What Next?

On Wednesday of last week my microwave oven quit working.

On Monday of this week my toaster oven quit working. 

On Tuesday, I spent five hours getting my lawn tractor operational after a tire went flat, and my Jeep's battery went dead. So what went wrong today?

Last night, I discovered that my Reminder program didn't work. I wrote it years ago, for Windows computers. The first version was called RxReminder, but that was later changed to ReminderXR after someone registered the first name for a trademark.  Windows 7 was mainstream at that time. Next, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 were released and I continued writing and revising my Reminder program. I quit revising it in 2013. At that time I was at version 1.8.1.

The Reminder program reminds me to take medications and also reminds me of appointments. It was inspired by memories of how difficult it was for my mother to remember to take her medicines at the right times as well as keep her appointments as she got older. My mother passed away without seeing the program, but the Reminder program has been very useful to me.

I've been using version 1.8.1 for about ten years. But yesterday it quit working. Nuria has it on her laptop and it still works there. She uses Windows 10 and I still use Windows 8.1. I tried various ways to get it working, but the program refused all of them. I gave up and went to bed. 

This morning when I came into the living room, I saw that the Reminder program was running and was open on my computer screen. I never turn my PC off—I just reboot once in a while if it gets slow. So my PC was running last night. A feature of the Reminder program is to start itself at midnight and reset medications to "not taken" and look for appointment reminders for the new day. Apparently, this self-start feature worked fine, even though it wouldn't start when I tried to make it start. 

So I exited the Reminder program and tried to start it again. And again, I couldn't start it. It just threw an error message and then the message box closed. I tried many ways to get it to start, but it wouldn't.

Then I had an idea. I tried starting the previous version, which was 1.8.0. It started up without any problem. So that's the Reminder I have running on my PC now. I haven't checked to see what the differences are between version 1.8.0 and 1.8.1, but I think they're minor. I think Fate made this happen just to continue my streak of having something to fix every day.

BTW, I created the Reminder program as a way to teach myself how to program Windows computers. I found a lot of help on the Internet. I already knew a little bit about programming. I had learned Fortran (a now obsolete language) and MBasic and CBasic, two flavors of the Basic language. I taught myself assembly language; first, I learned machine code for the MOS Technology 6502 on my KIM-1 board, then I learned Z80 assembly language for my Osborne 1 which ran the CP/M OS. Then I learned assembly language for the Motorola MC68302 multiprotocol processor that I used on a small computer I designed for a project at work. Then I taught myself Visual Basic which, despite the name, is a complicated language that has as much power as Visual C# (C-sharp). The syntax is different, but if you can do a thing with Visual C# then you can most likely do that same thing with Visual Basic.

I loved programming. Sometimes I would start programming in the morning and after what seemed like ten minutes I would realize that hours had passed. They say, "Time flies when you're having fun!" and I can vouch for that.

But, to get back on topic, what's going to go bad next?  TV?  Computer?  Jeep? And when? This evening?  Tomorrow?  Next week?  Whatever it is, there's one thing that I know for certain. I refuse to climb on the roof in order to fix it.