Example of Irony

We received this notice from TripAdvisor showing BudaBaB as one of the top bed and breakfasts in Budapest.









This happened right around the same time as this started appearing on Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer in various mutations. It seems that the alternate site that was used for our booking engine went belly up suddenly and unexpectedly. As they were doing the out of business thing, they left malware hacks in all of the sites they were affiliated with. This has been a nightmare trying to correct. In the meanwhile, no one can get onto the site to check us out nor can they make a booking. The potential loss of income is questionable.

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Too Much Excitement

How much excitement can one person take on a day, I ask you? I woke up knowing that today was the day that Ron would leave for the US. It is exciting for him, but for me it is so-so. I do enjoy the alone time, time to get caught up on ME time. 

But, this morning, when I turned off my school laptop, I was greeted with the screen showing there were Windows updates. Great! Almost immediately, it was followed by that nasty blue screen warning you it is up to no good at all. Then it turned itself off and on again with nasty messages that were not going to make my day brighter. After a mental scan, I remembered the Windows 7 disk for this computer is in my desk at school. There were State Exams today, so I would be there anyway.

Goodbye to Ron, his shuttle was coming at 10, I had to be at school by 9am. 

Five hours of exams where BA students defend their thesis and do the comprehensive oral exam. I had hopes it would be a quick and easy day until I noticed one of my colleagues packed a picnic lunch with afternoon snacks. How can you realistically justify grilling students for 20-25 minutes over a 20 page thesis? If you want more details, make the thesis longer. A page a minute for interrogation is way too long. Then they continue with the orals for the two subject areas. These kids could earn another BA in the amount of time we spend harassing them.

When I came home, I found a letter in the mail. It had those two side strips on the back like there was a form that needed signing, but was ripped off. It was from the electric company, but they did not say which apartment it was for. Of course, I couldn't read it so I sent it to Arpad for translation. 

Translation: The letter says you have run up a 1,336-forint debt, and this seems like a final notice. They claim to have sent you notifications, but you have not responded.
Unless you pay the debt off, which you can do until June 27th, they will shut down electricity in the apartment. This would happen sometime between July 2nd and July 9th.

For a total of about $7.00 they are threatening to turn off the electric? We give them over a hundred bucks a month as it is and for this piddly sum, they are threatening. I know there has not been other notices. Well, I wasn't sure which apartment it was for, but I paid it. Now, I am paranoid about whether or not they received it and credited the account. I went to the website, but it is in Hungarian only and will not work in Chrome so that I can have it translated automatically. The site says you have to use IE or Firefox. Geesh!

Home again with my Windows 7 disk, I tried repairing the laptop. Didn't work. I Googled every possible issue that I could identify and tried them. Still nothing. It seems the hard drive has died. It will not even recognize there is a hard drive there when I was going to do a clean install. The joys of daily living.

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When One Door Closes...

We all know that saying, "When one door closes, another door opens." Well I am not here to preach the goodness of the universe or something divine or even good luck. Ron decided our interior doors needed repainting. Secretly, I agreed, but knew that neither one of us would undertake the task, so the cost was not something I wanted to think about. We have, after all 16 doors. In reality, there are 17, but one is hidden from view. Mind you, this is not 16 sides of doors, but 16 doors, with 32 sides. 

Ron is leaving for the US on Wednesday, June has been a slow month so far and will not be overburdening from the looks of it, which is perfectly okay with me, but that is not going to have the money pouring in either. This is the month we pay quarterly taxes to Uncle Sam in the US and I am getting a new computer. 

Okay, no, I don't need a new computer, but thankfully we do need to replace the kitchen computer reserved for guests and Ron. It is so slow, once it is turned on, you can go brush your teeth while you wait. You come back and hope it is ready, but it is still chugging along like lawn mower that has run over a tree limb. You return the bathroom and shower. Wrapped in a towel, you sneak out the the kitchen to catch a peek. It has finally reached the Windows logo screen, so you decide to get dressed in the meantime. Getting distracted in the bedroom, you decide there needs a load of wash thrown into the washer, so you do that before returning to the kitchen.

Once back in the kitchen, turning the bend to check the screen of the monitor, you see that the wallpaper is emerging, but still is like a hesitant ghost deciding on how to make a full entry. You decide to blow dry your hair. You are then rewarded with the full background photo and all of your icons are available for action. Once you click on the Firefox or Chrome icon to open the browser, you grab your cloth shopping bags and go grocery shopping. If you linger over the produce, you will be rewarded with a full screen of Firefox or Chrome when you return. Should you not pay enough time checking out the tomatoes, you just may come home disappointed. 

Ron needs another computer; he is getting mine. I am upgrading. What is amazing it that what would have cost $3,000 a couple of years ago, now will only run me $1,099. Computer sales are really down since tablets hit the market.


Weighing all of these expenses, I held a thick pillow over my face and had a primal scream before telling Ron to give the painter the green light. He spent all day here giving all of the doors a first coat. If we don't die from the paint fume asphyxiation, they will look fabulous. The problem is that they are now starting the make the window frames look shabby and in need of a new coat.


So the moral is that when one door opens, the windows are sure to follow eventually.

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Symbaloo

Every so often in my computerized journeys, I come across some little tool that I try out and find really helpful. I like sharing it with others. This last week, I came across Symbaloo, a visual bookmarking system for Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, and I think Safari too. I have used a variety of these types o programs in the past, but what generally happened was they were computer dependent. I would get one all set up on one computer, but then have to recreate the entire thing on other computers. The other negative issue was that each time Firefox updated, it rendered the program inoperable until they upgraded for the compatibility.


With Symbaloo, it is created in the cloud. I only had to create it once to make it available on all computers and in all browsers. Better yet, I could create my personal set of links; I have travel one, another for school, and so on. One click and I can move from one set to the next. This saves me from hunting through my bookmarks and I no longer have a bunch of bookmarks across the top of my screen taking up valuable screen space. Here are shots of two of my Symbaloo tiles. There are many for teachers already created by other teachers, which is great since you can share your webmix with others.

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I Want to Set Hounds Loose on FireFox

I am ready for an old fashioned fox hunt, but of the virtual kind. Just yesterday, I noticed that on our website 
Image via Wikipediapage "More Useful Links", most of the pictures were not displaying. Why was this happening? I checked the kitchen computer, but they showed fine. On my school laptop, nothing. They were not there. Then the same thing was happening with Chrome, but not with Internet Explorer, which I never use at all. 


Time to contact my Joomla Guru, Nigel. Knowing ahead of time what his first suggestions would be, I cleared the cache of both programs, rebooted the computer after a full shutdown and tried again. No luck at all. 


Nigel was not able to recreate the problem; he could see all. He suggested I uninstall and re-install the programs. Viola, it worked with Chrome, but not FireFox. Damn! I cleared the cookies, I cleaned the cache again, I checked all security options, deleted add-ons, read all of FireFox's troubleshooting with images and followed each precisely. Still nothing. 


I looked at the CPanel of my site to see if there was something there, but since I had not changed anything there, why this would suddenly happen was beyond my comprehension. It was just a matter of ruling out everything possible. After Goggling the issue, the only things that were apparent were from 2009 the latest. I guess they cleared up their problems since then. I looked to the Joomla Forums for help, but had to register first. To register, they have one of those captcha codes that you have to figure out in order to move to the next level. Some of those damn things are harder than a tough level of Angry Birds. After 4 attempts of getting it wrong, I was an angry bird. It locked me out for too many tries. Now when I try again, I have to enter all of the contact information all over again and hope I can read the grayed out lettering that looks like Halloween script that had been written in pencil and left in the rain.  

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The Marvels of Technology

I have been using Google's Chrome browser since the secondary release was available. I waited for some of the kinks to be ironed out before plunging forward. For a long time afterward, I was still a dedicated FireFox user, but would switch over to Chrome at times to see how a website looked in different browsers.


It is unclear when I actually migrated over to Chrome exclusively, but I seem to think it was when FireFox was upgrading so rapidly most of my add-ins could not keep updated. They were therefore worthless to me.


Chrome had some add-ins, but not many. Honestly, I really did not pay much attention. Then just this last week, when I clicked to open a new window, I found a black page with these icons.

 For me, playing computer games is a time waster which I generally do not care to indulge in. Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought him back. I clicked on Pogo (Poppit). Click on the balloons in pairs or more... The last time I played a game such as this it was on my phone, but I only played when waiting at airports. Okay, I use Poppit to relax after hours of thinking.


Then I found that Chrome has come of age. There are numerous web developers creating freebies, so I went shopping and here is what I virtually carted as downloads. Google Books has free e-books waiting to be downloaded. There are others too, but hey there are so many free ones.

GRE Touch need a Gmail account log-in. It is a vocabulary development program. Not only did Ron and I find words we had never heard of, but there were plenty to use with teaching English or for students to develop entrance exam vocabulary.


Travelers will love Hipmunk, a flight searching tool with enough graphics to really narrow down a ticket purchase. Once you have the results, you can sort by different options. Though I am not sure it includes budget airlines, but it is a valuable tool.

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Fiabee is a nifty little program that allows me to drag and drop files so they can be accessed anywhere. Truth be told, I use Google Docs extensively, but something life Fiabee is convenient for things you need quick access to. There is no sign in procedure and it can be installed on my Android phone. If I know I will need something on the go, I have super reach out and grab it control.


SlideRocket is a PowerPoint for Dummies program. It is rich with resources, yet is not complicated to run. 


With Ge.tt I am told that I can turn any type of file into web content and share it instantly. And last of all is Picnik photo editor online. Fix that red-eye and add wet red lips to your parrots mouth. There are enough real photo editing options here to make it worth a look, but there are also bunches of fun things you can add for fun photos. 


If you have the time to go window shopping or rather Chrome shopping, there are hundreds more options to enhance some aspect of your life. The good news is that each highlighted program above will work in FireFox as well. They are not Chrome dependent. 

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Karen Writes

I am not sure, but I do believe this particular Karen is my cousin. She is the one that informed about Google many, many years ago when I was still technologically innocent. About every fifteenth time I use Google, I think of her with gratitude. Here is her comment "Hear, hear! I LOVE Google! " For the rest of you who may think Bing has something special, just let me share that if you use FireFox, there are so many plugins available that make Google an even better experience. Two that I can think of off the cuff are "Surf Canyon" and "Customize Google". One will give you expanded explanations of the site, so you can preview before you click and others will provide a thumbnail of the site for a quick preview. Surf Canyon offers alternative sites to each site listed. Very useful.

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Language Issues and a Good-Bye

I am having language issues with Google and the blog. Each time I start a search in Google or any other search engine, it defaults to Hungarian. The same with this blog. This started happening about a month ago and I don't know why. I checked my language preferences in Google every time I open it and change it to English. Firefox is in English in the tools section and has not changed. Internet Explorer is in English and that has not changed either. This is maddening, having to change each time I use it. I have cleaned the caches more than once and then did the changes yet again. There don't seem to be any new solutions that I can find when searching, so if anyone has any ideas, PLEASE... As we get closer to the end of October, we are coming to the end of SkyEurope airline's visibility in Hungary. As of November 1st, they will no longer fly into or out of Budapest. It is disheartening when an airline stops flying from your local airport, reducing the number of destination options. They flew to 23 cities from here and though some of those routes may be picked up by the force that drove them out, Wizz Airlines, not all of them will be covered. We had used SkyEurope often to go to Paris and Amsterdam. The fares were usually a bit lower than the competition. They will be missed. On the bright side, in October and then in November, Ryanair has started service from Budapest to Dublin and then Glasgow. Two places we cannot afford to visit often due to the state of the dollar. Of course when we went to Edinburgh in August, there were no budget airlines flying from here to there and to combine flights would have cost more than we spent on KLM. Maybe next summer.

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