Dammit, Microsoft!

No, not Windows 10 (that's queued and ready to go later, I expect to get more use out of the Microsoft - aargh! tag).

I got Outlook 201? (genuinely not certain what the current version is called, I've been using 2003 until now) working on the new laptop Friday and have been cursing it ever since then for not downloading the messages from my week away, thinking I must have updated the "which ones has he read" pointer when I ended up looking at my mail via the net in the course of figuring out my email password. And I've probably spent 2 or 3 hours since trying to figure out a way around it in case there's any mail in there I need to keep (especially as I couldn't work out how to scroll the net interface back more than a couple of days, so haven't actually seen most of it).

I've mostly been reading new mail as the alerts pop-up, but just had a spate of alerts, so went to Outlook proper to read them, and couldn't find them. Or any new messages since Friday, even the ones I'd read.

Then I noticed, right at the bottom of my fairly extensive list of email folders (imported from 2003), a new folder, with my email address as its name. Click, and there's 233 messages in there. Dammit, Microsoft, what was wrong with putting new mail in the bloody inbox!

On the plus side it's one problem solved, on the minus, it's time wasted and a bloody annoyance that MS expect us to work the way they see fit.

Banks - The State of the Art

I forgot to mention it before heading North, but BBC R4 just re-ran their radio play version of Iain M Bank's The State of the Art, which is a pretty good adaption and well worth listening to if you're a fan. It's available here until the 20th (though I'm not sure if that link will work for non-UK users).

The One in Which I Turn On the PC

I got back on Thursday, I finally managed to turn on my desktop PC this morning.

Not for lack of trying, I've probably pressed the blasted on-off switch a hundred times a day, but it has been getting more and more unreliable for the last couple of years*, taking repeated attempts to turn on, but never this bad.

I finally found the trick to getting the front fascia off last night, and dismantled the micro-switch from its housing. It powered up at the first attempt at pressing it directly, so I powered it down in order to reconnect everything I'd disconnected while fiddling about with screwdrivers, only for it to refuse to power up again. Much cursing and several hundred clicks later it's finally deigned to power up again.

I've got at least two cases in the house that could donate replacement on-off switches, and they're pennies at Amazon, but Dell have designed the blasted thing so the only way to get at the connector on the motherboard is to quite literally dismantle the entire thing, and I don't think my coordination's up to it any more.

Back in the Evil Aerospace days I could probably have gotten a friend to do it for me, but everyone I might have asked has fled the country to work for Airbus.

So I guess the blasted thing is just going to have to stay on all of the time (it pretty much did anyway, but I'll think twice before turning it off when I'm away from home now).

Computers, bah!

*It's almost 7 years old, but still a decent spec as I bought high-end as a post-redundancy indulgence.

Wheels within Wheels

I've been meaning to write-up my trip North, though I'd anticipated being slightly quicker about it.

I booked the train tickets at Chatham Station the Sunday before I travelled, made it clear I'd be travelling in my wheelchair, and was assured that wheelchair spaces and assistance had been booked for every leg of the journey - three there, three back. I'll be slightly more skeptical next time.

( Longish and very mixed experience! )