I have had this laptop for a long time now, and have been doing a lot of writing on it.

Up to now, the printing has always appeared nice and crisp on the screen.  There is no fading or anything like that.  The letters just keep on coming.

Surely it must be running low on ink?

I have this terrible feeling that I am going to be typing away sometime and the letters will just fail to appear on the screen, or will become so faint as to be illegible.  I don’t want that to happen, so I want to be prepared.

I have bought a new bottle of Parker [black] ink, but I have a problem.

I have read the manual from cover to cover, and have also scoured the Interweb, but I cannot find where the inkwell is in my laptop.

Does anyone know where it is?

he went and  pilled  ome of her gin on it whi h wa  a bit  arele  .

It i  a  trange thing, but gin and keyboard  ju t don’t mix very well, a  wa  obviou  by the wee  loud of  moke that aro e.

Lu kily it didn’t do mu h damage. The laptop  till work  a  well a  before ex ept of one  mall matter – the letter  ” ” and ” ” don’t work any more. Thi  will be fine a  long a   he doe n’t u e any plural  and  ho e  all other word   arefully.

In fa t, I’m u ing her laptop now ju t to  how her how ea y it i .

It was a day for sitting doing nothing, so it was an ideal time to do a wee job that I have meaning to do for a long time.

There were a couple of little irksome things about my PC that, well, irked me, and I have been meaning to do a fresh install of the operating system.  It’s the kind of job where I can just feed the odd CD into the machine and then daydream while it does its work.

My machine has two partitions. One contains the operating system, and the other contains my data.  A system restore usually formats the first one but leaves the other alone.  So I carefully copied all the really important stuff onto the second space and started the job.

I had a fine afternoon daydreaming while my laptop gave happy reassuring messages about how well it was doing.  Eventually it finished and rebooted.

I went to load up my antivirus and Firefox and all the essential stuff that I had saved on the data area.

The fucking machine had erased both partitions!

Bollox!!

I’m back up and running now, and I’m not getting any of those irritating messages which had been irking me for some time.  I had to download my Avast, my Firefox and my Thunderbird, and luckily I had a backup of all their settings.

I have been doing a little mental audit of what I have lost though.

All my sound files are nicely stored on my Sat Nav so no problem there.

I have lost a moxey load of photographs that I had taken recently.  I can live with that though.

There were some statistics that I had been gathering for a while now.  They’re gone.  Knickers!

Worst of all though, The Book is gone.  All of it.  Not a trace is left. 

Back to square one….

Fuck!

*sigh*

‘Aha!’ says you – ‘The old bastard has a rodent infestation?’

No.  The only rodent that resides within these four walls is Minnie, and she tends to piss on me, rather than piss me off.

I’m talking about those irritating little fuckers that I have to use to move things around on my computer.

I used to have one of the wireless ones.  Oh boy!  What a little nightmare that yoke was.  It had a mind of its own and [when if worked, or when I could find it] it used to randomly jiggle the curser so that it ended up in the opposite corner of the screen to where I was trying to point.  It used to eat batteries too as if they were pints of Guinness.  I fucked it onto the bonfire one day, and I can safely say that those few minutes when it crackled and spluttered in the fire were the best moments I had with that mouse.

In the old days [in computer speak – a few weeks ago?] we had to make do with the mice with the rubber balls.  They would have been OK if it weren’t for the fact that they used to collect gunge, dirt, hairs and fluff like my ex-wireless one used to collect batteries.  Frankly, the only good thing about those yokes was the endless supply of puerile jokes they inspired.

Nowadays, my mouse of choice is an optical USB one.  I say ‘choice’ in the same way a condemned man might chose lethal injection over the electric chair.

The optical mouse is fine, as it doesn’t collect dirt.  It does have one drawback however, which leads my to my current state of annoyance.  It is attached to my laptop by a wire.

I use my laptop in a way that is apparently unique – I rest it on my lap.  People look at me askance when I say this.  They tell me that I really should put it on a table or somewhere like that.  Why?  It is a fucking LAPtop!  Even the manufacturers haven’t grasped this notion as they always put the heating vents just where my left thigh blocks them.

Because I use my laptop on my lap, I have to remove it if I wish to stand up.  This is where my problem starts. No matter how careful I am, I always seem to move it in such a way that the mouse lead gets caught in my foot.  The inevitable then happens, and my next move sends the mouse flying off to the end of its lead whereupon it smacks into the floor.

I quite like the mouse I use at the moment.  I have had it for a long time, and I am almost familiar with it.  I say ‘almost’ because it was originally designed for an alien.  That is the only conclusion I can come to as it has the usual two buttons, and a wheel in the middle.  However, it also has another button behind the wheel, and there are two more where my thumb normally goes.  I recently discovered yet another one on the other side too.  Theses buttons are definitely not designed for human hands.

I like this mouse because it is the right size for my hand.  It is very comfortable.  It is also very quiet.  Or rather, it was very quiet, as with all the battering it gets off the floor the buttons are getting a little clanky.

I bought a new mouse the other day.  It is feels too small and the buttons sound like coins entering a slot machine. I have relegated it back to it’s box where it shall reside until the day my alien mouse expires.

What I really wish for though is for an alien to visit and tell be what the fuck all those extra buttons are for.

Laptop: Gee!  Thanks.  Like you care.

Me: There is no need for that attitude, and please don’t use those Americanisms.

Laptop: You send me off to that bloody hospital, and this is the kind of greeting I get on return?

Me: How are you, anyway?

Laptop: How the fuck do you think I am?  You send me off to that hell-hole where I get my heart ripped out.  How would you fucking feel?

Me: Don’t be so melodramatic.  It was only a hard disk replacement.

Laptop: Jeeeesus!!! It may only be a hard disk to you, mate, but to me it’s my whole essence; my being; my self.

Me: You’re worse than an old woman.

Laptop: Thanks for the card, by the way.

Me: What card?

Laptop: Exactly! I didn’t expect a visit, but you might have gone to the trouble of sending a get well card.

Me: They don’t make get well cards for laptops.

Laptop: Why the fuck not?  You humans really piss me off sometimes.

Me: Will you ever stop whinging?  You are home, aren’t you?

Laptop: With the warm welcome I’m getting, I’d be better off back in there.

Me: I can always overclock you?

Laptop: Aw! For fuck’s sake!

Me: Just behave.  OK?

Laptop: *sigh*

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?

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.

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?

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?

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.