Tedious tech

I accidentally clicked on an old Parallels Edubuntu virtual machine instead of Windows, and thought, okay, might as well update it -- it was several hundred days (over 800? is that possible? not launched since I played around with setting up an Edubuntu server at the school in late 2008? Which never went anywhere.)

Several hours later, after downloading and installing all of the packages, cleaning up, rebooting -- oops, the X server wouldn't load, so no GUI. It was probably to be expected -- I have held off on upgrading the Parallels Desktop client -- I felt Nova was just randomly changing the product to keep a cash stream flowing. But this update might actually be necessary to get the latest Edubuntu to work.

So the new Parallels finally finished downloading, but before I upgrade it, I'm thinking I should back up the Windows disk images, just in case. So I do that backup, and twenty minutes later, I'm ready to install Parallels 6, but the installer informs me that an update is available, and I should download that.

And at the same time, I have been trying to get my tweets -- which I don't do very often -- to automatically show up on my Facebook page. The Twitter app for Facebook (which has a useless and ambiguous interface) is supposed to do that, but for some reason it stopped working. Sorting out problems with Twitter and Facebook seems like a hopeless cause. I found another Facebook app called Selective Tweet which only posts tweets that end with #fb. That seems to work, and the help page is, well, helpful.

While trying to write this, the Google search widget on this blog has stopped showing search results. Not a Firefox 4.0 issue, as it happens with Safari too. Finding help on Google products is a tedious process, sifting through Google Search results, with no date filter (the blogger search widget seems to have a history of problems).

I tried to make this post as boring as the process that it documents. But it is also a test to see if the change I made to Twitterfeed, to post these blog updates to both Twitter and Facebook, works. Because every word is precious.

jd