Comic Cuts - 30 August 2018

Although there wasn't any warning, Google/Blogger has not been sending me notification of any comments for a couple of weeks. Although I don't receive that many – I had to switch to allowing only Google account holders to comment because of the vast amount of spam I was having to deal with every day – it was becoming noticeable that I wasn't receiving any comments.

Robert Kirkpatrick pointed out that one of his articles on artists had a weird Arabic message, which I believe was spam. I deleted it, and noticed that I'd had a couple of other similar comments, which I also deleted. More annoyingly, I'd had messages from readers with information, or asking for information, that I'd received no notification for.

I suspect the problem was caused by new data protection reforms that started back in May with the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation across the EU. With the problems highlighted subsequently with Facebook, Google and others, new protections are being brought into effect and, somehow, notification of comments on Blogger has been caught up in them.

I was fiddling around with the settings on Wednesday morning and didn't solve a thing. However, I did get an email from Blogger later that day asking if I wanted to resume receiving notifications, so hopefully the problem has now been resolved.

The river had a weird bloom of green algae a couple of weeks ago. Nothing exciting, just unusual

With that problem resolved, maybe, on to the next one. We're having our ancient gas and electricity meters replaced with a smart meter on Thursday afternoon. Normally that would be when I write this, so I've had to bring it forward and it's about 11:30 am. I'm juggling my time between writing this and trying to research the works of John Armstrong so I can put together an obituary. Whether it gets written in reasonable time to be run depends on how long we're going to be without power. I'm out of the house tomorrow for a trip into town to visit the dentist (a pre-arranged visit to the hygienist), and there's a ton of stuff that needs doing around the house that might disrupt the usual flow of writing.

UPDATE:  About an hour later, the fitters arrived to fit the new meters. As both meters are in cupboards and every cupboard in the house is stuffed to the gills with hefty boxes of books, magazines and comics, I'd had to hump the boxes out of the way. Everything was ready and they arrived earlier than expected while I was eating lunch. The guy took one look at the electricity meter and said, "Sorry, we can't fit anything today. We need to get in touch with the electricity board." Apparently some wire is meant to go into some thing (a block?) before it goes into box with the whirly thing.

So now we have to wait for the electricity board to fit something before the smart meter can be fitted, and, as it's not an urgent problem, it could take anything up to three months to fit, after which the meter fitters can come back and do their job. Can they do the gas meter while they're here? No. They have to do both at the same time.

Let's hope my trip to the dentist tomorrow doesn't turn into a similar mess.

For reasons that will now be obvious, I'm keeping this short and posting a day early. That means that our random scans for the week are also "short" in one way or another.