Selenay's Ramblings

I kind of really hate it when something that worked perfectly suddenly decides to break. Yesterday Google made some kind of change to the formatting of their documents in Google Drive and QuickOffice Pro on my iPad can no longer open them.

Yeah, that's not inconvenient at all!

So I'm conducting an experiment that may result in me finally switching over to use DropBox. If it works as conveniently on my iPad as Google Docs used to and is fairly seamless to use through the desktop client then I'll be converted. I may even fork out the money (finally) to use it as a backup for stuff like my photos.

Let's just see how this goes for a few days, OK? I've got a lot of editing to do on a couple of things and being able to get some of it done through my iPad rather than spending long evenings on in my home office has been awesome.

Yesterday also saw me have a bit (heh) of a meltdown over writing the summary and picking a title for my Marvel Big Bang. Fahre was awesome at talking be down from incipient hysteria and getting me to actually focus.

Let's just say, if I ever want a career writing book blurbs for really cheesy genre books and true crime novels then I have the skills. Poor Fahre :-D

The first draft is in and I'm putting it aside for a week so that Fahre can beta for me and I can get started on editing That AU. I need a break from it so that I don't go insane!

I read That AU back last night, having not looked at it for a week, and it is not quite as much of a pile of stinky crap as I thought it was. Go me! Some sections need some heavy tweaking, there are more than a few typos lurking and I spotted an overabundance of the word "horridly" (slaughter that word completely, Sel) and an overuse of the concept of hair sticking up wildly that I'm almost embarrassed about. But I don't think we're talking wholesale major plot changes.

I think that getting some of the major edits done will be my major occupation this weekend.

This afternoon I'm going to see Awesoem GI Guy to get the verdict on whether weekly Humira is having an effect. Wish me luck, I may need it *sigh*

Today I made an edible, quite tasty, omelette for supper. As my omelettes are usually awful, this is quite the thing for me. I will never understand how I can master apparently difficult cooking things and fail at simple things like omelette.

The trackball mouse that I've had for years has stopped working. Argh. It's definitely not the batteries so it looks like the thing has finally given up the ghost. Good thing I've got so many spare mouses around, although I'm finding the transition back to a mouse harder than you'd think.

Suddenly Netlfix Canada has tons of awesome stuff on it. Including the whole of Buffy. Looks like I'm sorted for TV watchings, then :-)

Must remember to catch up with some of the new stuff tonight, like NCIS and Grey's.

First day back at work wasn't too bad, but I'm ready for a weekend now. Why does the working week have to be so long?

New computer has been ordered, estimated delivery on 17th October. This is while my parents are on vacation, but I've set up the family computer with all the VPN stuff so that I can work from home on the delivery date. So, it should be here pretty soon and Dell gave me some nice savings so it's a fairly decent system. Phew!

I'll be relieved to have my own, working computer. Migration should be fairly smooth as all the data got backed up onto external drives when it first started to go wonky and I haven't actually stored anything on it since that. I figure that I can migrate all that stuff and then see what I'm missing, if anything, and try to get the lappie to behave long enough to get any missing things. There shouldn't be much, to be honest.

Dad arrived today for his visit. His flight took a different route to avoid the storm heading here and hence was longer than normal. He's exhausted. This did not stop him popping onto the laptop he's not supposed to have brought to do some work. Which he had promised that he wouldn't do.

*sigh*

It's about what I expected, to be honest. At least he's got his laptop so I can use the family computer when I need to?

I'm now at around 24 hours before I need to start my release if it's going to happen this week and still no word about whether it's going ahead. However, I am staying zen and calm about this so that I don't risk another migraine. I'm also coming around to the idea that I might be able to delegate supervising it if the release needs to go while I'm on vacation.

Look at me, being all mature and stuff.

Guess I'd better go and make nice with the old man, huh? Or at least, keep him company while he naps in his recliner and pretends that he's working :-)

( Cut for techy moaning )

There are no rugby matches today. Woe. So tonight will probably be Holby catch-up. And apparently all the American shows are premiering this week. I think that I'm going to stick with just the five that I've kept from last year and not worry about new stuff, unless someone tells me about something amazing. Between those, Netflix (which now has the whole of Stargate, Xena and various other cool TV shows thanks to a recent content update, yay!), UK telly and my DVD collection, I think that I'm sorted.

I just have to schedule in some time this week between rugby matches for Spooks. And get Mum out of the house for the Gray's Anatomy premier. Too much telly, not enough time!

In book news, I am continuing with Perdito Street Station. I'm enjoying it, but it's quite weird in places and my excellent imagination is rather too good at conjuring up disturbing images from the vivid descriptions. SO, er, it's not a pre-bed read and thus is going a bit slowly. I'm now reading Northanger Abbey and loving that to bits. It's my first time and, while it doesn't have the subtlety of Austen's later books (this is thought to be her first written novel, although it was published much later), it is very entertaining and a great read.

Mum and I watched the Strictly launch show over the weekend (a week late, I know). I can feel my brain atrophying. But it was darned fun. I'm trying to work out when I became a Strictly/Gray's/Holby sort of person. I'm sure that I used to disdain such viewing...

I've been having a bit of a week. My computer played silly buggers on Wednesday and I've been nervous about turning it on ever since. And having anxiety moments every time I think about it, even though it's irrational to the extreme because the world isn't over if I have to replace my computer a bit earlier than planned.

Deadlines are approaching at work and things we thought would be easy to achieve are turning out to be epically not easy and in some cases require extensive work-arounds in order to get things working. So, you know, more anxiety.

On top of that, I am starting to think that my remission status only lasted two weeks. I won't go into details, but since the middle of last week there have been strong hints that I'm getting sick again.

I keep promising myself that I'll call Awesome GI Guy tomorrow if things don't improve. And then promising the same thing tomorrow and on and on. Mostly I just don't want to admit that Humira may not be holding me in remission. I'm so sick of hospitals, tests, needles, drugs, side-effects and everything else. I'm done. I don't want to talk about it to friends or family IRL because it will just worry them and I know that burying my head in the sand is not helpful but I just wanted a few weeks of being OK :-(

I wish that I could forget all of this and go into the weekend feeling calm, but the computer issues and possible flare are both things that will be rearing their heads over the weekend and I'm not good at forgetting about work.

I'd been doing so well at not being anxious and this week has just thrown me. My head is a bad place.

OK, it looks like www.selenayhaven.com (my site) got hacked during the week (thank you paranoidangel42 for the heads up!).

I have removed/replaced all the files that got replaced (it appears to have just been anything that called index.xxx), changed my password and reported the hack to my hosts.

Anyone know what other steps I need to take?

I have no idea how long all the virus thingies are going to keep telling people that my site is compromised :-(

So, last night's problems don't seem to have been the Windows update after all. The computer is recognising the AC adaptor and behaving quite normally again. Ack!

On Dell's site there is some troubleshoot advice and the first step is to check the AC adaptor and battery by unplugging and removing both, then putting everything back and seeing what happens. Ta da! Happy compy.

I'm going to look at getting a new AC adaptor, though, in case this is an early warning that the adaptor is going funky.

It turns out that when the compy doesn't recognise the AC adaptor, it runs like treacle so that would be the reason for the system slow-down last night as well. Argh.

Still, at least the computer is fine and my sleepless night was completely unneeded.

It's been a very rough, exhausting few weeks due to horrendous amounts of work and the kitchen renovation continuing to be a nightmare. I'd pretty much decided when I got home last night that I'd be calling in sick today for a mental health day. I feel even worse than yesterday after worrying about this all night so I'm definitely taking a mental health day! I shall curl up in my recliner with a book and a hot water bottle (stress + IBS = urgh) and try to ignore the workmen upstairs sorting out kitchen stuff. With any luck, I'll sleep through most of the morning and feel human again.

Just purely hypothetically, if one had accidentally knocked the C key off their laptop keyboard while removing it from the docking station, what would be the best way to reattached said C key?

Am I looking at sending my baby to a workshop to get this fixed?

It's a Dell lappie that was absolutely lovely until about fifteen minutes ago :-(

That bit about Christmas can only go up from here? I'm still waiting for the up.

I am discovering the down side to being known as a geek by my family here. Tech support!

My aunt's computer has decided to play silly buggers. Just before I arrived, her home page in FireFox got switched to Yahoo - she swears she did nothing. I switched it back to Google without a problem and the computer ran perfectly.

About a week ago, she started having problems. It's hard to make out quite what all of the problems are, but it sounds like the computer isn't letting her browse the Internet properly although she can't really articulate what it's doing. She originally couldn't get into MSN either, but that seems to have worked itself out now. The bit that really scared her was that around the same time she had a flood of popups and blue screens warning her that her computer had been invaded by viruses, trojans, worms etc.

Hmmm.

She decided to just shut it down and look into getting someone to clean it up at some stage, but we've all been so busy with shipping arrivals and some work being done on her house that nobody got around to it.

Last night a friend walked her through running a full AVG scan but nothing virus-like was detected. I'm starting to think that those pop-ups weren't from her virus scanner but were webpages popping up with malicious intent. I'll need to check with her one whether she clicked the 'OK' button on any of them because she wasn't too clear on what they were.

Also last night, pop ups kept appearing whenever they were doing anything on her computer. A lot of them were ads but one or two were distinctly unsavoury. All of them were launched from Mozilla, which is her default browser. My aunt's comment was "Mozilla keeps interfering whenever we do anything!"

Her friend attempted to uninstall Mozilla but the computer wouldn't let her, saying that Mozilla was still running even though they'd closed it. So they turned to the computer programmer of the family to solve the problem :-)

I'm leaning towards the possibility that she's got a big spyware/adware problem on her computer. Does this sound familiar to anyone? And does anyone know of some tools that I could download to scan her computer and confirm/disprove my theory? I've never had a problem like this on my own computer so I'm a little uncertain on how to fix these problems!

All help will be gratefully received and virtual chocolate thrown your way.

Dear Spinal Column,

Yes, I did housework. I shifted stuff, sorted, tidied and vacuumed. This is not your cue to really, really, really hurt. So cut it out, will you?

No love,
Me


In other news, yesterday was really good fun. I met up with paranoidangel42, kate_closet and blonde_sheep for a few hours in London and it was really good to see them all again. We lost kate_clost and blonde_sheep when we got to the Canadian pub for a drink and discovered it was incredibly busy, but PA stayed on with me for a while. I tried not to watch the rugby match that was showing and failed miserably. Bad Sel.

Best Friend in America arrived later in the afternoon and we had a fabulous time. PA went to ZZ9 around 6pm (hopefully BFiA and I didn't bore you too much...) and somehow BFiA and I time-travelled because the next thing we knew it was 8pm and we should have started back to our homes ages ago. Oops.

In our defense, there's two years of stuff to catch up on and we've always been terrible for talking too much :-) It was fabulous to see her again. We'll be meeting up again on Friday - she's coming out for my birthday do. She's staying the night on my floor (hence the housework) so we'll probably sit up all night talking, as we have a bad habit of doing. Then she'll be going back to America next weekend, but with plans that she'll be back again sometime next year.

Today has mostly been about housework and doing computer things. The good news is that I got my new microphone set up so I can now chat to people from the computer. The bad news is that I'm having problems with external storage devices - they're working rather randomly. I've managed to get my card reader to work plugged directly into a port on the back of the machine, which is rather inconvenient. It refuses to work on the extension cable to the same port. Grrr. Haven't experimented with the iPod this weekend to find out which ports it likes. I'm not sure whether I want to try experimenting with the extension cable.

The ports on the front of the machine just plain hate external storage devices, but they're happy with my graphical table. Anyone else have these kinds of issues? I'm slightly worried because the first sign that my old laptop was dying was when it started dislking the outside world and I don't want to buy a new desktop before I emigrate. Computers sometimes drive me nuts.