1. I accidentally loaded Facebook as my home page. Jane figured it out.
2. I couldn’t get the webeditor to work. Jane solved it.
3. We got wood rot in the feet of the garden arch. Jane’s fixing it.
4. We tried to use a Seagate megadrive for backup. First it wouldn’t talk. Then we got it to talk. It’s been backing up for 2 days. Jane’s running it.
5. The desktop computer is dying. Jane is trying to keep it going.
6. Jane finally gets the HP laptop reformatted for the third time.
7. It takes an Acronis backup to be sure we don’t have to reformat a fourth time.
8…do you know how many updates Windows has if you install an original Win 7 on a computer? It installs them in groups of 200. Slowly. Jane’s in charge of it.
9. Jane reformats C again. It’s not working.
10. Jane reformats C. Many updates of windows. Many. Many.
11. Did I mention our dishwasher quit having power? We went through all the breakers. Seems to be a loose wire.
12. We got Jane’s old laptop back to use as an interim desktop. Jane’s trying to get the thing to talk.
It keeps screwing up.
12 a-24a. The Intuit (accounting software) screwed up and Intuit doesn’t want to talk to us. We end up ready to file Intent.
25. Jane helps me get the taxes off the dying desktop. Between trying to keep the garden tended.
Ongoing…we’re trying to find a decent file-compare, because we have backups all over the place.
So if you wonder why Jane is behind on posting—
She deserves e-hugs.
Glomp! Hugs to you both! Hugs, I say!
Jane says…thank you.
And reminds me that’s only the tip of the iceberg. I haven’t mentioned the number of times her computer has done something odd.
She’s a regular Jane-of-all-trades, hmmm???? No wonder she’s such a fascinating person. 😉
Yes, hugs and virtual massages of the shoulder and neck muscles to Jane-of-all-trades: I’m certain she and you must need massages after all this!
*Glomp!* Big eHug for you both.
Raesean’s suggestion is brilliant, btw.
Norton claims my computer is virus-free. This has been almost my sole weekend activity. Waah.
I hear you about the dishwasher. I’m hand-washing dishes because *something* electrical, probably, is out of whack and the dishwasher, she does nothing.
So I understand. …My cats, however, think they’re being horribly ignored. 😉
WHen we pulled our dishwasher out onto the floor as opposed to in the cabinet as a built-in—it started. Apparently a loose wire. We shoved it back in, and it still works. WE do not know why.
Jane deserves a long soak in the bathtub with (bubble bath, bath salts, herbal stuff, etc.) of choice, a double ration of rum and olympic dressage vids.
Is life ever dull chez vous?
Try ‘Beyond Compare’ from Scooter Software for File / Directory comparison.
I work as a software engineer, and have to do a lot of comparing files & directories as part of validating changes and version control – used it for many years, seen and tried a number of alternatives and nothing comes close.
Wow – kudos to Jane for all that. Isn’t technology marvellous until it goes wrong? I use Acronis 2011 at home on my server. It backs up every Sunday night. I’m not sure whether I’d recommend it to anyone or not – it has a painful UI (klunky and buggy and not very well designed). However I know it works and I know it can resize a system partition (I backed up a 250GB HDD and restored to a 64GB SSD last year).
My replacement laptop keyboard has started acting up with the same problem as the last one – a dicky shift key. Rather odd to have the same fault on two keyboards. I also can’t stop my AV from locking the machine for half minute after it’s come out of hibernate.
And..I’ll have to think about changing my avatar picture. Sadly my budgie passed away sometime last night. Not unexpected and at least he waited until my vacation was over. Puts a bit of a dampener on today though 🙁
So sorry to read of the passing of your budgie. Losing a friend pet is difficult, no matter how expected.
I’m very sorry to hear your budgie died. I bet he was a character!
Yes, he was a character. He could say ‘ploppy bottom’ amongst other things. I’ve forced myself to drink a bottle of wine in his honour. Above all else he believed in having fun. The world might be a better place if people followed budgie examples and didn’t take the world so seriously 🙂
So very sorry to hear about your little guy, andruec. I’ll lift a glass in his honor later today. ((hugs))
I too smile when seeing his photo; one that looked very much like him shared a few years with us long ago. His name was Leaf and he liked to sit on top of our oscillating fan and ride back and forth. (And, no, he never made a mess while doing that!) He didn’t have any human words, but he enjoyed chatting with the parrot who lived in the apartment upstairs.
Indeed, condolences on your suddenly quieter home and the passing of a brave budgie. We raise a glass to “ploppy bottoms!”
Yes indeedy, hugs and a dose of whatever your beverage of choice is — to wash down the Advil! They are necessary, but the endless updates and re-re-reconfirming of the software is a great time suck. Prithee that the dishwasher malfunctions aren’t catching, as I will be putting in our new one within the next couple of weeks. o_O
+1 on Beyond Compare. I use it for my documentation work – both within files and on nested folders containing hundreds of files. Default colour-coding is pretty intuitive I think.
(And my ‘e’ key is dying as I type – worst key ever :S )
{{{{HUGS}}}} to you and Jane……and perhaps a bottle of bubbly, because you deserve it!
In better news, Audible has just put up Serpent’s Reach and Cuckoo’s Egg! I am buying each as soon as I get home from work.
The audiobooks have been wonderful so far, though I think the Cyteen narrator gave by far the stronger performance – her Ari Senior just drips with chilly, confident power, great contrast to Ari junior. This summer I spent about two weeks sitting in pitch blackness counting little fluorescently-dyed specks of virus-infected cells under a microscope all day, and Cyteen was the perfect accompaniment. Ari Senior is the best lab mate; hearing her wax philosophic about psych sets and genetic arks and the underpinnings of scientific genius certainly makes one’s work feel a great deal more important than it would otherwise.
And hugs to Andruec—I’m so, so sorry about your budgie. A companion is a companion, furred, feathered, or scaled, and they have their ways and it hurts, it just hurts a lot.
Hugs to both Jane and Andruec. No need to change the gravatar Andruec. I always smile when I see that photo. He reminds me of the parakeets that graced my life when I was young.
“8…do you know how many updates Windows has if you install an original Win 7 on a computer? It installs them in groups of 200. Slowly. Jane’s in charge of it.”
And seeing as: I’m too poor to afford expensive high-speed Internet services, and sitting at the end of a mile-long copper wire to the nearest junction box, thus forced to limit my modem speed to only 40Kbps in order to avoid interminable retraining, one can easily see why I got off the Microsoft train years ago. That I’m not part of a vulnerable “monoculture”, as they call it in agriculture, is some compensation. I stopped buying NortonAV about the time they stopped supporting Win9x.
For those occasions (slow internet, many computers to update on the local net, multiple installs) there’s a handy tool around. Check out WSUS offline update from http://www.h-online.com/download/wsus-offline-update-ct.html
Using this tool, you can downlaod most of the patches to a local drive and install from there. It’s also got an option to automatically reboot and continue patching if necessary.
hth
Ektus.
I might, except that it does nothing for my 40,000bps, 4,000 BYTES/sec, 4.4min/MB, download speed. 😉
To borrow from an Anne McCaffrey book – many zen hugs to Jane. It’s a good thing you and Jane get along for sometimes I think that both of you need a keeper.
And I still cringe – iMac user.
I use WinMerge which is an open source project. It works great for file/directory compares. I mostly use it for plain text code files, but it may have some additional capabilities. It will at least tell you if a format it doesn’t understand is at least identical or not.
((((HUGS!)))) to Jane – and to you! There are days I consider going pack to pen and paper.
At this point, I just put up with some weird glitches on my work desktop to avoid 5-10 (especially #8) and 11-24a! Because, you know, throwing a computer out the window voids the warranty. . .
Andruec: sorry about your “ploppy bottom” budgie (he’s still making me laugh – keep the icon!)
The duplicate detector we’re using, (and thanks for the recommendations, BTW, which will stay in our file in case), is from Australia: auslogics duplicate finder is really quite a nice little software. They give a free try on it. It offers a folder-disposal option, which is nice.