The new laptop finally came in. I went with another Alienware (an M18 this time) because at the time I was still employed at SVP and we had a nice big discount with Dell, putting its cost far below the Asus ROG I had been eyeing. Basically the same specs, and to be fair, until my last lappy ate itself, both brands had proven rock solid. Dell’s tech support proved slightly better than ASUS in my own personal experience. And considering that machine was well over 7 years old, I’d say that it held up really well!

So now I’m still moving data over. I had online backups through Carbonite which kept most things that I’d forgotten. Sadly, I lost my OneNote notebook. The online Copy was over a year out of date. Apparently it had stopped backing up, and I could not find any local copies. If I could’ve gone back, I would have manually exported a backup copy somewhere. Oh well, you live and you learn. Sucks because that’s where I stored all of my custom Powershell scripts I’d written over the years. Bleh!

Almost all of my software licenses were backed up via email or my external backup drive. Unfortunately about 25% of my Plex library is on that drive too since I’d store my manual DVD and BluRay rips there. I’ve now got the drive mounted on my Shield again, so those are populating back into Plex now. I lost the rips I had done of my iTunes library, so I’ll have to do those over. No biggie, just gonna take time. I wish to God someone had a place where I could buy movies and TV shows with no DRM. I mean, it’s easy enough to buy on DVD or BluRay and rip it myself, but the out of print stuff is harder and harder to find. :(

Like, I’d love to have all of Murder She Wrote. Let me pay to download full copies to own myself and put on my Plex so I can watch offline. That’s one of my few comfort shows. Netflix, Hulu, Peacock Premium, hell even just basic cable, it’s all too expensive now. Let me pay for and own what I want. /le sigh

At least DRM-free music is easy to find and usually pretty reasonably priced, so no worries there. :)

Also: I accepted a job offer this past Friday with DataPerk. It’ll be a pay and benefits cut, but the job sounds fun. The guys I met seemed nice enough. I’m not looking forward to having to go through all the medical authorizations for all of my treatments and medications again (considering we JUST did that when SVP changed providers). And DP’s benefits do not cover my therapy so I’ll be back to paying that out of pocket, which is going to hurt for a while. Better than going without though. Been there, did that, not gonna be that stupid again.

I honestly don’t have updates on much else. I know I need to get away first chance I get. Unwind, let off some steam. The last year has mostly not been good for me outside of the few trips I took. This year I need to take better care of myself, drawing firmer boundaries where needed (family included). So we’ll see …