Gentle Spiders, It *must* be the weather (hot, humid, and unnerving)...
Sunday night, midway through the evening, "something happened", and I lost all connection to the outside world -- no e-mail at all, either coming or going, no websites... Monday (was it really only yesterday? Feels like aeons <g>) I called the help desk at my ISP and they walked me through some check-ups. "Nope, nothing wrong with the DSL, must be something wrong with your machine, but I know nothing about Macs, you'll have to talk to Dusan" (Dusan is the owner of "rockbridge.net") Dusan was busy, then went home for the night... Okey-dokey... Severn (DH), seeing me totally discombabulated (what do I do with my evening? I'm used to reading *at nihgt*)offered the use of his 'puter. I resisted the temptation for a while, because I knew there were "bristles" that came with it, but, finally gave in, and decided to try and access my mail via the Rockbridge website, if only to delete some of the spam, so as to make sure I don't go over tha data limit I'm allowed. 1) The puter is just under 6yrs old, but on its "last legs"; slow doesn't begin to describe it, even with the DSL. Hateful. 2) The mouse has 3 buttons (instead of the hand-relaxing single expanse; I had to relearn how to keep half of my palm in the air, and to use the proper one. Hateful. 3) Windows '98 was OK when it was all I knew but, all this repeated "you've performed an illegal operation" and restarting from scratch... Hateful. 4) Getting to the website and my mail account was a relatively simple procedure (only one crash and restart on the way), but that was the only thing that *was* simple... The messages in my box on the web aren't nicely filtered and separated; they're all jumbled together. Also, I'm unused to their system of deleting, reading, etc; just removing spam took forever (especially since some of them are as pernicious as cancer and refuse to be deleted; you delete, you've performed an illegal operation, and back to square one we go... Hateful #5 <g>). After 2 hrs of hard work, I was rid of all spam messages, read some of the non-spam which I thought would be either interesting or urgent, responded to a couple of the urgent ones, wrote one urgent one myself and quit. Dusan called this morning, tried to walk me through some checks (with no results) and, finally, said: "I know Macs, but not OSX; I need to *see* what you're seeing, to be effective; I'll come by after lunch. "After lunch" turned out to be 16:00 (long story and not his fault, but it was very inconvenient) His diagnosis is that it's not the puter, or even anything I'd changed (inadvertently) in configurations, but the router; it won't talk to my machine, all of a sudden. What he can't understand is how come it still talks to Severn's. And he can't do anything, because, even face to face, he doesn't know where to look for things im this Mac, and I can't tell him... I call Danek, and let the two-techno geeks talk to one another. Some things get explained, some things get fixed -- or so it seems for a moment. Turns out they aren't but, in the process, Severn's machine fell into pattern -- it, too, lost it's connection to DSL, which reassures Dusan no end :) 17:30 Severn and I depart for our much delayed grocery shopping trip (Tuesdays are senior citizen discount days, and since they discovered I'm still a yr+ short of qualifying, I've been carting him around to flash his face at the checkout <g>) Dusan't supposed to come back tomorrow, with some numbers he has in the office, now that he knows how to put them into the puter... So, here I am, on the dial-up again (hateful #6). With no idea whether this message's going to go to chat and/or in what format; if we didn't have an HTML-stripper, I probably wouldn't even try... :) Without my address-book, I can't even tell my joke sources to cease-and-desist sending them for a couple of days. So. I've got all the private messages I was supposed to get (I think) and read them, but won't be able to respond to most of them until after I've read all the messages I've been skipping (most on both lists) if/when the DSL gets restored to my own puter. Oh, and I'd appreciate it if those of you who feel motivated to commiserate (instead of dancing a jig like you should <g>), would send a small donation to their local hospice *instead*... I've not even been able to take the time to read all the reading recommendations that seem to be showing up, which is the hardest cross to bear :) Yours, without a signature, in hot and humid (we had a heavy rainstorm while shopping; we and the bags got soaked. When it rains... <g>) Lexington, Virginia, USA Tamara P (don't ask <g>) Duvall To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace-chat [EMAIL PROTECTED]
