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(Tuesday 10th June)Something nice happened to me today ..... makes a pleasant change. I won a runner up prize in Captain's day at Gosforth, and pulled my handicap to 20, which puts me back in silver division and back in category 3. Amazing when you think how little golf I've been playing since I started working full time hours!
(Monday 9th June)The site is now back on Geocities, for better or worse! Having spent a considerable amount of time last night finding, scanning, reducing and uploading some photos to prove to a couple of old school friends that Cheviot does NOT have a war memorial to a crashed plane on its summit, I discovered it was impossible to put these on a page on Brinkster that people could access directly. It seems every "sub" page has to be visited via a link from the main index, and I'm not sure that I want everyone from the school reunion reading about all the recent hassle! If I'm wrong about this, I don't mind being corrected, but I couldn't find a URL which worked for anything other than the index page. However, as Geocities seems to be saving edits again, it'll do. In fact it's quite useful to have a back up mirrored on another server.
I can now empathize with how Louise felt a few months ago, after she told the Easyjet check-in staff that she was carrying a bomb, in response to the routine question about tampering with luggage. Thinking she would show the woman what a stupid question she'd been asked, she discovered her remark was taken a lot more seriously than she'd anticipated! She was lucky on that occasion (although I wouldn't fancy her chances if she does it with that airline again) and although she could have found herself at worst in jail and at best, not allowed to board the plane, she was allowed to continue her journey, after a lot of fuss.
The password continues to puzzle me .... the only explanation I can come up with (and I can't even take any personal credit for that) is that after 7 characters, it was irrelevant what, if anything, was subsequently entered. ????
(Thursday 5th June)Good news for Rosie, who's been nominated to receive Apprentice of the Year award. Let's hope she does better than Newcastle/Gateshead in their bid to become European Capital of Culture for 2008! The CISV site is starting to resemble PCA forums, as I find myself recreating deleted logins to gain access. I've been here before and do NOT want to go down this road again! I would love to find out why the site password allows such an interesting "variation upon a theme" .... but if I openly admit to knowing it, Stephen or Nick will no doubt change it and then I'll be really stuck.
Well, that must be the dumbest entry I ever made .... although the new registration would probably have given the game away sooner or later. I have no idea how to wriggle out of the inevitable consequences .... this was a BAD idea!
(Tuesday 3rd June)My last day at CISV. Soon, when the site I've been working on goes live, I'll publish a link from here. Look out for a report I intend writing when I've time - at the moment bed is the priority with an early start tomorrow! I can't help feeling a bit sad, that this happy 6 months has finally come to an end ... and very touched by the kind present and card I received, plus time out taken by busy people to enjoy a wonderful cake, some equally wonderfully strong coffee, and everyone wishing me all the best for the future (whatever that may hold). Nick, I've been a thorn in your side, a network manager's nightmare, but I've learned some valuable lessons from you .... you're one of the nicest people I've ever met, and you didn't deserve someone like me :) I'm also grateful for the opportunities I've had to increase my knowledge of Access and website design. Thank you CISV!
(Monday 2nd June)In the end, I made a sensible decision and did what I feel I've been doing all week - deleted the guestbook post. I was tempted to delete the entire guestbook! I'm starting to have some sympathy for Caroline and Simon - I have better things to do than this!!! I managed less than four hours in bed last night and got even less sleep thanks to forgetting to take suncream on yesterday's walk. I am BURNT and it's painful! Deciding to quickly check email at 9.30pm and have a reasonably early night, I didn't anticipate it would be 1.30am before I finally switched off the computer! As well as dealing with the most pressing stuff, I spent a long time trying to persuade a particularly stubborn program to register. Thank you Michael, for your midnight help! Then Emily came downstairs to say that Lucy had caught a mouse and was chasing it all over the bedroom .... I don't know quite what she thought I was going do about it, as the bedroom in question was in total darkness with Rosie sleeping on undisturbed. I really didn't want to get up for morning training when the alarm rang at 4.40am!
(Sunday 1st June)I was not at all pleased, having returned from a weekend away at our bungalow, to discover that my guestbook appears to have been used as a platform for a few people to continue an argument in my absence! Although it goes against my principles to remove guestbook entries, on this occasion, I have deleted entries which give out names and addresses. I have kept one by Dood, because I am incensed that whilst leaving out one daughter who is in fact 18, he has seen fit to publish the name and address of my youngest who is still a CHILD and I would like this as evidence as I decide how best to deal with his (in my view) unacceptable conduct. As before, I have also deleted posts using foul language (which still leaves a lot of new entries!)
(Friday 30th May)One piece of serendipity to come out of this is that I've now learned (through trial and error) how to jump from one page to the middle of the next ..... I decided to add another postscript and remove some of the forum comments, or people will think the purpose of this site is to teach people how to get involved in pointless arguments. Steve, I read your comments and I have NOT got my facts wrong!!! You have now changed your profile (as you well know) in fact I'm quite impressed by your security, having wasted a ridiculous amount of time failing to find your blueyonder address any which way! Will you STOP adding comments to the guestbook that make it look like I'm talking nonsense! (Like the AUP) What I said was correct at the time!
You know, I have to laugh ..... there's a lot of talk on the forums about how important it is to have a firewall, configure it correctly, make sure your anti-virus software is updated regularly and your mail program can deal adequately with spam. You're advised to delete your cookies and temp files on a regular basis .... and yet Simon is utterly unable to stop someone with no real computer knowledge from browsing the private areas of his forum!
Looking forward to going away for the weekend - it'll be good to be somewhere that doesn't even have electricity, never mind a computer. Then a LDWA walk on Sunday and it'll be strange actually seeing John after all this email! Well done on completing the hundred, btw .... a fantastic achievement! Mind you, it must be nice not to have to work for a living - I could be super fit if I spent all my days doing long walks :)
(Wednesday 28th May)What do you do if you're trying to impose a ban on someone who hasn't actually broken any rules? Rewrite the Acceptable User Policy, that's what!
Best of luck complaining to AOL Simon! (Although hopefully it isn't going to come to that now.) By the time you've sent four faxes to Ireland (belatedly discovering that two of them went to the wrong number) made a dozen phone calls, sent a stack of email and even written a letter to head office, to achieve precisely nothing, you might give up! It took me four months to upgrade another phone line to broadband, and they never did take action against Spottyrock because I sent an attachment instead of a forward. Nowadays if I have a technical problem I tend to email the beta team rather than talk to a call centre worker in India following screen prompts, that way I get a halfway sensible response, but it isn't always the appropriate route. I thought I was persistent, but AOL are a lesson in stubbornness and staying power!
(Monday 26th May)I'm off to bed ... I seem to have done nothing but sleep today! Didn't get up till midday, and spent the afternoon/evening trying to stay awake! I must have had two half hour naps as it was - most unlike me!
(Monday 26th May)I have added a link to Ian's fantastic photos of our school reunion night, and also added an entry to the drop down navigation box and the list of favoured sites below that (on the index page). We all enjoyed a very successful evening and contrary to what Robin and I thought beforehand, we had plenty to talk about and all came away planning on doing this again in the not too distant future! Thanks Ian and Julia, for all the hard work!
I've also been reading the guestbook, and would like to say two things. One, when I couldn't find the AUP, I think that was during the time Simon was changing everything over, and it's quite possible it disappeared momentarily. Normally, there's never any problem finding a link to it on the site. Two, whoever has seen fit to list my name and address, it doesn't worry me at all. I'd be quite happy for someone to write to me - why not? I would say email was probably easier though, but I'm always willing to listen to someone else's point of view. I'd give you my phone number if you wanted it - nothing secret about my life! One last thing, I would have more respect for the comments if I knew who they were from ... are you all frightened to put your PCA names on???
One final point ... a few people mention they're glad I've gone (do I take it that Michael is now hero of the piece? :) I wonder why you think I've gone ....? I enjoyed the Off Topic section at the bottom today - LOL!
(Sunday 25th May)I've decided to move all the forum comments from Friday and yesterday to somewhere more appropriate, as a postscript to What Went Wrong?. I don't want to rekindle the horrible, churning feeling I get each time I think about recent events. Forget hackers, viruses and remote computers probing open ports - I've been worrying about the wrong dangers when seeking to protect myself from online attacks!
I still feel as though I'm in a dream ... nobody will believe this, but it wasn't my intention to cause such a fuss, and my genuine attempts to repair the damage have only made things worse. I take the point that everyone is hammering home, that I'm thriving on the attention and all I can say is, if this is thriving I wouldn't like to be suffering! Perhaps I should channel my energies into Comtun - it would give me enormous satisfaction to be able to tell AOL that I'd done what they said was impossible, ie share the BB internet connection. So far though, it's AOL who have the upper hand and I am indeed finding it impossible to surf web pages on the networked computer.
Dwindling attendance is something most churches are worried about and I sometimes wonder if anyone at all will be going to church in the next century. I guess people attend services more out of habit than a strong urge to worship God. As I sat listening to today's sermon, I reflected that I was only there reluctantly, because I needed to see Nick (my GP) and get a prescription from him - and that's a crap reason for going to church! Yet to people who know me, I'm that rare commodity, the committed christian. Baptised, confirmed and ordained as an elder, I sing in the choir, participate in housegroups and enjoy the respect and trust that goes with it.
But I could paint a different picture. Anyone probing more deeply into my life and my online activities (particularly recently) would soon see that I'm far from being the perfect example of christanity. Yet I'm probably a fairly typical churchgoer. We all make mistakes and most of us have the odd skeleton in the cupboard - but I can't help thinking, if I'm as good as it gets, maybe the church is right to be worried about its future!
(Tuesday 20th May)Having spent a good half hour trying to use my new WAP phone to access AOL mail, I will NOT be continuing with this service once my free month is up! It's the most cumbersome, slow, frustrating way to access what is laughingly called the internet! There is a snail icon which moves across the bottom of the screen when the browser is connecting - very apt! At the end of all this, I had managed to read the subject headers of my new AOL mail. It was recommended the email page be bookmarked, how to do this was anything but easy and I never did succeed! I don't honestly think I can be bothered to go throught all this hassle again! Motorola is a law unto itself ... my Nokia was in a different league when it came to user friendly!
(Sunday 18th May) HAPPY BIRTHDAY LOUISE! No doubt Dad will complain when he sees the phone bill, but how was I to know you were in Denmark when I rang your mobile to say happy birthday?
(Saturday 17th May)Emily is not my favourite daughter right now, having contributed to making me look a fool even by AOL standards. Complaining that the MP3 player wasn't working (it switched itself off when she pressed play) and busy as I was with other things, I rattled off an email to the beta team, telling them what I thought of their prize and asking what they proposed to do about the faulty player. Then Michael came over to try his hand with the scanner and suggested I put a new battery in .... and it's working now. Meanwhile, as someone from AOL had replied, I felt obliged to write back and explain how the "problem" was now solved! This, in addition to my frantic email asking why AOL 8 was connecting automatically to the internet every time I switched the PC on (solved by disabling something in services I think) was not very impressive.
I hardly dare comment on recent forum troubles for fear of inadvertently upsetting the tentative stability that seems to have returned over the last few days, I feel like I'm walking on eggshells! However, I'm sorry if Monday's edit upset anyone .... it wasn't meant to. I also very much regret that John decided to model his behaviour and weblog on mine and hope I didn't sound as though I was making such a personal attack on anyone. Still, what's done is done I suppose and the sooner all this can be history, the better. I do however, feel that people should not be put in the position of feeling too timid to express their opinions on the forums, which should be happy to accept diametrically opposing views. Surely that's what the internet is all about! I find it hard not to sympathise with certain people who've had posts removed as "irrelevant" when topics like "Boo! I'm drunk!" are given plenty of space (a really valuable addition to the database).
At the end of the day, PCA forums have solved every problem I've thrown at them (and that's a fair number!). There is a huge depth of knowledge within the forum, which is a fantastic, infinite resource, where people willingly give their free time to help others (emphasis on the word free). And nobody put a gun to my head and forced me into unpleasant situations in chat rooms ....
(Monday 12th May)Browser r.enhancer, you have an awful lot to answer for! As I struggle to extricate myself from what I can only describe as the virtual docusoap I've been living for the last 2½ weeks, I realise I'm never going to be able to look at a copy of PC Answers in quite the same way again! Prevented as I am from expressing myself without censorship on the forums or in Loop's chatroom, at least on my own website I can attempt to make sense of this strangely compelling virtual world and ask the question What Went Wrong? without having my words edited, the topic locked, the entire thread deleted or a ban imposed. Anyone who believes the internet is the pinnacle of a democratic society is WRONG!
To read more archive weblogs, click here which will take you to the previous archive, which in turn contains a link to the one before that.