I haven’t read anything new on your blog and wondered if everything is OK", emailed a regular reader, and continued, "All kinds of scenarios flashed before my eyes: the kayak overturned and you've been eaten by bull sharks; a snake bit you; you fell out of a tree; you were run down by your ride-on ... Or have you just run out of good stories?"
None of the above. My trusty old laptop packed it in and I've been busy trying to repair it. This morning I gave up and drove to Harvey Norman to spend three hundred dollars on a low-budget laptop and got upsold to an all-whistling, all-dancing Hewlett-Packard for $800.
Spent the afternoon setting it up and everything is working fine, except that every time I hit the quotation-mark key I get the @-sign, and every time I hit the @-key I get a quotation mark. And somewhere else is still lurking the £-sign because, during installation, I nominated a UK instead of a US-keyboard. Last time I looked, this country was still very much part of the old British Empire but at least in computing terms we seem to be part of the United States.
It's too much bother to go back to factor settings and restart the whole installation process, so @ for " and " for @ it is from now on, which, come to think of it, works better than any password to keep people away from my new computer (unless they know about ASCII and work straight off the numeric keypad which few would know). (@I don't agree@, I hear you say. Email me at riverbendnelligen"mail.com)
As for good stories, this one is as good as any but more will follow.
