2000: Meeting Tipper
2001:  Death is Alive and Well
2002:  Hello, Knees
2003:  Yes Sirrr!
2004:  The Next Chapter
2005:  Five by Five
2006:  Who You Taking to the Witch Burning?

IN MY OPINION
"Annie Get Your Gun"

Books Read in 2007

Updated 4/9:
"Mutant Message from Forever"

FUNNY THE VLOG

"Paul's Memorial - Tom"


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DEFEATED

28 April 2007

I give up.

I have nothing wise or witty or even moderately interesting to say today.

The computer has beaten me.  I just want to roll into a ball and moan softly.

You'd think with a library written just for me (for I certainly qualify as a "Dummy"), I should be able to figure the problem out, but the "for Dummies" books are generally too complicated for me.  I should have started with the "Idiot's Guide..." series instead.

I figured out a way to explain to you what I see on my screen.  Remember those nature special on TV or in the movies where they use high-speed film to show the opening up of a flower.  One minute there's this tight little bud and the next there are petals and leaves going every which way.

That's what it's like. I'll be sitting here, holding my breath, but happy that I've gone maybe 10 minutes or, miraculously, even 20 minutes without anything strange happening.  Suddenly IE will explode like that flower and there will be IE pages everywhere, mostly ads for things or video pages or error messages.  I can't understand why I get numerous "cannot find" pages.

I hear from the "Internet Explorer Security Center" all the time, a site which Internet Explorer tells me "is unresponsive."

It's like an aerobic exercise trying to shut them all down, because some will shut down easily, and some won't. 

Last night all I was trying to do was to get the code to embed the video of the day onto the web page.  To do this, I go to Blip and pick up a code from there, then I go to FreeVlog and insert the code there and it gives me a code to put on my journal page.  (I could probably write it myself, but I've been doing it this way for months now and have never had to do it).

Remember that the computer is operating at reduced speed.  To go from internet page to internet page is at the speed of dial-up most of the time.  So I wait and wait and wait and wait and finally Blip comes up.  So far so good.  Then I connect to the page with the codes and Firefox crashes.  But it crashes in slow motion, like you do if you fall from a great height.  Suddenly everything goes in slow motion.  Eventually Firefox is no more and I have to try once again. 

I tried six bleeping times last night before I finally managed to pick up the code, move it to Notepad and then write my own code based on previous days of embedding.  By this time the dogs were all cowering as far away from me as they could because I was screaming so much (fortunately, Walt was upstairs asleep and missed it all).

People have convinced me that the only hope is a complete re-install of XP.  But that is easier said than done.  A "complete re-install" means a re-install of every single thing that is on this computer.  Suddenly a 120 gig hard drive is not so much a blessing as it is a curse.  There is no easy back-up routine for XP, even if I had been good about backing things up.  And there is no restore disk for the home edition of XP anyway, the For Dummies book tells me.

Also, "re-installing XP" means using the original program disk and I don't know where it is.  I know it must be "around here somewhere," if I ever got one, but it's not in the logical places.  The mom & pop computer store that I had such a good relationship with back in 2003 when they created a computer system for Dr. G, and I had this computer made, rather than go with a big impersonal corporation, has now gone out of business, so no help there. 

I do have the registration numbers for the programs that I have purchased on line and, miracle of miracles, I even have them in their own file folder, but some of these programs were installed so long ago that I don't remember if I still have the install disks and/or the registration keys any more.  Logic tells me they must be somewhere.

But I also need a record of what I have.  Once I get a clean version of XP re-installed, will I remember that program that I use infrequently but that I really need when I need to use it?

I actually had this entry mostly written when I suddenly got the blue screen of death telling me that something horrible had gone wrong.

I am now writing this off line because I felt I would still be safe, but check the box for "photo of the day"

This popped up anyway, even working off line, which does lead me to think that this is something generated by my computer.  But when I attempted to shut this window down I get this message:

Which makes me think that the first warning was some sort of program that IE installed on my computer as yet another way to try to get money from me for something that I don't need.

I just don't know!  It's so damned frustrating.  And the web pages just won't go away even when I work off line!!!!!

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