Friday 7 August 2015

Living in a dream world



All this talk of silly games about hiding somewhere in the blogoshpere may be unnecessary. I keep getting disconnected from the internet anyway, so I can't even find myself. Three times I have been disconnected this morning.

I have gone through all sorts of procedures to try and sort this problem out - some of which I have told you about. I contacted my server (via a very helpful Asian man) and he blamed my router. Now I thought I had already set the passwords etc. on it, but when it came up n the screen, half of it had reverted to factory settings. I don't remember resetting it.

Many people don't bother to change the factory password on their routers (Password: Password) and lay themselves open to access by anyone, anywhere in the world. It was a hair-raising experience to see someone using my router from an unknown country once, having looked up a long list of unprotected routers, world-wide. (I have just been disconnected again, so you may not ever read this).

The Asian man ran me through the correct settings on my router, and when he got to the password, he told me exactly what it should be, even spelling it out. Even when I type my password in, it shows up as a series of black dots, so how the hell did he know what it should be? This worried me so much that I decided to change it again, but when I went back to it - you have to type in the old password to reset the new one - it kept telling me that the old password was wrong. This is worrying stuff.

My only redress will be to completely wipe the router and start again - including ALL of the numbers and information required to make a connection between the server and my machine via a third-party, BT land line. That's a lot of stuff to reconfigure, but now I know that there is at least one other person who knows my password, it may have to be done. It may have been changed already, but to a new word which has exactly the same amount of black dots. (I've just been reconnected an disconnected again).

I am a paranoid person by nature, coupled with a medieval attitude to life which is prepared to accept anything as the truth. This is a bad combination.

I had some wonderful dreams last night, sparked-off by the remembrance of a workshop I spent many years in before it was demolished to make way for some private, modern (and hideously ugly) apartments.

I had woken up in the dark and began to think about this workshop for some reason, and realised that I remembered every single detail of the shabby place as if it still existed.

It was basically a wooden pre-fab with second-hand windows bolted on. The door creaked and slammed in a certain way, and I can remember the exact sound of it, having gone in and out of it for so long, so in my dream I was back in there again as if I had never left. I could analyse the various components of just that one sound, and the components were made up of many things, including the metallic jingle of a loose padlock against a steel hasp.

As far as I am concerned, this makes the silly philosophical argument - about whether or not a tree falling over in a forest without witnesses makes any noise - even sillier. It is not just down to the various receivers we have - either ears or microphones. These things all exist somewhere else, independently. That's all I know.

12 comments:

  1. My Skype has suddenly stopped working. It keeps telling me that there is 'problem with recording device'. The biggest problem being that there is no suggestion on how to solve it. Grrrrrrr!

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    1. You've just got a new computer, haven't you? You may need to re-set it to Skype. Go on the net and find out how?

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  2. I am wondering whether Mercury is in retrograde for it makes communication difficult. Yesterday my Mac app Maps failed & I had to re-enter the password &restart to get it working.

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    1. I used to blame it on the rain. Now I blame it on the sun.

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  3. You guys are all technically brilliant compared to me. Those kind of problems send me over the edge. When I call for help, the helpers are from India and all have American names. They'll be saying D and with their accent I'll ask Z?Z?Z? The stuff of nightmares for me.

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    1. We don't have that problem here. Zs are pronounced 'zed'. We do have difficulties in believing their names are 'David' or 'Michael', though.

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  4. I am now totally neurotic after reading about these things going wrong (some of which I haven't even heard of). I shall now retire to my bed with a headache!

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  5. Putin supposedly made it into the Pentagon network. Could he possibly have an interest in you?

    Luckily, I have not had any major tech problems. It's just the occasional beachball that drives me crazy. Do you know if there is an equivalent for control/alt/delete for the Mac?

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    1. I thought that was Mac. I've never used Windows.

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  6. I never have these sort of communication problems.

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