Head Rambles

Grandad June 29th, 2009

I’m back. Sort of.

I managed to rob the other laptop when Herself wasn’t looking.  Heh!

My own laptop finally died the death.

And before any of you dumbfucks with Linux or Macs start shouting, it was a hard disk failure.  Got that?  Hardware.  Nothing to do with whatever software I was running.  And don’t tell me a Linux or Mac has never had a hard disk fail.

Now I have to run the gauntlet of the shop where I bought it.  Doubtless they will try to shift me to the manufacturers, but I know my Sale of Goods Act!!

Wooops!!

As I type, I just had a call from the shop [I sent them an email to phone me about five minutes ago].  I am impressed with their response so far.  And the told me to bring it into them and they will deal with it.  Irish business are improving somewhat.

Who says the recession is a bad thing?

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Grandad June 28th, 2009

Well, I wrote on Friday how my laptop was complaining of ill health….

It is very sick indeed.

In fact it has pretty much seen the white light at the end of the tunnel, though there is still a faint heartbeat. There is word of a heart transplant in the coming week but just in case, I’m currently removing everything off the hard drive before the funeral.

I am having to resort to a clapped out old machine that I thought was an air-conditioner, but turns out to be a PC. It’s in the junk room, and there is nowhere to sit so I won’t be doing much typing here.

I thought of asking Herself for a loan of hers, but after an attempt at baseball-bat-persuasion she has locked herself and her laptop in the bedroom.

So every cloud does have a silver lining?

One way or another, I am sans e-mail or even a decent browser, so I don’t think I’ll be in touch much.

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Grandad June 26th, 2009

There sometimes is an occasion in the tides of man when only one word will suffice to sum up a situation.

Last night, that occasion occurred.

“Fuck” I roared, as a message came up un my screen telling me that my hard disk was about to fail.

Sandy ran for cover; Herself muttered something uncomplimentary and Minnie actually stopped eating for a moment.

I did a backup of everything and then ran a check on the disk.

Fucking thing packed up.

This morning I ran some more tests.  Everything seemed to be OK, so I started on a wee project I had been asked to do for one of the newspapers.

The fucking computer crashed with a grinding noise.

I’m flying on one engine at the moment.  I have a feeling this machine is about to expire.  One of several futures awaits me.

Maybe it is sorry for scaring me and will carry on working normally, in which case the world can breathe a sigh of relief.

I am about to run some software on it, and that could mean a rebuild, in which case the world will have to survive without Grandad for a few days.

Or it could blow up.

This could be the last post?

Is Grandad about to expire?

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Grandad June 16th, 2009

I was happily browsing away yesterday visiting my usual porn anarchist highbrow web sites, when my Firefox browser decided it had had enough and needed a rest.

I got a little message on the screen saying that Firefox had closed to prevent damage to my computer.

Being the philosophical type, I just fired it up again.

I got a little message on the screen telling me that Firefox failed to load and would I like to inform the honchos so that they can broaden their minds a bit.  I said yes, and shut it down.

I fired up Firefox again, and once more it failed to load.  This was getting irritating at this stage.  I tried several times, and each time it fucked up on me.

I tried loading it in Safe Mode, whatever the hell that is, and it still failed.  By now, it was really getting on my tits.

I decided to fire up that abominable heap of shite called Internet Explorer and get a new version of Firefox.

I loaded that and everything went well, until I tried to fire up Firefox.

The fucking thing failed again.

This was really pissing me off at this stage, so I uninstalled Firefox, and reinstalled it.  It still failed.  Fuck!

I decided to uninstall it again, only this time, I told it to remove all traces of itself.  Being a smart sort of chap though, I backed up my bookmarks and my profile before doing that.  I reinstalled it, and it worked perfectly.

Great.  At last I am getting somewhere.  All I had to do then was restore my bookmarks and my profile and everything would be hunky dory.

I did my bookmarks first and had a look at them.

Bollox!!  I had backed up the wrong version, even though the date on it was yesterday’s date.  I could live with that though.

I went to restore my profile, only to find that fucking Firefox had deleted my old one and the backup.  Damn, blast, bother, knickers and spit!

My profile contained quite a few things.  It had all my little plug ins, my settings and gizmos like that, but it also contained all my stored passwords.

Now I can’t access a load of my sites.

I have written to Chang Li Sung in China and Vladimir Gradsky in Russia, both of whom I know have been ripping off my passwords for months, but I haven’t heard back from them yet.

I’m screwed now.

I wonder if Nympho Nancy will miss my daily visit?

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Grandad June 3rd, 2009

I think I may have been a little slow of late.

Initially, I blamed the cold damp weather, but since we have been having a few days where the sun actually shone but things didn’t improve, I had to do a rethink.

I put it down to old age with a dash of arthritis and maybe a drizzle of senility, but I’m told this may not be the case.

Someone suggested that it might not be so much old age as a faulty plugin.  They also suggested that I might like to have a look at my database.

So I unscrewed the back off my site and had a root around.

I drained the oil, checked the piston rings and had a good long look at my big end.

My database was looking a bit clunky.  There were also a few bits lying around that looked like they were a bit surplus to requirements.

So I rolled my sleeves up, put on my hard hat and safety goggles and attacked with my trusty delete key.

I think I may have been a little over enthusiastic, because I ended up with bits of web site lying all over the place.

There was a puddle of data underneath the couch, and a pile of HTML had collected in one corner of the room.  Sandy was quietly chewing on a graphic in the middle of the floor and I had a tin full of variables that came from somewhere, but I’m not sure where.

I have spent the last hour trying to reassemble the damned thing.  Of course I have lost the box that it came in originally, so the whole thing was a bit hit and miss.

The site looks like it used to, and I think it may be a bit faster.  Only you can tell me that.

I still have a problem though.

I have two variables left over, and I’m fucked if I know where they came from.

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Grandad April 15th, 2009

I wasn’t going to write anything today because I am sick to death of computers.

The fucking things are out to get me.  It is getting personal at this stage and I am on the verge of dumping the lot in a skip.

There is my own, which is driving me up the walls because it refuses to have anything to do with the Interweb.  I ask it politely for a web page and it sits there for about ten minutes before presenting me proudly with a blank screen and smugly declaring ‘Done’.  Done, my arse.  I have to reload the page, and with a bit of luck, I will eventually get what I am looking for. 

Yesterday, it started disconnecting altogether.  And when it wasn’t disconnected, it wouldn’t get me into important sites [like my own] but would connect to useless sites [like RTE].

I could just about cope with all of that, but then Herself started bitching about her laptop. 

Being a woman, she couldn’t have a simple problem like a virus or a crappy Interweb connection.  Oh no.  She has to have a complicated problem – a laptop that just switches itself off for no apparent reason when she is in the middle of buying something useless.  Normally I would say that it was just a laptop being sensible, but she sees it as a fault, so I have to fix it.

The only cause I could think of was overheating.  Why else would a machine work perfectly for long periods and then suddenly stop?  Unless it was running out of petrol?  I realised that if she nags me for a long period, I tend to overheat, so I thought it was worth investigating.

I downloaded a scrap of software from the Interweb and installed it, and it showed me lovely graphs of the temperature shooting up and down.  Each time I thought it was going to come to the boil it would suddenly shoot down again, so there doesn’t seem to be a problem there.  I decided to tell her to live with it and to stop annoying me, but then I noticed something else.

I had to reboot the laptop a couple of times, and each time I did, I got a fucking irritating little message telling me to validate Windows.

I should explain that this is a laptop I had a lot of problems with before.  I lost everything on it and had to reinstall everything.  Now, when they sold me the laptop they didn’t bother their arses giving me a Windows DVD, so I had to use a different one.  It may have been a different DVD, but it was for the same software that was on the original, that I had paid for, and had a licence for.

I tried validating the laptop, but it told me I had the wrong fucking licence code.  God give me strength!

I wasn’t going to go through the hassle of phoning Microsoft, on principle.  They are a shower of money grubbers and if they think I am going to waste any more time or cash on them, then they can whistle.

I went onto the Interweb and found a crack for Windows.  It now works perfectly, and there are no more nags.  I have no conscience whatsoever about using crack software, as I legally hold a licence for what is installed.

I’m off now to search for more crack software.  If I find it, I am going to make Herself eat it.

Maybe then she will work without nagging?

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