The Brain Dump

Last year I mistakenly recommended to my daughter to buy an inexpensive HP Stream 11 notebook for her first year of college.  With all due respect, it has been a great machine but the insufficient storage is a negative.  I was not aware that it did not have expandable storage (the eMMC hard drive is embedded on the motherboard and a technology I haven't seen before). When I tried to upgrade her machine from windows 8.1 to windows 10 I had to jump through multiple hoops in order to get the upgrade to happen due to insufficient storage (ie: removing the 8.1 preventing downgrade, removing unused applications and using an external hard drive). Flash forward a few months and there was an update to version 1511 but nothing I tried allowed the update to progress due to a bug with the update not handling external drives properly. No matter how large the drive I had attached was, I got an insufficient disk space message. I discovered a few KB articles that addresses that particular issue

At the end of last winter, I found a red seedless grape vine (and a pear tree) for sale at the local tractor & farm feed store and decided that I would purchase them before they died under the fluorescent lighting.  I knew enough to buy the ones that were still dormant or just showing signs of breaking dormancy to ensure they don't waste any energy to begin blooming too early. Just before a snow storm was due to hit our area, we had a warm spell that lasted long enough for me to get both items in the ground and get a jump start on the spring growing season. Although the pear tree bloomed just as expected, the grape vine stayed dormant for another month and a half before showing any sign of life (grapes tend to do better when it's warm).  I left the grape to grow wild so that the root system could establish itself and this season will build a trellis so that I can start to train the vine. My first plan of action was to purchase 2 heavy duty "T po