Vacation Diary -- Overview

Quotation of the day ~Tom Carey: The ultimate metric that I would like to propose for user friendliness is quite simple: if this system was a person, how long would it take before you punched it in the nose?

Hi, everyone. Here, on the final day of my spring holiday,  i have to say that it's been great. I think that i am eminently suited to the life of leisure. Anyone interested in financing this for me, please leave a comment and a contact address. Thanks! (I don't need much: $1000 a week would be ample.)

The week, in some ways, was also extremely frustrating. My long-term reader (i.e., me) will recall that, the last time i took a week off, back in October, i spent a great deal of time working on some drastic computer problems. During that week, both my desktop PC and my laptop had to go into the shop, and the PC had Windows re-installed, and, while i didn't lose any files, i lost most of my program files, and it took a great deal of time to re-install and configure them.

This week, another, albeit less serious problem arose. Something was corrupt in my email program (Thunderbird). Sent messages wouldn't appear in my Sent Items folder and in one isolated case, a message appeared there five times (when, of course, i'd only sent it once). And sometimes, the font size would go doolally, so that messages would appear to the recipient looking something like this. I went to various Thunderbird user forums and tried to solve the problem, i uninstalled and re-installed it, all to no avail. So i decided to find an alternate email client. I tried Sea Monkey. I liked it, it looked good, i successfully sent a test message and so i imported all of my settings from Thunderbird and ... must also have imported whatever was corrupt, because from then on it was useless. So, i uninstalled it. Then i tried Opera's built-in email program (i already use Opera as my secondary browser). Same thing -- as soon as i imported my Thunderbird settings, it was useless.

I tried, believe me. For three days.

Then i gave up and tried to find some workarounds in Thunderbird. And, not just another pretty face, i did. And then gave up, i was tired of working on it. Some holiday!

Well, that took me up to Wednesday. What did i do on Thursday? Don't remember, got drunk probably....

Friday i went to Toronto for the day. Via Rail has free Wi-Fi so i was able to listen to my favourite radio station, K-SHE, all the way (i have their app on my phone). Had lunch with my old friends Julian & Andrea, nipped over to the HMV superstore and bought the new CD by Paula Cole and Big Wreck's second album, and thereafter mostly took a walking tour. And it was a beautiful day for it -- nice and warm. Stumbled upon a charity book sale at the Church Of The Holy Trinity, a beautiful old (1847) church in the heart of downtown Toronto, and look, there's its picture:

I only bought one book, though: "The Child In Time," a title i'd never read by one of my favourite writers, Ian McEwan.










And then i just walked more and more, stopped in a pub whenever i got thirsty (and there's no shortage of those in downtown Toronna!) and then it was time for the train home.

One of my Toronto traditions is to buy some street meat -- generally spicy sausage on a bun -- from one of the vendors in front of Union Station before boarding the train home. Unfortunately, this time, it was not to be: there's so much construction going on around there that the vendors have been forced to relocate, and i couldn't find one in time. Bummer! So i had to settle for a can of very nasty beer and a very small bag of chips on the train -- for eight dollars, they must have seen me coming. At least i was able to listen to K-SHE all the way home....

And really, that was the end of the holiday: on Saturday, Sunday & Monday i had to go into work for just a couple of hours each day, but still, it meant that i didn't really have those days to myself, and this, then is it. Back to what we laughingly call "normal" around here tomorrow. Blah.

Oh, one last thing, my last post i said that my CD collection was complete for the letter "A." Wrong again. Somehow i missed this album by Kevin Ayers, Mike Oldfield, Robert Wyatt, David Bedford, Lol Coxhill & Six Beautiful Girls:

Now, onwards to the letter B.

Love, light & peace, y'all...

The Unproductive Life -- Exposed!

Quotation of the day: P.G. Wodehouse ~ She has about as much brain as a retarded billiard ball

Yes, a day off, at last, and it's going to be a good 'un.  For one thing it's not freezing cold here at Spriggs Central: it's a relatively tropical 14 degrees C.  So i only have one sweater on, instead of the usual five....

And how, i hear you ask, having i been spending this unwonted leisure time?

Glad you asked!  I had a beer 'n' clamato juice for breakfast, scrubbed Cate's litterbox and then....

Do you recall the film "Source Code"?  A great movie!

In the film, the control centre is called "Beleaguered Castle," and i just learnt that this is also the name of a variant of the card game Patience, or, as it's more commonly known, Solitaire.

So, just out of curiosity, i downloaded the game (from http://www.freewareshareware.net/download/BeleagueredCastleSolitaire.exe) and have played it a few times and it's fun.

And that's been my morning.

Time for lunch!

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.