OMG - it works!

Today is D-day for Microsoft Windows 10 and I actually have a mail system which works; it sends, receives and has formatting.

A shortcut appeared on my desktop last Saturday.  It was short on a few features but gradually, over the week, it has become more like the old Outlook.com, with a few glitches along the way and today any new mail is announced in my 'notifications'.  After faffing around for four months trying to get a reasonable, good looking, formattable, easy and understandable email program it has taken Microsoft Windows 10 until the last day of the Beta version to finally get it right.  My only complaint is that the window always opens in tablet size  -  but that is happening with a lot of Windows 10 so I suppose that I will have to get used to it unless a link appears to enable opening in desktop size.

Two days ago I saw a notice outside the frozen yoghurt shop across the road stating that a Pokémon had been sighted in the store.  What a great marketing ploy.  I must say, though, that I am getting very tired of people walking through the shopping centre with their eyes glued to their mobile phones.  I have stopped dodging them and simply keep walking.  I haven't bumped into one yet but there have been a couple of close calls.

The cats are back onto their 'happy juice' and we have some peace and quiet again.  I did some research on neutered male cat sexual urges and what I found was that castrating a male cat doesn't totally suppress his sexual urges but acts as a 'dimmer switch' and that the super-masculine ones are not dimmed as much  -  something to do with the number of male foetuses in utero.  Anyway, I came up with something which is supposed to work if sprayed onto the rear end of the female cat and which makes the male think that there is a huge and ferocious cat which should, under no circumstances, be tackled.  It is called 'Boar Mate' and since it is sprayed onto the sow to let the boar know that she is in oestrus I can't see how it works on cats in the opposite way.  It sounds too good to be true but I am worried that if I used it  -  just supposing that I could get it  -  that Parsifal would start spraying to protect his territory.  (Note to self  -  discuss it with their vet).

EDITED to say that my email is no longer working.  All emails which I write and attempt to send go to the Drafts Folder where they cling like limpets however many times I open them and try to send them on their way.  What the blazes does Microsoft think that they are doing?

To get it working yesterday I had to delete the account and reinstall it and then set it up to talk to my Internet Provider.  I suppose that I will have to do it all over again  -  every day?

Suddenly - things are not the way they used to be

OMG  -  Microsoft has finally synced my email.  I am not sure how well it will all work yet but at lease my lily pond is working, as well as Hotmail which suddenly appeared on my desktop yesterday.  Microsoft only has until July 29 to get everything up and running and has obviously, in the face of over 7,500 complaints from people all over the world about their email, finally done a dash for the finishing line at the very last minute  -  ignoring the fact that there are some businesses and individuals who have had very iffy email services for about the last six months.

My main complaint now is that all windows come up in Smart Phone or tablet size and I am forever maximising the windows to get the whole page onto my screen.  Maybe MS will adjust that in time since some people still like to use a desktop computer with a big screen. All I now have to worry about is setting everything up to suit myself and then trying to make sense of my clients' computers.

I have bought pork chops to make Smothered Pork which is a great comfort food for the sort of cold weather which we are enduring at the moment.  I have invited Himself since it was him who gave me the recipe but he is busy every evening and I am busy ever lunch time so ne'er the twain shall meet and he is off overseas next month.  The chops are in the freezer so I can thaw and cook them whenever.  It is a quick, easy recipe so there is no great hassle as far as preparation time goes and if the notice is too short a I can pop downstairs and buy a fresh supply.

The cats are scrapping and I am seriously considering consulting the vet about some sort of medication to dampen down his sexual urges  -  which he shouldn't have since he was castrated before he should have known about such things.  In the meanwhile I suppose that the Happy Juice works pretty well but I don't like to use it all the time.  He is very noisy at the moment and spends an inordinate amount of time trying to get into the television set to meet all the new people there.  It is sad that he will never be able to have that sort of freedom to explore or catch a rat or two.  I've never had totally indoor cats before and I feel for the poor babies who can't go out to play and hunt.

Blue Pictures - no, not blue movies.

Today I clipped the cats' claws.  It is always a bit of a fraught business; Parsifal is very good but poor little Poppy has to be muzzled and I hate having to do that to her although she is getting used to it and doesn't protest as much as she used to.  She has an arthritic toe and it obviously hurts her if I am not very gentle but after an X-ray and diagnosis from the Vet I know which toe and what is wrong so I am careful.

I went into Facebook yesterday to be confronted by a really blue picture.  The picture itself was blue and black and the subject matter nauseatingly pornographic.  It had been sent to Himself and since he is a 'friend' it came onto my wall as well.  Someone had posted it on his wall and I emailed him and blasted him about keeping his private life private and that all of his 120+ friends would also have it on their walls.  Poor man had no idea what I was talking about and when I went back to have another look it wasn't there any more.

All I remembered was the first name of the poster so I used 'find friends' to search but all I got was what looked like a dating site for scamming women wanting to rip off unsuspecting men.

Anyway, in the absence of the incriminating picture I was beginning to think that I must have imagined the whole thing but received an email from Himself this morning to say that a friend of his in Adelaide has also contacted him about it so there is no knowing how many of his friends saw it and are too embarrassed to comment.  Poor Himself.  He now recalls seeing a blue-coloured picture but was in a hurry and didn't look closely at it.  It was only online for just over four hours (the timeline showed four hours since posting when I saw it) and obviously the moderators removed it. 

Moderating Facebook must be a mammoth task and there must be a big team on duty all the time.  I used to have a small forum and two of the members had been at each others throats since the Starship Titanic Game days so I had to vet every post before I put it online to make sure that nothing inflammatory was posted.  Thems were the days  ... when the internet was young and fun.

Windows 10 goes on sale in just over a week and I have finally got Hotmail, but now renamed Outlook Live.  A shortcut appeared on my desktop overnight and it is very, very basic and my contacts list has disappeared.  The pretty lily-pond page still doesn't work but maybe one day ...    

Shock: horror ...

Last night I had to re-boot my I-Pad.  This has never happened to me before but it lost the sounds which accompany Montezuma and I like the crashing sounds which go with killing the little blobs  -  and I had no indication as to when the game was over.  That was something of a relief because the warning beep tends to send me into a flurry of indecision so I was probably doing better last night than usual.  Anyway, I tried going to settings and tweaking the sound which was still working with Angry Birds so I knew that it was related solely to Montezuma, not the whole I-Pad.  So I figured that it was a computer and therefore a reboot might work  -  and it did.

But my Outlook Mail still doesn't work.  Microsoft is supposed to be selling Windows 10 as of 29th July  -  12 days away  -  and from the number of posts (almost 7500) in the Outage page it is just not going to happen ... but watch this space; there might be a last-minute miracle.  Other than that I have Windows 10 more or less doing what I want it to do.  It is a bit tedious because of its disadvantage in that it is supposed to work on a Smart Phone which means that everything is hidden and takes more stages to get anywhere.  It takes nine steps to add a contact to my Contacts List in Office 16 and I have had to write it down because it took a while to work out just how to do it.

I have a new client at COTA whom I inherited from Himself who has just had his cataracts removed and had an appointment with his ophthalmologist on our COTA day.  She tells me that she programmed the ATM machines for one of our big banks and was chief Chef (tautism?) at the Sheridan Hotel but is so unfamiliar with computers that she didn't even know about drag-and-drop.  I think that she has a vivid fantasy life but she has booked herself for another seven classes and wants them with me rather than with Himself.  She brought along her little hotspot but it only works with a plug-in connection and she didn't bring the connection.

After my experience with the last computer which I connected to my own hotspot I was reluctant to use mine without looking at what was installed on an unknown computer so we worked off-line but we could do that for weeks, especially as she refuses to use a mouse and is slow.  I have told her that for the duration of the lessons she will have to use a mouse as I have only so much patience.  All she really wants is Skype which she appears to be using successfully already as she has a daughter in USA whom she contacts regularly.  The daughter set up the computer  -  a piece of information which always makes my heart sink.

I have started entering my B...more relatives into Family Tree Maker again now that the computer is up and running with fewer unpleasant surprises when I switch on in the morning but why did Richard B. have so many children?  Twelve, with a gap of six (6) years between the last two which makes me wonder (a) what else they did in their spare time and (b) did she lose four children in the intervening years.  I must check the dates  -  maybe he was off fighting Napoleon.

About the Cats

The unquiet of the last few days has settled down and I am not discounting the unseasonally chilly weather for that.  The cats are back to keeping each other warm.

I had a feeling that Poppy's hissy fit was the result of me shouting at both cats when they had a very noisy free-for-all.  Their breeder, who has boarded them a couple of times, mentioned that Poppy could be very aggressive and I know that she becomes so if she is frightened. Anyway, they were misbehaving excessively the other night and the result was that I shouted at them and that Poppy threw her hissy fit -  and Parsifal kept his distance, a wise move.  I certainly didn't want to get near her although I was afraid that she might have been hurt.  I decided to wait for morning since it was already late evening but turned on the crocodile tears  -  a strategy which has worked with various of my cats over time.

About an hour after my tearful episode Poppy sidled up to me and made friends so I knew that she was OK.  Since then I have left them to their squabbles, suspecting that Poppy could well have been the instigator  -   and certainly I saw her giving Parsifal a sly nip as she walked past him yesterday.

Anyway, for the last two mornings they have come into bed with me in the and they spent today curled up together, only waking for pit stops and food; so all is well with their world again.

I have about two more days of spinning to finish the Vetinari colourway.  I am pretty sure at this stage that I will already have enough yarn for yet another Kimono Sweater so the last two bobbins which I am spinning now can be used entirely to knit myself a new shawl as I have lost my useful black one.  I suspect that I left it in a restaurant but it was a while ago and even if I did the rounds of the eating places in Claremont and Cottesloe I doubt if they will still have it.  anyway, I can't keep on knitting sweaters and scarves so a shawl will be good as well as useful.

I have unpinned Windows Live Mail from my start menu;  it has not been working since March and it is just taking up space.  It will still be there among the apps if Microsoft ever gets around to syncing it but I have other mail options so I don't need it.  I am also working out how to manage my photos but it is a much more complicated business than it was to edit and save them.  I now use 'Pictures' to edit them, 'Paint' to resize them and 'Pictura' to add captions.  I still need to remember the name or number of the photo because Windows 10 has its own idea about where to save them and I sometimes have to do a search in order to move them to the folder I want.  I can understand that more processes are needed when using it on a Smart Phone but it is very irritating on my desktop computer.