h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

So whaddya gonna do about it???

( )

I was just knackered last night, so I shut this machine down just after 11pm and poured myself into bed. I got up just before 11am, and was just about to post when I got a phone call from Grambo announcing his imminent arrival, so it sort of got lost in the melee.

Yesterday was pretty quiet. My "spare" graphic tablet arrived, and I now have a working stylus again. I also got the tracking number for my Humax box which I was told was dispatched last Friday. Odd, then, that the tracking system showed it as being "collected from client" around 4:24pm on Monday...

Grambo arrived, we had and biccies, and he bleated a little about his computer that was still failing to function. I had an idea...

I gave Andy a call... By sheer good fortune, he had most of the day off w*rk while waiting for a package to arrive. Also, he had some RAM we could swap into Grambo's machine, as the reported symptoms were almost certainly a RAM fault, having eliminated all possible software problems last time I was round there. Also, apropos to nothing, Grambo's toilet seat had broken, and he needed to go and buy a new one.

Andy still had to wait till the arrived, but he said he'd come round afterwards, give Graham and me a lift to B&Q, then back to his place to swap out the RAM. Graham headed off to his volunteer job, and I waited in for a couple of hours till ANdy arrived, we picked Grambo up and headed for B&Q...

20 minutes later, we had a spiffy new bog seat, and were arriving at Grambo's place to swap out the RAM. We swapped out the RAM. It didn't fix the symptoms. We refitted his original RAM, removed, cleaned and reattached the heatsink. Still no better. Then...

Grambo had been wittering on in the background about all the problems he'd had since I last looked at his machine; I was trying to ignore him. Then he mentioned something to do with "Restore points"... I quizzed him, and it turned out that about five minutes after he'd got back on the previous time he'd tried to run something, didn't like the fact it asked him for a password, and restored his system back several weeks to the point where it didn't ask for a password. He was completely oblivious to the fact that the machine, not being psychic, doesn't just restore the bit he's thinking about at the time - he not only removed all the anti-adware and antivirus software I'd spent the whole day installing, but restored some of the virus-infected versions of software packages at the same time. Further questioning showed that he'd done the same thing the previous time too - it wasn't a virus that had re-disabled the virus scanners and removed the firewall, it was Grambo.

Basically, as I reported originally, I had fixed all his machine's faults. He just reintroduced all of them five minutes after the Scandisk finished, then blamed me for being incompetent. Andy and I reinstalled AVG, Ad-Aware, Zone Alarm etc. etc...

We hung about for another hour or so, while he tried to change the subject to his satellite system. Andy unplugged the cable from his LNB and found it badly corroded. I said "That's why I told you to seal it in with rubber solution the second you plugged it in. You can't leave bare copper in contact with air and moisture." He said, "Oh, OK, do you still have the rubber stuff?" (A couple of months ago, when he was on his way to fit a new cable, I lent him two tubes of Dow Corning silicone rubber and made him promise to seal everything as soon as he plugged it in. He gave me the rubber back two weeks ago and said all was well. He lied.)

Andy gave me a lift home. I had supper, then I was so frazzled I crawled back into bed for a couple of hours. I got up, listened to "The Archers", watched "The Bill" and did some work on one of Chris's websites. It's barely 11pm, and I'm shattered again.

I bought a couple of coathooks at B&Q to replace a broken pair in my hallway; I think I'll head for bed again soon, and spend the morning reattaching them before I have another go at this website. At the moment, I have a fan blowing on me, yet still have sweat dripping off my nose. I think that's more related to the large bowl of onion rings and potato cubes I just consumed than the ambient temperature...

(I phoned Grambo several hours later and his computer was still working well... Fingers crossed... )

Oh, and yesterday's medical was... brief...

I spent over £10 on a taxi there. The doctor had me sit in the waiting room for 15 minutes, then come in, tell her my date of birth and sign a form so she could look at my medical records. That was it. If she'd just posted me out the form to fill in my DOB and signature I could have saved £13! (Taxi there plus pass afterwards...)

On the way home I made the best of a bad job by stopping off at Maplin for a 3-way video switcher and RF modulator to connect all my DVDs up to the TV.

This Grambo is a menace! You're too good, Peet.

Sleep on to undo the ravelled sleeve of care.

Grambo doesn't deserve your time and energy, Peet!