Death of a million Hamsters

As anyone who uses iGoogle knows, it will be closing down in a few days. All over the internet there are people like me worrying about their pet hamster. Mine is purple and called Jupiter. She’s lovely and I’m going to be very upset when the plug is pulled out.

Jupiter was invented by a very nice person called Adam Bowman who has shared his work with millions of people over the years.

I've created a new home page using NetVibes.com   It’s not the same, but I will make it into my home very soon. Fortunately, Mr. Bowman has made a new hamster to live in the NetVibes home page and you don’t have to fiddle with code like I did for hours and hours and get nowhere. On your NetVibes page there is a button in the top left hand corner called “Add”, click on that and type hamster into the search box that appears. There is a choice of hamsters, click on ‘hamster widget’ and you can follow the instructions to put your hamster on the page. I haven’t found a way to change the colour so I have a pale grey Jupiter this time.

How else would my computer get the electricity to work on?

(M)cAfee break

I was just writing a comment on a forum on Wednesday evening at 9 o’clock when I was told that the system was closing in a minute and the seconds started counting down. Of course I panicked and tried to open Word in order to save my comment and close down both AOL and Firefox – impossible within 40 seconds. It was impossible to hide from Rob that I had a problem and he accused me of going where I shouldn’t and letting in a virus. Half an hour later his laptop went through the same. (Na, na! ) Try as we could there was no way we could get back online, the scanner had disappeared and we could do nothing to correct the problem. I sent Dom the names of some files in a text message to check on Google that they weren’t viruses. I think that she was probably asleep as it was getting close to midnight.

Rob and I are opposites; he was sure we wouldn’t be able to carry on our business on eBay and I went to sleep positive that a good night’s rest would mend the computer problems. We were both wrong. I could use Word the next day, but I couldn’t copy and paste, so I could still prepare the descriptions of postcards for sale and record them onto Rob’s key. Rob could then put the descriptions online at the cyber café. What to do about the scans we just didn’t know. Olivier phoned as I’d sent him a text warning him not to bring his laptop home as we had a virus. I explained what had happened and he looked the symptoms up on Google. Apparently McAfee sent out an update which took something in Windows as a virus and put it into quarantine. I don’t know about your country, but in France McAfee are used by hospitals and universities, so you can imagine the chaos.

When Rob arrived home on Thursday evening we set about starting to re-install XP. This was another problem because our computer was more up to date than the original discs. We decided that we’d get someone to clear off the computer and we’d start again.

Olivier arrived home on Friday lunchtime ready for battle. Using his laptop, he could get online. French websites are useless; very pretty to look at and that is all. The link to the solution to the problem went nowhere. We both thought of looking at forums and he found exactly what he wanted. Rob’s laptop was easier to fix than the main computer but after three hours we were back in action.

All I have to fix now is the media thing so that I can listen to my music again - and would you believe that Deezer France was out of action this morning?…