Note: The preceding post is a good example of how me and the computer aren’t getting along – I NEVER WENT ANYWHERE NEAR THE PUBLISH BUTTON!

Hey Friends,

How is it all going? A lot better than it it is for me, my blog, and I. Of that I am sure.

Many seasons ago I began to merrily pound out my blog on my battered, bruised and bemused key board only to find my life and blog unwilling participants in a war for supremacy between windows 7 and windows 10 that was taking place within the framework of my computer.

This, of course, was a no-winner state-of-affair, and the computer itself was given a decent funeral after it sparked and spluttered for the last time and replaced by another in order to keep the blog alive.

However, it was taking so long for my limited computer knowledge to kick the new computer into gear and get everything transferred. that I found time to reflect on things as they stood, which, at that particular point of time, had the book blog with less than a dozen episodes still to be printed. Something snapped inside my mind, and I soon found myself starting from scratch, deleting huge chunks of old chapters, and replacing them with a dozen or more new chapters … and god-only-knows how many additional words.

But all was going well until the second computer began to assume a medical condition I refer to as ‘slowitis’ where it would take over twenty minutes to boot up, then require a constant playing of audio (podcasts) on a usb stick to keep the computer active when not in use.

A third computer, albeit second hand, was purchased and that was where my problems;really began as everything around me began crashing. With six or seven blogs (chapters) to be published to complete the ‘abridged‘ version’ of ‘The Night of the Darkness,’ the new computer has been under stress from various programs*;

*APPEARANCE: The screen appearance was set to hi-def which is fine if you know how to fix it or are in a network, but if you are on your Pat Malone (alone) then it takes quite a while to find the answer. The problem that it caused was all my programs (word, excel, ect. were appearing as a bright golden text against a black background, but any icon appearing on the screen appeared as a black square or rectangle and required brushing over with a particular text colour to see what it offered.

*MS WORD 2007 – 2010: Occassionaly refused to SAVE amendments to chapters, then eventually, not only decided to delete all (saved) amendments to chapter 78 during a ‘save‘, it also deleted the entire working copy.

*wordpress: Changed the appearance and various functions of the blog I have been using over the past five or so years and I am not able to quickly adjust to the new system and am glad that I have been able to repproduce the template I have been using over the past few years despite the information I have obtained from google search which seems to indicate that I can’t.

Anyway, to cut a long story down to a short one, fortunately I managed to locate another (non-updated) working version of chapter 78, so I have finally re-edited that chapter, I have purchased a copy of msoffice 2019, and fixed a few of the other problems that were holding me back (reinstated my contact with the tax office so I can put in my tax return and regained my e-mail output which suddenly wouldn’t work.

However, I have have now encountered other problems with the main one appearing to be the mysterious disappearance of CHAPTER 77.

I have no idea what happened to chapter 77. As far as I was concerned, it was posted late September, but know I am in the process of re-editing it and will, hopefully, have both chapters 77 and 78 released within twenty four hours of each other.

Well,

have a good day with a smile on your dial

Tony S