wendy house

On Boyfriends:

• Wendy age 12 “Mum, what do you think of boyfriends?”  .    Mum “They’re okay one at a time“
• Gave me a front door key (age 12) and said “let us know if you’re not coming home  over-night,   otherwise we’ll stay awake waiting to hear you come in”   Cunning,   I always felt morally obliged to tell her exactly where I was and when I was coming home…
• Wendy age 16, after boyfriend dumped me because I wouldn’t marry him before I’d been to college.   Wendy “what did you think of him mum?“.   Mum “He’s in the Navy dear“
• Wendy age 17, dating an  Oxford University undergraduate studying “Classic’s” who had  an Aristocratic family name, all boys-private-school education with a ‘plummy‘ accent.   He  would bring HER roses when he visited.    She phoned all her relatives, even distant ones that she didn’t like,  to tell them his name.   Never before or since has she done this.  
• Upon meeting my first love (age 19),   she left the hallway,   shut the kitchen door (NEVER normally shut) and we could hear:   “HaaaHaaaa Haaaa,   haaa,   haaa,   teeee heee heeee“
• After first-love dumped me (age 22):   “He didn’t have enough umpff for you dear“.    I know why she laughed,   I thought that was ‘Umpff’.   Poweful insight on her part,   wish I knew how to recognise “Umpff“.  

On Wendy’s pierced nose  (since age 19)

• “Congratulations,   you’ve managed to highlight the worst feature on your face“
• “Oh,   let me polish that dear it’s all greasy“
• “It’s just a phase you’re going through,   you’ll grow out of it”
• “Is that a zit dear?   oh,   I couldn’t tell the difference”
• “Don’t wear emerald’s there dear“

On Wendy’s tattoos (since age 22)

• “Oh dear,   will that wash off?”
• “Is that cancerous?”
• “What exactly is it meant to be?”

On Marriage:

• After Wendy had been ‘engaged’ for  3 years, over formal family dinner, she  said to us both:   “If you want to elope,   that’s fine with us“
• After Wendy had been ‘engaged’ for 5 years,   to me in the kitchen  ”If money’s the problem dear we can contribute   <generous amount>“
• Unprompted this September:   “good job you didn’t get married dear,   have you seen the cost of weddings?   Its outrageous!“

Mum’s a complete treasure.   I adore her mixture of pragamatism,   support, and clearly stated prejudice.   Love her to bits.

Wendy

You know how some people  have the kind of smile that could melt a chocolate bar at 20 paces?    

Hold that thought.

Today I  discovered that some people have the kind of  email-writing that can melt a Wendy irrespective of distance.  

All the cute kiddies wandering around in costume today are making a eutectic mixture of me.

* the sound of Wendy reading an email as a cute kiddie walks by

W

Current ‘hottie’ decided to place his first phone-call to me at approximately 2am this morning.

I didn’t let a little thing like ‘being asleep’ stop me from holding a conversation on cue!

I woke this morning wondering,   “was that a dream or did i get a phone-call last night?”  I haven’t a clue what I said.    

Sleep talking is a skill I’ve developed.  I just need to work on the remembering bit….

W Will-answer-phone-in-sleep

My internet dating profile is more  bouncy than a girl-scout with a yoyo on a trampoline!
This is how it works:

• I start emailing with a potential hottie, so I ‘hide’ my profile to focus attention on said hottie
• Said hottie says they’ll write tonight,   I don’t receive an email,   my profile goes back up
• Said hottie writes that he sent an email and demonstrates both irritation and cutie-ness
• I reply and my profile gets hidden again
• Add to that the previous relationship uncertainty:   dumped,   not dumped.   Relationship over. Which went with profile posting-removing

And you’ve got the full girl-scout with a yoyo on a trampoline picture*!

(*not literally a picture,   apologies to the people sent here by search engines  looking  for pictures of girl scouts on trampolines. This site might help.   It  has more ‘raunchy’ dating and a great video of the world YoYo champion 2005: http://www.m90.org/view_image.php?image_id=8230)

Why do I bother  bouncing the profile?   Why not leave the profile totally posted until I’m ‘in’ a relationship?   Good question,   you guys are on the ball.   Here’s a long explanation why.

To me it looks like there are two main potential strategies  for establishing the beginning of a fulfilling-have-fun-with-boy-man relationship using  the service I’ve subscribed to:

1)  Maximising statistical probability
If I keep email threads going with all  the hotties I can find I’m bound to have a hit with one of them.  This ignores that HOW we engage in relationships significantly impacts their quality.        The service charges on a time-based model (per month),   not per-person-contacted.   A capitalistic,    mechanistical, individualistic  science oriented value set would  suggest that maximising probablity is both a pragmatic and profitable approach to securing the start of a fulfilling relationship

2) Maximising mutual engagement 
If I know what I want and explore that within any exchange with one hottie I can work out whether this hottie really ‘works well’ with me.   Mutuality.   This ignores that ‘there are plenty more fish in the sea’, the abundance of choice… ..so prevalent in wealthy societies like the US…   …even people can experience being treated as a replaceable commodity.

What do people do?

Based on personal experience I’m guessing that within this dating service  the majority of users are applying  a statistical approach.  ’Daters’ can expect their  hotties to be  using a statistical approach,   keeping a profile visible until absolutely sure of a decision which had to be negotiated,   or ‘given’  as part of the relationship development process.   Nothing wrong with that.    Culturally ‘acceptable’.   Agreed.   Agreed?

What does Wendy do?

I’m opting for mutual engagement on a ‘serial’ basis.   Potentially more Expensive, time consuming and open to being misunderstood because its not the Norm.        Urgh.

Why?

Is fulfillment really a statistical concept?

I don’t think so!  

I believe that, unlike the statistical approach,  a mutual engagement approach affords the basis for  clear,   open,   honest communications.   For example,   if I was using a statistical approach would I discuss any single hottie  with the others that I was writting to?   This might reduce my chances of quickly establishing an intimate relationship with  them.    I  believe that omission of  pertinent,   known, chance-reducing,  information can be sufficiently misleading to be experienced as dishonest or at minimum unduely induce paranoia (promote the need for therapy?).

As an extreme fictional example,   Married man omits to tell his wife he’s having an affair.  He hasn’t lied.   She may get paranoid,   why is he working late so often?   I can’t keep questioning him  about where he is etc.   The key thing here is pertinent information,   stuff where knowledge is being withheld BECAUSE it will have an impact on a specific relationship.    I wonder how ‘open’ the dating service users feel able to be if they are employing a high numbers approach?

If the hottie using the statistical approach is honest and decides to provide this information the recipient is given a clear indicator that they are not (yet?) special.   As an egotist this is not a message I like to receive too often!   As someone who aspires to being a caring person this is not a message I want to feel obliged to give to people who have flatteringly shown an interest in me.   To illustrate,   here’s  a fictional, potential open honest conversation between two statistical approach users based on actual convesations I had with service users:

Left-hander:I am having some fun email threads with 5 people through this dating service at the moment,   what about you?

Right-hander:   Just the 20,   I normally have about 34 going,   I’m a fast thinker and typer

Left-hander: Oh,   how do I rate in the 20,   is it worth my considering this relationship as anything other than friendship?

Right hander:   Can’t tell at the moment,   well over half of the 20 will just drop-out over the next week,   and I’m only really sure I’m interested in 4.   The others are just entertainment value.   You’re one of the 4.   Lets start with friends and just see how it goes,   I dont want to rush into anything.  How do you feel about your 5 people?

Left hander: well,   foot-fetishist is fun but wont go out on hikes for fear of blisters.    Hand-fetishist is a bit too tactile but really tickles my sense of humour.   Obviously,  you’re gorgeous but I’m not confident we have potential because you dont seem  really interested in me,   the other two I haven’t met yet so its early days

Right hander:   sounds fun,   why all the fetishists? etc…

There is also a perceived time-based anxiety for all statistical approach users.   People can easily believe that if they don’t establish intimacy quickly then the other  person will easily find someone else,   particularly if they are attractive.   This creates a  perceived need to establish intimacy quickly  to  legitimately reduce competition by asking  for the new-partners profile to be removed.

From a finance perspective the mutual engagement method sets the expectation of not finding a right person ‘quickly’ together with longer subscription to the service (service profit).    I’ve actually had people write   asking me to reply quickly before their subscription runs-out.   These people were honest,  but hey babe,   I’m worth more than the subscription!

I suspect  that a statistical approach promotes ‘insecurity’,   lack of perceived self-value,   and lots of social interactional experiences that are highly negative (paranoia, deception).   Consequently,    it aligns with a profit principle through the supply of ongoing services (dating, counselling). For these reasons I believe using  a statistical approach  would be  a morally  irresponsible act from anyone who see’s this dating services affordances  as I see  them.

In maximising mutual engagement,   I can say honestly,   i’m only mailing with you.   The hottie can indepedently verify this by checking my profile availability (not there).   He can feel re-assured.   I can be fully open and comfortably convey  all relationship pertinent information.   Trust grows quickly.   This suits my conscience and  sense of self as a responsible society member.   It also promotes trust, comfort,  confidence and happiness.   It has the Wendy-pleasing by-product of scaring-off  people that might not feel easy with open, honest and fairly focussed Wendy-communications.   Hooray!

However,   I can still be paranoid because the person I’m mailing is likely to be using a statistical approach.   Their choice.    I can respect the logic that promotes this strategy and self-treat myself for any paranoid outbursts,   or blog them.

The challenge is how to maintian  mutual engagement approach  when the  social and business system heavily promotes a  statistical model?   Here’s my plan:

• Errr…   …be stubborn based on principle
• Suggest to the service  providers that they seriously consider revamping their charging model to  a  per ‘start-contact’ basis.   This would encourage a mutual-engagement model over a statistical model and could be constructed to be profitable using the specifics of the pricing model

W believes-that-individual-emotional-responsibility-makes-a-difference-everywhere

A quick visual scan of the Wikipedia listings of  fruits and Vegetables confirms that no common produce rhymes with the word ‘Hex’.  

Tonight I’m investigating tomatoes.   If I leave these for a couple of days they might go all ‘squishy’,   but you didn’t really need to know that did you?

Wendy   Investigating-the-properties-of-produce  

Post relationship clutter has invaded my dining-room table.   A space that was previously under control has subversively developed a magnetic power for things that normally live elsewhere.  

What things?  

If you’re feeling extremely bored spend a few minutes trying to spot  the following things  in the photograph.  

• birthday card & present for Swedish friend
• housewarming present for recently moved friend
• Package of summer from eastcoast friend
• open book (Marilyn Monroe quotations,    sharp lady)
• camera-case
• UK adapter power  plug
• mug of tea
• beer bottle (Samuel Smith’s Nutbrown Ale)
• pile of unopened mail from organisations
• collection of documents providing guidance on how to review papers for a conference.
• print-out of conference papers I’m reviewing.   This helps me  to make colourful doodles on them.   More satisfying than scrolling through a .pdf file.  
• vase of roses.   Hooray,   how pretty they look.   How sweet they smell.   I have to keep an eye on the kitties though.   Kitties love to eat roses.   I’ll try and catch a picture of them browsing the blooms…
• 2  closed books (Adam Nicolson,   really must start reading it again…) & Mervyn Peake’s ‘Letters from a lost uncle’.   Great bedtime story…
• 2 sketchpads sat on their carrying-case
• 2 plastic bags of legal documents (preparing a will)
• 2 Laptops (Tinkerbell on your left  & Work supplied)
• 2 bowls of ‘produce’ (green & orange – like the roses).   Produce is beginning to fascinate me….
• 3  colour pens.

Wendy making-lists-rather-than-moving-clutter

I’ve had to hide my online dating service profile because I received too many emails to read and reply to in a week let-alone an evening. Though, it is difficult to take people from across the mountains (Florida?!!), or old enough to be my dad, seriously.

I can’t handle anymore without employing a part time assistant to filter them on my behalf. Instead, I’ve hidden my profile and will write polite replies to those who took the trouble to write. Yes, this time I whipped-out my credit card and paid a subscription for the privilege of being able to reply…..

W Ego-the-size-of-a-house-and-inbox-contents-to-match

Getting a picture of my beautiful-self accepted for an internet dating profile main photograph?

Nightmare.

Being a pro-active gal that luuuurrrrves happily being with a gorgeous boy-man, I put a ‘profile’ on a dating site. Each of approximately 7 photographs I submitted were subject to quality control decisions. Each time, censors’ decision was:

Rejected.

Naturally, wanting to appeal to the specific dating market of rightist hand-o-philes, I tried a photograph of my right hand. Quality censors decision:

Rejected.

I sent the photograph of me at 15 and plastered the ‘date-taken’ in large clear letters under the face. Quality censors decision? They removed the date and:

Published!

Hmmmm… …the service is apparantly prepared to be complicit in publishing misleading photographs (by age) but is not prepared to cater to diverse (minority fetish) groups such as right-hand-o-philes. Now I may never find one. My only consolation is that I have on several occassions been approached by foot-fetishist. Evidently I have ‘adorable arches’. Maybe I’ll try a photograph of this asset next. Faces are the censors (majority) preference. But. Excluding other significant body parts is blatant, prejudicial, discrimination.

Shocking!

In less than 2 weeks I’ll be 42

According to Douglas Adams the second most impressive computer in the Universe, ‘Deep thought’  spent 7.5 million years to discover that 42 is the ultimate  answer to life the universe and everything.  

I get to experience  42 directly, no  lawyers, no phone-menu, no queuing, no bureaucratic machinery, no gloves, no Windows, no 7.5 million years waiting.   How sexy is that?  42 uncovered, unprotected, outside and in the ‘raw’ and nearly-now!   I’m getting way too excited just thinking about it.   Time for a cup of tea.

W

Would you trust this 15yr old to knit your Fair-Isle Jumper?

W Ex-Professional-Knitter

I’m free!

Insensitivity criminal on the streets again!

W  

Wendy’s beer in the foreground.  

Crazy Lady’s “Wild at Heart” Laura Dern style hair in the background.  

Crazy Lady drew together 6 women and  1 guy to picnic at an art auction for a thoroughly enjoyable evening.   They bought food and drink,   talked, laughed,  viewed art,  argued  and ‘bid’.     I didnt know anyone   at the beginning of the evening beyond 2 previous nights with Crazy Lady.  

Despite enjoying myself I ‘ran-away’ after about 5hrs of their company.   Just call me socio-feeble,   its like ‘socio-fugal’ (Halls,      Proxemics) with a Wendy-specific impact that progressively builds in a logarithmic fashion at large social gatherings or when no-one present  is sufficiently ‘Wendy-aware’ to cunningly pre-empt it.    

My post-publishing ‘fiddling’ habits are spamming people with RSS Aggregators (blog readers).

Despite the totally obscure and misleading name I managed to work out that  an ‘RSS Feed’ delivers a summary of new and updated blog entries to an blog reader somewhere-else.

Arranging to get a flood from Wendy’s Blog

Several people use RSS Feeds to  get updates from my  blog delivered.   I’m guessing their blog readers allow them to do things like view summaries of multiple different self-specified blogs on a single web-page or deliver blog summary contents  as e-mails  at specific times.  

I WANT ONE.   I want a blog reader on my blog!!!!  

Who would have guessed that reflexivity is both amusing and practical?

I  can’t find an RSS Reader on MSN Spaces that will enable me to feed information  to my  Blog from outside MSN.   Boo Hoo (sound of fake blubbing).    

What does a flood from Wendy’s blog look like?

Snoo Tee sees a new entry in his blog reader everytime I make an edit to the site.  

MSN doesn’t provide a spell-checker.

I’m a poor typer,   my spelling, grammar and stuff  doesn’t work properly without  some form of external review.  

I fiddle with formatting post-publication.

This means Snoo Tee’s blog reader shows a  string of updates prompted by minor edits  soon after I’ve publshed.  

Ooops.  

If MSN upgrades its pre-plog services (I’ll ask) then  the RSS  flood of editing changes that I produce will be reduced.   Not eliminated.   I like to fiddle.   Ideally I’d like to be able to specify when an edit warrants pushing the new version to people who have already seen it….

Wendy maybe-I’ll-change-that-text-to-bold-or-red….

Evidently,   that’s what some boys kiss like.

Wendy cautiously-doing-her-laundry

The Oxford English Dictionary Online refuses to recognise that ‘scatty’ is a legitimate word.   Bloody-mindedness I’d say!   Meanwhile,   the ever faithfull slang dictionary provides a description that clearly matches my colloquial understanding:

 scatty Adj. Absent-minded. Possibly from scatterbrained. {Informal}

Here’s a short (who am I kidding?) account of this autumn’s scattiness that excludes normal stuff like losing my car keys,   my car in the car-park,   and occassionally the car-park I’ve left the car in.   This autumn has proved exceptional.    My outstanding achievement of  absent mindedness this autumn includes,   but is not limited to:

1. Left handbag in downtown restaurant. August
2. Left jumper in Bristol. September.   Will be posted as packaging around a B’day present (hooray!).
3. Left camera battery charger with battery plugged into a wall in Portsmouth. October.   Currently in the post.
4. Lost Passport and Advance Parole documents (2x). October.  Found them each time within 2 hrs.
5. Lost boyfriend.   October.   Partially retrieved in October.
6. Lost Mobile phone power 2x. October.
7. Left slippers at friends temporary home just before he moved out. October.
8. Left company entrance card-key inside the building when I left,   house keys & lip-balm.  Today.   Retrieved all.
9. Lost my appetite. October.
10. Lost sleep.   Monday.   Found Tuesday onward… hoorah!.

 Do I get an award or what?   Just feel the attitude.   Sleep deprivation does wacky things to the superficially normal gal.   I must remember to be polite to my colleagues tomorrow,   or should i….

Wendy where-did-i-leave-my……

Met a fabulous British lady at a party last Saturday who’d just been dumped by her boyfriend.   Evidently,   he said she was too ‘crazy’ for him,   he couldn’t ‘deal’ with it.   Hmmmmm…..     …either it was the full moon,    craziness is contagious or inherent in british lasses…   …because that sounds spookily familiar and potentially accurate…  

Anyway  

Crazy lady is taking me out on Friday.   Hooray.   Who knows what will happen….     ….one thing is for sure.   There will be high-heeled pointy-toed thigh-length calf-hugging boots involved…..

After a steamy hot shower (mmMMmmm….) I tumbled into the trusty old Honda Civic (called Loo Sea). Loo Sea’s windows instantly went opaque as we left the warmth of my home. I know a bit about physics – condensation is attracted to cold surfaces. So I whacked up the heating controls and directed all the vents at the windows and pulled over while the windows cleared.

Accident avoided.

Guess I’ll have to either shave my head or get a hair-dryer because Loo Sea’s directional heat controls are a bit funky.

Wendy wet-hair

An unexpected side effect of recently-dumped-ness is that your Mobile phone batteries start running-out way too frequently in places where your charger isn’t handy.

Solutions?

• Use the car charger even when I’m not driving. Heck no! That means sitting in the car with the engine running waiting for the phone to charge. How sad is that? That’s 700x sad. I love my mobile, but not that much…
• Carry a charger in my back-pocket. Bumpy-bum? I dont think so. The power-prongs could produce painful side-effects when enthusiastically approaching a chair. I’m prone to approaching chairs enthusiastically.
• Carry a charger in my front pocket. Non-starter. Everything else is there. No room!
• Put charger in a handbag (US ‘purse’). Can’t do it, my handbag management skills are catastrophic. A handbag is something that I can, will, leave behind because its not physically attached to my body. In my 20′s I tried using handbags but it just didn’t work for me. I left them on buses, trains, Pubs, Disco’s, in other people’s homes….. This normally resulted in a stressful ‘Oh shite where’s my house keys, money, phone, camera, sunglasses, flat-erik and emergency condom’ experience. Followed by “can I borrow your phone or small change for a public call box” for a round of urgent phonecalls to multiple places. Just finding the phone-numbers was a nightmare. Then I’d have to get back to pick it up. Retrieval trips could cover over a hundred miles each way. Nasty Nasty Nasty. I still have a couple of variations on handbags. I still leave them behind on the rare occasions I risk using them. A girlfriend recently suggested attaching the bag to my clothes with a chain. Novel, but somewhat bizarre and my bizarreness ratings do not need enhancing at the moment. I have bucket loads of admiration for people that have mastered the skill of handbag management to a level where it looks seamless and automatic.
• Check the charge level more frequently and plan to charge it at sensible times. Ugh, I’ll try this one. Scattiness is also a by-product of recently-dumped-ness so I’m not too confident of this solution working.
• Carry a fully charged spare battery. Is that even possible?
• Have lots of chargers left in the places I spend lots of time. Back-up plan for the incurably scatty.
• Tolerate dead-phone for hours. What? Can’t text, take pictures or feel the pleasant vibrate in my front pocket during ‘important’ meetings. NO WAY!
• Use phone less to place and receive calls. Preposterous!.

Wendy mobile-phonophile

Across the 24hr period of ‘singleness’ I’d posted a ‘profile’ on an international dating service. I received emails from

• 55yr very polite fellow. Looks and writes like he could be older than even my dad….
• 51yr Seattle East-sider self-described ‘techy’ with big income, requires his girlfriend to have a PhD, wrote 2x making ‘overgenerous’ suggestions. No evidence of a sense of humour.
• 48yr handsome artsy gentle natured buddist with silver hair and a painful, giving, low-paid job (technical support helpdesk).
• 45yr Seattle local who recognised my boat, can cook, has firm abs, a witty email technique and humorous profile.
• 44yr rotund, big income (self-reported) business man based in NY (?!).

2/5 almost matched my ‘requirements’ list. The Seattle guy with humour and the Buddist smelt of potential….

I didn’t pay to let them know of my unexpected lack of single-ness. Their messages go cruelly unanswered. This internet dating thing involves a lot of uncertainty and requires robustness.

Feel bad about not paying to reply.

3 other guys ‘winked’ (for free) at me. This seems like a good way of working-out whether writing will be well received…. ….I don’t feel bad about not returning the winks.

The service sent me links to 12 profiles that were ‘mutual matches’, they fit the explicit requirements I’m looking for and I fit the explicit requirements they are looking for. Judging by the 12 photographs, self-assessments of body-type vary dramatically. Either these people have lost a lot of weight, or seriously toned-up, since they posted their photographs!

The suddenly-single judgement was overuled last night.   Judge commented that he’s ‘cautiously optimistic’.    We’re on relationship parole.  

All of your good wishes helped,   good team effort

W

during  immediate post-relationship insomina-trauma my ‘your absolutely fabulous’ votes go to:

• Rob -  because he’s a boy with the gutsiness to  double-cheek kiss british rugby players.   Hooray for pluckiness!
• Raymond - for providing wacky overnight reading material to make me giggle,   how does he find the time to be a ‘guru’,   speak and code in multiple obscure languages, and dig up obscure, yet spookily sensible, sociological  phenomena.
• M - for an outstanding,   promptly delivered,  2 hour phone conversation that included gems like ‘insomnia makes things happen’ and wonderfully surreal details of M’s own passage through life followed by some subtly subversive plans for upcoming weekends.   Hooray.   I’m so lucky to know people who can understand what I’m saying through the sound of blubby-blubby-really-blubby-tears in a foreign accent over a cellular service.   M’s the best.
• Drew - because he recommended the book on plastics in culture which impending post-realtionship insomnia will now give me time to read.   He’s also aware of Spokane.   Spokane is a mystery to me,   maybe I should drive there one night and tell you all about it.   What do you think,   Spokane,   land of mystery ‘exposed’?
• Tiger - for suggesting a painting project and tackling the hug-over-7,000-miles-apart-over-the-internet challenge.
• 4 individuals who invited me out to dinner almost every evening  this week.   Maybe some of them want a complimentary painting to their own brief?
• The Gal  who blames the full moon.
• The Posse who spontaneously arranged to chauffer me to a bar that sells good British beer for a mini party.

The goodness is I know that I can still ‘feel’ with the passion of a teenager.    Years haven’t ‘numbed’ me with sensible,   detached, reasonableness to being suddenly single.   It would seem I’m not sensible by nature.

Thanks to Snoo Tea this entry was made from my personal laptop (Tinkerbell) with its new hard drive!! The story involved:

Discovery - Snew Tea took out the new hard drive, looked at it put it back in & looked at the BIOS. It didn’t see the drive. Took it out again to read the information on the drive, put it back in and the BIOS saw it! Quickly we inserted the Windows XP SP1 OS restore disc supplied with the computer. It started installing!!!! I was able to log-on. Hooray!

Diagnosis - the drive wasn’t held in close-enough contact with the machine connectors by the Laptop casing. So we put some buffering material in place (bubble-wrap) to hold the drive in contact with the connectors and fastened up the casing.

Download and Installed

• Driver recovery package (CD came with the computer)
• Phonecall to activate XP SP1
• critical OS updates
• XP SP2
• antivirus
• anti-spyware
• anti-malicious-software
• Camera drivers (Canon Website)
• Office 2003 (and activated it)
• Office critical updates
• MSN Messenger 7.5
• photographs from my camera to my network drive

Tinkerbell is back to full health

Wendy full-happy-service-resumed

The US has ‘sold’ two ships to a UK company ‘Able’ for ‘dismantling’. The ships are controverial because of the potential pollution associated with dismantaling them. The alternative argument appears to be that decontamination is a valuable and necessary service inducstry.

These ships now sit in a Teeside harbour in North East England.

W

At the beginning of the week I had responsibility for 4 PC’s theoretically  running <ha!> 6 OS’s.       I could only log-on to one PC OS.   I didn’t have a clue.  

I’ve managed to get 2/3  PC’s to a point where I can log-on!   Hooray, progress.   very time consuming,   painful progress.    

NOT FUN

It’s a waste of my time.   But there is no official support for my machines….    …just me and the goodwill of colleagues…   …who also have more important things to do….  

My home laptop is still destined for the service center.    At least  I CAN opt to call an expert in my personal life…..      

At this point in time I’d rather have  a friendly  technical computer whizzz than a hug.   Dad’s are good at that sort of thing.  Mine’s in the UK….  

W would-rather-be-using-her-core-skills-at-work

A sensible friend used a pair of pliers to twist the screw-driver on the screws of my hard drive casing.    Simple obvious.   Doh!    

Hooray,   old hard drive removed.    New hard drive in place. All I need to do is turn on the laptop and  start loading my software!  

No.   Apparently not.  

We turned on the power and nothing appeared to happen.   Sensible friend checked out  the ‘set-up’ (like a  pre-windows OS).   It told him that the laptop couldn’t ‘see’ the new hard drive.   Now I have 2 hard drives.    One possibly broken,   one brand new.   A laptop that doesn’t ‘see’ either of them but does have some form of set-up pre-windows stuff that works fine in telling people who can ‘read’ it that it cant see either hard drive.

Sigh.  What next?

I’m thinking of taking the little tyke down to a computer service center  to ask someone for a quote on servicing/fixing it.    I just want it to work,   I dont want to have to learn how to diagnose problems and stuff.   BIG SIGH.  

Wendy Using-Work-Computer-to-Blog

I took the hard drive out of my laptop,   carried it to a computer store, identified an appropriate  replacement, and picked up some small Phillips screw drivers.   Progress!

I  was feeling prematurely pleased with myself.   Maybe  I  could replace the drive and start the long tedious process or re-installing all my software:   OS, anti-virus, applications, anti-spyware etc….

HA!  more fool me…

I  discovered I need to remove the old drive from a close-fitting case that I had assumed was actually part of the drive.  

My hands are now raw with using all my strength to try and unscrew the casing.   No joy.   not even one of the four screws flinched.   I’m stuck.     Suggestions welcomed.   How do I loosen the screws?  Then once loosened how do I tighten them sufficently on the new drive without damaging it?

I  feel pathetic and frustrated.  

Computers shouldn’t do that to anyone.

Ineffectual Wendy    

Flat Eric went to the Factory Outlet shops in Gun Wharf. He particularly enjoyed the ‘Animal’ shop.     He was a little disappointed that the Millenium Tower is still not open to visitors…

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