Showing posts with label all sorts of technology trouble. Show all posts
Showing posts with label all sorts of technology trouble. Show all posts

Saturday, August 21, 2010

Rage of the Machines

Technology has made this past week for me a bad one.
On Sunday I drove in my Volkswagen to, of all places, a VW show in Connecticut. Two-thirds of the way there the "check engine" light came on. The engine started bucking and resisting acceleration. I made it to the Volkswagen show and back to New Jersey, but the problem was an ignition coil that cost over five hundred dollars to fix.
I spent Tuesday morning waiting for the repair and missed my regular writers' group meeting. I drove off after the dealership fixed it, and the "check engine" light came back on. I turned around and went back, and they fixed the errant spark plug that caused the problem.
I spent part of Wednesday afternoon printing handouts for a blogging workshop I was to give for my writers' group on Thursday, and I had a little trouble with the printer - and a lot of trouble collating the pages manually. A job that should have taken one hour at the most took more than two.
Thursday I gave my blogging workshop. But there was a major problem - the laptop I was using wouldn't connect to Blogger.com or any of my blogs, except one. I could connect to any other Internet site, but not Blogger.com or most Blogger-based sites. I spent the night talking about what I do rather than showing anyone. And the bad connection to Blogger was due to a bad laptop, not Blogger; I went home and signed onto Blogger on my own PC without a problem.
Tonight I had to start my computer four times because my Windows picture file kept failing to respond.
Welcome to the machine. :-O