switching it off and on again

The weather is so much cooler now, it's great! (I mean, I am horribly cold, because I've always got cold easily, but at least I don't feel like I will die in the heat).

I saw a dumb take on twitter last night, and proceeded to spend all the time when I should've been sleeping thinking about it. I slept badly anyway, because I was worrying about some stuff, so every time I was conscious, this stupid thing kept coming back into my head.

(I think it pissed me off, because it was about why people like autumn/winter (apparently no-one really does *eye roll*) and, as someone who fucking loves the shit out of autumn, it annoyed me that this dumb twerp on there was trying to tell me how I feel).

~

I had a bug on my computer the other day! I don't even know how it happened, it just did!

I had had the computer on to check my email, and I saw that it said updates were due. It was quite a large download (100Mb+), and I didn't have time to do it before I went out. So I clicked the "remind me later" box, and shut my computer down as usual.

Cut to several days later, when I wanted to check out some Animal Crossing sprites I'd seen a while back. I booted the computer up, logged in, and there was a distinct absence of my launcher and top bar.

So I did some googling on my phone, and it turned out it's actually a common bug, going back several iterations of Ubuntu. It's to do with the compiz config file (which the crash report did tell me). The first fix I found didn't work, in spite of my trying it more than once, and I wondered, as I always do, whether it was because I'm too dumb to understand the code*. Actually, it turned out that I was not being dumb, but that what had happened to me was a more simple version of the bug, and was ludicrously easy to fix. So that's what I did this morning.

I had to install the Lubuntu desktop (which displayed correctly), then navigate to the compiz config file**, and reset the setting from unity-lowgfx to just unity, and then log out of the Lubuntu desktop, and back into normal Ubuntu. And it worked! Thank frog! Although because I'd cleared my cache in trying one of the other fixes, everything took about three years to load, but at least it worked!

PHEW

(Now I just need to back everything the fuck up. But that can wait for another day).

~

*That said, one of the comments on the fix said sometimes it's hard to strike a right tone between people understanding, and you not sounding condescending to people who know what they're doing.

**I feel compiz config would be a good tongue twister for drunk people ;)