Monthly Archives: July 2011

evening stroll

20 Wednesday Jul 2011

Posted by in home, sevilla, spain, summer, tapas

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On a hot summer night in Sevilla it just doesn’t seem right to go to bed just when the weather is turning agreeable, so lately flatmate Nog and I have taken to late evening walks, which often end up with us stopping off somewhere for a Cold Beer and a tapa. Tonight we made two stops as I hadn’t had dinner, and we ended up going over the river to Triana, thinking it might be a bit cooler. It wasn’t. But it was cooler than inside the house, and there was a lovely breeze. And look at all the pretty things we saw! Plus we got some exercise and our two snacks cost a grand total of 12 euros. I love Sevilla.

Now it’s time for a cool shower and bed…

password problem

19 Tuesday Jul 2011

Posted by in computers, gaaaaa!!!, geekiness

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Oh noooo!

Two nights ago I was shutting down my laptop Shadow (a Toshiba Satellite L-300) and suddenly the screen went wonky and then a page like this showed up asking me for a password. Except I don’t use a password for Shadow. And then I remembered that the same thing happened to my friend Flor a couple of years ago with her almost new Toshiba. Apparently there is a company-set password that exists in each Toshiba computer and sometimes something sets it off – have never been sure what. Anyhow, Flor had to have her laptop memory replaced and lost all her data, photos, etc. because she hadn’t made a back up. Disaster.

I have no idea what happened the other night but it could be the very stupid shut-down process on Windows Vista. As you can see, there are various options given, the first three being “change user”, “close session” and “block”. Block?? Who the hell would want to block their own computer? In any case, ever since hearing about Flor’s problem I have been very careful when signing out, but I must have hit block instead of close session and then got the scary screen above asking me for my password.

I tried one of my usual passwords (even though I knew I hadn’t set one – panic!) and then remembered that when Flor tried doing this, after about three tries her computer shut down totally. Aack. So then I tried rebooting by holding down the off button and turning it back on again and … phew! It worked! But later when I tried shutting down by closing my session I got the scary password screen again. So I did the same re-start thing and haven’t dared turn my laptop off since. It has a sleep button, so I’ve been using that.

Luckily I had just reorganised all my photos and had done a back-up of all my important files on my external HD. But now what do I do?

photos

17 Sunday Jul 2011

Posted by in photos

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Was a time when we would sift through our old photos and select our favourites to save in pretty photo albums, or at least we would store them away properly to keep for posterity. In fact, a few years ago I had a go at doing this very thing with a couple of scary boxes stuffed full of old pics, some that I’d even brought over from Canada, and many from the UK. Well, they are still in those boxes. The job has so far proved to be too mind-numbingly tedious to dedicate a full day of my life to.

Then along came digital cameras and suddenly I not only had a few hundred old photos in a box to sort out, but also several thousand scattered throughout various files in my laptop. And well, today was the day. I sat myself down and did the first clean-up, which took about four hours. And I have to say I have a real sense of accomplishment, though some of the sub-files will need further editing. But at least now I know where everything is! What a great feeling.