Category Archives: Personal

Chrome opens then shuts – no error message

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My daughters both got new laptops for Christmas, one has had no issues whatsoever, one had an issue once we installed Chrome. Whenever you tried to open chrome it would flash open and then….nothing. No error dialogue, nothing logged in event log, just…nothing. This was incredibly frustrating to troubleshoot and it turned out to be Microsoft up to the old ‘directly sabotage the competition and call it security’ trick.

Generally I’m pretty chill, but this one has gotten me worked up. I’m quite angry that I lost the better part of a day of my holidays trying to figure out what was going on here. We even took the laptop back to the store we purchased it from and thier tech had no idea what was going on. He re-installed the operating system, reinstalled chrome, spouted some nonsense about 32-bit vs 64-bit that made no sense but I didn’t argue with because Chrome was magically working again. Chrome then worked happily for a week and then my daughter bought me her laptop and once again it just wouldn’t start.

I tried a bunch of stuff from various forums and blogs out there. Here’s a list of stuff I can remember:

  • Reinstalled Chome – starting with the big hammer. This made no difference.
  • Tried starting Chrome in incognito – same behaviour.
  • Entered exceptions in firewall. Same behaviour.
  • Disabled Firewall. Same behaviour.
  • Disabled anti-virus. Same behaviour.
  • Started the laptop in safe mode with network support – Chome Started!
  • Created a new non-MS account on the laptop and logged in as that – Chrome Started.
  • Installed Firefox which also failed, but started successfully under the two conditions above(Safe mode and different account).

The firefox step changed my thinking somewhat, I was now reasonably certain I had an account issue rather than a software, firewall or anti-virus issue. I was about to look into wiping the default profile when I happened to glance in my email and noticed an installation notification from Microsoft Family Safety from a few days ago. When I set up the girls previous laptops they were a lot younger, and I remember they were added to Microsoft Family. This never caused an issue on the old laptops, but I thought it was worth taking a look into. I logged into Microsoft Family and lo and behld….the smoking gun.

Microsoft had placed a filter on pretty much all their major browser competitors. Chrome, Firefox and opera are all listed as ‘blocked apps’. Presumably as non-Microsoft browsers Microsoft is unable to content monitor on them, so simple disabled the ability to use them. I removed this and instantly everything worked on my daughters laptop again. You can log into Microsoft Family here and see if this is the problem effecting you.

Now, I have as many questions as answers from this. Why did it work after the operating system reinstall? Why did we never have any issues on the old laptop. If it’s listed as blocked shouldn’t it always block? Why wouldn’t Microsoft have the decency to drop a little message into the event log? Something like “Google Chrome was prevented from starting due to your Microsoft Family Safety Policy” would have saved a huge amount of very frustrating troubleshooting time. But then, from what I can see the frustration with this problem online is all directed at Google, rather than Microsoft. And maybe that’s the point.

A Personal Weight Loss Milestone

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2019 has gotten off to a very busy start on the work front, but on the personal front it has been more of the same. I’ve just been putting one foot infront of the other, and I’ve been doing it alot. As a result I’ve dropped 10% of my body weight in the last 3 months.

Back in October 2018 I had a couple of health issues. The most obvious was a back injury which cost me a number of days off work and is still troubling me today when I move in the wrong way. Less obvious was a brief chest pain I experienced which I found a bit scary. My mother has suffered multiple heart attacks and my Grandfather died from one. While this issue was not a heart attack, it was scary. I knew I was overweight and working in IT I live a lifestyle which is mostly sedentary.

But while I wasn’t moving much, things were certainly very busy at work. Quite simply I felt that I didn’t have time to fit exercise into my life. I kept thinking “You can start getting fit when things aren’t so crazy” or “You can work on your health when this project is out of the way”. The only problem is, things are always crazy, and finishing one project just means you’ll have another one take it’s place.

So I took some advice from the Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was asked how he fit everything in. “Sleep faster”. I got a fitbit and resolved to getting up at 5 o’clock each morning and walking for a couple of hours. I still can’t run because it jars my back, but if I can walk, I walk. After a while walking every morning a few of those fitbit challenges seemed within reach and I found myself walking in the evenings at night. It’s a great way to unwind, get exercise and fresh air, and as a nice side effect I have slept very soundly since I started doing this.

Looking back at my history the first day I logged steps was November 21st when I was 98.8kg. Today I dropped under 90kg for the first time, weighing in at 89.6kg. That means dropping a kg roughly every 9 days, which was a bit slower than the 1 per week I was targeting, but still something I’m pretty happy about.

Why is this on a blog which is mostly technical and work related? Quite simply I’ve come to realize that everything starts with looking after yourself. I encourage everyone else to challenge their belief about how much free time they have to fit exercise into your schedule. My perspective has been flipped on its head and now everything else needs to fit around my walking, not the other way around.