IKEA

Did I mention I got myself a little laptop table for my work? Working in the winter on my laptop hadn't been a problem but with it being such a nice summer, I was finding that sitting working in the afternoons wearing a light skirt, the air vents on the bottom of my laptop were burning my left leg! This little beanbag with a tray stuck on top has certainly done the trick. I love IKEA. They always think of everything!

OMG, WHAT'S SHE DONE NOW????

I laid my computer down for two seconds today to lift my coffee and Bits touched something, the screen went completely black - the cursor was still there but looked like it was pointing down instead of up. Eventually it flickered back into life, phew... arg! Oh no, the screen is upside down. I move my cursor to see if anything is working and it moves in an exact mirror image to what I want it to do - OMG, OMG, what has she done??? I open my email and close my eyes (I know I can type a message as long as I don't look at the screen.) I tell Thomas what's happened and 10 minutes later I get a reply telling me she must have hit Ctrl-alt-up arrow. I hit Ctrl-alt-down arrow, and close my eyes, terrified. The screen goes blank, suddenly my Australian world pops back round and normality is restored, phew. Anna - you are a naughty (if clever) girl!!

DANISH KEYBOARDS

Have I ever ranted about keyboards, French keyboards in particular? Every year on holidays I would try to use the awful AZERTY things and write utter gobbledygook. But even standard British ones annoy me because if you write a lot in a foreign language (which I do) you either have to remember where the accented characters are hidden - combinations of Alt Gr and Alt and the likes or customize them and try to remember the other combinations any time you are on someone else's machine. Pain in the arse...
So what a breath of fresh air to discover the standard Danish keyboard. Firstly it is QWERTY, which is nice. Secondly the actual Danish accented characters have their own separate keys: look ÆØÅ! But the also have dead accent keys. If you want é, you simply type a dead accent and the computer remembers it so sticks it on the next letter you type. So you can make anything valid up: éèÖã etc
Easy peasy lemon queasy - wish I could afford a Danish laptop but I guess it comes with too high a tax bill :-(

ROSE

I love the smell of roses - roses with a smell that is! I planted a beautiful white rose in my garden and found out, disappointingly, that it had no smell at all :-( This beautiful lilac one Thomas bought me, on the other hand, is deliciously wonderful. It is time someone discovered a way to upload smells along with photos. Isn't my photo of it just beautiful?

LEXMARK X1290

About a year ago Thomas bought a Lexmark X1290 combined scanner and printer as the kids often need to print out homework. We printed a photo or two but the quality wasn't great for photos. It then got packed up for the move.We reinstalled it last week and it printed one page of homework before it told us it had run out of cyan. I bought new ink for a tenner, installed that and it printed Marcel's one sheet of homework fine on Friday. Today, we tried to print another picture only to be told it was out of cyan again. What a load of rubbish! Poor quality, faulty ink feeds, expensive ink. I think it is time I dug out my clumsy old but reliable HP 1315.

HOW COULD I FORGET?

A few weeks ago my beloved hp Pavilion - you know the one whose DC socket was fixed in November, December, January and February - developed two new faults! It started overheating, the fan would come on, it would tell me it had reached critical temperature and it would shut itself down automatically usually between 30 seconds and 5 minutes after I turned it on! Then the on-off switch started only working every 10th attempt. I probably didn't blog it at the time for fear of my children being exposed to a rather long list of expletives! Anyway - the diagnosis was another £140 bill, on top of the £70 the DC socket had cost. I didn't trust them to fix it again, nor did I fancy them having it on and off for 4 months until it finally worked again, so I bit the bullet and ordered a nice new Lenovo laptop complete with windows VISTA. I have spent the last week installing most of my stuff on it - which wasn't fun - as the old computer only stays on 5 minutes at a time before switching itself off, backing up my whole system in 5 minute chunks was fairly tedious. Fortunately I had backed up most stuff in January so it was feasible. I am now very happy with my new acquisition - hopefully it will not give me reason to blog-rant in the near future at least.

With the kids away visiting their Oma in France this week, I have spent the first few days on the computer on a top secret, for now, assignment - possibly the most surreal thing I have been asked to do in a long time, but I can't mention it just yet though ;-)

PRICELESS COMPUTING

I am sitting here typing on my computer. Its new cable is plugged into its new DC socket :-) I wonder how long this will last :-\ It is amazing the different treatment you get when you start explaining you'll be happy to take your computer to be fixed elsewhere using your refund if they will simply admit they aren't competent enough to repair it!

But I'm sure you'll be the first to know if this repair also fails - you may need to shield your eyes from a barrage expletives if it breaks down again.

WE'LL SEE

Well I just got a call to say my laptop has been fixed for the third time since November - surely they will have done it properly this time? - it is such a simple minor problem (the socket to connect to the mains power supply keeps coming loose). If it breaks again I will have to consider a more permanent solution, I just don't know exactly what, as it is such a lovely widescreen top-of-the-range beauty.

BLOODY USELESS COMPUTER, BLOODY USELESS COMPUTER REPAIR SHOP

I don't think I mentioned it at the time, well maybe in the passing on one of my NY postings but I definitely didn't devote a whole posting to it. What? My damned computer's DC socket problem, of course! Basically about August my computer started acting up - every so often though the power cable was plugged in, the toolbar would tell me I was running off battery and not mains. Consequently it wouldn't always charge. Eventually in October I just couldn't get it to run off the mains at all so I took it to be repaired. It was taken apart and the internal DC socket was replaced and reattached - it worked great... for 4 weeks till the problem recurred. I took it back and didn't even offer to pay - I simply handed it to the shop and told them I would pick it up in full working order the following week. They didn't seem to want to mess with me. I returned and it was waiting - repaired. The repair worked well for 4 more weeks and then of course two days ago, I was sitting here happily blogging, plugged into the mains when my nasty little blue battery light flashed on to tell me I wasn't connected to my cable once again. So Saturday morning will no doubt see another trip to the computer repair shop, followed my much gnashing of teeth and many threats, followed once again by me sitting miserably unable to blog for three or four more days.