Okay, I'm writing this in Wordpad. Microsoft Word is "not responding." Clicking the "X" gives me the little window which says it is not responding and clicking on its "end now" button does nothing. The locked window is still there. CTL-ALT-DEL "Task Manager" ... "Applications" pressing the "End Task" button also does nothing. Which means I will have to shut off the computer and reboot.
Dear Microsoft,
If I had the time right now, I would make more space on my hard drive to download Open Office. Rumor has it that it works. Which is more than I can say for Word.
Showing posts with label Technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Technology. Show all posts
Friday, June 10, 2011
2009 Archive, Technology, MS Word
So, I tried to post the previous two entries by doing a cut & paste from my original Microsoft Word document into the "Compose" tab inside the "New Post" tab, inside the "Posting" tab within this Blog. But next to the "Compose" tab is an "Edit Html" tab to allow me to add things like bold, italics etc..
Imagine my surprise when the "Edit Html" box showed page after page of everything in the world (or at least in my computer) that Microsoft Word thought I might ever use in the original document. So I deleted the HTML, which also deleted the "Compose" text. Then I saved the original document as a ".txt" file --- no formatting. And again I did a cut & paste into the "Compose" box.
Imagine my surprise when the "Edit Html" box showed the same pile of ... uh ... stuff from Microsoft Word for the ".txt" file as it gave me for the original, formatted file. So, I thought, maybe it will work anyway and I saved the post, and tried to view it. But the BlogSpot software would not accept it, saying that "meta" is an invalid tag.
Again I deleted everything out of the box, and was forced to open the ".txt" file using textpad. Then the cut & paste gave me only what I typed, with no added HTML.
Dear Microsoft,
Just a suggestion. Stop your programs from vomiting up all kinds of irrelevant HTML whenever you "convert" simple text. Until you do, I cannot use your tools for word processing.
Imagine my surprise when the "Edit Html" box showed page after page of everything in the world (or at least in my computer) that Microsoft Word thought I might ever use in the original document. So I deleted the HTML, which also deleted the "Compose" text. Then I saved the original document as a ".txt" file --- no formatting. And again I did a cut & paste into the "Compose" box.
Imagine my surprise when the "Edit Html" box showed the same pile of ... uh ... stuff from Microsoft Word for the ".txt" file as it gave me for the original, formatted file. So, I thought, maybe it will work anyway and I saved the post, and tried to view it. But the BlogSpot software would not accept it, saying that "meta" is an invalid tag.
Again I deleted everything out of the box, and was forced to open the ".txt" file using textpad. Then the cut & paste gave me only what I typed, with no added HTML.
Dear Microsoft,
Just a suggestion. Stop your programs from vomiting up all kinds of irrelevant HTML whenever you "convert" simple text. Until you do, I cannot use your tools for word processing.
2009 Archive, Technology, Web Browser Pain 2
This being December, I was trying to print out a wish list from Amazon.com, but it wasn't working. First of all I tried to open Microsoft's Internet Explorer --- Double-click the icon; nothing happens. Do it again; nothing happens. Do it again; etc.. So I finally notice that the light, indicating my computer is broadcasting wi-fi, is off. But the switch is on, so I have to do a complete shutdown and reboot.
Now the light is on, so when I double-click the IE icon, it correctly opens to my Comcast home page, so I select the drop-down for Amazon.com. It freezes up and eventually gives me a message saying that the program is not responding. So, I open the Task Manager and kill the non-responsive program. Double-click the icon and attempt to go to Amazon.com, and again have to kill it for not responding. And again, and again, and again.
Finally I get halfway smart and right click the Internet Explorer icon. I can open the program with no Add-ons. Swiftly and perfectly, the Comcast website opens. But Amazon.com will not. Imagine requiring the Flash Player Add-on, the Java and Javascript Add-ons, or (for Netflix) the Microsoft Silverlight Add-on in order to run the screens the way they were designed to be run. But one good thing is the pop-up ribbon which allows me to manage the add-ons. There must be thirty or forty of them. I spend a significant amount of time trying to get IE to work with more or fewer Add-ons.
Finally, after two hours of having it continue fail time after time, I gave up and downloaded and installed Firefox.
It is such a breath of fresh air to have a computer program actually work the way it is supposed to work, and do it quickly.
Dear Microsoft,
I am not at all willing to be forced to delete and re-install your applications every three months just to keep them (barely) functioning. I was already forced to do that once on my wife's computer just to make Internet Explorer work. Since then, she has been complaining for the last 3 months that it keeps freezing up. The next time it fails to work as specified, I will replace it. I give it a week.
Now the light is on, so when I double-click the IE icon, it correctly opens to my Comcast home page, so I select the drop-down for Amazon.com. It freezes up and eventually gives me a message saying that the program is not responding. So, I open the Task Manager and kill the non-responsive program. Double-click the icon and attempt to go to Amazon.com, and again have to kill it for not responding. And again, and again, and again.
Finally I get halfway smart and right click the Internet Explorer icon. I can open the program with no Add-ons. Swiftly and perfectly, the Comcast website opens. But Amazon.com will not. Imagine requiring the Flash Player Add-on, the Java and Javascript Add-ons, or (for Netflix) the Microsoft Silverlight Add-on in order to run the screens the way they were designed to be run. But one good thing is the pop-up ribbon which allows me to manage the add-ons. There must be thirty or forty of them. I spend a significant amount of time trying to get IE to work with more or fewer Add-ons.
Finally, after two hours of having it continue fail time after time, I gave up and downloaded and installed Firefox.
It is such a breath of fresh air to have a computer program actually work the way it is supposed to work, and do it quickly.
Dear Microsoft,
I am not at all willing to be forced to delete and re-install your applications every three months just to keep them (barely) functioning. I was already forced to do that once on my wife's computer just to make Internet Explorer work. Since then, she has been complaining for the last 3 months that it keeps freezing up. The next time it fails to work as specified, I will replace it. I give it a week.
2009 Archive, Technology, Web Browser Pain 1
My wife has been complaining for the past three months that (almost) every time she tried to browse the web --- by this, I mean viewing video, coming across our 11-15 Mbs Comcast connection --- that her browser would stop, freeze up, then restart, sometimes, or sometimes it would not restart. It kept popping up a little window saying "You are now connected," indicating, to her surprise, that she had been momentarily disconnected. It was driving her nuts. Or maybe what was driving her nuts was that every time I used her computer, it seemed to work just fine, although a little slow.
So, times being semi-hard, financially speaking, I did not want to take her computer in to have someone go over it at $60 per hour, only to tell us it was fine. Maybe there was another problem. Her computer sits on the dining room table directly in between the 2.4Ghz Wireless phone base station in one room, and the remote wireless phone in the living room. Here's what I know: Every time someone is on the internet --- a 2.4Ghz wireless connection to the router in another room behind the remote wireless phone --- If someone answers this phone in the living room, the Internet connection fails. Every single time.
And, if someone is on the wireless phone and we start the microwave sitting next to the dining room, the interference with the phone is bad enough to force us to use the land-line phone, at least until the microwave stops.
So, my guess is, that the Wireless phone base station has to "talk" to the remote phone, even when no one is using it for a phone call. Maybe that bit of interference was disconnecting her from the router every few minutes. So, I bought (for $45) a replacement wireless phone running on 1.97 Ghz, which is not close to the 2.4 Ghz of the router, or the 900 ghz of the wireless headset from the Television. (This is really nice if I want to watch something while my wife takes a nap on the couch.) So now we can talk on the phone while browsing the Web, and we can talk on the phone while microwaving popcorn --- but things were still not perfect.
I finally took her computer into Office Depot to have their local whiz-guy look at it. After reviewing it, he pronounced it "clean" and didn't want to charge me the $59.99 it would take to look into it more closely. In his opinion, whatever they could do would not make any visible difference to us. He suggested that maybe I should use Firefox instead. So, I got to take it home again --- such fast service --- and it didn't cost a penny. That was Tuesday. Little did I know that on Thursday it would not be her computer that failed, but mine.
So, times being semi-hard, financially speaking, I did not want to take her computer in to have someone go over it at $60 per hour, only to tell us it was fine. Maybe there was another problem. Her computer sits on the dining room table directly in between the 2.4Ghz Wireless phone base station in one room, and the remote wireless phone in the living room. Here's what I know: Every time someone is on the internet --- a 2.4Ghz wireless connection to the router in another room behind the remote wireless phone --- If someone answers this phone in the living room, the Internet connection fails. Every single time.
And, if someone is on the wireless phone and we start the microwave sitting next to the dining room, the interference with the phone is bad enough to force us to use the land-line phone, at least until the microwave stops.
So, my guess is, that the Wireless phone base station has to "talk" to the remote phone, even when no one is using it for a phone call. Maybe that bit of interference was disconnecting her from the router every few minutes. So, I bought (for $45) a replacement wireless phone running on 1.97 Ghz, which is not close to the 2.4 Ghz of the router, or the 900 ghz of the wireless headset from the Television. (This is really nice if I want to watch something while my wife takes a nap on the couch.) So now we can talk on the phone while browsing the Web, and we can talk on the phone while microwaving popcorn --- but things were still not perfect.
I finally took her computer into Office Depot to have their local whiz-guy look at it. After reviewing it, he pronounced it "clean" and didn't want to charge me the $59.99 it would take to look into it more closely. In his opinion, whatever they could do would not make any visible difference to us. He suggested that maybe I should use Firefox instead. So, I got to take it home again --- such fast service --- and it didn't cost a penny. That was Tuesday. Little did I know that on Thursday it would not be her computer that failed, but mine.
Saturday, May 21, 2011
Technology crashes.
Chaos arrived at 8:01 A.M. on Friday the 13th.
The first message on my computer screen said "Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM "
But hey, I am not superstitious. Thirteen is one of my favorite prime numbers. It was my locker number in high school. So, I did the usual things: Rebooted the computer (didn't work); Turned it off and restarted it (didn't work); then, being in the work environment of a large company, I called for Desktop Support, and went around the corner to the nearest lab to use another computer while they ran a check on my hard drive.
I did ask, "You'll save all the data on the hard drive, right?" as they carried it away to be "re-imaged." And I was assured that, yes, I would still have everything.
They brought it back at 4:00 P.M. and explained that all I had to do was run the program in the directory with my name on it, and open the ghost file to drag-n-drop old files back onto the hard drive. By the time I got into the ghost file, they were long gone. It took me several minutes of searching through unfamiliar directories in the ghost file to realize the truth: None of my files were in it. And, come to find out, the userid in the Documents and Settings directory was not mine. The ghost file was not even from my computer. Everything I had on that hard drive, including seven years worth of emails, was gone.
But hey, this was not a life-threatening earthquake, it was merely an inconvenience. Right? I said that the guy who cleaned my hard drive must have had a bad day. Then someone told me that, yeah, his wife has been battling breast cancer for four months. Sometimes we never know the problems other people are going through.
So, over the weekend I decided to buckle down and consolidate my four facebook accounts into one. Why did I have four accounts? Because I wanted one for my family, one for the people I went to high school with (over forty years ago), one for people I know from church, and the last one for my book (or books, since I now have two titles on Amazon.com). None of these groups of people knew each other, and none of them belonged in my family group, so why should I let them see posts from my family? Facebook is all about connecting everyone with everyone else. They lack an intermediate privacy tool that would allow members of my lists to see only what other members of that same list posted on my page.
How could I have set up four accounts? Well, I had to create a separate gmail account for each one. So, after I did a friend-request, inviting everyone over to my primary account, I closed the other facebook accounts. Then I thought I should probably close the gmail accounts that I had set up for the facebook accounts [insert hair-raising, threatening theatre music here]. But come to find out, my blog was automatically deleted with the gmail account.
I had no idea that blogspot.com was a subsidiary of Google/gmail. So now my blog is gone. Of course, I opened a request to have it restored, but it has been a week and I have heard nothing. So, I'm in the process of rebuilding it myself. But, of course, I cannot re-use the same gmail names, and I cannot re-use the same blog name. So now the blog is logancowartwords.blogspot.com (with no dash) instead of logancowart-words.blogspot.com. And the blog does not post to Amazon.com, or to my facebook page like it did before. I hope that someday I'll figure out how to make that work again.
There were other chaotic things that happened this last week. Milk was spilled onto our minister's computer and it died. His wife was almost killed by a falling beam. At least one person, a friend of people in the congregation, did actually die.
When I returned to work on Monday, I began the task of recovering my emails from a backup I made in December, 2009. These emails were in separate .PST files, one for each year from 2004 (the last time I lost my hard drive) to 2009. I began by trying to copy these onto my P: drive which is hosted on a server. But after about 600 megabytes, the message popped up that my P: drive was full. So, I had to call the help desk to ask for more space on my P: drive. Instead, they talked me into moving the emails into the Enterprise Vault which was in my Inbox in Outlook. This worked for about 600 megabytes (about a year and a half of emails), and then I received the message that my Outlook inbox was full, and I could no longer send or receive emails until I deleted some of them. So, I got to call the help desk again and ask for more space. But they couldn't give me more space in the Vault without getting someone's approval, so they consented to adding 3.5 gigabytes of space to my P: drive — which is what I wanted in the first place.
I think I got about three hours of actual work done this week. When chaos hits, everything falls apart.
Hopefully, things will be getting better now.
Logan
The first message on my computer screen said "Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM "
But hey, I am not superstitious. Thirteen is one of my favorite prime numbers. It was my locker number in high school. So, I did the usual things: Rebooted the computer (didn't work); Turned it off and restarted it (didn't work); then, being in the work environment of a large company, I called for Desktop Support, and went around the corner to the nearest lab to use another computer while they ran a check on my hard drive.
I did ask, "You'll save all the data on the hard drive, right?" as they carried it away to be "re-imaged." And I was assured that, yes, I would still have everything.
They brought it back at 4:00 P.M. and explained that all I had to do was run the program in the directory with my name on it, and open the ghost file to drag-n-drop old files back onto the hard drive. By the time I got into the ghost file, they were long gone. It took me several minutes of searching through unfamiliar directories in the ghost file to realize the truth: None of my files were in it. And, come to find out, the userid in the Documents and Settings directory was not mine. The ghost file was not even from my computer. Everything I had on that hard drive, including seven years worth of emails, was gone.
But hey, this was not a life-threatening earthquake, it was merely an inconvenience. Right? I said that the guy who cleaned my hard drive must have had a bad day. Then someone told me that, yeah, his wife has been battling breast cancer for four months. Sometimes we never know the problems other people are going through.
So, over the weekend I decided to buckle down and consolidate my four facebook accounts into one. Why did I have four accounts? Because I wanted one for my family, one for the people I went to high school with (over forty years ago), one for people I know from church, and the last one for my book (or books, since I now have two titles on Amazon.com). None of these groups of people knew each other, and none of them belonged in my family group, so why should I let them see posts from my family? Facebook is all about connecting everyone with everyone else. They lack an intermediate privacy tool that would allow members of my lists to see only what other members of that same list posted on my page.
How could I have set up four accounts? Well, I had to create a separate gmail account for each one. So, after I did a friend-request, inviting everyone over to my primary account, I closed the other facebook accounts. Then I thought I should probably close the gmail accounts that I had set up for the facebook accounts [insert hair-raising, threatening theatre music here]. But come to find out, my blog was automatically deleted with the gmail account.
I had no idea that blogspot.com was a subsidiary of Google/gmail. So now my blog is gone. Of course, I opened a request to have it restored, but it has been a week and I have heard nothing. So, I'm in the process of rebuilding it myself. But, of course, I cannot re-use the same gmail names, and I cannot re-use the same blog name. So now the blog is logancowartwords.blogspot.com (with no dash) instead of logancowart-words.blogspot.com. And the blog does not post to Amazon.com, or to my facebook page like it did before. I hope that someday I'll figure out how to make that work again.
There were other chaotic things that happened this last week. Milk was spilled onto our minister's computer and it died. His wife was almost killed by a falling beam. At least one person, a friend of people in the congregation, did actually die.
When I returned to work on Monday, I began the task of recovering my emails from a backup I made in December, 2009. These emails were in separate .PST files, one for each year from 2004 (the last time I lost my hard drive) to 2009. I began by trying to copy these onto my P: drive which is hosted on a server. But after about 600 megabytes, the message popped up that my P: drive was full. So, I had to call the help desk to ask for more space on my P: drive. Instead, they talked me into moving the emails into the Enterprise Vault which was in my Inbox in Outlook. This worked for about 600 megabytes (about a year and a half of emails), and then I received the message that my Outlook inbox was full, and I could no longer send or receive emails until I deleted some of them. So, I got to call the help desk again and ask for more space. But they couldn't give me more space in the Vault without getting someone's approval, so they consented to adding 3.5 gigabytes of space to my P: drive — which is what I wanted in the first place.
I think I got about three hours of actual work done this week. When chaos hits, everything falls apart.
Hopefully, things will be getting better now.
Logan
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