February 21st: Visiting Oakland Chinatown and Laptop Issues

Today was good.

In the morning my father drove my grandma and I to the BART station so that we could go to Chinatown in Oakland. My grandma went to see the eye doctor, which gave me time to walk around Chinatown. It had been a long time since I visited Chinatown because I've been very busy lately.

After my grandma went into the doctor's office, I began walking around the Pacific Renaissance Plaza, where I decided to settle in the Oakland Public Library, Asian Branch for a while. I looked around for some books and decided to do a little bit of reading for the SAT. I have done no preparation for it at all!

I read for around 20 minutes, when I got bored so I left the library. I started walking around Chinatown, and I got thirsty, so I decided to buy something to drink from T4. I bought the Apple Black Tea. It was pretty good.

After my purchase, I went back to my grandma's doctor's office and waited for her until she was finished. My grandma said that the doctor said that her eyes were fine. We walked down together in the Pacific Renaissance Plaza to C&M Bistro. The wait was pretty long but the food was pretty fresh and good. I got the empress chicken BBQ plate, while my grandma got the seafood udon.

My grandma paid the bill and left the restaurant because she wanted a head start on buying groceries. She said she would be on 10th street. When I boxed our leftovers and left the restaurant, I decided to challenge myself in navigating Chinatown without maps. However, I was really confused because I couldn't find 10th street. The streets when from 8th, to 9th, to 11th! I gave up and opened maps and realized 10th street was a good 10 minutes away, so I gave up and called my grandma. She ended up being behind me when I called her.

After we were finally done with buying groceries we went on BART to leave back home.

When I arrived back home I kept setting up my new laptop. I don't exactly trust the OEM installation of Windows that Dell pre-installed on my laptop, so I wanted to make a fresh installation of Windows. Dell also has a bunch of recovery partitions that I don't think I'll need, so I also wanted to get rid of those. At first I tried to install Windows 11 using the default USB configurator, but I think my USB is broken. It's the Walmart brand USB, so I should've expected less of it. Anyways, I went on my bike to go back to Walmart to buy some USBs that WERENT WALMART BRANDED. After that, I tried using the default USB configurator again, but it still didn't work because the installer wasn't detecting the SSD in the laptop, so I tried using Dell's Windows Recovery Creator. However, THAT didn't work because Windows Update hanged on me! Right now I'm finding the storage drivers for my laptop to see if I can use the Windows 11 default USB configurator, and give it the proper drivers.

Tomorrow there's a robotics meeting, so hopefully we're productive! We have just 50 build hours left until competition!

Thanks for reading,
Issac