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Most of today has been completely unproductive. I spent the majority of it fighting with Instantbird, (which is not so instant), which I use for Slack, which we use for WordPress Core contributions and other WordPress bits like WordPress accessibility, and other sub-projects. I spent several hours getting conversations to appear and allow me to interact with them. This is text-based chat, so you’d think everything would just work. I finally got everything up and running just before the weekly WordPress accessibility meeting. So by 3PM, I was pretty much done.

And then, I decided I wanted to listen to some of the content that’s on my USB drive. My network attached storage is dead, and this serves as the backup for most of that content. I have music that’s not available on Spotify, or, if it is, it’s “digitally remastered,” (which in most cases actually means re-recorded by the original artist, except now they’re older and they’re showing their wear and tear), plus some audio dramas and books that aren’t on Audible.

Yay time to screw with Windows homegroup settings. Two different versions of Windows on two different PC’s, and the one with the big speakers connected to it is by my bed, as it should be. Well, Windows has never been great shakes at either networking or permissions, (See also: Windows PC versus Windows Vista), and so unless you have a crossover cable, that’s long enough, (I don’t), or you want to make things more complicated and use one computer as a pass-through for network traffic, (I don’t), it’s homegroup configuration time. This is usually straight layout tables all the way down, and will usually take up much more of your time than you’d like, and require several beers to get the entire job done.

So I set to work. Shared the drive properly, set the permissions, then went to access it on the PC by the bed. “Network path not found.” OK then, time to start digging. Make sure I have the homegroup password correct, (I didn’t), get all the names correct. In networking, names are very important. PC’s/devices are not like your hookups. Forget their names and you’re done. So I get all that correct, in less than an hour, and, we have content delivery.

And that’s Monday in the bag.