Oh Dear! Me Too …

In the end I gave in, despite putting up strong resistance for several years. I did not need it, I thought. I am a blogger, although I have been far too busy of late to find time and space to both read and write.

Lately emails and phone calls have been very frequent between myself and Sweden due to events and situations in “the old country”.

On Saturday my brother said “But you are the perfect person for it, your circumstances make the ideal and optimal setting for it. If you join you will be constantly updated about what is going on. You will feel the physical distance disappear.”

So after thinking about it for half an hour, I finally set up an account and joined . Easy peasy, lätt som en plätt, as we say in Swedish. I had been advised how to find my first “friends”.

I requested to become “friends” with people I have known all my life, which sounds a bit odd actually. All of these had their own “friends”, and mutual “friends”, who in turn had other “friends”, and so it went on.

Within half an hour others had detected me and requested to become my “friend”. I started to understand how it worked. My circle of “friends” began to widen almost organically. There was an abundance of suggested “friends”, most of whom I had no knowledge of whatsoever. I recognised some faces and names, but not necessarily in combination. Names from my past appeared on the screen in front of me, and then welcome greetings started coming up on my “wall”. I also had a message from somebody with an explanation of the difference in visibility between the “wall” and my “message” box.

When I clicked on “Friends”, the whole world seemed to stream up from below onto my screen. It would not take much to get really silly and try to make everybody my “friend”. I actually thought of the old song “Everybody Is Trying To Be My Baby”, as sung by The Beatles once.

I soon realised that I had to be selective and restrict myself, not to go into overdrive and try to break some record. I really just needed another means of communication with, in the first instance, my family.

I have not explored all features of Facebook yet, only really just opened my account, but I already know so much more of what is going on in some people’s lives, all those little things you get to hear when you bump into each other at the supermarket. I believe Facebook is trying to transform the whole world into a small market square. The trick is, I suppose, to find a balance between the advantage of virtual proximity and one’s need for some privacy.

China - Dictatorship's Dubious Internet Activities

 

China, with 400 million internet users, has set up a new wall, The Great Firewall of China. The government is trying to oppress its citizens in new ways, but people still find ways around it with clever thinking and ingenuity. We have all heard and read about it, the whole Google-in-China saga.

I found this very interesting article in The Guardian (UK) today about Chinese censorship. It is well worth a read, and then you can thank your lucky star that you are not one of China's netizens, but can use the internet as you like.

Then I found another China-related article in the same online paper, this time about how Chinese hackers are hacking Gmail accounts. The article also tells you how you can check if your Gmail account has been hacked, if there has been unusual activity. It is somewhere down in the small print at the bottom of the page. Read about how to check and also set it to alert you if something suspicious has been detected.

Who is using your email account? Well, don't panic, but it is worth checking out. And it is always useful to learn something new, isn't it? Stay in control!

Spag Ball

One day when I had formatted the camera memory card to make space for new images, I took a photograph just to check that all was OK. Normally I just hold the camera in front of me, which means I get a picture of my desk with the PC screen on it.

This time however I aimed at the floor next to me by the wall, and this is what it looked like.

And I thought, what a mess! How the heck do I know which is which, where do they go and where do they come from? Do I need them all?

Somehow I know them all, even without having labelled them, and should I forget, I just follow them with my fingers. They are all needed for the PC, phone, PDA, iPod, cameras, headphones etc. Is there a better way? Is it possible to organise this ball of spaghetti differently? What does yours look like?

Hopefully one day we won't be needing a physical conductor of signals and electricity at all; everything will be done by Bluetooth, infrared or something even more sophisticated and advanced. I can't wait!

Then I thought, life is a bit like this too, isn't it? But that's another issue all together. Have a wonderful weekend!

 

The Dribs and Drabs Launch

My photo web site is coming along, if not nicely, at least little by little.

I struggled for days with uploading changes that I made before I eventually figured out how to do it. I was quite ecstatic after having launched the site initially, but any subsequent additions or changes caused me problems.

Uploading elements of various kinds was slightly more complicated than I first thought. I imagined it was just a matter of uploading the html page in question, and everything that belonged to it or was affected by it would follow suit. Oh no, it wasn't.

Some pages loaded very slowly on the site, others not at all, so I looked into the size issue. Were there too many pictures in the flash galleries? Comparing file sizes did not make much sense. Was the type of gallery of any importance? My conclusion was to turn off the auto play function so the viewer wouldn't have to wait for all pictures to load before the slide show got going. But that did not solve all the problems.

In the end I found scripts and xml pages that needed to be dealt with on an individual basis, as well as the images themselves. That's when the problem of the software renaming all the images as they were prepared for uploading, came into play. In the ftp client that I use for uploading you can only get the file name, not thumbnails, so it was very difficult to find the relevant files, with names like "x87tjkh.jpg" for instance, keeping in mind that there are many hundreds of files in the one folder!

Then the simple solution hit me on the head like a giant silver hammer. Sometimes you get so involved that you don't think of the simplest solution. I should have known better.

The obvious way of finding all files that had been changed was of course, here it comes..., to click at the top of the list to sort the files according to time & date. The most recently changed or created files sit on top and can be selected very easily for transfer. Dooohh!! I am almost ashamed to admit it.

But now I can get on with completing the folders and photo galleries with the pictures I have lined up, upload them skillfully without a hitch and then get on with the comments page, which I think still does not work properly. I have, by the way, put a permanent link to the photo site on the right of this blog.

And again, apologies to my regular readers for not visiting your sights as frequently. I promise to improve shortly.

The Big Launch

Trial and error, there was a lot of that, and frustration, but also stubbornness, because I don’t give up easily when I try to solve a problem. I tried to be systematic and logical in my approach, since that is how I do things, but this time, at times, I felt I had taken on a Sisyphean task. I was learning as I went along, but trial and error eventually made me triumph.

I hope that opening paragraph didn’t sound too pompous or self-conceited, because I could simply have said that I had managed to launch my photo web site yesterday. It might develop into something more over time, but for now it will be where I display my photographs in a structured way. The design is straightforward, clean and simple, which wasn’t necessarily easy to achieve. Not using a template meant I had to manage every little detail myself, all from scratch. IT works in mysterious ways, which we all know, but in the end I got it right.

Now I can sit back and catch up on some blog reading, something I sadly have neglected lately. It is very easy to become a “fickle friend” in the blogosphere.

If you do visit my photo web site, bjellerup.com, you’ll see that there are galleries which haven’t yet been linked to any page, but they will be. All the galleries are on auto play, but it is of course possible to override that. Hopefully they will not take too long to load (25 max in each flash gallery).

I tried the Comments page myself without great success. It is supposed to send the comment as an email to contact @ bjellerup.com . Please feel free to comment here or directly to ‘contact…’ if it doesn’t work, because I am understandably very interested in your views, and I promise to reply. So if you don’t get any response from me, it didn’t work.

Apart from continuing work on the “empty” galleries, I will look into any problems on the Comments page. Then of course, I hope to take many more good photos and add them to the site, sometimes replacing old ones of lesser quality.

Happy viewing!

Building a Photo Web Site

I have been a very absent blogger of late. Sorry about that. The reason for this is that I am building a web site, and I am currently organising and processing lots of photos. The main structure is more or less in place, but the many photo galleries are hard work.

Why do I do this? Well, I just did not know what to do with all my pictures. I post some of them here and some on my photo blog, Camera Digitalis, so I thought I would display them in a much more organised way. I am building a straight-forward, no-frills, no bells-and-whistles site, although I use flash galleries to make it a little lively at least. Everything is done from scratch, no templates, because the only suitable photo site template that came with the software, was inadequate in my opinion.

The great difficulty is of course which photos to choose, how to categorise them and then to create the appropriate folders. After that comes the watermarking, since I want to protect my copyright. I am not so foolish as to think that all of my images are so attractive that people would want to copy them (steal them) all, but out of principle and for practical purposes I watermark every single one.

My particular interest in photography took off when I bought my digital SLR in the spring this year. Together with my previous compact camera photos, I have now many thousand images, although I have learned to be self-critical and I delete loads of them after transferring them to my PC for close inspection.

In the last couple of weeks I have trawled through gigabyte after gigabyte to find photos that I believe would be suitable. I am sure I will have second thoughts about many of them and take them off, and also replace some as I add new pictures.

One big issue is that I am not quite certain how much space they will use up of my total allowance, and also how long they will take to upload, so maybe I should launch the site well before I have completed all my planned galleries. Maybe I have to buy more space, we will see.

I am not far off now, perhaps a couple of weeks, so I hope to be able to announce the news before too long. It might come as a surprise to some readers, but I have decided to lift the veil of anonymity and use my real name on the new photo web site. I have nothing to hide, rather the opposite.

My New Little Blue One

I have found it increasingly difficult to focus on my "writing project", "literary ambitions", you know, the book that I am trying to write.

When I am at my PC with its wonderful big screen and many temptations, like blogging, online papers and much more, my self-discipline often lets me down. I feel I am getting nowhere with my writing, so I came up with a "cunning plan", just like Baldrick in Blackadder, but hopefully somewhat cleverer.

Sometimes when I have been away from my study and used good old pen and paper, or even better, my wife's work laptop when we've been on holiday, I have produced many more pages than I normally do at home. So here comes my cunning plan.

I have bought myself a netbook, a mini laptop, to use mainly for writing but also for storing photos that I can show to people when travelling to Sweden for instance.

My new little blue one is a Samsung NC10, a beautiful little thing. After some internet research I decided that the NC10 was the best option for me. It has a near-full-size keyboard with nice, big keys and a crispy clear screen. One negative aspect is that there is no CD/DVD drive, but I intend to use my external hard drive from the PC to copy and then transfer data to the netbook. For smaller amounts of data I will use my USB stick. The best feature of this wonderful little machine, which definitely clinched it, is the battery, which gives you up to 5-6 hours. That beats all competition easily; some other popular netbooks only give you 2-3 hours before the battery is flat and needs recharging.

As the icing on the cake, I also bought a blue-tooth mouse, which of course also is blue, my favourite colour.

Now it only remains to see if my cunning plan will bear fruit, as in Fruits of My Mind (!), or not. Time will tell. (And I apologise to my bloglings (blogger friends), whose blogs I have not visited often enough of late. I have been preoccupied with other stuff and feel very guilty, sorry!)

From Lo-Tech To Hi-Tech

I have had one of those philosophical moments thinking about technological development. I thought of my grandfather, who was twenty years old when the brothers Wright managed to fly an aircraft for the very first time on 17 December 1903. Well before he passed away in 1976 he had also seen the first man on the moon. Isn't that a wonderful, fantastic thought? In his lifetime mankind developed the technology to put a man on that mysterious round disc illuminating the night sky. However Leonardo da Vinci, that multi-talented brainbox from half a millennium ago with his many ingenious ideas, did not always get it right. Like this one ...

So I started thinking about technological milestones in my own life, so far. Typing this draws my mind back to when I was a little boy. Then I used a pencil for most writing; on the odd occasion we used metal-nibbed pens in school for handwriting practice. Later the fountain pen, despite the danger of making a mess of your shirt pocket or your pencil case, made it much more user-friendly since you did not have to dip the nib into a bottle of ink every five seconds. My first fountain pen though, was of the kind that you had to fill, sucking the ink up with a pulling movement. When the ink cartridge was introduced some time later you felt that things were really moving on. Then there was the ballpoint pen, the greatest of them all. How that has revolutionised writing by hand! They were initially not really affordable to the average person, but these days most people would not care if they lost their ballpoint pen.

Long before these relatively modern writing tools, the quill pen was the only alternative, the forerunner to the metal-nibbed pen. I still remember how, when I was thirteen, I had found a big wing feather from a buzzard or similar bird of prey, and I made my own modern ballpoint quill pen out of it by inserting the ink tube with ballpoint into the shaft of the feather. Genius, I thought.

As a lucky seven-year-old I was sometimes allowed to use my fathers typewriter. Remember them? When the ribbon got stuck, entangled and messy? And the arms with the letters on them jammed completely if you tried to type too quickly! Much better when the electric ones with the spinning ball were introduced. There was no stopping the world's typists then. The employers could demand even higher speeds, as long as you did not forget to put in the carbon sheet so you got a copy, because this was when photo-copying was relatively new and expensive. Do you remember those days?

I was a newly appointed deputy head teacher when my head teacher said I needed a calculator for my work. I would be reimbursed, he assured me, otherwise I might have hesitated. This one had solar cells, and I was so impressed by the whole idea that I asked the shop assistant how long the solar cells would last?! I still use my second calculator, which must be at least twenty to twenty-five years old; and the cells have not given up on me yet!

Thinking of sunlight, makes me think again of my grandfather, how he went about taking photographs. It was a slow process; at least that was what we children thought as we stood there waiting to have the group picture taken. The technology in my digital camera is quite different.

Then we have communication technology; remember telex machines? The sender had to either type, punching a tape that then (I think) was put into another machine producing typed text, or it was received as it was typed in at the other end. After telex came fax; what a revolution! You could send any document over the phone?! Unheard of! Put the sheet in the facsimile machine, watch it being pulled slowly through and then phone to check that it had been received alright. You could not really trust the fickle fax!

These days we just attach a document to an email, but hey, that was almost surpassing the computer! Young folk nowadays have little understanding of how quickly things have moved on with computers. The computer on the first lunar landing craft, The Eagle, had less memory than a modern mobile phone. I remember buying my first PC nearly twenty years ago, how I said that I did not want to become a second class citizen, I had to learn about this new technology. How things have moved on since!

In the beginning the features of a computer were extremely limited and when the internet started up it was a desperate struggle to find anything since search engines were in their infancy as well. Those of you who also know the whole development would probably agree when I say it has been mind-boggling.

I must not forget to mention mobile phones; texting, sending pictures, taking photos ...

We have come a long way from the bricks of the eighties to the iPhones. It is amazing; and you wonder what will come next. Did I forget the iPod?

And here I am blogging about it all in my personal little space in the blogosphere.

C u l8r!

Long Time No Post

My mind has not been so full of fruits for my blog lately, it has been busy elsewhere. But here I am. I have had time to read some other blogs though, and I noticed that one blogger friend had changed to the same template as I have. The colours were different as expected but she had also a big, beautiful picture in her header. I had a look in her source html, but it looked the same as mine, so I could not figure out why my fruit photo would not expand. In the end, after a lot of trial-and-error, I figured out that my photo simply was too small. So I found another one which I had snapped in France at a market, and now it happened! Some tweaking later I had a new banner spanning the whole of my 22-inch screen. I only hope it does not cause problems for people with normal screen sizes.

(Click to enlarge. See how thin the thread is!)

My oldest readers might remember that apart from many birds, we also get squirrels in our garden. I have posted video clips before of squirrels raiding the bird food. With the new bird feeder it is extremely difficult for our furry friends to steal from the birdies, or so I thought. Check out this young athlete, not only can he hang by his hind legs, he also manages to slide down the thin sewing threads that hold the two grease balls full of seeds. But can he get back up? Watch him in this minute-long video. The little rascal!

Google Earth and Some More Stats Stuff

I have some friends in France who just bought their first computer some weeks ago. When we saw them in February they were on a very steep learning curve. Readers of this blog and, in particular, blogger friends will not find it difficult to imagine how much there is for these novices of the PC and the Internet to learn about. Everything is new, how to log on, how to navigate, how to find their way around the keyboard even! But to see the joy in their eyes when they very proudly showed emails with pictures from relatives was a great joy to me as well. They had also discovered Google Earth and had had a look at various places, where they lived themselves for instance. Great entertainment!

All of this reminded me that I had had the first version of Google Earth on my old PC, so I decided to download the latest Beta version. And boy was I surprised at how much it had improved. I could hardly believe my eyes when I zoomed in on our house; I could see my car parked in the street, and I am pretty sure the boot was open, which means I had just done some shopping and was at that very moment inside dropping off the first load. There is no mistaking a Nordic Blue (!) car with a sunroof, and the shadow and the rear end looked a bit strange, indicating an open boot. I was speechless! From other features around where we live I figured out that the photo was roughly three years old. I could see people crossing a road, cyclists on the cycle path and various other astonishing details. Talk about Big Brother! Isn’t it scary that these satellites can see you as soon as you set foot outside your front door? What next?

I have also had some tedious fun (can you say that?) checking my visitor stats again, since I am intrigued by how the flipping thing works! All those random hits seem to come approximately 14 minutes after posting (including the time it takes to type in the title and upload two photos), and keep coming for about another four minutes. Checking the referral feature I found out how it works, I think. A visitor from country A is referred by another blog in country B, and if this second blog has no connection with me whatsoever, the country A visitor must have clicked on Next Blog to get to me. Otherwise I cannot see how it works. So I set about to check out all the country B blogs.

I found an Italian visitor referred by an Aberdeen blog, a Mexican visitor referred by a Swedish interior design blog, a Portuguese visitor coming from a Uruguayan blog and a Sri Lankan visitor finding me through a Belgian children’s entertainment blog! How is that for international? Wow! All this only goes to show how widely spread the Internet is these days. Everybody seems to be doing it. You can travel the world from your desk, see all the famous sights, find out about how other people live, share thoughts, ideas and experiences and also make blogger friends. But hey, we must not fool ourselves, although it is a great way, it is a substitute. There is nothing like the real thing, don’t you agree?

Blog Reading

I was just thinking how much I love Google Reader. It sits there on my screen as the first tab in Firefox. As soon as one of the blogs I have listed there, is updated, it notifies me. It saves me a lot of time, not having to trawl through my bookmarks to read new stuff. If I want to comment, I simply click on the little double arrow taking me to the new post where I also can see other comments directly underneath. Should I wish to check if I have had a reply comment to an earlier comment, the Home button takes me to the full blog. All very simple and user-friendly. Thank you, Google. BTW I know there are others, like Pageflakes, doing pretty much the same job.

Before I sign off, I have now made that call to Abbey to ask for the third time to send me internet-banking details. I was served by a not-so-customer-friendly, young man who did not have the courtesy to apologise for their bad service. He was definitely in the wrong job!

On a happier note, it is now Friday, so there will be chilled bubbly later. Hooraay!

ABBEY - Oh No, Not Again!

I have been on about this before, but some problems just don’t seem to go away. Abbey, my UK bank, introduced a new computer system last year, and you understand straight away where this is going, don’t you? If there is one foolproof way of effing something up, it surely has to be to start using a new system before it has been properly tested. I know their old system was hopelessly old, but it worked!

Not only do the programmers have to build a robust application, but the existing database has to be transferred safely, and then staff need training. I know all of that; a lot of experience, skill and effort need to go into this mammoth task. And who suffers if it doesn’t work? The customers do. I am one of those.

The first time I noticed something odd was when there was a discrepancy between the printed and the online statement. Secondly the overdraft on one account just disappeared; the new system had changed our address for that account and consequently sent statements to the wrong address. That in turn resulted in a “return-to-sender”; they thought something was afoot and withdrew the overdraft facility. The system did not pick up the difference in addresses for our six accounts. Huh?

Later in the autumn when I had to cancel bank cards and internet banking details due to a theft, the real “fun” started. The cards took forever to be delivered, twice they failed in their attempts to deliver the two separate, secret pieces of information so I can start internet banking again. To make things worse, in order to communicate my frustration, I always have to make a phone call to the UK, often being on hold for absolute ages!

The list is long. In December I rang to ask them to send me new internet banking details, to transfer money between accounts and also to pay a credit card bill, all of which resulted in the money being transferred, but the credit card bill not being paid and no internet banking details as yet. I realised it had gone wrong when I had the next credit card statement, and at the same time getting a partly wrongly-addressed letter saying there had been a problem. Houston or what?! A new phone call corrected a few of the mistakes, but I was advised to wait just a little longer for the internet banking details, since they might have been delayed due to the Christmas Holiday. Dodgy software, sloppy staff, bad management….? I don’t know. I only know that I have to make that phone call again and ask them to send the internet banking details for the third time. Wish me luck, I need it!

Visit Stats

All bloggers like visitors to their blogs, unless they are just letting off steam in an online diary and don’t care about anybody but themselves. Some are desperate to get as many visitors as possible because they are advertising stuff for themselves or for others, eager to make money out of their blog. Fair enough, but sometimes the content of the blog is very dubious. Take all these mock-blogs for instance; you know, the ones that are set up just to display links to p**n sites (don’t want to write the word in full to avoid hits by googlers!). They put up a blog with an innocent-looking title and blaaadi…blaaah posts. Every time I click on the “Next Blog” button, I seem to find one of those, more and more often. I suppose they are very difficult to police. But I have also found some good, genuine blogs that way. Otherwise it is much safer and rewarding to find interesting blogs through online friends and contacts. Some of us even sign up to MyBlogLog and show our face, part of it or just a dummy picture. This makes it a little more personal, as personal as it can get on the net. You know who has visited recently.

Most of us, if not all, have some stats provider. I have signed up to Sitemeter, but only the basic version, not wanting to part with money unnecessarily. So I have to accept the limitations in the stats provided. Sometimes I can tell who it actually is from the information. For instance some employers, big companies, institutions etc display their name, making it obvious to you who the visitor is. Then of course there are the ones who keep coming back to your blog, with the company name and location revealed, and you still cannot figure out who it is. Very frustrating! I am intrigued and puzzled sometimes; who is that? And they never leave a comment; it is like being teased!

Other visitors have somehow suppressed the information almost completely. Domain Name and Location display “Unknown”. What have they got to hide, I wonder? But the IP address is always there. Maybe there is a way of tracing that? Who knows.

Then of course there is the issue of the location of the service provider. If the visitor lives in a certain place, it is not necessarily the same place as where the service provider is located, so you cannot tell. Do I sound like an obsessed control freak? I would just like to know; I am inquisitive.

With my basic version of Sitemeter I don’t seem to be able to trust the Visit Length either. In the past I have spoken about a specific visit with a relative and asked how long it was, where Sitemeter told me “0 seconds”. Oh no, it had lasted several minutes. There must be some technical issue here, because even if you get a hit from somebody searching for certain words, surely they must spend a few seconds reading before they realise that you are for instance not an “Old Vinyl Dealer”. How does that work? I have no idea.

Anyway, it is good fun trying to keep up with who is visiting, but I do not spend sleepless nights over it!

Memory Lane

When my dad passed away a little over two years ago, he left behind a rather large collection of old slides. Many of them were from his trips abroad with my mother to do research for a number of travel guides that he kept on writing well into his seventies. That was at least the purpose of the trips he declared to the taxman to make the holiday cheaper; clever man! Others were your typical family slides from birthdays, holidays etc. My mother did not know what to do with them, but I had an idea. I wanted to transfer them to digital, i.e. jpegs, to store on a PC. I wanted to make sure they did not just sit in a dark cupboard forever.

So once when I visited my mother, I got the old projector out, selected the family photos and brought it all to Germany. When I got home I dug out my own old slides from “the dark cupboard” and took the whole lot, several hundreds of them, to a photo dealer. It would still be cheaper to let them do it than to buy the machine to convert them to digital myself, according to the guy in the shop.

So now I had a treasure of old slides on my PC, but some of them had not fared well over the years; there were scratches, cracks in the colours, dark spots, minute hairs, fluff and so on. This is where the newly acquired Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 (too long to say!) comes in handy. I have started working on some photos, cleaning them up by using mostly the Scratch Remover tool, with stunning effect.

I have also learned how to add watermarks to photos, so I thought I might do that with some of my most precious pictures. The first picture is of my dad when he was not yet forty, I believe. He is standing somewhere on the south coast of England, probably Bournemouth, where he taught English to summer students in the late fifties and early sixties. I think he looks really handsome in his cricket-inspired outfit, and those cool clip-on sunglasses!

The second picture is of yours truly in the late sixties. It was taken at Rödby ferry port in Denmark. My friend and I were on our way down to Frankfurt to surprise my two sisters. My younger sister had travelled to Frankfurt to meet our older sister who was an air-stewardess with Pan Am, and was stationed in Washington D.C. So my friend and I tossed a tent and a few things in the boot of his Ford Anglia (I think), which had a souped-up Ford Cortina GT engine under the bonnet. He had done a few other things to it, which I don’t remember, but was not overly concerned with the exterior. Looking at that picture now I think, was the car small, me big (183 cm) or was it just the angle?

Our first stop-over was Hamburg, where we obviously had to look at the Reeperbahn. There we were pulled into, literally, a bar of some sort, and then quickly thrown out when we said we did not have any money (to speak of). We only wanted to look at this sinful place and were not even used to drinking beer. Sweet innocence! I actually found the postcard I sent from Hamburg to my parents, among my dad’s belongings. OK, I’ll throw that into the blog as well then. I just might tell you later about our continued adventures in Germany. Auf Wiedersehen!

Blog Tweaking

As the observant reader has already spotted, I have changed my title field. I had tried to figure out for a long time how to get a picture in there that would stretch across, not only a small section in the middle. The most annoying thing was the double border with lots of empty space on both sides. After having played around with my new software, Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2, I finally had something I thought worth trying. I am not sure I am totally happy with the result, but it will have to do for now. While I was at it, I also got rid of both title borders and picture borders by diving into the HTML and commenting out the corresponding code. You can learn a lot by just studying the template code. I feel rather pleased with myself now. I've earned a cup of tea!

Back in business

Yes, I am now fully operational, from an IT point of view, that is. I have installed my new all-in-one printer from DELL, only a simple 926, but boy does it print well! I first printed some A4-size photos. I used a high capacity cartridge rather than a special photo print cartridge, and out came a superb picture, sharp and professional-looking. Then came the moment to print the first document, which was a letter to my UK bank to complain about their web site. I do a lot of internet banking and it normally works extremely well, but this summer their application went bonkers, deleting a long-standing overdraft on one account and delayed a transfer between some other accounts for a day, sending the a/c into the red, and charging me for an unauthorised overdraft. The cheek! However, my letter was, as always, polite and correct, but to the point. Let's see how long it takes them to rectify and reimburse. I want my money back!

Techie Tweaking

Some time ago I started noticing the nice-looking, personalised, tiny icons, so called favatars or favicons, on some people's blogs. You know, the little picture in front of your URL. Most Blogspot bloggers have the default, fat B on an orange background. How can I get my own little symbol, I thought. Said and done; I started investigating by looking at people's HTML using View / Page Source on the Tool Bar. Not that I can read, let alone write, HTML particularly well, but I just looked for some key words. So eventually I visited the Favicon website and made myself a favicon by uploading something I created over ten years ago. Then my real problems began. How could I get it onto my blog? Well, it said to just 'upload it into my root directory'. Yeah, as if! I could not find a way of doing that, and there was no result when I searched Blogger for help. So I looked at other blogs until I found another site, MyFavatar , where I repeated the process, and here comes the difference; they host your favatar and you just paste in a code that links it to your blog. It worked instantly and I thought I was a genius for having sorted it out. I do not give up easily when it comes to IT problems; I will never let a stupid machine outsmart me, if I can help it, that is. In gratitude I obviously put a link on my blog. Thank you, Favatar, for a very user-friendly website.

When I spoke to DELL's techie help desk yesterday I was given a web address to access an online form should I need it later. The techie engineer said it was a rather long URL to take over the phone, so he made it shorter for me with the help of TinyURL . Then I remembered that I had been given another TinyURL the other day when I bought something on the net. Brilliant idea! All those long URLs you sometimes come across are almost impossible to get right if you have to copy by hand and type in. These very short ones are easy to deal with if you, for instance, are in an internet cafe and can't copy from somewhere on your computer. Excellent! So I included a TinyURL field on my blog that anyone can use. Help yourselves.

At last!

Finally I have managed to speak to tech support and sort out my CD and DVD drivers. Good old DELL! They are working again. I had previously investigated enough to have a go on my own, but hesitated because I did not want to risk buggering up my PC unnecessarily. You never know with techie stuff. It can go pear-shaped anytime for no apparent reason. So after a long phone call, things are back to normal. This means I can install software for my new all-in-one printer, which I hope will turn up in the post any day now. All systems go!

Frustration

We have a letting agency looking after our UK property, which is fine; it works well most of the time. Dealing with them remotely is not always plain sailing though. There seems to be quite a turnover of staff. New names keep sending emails about this, that and the other. Sometimes they ask you to reply to somebody else, the person who is actually dealing with the issue at hand. I am normally very organised, and with people like these, it is a must, but even I find it difficult to keep up with changes and to update my contact files. We have now had new tenants installed in the flat, and a change-over always raises issues. I just want it to be trouble-free, leaving the business in somebody's capable hands. This time it seemed to go well, the only issue being the identification of the sofa! Is it still the same sofa that we left behind? Because I cannot see how that could be taken apart and partly stored in the loft, partly under the double bed. Is it even the same bed? Have some previous tenants walked off with our furniture and replaced it with inferior quality? We don't know until the agents send us some pictures! How difficult can it be to take a few photos and email them? Frrrrustrrration!

Then there is the management company of the building. Frrrrustrrration again! Today we had a thick envelope with some letters sent to us by the letting agent. It contained a Council Tax demand, which we should not have, and a 'Final reminder before legal action' regarding unpaid fees from the management company. The letters had the London flat address on them and had been left in the hall by the leaving tenants. For more than three years the company have sent all correspondence to our German address, but now something had gone wrong. Guess what! They had a new computer system installed in the autumn and 'unfortunately all data had not been transferred, it seemed'. Monkeys! But we don't pay them peanuts. How many times have we all heard people blaming techie systems instead of human failure? There is always a person behind the keyboard, isn't there?

Maybe things would have gone better had they not had this little pop-up window on their PCs? You can't let the machines do it all, you know.

Vista revisited

My computer is making fun of me! We all know how tricky it can be to transfer stuff from an old PC to a new one, but this takes the biscuit. After having sorted out nearly everything and got it working, the disc drives, which I used to install the new monitor and my Office Software, have stopped responding. They simply don't detect any discs. What do I do? I use the Device Manager to establish the status of the drivers and it tells me that they might be corrupted or something. So, I download the correct drivers from the net, try to install them, get a message like 'You are up the proverbial creek, mate!', and my patience is severely tested. I never dispair, I always walk away victorious in the end, but the end does not seem to be nigh! Like Amy Winehouse sings - 'No, no, no!' I might have to resort to reading a manual. No, I'm only joking. I couldn't possibly do that, could I?