undeserved award

Despite my posts being somewhat erratic lately, it seems some people are keeping the faith. Which is good, 'cos I gotta say mine is a little shaky at times.
Angel, who has been a regular reader here for ages has seen fit to create her very own special award - and I am one of the lucky few first recipients!




Angel, you're a peach :-)
Thank you for not giving up on me and for the many hours of entertaining reading you have given to me in Blogland.

xxx


And in other news:
It's cold. Really cold. Probably as a result of it being Winter again. Sheesh, I was still holding out for the Summer that never really arrived and BAM! Here's Winter.
Not only that - it's only something silly like three weeks till Christmas. I found my weekly groceries peppered with things like mince pies and Christmas crackers this morning. As if that's not enough, I found myself pumping up the volume on the radio while I was packing said groceries in my kitchen afterwards, when one of those super-spicy energetic Christmas songs came on.
Hubby and Cinderella were completely unfazed by this little display of festive spirit, staying safely tucked away with their respective computer games / movie watching and leaving me to prance around like a reindeer on speed all by myself, with nothing but Cornflakes for company.

As images go, that's not a great one, I'll admit. So I'll leave you with this one instead - they've decorated the trees along the quay with purple and blue lights and it just looks so darn pretty as dawn is breaking I simply had to stop to take a picture.

fleeting thoughts

Why d'you suppose our spam filter blocked a plain text email from me to a friend of mine asking how her mother was, yet this morning there was an html message with the words "puffy penis" in the title waiting for me from someone called... actually I can't remember 'cos I deleted it without paying too much attention.

And another thing; our firewall seems to have a mind of its own. Yesterday I couldn't leave comments on blogs but today I can. Yes I know I said I won't be blogging from work anymore but what can I say? I have no self-control.

It was raining this morning when I was riding to work. Traffic wasn't great and visibility was poor since daylight had only just begun to think about putting in an appearance. In these conditions I take it slow because even with my high-viz vest I know that drivers are less likely to see a girl on a motorcycle than they otherwise might be.
Two things happened.
One, I almost missed my turnoff. For the first time since I started riding the bike (about 9 months ago) my subconscious took over driving for a while. There is a stretch of around 2.5km of motorway that I do not remember riding this morning. My mind was on something else completely. They say that's a good thing, because apparently your subconscious drives better than your conscious but I found it a little scary.

The second thing was completely unrelated. On a bike, you're much more in touch with your surroundings; you feel the cold (or warmth, as the case may be, though not in Dublin very often) and you smell the scents of your surroundings. For me, it is always the smells that do it and this morning I was suddenly transported back to Jeffreys Bay in the summertime, in the rain because although it was freezing outside (unlike J-Bay in the summertime!) there was something about the smell, like salty sea air (again, very unusual in Dublin) mixed with the smell of rain and I could smell the vegetation on the sand dunes and hear the endless swooshing of the waves on the sand, and I was filled with young love and enthusiasm and life. Our summer holidays in Jeffreys Bay when I was a teenager were some of the happiest times of my life. Sun, fun and summer romances, bonfires on the beach at night with friends I thought would be there forever.
The sensation lasted about 30 seconds and then I was belched on by a bus.
Sure, we grab the moments when we can.

At the risk of repeating myself...

Do you want to know what really annoys me? Well I'm going to tell you anyway.
I am sick to death of people sending me guilt emails. You know the ones: the hard luck stories, designed to bring a tear to your eye and make you feel guilty about every good thing that's ever happened to you and every cent you ever earned. I'm not sure what their purpose is.
Some will tell you the email is being tracked so you must send it to everyone you know.

NEWS FLASH: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS EMAIL TRACKING AND AOL / MICROSOFT ARE NOT GOING TO GIVE YOU MONEY EVEN IF YOU SEND THE THING TO A MILLION PEOPLE!!!

The only thing you're doing is clogging up my mailbox with yet more crap.
Those that don't, well, I truly don't see their purpose. Trying to spread goodwill? It's not working. I just get pissed off because I feel like someone is trying to guilt me into giving to charity, or going to Church more often, or for feeling down when "there are people so much worse off than me".
I am perfectly entitled to feel depressed for my very own reasons, even if I don't have a third eye or a dying budgie.

You know what else? I don't want to hear about little Mary and her leg that fell off. It doesn't bring a tear to my eye - it brings a curse to my lips for wasting my time! Why must I feel guilty about fictitious peoples' hard luck stories... because no matter how many times they tell you "This is a true story!!!" ... chances are it's bullshit. Someone made it up. I have yet to figure out why but there you go.

What, you don't believe me? Here's a challenge:
For the next ten emails of hard luck emails, go check it out. It's fairly simple: just ask Google. The quickest way is to put a line from the email in quotes in the search box, and add the word "hoax" at the end.

Spread the word folks - but not by email, for goodness' sake; chances are some eejit would add a curse to the end of it, like "Send this to everyone in your address book in the next 30 seconds or the Terrible Terri is going to plant a virus in your RAM!".
And then I would have perpetuated yet another useless chain-mail.
Now THAT would make me feel guilty!

technological advancements

I've had some technological woes just lately. I think it probably started when our TV died but that actually turned out to be a good thing as we're now the proud owners of a fancy-schmancy flat-screen LCD TV instead.

And then there was my new laptop. I wanted to love it, I really did. It's all sleek and shiny, and really quiet - you hardly hear it running at all. And it's fast, too. I no longer have time to boil the kettle and make coffee decaf while it boots up, and my email opens in a flash.
But...
I've had intermittent problems, mostly surrounding the wireless broadband / internet. I noticed that sometimes the internet was really slow - I was genuinely surprised that I actually got my photos of our trip to SA uploaded to Flickr the other night. I almost just gave up.

The night before that I was ready to throw the "bloody new-fangled thing with all it's fancy new bits and pieces" out the window because the wireless broadband just would. not. work. And it wasn't the router, because young Cinderella had no problems with her connection... using the wireless card from MY old laptop (how annoyed was I?!). I even uninstalled Norton Internet Suite because I thought it might have had something to do with the auto-update it had run the night before, but no, it was just not working. The fact that the LAN connection worked fine should've given me a hint but by that stage I was too far gone to think straight.

But then on Thursday night I switched the offending machine back on and started from scratch and chose to follow my favourite motto:

WHEN ALL ELSE FAILS, READ THE INSTRUCTIONS.^[1]

And when I found the e-manual and browsed to the "Wireless Networking" section, the first thing I saw was a diagram. Item 5 was labelled "Wireless Networking on/off switch".
D'OH! I must have unknowingly flipped it to Off when I was putting the machine in it's bag... a quick flip of the little sliding button about 2mm to the right and hey, presto! My wireless net began working again.

Terri - 1
Technology Gremlins - Zero!

So that was one problem solved.
Today I decided it was time to look at this intermittent performance issue. I reinstalled the Norton software because honestly it didn't make a noticeable difference and I don't want the cyber-aliens abducting my data and performing nasty experiments on it when I'm not looking.

I searched all the settings I could find in both Firefox and the Norton stuff. I downloaded IE7 and checked all those settings too. Luckily it made no difference whether I used Firefox or IE - they were both dog-slow. I couldn't even open my own blog - how bad is that??!
And then something went PING! in my head^[2] and I went back to the wireless network settings that I had spent so much time looking at during the week. Sure enough, there it was - one little slider that I moved from "min" to "max"... the one that controls throughput vs saving battery life. Screw the battery - gimme Megs!!!
So this message may pop up a little (?!) sooner than it did before. I can live with that.

Terri - 2
Technology Gremlins - still Zero!

You may applaud :-)

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^[1] Yes, that really IS my motto. I hate reading instructions - I'm a true Techie at heart.

^[2] Not literally, of course.