DNA and that Pesky Blood Group

This was given to me yesterday and I thought that I would share it post by post:-

"In Japan, they have replaced the impersonal and unhelpful Microsoft Error messages with Haiku poetry messages.  Haiku poetry has strict construction rules.  Each poem has only three lines, 17 syllables:  five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, five in the third.

Haikus are used to communicate a timeless message, often achieving a wistful, yearning and powerful insight through extreme brevity  -  the essence of Zen . . . "

Your file was so big.
It might be very useful.
But now it is gone.

I have just posted off a sample for DNA testing to see if it can shed some light on the origin of my B blood group.  It will  take a couple of months to get back to me so I will forget it for the next few weeks. I had to spit into a little tube and it is astonishing how hard it is even with the aid of a lemon but I think that I managed in the end.  The instructions told me to fill the tube up to the line, excluding the bubbles.  Hmmmm . . .

To add to my computer woes, now my printer has been refusing to behave itself, telling me that it was low on toner but then printing for me albeit reluctantly.  Since I had just replaced the toner I was inclined to ignore its instructions  but last night I gave in and replaced the toner which seemed to satisfy its yearning and it is now printing on request without moaning about being empty.

And to make matters more frustrating it is refusing to scan so I spent some time last night trying to fix the problem.  Pressing the two buttons simultaneously as per the online instructions did nothing so I went to Control panel/Devices and printers and right-clicked on the printer icon.  That gave me a whole list of options, one of which was 'scan'  -  and it scanned for me.  My old printer never put me through that sort of hassle but technology seems to be getting harder the more Microsoft shrinks the screen contents to dots and lines with hidden menus which only the computer savvy ever find.

Back to my Slush Fund

A few years ago, after the revelations about some of the things which my mother's family got up to and which were never spoken of  (great great uncle Charles was the black sheep of the family but nobody knew why  -  What???) I decided to record some of the truth about the family, not the fairy stories which I grew up with.

This was triggered by online access to archived newspapers which reported not only births, marriages and deaths  -  but the Court Reports where I discovered the family divorces, litigation, arrests and trials and the fact (not the newspapers but from my forebears' Wills) that my grandfather and his twin brother were "cuckoo babies".  So I am not actually the person I was brought up to believe I was and as the twins were born within a marriage they were legally legitimate and therefore their uncertain status was probably never ever talked about.

So I began to write a truthful family history which I named "Slush Fund".  I started doing it in html format so that it could be stored on a flash drive and sent to any family members who were interested.  The HTML format was so that I could incorporate links to allow easy navigation although I have never had any intention of posting it online even though most of what is written there is in the public domain.

For some reason I stopped creating this masterpiece, probably because I moved into my apartment about that time after selling my house and my life was severely disrupted for a while and I never got back to it.

Now I am back to it again and am faced with HTML and Windows 10 which came as a bit of a shock to me as I discovered that I could no longer edit easily the way I used to.  So I went online and found that most of the HTML users who had upgraded to Windows 10 were having the same problem: no longer could we right click on a web page and "view source"  which was the way to edit web pages created in Notepad which is an HTML facilitator.

So I spent all of yesterday evening trying to solve the issue and finally succeeded.  It is not as easy as it once was since I have yet to find out how to view both the web page and the coded page simultaneously so that it was possible to correct and save and instantly see the correction.  Maybe one day ...


In gratitude to FTM and Ancestry.com.au for making re-downloading FTM and syncing it to Ancestry.com.au so easy  I have sent off for a DNA kit, something I have been thinking about for some time as I would like to know why I have a B blood group.  It is coming next week.  I'll keep you posted. 

And then this happened.

Yesterday I clicked on a link on Facebook and was faced with blaring horns and a voice from Hell telling me that I had a dangerous virus from a porn site which would hack into all my financial files and drain them.  As usual when this happens I turned off the computer at the switch to give my modem a breather and turned it on again with its new IP Number only to be told that, yes, I had caught a very dangerous virus but that the scanner had quarantined it and would delete it in due course.

That got me thinking  -  why not just delete it?  Perhaps my computer thought that I just might be interested in an infected porn site. It is nice to know that my virus scanner is efficient and quick on the draw and since I am very careful to keep my finances to myself, not to mention that my hard drive was only a couple of days old, I am not so very worried.

FTM seems to be back to its old self and to reward it I have sent off for the Ancestry DNA test which I have been considering for some time.  My blood group which I inherited from my father is B+ which is an eastern Mediterranean/Asian blood group and I can't imagine where, on my father's side, it could have come from (from my mother's side nothing would surprise me) because as far as I know that branch is pure English with a drop of Irish since everybody has at least a drop of Irish blood.  I will post the results when they arrive.

The other fun thing which I have been doing is tangling with the Central Animal Register which wanted me to verify the data which they had about my two cats.  The problem is that they both had faulty microchips installed when they were babies so last February the vet installed new ones.  I registered the new Chip numbers with my local council but obviously they did not pass the information on to CAR.  When I phoned them to enable me to go  into their site to update the information I was told very firmly that "microchip numbers do not change".  Eventually on my second phone call I was helped by a very sensible woman who said that I would have to talk to my vet and get her to sign something to say that my chip numbers had changed.  The cats are due for their booster vaccinations in about three weeks so I figure that this particular hassle can wait for a couple of weeks; the cats aren't going anywhere any time soon.

My Personal Blue Tsunami

I have my computer back and it is working

Techie brought it back two days ago after it underwent a heart transplant.  He was able to move almost everything to the new hard drive but the tiles were not working as they should.  I was unable to create tiles by pinning to start and was unable to delete tiles.

I figured that it was Microsoft’s new order of things and worked around it by pinning frequently visited sites to the Task Bar.  However  -  when I booted it up yesterday all my tiles were lined up and ready to go, prepared to be deleted and to be created and re-sized.  So, obviously all it needed was to be rebooted to get things up and running.

My next move had to be reloading Family Tree maker, a thing which I was not looking forward to.  I have a backup version of FTM-14 on CD but I had progressed to FTM-17 via download and free because I was prepared to try the Beta version.  I searched the FTM site for someway to reload FTM17 and eventually contacted the Support Line which sent me a link (not actually a link, just a URL) which I didn’t recognise as the way to go the first time they sent it to me.  However, they re-sent it and I was able to download FTM17.

The next problem was re-syncing FTM to Ancestry.com, something which I had been dreading having to do since is was difficult last time I had to do it after the BSOD 16 months ago.

BUT . . . after the download   -  and FTM recognised me  -  it asked if I wanted to sync with Ancestry and provided a link.  Presto  -  my Family Tree was back in FTM.  Yeah!!  I have over 1600 names and it would have been a very long job to even get the names back into FTM, let alone the sources so it was a huge relief and after sweating on it for days it turned out to be almost simple.

This morning I posted off the descendant line related to my father’s family to a first cousin once removed who doesn’t have a computer but is interested in family history.  The descendant chart has been sitting on my hall table for a couple of weeks so finally all appears to be well family and computer wise.

With luck there will be no more Blue Screens and all seems to be right with the world.

Banishing the Blue Screen?

Today my computer was taken away to have a heart/brain transplant.  Hopefully it will return to its former glory although I am not looking forward to reloading Family Tree Maker.  I did it 16 months ago and it seemed to sync without the assistance of Gedcom so I am hoping that it will do so again. With luck I will not lose too much data but sometimes I can almost see the benefits of The Cloud although I have avoided it where I could up until now.

Over the 24 hours of Monday 15^th January, Swanbourne, which is the suburb adjacent to Claremont and officially measures the rainfall in the area, registered 138.6mm of rain.  It rained steadily, heavily and without pause for over 24 hours, something I have never seen before here in Western Australia.  I used to cycle to work all through the winter months and only once managed to get wet.  We mostly get our rain via intermittent showers, heavy at times.

We are now back to fine and hot but not as hot as it is over east where cricket and tennis is being played in 40+ degrees Celsius.

The family called in a couple of days ago and Parsifal snuck out into the passage and we didn’t even miss him.  He was very happy to be home again but he had missed out his usual meeting and greeting.  Luckily I do not think that anyone except Mrs 705 is up here at the moment so there was no lift traffic to tempt him to take a trip downstairs.  Poppy always takes herself off to her ‘safe place’ which is my bedroom and only comes out when everyone has departed.

I have bought myself a hard copy of ‘Fire and Fury’ so that I can re-read it and mark places worthy of  going back to.  When I decided to re-read ‘Daily Life in Biblical Times’ I had a difficult hunt through my Kobo library to find it again.  I am thinking of getting that book in a hard copy as well; it is a very interesting read even the second time around.

There was a very, very funny Newspaper headline posted on Facebook today.  I do not know if it was Fake News or for real but it was very clever.  However, I will not reproduce it here as it is political and Google and my readers might not like it.  But it is too good to forget so I have taken a screen shot of it for posterity.

. . . and then Came Joyce

Joyce was a cyclone a few days ago.  Starting up in the North of Western Australia she has slowly lost strength as she wended her way down to the coast and this morning she arrived in Perth as a rain-bearing depression of mammoth proportions.  So far we have received 80mm of rain and it doesn’t look as though it is going to stop any time soon.  It is not cold and the wind is only light but there has been no pause in the downpour all day.  When the rain finally stops and the sun comes out again it is going to be unbearably humid.  Thank goodness for air conditioning.

I still have The Blue Screen of Death on my main computer.  There was a short paragraph in the website of the Australian Broadcasting  Corporation on Friday morning suggesting that there is an epidemic of the BSOD around the world and Microsoft has decided that some of their automatic updates are incompatible with some of the Intel Chips, causing the problem, and have suspended updating until they can find a solution.

There has not been any follow-up that I can find but googling BSOD Intel Chip brings up a great deal of information but sadly nothing which is any use to me.

Techie has not been back to take away my computer and replace the hard drive so perhaps he is  waiting for a solution; I can see problems if the new hard drive has the same problem and goes blue as well.  I would like to get the problem fixed and re-download FTM as I feel rather as though I have lost a limb  -  which is silly because there are great stretches of time when I hardly look at it at all and then get spasms of researching and adding.

On Sunday D2 and I cleaned up the oil left by her incontinent cars but it is going to need some more work.  Unfortunately the builders left the concrete in the residents’ parking area quite friable and the oil has soaked right in in some places. A bit of wind might help to send the rain over the area and get rid of some of the dust and dirt.  When it all boils down it is not really my problem  -  I just provide the parking spaces and buy the degreaser.

Fire and Fury Mk II

I have just returned from a tour of the local bookshops to try to buy a hard copy of Fire and Fury by Michael Wolff but to no avail.  It has supposedly been available in hard copy for a couple of days now and the “Proper” bookshop (The Lane Bookshop) has been inundated with orders for it but so far has been unable to get it in.  Dymock’s  will have a problem with space unless the book “flies off the shelf” as reports of its sales suggest.

I am reading it on e-Book and am up to chapter 12 but with an e-Book it is hard to  bookmark parts for future reference  or to re-read some of the earlier pages  -  hence my wish for a hard copy.  I am in no hurry since I am able to read it anyway and have had it on my e-reader since 5^th January, but . . .

Techie came this morning to try to fix my main computer but I still ended up with the Blue Screen of Death and I have asked him to take it away and do whatever is necessary to get it up and running again which he said might mean a new hard drive and then load everything back.  My main concerns are Family Tree Maker which should be no problem since I have a backup CD and all the documentation needed for the upgrade to FTM 17 but I am concerned that I might have to pay for a subscription to MS Office.  Fingers crossed that Microsoft will allow me to reload Office 16.  I have all the documentation for that as well so I might be lucky.

I only have a few rows more to knit to finish the back of the possum sweater I am knitting and they are all ever decreasing rows.  Next up is the front where I am going to modify the pattern in order to give the sweater a cowl neckline, the pattern for which I have stolen from another sweater pattern but it looks fairly simple so I am confident that I will be able to do it.  If not it will end up having a V-neck; no big deal but a nuisance.

Fire and Fury . . .

. . . the way I feel about my main computer at the moment.  If it had to blow a gasket then I would have preferred that it did so any time except at the beginning of the Christmas season when getting it fixed was going to be a long-term process.  I'll try phoning Techie next week.

I am still managing with my surface Pro 3 and am gradually setting up and adding tiles and links to sites which I frequent but the screen is small and that irritates me somewhat.  I realise that I could plug it into my big screen  -  I have already plugged in a standard keyboard and mouse but it seems to be a bit of a slap in the monitor to simply use it as a conduit.

As for the title of this entry  -  I pre-ordered the above-named e-book and it appeared in my Kobo reader this morning.  I am looking forward to reading it although I realise that it could be part fiction and only loosely based on fact.  However, I have been following American Politics for the past year and am prepared, at this stage, to believe almost anything generated by the White House.

As an Australian I have been able to stand back and tell myself that "there but for the grace of god go I" although insulting Kim Jong-Un seems to be akin to stirring up a nest of fire ants . . . but we are in the danger zone on a couple of counts.

Christmas is over today  - last night was Twelfth Night and I have dismantled the tiny Christmas Tree which I placed on top of one of the cats' scratching posts.  All but one of my Christmas cards came from a couple of my financial connections and organisations to which I donate and I have no regrets about binning them, except the one from a friend in Malta; I collect them as her husband paints beautiful water colour Maltese scenes and each year one of the paintings features on their Christmas cards. 

I received a couple of emails from people apologising for not sending out cards this year; it seems to be the latest trend as the Post office becomes more parcel orientated because now we shop online for a lot of things.  Yesterday I received a consignment of heavy degreaser to clean up the mess left by on of D2's incontinent cars.  For some reason it is something which Bunnings doesn't stock so I had to get it from the other side of the country.

Today we watch the cricket  -  tomorrow we degrease.

The Blue Screen of Death Mk II

On 20th December 2017 for the second time I have been faced with the blue screen of death on my computer.  This happened only 16 months since the last time and then I had to purchase a new computer.  I must confess to being somewhat miffed about this and since I bought the last one sort of under the radar from Techie I am not sure what will happen regarding replacement and warranties.

Since it is the Christmas season and I emailed him (no response) I suspect that he is taking a well-earned break and spending Christmas with his family.  I will phone him in a week or so and find out what sort of  recourse I have.

In the meanwhile I have set up my Surface Pro 3 tablet and plugged in a keyboard and mouse which is working well in the interim but am wondering if everything would have transferred here if I had saved all the information on my main computer to THE  CLOUD which I have so far managed to avoid as I worry that at some stage it could be hacked.  To be honest, the only thing which is at all sensitive is my Family Tree Maker program and that all automatically syncs to Ancestry.com but Ancestry blocks people who have not died or have not had their deaths recorded in FTM.

FTM is really the only program which I would prefer not to have to reload but I did it last time so it should be easier this time and I have all the documentation just in case.

Christmas is over, thank goodness.  I had the family for Boxing day this year and next year I will have them on Christmas day.  The joys of split families.  I suppose that, in a way, it is telling that I mostly received chocolates and things pertaining to cats.   I am glad, though, that it is over for another year and life is starting to get back to normal again.

D1 flew over from Sydney and stayed until Boxing Day Eve which was lovely and the cats were very happy to see her again. She is, and always has been, a cat whisperer and it is great that after many years of living in rented accommodation she finally has a cat of her own.  Strictly illegal in her apartment block and it is a very talkative Tonkinese but she suspects that it's presence is known but ignored.  We are lucky here  -  pets are allowed within reason; one animal weighing under 7 kilos except with permission from the board of owners.  I have written permission to have two cats (Parsifal weights in at just over 7 kilos) so I am legal but most pet owners here have dogs.