Lost

 

(Origin of the picture unknown.)

Yesterday afternoon I suddenly found myself without internet access.  Luckily it had been working just fine in the morning. I was able to complete and send off the income tax return forms and bank payments I'd been working with. Then I turned the computer off at lunch time. When I turned in on again later there was no connection. Waited a while to see if it would just come back. It didn't. So then I spent some futile energy on checking everything one should check before calling the service guys. You know -  shutting things off, unplugging, checking wires, restarting, looking for the manuals and all the numbers they might want... Then it was too late to make the phone call!   

Not sure whether 'funny' or 'scary' is the best word for how lost it suddenly made me feel, to find myself unexpectedly disconnected like that from "the rest of the world" - not knowing what was wrong, how long it might last, or how to fix it.

Still disconnected this morning. Had breakfast, then called the cable company. They informed me there was an external fault somewhere, nothing to do with my modem. They had been working on it since yesterday.  When I got off the phone and back to the computer... I found myself connected again!

Somewhere inside though, I have a sort of weird feeling that I might still need some shutting off and unplugging and recharging... Finding it very hard these days to get back to where I was, when something happens to disturb my concentration.

Back On Track

It seems I have managed to reinstall the Followers gadget. (Had to remove it last week because of technical problems, see posts from 27 February and 1 March.) However, when I tried putting it back at the bottom of the margin, below all the other gadgets, it evidently got upset and again blocked the whole blog from access. I had to move it up a bit to get it to cooperate. Now we seem to have agreed on a compromise solution (somewhere in the middle)...

I have recently been watching the British TV adaption (from 1981) of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and the behaviour of this widget/gadget thingy here sort of reminds me of the depressed robot Marvin... Quotation from Wikipedia:

Marvin is the ship's robot aboard the starship Heart of Gold. He was built as a prototype of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation's GPP (Genuine People Personalities) technology. Marvin is apparently afflicted with severe depression and boredom, in part because he has a "brain the size of a planet" which he is seldom able to use. Indeed, the true horror of Marvin's existence is that no task he could be given would occupy even the tiniest fraction of his vast intellect.

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Quotation of the Week 10/09

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The weather outside (still rather wintry) + yesterday's post about computer trouble made me think of this passage from Winnie-the-Pooh:

One fine winter's day when Piglet was brushing away the snow in front of his house, he happened to look up, and there was Winnie-the-Pooh. Pooh was walking round and round in a circle, thinking of something else, and when Piglet called to him, he just went on walking.

'Hallo!' said Piglet, 'what are you doing?'
'Hunting,' said Pooh.
'Hunting what?'
'Tracking something,' said Winne-the-Pooh very mysteriously.
'Tracking what?' said Piglet, coming closer.
'That's just what I ask myself, What?'
'What do you think you'll answer?'
'I shall have to wait until I catch up with it,' said Winnie-the-Pooh. 'Now, look there.' He pointed to the ground in front of him. 'What do you see there?'
'Tracks,' said Piglet. 'Paw-marks.' He gave a little squeak of excitement. 'Oh, Pooh! Do you think it's a - a - a Woozle?'
'It may be,' said Pooh. 'Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn't. You can never tell with paw-marks.'

Troubleshooting

Yesterday, suddenly I could not access my blog at all through Internet Explorer. I kept getting an error message saying the address could not be found, and the search process was aborted. Every now and then, though, I could still see the page behind the error message, so it was obviously not gone... And my other blog was still accessible. Switching to Firefox, I could also enter this blog that IE stubbornly maintained did not exist. Big mystery...

I was kind of hoping the problem would mend itself during the night, but it did not. Reading some help messages at Blogger Help Group this morning revealed that other people "out there" were having similar problems, and some blamed the changes recently made to the Followers function.

So I removed the Followers gadget in my margin and now I seem to be rid of the problem. I will wait a while before I try to reinstall it. If many users are having the same trouble, I'm guessing it's a bug that Blogger/Google will have to find a way to fix.

The computer is a wonderful invention, but not always a time saver. I wonder how many times I have said "I'll just take a quick glance at..." - and ended up spending hours trying (more or less successfully) to fix some kind of error...!