Today Is The Tuesday I Should Have Had Last Tuesday

Quotation of the day: Woody Allen -- She wore a short skirt and a tight sweater and her figure described a set of parabolas that could cause cardiac arrest in a yak.

Time constraints seem to have resulted in me only posting to this modest li'l blog o' mine on my day off, which, most weeks, is Tuesday, but there was no post last Tuesday.  Why (i hear you ask)?

First, last Monday, i started to feel the symptoms of a cold; by Tuesday it was full-blown and i spent the day coughing and sneezing (with eyes and nose streaming).  Poetic justice, really:  i was talking to someone at the pub last week about the 'flu shot -- i said i'd never had one and boasted that i hadn't had so much as a cold in about ten years (a fact i attributed to my healthy lifestyle: i drink and smoke too much and try to avoid fresh fruit & vegetables).  Three days later, aaaa-CHOOOO! Sniff, koff.

But that's not the only reason there was no new posting last week.  I had computer problems all day.  Again!  Good grief, i love computers when they work, but i seem to have so many problems with mine.

It began in the morning, when i discovered that i couldn't send any email.  I did some Googling, tweaked some settings, disabled my firewall, even power-cycled my modem.  Nothing.  Then i tried disabling my anti-virus and re-booting and ... Windows wouldn't load!  It loaded my wallpaper, but nothing else, no desktop icons or Start Menu, just the wallpaper.  I thought at first that Windows was lost altogether, but after five minutes, my screen saver kicked in so i knew that i still had an operating system, just no way to use it.

So i plugged my network cable in to my laptop and did yet more Googling (coughing and sneezing all the while).  I found a few possibilities, but nothing worked.  "Why," i cried in despair, "do my computer probs seem to be unique in the history of personal computers? Why?!?"  And i added a superfluous "aaaah-CHOOO!"

Finally, it occurred to me (with no help from Google) that maybe Windows Explorer had crashed when i re-booted earlier, so i decided to re-boot again, this time into "Safe Mode With Command Prompt."  At the prompt i ran "explorer.exe" and Eureka! (as Archimedes said).  Windows loaded.  Whew!  I'd just spent a fair chunk of the hard-earned on this compooter at the repair shop a few weeks ago, maybe i could avoid further expense.

It seems that i had two different problems, then, instead of (the premise i'd spent most of the morning working on) just one.  Whilst in safe mode, i ran an anti-virus scan, an anti-spyware scan, i defragged, i deleted temp files, all this diagnostic shit that one does on a regular basis (when one remembers).  And re-booted.

It worked! Hurrah! But .. i still couldn't send email.  GRRRRRRRRRRR!

I plugged the network cable back into the desktop and went to visit Mr Google yet again.  A couple of ideas came up:  i uninstalled and then re-installed both my firewall and anti-virus software.  Still no ability to send email, and then i discovered something else.

I use Thunderbird as my email client, Avast as my a/v program.  I went to an Avast forum and learned that Avast and Thunderbird are traditionally in conflict, something to do with the way each handles security settings.  I disabled Avast's email scanner and ... it worked.  I could send email again and all was right in the world.

But it was now almost 7 p.m.  I'd spent over twelve hours on it (and used an entire box of Kleenex), so i was in no mood.

 

And that's Emily Blunt to my left there.  She has absolutely no relevance to this post, i just wanted to cheer myself up :o)  Today, i'm having a good day.