My computer is back - sort of!

A great weekend with youngest son visiting in order to repair my PC

He arrived on Saturday morning, replaced the confirmed blown power supply even though it was surge protected and also added some memory for me within an hour or so. That is when I should have called a halt, but being the geek that he is (and proud of it) on Sunday he commenced to tell me about how I could save money by getting all my email and various other things hosted by Google Apps for free.
Now I am not saying it is a bad idea but we really should have done it on Saturday if we were going to do it at all. It involved changing all my DNS records. Now don't for a minute think that I know what I am talking about - because I don't. All I know is that his fingers flew over my keyboard and changed a lot of things and added a few more to my domain records. We then got the message that to take effect it may be between 24 and 48 hours.
"That's OK Dad I will check it out tomorrow" he said.
He did, I got several emails from him at work this morning (mine is not working now due to the changes) telling me that something is not quite right and can I remember .....etc.
Don't be silly son, I have been to sleep since then and this is your senile father's memory you are querying!
So after a morning of sporadic follow up messages from him asking me to do a load of further things that I don't understand he tells me that everything should be OK now but once again we have to wait 24 hours or so for it all to take effect over t'internet.

We also had a great belated birthday dinner for him on Saturday as we were on holiday on the day.

We went to the allotment so that I could give him a load of vegetables to take home with him. One of my neighbouring plot holders has temporarily put her chickens there while she is away on holiday and to our horror we discovered them all loose. It appears that somone has undone all of the wire mesh on one side of the coop. We have a suspicion as to who it might be as one of the nearby house owners has complained about the chickens - goodness knows why we live in a rural community for goodness sake and the cowas on the farm that is just as close to his house make far more noise than the chickens. So we spent a fun filled 40 minutes or so catching them and returning them to the coop once I had repaired it. However we were sure that one of them was missing but nowhere to be seen. Until that is we visited again yesterday to water our plot. Because we had used up all of our water from the water butts on saturday I had to get water from the nearby stream and yes, there I found a dead chicken with its neck broken.
Why can't people live together without messing with other people's property?

I thought that I would post here some of the comment that I have just left on Furtheron's blog as both his latest post and this comment may help someone else feeling lethargic and somewhat despairing as we both seem to have been over the past few days.

Its an amazing coincidence about how both Furtheron and I have been feeling recently because not only did we both discover yesterday that we have a really bad case of procrastination at the moment, but also we both separately experienced extreme frustration and doom & gloom last night over some really quite insignificant things.
I will let you read Furtheron's own account, but last night when I discovered that my home PC has died I really went into an "end of the world" thought process thinking about all the things I needed from the PC and could simply not do without. I was as grumpy as hell until Mrs DeeJay simply said "its only a bloody PC" well actually she didn't swear 'cos she doesn't do that like me.
That really pulled me up for a few minutes and made me realise that there are far worse things that could have happened and it is really not that important after all.
The good thing about it is that youngest son, who built it for me in the first place 'cos he is a geek like that, is now going to visit the weekend after next to fix it. See there is a silver lining in everything

It has been a long time

I have just noticed that I haven't posted here since 2nd January! I don't know why really as I have been avidly reading all my favourite blogs so it has not been an issue of time.
I put it down to simply being a boring old fart with nothing much to write about in my life for the past 3 weeks or so.
So, nothing changed there then, but I will ramble on for a few lines.
As I was mentioning in my January 2nd post, I started the New Year off with yet another business trip to the U.S. The planned airport strikes were cancelled and all went well with the trip. In fact it was better than expected as the usual Connecticut January weather was markedly absent and the hat, scarf, gloves etc that I took were not needed at all.

I just had a bit of a 'geek' weekend as I bought a new printer for my home PC. I have got finally fed up with the intermittent failure of my old one. It is about 10 years old so I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised but some days it took about 10 attempts to get it to boot up properly and print. So I bought myself a nice new multi function one. Isn't it amazing though in these days of "plug 'n' play" peripherals it still takes forever to load relevant drivers and set up the darn things. This wasn't helped of course by the masses of disk space that these things need to load up all the manuals and this particular installation insisted that they had to go on my already crowded C: drive even though I had plenty of space on my D: data drive, so I had to spend time cleaning up my C: drive.
Well I know that Windows has a habit of storing temporary files, but I was under the impression that it cleaned them up when you closed down. Not so! I found masses of small and large files hiding away and managed to regain about 1.5 Gb!!!!!
I must stop watching all those porn flicks they take up so much space :-)

Oh by the way did I say that I also treated myself to a nice new shiny 22" flat wide screen monitor? No?, oh well I deserved a bit of self indulgence.

I will try to keep up with more regular postings, so please stay with me as I intend to keep reading yours.