My laptop problems are slowly being sorted out. I mentioned in a sitrep on Sunday that I had managed to reinstall the operating system. This completely trashed the original system and all the files, folders, programmes, preferences, bookmarks, etc., etc., that I'd built up over the year I have been using it.
The good news: I managed to copy all of my files and folders back onto the laptop, although I'm yet to copy across files that have been updated since the copy was made; I have managed to reinstall various Windows programmes that I paid for last year, so I can now open my documents and other files; I'm slowly repopulating all the programmes I used, including iTunes, 7zip, Messenger, and others.
The bad news: the 'clone' that was meant to have been saved to an external hard drive didn't work. I only recovered a handful of folders. Thankfully (good news), a straightforward back-up onto a different hard drive meant that I recovered all my files and folders. I copied them all into the wrong place (bad news) and I'm still gradually sorting out what should go where. The other annoyance is that I tried copying the bookmarks from my PC browser and load them into the browser on the laptop, but it only partly worked – a bunch of them didn't show up (bad news)... but I can see them in the Bookmark Manager, just not in the Bookmarks Menu (mystifying news!). (Just to add to that frustration, I had recently spent a couple of hours going through a couple of hundred bookmarks to find out if they still worked, deleting those that didn't and shifting other around into folders where they might actually be of some use. That all disappeared when the new operating system installed – time I'll never get back... and the thought of starting all over again fills me with dread!)
Another slight annoyance: some programmes have updated since I last installed them and got all my preferences in place so they worked efficiently in the way I wanted them to. That's all gone... I'm back to default settings and rediscovering why I changed them as soon as I could.
Truth be told, I could have just taken a few days off and sorted all this out, but I didn't want to sit here thinking about it all day, so I have been doing a bit here, a bit there and just slowly bringing everything back, checking it out (as much as I can) and trying to get the settings how I like them.
I've now completed work on an article for a Japanese magazine, which was submitted the morning that the laptop crashed so spectacularly. I had some additional images that needed to be cleaned up and those have now been sent over to the editor. I'm now waiting on a proof of the layout.
I've also been helping with a German book that is reprinting some Don Lawrence material, and two Spanish books, one on artists who worked for British war libraries, and a second that concentrates on the work of Joao Mottini.
And there have been other distractions, like a glitch in Amazon's two-step verification that saw them trying to send text messages to my land line rather than call it. It just seems to be one thing after another with technology at the moment. I discovered, for instance, that my mobile reception in the office is almost zero, so switching from land line to mobile isn't the big help I thought it would be! I did eventually resolve the problem, but to an outsider it would have looked like something out of a Chaplin film as I pressed a link to get a code and then immediately dashed out of the room waving a mobile around hoping for reception fast enough for me to get back and type in the code before it timed out. (A similar thing, but in reverse, happened on Saturday, as mentioned in the Sunday update.)
I'm also still waiting for my last print order to arrive, after being told a week ago that it was running late. Chasing people up for missing books or missing payments can lose you half an afternoon. (I had to pop out to the post box, and nipped into our second-hand book shop on the way back. The owner asked how I was and I had to admit that I was in "full grump" and had dropped in for some retail therapy. Spent a whole £3 on a book.)
In the meantime, I have been writing a long piece (too long, to be hones) for the local Wivenhoe History society, a side project to the article that I was actually planning to write until I noticed a local connection. I've now written over 9,000 words about a family that a handful of people are going to find interesting due to the fact that they bought a big house on the High Street. Talk about easily distracted!
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