computer issues

1. Everyone is remarking on Joe Biden having dropped out of the presidential race and endorsing Kamala Harris. Nobody seems to be remarking on the fact that he did both these things on (the service known until recently as) Twitter. The first thing I'd have done, were I a reporter charged with writing this up, would have been to phone the White House and ask, "Is this real or was he hacked?"

2. Opera, which for years has been the backup browser I used for anything Firefox hiccuped on, has suddenly broken. (This was yesterday, Sunday.) All sites now give me an error message of "This site can't be reached. The connection was reset." All suggestions I've received for fixing this are random lists of things you might try that are either 1) obviously inapplicable (your connection might be down [not if my other browser works fine on the same sites]; turn off some feature you never turned on); 2) don't work; 3) are hideously complicated and time-consuming to try (and after half-a-dozen that don't work, you're skeptical that these will). I don't want a random list of unlikely-to-work fixes; I want a diagnosis of the problem and then a fix for that.
Not getting one, I'm giving up on Opera. I have Edge anyway whether I want it or not, so I'm going to try that.

3. The airline meltdown caused by the CrowdStrike bug has impacted at least one person I know: the Music@Menlo publicist, whom I work with because of my reviewer duties, has been at least three days delayed in getting from her base in NYC to the festival, which started, ta da, on Friday. At least there is still e-mail, plus other staff members to step in.

4. This isn't about computers, but Mark Evanier is skeptical of stories of parents throwing away valuable comic books. It never happened to me; I never had any comic books and hardly ever read them. (I find a love for superhero comics as inexplicable as a love for dogs or for roller coasters.) But I had two male friends in college who testified that it happened to them in exactly the same way: not that their parents disapproved of comics or made their sons get rid of them. Instead, after they went off to college their mothers went through their belongings at home and threw out anything they wanted to throw out, without asking or even informing the person whose belongings they were.