Experiencing Technical Difficulties
It's been a weekend of dealing with some of the dark side of technology.

First, daughter's Compaq Armada is displaying a serious error message on startup, the kind that means the hard disk is not long for this world. She forgot to tell me about this and I think it's been a month or so. Tried repairs but the message remains. It goes in this week for a replacement drive.

But she still needs to print receipts from a recent Pampered Chef show (she is a consultant). So her printer breaks down next. Jams the paper every time. (I found out that printers are now consumable products, given that new printers can purchased for under $30.)

I decide to configure her computer to work with my Epson 785EPX printer. I spent a lot of time at the task and it's still not printing. The drivers install but there are communication errors every time I try to print. Very frustrating.

Second tech issue from hell was a major spamming of this blog. Looks like it's Italians from the text or some romance language country. In my zeal to remove the spam comments, I deleted some real comments (and I can't spare them). In particular I deleted one with a link to how to get Haloscan comments to work in the new Google Blogger Beta.

Third tech issue and maybe the worst was the reset of my ancient Handspring Visor. I let the batteries run down and after a certain time, the unit loses it's settings so when you turn it on, it's as if it were brand new. No calendar data, address book entries, or anything. Luckily I have some backup software and can restore the data. Except the YAP (yet another password manager) database wasn't getting backed up and I'm missing a few of years of passwords. I don't think I had any critical ones there that also weren't listed somewhere else but I'm not sure.

Hopefully, the Gods will be more benevolent this week.


- posted by Peter Fleck @ Permalink 10:10 PM [to Del.icio.us]