One of the things I enjoy about being my own boss and doing my own stuff is that I regularly get served with a nice new challenge - something to update, something to change, something to get better next time, something new to add to the stack of goods to sell.

And quite often, those little (or bigger) challenges come with a change to the better. As does the thing I'm facing now... as our Textile Forum gets a bit better known, its ranking on search machines in the 'Net gets higher. And that inevitably leads to more spam.



Last year, I was still sifting out the real entries from the non-real spammy ones by hand, but meanwhile it looks as if there will be a huge lot more spammy entries than last time - so today I have the wonderful opportunity to build an anti-spam trap into the registration questionnaire. So... I'm off to look for an instruction of how to do that!

We all know that The InternetsTM are a non-safe place, so I try to be as safe as possible. That includes the use of Firefox with the NoScript add-on, regular updates to safety-relevant programmes, and so on.

So I'm all for security. Unless... well, unless said extra secure methods keep me from actually paying for something over the Internet. Which is how I spent my morning (and which is why I am only blogging now, not two and a half hours ago as I had planned). I have succumbed to the lure of Leeds and now have been trying to register using the online form... and what can I say? It could be a little more user-friendly, maybe, as in not giving me a time-out that requires me to fill in all the forms again. Or a second time-out. Or forget everything already filled in when I log out. Or actually transmit my card data to my card issuer so that they can authorise the payment. Gah.

It does take a bit of stuff to get me pissed off, but I'm actually a little more than moderately pissed right now. Booking for a conference (or a flight, or whatever) is something that always sort of racks my nerves, so I like to have it run smoothly, not need to try it a gazillion times without success.

Well. I mailed the conference team with my woes, and I hope that it will get solved soon. Anyways (and if I have to mail in the .pdf and pay the extra process fee they charge for not using the online-booking system), I will go to Leeds Congress. Anyone else coming?

Working with a laptop is very nice - it has internal batteries so you can work even if there's no electricity (at least for a while), you can easily take it with you, it takes up little space on the desk even when set up, and there's probably a dozen more reasons. However, laptops also have their little drawbacks - like, for example, that it is not always possible to do an upgrade, or repair something. And probably everybody who has been using a laptop for a while has stumbled across one or more laptop-related problems already.

So... I stumbled over this instruction on how to clean a laptop fan yesterday, and it made me laugh really hard - so I'm passing it on.

Here you go. Clean the fan (or don't).

While blogging on Friday went off into the 'Net without any trouble, things quickly went pearshaped from there - with the wlan on and off again and on and off and finally off only. And then something in the innards of Windows, in the regions where the little drivers sit and make their thing, digested itself. And it was not possible to put that Humpty Dumpty back together again - so I finally had to reinstall Windows.

Let me tell you: That is quite an experience. I think it must have been a dozen times that the computer booted and did something (always stating "setup is preparing your computer for first use") and then re-booting. After a while of this continuous rebooting game with things done inbetween, it cried for the supplementary driver CD (which it got) and then had some more quality boot-and-reboot time. And then it actually finished.

On the down side, that now means that I have to re-install the ten or so programmes that I had already installed. On the up side, the pre-configured and pre-installed computer came with about 30 Gigabytes taken on the drive C. Thirty Freaking Gigabytes! For the operating system! I remember those times - that are not so very long gone - when a whole hard disk with 30 Gigabytes was a huge disk, and a very modern (and expensive) thing to have. Maybe I have lived under a rock the last years, but do operating systems really need to have so much disk space? I had very much planned to use the extra GBytes for storing more photos and documents, not more system. Well, after the re-installation, the new system takes up only (only! hah!) twenty gigabytes. That's ten more for me (once I figure out if some partition magic programme can shift partitions on Win7, that is).
Oh, and the connectivity problem, by the way, is not completely solved yet - though we now have a better idea what might cause the problem. So there will be some more configuring fun in the next days.

On the non-so-software-front, not too much got done (obviously) - a little bit of sewing on the tent and a little bit of knitting. I hope to get the hat testknit finished today or maybe, if I can't find much time for that, tomorrow.

...fruit flies like a banana.

It took me a good while to make it back into the internet - now on the new computer. I have a feeling that it will take me a few days to get used to the new kid on the desk, but I already had some good laughs (and some moments of severe d'oh).

You'd think that Microsoft Windows 7 would come from Microsoft, right? And the Office suite - Microsoft, right? So I got a good laugh when the brand-new system did get all agitated and warning when I tried to install my old Office suite... because "do you really want to allow that software from an unknown author to change something on your computer? Reallyreally?"

Well... actually... yes. That was the reason I put in the CD and clicked "install", you know?

Apart from that (and the fairly annoying getting-into-the-internet-problems) and the new keyboard that I need to get used to (and tweak with my custom keyboard settings), Win7 does look nice, and things all went quite smoothly. And I really love how easy it was to transplant my Firefox settings to their new home - copy the profile folder, mend the folder name in the profile.ini, and that was it!

Now, please excuse me while I spend most of this day with deinstalling stuff (Win7 comes with about 30 gigabyte of disk space already taken, and I'm still wondering by what) and installing stuff (I have a huge list of programmes on my old 'puter, and I actually do use quite a few of them).

In a recent comment, I found a link to academia.edu, which seems to be something like Facebook for academics (with listing of papers). Another social platform, just what the Internet needs! Did any of you know about that platform before? Am I the only one who was in the darkness?

To blog in earnest about that, I think it is a brilliant idea to have some sort of academical network like that - you can list books and papers you have read, maybe discuss them with colleagues, follow other people's work, and so on. Just like Facebook is a brilliant idea, keeping track of old colleagues and friends, instant chatting to just drop a word or two, and so on. And like Xing and LinkedIn are brilliant ideas, building a network of business acquaintances and partners, getting recommendations and seeing who trusts whom in business things, and so on. And like Ravelry, where you can connect with knitters you know and new folks, see who knits what, find new pattern ideas, message around, hang out in groups and so on. But is having so many different network platforms still a brilliant idea?

The problem of all this, as I see it: There's too many of them platforms. And each and every platform presence of a person means you need to dedicate time and energy to your place in that network, keeping your status and your information up-to-date, keeping track of your network connections, dropping a comment here and an answer there. And more and more I get the feeling that all those social networks are a good idea, but a great big honking single one would be an even better idea - because the idea of each of these networking sites is to collect everybody into the site and database, and every single platform wants as many people as possible, but my time is limited, and my energy that I am willing to devote daily to my presence on the Net is limited too. And that is exactly why I am blogging, but not going online to check Facebook or Xing or LinkedIn or whatever often: because this blog is my main bit of internet presence, and all the other groups and networks have to take the back seat. With this blog, what I write is there to read for everybody with Internet access and sufficient knowledge of English, and there is no need to be in any of the social network sites - and no need to know in which of these many sites I can be found...

That title was supposed to read "Laptop woes" - and nw yu can prbably guess what key desn't wrk prperly n my laptp anymre.

Writing that phrase also made me realise why that might be so - it seems as if the letter "O" is a  frequent one in English. Or maybe I have a penchant for using words with that letter often. Maybe I should start a quest to merely utilise different expressions in the future. (I just realised how hard to nigh impossible that is.) 0r empl0y the zer0 instead? N0. N0t a s0luti0n either.

I guess that after many years of using my trusty laptop, it is probably time to look for a replacement... because hitting that key real hard and waiting for it to respond with an O seriously cramps my normally soft-typing writing style...