Author Archives: Blender Fox

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About Blender Fox

Recreational road-runner, blender/CG rookie, linux user (LE-1, LPIC-1, SUSE CLA 11, SUSE 11 Tech Spec), programmer, avid tinkerer (I'm always breaking things), self-confessed anime & manga otaku & japanophile

Stages of Grief

I started this post over a year ago, then abandoned it and though perhaps its high time I actually finished it.

You may recall I lost my uncle to cancer in October 2017 and felt I should write down the phases of dealing with the death

Stage 0 — Normality

This is the normal day-to-day life no indication of any problems in the future

Stage 1 — Terminal

This is where you or your loved one is diagnosed with an illness that cannot (normally) be recovered from.

Stage 2 — Death & Disbelief

Immediately after death, this starts. You run through a period of “this can’t be happening”, “this has got to be a dream” and keep wanting to wake up from the nightmare, even though it isn’t one.

Stage 3 — Guilt & Denial

After you’ve gotten past the “this can’t be happening”, you get to “this isn’t happening” — you don’t want to believe this is true and refuse to believe this is true. Also, you start second-guessing yourself thinking “did I do everything I could to save them?” “could I have done something differently?” “could they still be alive had I picked up on that symptom just a day earlier?”

This stage lasts the longest, and to some, the guilt consumes their lives

Stage 4 — Acceptance

The hardest stage to reach is acceptance. You accept the death and move on. Some keep a piece of the loved one with them — a piece of jewellery, a photo, a locket, a favourite song — something that lets them remember them going forward or when they want the feeling of warm, loving memories.

Where am I on this list? Stage 4. I have photos of my uncle in Google Photos I can look back on whenever I want to remember him. I have pictures of him playing with my cousin’s children; I have fond memories of playing poker with him (and me losing :-) ); I have memories of having drinks with him — he was an alchoholic, but really was loose when drinking. I remember that I also didn’t know him as well as I thought I did. His drinking buddy took the pedestal at his funeral and told about how he donated food from his KFC-style shop to people at the pub.

I really did not know my uncle as well as I thought I did.

This one’s for you, Uncle.

Training in Quarantine – Day 316

Found out why I couldn’t backup my new machine — Windows 10 had BitLocker setup which meant CloneZilla couldn’t clone it. Ubuntu installation on computers running Windows and BitLocker turned on – Documentation – Ubuntu Community Hub told me how to remove it. But still had a few issues with the backing up, namely Clonezilla still reporting some filesystems being read-only.

Turns out Fast Startup was also enabled by default https://help.uaudio.com/hc/en-us/articles/213195423-How-To-Disable-Fast-Startup-in-Windows-10 for disabling it.

Trying to back up the machine before installing Ubuntu

Backup was fine, completed successfully, and was able to install Ubuntu

Benchmarked both Windows and Linux on 4K, and Linux performed a bit less, presumably due to the APIs being different

And it’s been another hot day, and people have been really tetchy today, lots of horn tooting and then, inevitably, this happened

The heat really does bring out the worst in people.

Training in Quarantine – Day 315

I’ve been slacking logging my walks lately, so apologies for that.

This was should have been logged yesterday. It was very hot, so much that I didn’t even need to worry about wearing a jacket or anything while walking, and perhaps I should have worn sunglasses, it was that bright.

In other news, my laptop seems like it’s on its way out so I have got a replacement and an upgrade, and spent Saturday trying to set it up but clonezilla seems to be having trouble registering the partition labels. I had already purchased a 2TB NVME so instead of cloning then restoring, I cross-device cloned directly, making the 2TB disk exactly the same as the 1TB, but with the space at the end of the disk which I will use for Ubuntu.

Then took the rest of the day downloading my games from Steam. Warframe and Stellaris are the main ones I’ve been downloading

Streaming also seems fine, with only a slight fps drop.

Car Update

As you may be aware if you follow my non-exercise posts, I’ve been contacted by the hire car company to start legal proceedings against the third party’s insurance company to recover funds from them for the cost of the hire car I held on to for around 45 days due to being unable to get a new during because of lockdown.

Yesterday I was contacted by the lawyers and today, I’ve got the details to log into their portal to provide details for them to start the case.

I’m hoping I don’t have to attend court for this, but you never know with insurers.