Technicalities

The last ten days have been filled with frustrations, all caused by technical difficulties. I am not a natural on the computer but have learned how to do a lot of things over the last three years or so since moving much of my business online. I don't have any IT training and rely heavily on advice and guidance from my husband, friends and forums. However since getting my IMac just under two years ago, things began to make a lot more sense. The apple system just seems to operate more in line with my mindset than PCs ever did and as a result I have gained confidence, that is until last Friday, nasty, horrid, bad, bad, Friday. My wonderful foolproof IMac just decided to die. Well actually the hard drive has died. It has proven itself immune to being read from any source and needs to be sent to a specialist. The death of the hard drive almost caused one of maybe only three or four arguments my husband and I have ever had. Who was supposed to be backing up the hard drive? The answer from each of us was the other, the reality was neither. I have no excuses other than I genuinely believed that it was being done on my behalf. I never actually thought to double check, so a valuable, and unfortunately costly and time consuming lesson has been learned.

I have therefore been predominantly without computer or internet access for 10 days except for when my daughter, like now, has left her Macbook home alone. My pride and joy, my IMac was accepted for repair by the apple store yesterday and I found out that I had miraculously had the sense to purchase apple care when I first bought it, so the repair of the computer itself including a new hard drive is covered. Ordinarily apple keep the old hard drive, which they return to the manufacturer, but they have kindly agreed to let me keep it so I can send it off for data recovery. This however is a more costly affair, costing several hundred pounds and maybe taking several weeks. So unfortunately, much ongoing work is currently held up, accounts not available, photographs and emails lost. And so it goes on. But hopefully much of this valuable data will eventually be recovered and as I have already said, an important lesson has been learnt. So if everything seems a bit slow over here its because even more than is normal, I don't know what's going on!

My other main technical gripe, is much to my disappointment, with blogger. I have been aware for a while that there is a significant lack of space on my blog pages for patterns both to be purchased or free, and also for my books. I recently discovered that additional pages could be added to my blog so that I could set up independent pattern pages etc., to make it easier for readers to find things while they wait for me to develop my website. Although this has been delayed by lack of computer access anyway, I have found the system sadly lacking. The design control panel does not function properly with error messages coming up for a whole raft of functions. It has taken several hours today just to get one page to remember its styles and settings. I have therefore decided that putting all these hours into something that was supposed to be a quick temporary fix is really turning into a waste of time that would be better spent getting the website built. So please do excuse the blog if it is somewhat untidy for a little while and some of the links to products etc are missing. I will add the basic items that need to be present but not all the information that the currently empty pages suggest. Treat them as a taster of the type of thing that will be coming on the website and in the meantime I will just keep blogging as normal - once I get my computer and data back - at which point normal service will be resumed!

for now
a technilogically frazzled
Ruby xx