New Year Scramble

Usually we host a lunch at Christmas and New Year. The Christmas crowd consists mainly of people who are either new to the country or just visiting, those who live on their own, or one or two who have no where else to go at Christmas.

Since we were away for Christmas, it was only New Year lunch this time. Our usual 'select' crowd gathered, mainly friends whom we've known for a long time and family who live further afield.

We had a lovely time. Food was OK but simple. Company was fine. Son was not as anti-social as he often is. In fact, after the Christmas pudding (which apparently was generously laced with cognac) he was definitely on a high.

I do not usually like Christmas pudding, by the way. But we managed to get our hands on an organic version, packed "in an earthenware basin with cloth" and it was delicious. Unlike other Christmas puds I've tasted, this was very light in texture.

We were also impressed that there was not a bit of pl-st-c packaging in sight, and it was "hand finished and packed" by someone who signed himself/herself as "Des".

We had a few more visitors later for coffee and cake, and then everyone (bar one) left.

I was ready, after watching a comedy on TV, to turn in when I checked my website and realized that something had gone wrong with one of the pages I had just uploaded.

Clearly some of the code has been scrambled. I felt a shiver go down my spine. It reminded me of when I was coding a computer-based training programme and a simple mistake (saving over a file) meant that I had wiped out three whole days of work.

How was I to correct this page now so that customers do not get cross when they visit the site?

I was tired. My eyelids were struggling to stay apart. But I managed somehow to detect a basic flaw in the codes. They seemed to have referenced (erroneously) all the links to files on my laptop (I was working on the laptop while at mum-in-law's). Little wonder that the system would come to a halt when a link is clicked.

Midnight now, and very groggy, I managed to copy and paste as much of the codes as was needed to get the page going. Still, some 'cosmetic features' (colour-changing arrows) were not working.

Tough! I was not going to comb through the code at that point. My brains had packed up for the day two hours before (hence I was watching a comedy, remember?). The cosmetics would have to wait.

That was my first day of the year 2007: a scramble to unscramble some scrambled code.

I am pleased to say that I had a brainwave while still awake that night/early morning. The cosmetics were reinstated the following morning before breakfast.

Back to Organic-Ally.

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