Illustration Friday - Tango

The name is misleading; Tango is not actually very good at Latin dance, nor, come to that, the Can-can.

Critters don't die, they just go somewhere else.

I was reminded of this by Chichi Parish, who pointed out that Falafel was probably causing havoc in the sky, and that if I saw a weird cloud with weird plumes - that's him! Anyway, as the above photo shows, he's not only up there, but up there with friends!

It's a cloud formation known as 'long haired sable', and is little known to meteorologists.

Lots more space to roll around in ...

Well, I've been and gone and done it, and had a new, bigger, hard drive fitted into my machine. No more room in the machine, but now I can defragment it (having more than 15% room harharhar) and put more software on it and fill it all up again and all sorts of things.

The computer person confirmed that the two little updates which appeared every time I logged on were, indeed, the ones which had been deleted every time I removed all but the last 'Restore' point. This was always necessary just so I could use the machine, but now the little blighters can do what they want and I won't care harharhar.

Who'd have thought that such a simple operation could cause such unholy glee? Thank you, Hypervox, for giving me that final nudge.

Sadly, this is the last farewell to Falafel

I went to take Flaf out for his usual runaround last night, but he didn't come out of his nest when called, and when I went to pick him up he was totally paralysed in his front limbs, and had very little movement in his rear ones. He looked totally pitiful, and when I'd finally found a vet which was open on a Sunday ... they said the kindest thing would be to let him go. I stayed with him while they did it, and brought him home to bury him. I'm going to miss him so much. I think you need to have owned one of these little critters to realise how much they get to you.

Above is a pic of him as a youngster, making friends with a tea cosy.

I'm going to bite the bullet! I've got a date ...

...when a nice man is going to put a bigger hard drive in my computer. I just pulled a name at random out of the phone book when something in my computer blew up and then the whole lot went dead, a few years ago. Well, when I say at random, he was listed as an IT specialist - rather than just someone with an appealing name in the domestic user bit, which I suppose shortened the odds a bit.

The worst case scenario at the time was that it could have been a very expensive repair. As it was, he said it could potentially be a very cheap repair, which he then proceded to repair inexpensively and charged accordingly. Being that he could have ripped me off something rotten and I wouldn't have been any the wiser, this gave me confidence.

So, having listened compassionately to my garbled account of what was happening with the computer (see previous post), he told me that I could get a much bigger hard drive than I was expecting for a lot less than I expected. He didn't put it quite like that, but this was the information gleaned by me from the conversation. I also had a vague, yet strangely persistent, feeling that he was having a bit of a chuckle.

But anyway, if all goes according to plan, after Thursday night - NO MORE RUDE MESSAGES telling me that I'm running out of space on Local Disk (C:) - for now. No more deleting all but the most recent restore point, only to have the amputations revisit the moment my back's turned ... hehehehe ... that'll learn 'em ....

I think Internet Explorer is getting its own back

A couple of years ago, I was having 'issues' (that's what you have these days, innit?) with Internet Explorer 6. It kept encountering problems and having to close, and I changed my web-surfing companion to Opera, which has all sorts of features, is mildly eccentric and made of sterner stuff. That is, it didn't throw its toys out of the pram and storm off every time there was an error. No, it remembered the dictum that 'poise is the art of gaining results by raising the eyebrows rather than raising the roof', and just got on with it.

However, the software I use to create my website, courtesy of Mr Site, doesn't like Opera, so I was obliged to resort to Internet Explorer when I wanted to do a mini-update. Ah, but then it decided IE 6 wasn't good enough any more, and I had to do an upgrade to the 7th version. At least this one doesn't keep closing itself down every three minutes or so, but now, whenever I turn the computer on, I get a message telling me that I'm running out of space on local disc 'C'. I respond defiantly by doing a cleanup and deleting all but the last restore point. Then everything seems tickety-boo and hunky-dory - until the next time I log on, when the same ominous message appears. However, I've noticed that every time I turn the computer off, it installs 'important updates' ...unless I tell it not to.

I have a nasty feeling that the 'important updates' are the self-same files which are binned when I do the thingy with the restore point.

Is there anyone out there who's good at creating houseroom who could offer an opinion on this negative situation?

Illustration Friday - Shaky

Gordon's confidence was shaky at times.