Nothing Worked Land
A few days ago I congratulated myself on my computer skills.
Karma took its revenge on me quickly enough.
There is a little known site what I run called Martin Scriblerus. One or two of you may have heard of it? Anyhows it developed a problem. Luckily the problem was only in the little private meeting room for members, and only really affected the administration of that room.
Nevertheless it was an important error in its own irritating fashion and had to be fixed. Basically, if I searched for a member’s details, the details it gave me belonged to another member.
So I reverted the database to an earlier backup. That didn’t work.
I reverted the whole site to an earlier backup. That didn’t work either.
I deleted the whole meeting room and installed the latest software. No joy.
I was getting pretty pissed off at this stage.
Maybe the problem was the Interweb. I bypassed a site I use there [CloudFlare]. Nope.
Maybe the problem was in my browser [Waterfox]. I tried in Firefox which I haven’t used in many months. No joy again.
In desperation I took to the Interwebs and joined a help forum. I explained my problem in detail and got a load of replies. All of them suggested things I had tried before.
A thought crossed my mind. Firefox and Waterfox use almost identical software. I loaded Chromium. That worked!
But that meant that any time I wanted to do anything with the site I would have to use a separate browser. Fucking messy. That didn’t appeal at all.
There still had to be a reason. I had eliminated the site as a cause. The Interweb wasn’t to blame. It had to be the browser is some weird way. Maybe it was an add-on I had installed. I ran Waterfox in Safe Mode. That worked! It was an add-on at fault. I went through them and found the culprit – a dodgy record in LastPass which I deleted [the record, not LastPass]. At last the problem was solved and I could relax after several days work.
Being on a roll, I thought I would have a go at fixing a totally unrelated problem that had been bugging me for a while [since I moved to this new laptop]. Any time I clicked a link in an email it opened up a blank new browser. I had come across this in the past and I tried all the fixes. I was back in Nothing Worked Land.
I cracked it in the end. I told the mail to open in Chromium. That worked. Then I told it to forget that and to work back in Waterfox. That worked.
And they say computers run on logic?
At least it all took my mind off the Virus and the miserable weather.
Computers are very logical. They will do exactly what you tell them to do, even if it is not what you intended to tell them, or you did not know that you had told them, or some other human had put their tuppence worth in unbeknownst to you.
At least, up to now.
Now we are getting these "self learning" systems. Are they still computers? God help us. Welcome to HAL9000. This old retired hardware engineer is lost in he jargon.
I confess I have a few concerns about AI. Also the reliance on technology – for example, "smart" driverless cars. I can see trouble ahead….
Sounds like a typical day in computer la-la land. I remember those types of days well. I always seemed to solve those niggling problems but there were times I just wanted to smash the whole kit and caboodle and be done with it. These days it's just Linux Mint, email and browsing. Occasionally I mangle an image or two just for fun but that's about it. Oh yeah, I keep my old site updated just because.
LastPass caused the problem? To be honest I gave LastPass the boot a long while back. High resource usage, outages now and then. Then they got hacked and I'd had enough. These days it's Bitwarden. Highly secure, stable, open source and can import LastPass data. Works for me.
Now I wonder what tomorrow may bring?
I hadn't come across Bitwarden before. It looks interesting. I have already set up an account….!
"At least it all took my mind off the Virus and the miserable weather."
We currently have about two feet of snow in the yard and I'm shoveling walks and the driveway every other day. Retirement leaves plenty of time for this along with a few pipes and some great tobacco. To go along with these I went to Amazon to see what books I could find.
I have read all the books I currently have and was looking for something different, and there it was…something titled "Head Rambles"! This fine winter distraction is on it's way to me now.
You're joking!!! Really?
So I can finally put down the deposit on the Carribean Island? Or did you go cheap on me and buy a second hand copy for 5c?
Well Gramps, I don't know about property in the tropics, but maybe you could pay someone to take care of that sewer chore next year. (I went brand spankin' new.) For what it may be worth, Amazon did give me the dire warning: "only one copy left".
I would imagine they had to delve into the darkest dustiest dirtiest corner to find it under all the cobwebs.
Actually, I don't get a red cent these days. The publisher is still trying to cover its costs!