It’s been a busy month (hence the lack of me or Bliss around here recently) and I’ve been off on my travels to Brokie meet-ups in London and Brussels, amongst other things.

I’ve had major disasters with hard drives, slight panics over backups when my brain ended up nearly as fried as my hard drive, and the usual crop of medical dramas and unexpected hassles to deal with, and what I could do with right now is a very long holiday.

I’m pleased to report though that I’m now back up and running with a shiny new laptop, albeit with a somewhat temperamental internet connection, and the jury’s still out on Vista. All I can say is that Microshite as usual couldn’t run a piss up in a brewery! For a week now I’ve been trying to sign in to post my tale of woe of my internet connectivity issues on the Vista community forums, but will their damned website accept my email address and password? No! Correct email address; correct password. Microshite thinks they’re wrong though. In desperation I tried re-setting my password. They sent me the email link to reset the password to the correct email address, which kind of proves two things 1) the email address I’d been entering was right all along, and 2) I am capable of typing my own email address.

Next comes re-setting the password. Enter your new password…. *Enters new password* Apparently I can’t have that one because it’s the same as the one I had before…this is the same password I’ve been typing to use all week…

‘Problems logging in?’ asks a helpful looking link, so I click that. Now in Opera (which I’m currently using to browse with as Firefox has recently thrown a major wobbler) the window that should open won’t open. So I switch to the dreaded Incompetent Explorer (you’d have though by version 7 they really would have got it right by now, and then we hear there’s an IE8 beta out – joy!), and guess what? This time the window opens, a “windows help” popup, but scrolling down the list of helpful possibilities for not been able to log in (like you’ve typed your email address wrong, or your password (I think we’ve covered that bit), then I come to one that looks like it might be useful and click on it. I can see from the message in the status bar that it’s a javascript pop-up, but does anything pop up? No! So I click the next one, and the next one (wait for it, you’ll like this one) won’t open because it’s been blocked becuase it’s not been signed by a valid security certificate. It helpfully suggests I should check out IE’s help facility (um, is this the one that I’ve already got open, but it won’t display because they’re blocking their own content because they’re not sure they trust it, and there’s no ‘back’ or ‘forward’ buttons on the help popup, so short of closing it and hitting F1 again I can’t do that?). And 90% of the world’s computer owning population trusts these muppets to produce something that makes their computers work?

*sigh*

Anyhow, as I said, August’s been a busy month so expect lots of updates soon…that’s providing my internet connection holds out, and the Microshite software that runs my computer decides to actually play nice…