Technical Hitches and Other Glitches

Jonah Jones does it again!  No sooner do I arrive in Italy than the gas boiler takes one look at me and expires.  4 days without heating or hot water.  I managed to endure that with reasonable fortitude (okay so I swore and used a lot of deodorant), but when I switched my computer on and it refused to obey, it was a major incident.  Writers are dependent on technology;  needing to work, committed to a monthly blog for Authors Electric, I was reduced to the basic communications of my mobile phone. I missed a couple of deadlines, but there was nothing I could do.  Rural Italy is not the world centre of IT.  It wasn't all doom and gloom though.  Neil's exhibition looked wonderful and the opening party was spectacular. The President of the Commune made a speech and called him Maestro Ferber, celebrating a lifetime of skill and knowledge.



Who cares about technology when there's wine and music?  And friends.   The first diagnosis on the computer was that it was the boot drive - the screen flickered for a couple of seconds when I pressed the start button but then went blank.  Nothing worked.  There didn't seem to be a way to get into anything to even do a diagnostic test.  I normally work on 'the cloud' so all my files were safe, but there's always a lot of things, mainly photographs, that you haven't backed up. I resigned myself to the loss. The culprit turned out to be a Windows update which had failed to load properly and corrupted the hard drive.  Windows 10 is a nightmare - you have no control over what happens. It's Thursday night now (almost a week) and I'm back in the UK and up and running again, thanks to a partner who is not just a gifted sculptor, but a computer geek as well.  Thank you Neil!

Neil and I before the hordes arrived, plus wine, minus computer.