Please release me, let me go

I'm very annoyed. In fact I'm more than annoyed, I'm very very cross and fed up. Yesterday I was silly and clicked on the Friend Finder application on Farcebook. I know, I know, you should never click on anything on the right hand side, but I believed its lies about which of my friends had used it, and now all my real friends are going to get the spam emails like Ned's had in the past about how X, Y and Z are suggesting he joins Farcebook himself. Seeing that some of the invites have been from me, and I haven't sent them, I know it's all spam.

But worse than that I now can't fully sign out of Windows Live after using my email account. All the Hotmail accounts on this computer, even ones that Farcebook haven't heard of, give the same message after signing out - that it's failed to log out of the following site: h ttps://ssl.facebook. com/accept_token. php (I've put in a few spaces to try to stop it making a link). When I paste that into google I find it's been happening for years, with various suggestions of what to do to fix it. The ones that aren't too complicated for me to understand are clearing cookies (done, no effect) and contacting Windows live help (done, no answer).

Does anyone else have any ideas? I'm really not happy.

They seek him here, they seek him there

A while back the Boy asked me to get him some more pants and some particular work gloves when I was shopping, which I duly did. Of course the gloves were the wrong type, and the pants the wrong design, but I still had the receipts to return them and get my hard-earned money back. However for some reason I just can't manage to do it. I do the in-town shopping when I've finished my weekly morning accounting before I come home for the afternoon shift at the vet, and the first week I left the bag with the goods in by the computer where I'd put them to remind me to take them. The next week I decided to be clever and put the bag on my handbag so I couldn't forget them; but I was in a rush that morning and just grabbed my bag, leaving the carrier bag behind on the kitchen table. This week I knew I couldn't fail - I put the bag into my handbag last night so there was no chance of me leaving them behind. And it worked! When I reached work I carefully put the bag of gloves and pants on the car seat and went to juggle invoices.

It was a trickier job than usual, it being the start of a new financial year so a new spreadsheet was required (luckily Paul had prepared most of it in advance) and items transferred from last year's to this year's, repeating items listed, details of Purchase Orders added, and so on, as well as putting on the invoices that had come in during the week. So it took a while but all looked lovely when I clicked Save and went to do the same for the other company. Once that was done the post arrived and there was a new invoice to add to the first spreadsheet before I logged off and went to do the shopping. I clicked on the link to take me to the spreadsheet - and it had gone. The link had somehow turned into a shortcut to itself, not to the file. With rising panic I looked everywhere - how the hell could a file just vanish?

It didn't take long for me to realise I was beaten. "Paul, something seems to have gone horribly wrong here", and he came to see. And he searched fruitlessly too - on my computer and on his where he knows the layout better. Zilch. So we went to the server and explored the innards of the backup. Nada. It reluctantly acknowledged that yes, there had been a file of that name opened and edited this morning but no, it wasn't going to say what had become of it. We conceded defeat and rang our tame IT advisor, who talked us through the internal workings of the server and managed to locate a file with that name and it was duly returned to our computers. We tentatively opened it and ... oh joy! ...it was the right one! Except that all the morning's work I'd so carefully saved had been removed and it was back to the beginning again.

So by the time I'd re-input all the data it was far too late to do the shopping so the gloves and pants came home again. Maybe next week ....

Things can only get better

Hmmm. So much for thinking I'd become vaguely computer-literate. I did the 'simple' template upgrade so that I could have the list of labels on the sidebar, and now I seem to have lost the Commentification mechanism, even though I've downloaded and uploaded as instructed. And of course without it nobody can tell me how to put it back. Plop.

ETA: Woot! That just shows the power of Earl Grey! Hurrah!

We must chat about a very important matter

The computer isn't very happy at all. I didn't know it was possible for an electronic clock to be quite so inaccurate - it's losing about half an hour a day. Anyone know what causes that?

Floating in limbo

A thorough (well, as thorough as I dare) search of the external hard drive tells me that we did no backups between September 05 and April 07 - which isn't beyond the realms of possibility. But the latest backup doesn't show files and documents that I know were saved between those dates; that old diary, my CV, my list of the hours I work so I know how much to invoice my employer (eek!), squillions of photos etc.

But I think I've worked out a possible explanation. Between the last two backups, when all that work was done, we had an explodification and a tame geek managed to extract all that useful stuff and replace it when he'd scrubbed the hard drive. But when he loaded it all again he put on an earlier version of Windows (let's call it version A) from what we'd had previously but everything was hunky dory. Not so good in general but had features that we didn't have before so was okay. It was this version that was running when we did the April backup.

Then came the last explodification. This time we've reinstalled the later version (version B) which works much better but won't recognise the data that had been added when we did the backup with the earlier version.

I reckon if we were to find a computer that was running version A we could recover the data, put it onto a disk and then copy it onto this computer we could then do a backup (I'd also print it out onto hard copy so it's real!) and I wouldn't be fainting at the thought of redoing all those months of work.

Bang bang, that awful sound

Did I tell you we’ve had another computer explodification? No, I didn’t think so. It manifested itself by playing Ring-a-ring-roses when it was meant to turn on – it’d get partway there then restart. So I called our local computer-mender who kindly came out in the hour between packing and leaving for Heathrow for 3 weeks in Oz and Fiji. He fitted a shiny new hard drive, plugged our external drive into it and hastily copied saved stuff over. Except that it doesn’t seem to have copied everything over. Lots of documents are floating in limbo, including several months’ work of transcribing a diary from 1862 and the contents being inserted chronologically into previously-copied letters and other documents for future publication. Buggerbuggerbuggerbugger. I know we did a backup recently so where the sodding hell’s it all gone?

Don't leave me hanging on the telephone

Why is it impossible, with a landline phone, to hang up and get a clear line when someone's called you with a mobile? Boy didn't believe me, but I showed him that, if the caller with the mobile doesn't cancel the call, the landline phone can't get a clear line again, no matter how many times you hang up the receiver. It's infuriating when it happens to your home phone (when your Beloved has the mobile in his pocket and all you can hear is the sound of his rhythmic stride), but it happened at work and I had to spend a full 20 minutes shouting and whistling and desperately trying to attract the attention of the mobile owner. Silly twit had accidentally speed-dialled the vet's number without realising. I hope nobody wanted to contact the vet urgently.

Such a digital lifetime

I tried to use the credit card in Asda today, because they don't accept cheques any more. I tentatively put the card into their machine, and the screen told me I had one more try left to get the PIN right. I checked the number, carefully moved towards the buttons ... when Ned leaned over my shoulder and put in the wrong number before I could stop him! So the PIN was blocked and the card useless. Ned then promptly forgot the PIN for his other card, and the lengthening queue behind us started getting restive, so we decided to hand over cash instead and beat a hasty retreat.

On my return home I phoned the credit card company to ask them to unblock the PIN. The woman at the other end was a little surprised at this request because it wasn't showing up as being blocked in the first place. Neither had they any record of declined transactions - not today, and not from the shop in Coventry on the 3rd. She went the formality of unblocking it for me anyeway, and I have to go to a hole-in-the-wall and unblock it myself as well. If it still doesn't work I'm going to get very very cross indeed.

Every time I thought I'd got it made

I seem to have sussed the enpiccification now (although our front garden is very small, it looks and smells lovely right now so I thought I'd share), which is good. What is bad, though, is that even though I saved the right page to Faves, I still had to sign in three times to be able to compose a post.

I loathe and detest this new 'improvement'. It's pants.

You know it ain't easy

So, we suffer a Great Explodification which means I can no longer access new pictures (there must be a way of transferring them from Camedia to My Pictures, because they did prior to the GE, but they don't now). And while I was away Blogger's changed and I was forced against my will to get a Google account so there's much more logging in involved in blogging. To quote one of the great thinkers of our era, "Why does nothing ever WORK?" I may yet throw a hissy fit and have a hutters incident.

They don't want your name

My PIN confirmation arrived in the post today, and I was using the right one all along. So something's up with the machine at the Coventry store.

Living by numbers

Boy and I went into Coventry so that I could dust off and exercise the credit card and get him some of the kit he needs for the next stage of his course. Naturally his feet are the wrong shape for the standard boots (German feet are wide) so he needed more expensive Italian ones which are made narrower. The trousers aren't cheap either, but then neither are his legs, so they too went on the list, topped off with a helmet with built-in visor and ear defenders. The sales-child told me the total price, and once I'd regained consciousness and stopped hyperventilating I inserted the card and did the pin. Which was rejected.

Eh? I was certain I had the right number as I'd made a very careful note of it. I checked it - yes, it was right - and retried. Again it was refused. If the third go was refused the card would be blocked so we had to do it as an 'over-the-phone' transaction without the pin. That was successful so off we went.

Once home I double-double-checked the pin and I'd been right all along. The credit card company are sending me verification of it, but I suppose it would be sensible to change it for another one for me to forget. It was much better when you signed.

A thought: perhaps the well-thumbed Bible beside the credit card machine should have given me a clue that perhaps things didn't always go smoothly.

Needles and PINs

When I was on shift at the vet the other day I was horrified slightly alarmed to see that the receipt roll for the credit card machine was about to run out and I've never changed it before, and had no idea where the destructions instructions were. I toyed with the idea of leaving it for the next person on duty because there weren't many appointments booked, but that doesn't mean it'll be a quiet shift sales-wise so I didn't dare. I cautiously opened or removed all flaps and covers and thought it looked reasonably straightforward, so I got a new roll ready (I'm not entirely stupid), took a deep breath and removed the remnants of old roll. I carefully fed the the end of the new roll through any appropriate-looking slots then panicked as I realised it needed mechanical assistance for the final stretch. How?*

A brainwave! If I used my own credit card and made a dog's breakfast of the sale it might still feed the paper through. I duly inserted the card, logged a sale for £0.01 and pressed random numbers because I have no idea of my PIN. This would ensure a void sale, I'd be asked to remove the card, the recipt would come through and all would be hunky-dory. What are the chances that the random numbers I pressed were right?

I left a note explaining the strange 1p sale on the receipt (yes, it worked. It seems I do know my PIN after all) in the cash box, which today was found annotated by BossVet "What the !!!!? See me"

Oops!

*If I'd been looking at the machine the right way up I'd have noticed the button marked 'Feed'.