Monday, September 13, 2010

Early morning intruders


I love our little West Virginia house in the woods usually feel safe and secure snuggled in my bed with lots of covers. This morning Bruce left before 6AM to drive down the mountain to Raleigh for a lunch meeting, leaving me another hour before I had to finish loading my car and heading home. At 6:30AM my fearless guard dog lept out of bed, raced upstairs and planted himself in the upstairs window barking as if the Visigoths were on the front porch. He would not be distracted by entreaties to come back and hush. He just raced down the stairs and continued to bark. My sleepy brain decided this must be more than a stray rabbit hopping down the lane. I struggled to the window, peered out into the morning and saw - nothing. This did not appease him.

So out on the deck he went to ferret out the intruder while I got dressed and prepared to venture out into the morning to do battle. The bears are safe from detection for another few weeks while we are in North Carolina. But be warned we will be back soon and the neighborhood alarmist will raise the warning if you venture near.


Friday, September 3, 2010

Can I shake my laptop? Will it suffer permanent brain damage?

Most days I am reasonably computer savy and a good problem solver. This was not one of those days. The first clue -- no email. No junk email, no work email, no ads to buy something wonderful. Nothing. What could be the problem? Two days ago I renewed my web hosting service. Could that be the problem. I try to log on and am rejected, I wait and wait for a person on the help line. "Well it is possible when they renewed the account they deleted the mail forwarding." My question - can you check and help me? No not really, I can send you an email with the instructions on how to do it, and in the meantime I will send you the link to reset your password. The reset password email came but no sight of the how to fix the forwarding problem. After 2 hours, calls to company hosting the email who verified they weren't getting any email to host for me, and hunting around the web site "help" pages, I think I have fixed it, but am not sure. In the meantime I send another trouble ticket to the web hosting company, getting another auto response that someone will email me in 24 hours. I am now getting email. Hopefully it will stay fixed.

I HATE problems I cannot see to resolve or get someone to answer me.

Vanity the ultimate gotcha.

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