Cav's Place

I was saying we’re in that part of the year with miserable weather now and the forecast says it’ll last for quite some time. Cold and no heating yet, very high humidity that chills you to the bones even inside, if it doesn’t rain it at least slightly drizzles…
Now I like cloudy days and rain, but definitely not this sort of rain and the temperatures I’m comfortable at are in the high 20s at least when I’m inside, maybe mid-20s when it’s sunny and I’m going out. Low 20s are only all right while running or otherwise making a fair amount of physical effort. With highs around 15°C and lows below 10°C, even down to around 5°C, these days I’m pretty much wearing what are my winter clothes around the house, there’s just one thing I can change to make them even warmer, and I just want to be curled in a tight ball under the blanket, and did just that for quite some time last evening, but the cold also makes me need to pee very often. So, as I was saying, just one more reason to feel utterly miserable, and this is the “perfect” weather to get colds as well, so there may be yet another reason added because of it soon enough.

Otherwise, the new computer issues mentioned in the previous post have to do with Emsisoft again, since as of Monday I started noticing a2service.exe errors in the event logs. No description or ID that Windows can make anything out of, just that it’s a matter of some access being denied, and so far they happened when plugging in and unplugging my camera, when turning on and a varying amount of minutes after turning off the TV tuner’s software, after the system completed boot optimization, and when the shadow copy service attempted something that didn’t quite work, once resulting in the pretty common error saying it hit the size limit and another time in the access denied error that seems to be the rule when I update Paint.NET. So far it doesn’t seem to happen when Defrag runs normally, on partitions, and I’m not sure whether it would happen if those shadow copy operations complete without errors, but I’m going to assume there are quite a number of other things that may trigger it which just haven’t happened yet.
The thing is that, while I hadn’t plugged in my camera or updated Paint.NET since July, so since well before that forced Emsisoft update, the other things happen regularly, and I had even used the tuner’s software Sunday evening, and I definitely didn’t change any settings or install or update anything in between, and I actually checked what Emsisoft’s automatic updates installed and there were only definition files. Also, regardless of the trigger, the same address was listed for all such errors between Monday and Thursday afternoon, at which point they changed slightly, and also changed from a denied attempt to read to a denied attempt to write. They remained the same since, again regardless of trigger.
I have no clue what’s going on, and what’s worse is that their customer support doesn’t seem to either. The guy I’ve been talking to really seems to be going above and beyond the call of duty, and has put in an unbelievable amount of time and attention in the conversation with me, be it about this issue or any others, but unfortunately there are pretty much no actual results to show for it, again whether we’re talking about this issue or about the logging problems noticed ever since that forced update or about anything else really. For a while the logging seemed to work fine after I reset it all, but now I noticed a missing update entry from last evening, so they seem to be appearing again after less than a week. And otherwise he says he’s sending reports and requests to the developers, but so far getting nothing back, and that everybody’s focused on releasing the next version so it may be a while yet.

But now there’s a match at 7 PM, and watching it will normally trigger more of those errors, and I want to make myself some popcorn before it starts, so let me finish this by saying I still didn’t decide what I’m going to do tomorrow. I’m definitely getting up early to watch the race, but the Bucharest Marathon is also tomorrow morning and now that I know just how badly the lack of support is felt on that part of the route I meant to make a sign saying “Next bridge: Turn left. Reach 15.5 / 40 km. Come on, you can do it!” in both Romanian and English and position myself with it just after the last bridge before the one where the route crosses the river. However, I’ll be very sleepy and leaving after the race will mean that I’ll likely get there after the first runners will pass that point the first time, and that’s assuming dad won’t need the metro card. But such support is needed by those who’re struggling far more than by the leading pack, so if I’ll be able to take the metro I may just do it. Will need to decide this evening though, as I’ll need to actually make the sign first, and then also shave. But at least the forecast for tomorrow seems quite decent at the moment, in the sense that it at least shouldn’t rain…