty far to get me as mad as Samsung did.

So, dear Diary, you owe a lot to my brother, and anyone else who reads your pages owes in proportion to whatever they get out of those pages, too.

Anyway.  Speaking of photos...  I've really had exceptionally bad luck with technology this summer.  About a month ago, something posing as an update wiped out my Ubuntu Linux installation's ability to use a graphical interface, including all the software that couldn't be used without the interface.  (What I saw before the crash was that it was bragging about deleting my office software, LibreOffice.)  Well, I was able, using just the command line, copy all my files to my long-neglected backup drive, so once I got Debian Linux installed, I figured my problems were over.  This has turned out not to be true.  

First, I now have some kind of crippleware version of Debian, which won't let me use any keyboard but the Roman script one, won't let me escape it into Windows (not that I like to spend time in Windows, but it's profoundly annoying not to have the option, to be reminded every time I start the computer that this Linux version thinks it owns me, rather than the reverse), and in general reminds me daily that because I'm not a Unix wizard, I don't have any rights with respect to it.

Second, however, none of that is as important to you, dear Diary, as something else, an entirely unrelated consequence of the crash which I only discovered last week.  Turns out the crash didn't just wipe out graphics-dependent software, it also wiped out graphics-dependent data, such as, most obviously, photos.  Specifically, photos for you.  (It seems to have been crazy selective.  No maps were damaged, for example.)  The only photos it cared to leave are those I took this year, 2023.  So, in particular, lots of photos of downtown Seattle are now gone, as well as those I took for the never-written pages about Tacoma, and any number of others.

We'll just see what happens, but anyway, there have been some reasons other than my laziness why I haven't written any pages in you for a long time, dear Diary.  After tonight, I'll try to do better in the short term, and then we'll see about the longer term.  See you again soon, though.