Category: technology

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Something weird

Something weird has happened. This blog disappeared in May 2021 and since then has been displaying a message saying that the version of PhP wasn’t compatible. I tried to follow the instructions for updating the version of PhP, and thought I’d done so, but nothing seemed to be happening, just the same message whenever anyone tried to link to this site.

I found by experiment that the Damson Tree and Phyllida Fogg blogs were still accessible, and so was the Southsea Storytellers, so I could have continued blogging if I’d wanted to, but it seemed like a good time to give up, and that’s what I did. I carried on writing a journal for a while, just something where I wrote (at first every day) but didn’t share it with anybody (or rather didn’t put it anywhere where other people could potentially read it even if they wanted to), but after a couple of months that just fizzled out too. I think I may have jotted down a couple of poems since then, but don’t really know what happened to them. I removed writing from my life as a hobby, as I’d been drifting towards for several years, and deleted ‘writer’ from the tagline on my FB profile, though I left in ‘poet’.

This morning I saw that I’d had an email from my hosting provider saying that I needed to update the PhP version on my whole site before the 9th February. I almost didn’t renew it when it came up in September, because I hadn’t done anything with the site in so long, but then I paid for another two years, almost out of inertia, and from a superstitious dread that if I didn’t, I’d regret it.

Anyway, I almost didn’t read the email, but having paid up in the autumn I thought I’d better. It also gave a link to how to do it, so I tried it, though it didn’t look any different from what I’d done before. But hey presto, suddenly I have my blog back…

Except that…

Now it appears that the Damson Tree blog isn’t working any more (but with a different error message). which means the ‘bookshop’ isn’t either.

Not that I have any plans of writing anything – or any expectations of selling any copies of my books.

PS: I had a brainwave and changed the php version on Damson-tree.co.uk back to the one it was before. Now all the blogs seem to be working. Go figure.

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Two Days in One (Again)

Wednesday, 05 May 2021

I started writing, but after about 100 words looked up and realised nothing was happening, the last couple of sentences I’d typed weren’t there. I thought I must have accidentally overwritten it, as sometimes happens when I’m not paying attention, then I found that my mouse wasn’t working, tried the touchpad on my keyboard and that wasn’t working, nothing was working, I had no cursor. I waited for a while, then tried alt-del-ctrl and that didn’t do anything either, everything was frozen, so I switched off and started it up again. When I finally got back into Word, what I’d written wasn’t autosaved, so I had to start all over again, even though I didn’t really want to write this morning anyway.

When I got home on Tuesday I called my cat a few times, but she didn’t respond. This isn’t like her, when I’ve been away she’s usually really pleased to see me, but I didn’t worry, thinking she would come out when she was ready. I spent about an hour in the kitchen, very excited to have wifi in there at last – my son installed a booster for me when he was here on Saturday, and I now have wifi in the kitchen and bedrooms, which has been a huge bugbear for me in the four years I’ve been living here. I thought she’d appear, but she didn’t, so I went round everywhere calling her name and looking in her usual hiding places. Got my dinner – and hers – then afterwards went into the front room for my evening telly-watching. Still no cat. About eight o’clock I went all round upstairs again, and in the study (I’d been in there before) I found a little face peeping out nervously from the bottom of a book case hidden in the corner behind piles of junk and stuff.

I need to do something about this room. It is so awful. I just leave it and leave it and let it get worse.

Thursday, 06 May 2021

That’s what I got to yesterday and then gave up. Maybe today I’ll just fill up what’s left. This week I don’t seem able to come up with a full 500 words on any day. The words are there, they always are, but the inner critic keeps batting them away as being too boring or too depressing or whatever.

I got a text from my daughter, asking if I want to go and stay with them after the 17th but before she goes back to work. I told her about losing and finding the cat, and about the mess in the study. She and her sister-in-law want to go away without the kids and husbands for a few days, maybe to the cabin and I have a key now, so I could get the train and she could meet me at the station. Or she might come here and help me sort out the study, then take me back with her. I sent her photos of the mess.

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Bleuuurrrgggh

Hey ho, switched on the computer and it took me four attempts to realise that the reason it wasn’t accepting my password was because the caps lock was on. When it occurred to me, I thought: ‘surely there’s usually a message to tell you that’ and then saw that there was one but I hadn’t noticed it. It hadn’t been switched off properly, so when I got on it went straight to Facebook and I started scrolling through that, ‘loving’ friends’ pictures of their cats and laughing at cartoons.

I’ve been to Sainsbury’s already this morning to find that they didn’t have any of the usual cat food (trust me, it’s not worth buying any other kind), and, more seriously that they didn’t have any Marmite. I asked a young man who was restocking the bakery shelves, and he showed me where it should be and said ‘it’s in short supply everywhere isn’t it?’ Is it? I didn’t know, and I’ve completely run out. ‘You could try one of the larger stores, or’ and he lowered his voice confidentially and pointed across the road: ‘Tesco’s!’

I will return to Tesco, but I wasn’t about to go over there with my three bags of shopping from Sainsbury’s, so I came home.

I had a bad night last night – they’re never good, but this was particularly bad, and I don’t know why. I tried listening to two programmes I’d downloaded, and they were both pretty depressing, one the fifth episode of a series, and I’m not sure if it’s the last or just the last I’ve downloaded, and the other the start of the second series of something else. They were oddly similar, both about feisty women in history, one being Eleanor of Aquitaine, and the other a fictional Icelandic woman from some period in history, which come to think of it could be about the same. The actresses sounded very similar, both with Northern English accents (in Eleanor’s case, presumably to emphasise her provincial back ground) – I suppose it could even have been the same actress, but I haven’t checked. I’m not sure I want to listen to any more of either of them, not even in the early hours – as I said, they were both very depressing, although Eleanor was the less sympathetic of the two.

Although I’ve lived with this insomnia all my life, so that it’s part of my life, I still keep wondering if there is any better way of dealing with it. I lay there doing my downwards-counting in my head, and thought: well, soon it should be warm enough to be worth getting up and sitting in another room when I can’t sleep, even though it’s never helped when I’ve tried it before. But I feel so tired when I’m lying there, I don’t have the energy to get out of bed – and that of course carries over to the morning as well, I never want to get up, but I also hate lying awake.

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Gobbledygook

Thursday, 22 April 2021n the Windows logn screen eing part of the same, instead of both yrtnewswf what is ectrum  sf te ends si are somehow at oppentertainmentport’ and enas though .ekt do you remember from the news this wekhenthing in betwSport to entertainment and everr: ayinessage here was a  PC this morningon my…

When I glanced up from typing, the above gobbledygook was on my screen. How it got so mangled I have no idea – clearly in some places I had hit the ‘up arrow’ and taken my cursor – and hence my typing – up to the line above – something that frequently happens when I’m typing without paying attention, often leading to whole lines being overwritten and I have to copy what’s there onto the ‘clipboard’ and carefully go back through ‘undo’ to get back what’s disappeared. If I untangle the mess, I think what I was trying to say was this:

‘On the Windows login screen on my PC this morning there was a message saying: Sport to entertainment and everything in between, what do you remember from the news this week?’ as though ‘sport’ and ‘entertainment’ are somehow at opposite ends of a spectrum of ‘the news’ as opposed to being both at the same end…’ and I was intending to go on to write something about the implication that the genuinely important stuff about what’s happening in the world can somehow be dismissed as less significant  – but I’m not going to go into that now because I’m just amazed at the madness I seem to have unleashed, and would like to make the analogy that that is pretty much what it feels like inside my mind most of the time. (Forgot tpo mentione that somehow I also caused this paragraph to go to double spacing, but I’ve corrected that. ‘to mention’.)

Well.

I have written two poems (one for today, on efor tomorrow – maybe) on my notebook with my black crayon pencil while still in bed. This new technology of discovered is still working find, though no doubt the ‘lead’ will snap soon. ‘one for’ not ‘on efor’ and ‘I’ve’ not ‘of’. It’s interesting to note that writing words that sound vaguely like the one I intended to write seems to be quite a new phenomenon in my wrting/typing’. ‘fine’ not ‘find’. ‘writing’ not ‘wrting’. And so it goes. My typing is becoming, at first glance, almost as illegible as my handwriting. I now the right words perfectly well, they just come out wrong. ‘know’, not ‘now’ – and I promise you I am not doing this deliberately, just not making the corrections when I notice them. And Word spell checker just automatically corrected ‘diong’ to doing’ – but not that time. Interesting.

Well, that has taken up most of 500 words this morning, writing about my terrible typing. I once wrote about this before and read it out at a writers group and everyone laughed. It’s mortying when everyone supposedly laughing ‘with’ you fails to notice you’re not laughing. Mortifying.

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Monday

Already written my NaPoWriMo poem for today – and, incidentally, I seem to have resolved my issue with the keyboard. I turned it upside down and shook it vigorously for a while, watching the crud cascade out from between the keys, and although I’d already tried that method several times, it seems to have dislodged the specific bit of crud which was causing the problem and for now the problem has gone away (without my having to buy a new keyboard).

Well, all that happy news has got me started, but I don’t know where I’m going from here. Except that I’ve just discovered that I have two avatars on WordPress – possibly three, if ‘Southsea Storytellers’ also counts. Sorry, I just got distracted again, into trying to work out how the ‘community’ feature works on WordPress. I really know nothing about the software I use every day – except the bits I use every day. I’m probably using it all wrong.

But that’s how I found out about the other avatar – from the community feature. I saw a picture of my own face from 2008 in Paris, not a bad picture but terrible resolution when it was squeezed onto an avatar. I clicked on it and it took me to ‘Gravatar’ which , rather disturbingly, had a ‘Contact me’ followed by an email address I still use – fortunately, no one has bothered to contact me through that route, as far as I’m aware – or maybe they’ve all been trapped by the spam filter.

I don’t really know what I’m doing and I don’t know what to say about it. Pretty much sums up my attitude to life this morning. I don’t know why I write 500 words a day. Sometimes it works and sometimes it just goes horribly wrong. Mostly I feel better for doing it, but today it is just a massive slog.

Sunny at the moment. I’ve got no plans to go anywhere today. I might go to the knitting shop – I said that last Monday, when they opened after lockdown, then I found out that I have to make an appointment (it’s a really tiny space) and I didn’t feel like committing myself to a specific time so didn’t do it, even though I’d been waiting for it to open to get a 5.5mm circular needle, which I need for one of the jumpers I’m making (the old one is on the verge of breaking, with one of the needle ends coming away from the connecting plastic wire, if that means anything to you). But I’ve got plenty of other projects I can be getting on with, and even if I finish it I won’t want to wear it till next winter, so there’s no rush.

I just remembered I haven’t typed up the poem I wrote yesterday morning. A couple of the words were quite hard to read, I think I’ve got them now, but I’d probably better write it up soon – if I want to keep it.

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Morning Walk Continued, and NaPoWriMo Stress

Two observations about yesterday’s blogging attempts; firstly, the post on here was written in a notebook while sitting in the park, without the benefit of automatic word-counting until I got home and typed it up and discovered I’d written 700 words, so I saved the last 200 for today. The other issue was that I hadn’t got a clue what to write for NaPo, nothing came to me till dinner time, when I thought of something quickly and shoved it out.

Here is the last 40% of what was in my notebook from yesterday:

…

…

Eek, it’s not on the PC, because yesterday I sat downstairs and typed it on my laptop. There will be a brief delay while I run down and email it to myself…

…or maybe I’ll carry on with what I was going to say about napo first 9dammit, still got that problem with the keyboard and still haven’t ordered a new one).

When I started the NaPoWriMo poem(s) this year (consciously using the left shift key now), they kept coming every day, but I was aware that this was a risky strategy

Over the last few days, although only half way through the month, I felt that I had reached so far into the dark, that I was obliged to start coming out. By opening Pandora’s Box, and acknowledging the Hope that hides at the bottom, I started turning it around – although that wasn’t at all how I was feeling. Is it a good idea to have a crisis bang in the middle of a narrative? And after all, hope isn’t always to be trusted.

…Then I remembered that the gates to the garden behind the Natural History Museum were open when I passed the other day, and as that is quieter than the Rose Garden I decided to go there – it’s on my usual route. I found another sunny bench near the tree where I used to go to outdoor yoga classes last summer, and sat with my coffee and notebook, listening to the birds and the sound of tennis racquets and writing this (which I’m now transcribing at home).

I know it’s not unusual for people of my age to grieve for the past: the career, the family times, the children now grown up, and so on. But I think I grieve more for the future, or futures, in which I was going to raise a family; study for a PhD; live in a big house in the country; end my marriage and live my own life; go travelling alone across Europe; write and publish a book; move to the seaside. Now when I look to the future I see that my son-in-law is planning to build a ‘granny annexe’, so that when I’m no longer capable of looking after myself, I can return to Bedford and live with them. Which is reassuring, in lots of ways, but what else is there? What about the years – hopefully many – between now and then?

Linda Rushby 15 April 2021
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grim

I didn’t write yesterday. It was one of those utterly grim mornings when I couldn’t think of anything which wasn’t… utterly grim, so I couldn’t bring myself to say anything at all.

I did my napowrimo thing, but thought; what can I say/ it’s not even half way through the month, and if I’ve reached the darkest point already, what am I going to do for the next two and a half weeks? (Seventeen days counting today). To add to the frustration, the shift key on the right side of my keyboard has stopped working, which means it’s a pain to do the capitalisation for NaPoWriMo 9and if I don’t keep on top of it lots of other things go down the toilet, like question marks, brackets and i0.

But the keyboard thing isn’t really relevant to my general feelings of despair, and I just need to get round to ordering a new one. I came up with a Napo-etc poem yesterday, but couldn’t quite bring myself to use the word ‘hope’. That’s the problem, isn’t it? When you can’t see any hope you can’t wish it into existence from nowhere. It doesn’t matter how irrational that is, that sense of everything falling apart. What makes any one morning feel any worse than any other? All mornings are shit – if you choose to write in the morning, it’s not surprising if everything comes back to moaning.

But if I’m honest, I know exactly why yesterday was so hard – because it was the first session of tai chi in the park – as opposed to on Zoom – and I’d been dreading going out and interacting with other people – even a nice, friendly group of people whom I used to see every Tuesday morning. Did walking twenty minutes to the park make it somehow worse than three minutes to the community centre where the classes used to be? No, not particularly. Anyway, I could have driven, but that would have meant finding a parking place near the park, and another one near home when I got back, and I need the exercise. The fact that it was in a new place probably did enter into it somehow, even though it’s a place I’ve driven past many times, it’s still a new walk and a new location. But mainly it’s the experience I HAD AT THE END OF THE FIRST LOCKDOWN (not shouting, just demonstrating that because I’m trying to use the left hand shift key I keep getting caps lock instead without noticing. Also, on the sentence I started with ‘Anyway’, I accidentally hit the ctrl key, and when I glanced up everything I’d typed so far had disappeared, because it had done ‘select all’, and I carried on typing – I didn’t realise that was what had happened, but I managed to keep hitting ‘undo’ till it all came back).

I have to go out again today, for a Covid test, but at least that only requires the minimum of human interaction.

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Spring Thoughts

Sun shining again this morning. There’s something sneakily deceptive about the tail end of winter and start of spring because, although it might be sunny, it’s not actually warm enough to throw off coats and jumpers, until that day when you find yourself walking down the street in your winter coat and notice that other people are out with bare arms and legs (scrub the latter because these days there are some English blokes who will go out in shorts at any time of year – very different from how it was in my childhood). Oh look, the grammar checker wants me to change ‘bare’ to ‘bear’ in that previous sentence – must be thinking about the US Constitution (or is it the Bill of Rights?) Either that, or it’s about men walking around with fat arms covered in dense fur, like bears – that’s an image that’s now lodged into my brain and won’t go away in a hurry. The explanation given is: ‘possible word choice error’ – nope, sorry mister grammar checker, I said exactly what I intended to say, and I’m right and you’re wrong, as usual.

The coming of spring should be a source of joy, so why am I so grumpy? Partly because of the shambles in the garden, I guess – not that I’m ungrateful for my snazzy new shed, but it’s brought home to me the amount of work that needs to be done everywhere else. Gardening is one of those things that I have in times past been very enthusiastic about – or enthusiastic about planning, thinking and fantasising about, at least. Like most things which require sustained effort and attention, I rapidly lose interest when the results don’t live up to my hopes – or just generally lose interest when other things take over my time and attention.

A recent discussion on the dyspraxia Facebook page centred on the word ‘dyspraxia’ itself, which has been concocted from Latin or Greek (maybe both) to mean ‘bad at doing’, just as ‘dsylexia’ translates as ‘bad at reading’ or dyscalculia ‘bad at arithmetic’. (BTW, I did pick on the fact that I mistyped ‘dyslexia’, but left it because it amused me.) To me, ‘bad at doing’ sums up everything perfectly, but some contributors to the discussion found it excessively negative, and were arguing for the use of the term preferred in the US, which is ‘Developmental Co-ordination Disorder’, or DCD. I don’t like this at all, and not just because it’s American. ‘Developmental’ makes it sound as though it’s something that occurs in the developing child, and hence the implication is that you can ‘grow out of it’, which I can confirm is a long way from the truth. Then ‘Co-ordination’ puts the stress on the physical effects on gross motor skills, reminiscent of the old term: ‘clumsy child syndrome’, whereas the main impacts for me are those on brain functions: working memory, planning, organisation, absorbing and retaining information, time management, lack of concentration etc.

Not to mention, shit at gardening.  

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Tackling… a Metaphor

Today Backup and Sync tells me that it can’t sync 7107 items, but it is syncing 7130 of 18221. Or something like that. The numbers change every time I look. But I think this is a good thing, because yesterday it couldn’t sync 20837, which I think means that the numbers of files it wants to sync has gone down, and I take that to mean that some of the files which were formerly on the google drive are no longer there – so my deletions have achieved something. But, the space is still full. Is this because of what’s being uploaded from my phone?

Why do I keep harping on about this? Because I’m sure there has to be a solution somewhere, somehow. It’s a problem I’ve ignored for a long time, but always assumed there was a simple solution. Now I’ve decided to try and resolve it, it’s turning out to be a lot more challenging than just deleting some old emails and photos.

I have just taken what feels like the nuclear option. I have disconnected my account from Backup and Sync. But is that really what I wanted to do? Does this mean that I can’t now access my files on Google Drive, even to delete them? What does that mean for my emails? And my photos? And sharing files between my PC and other devices?

I have written an awful lot of words on this topic (I’m guessing about 4,000, but I haven’t checked). It’s not the only thing going on in my life at the moment – I can walk away at any time and forget about it for hours on end. But it feels symbolic. If the issue is about stuff lying around on my electronic ‘desktop’, isn’t that very similar to the state of my physical desktop, my study, my whole house? Things which have just been left to lie where they are, no real system of filing or tidying away, just overwhelming clutter? And what about my mental state – isn’t it all a perfect metaphor for that too?

I have been ignoring the messages relating to my emails for years, with only occasional bursts of enthusiasm for going through and deleting them when the warnings become too dire. My old Yahoo email currently has 7,526 unread emails – that’s right, unread, not undeleted. But taking yesterday as a typical example, I received 12 new ones, of which two, relating to an online order for cat food, are of significance. What about the rest? None of them are actually malicious or a nuisance (unless there were others that got sent directly into the spam folder), they’re mostly from companies I have accounts with or organisations that send out newsletters I don’t want to unsubscribe from because you never know when there might be something that I’m interested in. There’s even one from someone who wants to tell me how to stop procrastinating – I might unsubscribe from that if I ever get round to it.

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Tackling the… Whatever

To recap, at the end of yesterday’s instalment I mentioned how I had realised that the photos I was carefully downloading to a folder I had created on my hard drive, and then deleting from Google Photos to create space on my Google Drive, were being grabbed back onto Google Drive overnight by the naughty Data Pixies (or perhaps I should call them the Google Gnomes, or Data Demons?) Anyway, every day I was returning to find the inevitable messages about my cloud space being 99% full.

So I started looking into Windows 10’s ‘Backup and sync’ feature, which told me that I could select the folders which I wanted to be backed up to the cloud – which was news to me, because I didn’t realise anything was being automatically up to anywhere from my computer. I’m very old school in that I assume it’s my personal responsibility to arrange to keep my important files backed up somewhere, as was drilled into me many decades ago, before the idea arose that computers could ever be accessed directly by mere mortals who needed protection from their own folly and carelessness.

With some effort (to be honest, I can’t remember exactly how I did it, and just had to Google it again, when I discovered that I needed to click on the icon at the bottom right of the screen near the volume/mute symbol, and then go to Preferences, though I’m sure that’s not how it happened last time), I came to a window with the header: ‘Choose folders to continuously back up to Google Drive’ and underneath, the names of three folders with tick boxes next to them: ‘Desktop’, ‘Documents’ and ‘Pictures’. I unticked them, rubbed my hands with glee, and deleted some more files, till I got down to roughly 10GB again.

Problem solved? Not exactly.

Next day, there it was again. Google Drive 99% full, 15GB of 15GB used. ‘If you run out of space you won’t be able to upload files or send or receive emails. Delete some files or upgrade your storage.’

When I listed the files in descending order of size, I saw on the list not only photos which had been bounced back and forth, but also a large number of music files and some Powerpoint presentations from an art history course I did about five years ago. In a previous purge, a year or two ago, when I was going through and deleting large emails, I had downloaded them and hidden them safely in a folder named ‘art stuff’, located on… wait for it…  the desktop. .

Every day I go into the ‘Desktop’ folder on Google Drive, and delete some more files – but there’s a limit to how many I can select at a time without causing the computer to seize up completely. I swear I can hear the data crackling back and forth. It is a huge job, it is mind-numbing and where the f…heck is it filling up from now?